TWAS-DBT Postgraduate Research Fellowship 2019/2020 for Developing Countries – India

Application Deadline: 15th July 2019

Offered annually? Yes

Eligible Countries: Developing Countries

To be taken at (country): Applicants may be registered for a PhD degree in their home country, or may enrol in a PhD course at a host laboratory/institute in India.

Fields of Research: 
01-Agricultural Sciences
02-Structural, Cell and Molecular Biology
03-Biological Systems and Organisms
04-Medical and Health Sciences incl. Neurosciences
05-Chemical Sciences

Eligibility: Applicants for these fellowships must meet the following criteria:

• Be a maximum age of 35 years on 31 December of the application year.
• Be nationals of a developing country (other than India).
• Must not hold any visa for temporary or permanent residency in India or any developed country.
• Hold a Master’s or equivalent degree in science or engineering.
• For SANDWICH Fellowships, be registered PhD students in their home country and provide the “Registration and No Objection Certificate” from the HOME university (sample is included in the application form); OR
• For FULL-TIME Fellowships; be willing to register at a university in India.
• Be accepted at a biotechnology institution in India (see sample Acceptance Letter included in the application form). N.B. Requests for acceptance must be directed to the chosen host institution(s), and NOT to DBT.
• Provide evidence of proficiency in English, if medium of education was not English;
• Provide evidence that s/he will return to her/his home country on completion of the fellowship;
• Not take up other assignments during the period of her/his fellowship;
• Be financially responsible for any accompanying family members.

Number of scholarship: Several

Value of Scholarship: DBT will provide a monthly stipend to cover for living costs, food and health insurance. The monthly stipend will not be convertible into foreign currency. In addition, the fellowship holder will receive a house rent allowance.

Duration of Award: Up to five years.

• SANDWICH Fellowships (for those registered for a PhD in their home country): The Fellowship may be granted for a minimum period of 12 months and a maximum period of 2 years.
• FULL-TIME Fellowships (for those not registered for a PhD): The Fellowship is granted for an initial period of up to 3 years.  Such Fellowships may then be extended for a further 2 years, subject to the student’s performance.  Candidates will register for their PhD at a university in India. DBT will confirm any such extensions to both TWAS and the candidate.

How to Apply:

• Before applying it is recommended that applicants read very carefully the application guidelines for detailed information on eligibility criteria, and other key requirements of the application procedure.
• Applications for the TWAS-DBT Postgraduate Fellowship Programme can ONLY be submitted to TWAS via the online portal and copy of the submitted application must be sent to DBT by email.

Apply Here

Visit Scholarship webpage for Details

Hidden Plastics: Glitter Gum and the Air we Breath

Graham Peebles

The plastic contamination of the natural world flows from three main sources: complacency, apathy and ignorance, a poisonous trinity that is itself the result of a narrow and destructive approach to living. While there are signs of a shift in attitudes among many people, resistance to changing the lifestyle habits that feed the environmental crisis, is strong.

This apathy is partly fueled by a lack of knowledge about what products contain plastic and the impact it has; feeling overwhelmed by the scale of the crisis and ignorance about the interrelated nature of the Environmental Emergency more broadly. Underpinning these is the corrosive core of the issue: deep complacency within governments and businesses.

Reducing plastic use is essential if we are to clean up the seas and rivers, safeguard marine life and sea birds, and start to decontaminate the air we breathe. Unseen by the naked eye, tiny plastic fibers are all around us. According to research carried out by King’s College London and featured in the excellent BBC series, War on Plastic with Hugh and Anita, in the square mile of the City of London – home to St. Paul’s Cathedral and the Stock Exchange – the air is filled with an estimated two billion plastic fibers. And that’s just one area in one city, in one country, and of course, as it’s airborne pollution it cannot be contained, it moves where the wind takes it; there is no such thing as national air pollution or national water pollution.

The King’s College team found eight different types of micro plastic in the air: Acrylic fibers and Polyester were the most common, both of which come from clothing made of synthetic textiles. We are literally shedding plastics into the atmosphere. Tests were also undertaken indoors; special filters were installed in two homes in an average street in Bristol. Here too, micro plastics were collected. Shocking and alarming, frightening to many, a source of anxiety and hopelessness – there is no alternative air to breath.

It’s not clear what the long term health impacts are of inhaling plastic micro fibers over a life-time; respiratory diseases including wheezing and asthma probably, heart conditions perhaps, and detrimental impacts on mental sharpness – the brain doesn’t function well in filth. Studies are underway in various countries to investigate if there is a link between air pollution and dementia.

Concealed Pollutants

Carrier bags, water bottles, supermarket packaging etc., these are obvious sources of plastic, but there are a whole host of products that one may not realize contain plastics, products that do not announce the fact. Hidden plastics.

Globally its estimated that 16 billion disposable coffee cups are used every year, they appear to be made of a sort of paper/card but they are lined with polythene; this strengthens the cup, but makes it difficult to process resulting in a tiny percentage being recycled. In the UK, e.g., Eradicate Plastic states that only 0.25% of the 2.5 billion cups used every year get recycled. A simple solution is for cafes to only offer reusable cups or for customers to supply their own. Teabags are another source of hidden plastic; on average one-third of a bag is heat-resistant polypropylene – plastic. An economic alternative is to buy loose tea in recyclable packaging.

Chewing gum is commonly made from polymer, who knew. A kind of synthetic rubber also used to make car tires. Non-digestible and water insoluble, no matter how long it’s chewed it will never break down. Glitter, gold, silver red, it’s a micro plastic – cosmetic glitter and craft glitter on cards etc., and it can’t be recycled. Cigarette butts also contain plastic – cellulose acetate, same compound used in the manufacture of sunglasses. Cigarette butts are the most common form of rubbish in the world, although somewhat surprisingly, a survey conducted by Keep America Beautiful “found that 77% of Americans do not think of cigarette butts as litter.”

