Jose Castillo is an undocumented immigrant, who after 15 years in the U.S. uprooted his family, hid them in the basement of a church in Buffalo, and snuck them across the border to Canada to seek asylum.
Watch: Anywhere but here: An undocumented immigrant’s journey to Canada
It was supposed to be the end of his struggle — like tens of thousands of immigrants who have fled to Canada, Jose believed it would welcome him with open arms. But now, just 10 months later, he’s worried he might have made a huge mistake.
VICE News traveled to Canada, where Jose and more than 20,000 people are learning that the country isn’t quite as welcoming as they thought, and government officials are being dispatched to the United States to clear up the misunderstanding before another 20,000 show up.
I want to highlight something I discussed on DN that has gotten drowned out in the rest of the day’s news: Trey Gowdy’s decision to retire, taken even as he was raising money for his reelection.
AMYGOODMAN: You know, I meant to say progressive activists, not even Democratic congressmembers, when it came to being concerned about FBI and intelligence and NSA overreach. But you mentioned Trey Gowdy. And yesterday, the Republican congressman from South Carolina, a chair of the House Oversight Committee, announced he is not going to seek re-election. He was instrumental in crafting the Nunes memo. Can you talk about the significance of him leaving Congress, leader in the Benghazi investigation, attacking Hillary Clinton, etc.?
MARCYWHEELER: Yeah, Trey Gowdy, when he’s in front of a camera, is one of the most blustery Republican partisans. But you can tell, even, for example, from the Carter Page transcript, his interview with House Intelligence Committee, that behind closed doors he actually is a competent prosecutor, which is—you know, he’s got a background in that. And he can hammer Republican witnesses.
So, what’s interesting about Gowdy is that he—the underlying materials—this is another complaint the Democrats have. The only people who have read the underlying materials are Adam Schiff, four staffers—two of Adam Schiff’s and two of Devin Nunes’s—and Trey Gowdy. It would have been Devin Nunes, but Devin Nunes, probably because of the recusal you talked about earlier, had Gowdy do it instead. So, the only people who have actually looked at the underlying materials include Trey Gowdy. Now, he didn’t write the memo, Nunes’s staffers did. So there’s this game of telephone going on already.
On Sunday, on one of the Sunday shows, Trey—I think it was a Fox show—Trey Gowdy said, “You know, this memo should come out. It’s important. But my side should not use it to undermine the Mueller investigation.” And the reason he gave is that what is not being seen about the Mueller investigation is there’s a whole counterintelligence side to it. There’s a whole side of it investigating how the Russians tampered in our election. And according to Gowdy, who has seen these underlying documents, he thinks that’s an important and legitimate investigation.
Now, we don’t know fully why he decided not to run. He did cite yesterday that he’s sick of politics. But what’s interesting is, yesterday morning, he was still fundraising. So, as of yesterday morning, he was still planning on running. There’s also reports that Don McGahn, who is the White House counsel, who has been in this sort of obstructive role for Trump, as well, was discussing with Gowdy a position on the Fourth Circuit as a circuit court judge, which is something Gowdy has been interested in the past, and Gowdy turned that down. So, Gowdy, even though he is this fire-breathing partisan hack—you know, you go back to the Benghazi case—he seems to have seen something in the underlying investigation that troubles him, that his Republican partisan colleagues are not paying attention to. And so, Gowdy may surprise us, going forward. But I do think that that is an interesting development yesterday, that the one guy on the House Intelligence Committee who’s actually seen the underlying intelligence has decided to get out of the Republican partisan hackery rat race.
This piece in Politico emphasizes his disillusionment with the partisanship, especially around the Mueller inquiry. It sounds like he’s getting concerned that the GOP defense of Trump is beginning to threaten DOJ.
Gowdy has found himself butting heads in recent months with Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) and other pro-Trump Republicans who have hinted at corruption at the FBI. He’s expressed concerns about anti-Trump texts by some FBI officials, and he has said on TV that Congress has a duty to oversee the agency. But behind the scenes he’s had to rein in some of his conservative colleagues who want to undercut the entirety of the Justice Department, which he views as essential to American life.
I know we’ve been trained to consider Gowdy the worst kind of partisan, but in some witness transcripts it’s clear he’s seeing the GOP bullshit (and, like I said on DN, he’s the one guy who has seen what Mueller is looking at).
Gowdy is trusted by many of his colleagues. And if he begins to defend the Mueller inquiry, things may begin to shift under Trump.
Marcy Wheeler is an independent journalist writing about national security and civil liberties. She writes as emptywheel at her eponymous blog, publishes at outlets including Vice, Motherboard, the Nation, the Atlantic, Al Jazeera, and appears frequently on television and radio. She is the author of Anatomy of Deceit, a primer on the CIA leak investigation, and liveblogged the Scooter Libby trial.
Marcy has a PhD from the University of Michigan, where she researched the “feuilleton,” a short conversational newspaper form that has proven important in times of heightened censorship. Before and after her time in academics, Marcy provided documentation consulting for corporations in the auto, tech, and energy industries. She lives with her spouse in Grand Rapids, MI.
The ongoing political circus in the capital of the world’s most powerful empire opens almost daily with a new act each day showcasing an even more bizarre and more revealing display of the internal rot of a culture and a political system in decline.
The day before Donald Trump’s first State of the Union address, the Russia-gate drama took an unexpected and dangerous turn with the vote by the House Intelligence Committee to release a now classified memo that alleges that senior members of the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) may have misled the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA court) in order to secure a warrant to engage in what Republicans assert is a politically motivated effort that spied on the Trump campaign before he won the 2016 election and attempted to undermine his presidency.
Right-wing neoliberal Democrats who have engaged in a vigorous defense of the intelligence agencies of the U.S. state are concerned about the possible fallout with the public. They argue Republicans are deliberately undermining confidence in U.S. institutions by irresponsibly hurling allegations that support a growing public perception that the government and the individuals who populate governmental institutions are inherently corrupt.
Republicans now refer to this as “FBI-gate” and Democrats counter by appealing to the dubious belief that the FBI is some kind of neutral political force populated by people of unreproachable character—those who would never engage in the kind of crass partisanship being alleged by Republicans in Congress.
Even members of the Congressional Black Caucus — the one caucus that traditionally has always been wary of the FBI because of its history abuse against Black activists, including the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. — joined in the effort to prop up this institution and its former director Robert Mueller.
This new narrative of FBI integrity and neutrality is predicated on the assumption that most of the public has forgotten or is unaware of the notorious history of the FBI and its founder, J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover was a racist anti-Semite and fascist sympathizer. He shared his obsessive anti-communism and anti-Semitism with Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s Gestapo chief, who Hoover corresponded with personally and kept on the FBI’s mailing list right up until the eve of the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939.
As the nation’s political police, the FBI has been at the center of domestic repression and political manipulation for decades. From Hoover’s early career working as special assistant to Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, when Hoover was given the responsibility to plan and execute the infamous “Palmer raids” in which thousands were arrested in twenty-three states for “subversive activities,” to his and the FBI’s role in the first McCarthy period of repression in the 1950s through to the COINTELPRO program against the anti-war, Black Liberation and Civil Rights movement. The intelligence gathering, counter-insurgent role of the FBI has been consistent.
When the history and role of the FBI is objectively understood as a central component of the repressive state apparatus, it is not farfetched to accept the meaning of the August 2016 message Peter Strzock, the director of the FBI’s counter-intelligence division, sent to Lisa Page, a high-level official with whom he was romantically involved. In that message, it is clear that Strzock thought it prudent to develop a strategy to undermine a Trump presidency, even when the chance of Trump getting elected seem impossible to many.
I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office—that there’s no way he [Trump] gets elected—but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event that you die before you’re 40.
This quote reveals two things: (1) the thinking of individuals who hold institutional power and are well versed in the exercise of “extra-democratic” institutional power, or what some refer to as the power of the Deep State; and (2) the specific rationale for implementing what appears to have been a classic counter-intelligence project to influence, manipulate and control a political process, in this case the election for the presidency of the United States.
In response to the information coming out about the memo and the explosive allegations of governmental malfeasance, Rep. Adam Schiff, ranking Democratic member of House Intelligence Committee made the laughable statement that the vote to release the memo “politicize(s) intelligence process.” Perhaps Schiff hoped that the public had forgotten all of the instances of politicized intelligence from the manufactured data supporting the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution to the manufactured data about the existence of weapons of mass destruction that justified the disastrous attack on Iraq.