While these and other products with concealed plastics are contributing to plastic pollution, the biggest source of hidden plastics is disposable wipes – wet wipes. In industrialized countries wipes are numerous and commonplace, a ubiquitous symbol of the consumer society; baby wipes, multi-surface wipes, metal wipes, window wipes, hand wipes, toilet wipes – rather than toilet paper, you name it wipes. Convenient, throw away and for many people indispensable. They are made up of up to 80% plastic and are a significant source of plastic pollution in sewers, rivers and oceans.

First developed in 1958 by Arthur Julius in the US and marketed as ‘moist towelettes’, global usage is now estimated at 450 billion a year, about 14,000 every second. Friends of the Earth state most wet wipes are not flushable or biodegradable, no matter what the labeling claims. Yet huge numbers are flushed down the toilet, presumably by people who imagine they will magically dissolve or just disappear. In fact, they mass together in the sewers of the world together with fat deposits creating ‘Fatbergs’, mountains of filthy waste, which block sewers.

Hundreds of thousands of wet wipes flushed down toilets in London have carved out a new ‘riverbed’ in the Thames. Far from unique, this is happening in rivers around the world. The waste in the rivers flows into the oceans, the plastics slowly become smaller and smaller until, as micro plastics and Nano plastics they become part of the fabric of the sea. Ingested by marine life, some of which enters the food chain, these microscopic plastics are even in the sea salt we cook with.

Simplicity of Living

For years, environmentalists have been calling on governments to ban the sale of wet wipes, but, complacent and duplicitous, none have done so. Rather the ‘non-woven’ industry has been allowed to regulate itself. This cowardly approach is symptomatic of the way governments have up until now responded, by not acting. Why not ban wet wipes? They are certainly not indispensable; they are just another needless ‘thing’ in a world that is literally suffocating under the weight of unnecessary stuff. In the absence of a ban, and such a common-sense step is unlikely, stop buying them! Use a flannel, soap and water to wash with, use recycled toilet paper, make your own multi-surface cleaner. Simplicity of living needs to be the message.

If, and it’s a big ‘if’, we are going to really respond to the environmental crisis, governments must impose regulations on business, substantial regulations not inadequate half-hearted measures within prolonged timeframes. Otherwise they will either not act, or act in a piecemeal fashion. Take plastic production: according to Greenpeace, far from reducing it “corporations have plans to … quadruple production by 2050.” Businesses must be forced to change their practices. If e.g. you want to drastically reduce the use of plastic carrier bags then just tell shops (all shops and market traders) that they cannot any longer provide them, neither free nor for sale.

Last year the European Union announced a range of measures on single-use plastics including wet wipes. By 2025 all wet wipes packaging within EU countries must be labeled as containing plastics; better than nothing certainly, but why wait six years? Measures like this need to be implemented immediately, forcing companies to do what they should be doing anyway – informing the public what is in their products.

In addition to accurate and clear labeling, recyclable packaging and ethical production, manufacturers should be required by law to pay to clean up the environmental mess that their products cause; making the ‘polluter to pay’ should be extended to all areas of waste pollution including investment in state-of-the-art recycling plants. Businesses, large and small are driven by profit and short-term gain, and corporate governments are obsessed with economic growth no matter the impact on the environment. Partners in mass environmental vandalism, they are complacent and blind to the scale of the crisis.

Large scale public protest (like the Extinction Rebellion and the Youth for Climate Change actions), civil disobedience, and coordinated boycotting of products that are contaminating the environment is the only thing that will make government and business act within a timeframe dictated by environmental need, not the blind demands of the market. We cannot go on as we have been and Save Our Planet. It’s an Environmental Emergency, and we need to respond to it as such. Saving Our Planet calls for actions rooted in Love, and the corporate state knows nothing of Love.

Is the US Trade Deficit With China Exaggerated?

Dean Baker

For many years we regularly saw news stories, like this Washington Post piece, telling us that the official data on the bilateral U.S. trade deficit was hugely exaggerated. The argument was that we count the full value of a final good imported from China in calculating our trade deficit, even though much of the value added came from other countries.

The classic case is an iPhone exported from China to the U.S. We would count the full value of the iPhone as an import from China even though the vast majority of the value added came from other countries. This Post piece cites a study showing that the trade deficit with China would be reduced by 40 percent if we subtracted the value of all intermediate goods produced in third countries. (An honest assessment would also add in the intermediate goods manufactured in China that come to the U.S. in imports from the Japan, the European Union, and elsewhere.)

This argument about an overstatement of the China trade deficit was frequently used to argue that people were wrong to be concerned about the bilateral trade deficit. Remarkably, now that Trump has embarked on his trade war with China, the media are telling us that China’s exports to the U.S. actually were a huge deal for its economy.

The NYT ran the strongest piece in this vein, telling readers that the trade war truce “could enshrine a global economic shift.” The homepage lead said that it could “unseat China as the world’s factory floor.”

For fans of logic and arithmetic, we can’t both have China’s trade deficit with the U.S. being no big deal and also a scenario where reducing the deficit unseats China as the world’s factory floor. To see what the actual story might be, a little data is helpful.

The U.S. trade deficit with China peaked at $420 billion in 2018. China’s GDP measured in dollar terms is $14.2 trillion this year. (Measured at purchasing power parity it’s $27.3 trillion. For this question, it is appropriate to use the exchange rate measure.)

If we use the great wisdom from the Washington Post piece and say that our trade deficit with China is just 60 percent of the official figure, then it came to $252 billion in 2018. If we assume an extreme effect of the trade war and the deficit falls by 50 percent (that’s way more than the impact seen to date), China would see a reduction in its trade surplus with the U.S. of $126 billion. That’s just under 0.9 percent of its GDP. It’s a bit hard to believe a loss of net exports equal to 0.9 percent of China’s GDP of 0.9 percent of GDP will fundamentally alter its position in the global economy.

Even if we use the official data the loss would be $210 billion or just under 1.5 percent of GDP. It’s still hard to imagine that fundamentally changing China’s economy, and this is assuming an impact of the trade war that is absurdly high.

Anyhow, the moral of this story is that our top media outlets are perfectly willing to play with the data to tell a story. They don’t care if their story directly contradicts other stories they tell. They just assume that no one will notice.

Capitalism vs. The World

James Rothenberg

The love of money is a sin…the root of all evil.

• Judeo-Christian biblical tradition –

O believers Do not devour one another’s wealth by evil means except through trading by mutual consent.

• Islamic tradition –

Sharing wealth is a divine duty, but wealth gained and spent for one’s behalf is evil.

• Hindu tradition –

Is our toleration of the dominating global capitalist system the greatest work-around in recorded history?

work-around (noun): a plan or method to circumvent a problem without eliminating it.

– Merriam-Webster –

——————————————————

Test cases for our survival:

The global climate has recently been getting warmer, forewarning more frequent and severe storms, threatening many life forms, coastal habitations, resources, and food production.

The warming we see is but a tiny picture of an ever changing big whole, with a history of reversals.

Global wealth inequality has created an underclass of billions, forewarning social and political unrest, threatening rebellions and wars.

Inequality is a feature of the human condition due to people’s innate differences in adaptation, aptitude, and desire.

State secrecy and surveillance of citizens has reached a fascistic level, forewarning loss of personal freedom and liberty.

States have a responsibility to monitor citizen activity to maintain order for the general good.

Nuclear weapons show no signs of going away, forewarning devastating consequences of their usage.

Nuclear weapons have proved to be an effective tool for maintaining world hierarchal order.

In each of these cases, U.S. capitalism comes down on the italicized side of the equation. It is not in the nature of capitalism to tolerate any loss of private profit, whether it be diverting capital from proven profitable production, allowing the world’s poorest countries to prosper from their own above and underground wealth resources, de-coupling its interests from a state founded in support of it, or allowing competing nations and ideologies a chance to rival our economy.

As the name implies, socialism places people ahead of capital, working people as distinct from people that prosper off of other’s work. Relatively few people prosper off of other’s work, yet these few people have, in their hands, an inordinate amount of the world’s wealth. And these few people have, in their hands, the means to set the conditions under which the workers of the world must sustain themselves. You don’t have to be a fan of socialism to see that capitalism favors the billionaire (with trillionaires not far off) and that it is incapable of dealing with existing survival threats.

It will take a new way of thinking to address existential threats, and it must involve the many over the few. People do not wish to fight in wars, thirst for water, starve for food, breathe dirty air, or withstand the elements for lack of shelter. People of any one country have to see in other countries their brothers and sisters. Less a utopian desire, it is a remedy for one nation’s leadership lying and misleading its citizens into thinking that they have enemies intent on harming them.

People don’t fight people in wars. They put on uniforms and fight for big shots. States fight states. The citizen must be led into it. This is a propaganda role states give to themselves and it has proven effective through centuries of use. Tell the people what they’re afraid of, tell them they’re fighting for the “good”, and refer to them as “heroes” of the state. Then all they have to do is obey.

It’s a big thing to imagine, but if international socialism replaced capitalism, with workers in all the world’s countries having control over their economy, war would become less inevitable. Certainly there could be no capitalist, imperialist war. One can react dryly to capitalism’s cynical program of mustering young men and women off to war, and then giving veterans 10% off.

Speaking glowingly of an “American way of life” when large numbers of these Americans are under the control of the whims of others (those that have a job) for their very existence is a hypocrisy that can only be maintained through sheer repetition. The modern corporation is the antithesis of democracy. It’s purposely structured that way —  by law, the kind we’re taught to have reverence for — to protect it from unhappy workers and outsiders. And, yes, polls confirm most workers are unhappy. Worldwide.

That some people don’t want to be boss, and are happy to work for others with less responsibility, is not an argument for the beneficence of capitalism. It’s an indication of the accommodation workers have made to an exploitive economic system that does not invite worker participation. Perhaps the only thing you’re free to do is quit.

U.S. capitalism has taken all three branches of government and swallowed them whole. There’s much talk about election interference lately. Their’s, not our’s. Their’s is relatively puny compared to our’s but leaving aside the international kind, for a look at real interference we need go no further than money as a predictor in all our own elections. You almost can’t go wrong by betting on the party’s candidate that spends the most money in the campaign.

Are we presently living in a pre-fascist stage? It’s safer to say we’ve entered a post-democratic age because capitalism is inherently anti-democratic, and little in our national life has been spared from its abuse. It’s not for a lack of evidence that there is reluctance to move away from it. That’s due to long term demonization and the failed examples of socialist experiments.

The irony in the “failed example” argument is that it presents the United States as a neutral outside observer, merely keeping track of history’s winners and losers for the record. This is the record that can be portrayed to the American public as an example of the superiority of our system. It has been wildly successful because the failures are real and the results of this one-sided record are plain to see. Today’s aspiring presidential hopefuls can be openly-almost anything, but they still can’t be openly atheist, or socialist. Not and get tens of millions of votes.

There is a fuller record, one that takes into account the United States’ role in actively undermining independent people’s movements, socialist or otherwise, at home and abroad. We have stopped at nothing (bribery, arming right-wing militias, economic strangulation, torture, sabotage, and outright murder) to put down this sort of uprising against the existent economic and political arrangement that the United States refers to as responsible world order.

We can make ironical use out of the “exceptional nation” theme that has served to justify pretty much all of our behavior. That is, justify it to the home population at which it is aimed. Foreign populations might find it perplexing.

If we are so exceptional, why concern ourselves with what lessers have been able to achieve? Surely we can do better with the ‘hardest working and most talented people on earth’. For one thing, a U.S. socialist experiment would have the advantage of not having the reigning world superpower working overtime to snuff it out.

Vladimir Putin vs Liberalism 1:0

James M. Dorsey

Certain that Western and liberal democratic leaders would limit themselves to verbal denials, Russian president Vladimir Putin knew he was kicking into an open goal when he declared on the eve of the Group of 20 (G20) summit in Osaka that liberalism had “outlived its purpose.”

He may even have anticipated that US president Donald J. Trump would go further and in his own way endorse the Russian president’s assertion.

When asked at a news conference to respond to Mr. Putin’s remarks, Mr. Trump opted to denounce America’s liberals by focusing on American municipal leaders who oppose his policies, including his clampdown on migration.