But what Schiff, as well as some Republicans, are concerned with is how the public will process and respond to the existence of a massive, coordinated effort to exercise unelected political power.
They are concerned the extent of the coordination between the state and elements of financial and corporate sectors exposes the hidden reality of how real power is exercised in Washington and the financial center in New York, the power behind the reach of the atrophied mechanisms of democratic accountability and control.
Beyond the Circus: Strengthening the Ideological and Political Mechanisms of Domination
It’s ironic, or perhaps just a reflection of the power of propaganda, that it is now just becoming apparent that while the attention of the people was mobilized and directed to fictitious external sources of electoral interference by the Russians, the real culprits working to undermine the limited democracy that does exist were always in the United States and in plain sight.
They are the ones who re-authorized extending FISA section 702 that allows the state to collect communications from U.S. citizens and even tap into communications databases of companies like Google to collect information without a warrant. They supported inserting provisions of the “Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act” into the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) as one of Obama’s last legislative acts. They were silent as the government prosecuted whistleblowers under the Espionage Act, which justified expanded National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance and called for the head of former federal contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden. They think it is a good idea for Facebook to establish “counter speech” controls and for Google to adjust its algorithms to bury alternative news sites and sources of “radical” analysis.
And while Trump has been a useful idiot for the Deep State, it is important to clearly identify the forces driving this process and giving it political legitimacy–liberal Democrats!
Despite the phony news of economic prosperity that came out of Trump’s State of the Union speech on Tuesday night, the more insightful and “responsible” members of the ruling elite recognize the explosive potential of real opposition to the elite agenda and understand the crisis of confidence in and legitimacy of the system will continue to deepen.
The recognition of that has resulted in ruling-class elements being united in one very important area– “domestic national security.” That is to say not the threat of “terror attacks” or other physical threats, but the security that the ruling class is attempting to acquire for itself by strengthening the repressive state apparatus against the people. Using the gift of “Russia-gate” given to it by the Democrats, the state, in collaboration with the capitalist communication sector, has attempted to tighten its ideological grip on the public by limiting the range of information available to the public.
The neo-liberal right has always understood much better than many elements of the left what Cuba revolutionary Jose Marti meant when he said that “trenches of ideas are more powerful than weapons.”
So, while we are entertained by the theatrics of Trump and shudder with horror after his latest antic, the real forces of totalitarianism are working right under our noses, normalizing the capitalist dictatorship in the name of upholding freedom.
Ajamu Baraka is a board member with Cooperation Jackson, the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace and was the 2016 candidate for vice president on the Green Party ticket. He is an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report and contributing columnist for Counterpunch. He can be reached at www.AjamuBaraka.com Read other articles by Ajamu, or visit Ajamu’s website.
One of the nicest guys in the music world, Brett Dennenis a pillar of creativity and positive vibes. He hasn’t been on the road for a while so he wrote some rocking new songs to share on an extensive stateside tour this year. Produced by Adele and Semisonic hitmaker, Dan Wilson, here’s “Already Gone.”
Developments in Russia’s intellectual community confirm that the worst Soviet practices and institutions are being restored. They have no place in Russia today – yet they’ve already become entrenched in it. RU
Students and EUSP staff at the conference. Right in the last row – Alexander Kondakov and Evgeny Stororn. Photo from the author’s archive.Academic research in Russia, particularly in the social and political sciences, is increasingly being directed by the law enforcement agencies. Two ongoing developments in St Petersburg confirm this trend. The first is the crisis that has enveloped the European University at St Petersburg (EUSP); the second is the story surrounding Evgeny Shtorn, an employee of the city’s Centre for Independent Social Research who has been forced to flee Russia.
For more than a year now, EUSP has been battling to claw back its educational license, which it almost lost in December 2016, before being stripped of it completely in summer 2017. The Federal Service for the Supervision of Education and Science (Rosobrnadzor) alleges that the university is ill equipped for teaching, citing various technicalities as evidence (there’s no swimming pool, you see, and the lift doors are too narrow).
As for Shtorn, his “transgression” was simply working for an academic organisation – Petersburg’s Centre for Independent Social Research – which, in 2015, was added to Russia’s “foreign agents” registry. It was precisely on these grounds that Shtorn was refused Russian citizenship, for which he (a stateless person) had applied according to standard procedure. The formal justification for the refusal was entirely unrelated to Shtorn’s research work and social activism (which encompasses LGBT issues). In reality, however, it was precisely these factors that were behind the pressure on him.