Mr. Putin “sees what’s going on. If you look at what’s happening in Los Angeles…and San Francisco and a couple of other cities which are run by an extraordinary group of liberal people, I don’t know what they are thinking, but he does see things that are happening in the United States that would probably preclude him from saying how wonderful it is. I’m very embarrassed by what I see,” Mr. Trump said.

In a nod to illiberal governance, Mr. Trump went on to say that “you don’t want it to spread and at a certain point, I think the federal government may have to get involved. We can’t let that continue to happen.”

Mr. Trump’s response was not a one-off remark. His empathy with illiberalism was also evident in his refusal to seriously take Mr. Putin to task for alleged Russian interference in US elections despite the conclusion by US intelligence and special counsel Robert Mueller that there had been extensive meddling.

Similarly, during a breakfast meeting at the G-20 with crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, Mr. Trump praised the Saudi leader for doing a “spectacular job.”

He praised Prince Mohammed as “a man who has really done things in the last five years in terms of opening up Saudi Arabia” and described the prince’s enhancement of some women’s rights as a “a revolution in a very positive way.”

Mr. Trump made no mention of the fact that Prince Mohammed had imprisoned activists who had campaigned for things like the lifting of a ban on women’s driving as well as scores of critics and dissidents.

The activists, some of whom have asserted that they have been tortured, are standing trial on charges of undertaking “coordinated and organized activities… that aim to undermine the Kingdom’s security, stability, and national unity.”

Like virtually all Western and liberal democratic leaders at the G20, Mr. Trump played down Saudi Arabia’s lack of transparent accountability for last October’s killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi as well as the conduct of the Saudi-United Arab Emirates-led war in Yemen.

The leaders made sure that Prince Mohammed, the host of next year’s G20, was not isolated as he was at their gathering last year in Buenos Aires.

A senior official tempered outgoing British prime minister Teresa May’s call for accountability in a one-on-one with Prince Mohammed by noting that the two leaders had “concluded by agreeing on the importance of the relationship” and of “regional stability” with no apparent qualification.

Perhaps because the targeting in 2018 of two Russians with a nerve agent occurred on British soil, Ms. May took a tougher stand than most in a frosty meeting with Mr. Putin.

“The prime minister underlined that we remain open to a different relationship, but for that to happen the Russian government must choose a different path. The prime minister said the UK would continue to unequivocally defend liberal democracy and protect the human rights and equality of all groups, including LGBT people,” a spokesperson for Ms. May said.

By and large, however, Western and liberal democratic leaders seemed to lend credibility to Mr. Putin’s assertion on liberalism by failing to put their money where their mouth is.

They were equally soft gloved in their interactions with Chinese president Xi Jinping when it came to liberal values such as human rights.

There was no apparent mention, at least no public mention, of China’s brutal clampdown on Turkic Muslims in the troubled north-western province of Xinjiang.

The incarceration in re-education camps of an estimated one million Uyghurs amounts to the most frontal assault on a faith group since World War Two’s Nazi assault on Jews.

Likewise, there was overall little that went beyond strong verbiage in the response by liberal democratic leaders to Mr. Putin’s attempt to fuel polarisation in the West by asserting that liberalism “presupposes that…migrants can kill, plunder and rape with impunity because their rights… have to be protected.”

As a result, European Council president Donald Tusk’s retort put little, if any meat, on the response of liberal democratic leaders and seemed more like paying sharp-tongued lip service to values such as human rights

“For us in Europe, these are and will remain essential and vibrant values. What I find really obsolete are authoritarianism, personality cults, the rule of oligarchs. Even if sometimes they may seem effective,” Mr. Tusk said.

Human rights imperialism, social media censorship and the fraud of Facebook’s “Oversight Board”

Kevin Reed

On June 27, Facebook published a report entitled “Global Feedback and Input on the Facebook Oversight Board for Content Decisions” on the progress of its plan to create an international review committee to oversee its censorship regime. A careful examination of this report shows that the real purpose of the planned Oversight Board—contrary to Facebook’s pretensions of creating an “external appeals process” and safeguarding “free expression and safety for all users of our platforms”—is to expand and systematize social media censorship in defense of world capitalism.

In publishing the report, Brent Harris, Facebook’s Director of Governance and Global Affairs, explained that the company was closing a six-month “global consultation” period and turning to the selection of the 40 members of its Oversight Board. Harris writes that the selection process will include “engaging consultants and executive search firms” to begin nominations. Indicating just how “open” and “diverse” the board will be, Harris adds, “Facebook will select the first few people and those members will then help select the remaining people.”

Mark Zuckerberg speaks at 2018 Facebook conference. [Credit: Anthony Quintano]

The heavily footnoted 37-page report is a summary of the responses of 2,000 people from 88 countries who attended 28 “workshops, roundtables, and town halls” on five continents to discuss Facebook’s Oversight Board proposal. Facebook representatives also met with “250 people through one-on-one meetings” that included “experts from multiple disciplines in both the private and public sector.” None of these corporate and government “experts” are named in the report.

Additionally, Facebook received 1,206 responses to a public online questionnaire and accepted essays from private individuals and white papers from civil society organizations and individuals on the membership, decision-making process and rules of the board. Lastly, Facebook prepared a comparative analysis of eight “oversight models” currently in use across business and government, including those of the academic research community and the US Court of Appeals system. All of these items have been gathered together and published in a 180-page appendix to the main report.

The proposal for the creation of a Facebook Oversight Board began with an announcement by company CEO Mark Zuckerberg in November 2018. At that time—in an ongoing response to pressure from the US political establishment over “fake news” and unsubstantiated claims of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election—Zuckerberg outlined his concerns about “interference in elections,” “misinformation” and “polarization and extremism” on Facebook.

In his “Blueprint for Content Governance and Enforcement,” Zuckerberg was explicit in proposing the creation of an “independent body” that will have binding authority to remove content that seeks “to divide us.” In other words, under conditions of a global movement to the left by masses of people, Facebook planned to create a committee to ensure that its censorship of the working class and revolutionary socialist ideas has the imprimatur of an ostensibly impartial body.