In both cases, the final decisions were formalised in accordance with administrative law yet inspired by ideological control. A Rosobrnadzor commission pays a visit to EUSP and stuffs its final report with vague objections: the university’s auditoria, claims the report, are not “logistically equipped” for the teaching of political science and economics. What this might imply is a subject for esoteric speculation rather than legal interpretation. Nevertheless, the wording is perfectly legitimate: the licensing of educational activities can be denied on its basis.
The FSB deliberately and knowingly breaks Russian laws when it interferes in the procedures of other agencies
As regards citizenship denial, the law provides a closed list of potential reasons. Shtorn was refused citizenship because he allegedly gave “false information” about his place of residence. When district police officers arrived at the address he’d indicated on the form, he wasn’t at home. As far as the factual side of things is concerned, it’s important to note that they arrived during working hours, when Evgeny was, well, at work. As regards the instrumental deployment of the law, however, what matters is the fact that a norm can now be used against a person: if he’s not at home, perhaps he’s actually lying when he claims to live there.
Now, as for Rosobrnadzor’s technical gripes with the EUSP, many struggled to believe they were genuine throughout the affair. Ever since the legal battle between the university and the state got underway, commentators have concurred that these developments constitute an organised assault against the freedom of thought. Deputy Vitaly Milonov, responsible for giving voice to the awkward positions of the state bureaucracy, confirmed these suspicions, taking every opportunity to castigate the EUSP’s Gender Studies programme. In today’s Russia, gender and sexuality represent an enormous bone of contention between government-endorsed conservatives and the progressive intellectual community, of which the EUSP is a part.
Other observers, meanwhile, have focused on the economic interests potentially being pursued by the instigators of the witch hunt against the university: someone within the Russian government may have taken a fancy to the Small Marble Palace, where the EUSP has been based since its foundation. But a recently floated theory strikes me as the most convincing one of all: the university may have attracted the interest of an FSB department engaged in the containment and elimination of “ideological sabotage”.
Photo from the archive of Evgeny Shtorn.The story of Evgeny Shtorn, too, points towards FSB involvement. In interviews with Novaya Gazeta and the BBC Russian Service, Shtorn maintains that his citizenship application was allegedly refused because he hadn’t filled out his form in the proper fashion – this despite the fact that the form was thoroughly checked on receipt by the same officials who issued the refusal. Shtorn was subsequently invited to the Federal Migration Service to discuss Russian migration legislation in person. But when he arrived at the Migration Service office, Evgeny encountered a sentinel of the ideological order – an FSB man who’d decorated the office with a portrait of Andropov and a bust of Dzerzhinsky. It turned out that the FSB officer had gone through Shtorn’s citizenship documents and, surprised to discover that the applicant was working for a “foreign agent”, he’d recommended that the application be rejected. Needless to say, this was not a legal course of action: working for an NGO listed as a “foreign agent” is no basis for citizenship denial. Hence the necessity of claiming that the applicant had provided false information on his form.
At the “migration legislation” meeting, the FSB officer informed Shtorn that, if his understanding was correct, the US was gradually subordinating Russia by means of “soft power”. The wellsprings of US “soft power” in Russia, he said, were organisations such as the CISR and the EUSP – organisations used by the American government to disseminate views and values alien to this country of ours: support for LGBT rights, discontent with the regime, criticism of Soviet-era repressions, and so on and so forth.
Russian values, in the FSB’s eyes, were the following: subordination to one’s superiors; loyalty; “traditional” expressions of sexuality. All other values were alien and served as instruments for the subjugation of Russia. The FSB learned of this imminent threat from publicly available sources, and namely from Zbigniew Brzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard. In the stories surrounding the EUSP and Shtorn, however, the chessboard has shrunk to the very specific cases of a modestly sized university and a stateless person. Nevertheless, both stories showcase the revival of institutions from the past. The Soviet past. The past we’ve been fleeing for so long.