Zuckerberg’s blueprint was followed last January with the publication of a Draft Charter for the Oversight Board. The draft included a series of eleven questions regarding the membership and decision-making process of the board along with Facebook’s own “suggested approach” to the questions.

Following a range of responses by the corporate media and non-government organizations (NGO) to both Zuckerberg’s blueprint and the draft charter—some expressing enthusiasm and others skepticism—Facebook initiated its “global consultation” process. Among the more perceptive responses referred to the Oversight Board as a “faux regulator,” lampooned it as an “empty gesture” and, in a Washington Post column, editorial writer Molly Roberts mocked Facebook as having “declared sovereignty” with its phony Supreme Court-like proposal that does not allow the public to vote on anything.

What all of these bourgeois critics lacked—and are opposed to—however, is an objective assessment of the corporate entity called Facebook and the political and ideological motives behind the drive to create a global censorship infrastructure within the world’s largest social media platform. No one should accept for one second Facebook’s or Zuckerberg’s claim that an Oversight Board is going to halt or even mediate the company’s ongoing censorship practices—including the unilateral removal of posts or scrubbing of accounts without explanation.

Facebook is a global US-based corporation with 37,700 employees headquartered in Menlo Park, California and with offices in 22 US cities as well as 47 other corporate centers and 16 data facilities across six continents. As of this writing, Facebook’s Wall Street value stands at approximately $550 billion. This is greater than the Gross Domestic Product of all but the top 20 countries of the world.

The majority of Facebook stock is controlled by the following individuals and organizations: Mark Zuckerberg owns 28.4 percent, the venture capital firm Accel Partners owns 11.4 percent, former Facebook employee Dan Moskovitz owns 7.6 percent, the Moscow-based Digital Sky Technologies owns 5.4 percent and former Facebook employee Eduardo Saverin own 5 percent. The balance of 42.5 percent ($234 billion) is shared among a combination of individuals, institutional investors, mutual funds and exchange traded funds.

Despite the negative investment implications of the “fake news” furor and the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal—Facebook will likely settle a $5 billion fine with the FTC for violation of a 2011 consent decree—the company earned a net profit of $22 billion in 2018, up by nearly 40 percent over 2017. The expectations on Wall Street remain high for 2019, as global user numbers continue to climb.

Facebook’s primary platforms are Facebook (2.4 billion users), Instagram (1 billion users) and WhatsApp (600 million users). It is by far the most popular social media company in the world with more than 80 percent of its users outside the United States. For masses of people in countries around the world—especially those that are less developed—Facebook is more than a social media platform; it is the internet.

Herein lies the contradiction facing Facebook, the big technology sector of the economy including Google, Amazon and Apple and the entire ruling elite that has reaped billions since the financial crisis of 2008. On one hand, the world capitalist system depends upon the enormous financial performance of the tech sector, including the growing adoption of wireless broadband internet service, smartphones and social media by the world’s population.

Additionally, the ongoing production and management of these technologies are based upon ever greater forms of exploitation of the international working class from the high-tech assembly factories in Asia to Amazon’s sweatshop warehouses in Europe and North America. This is the basis upon which the enormous profits of these companies have been generated and is expected into the future.

However, on the other hand—as the international class struggle is reemerging and masses of people are gravitating toward socialism—the ruling elite is terrified that these technologies will also become the instruments of social and political struggle in the hands of the masses against the capitalist system itself.

These objective factors form the backdrop of the discussions taking place about Facebook’s “content decisions.” Knowing that they cannot overtly censor left-wing and oppositional views on their platforms, the social and political forces behind Facebook are seeking to erect an infrastructure based upon the same language used for decades by US imperialism to cover its criminal war aims, regime change operations and occupational conquests. The American ruling establishment is directing Facebook to proceed with an international censorship regime under the cover of spreading “democracy,” “freedom” and “human rights.”

That the Facebook Oversight Board project corresponds to the global interests of US imperialism is proven by the participants involved directly in the initiative. Although none of the private and public sector “experts” who were interviewed for the project are mentioned by name, several key individuals and organizations are credited in the document for their contributions. The following biographies are significant:

· Zoe Mentel Darmé is Facebook’s Manager of Global Affairs and Governance; she is credited with writing the Oversight Board report. Darmé has been with Facebook since December 2018 and was clearly brought on for the purposes of this project.

Prior to her employment at Facebook, she worked for six years at the United Nations as a Policy and Planning Officer, specializing in the Office of Rule of Law and Security Institutions in the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO). This department, which traces its roots back to the US-dominated arrangements after World War II, has been involved in every operation of American imperialism since the dissolution of the Soviet Union and integration of the countries of the former-USSR and the Eastern Bloc into the world capitalist system.

On her LinkedIn page, Darmé boasts of her work in various UN departments and functions, including drafting “a wide variety of strategy papers, reports, funding proposals and other documents necessary for the smooth conduct of divisional business” as Communications/Programme Officer for the Police Advisor to the UN DPKO.

· Kevin Steeves is, according to Facebook, an independent researcher credited with helping Darmé write the Oversight Board report. Steeves promotes himself on LinkedIn as an Independent Advisor and Consultant on Global Affairs, Peace and Security from Alsace, France.

Prior to working as Director of the imperialist think tanks European Implementation Network in Strasbourg and Chatham House in London, Steeves also worked in New York City for nine years as a Policy Officer and Special Assistant for the UN’s DPKO. In the late 1990s and early 2000s he worked for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), a major post-war institution of American and European imperialism dedicated to “arms control” and “human rights.”

In 1999, Steeves was a professional consultant for the OSCE in Croatia with an office in Zagreb involved in securing Western imperialist interests in the former Yugoslavian territory under the cover of protecting “national minorities” and promoting “democratic institutions” and defending “human rights.”

· Noah Feldman is currently a professor of Law at Harvard University. According to the Facebook report, Prof. Feldman is the author of two white papers that have been the basis of the Oversight Board concept and he has worked with Zuckerberg directly on the project since the original announcement of November 2018. The Facebook report says, “Core features of Feldman’s white paper remain, and he has been advising Facebook on the Board throughout its development.”