Post-Soviet “organs”
After the collapse of the USSR, Soviet state institutions experienced a long and painful crisis. Many of them failed to find a niche of their own in the new reality, in the new type of state brought into being by the 1993 Russian Constitution, which affirmed (at least nominally so) democratic freedoms and human rights as the basis of Russian statehood. One of the first obvious candidates for elimination in this new state was the centrally planned economy. Determining supply and demand by means of statistical calculations became inadmissible: in capitalist societies, supply and demand are determined by autonomous market agents, and the limits of their freedom can be regulated by the state only to a certain degree. It is of no consequence in this case which of the methods is better – what matters is that the former was rendered rudimentary in the new conditions.
Another Soviet institution to become unfit for purpose was that enforcer of ideological control, the KGB. If Soviet citizens were officially forbidden to think their own thoughts – to say nothing of thoughts at variance with the positions of the Communist Party – freedom of thought is guaranteed for the citizens of Russia by Articles 13 and 29 of the Constitution. Monitoring people who think “incorrectly” therefore ceased to have any purpose. Though the “security” agencies remained in place, they acquired new functions that partly overlapped with the functions of other law-enforcement agencies. It is important to emphasise that Russia’s new KGB (the FSB) has become a law-enforcement organisation – that is, an organisation that formally acts within the framework of the law and applies it to resolve conflicts. In theory, then, ideology should play no role in the endeavours of this agency. The reality, of course, is rather different.
Resurrecting the form of Soviet state institutions leads ineluctably to the replication of their content
Throughout post-Soviet history, Russia has witnessed an ongoing reestablishment of Soviet-style statecraft institutions. What should have perished with the Soviet Union had merely entered a brief dormancy period that facilitated adaptation to the new conditions. Did this happen because statecraft in post-Soviet Russia was performed in keeping with Soviet textbooks and the Soviet experience, or because it was in the interest of the new ruling class to recreate the statecraft system of the USSR, wherein all branches of power are integrated into a single administrative chain of subordination? Either way, the state agencies of the past underwent a gradual resurrection in the new Russian state. Most likely, the explanation should be sought in the incompetence of government officials capable of doing only what they’d been taught to do in the past.
Graduate students of the European University at the meeting.Resurrecting the form of Soviet state institutions – that is, the administrative logic that determines their behaviour and position in the system – leads ineluctably to the replication of their content. Under the new conditions, this content is naturally subject to modification: you can’t step into the same river twice. We may no longer have a planned economy, but the country’s principal industries and a host of market agents have been subordinated to the state bureaucracy and pursue the goals it sets for them, even if said goals are inconsistent with revenue generation. Which is precisely why certain business can continue operating at a loss – provided they’re catering to the interests of the state. Whether or not some new product or other proves a hit among consumers is unimportant. What matters is that its creation was ordered; consumers can always be forced to use it, as has happened, for example, in the case of the Mir payment system.
The content of the new Russian ideology – to be controlled by state security – remained unclear for a long time. Russian nationalism can be integrated into this ideology only to a limited degree: it is problematic because it provokes undesirable conflicts. Ditto Russian Orthodoxy. Although both ideas undoubtedly play a role in the current fragmented ideological project, they’ve not become central to it. Only recently was it decided that the ideological keystone of today’s Russia would be anti-Americanism. Although the belief that Russia and the United States represent opposing poles in a conflict of values is not underpinned by the facts, it works well enough as a central ideological concept, facilitating distinctions between “good” and “bad”, “us” and “them”, “Self” and “Other”. This gives the ideological police a raison d’être: with a particular coordinate system now specified and the requisite dichotomies easy to erect, it makes sense to exercise control and mete out punishment.
Doubting the undoubtable
This ideological police turned out to be the central protagonist in the cases involving the EUSP and Evgeny Shtorn.
It is not the law that is enforced by this police: it is their own value system, habitually moulded by specific individuals within the power structures. Privately, of course, FSB personnel have the right, as citizens of Russia, to think whatever they see fit; they can deem the US their ultimate enemy and regard Russia’s research institutions as weapons in ideological conflicts. Nonetheless, they cannot act on these beliefs in their professional activities, for restrictions on freedom of thought as stipulated by ideological control are contrary to the Russian Constitution and federal laws. Institutions that implement the law, the FSB included, are expected to abide by that selfsame law – or is this expectation just another of the “false” values that the US, taking its cue from Brzezinski, has foisted upon us? Nowhere in the current legislation is it specified that universities deemed by someone or other to be “ideologically alien” must be denied an educational license, or that individuals in the employ of “foreign agents” must be denied citizenship. Furthermore, if the Russian Constitution is anything to go by, this cannot be specified in the current legislation.
FSB personnel, needless to say, know all this full well themselves, which is why they force other agencies and departments – the Migration Service, say, or the Ministry of Education – to hunt for formal reasons to give this red light or that, thereby allowing the true motives to be kept hidden. In other words, the upshot is that the FSB deliberately and knowingly breaks the law when it interferes in the procedures of other agencies in order to monitor the ideological loyalty of individuals making applications to these agencies for whatever reason.
Even in the Soviet era, it was the exception rather than the rule for state agencies to act illegally – the USSR didn’t guarantee freedom of thought and legislatively codified its limitations. In today’s Russia, however, there would appear to exist an agency that restricts heterodox thinking without any legal grounds to do so, even as far as current Russian legislation is concerned (to say nothing of the “alien” norms of international law).
The FSB believes that Russian citizens love the regime, and social scientists ask whether or not this is the case
In this situation, the social sciences and humanities become targets for the ideological police. In the domain of the social sciences, universities and research centres are engaged in criticism: they do not toe the party line. We scholars and researchers critique the current state of affairs or some prior state of affairs (the government’s behaviour included) because this is the essence of our work. We’re interested in situations where some factor or other may take us by surprise, situations where conflict may be unearthed, situations whose reality is far removed from idealisations thereof. The FSB believes that Russian citizens love the regime, and social scientists ask whether or not this is the case. The very fact of such enquiries is sufficient to bring us into conflict with the FSB, since we’re effectively permitting ourselves to doubt the “undoubtable”.
The stories surrounding the EUSP and Evgeny Shtorn, which have brought this conflict into sharp focus, testify to the fact that Soviet-era institutions of ideological control are being resurrected in a post-Soviet political reality and becoming progressively more powerful. But existing as they do in this new reality – and specifically against the backdrop of the norms established by the Constitution of 1993 – these institutions also undoubtedly contravene the law. They have no place in the new Russia, yet they’ve already become entrenched in it.
The ideological department of the FSB cannot vindicate its right to exist in the current legal environment, since we, the citizens of Russia, do have the right to think differently, to criticise the authorities, to refuse loyalty to the regime. Our value systems are diverse: they don’t all follow the same template. Some of us support LGBT rights, and some of us do not; we can hold different views on gender equality and the country’s historical experience, vote for different presidential candidates, have preferences for different films and plays. In theory, this diversity of worldviews is legally unrestricted, and the “traditionalism” (or otherwise) of your values legally inconsequential. “In theory” being, once again, the operative phrase.
In reality, we’re all being monitored by an ideological morality police who are guided by ignorant interpretations of American political scientists.
MINSK — A Belarusian court has convicted three journalists of hate crimes over articles they wrote for a Russian news agency, ruling that the stories risked inciting ethnic discord by belittling Belarus.
In a decision on February 2, the Minsk City Court sentenced Belarusians Yury Paulavets, Dzmitry Alimkin, and Syarhey Shyptenka to five years in prison but postponed the start of the sentences for three years.
The court released the three journalists from custody but ordered them to remain in Minsk.
The verdict and sentences were in line with what prosecutors had recommended at a hearing in January.
Paulavets, Alimkin, and Shyptenka, who were arrested in December 2016 and went on trial a year later, pleaded not guilty.
The charges stem from articles they contributed to the Russian news outlet Regnum in which they expressed pro-Russia views and promoted the idea of closer integration between Belarus and Russia.
In some of the articles, the authors described the Belarusian language as a Russian dialect and an attribute of “a lower cultural level.”
The three were arrested in December 2016. Their trial began on December 18, 2017.
Belarus and Russia have close ties and are partners in a “union state” that was established in the 1990s but exists mostly on paper.
Wariness about Moscow’s intentions toward its neighbors deepened after Russia seized Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and began supporting separatists in eastern Ukraine, where the ensuing war has killed more than 10,300 people since April 2014.
Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka has strained ties with the West but now speaks frequently of the need to protect Belarus’s sovereignty against potential threats from the east — meaning Russia.
Regnum is an online news outlet that covers events in Russia and other former Soviet republics.
A fourth defendant in the Belarusian case, Yury Baranchyk, is also a Belarusian citizen but is residing in Russia.
Russian authorities detained Baranchyk in March at Minsk’s request, but refused to extradite him and later released him.