After graduating from Yale Law school in 1997, Feldman worked as a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice David Souter. He is currently an adjunct fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a think-tank of US imperialism going back to World War I and a fellow at New America Foundation, a more recent organization established to support US imperialist interests that includes Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet.

After the invasion of Iraq by the Bush Administration in 2003, Feldman distinguished himself by working on the Iraqi Constitution which was drafted and approved in 2005. Feldman provided liberal justifications—including the publication of documents such as “The new Iraq: An Experiment in Islamic Democracy”—for the overthrow and brutal execution of Saddam Hussein and the transfer of the Iraqi oil fields to the imperialist petrochemical monopolies such as British Petroleum and Exxon-Mobile.

These are among the most significant and known individual contributors to Facebook’s plans for a censorship Oversight Board. There are undoubtedly more “experts” whose names have yet to come to light. It is also worth mentioning the participation of the corporate law firm Baker McKenzie and the marketing agency George P. Johnson (GPJ).

Baker McKenzie, which has specialized in human rights law and boasts its progressive credentials by having elected a female chair of its global executive committee, represents “venture capital funds, investment banks, tech powerhouses, household names, multinational technology companies, famous consumer brands, world-leading automotive companies and private equity houses.”

GPJ is multinational corporation that specializes in corporate branding and “event marketing.” With deep roots in corporate America that go back to the early twentieth century, GPJ counts among its clients the big three American auto companies as well as Toyota and Nissan and the tech companies IBM, Cisco Systems, Siebel and Intel.

Behind all the talk by Zuckerberg and Facebook executives about aligning social media content decisions with “democratic ideals and enlightenment philosophy of free thought and free expression” is a strategy to safeguard the interests of corporate America and the global agenda of US imperialism in every corner of the globe. The creation of an Oversight Board for Facebook—like so many local police department oversight committees that have supervised a steady increase in police violence and murder of working class and poor people across the US—is so much window dressing behind which the censorship of social media content will be intensified.

The defense of free speech and the right to utilize social media tools to organize the growing struggles of the working class and youth against unemployment, poverty, low wages, college debt, police violence and war cannot be trusted to any faction of the ruling establishment or giant tech company. Only the working class can defend the most basic democratic rights through an internationally coordinated struggle against the capitalist system and for socialism.

UK: GCHQ/MI5 admit illegally spying on millions

Trevor Johnson

The domestic spy agency MI5 and the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) intelligence gathering unit have been forced to admit in court that they are acting illegally in their use of bulk data, gathered by intruding into the lives of millions of innocent people. MI5 “has been unlawfully retaining innocent people’s data for years.”

Their admissions were the result of a court case brought by the civil rights organisation Liberty. The basis of Liberty’s case against the spy agencies is that government surveillance practices breach human rights law.

By early 2018 the government had been forced to accept that clauses of the Investigatory Powers Act (IPA, also known as the Snoopers’ Charter) would have to be changed to be in accordance with European human rights legislation. But it also redefined what was meant by “serious crime” in order to give the spy agencies as much leeway as possible.

The IPA was the government’s response to the fact that US National Security Agency whistle-blower Edward Snowden had made it public knowledge that Britain’s security services were colluding in illegal mass surveillance and collecting of data.

GCHQ worked with the NSA on PRISM, monitoring internet communications via Google, Yahoo, etc., and ran Tempora, storing most internet communications made via fibre-optic cables since 2011. The UK, as one of the “five eyes,” had access to Xkeyscore, an analytical tool that allows for collection of almost all internet activity.

GCHQ’s MILKWHITE program of storing data on people’s metadata from the usage of smartphone apps was made available to MI5, as well as the Metropolitan Police and other forces and no doubt the international spy agency MI6.

Rather than ending this illegal behaviour, the government response was to widen the spy agencies’ remit by means of the IPA. The IPA makes legal a level of intrusion into the lives of innocent people that was not deemed necessary in the course of two world wars, the troubles in Ireland and other domestic crises.

It has now been confirmed that from the day the IPA became law, the activities of the spy agencies continued to operate outside its boundaries and are therefore illegal. This was supposedly “concealed” for years from the Investigatory Powers Commissioner’s Office (IPCO), which is charged with overseeing their activities.

The IPCO claims that warrants for bulk data gathering would have been withheld had it been told in advance that the spy agencies were acting illegally. However, this claim is made suspect both by the fact that warrants are still being authorized and that the extent of the illegality and who is responsible are still being hidden.

The usual claims are made that these details could not be revealed without impeding the agencies’ targeting of serious crime, even though it is not serious criminals whose rights have been infringed but millions of innocent people.

MI5 knew it was breaking the law for three years before informing those charged with its oversight. It claimed to have lost control of its data storage operations and that there were “ungoverned spaces” on its computers on which it apparently did not know what was being held.

Home Secretary and failed Tory leadership contender Sajid Javid bizarrely claimed that the law-breaking was reason to have confidence that everything was as it should be: “It is of course paramount that UK intelligence agencies demonstrate full compliance with the law. In that context, the interchange between the commissioner and MI5 on this issue demonstrates that the world leading system of oversight established by the Act is working as it should.”

The investigatory powers commissioner, Lord Justice Fulford, whose position was created to give the snoopers’ charter a thin veneer of “independent” oversight, similarly claimed that he was “reassured that MI5 has taken immediate steps to introduce a series of mitigating actions in the light of that thorough review ...”

Liberty condemned the government and spy agencies for refusing to disclose details of the breach, what information had been put at risk and for how long. Megan Goulding, a lawyer representing Liberty, said the case showed how “fatally flawed the oversight system for security services is.”

“In creating the snoopers’ charter, the UK government has attempted to legitimise the most sweeping and intrusive mass surveillance powers to be found anywhere in the democratic world. These powers allow the state to collect the messages, location and browsing history of innocent, ordinary people” without any grounds for targeting them.

Martin Chamberlain QC explained that the IPA “provides for a wide expansion of bulk secret surveillance powers” which breached the European Convention on Human Rights protecting privacy and freedom of expression. He warned of the “inherent dangers” of bulk hacking powers, by which the intelligence services could take “remote control of a device, for example, to turn mobile phones with cameras into recording devices ...”

Vulnerabilities built into software to allow law enforcement access cause “real and significant risks” that third parties could exploit.

All claims that judicial oversight would curtail the spy agencies when the IPA was passing through Parliament were for public consumption only. Sir James Eadie QC, representing the government, said in a written submission, “The powers under challenge are of critical importance to, and are effective in securing, the protection of the public from a range of serious and sophisticated threats arising in the context of terrorism, hostile state activity and serious/organised crime.”

Recent experience has shown to the contrary that the authorities look the other way when confronted with not just threats, but the targeting of ordinary people by terrorists and others whose presence is repeatedly used to justify the introduction of a police state surveillance apparatus. The claims of “hostile state activity” by foreign powers are largely inventions of the government and their agencies, used to justify the ever-increasing powers of the state apparatus and the drive to militarism and war.

Mass protests resume against Sudan’s junta

Jean Shaoul

Tens of thousands protested in the capital Khartoum Sunday, demanding Sudan’s military junta hand power to a civilian-led government in a rally dubbed the “march of millions.” They were joined by thousands more in cities across the country seeking justice for the victims killed in the months-long movement for democracy.

Protesters were met with tear gas, stun grenades and live ammunition that killed at least seven people and injured 181 more, according to the Sudan News Agency. This comes almost one month after security forces launched an assault on the two-month long, mass sit-in outside the defense ministry headquarters in Khartoum, killing at least 128 protesters, including 40 people whose brutalized bodies were dumped in the Nile, injuring nearly 1,000 more and raping many women.

Part of the sit-in near the army headquarters in Khartoum in April [Credit M. Saleh]

That assault on peaceful protesters was led by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagolo, vice president of the Transitional Military Council (TMC) and head of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), an offshoot of the Janjaweed, notorious for its brutal suppression of the Darfur rebellion. Dagolo aspires to take the place of former dictator Omar al-Bashir, his former patron, deposed by the military in April.

Since the June 3 crackdown, the capital has been in virtual lockdown. All access to the internet and social media has been blocked to prevent the spread of information. Opposition groups have been refused permission to organise public forums. The on-off talks between the military and opposition groups over the composition and powers of a civilian-fronted transitional government were cancelled.

The June 3 rampage came in the wake of Dagalo’s trip to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, and trips by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the head of the TMC and Sudan’s de facto ruler, to Abu Dhabi and Cairo, where he received advice on how to drown a revolution in blood from Egyptian dictator General Abdel Fattah El-Sisi.

While the Trump administration has viewed the instability caused by the military crackdown with some concern, it has supported the main allies of US imperialism in the Middle East and the Horn of Africa, who fear for their own shaky regimes, in their bid to shore up Sudan’s military dictatorship. The Saudi monarchy and Emirati sheiks have pledged $3 billion to prop up the TMC. In turn, the RSF has sent thousands of its members to fight in the Saudi-led assault on Yemen.

Since then, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, Washington’s key ally in the Horn of Africa, and the African Union (AU) have been trying to negotiate a deal between the TMC and the Forces for Freedom and Change (FFC), an umbrella coalition made up of some 20 opposition groups that includes the Sudanese Professionals’ Association (SPA) that has organised many of the strikes.

While TMC spokesperson Lieutenant General Shams El Din Kabbashi said on Saturday that the council had rejected Ethiopia's proposal, which the opposition coalition had accepted, it had agreed “in principle” to the AU’s plan, although he gave no details about its proposals.

The European Union has issued pro forma statements calling for a return to civilian rule, but its chief concern is to ensure that the authorities continue to uphold a filthy $400 million deal—at least some of which has found its way to the RSF to police Sudan’s borders—aimed at preventing the migration of Sudanese people to Europe.

The June 3 crackdown served to destroy any illusions among protesters that the military represented a benevolent force that would usher in a new era of democracy and prosperity. Within weeks, demonstrators took to organising neighbourhood protests and were regularly back on the streets of Sudan’s towns. On June 23, a Sudanese court ordered telecom operator Zain Sudan to restore internet services in response to a civil suit, although it is unclear what impact the ruling has had.

In the days before the rallies, the TMC sought to prevent the FFC from publicizing the rally, blocking it from giving a press conference, and arrested the head of a teachers’ committee and a leading member of the FFC.

Last Monday, dozens of students rallied outside the National Ribat University near the Ministry of Defence headquarters in Khartoum, chanting “civilian rule.” Security forces used batons to beat the students and break up the demonstration.

Sunday’s mass protests took place on the 30th anniversary of the coup that toppled Sudan’s last elected government, bringing former president al-Bashir to power. Al-Bashir’s ouster by the military was carried out in a bid to prevent the four-month long protests from overthrowing the regime of the tiny venal clique that has ruled Sudan since independence from Britain in 1956.

Organised by the FFC, the protesters were determined to show their opposition to the military, turning out despite the junta’s threats to respond with force.

On Saturday, RSF chief Dagalo had warned that he would not tolerate any “vandalism” at the protests, saying, “There are people who have an agenda, a hidden agenda, we don’t want problems.” He said he would hold the FFC “fully responsible for any spirit that is lost in this march, or any damage or harm to citizens or state institutions.”

He later tried to justify the killing of unarmed civilians by claiming that there were snipers among the protesters who had injured at least three members of the armed forces and several civilians. The claim was dismissed by the organisers of the march, who pointed out that Dagolo had used similar accusations to justify the June 3 bloodbath.

Eye-witnesses in Nyala, the capital of South Darfur, said that the RSF had not only violently suppressed the protests, but had actively instigated clashes, with one witness tweeting, “Thousands assaulted in Nyala market with whips and canes by RSF forces, as well as verbal assault to draw them into violence. Market has been shut down and surrounded by RSF vehicles, as well as some police vehicles. Anyone walking around the market is attacked.”