The International Organization for Migration (IOM) says at least 90 people are feared dead after a boat carrying migrants capsized in the Mediterranean Sea.
“At least 90 migrants are reported to have drowned when a boat capsized off the coast of Libya this morning”, the IOM said in a statement on February 2.
It said that the bodies of 10 people — eight Pakistanis and two Libyans — were “reported to have washed up on Libyan shores.”
Two survivors swam to shore while another was rescued by a fishing boat, IOM said.
Most of the migrants onboard were from Pakistan, according to the survivors.
The agency has warned repeatedly over the extreme dangers facing migrants who try to reach Europe via the so-called central Mediterranean route, which connects Libya to Italy.
As the Corbynistas besiege the New Labour diehards, as in other Labour-run councils, the main battleground is housing. Meanwhile, Salford is pursuing a genuinely radical path.
Picture
caption: Manchester, Empire of the Pound/Steve Hanson.
Andy Burnham has a look of Tommy Carcetti,
the fictional mayor in the celebrated HBO TV series The Wire, played by Aidan Gillen.
In a memorable scene Tommy Carcetti is told
by a fictional former mayor of Baltimore that his job, if he gets elected to
mayoral office, will be to eat bowl of shit after bowl of shit. One each, from
‘the unions’ and other urban groups. It is an offensive metaphor, but now is
not the time for politeness.
I am sure the parallel is not lost on
Burnham. Having won the new Greater Manchester Mayor position with his easy
populist style, he’s been continuing that style with media actions such as
charity runs and spending time out with firefighters on bonfire night – during
which he had fireworks thrown at him. He’s now settling down to eat the
notoriously noxious Mancunian shit.
But Burnham has a large ego and desire for
power and no pity should be given to players. Several narratives seethe just
below the surface of Manchester and we can view them via a thin but deep crack
running across the frozen surface of city politics.
Has this fissure in city politics has been
created by the housing crisis? Sir Richard Leese continues the old
fundamentalist New Labour game of enabling the property developers, via which
he seems to think the homeless problem will somehow miraculously heal itself.
Meanwhile, the Labour Party centrists’ grip
on Manchester City Council is now being challenged as councillors are
deselected and replaced with Momentum sympathisers as boundaries change. Of
course, these local shifts mirror national tensions between Burnham and Corbyn,
Leese and Corbyn, Old New Labour and emerging New Old Labour.
Burnham, at times vocally opposed to
Stockport Council’s plan to build on green belt land in High Lane, Cheadle,
Woodford and Heald Green, could be found declaring – at mayoral hustings in
Stockport I attended – that we should not be shy of building on green belt land
to solve the housing crisis. The unglamorously-titled Greater Manchester
Spatial Framework is still being developed, but it’s already a highly
contentious mess.
Meanwhile, over in Salford, and of course getting
little coverage in mainstream media, solidly pro-Corbyn City Mayor Paul Dennett
is getting on with trying to sidestep central government regulations that
effectively act as a ban on creating new social housing, by working on inventive
new housing strategies. Burnham has strong links with Dennett, but he is
overlooking already existing radical housing strategies in Manchester.
Rhetoric
and reality
I live in a property that is part of New
Longsight Housing Co-op. This housing co-op began in the 1980s and picked up
cheap properties to rent out at social housing rates, about a third of market
prices. The house I previously rented burned down nearly killing me, and my
attempts to chase the unscrupulous agency, landlord and the others involved
were futile. The co-op is quite literally a life-saver. For the first time in
my life, at 45 years of age, I actually enjoy paying my rent, because I believe
in what I am paying into.
Just before Andy Burnham was elected I
attended an event he and his team hosted on housing. During this event we were
told support for housing co-ops was on the cards. I duly voted Burnham. I then
tentatively chased Burnham up via email. New Longsight Housing Co-op needs to
expand, to extend its provision to the worst off in Manchester with its
affordable rent. To do this, it simply needs access to land to build on.
I communicated this by letter repeatedly. It
took well over six months to get a reply, and the perfunctory reply said please
register yourselves with self-build, a scheme that pre-existed Burnham’s
election as mayor. Further emails asking Burnham to visit the Co-op to see what
we do have been ignored: Promises made pre-election have been reneged on
already.