Other witnesses reported that the armed forces had opened fire at crowds in el-Obeid in North Kordofan, Kadugli in South Kordofan and Kassala, the capital of Kassala state.

UK dominated by the privately educated and Oxbridge graduates

Thomas Scripps

“Power rests with a narrow section of the population—the 7% who attend private schools and the 1% who graduate from Oxford and Cambridge.” These are the findings of a report by the Sutton Trust and Social Mobility Commission.

Elitist Britain, based on a survey of 5,000 individuals, details the stranglehold on the commanding heights of British society maintained by a tiny ruling elite. According to the study, these “influential people” are overall five times more likely to be privately educated than the average population.

When those educated in selective state grammar schools—overwhelmingly dominated by the upper classes—are included, the disparity grows even wider. The elite are also eight times more likely to have attended a top Russell Group University and twenty-four times more likely to have gone to Oxbridge (Oxford or Cambridge) Universities.

Just 7 percent of the population as a whole attend private schools, while only 5 percent attend grammar schools. Only 19 percent of the current working population has attended any university, 6 percent have gone to a Russell Group University and less than one percent to either Oxford or Cambridge.

By contrast, in politics and the judiciary, the private and grammar school educated account for 46 percent of Members of Parliament, 79 percent of the House of Lords, 73 percent of civil service Permanent Secretaries, 73 percent of public body chairs, 43 percent of select committee chairs and a massive 85 percent of senior judges.

Twenty-four percent of MPs went to Oxbridge, as did 38 percent of Lords, 56 percent of Permanent Secretaries, 40 percent of public body chairs, 33 percent of select committee chairs and 71 percent of senior judges. Well over half of all these groups went to Russell Group universities.

It is the same story in the army and the police, where 64 percent of senior members of the armed forces and 45 percent of police chiefs are from private or grammar schools. Sixteen percent of senior armed forces officers and 13 percent of police chiefs went to Oxbridge.

And if anyone wishes to know why this system of grotesque, all-encompassing class privilege is so rarely criticized by the media, 68 percent of newspaper columnists went to a private or grammar school, 63 percent of the most influential news media figures and 49 percent of BBC executives. Forty-four percent of newspaper columnists have Oxbridge backgrounds, as do 36 percent of the most influential media figures and 31 percent of BBC executives. Over 70 percent of all these groups attended at least a Russell Group University.

To complete the cultural picture of privilege, 25 percent of pop stars and 56 percent of the richest figures in TV, Film and Music went to a private or grammar school. In sport, 43 percent of men and 35 percent of women playing international cricket for England went to private school, as well as 37 percent of male British rugby union internationals and an extraordinary one in three Olympic medalists.

In business, 41 percent of the CEOs of FTSE 350 companies were educated in private or grammar schools and 15 percent went to Oxbridge.

These figures do not take account those educated in the top Comprehensive schools in the country, monopolised by families rich enough to afford the premium for houses in their catchment areas.

The report’s findings are hardly surprising. They confirm what workers and youth across Britain come to understand through their daily experiences: that positions of influence in society are a closed shop dominated by a rarefied elite. But Elitist Britain does highlight the incredible personal closeness of this narrow layer. The elite are not simply of the same socio-economic class; many of them likely attended the same classes at school and all mix together at dinner parties, resorts and the like.

As the study’s authors explain, “The most common pathway into the elite is attending independent school followed by Oxford or Cambridge, making up 17 percent of the whole group, and forming a strong ‘pipeline’ into the highest status jobs. Those who attended independent school and any Russell Group university comprise over one in four of the elite as a whole (27 percent).”

In some cases, these individuals are members of aristocratic families that have ruled Britain for generations.

The two contenders to replace Theresa May as Prime Minister, Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt, are not only both privately and Oxbridge educated, they are both related to the Queen. In Johnson’s case, this is thanks to his descending from the German Prince Paul Von Wurttemburg, a descendant of King George II. Hunt, meanwhile, is the Queen’s 5th cousin. The former Prime Minister, David Cameron, another Oxbridge graduate, is a fourth cousin to the Queen.

The Daily Express also reports that Hunt is “related to Sir Oswald Mosley, who became leader of the British Union of Fascists and whose father was as a third cousin to the 14th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, father of Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, who served alongside King George VI as Queen.”

Other studies have found that almost one in five MPs are landlords, including 28 percent of Tory MPs and 11 percent of Labour MPs. This compares to less than 3 percent of the overall population. The proportion of MPs with backgrounds in manual occupations fell from 37 percent in 1964 to 3 percent in 2015—almost all of this decline taking place within the overwhelmingly privileged middle class leadership of the Labour Party. One quarter of MPs had an occupational background in politics, 22 percent in corporate business, 15 percent in finance, 14 percent in law and 10 percent in media.

These facts tear to pieces the farce of “representative democracy” in Britain. They confirm Karl Marx’s observation in the Communist Manifesto: “The executive of the modern state is nothing but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”

The government, the judiciary, the security services and the media are all manned by the same ruling elite to ensure their continued control of society.

The shock at the “scandalous” figures of Elitist Britain registered in the liberal media is feigned. The hopeful references to “equal opportunities” and “diversity” legislation are a cynical fraud. The fact that a privileged few dominate positions of influence is not a flaw in an otherwise fair system to be tinkered with and fixed. This is the natural development of a society based on capitalist relations of production and the resulting extreme levels of inequality. Far from an “engine of social mobility,” the education system is a tried and tested mechanism for excluding the majority of the population from the running of society.

Appeals for gender balances or greater representation of ethnic groups in top positions, as championed by the purveyors of identity politics, obscure this fundamental class reality and serve as vehicles for the advancement of competing layers within the upper middle class. Schemes to promote a token contingent of working-class individuals into top universities and professions do nothing to challenge the dominance of the upper classes—who look down on their poorer fellows as, in the words of Oxford graduate Toby Young, “small, vaguely deformed” interlopers.

The sole progressive way forward is a socialist transformation of society, which brings an end to social inequality, makes high quality education available to all and establishes a genuine participatory democracy among working people.