Or, to use a less polite metaphor, a bowl
of shit pushed aside in the mayor’s office means hundreds of citizens who might
eat less of the landlord’s shit are denied such charity. On one hand all the
rhetoric seems to be directed at the homeless problem and the housing crisis –
Burnham gives a portion of his salary to the causes of the homeless – yet when
a genuinely radical provider of low cost housing for the needy tries to get
help, they are brushed aside. Meanwhile, private for-profit players such as Capital
& Centric are effectively being handed public money. These contradictions
are not anomalies in Manchester.
The CRESC/LSE Public Interest Report warned
that Manchester has created a ‘monoculture’ of property speculation. In a book
on Engels, Steven Marcus wrote that nineteenth century Manchester ‘was the
Detroit of the first phase of the Industrial Revolution’, and that ‘the
historical fate that befell a town that was committed overwhelmingly to a
single industry is a cautionary tale in itself.’
Apparently nothing, it seems, has been
learned in 150 years. Instead Manchester is now reaping the consequences of
another kind of revolution. From the late 1980s, Manchester City Council (MCC)
have out of sheer desperation begun to seek money from all kinds of
non-governmental sources. This essentially became the model for the neoliberal
form of governance and statecraft in 1990s Britain, including the
re-calibration of the Labour Party as New Labour, eventually under the
leadership of Tony Blair.
Labour in Manchester became ‘successful’ in
terms of metrics and big business, at the same time as the symptoms of those
processes began bleeding out of the surface of the city, homelessness
particularly. Last week it was announced that homelessness
is up by over 40%.
Meanwhile, Labour Party central and many
among the general population have begun the process of leftward reorientation,
leaving this New Labour city council stranded, unable to change direction.
Manchester,
a city of myth and concrete
Manchester is the last refuge of the
neoconservatives. We can see this in Peter
Mandelson’s appointment to Chancellor at Manchester Metropolitan University.
We can see it in George Osborne’s announcement of his Northern Powerhouse
vision at the Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI) and then with David Cameron
in the Old Granada Studios.
All of this is completely contrary to the
stories the city tells itself. Manchester’s ‘revolution’ in the nineteenth
century was overwhelmingly economic and technological. The real ‘radical
politics’ that followed were put in place to try to deal with the rapacious
machine of industrialism. Manchester is not foremost a political innovator: The
real socialist innovators were the daughters of disaster, the co-operatives,
for instance, borne out of sheer poverty and need.
A 2016 CRESC/LSE Public Interest Report
even suggested that Manchester’s emotive city symbol of a worker bee might be
more appropriately replaced with an image of a lift in some private residential
new build block. But the worker bee is actually very appropriate: Pull yourself
up by your bootstraps it says; be self-made or be undone, nobody is going to
save you. Buy a new shirt, get out there and work, or die in a doorway.
The same logic underpins the sense of
Manchester as a resilient city, it can be seen in its sense of pride too, and
most recently in the co-opting of the ‘I heart MCR’ sign and the worker bee as
symbols of resistance to the terrorist attack at the MEN Arena. That resistance
is 100% admirable, but the form it takes tells us other things about the city
too. Here we see the logic of what became known as ‘Manchester Capitalism’. If
we pull together we do so in a place of savage circumstance. We do so to get
by, to survive, not to criticise the logic of the going order.
But the logic of the going order must be
challenged. The CRESC/LSE Public Interest Report also evidences how Manchester
is not significantly ahead of other similarly sized cities in terms of the
outputs of its ‘creative industries’. This myth in Manchester is as swollen and
nonsensical as the idea of Manchester as a radical city.
It is time to peel the myths about
Manchester off, all of them, discard them completely and see what we are left
with. Because the homeless still sleep in doorways as yet another Christmas
passes and the temperature stays well below zero. Current data suggests that
more will join them.
Still the trite, lazy, retroactive dead rhetoric
rolls out, for instance in the opening lines of the 2017 Manchester Literature
Festival brochure, that Manchester is ‘a city of activism, protest, pioneers
and radicals.’
This is nothing but a middle-class alibi.
Manchester’s real power is Sir Richard Leese, but Andy Burnham has been working
with Paul Dennett, elected City Mayor of Salford, to push a new housing agenda,
so there is still time to write his legacy.
We have seen in the last couple of weeks how
the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee – in the wake of the Carillion
collapse – requested Haringey Council halt the Haringey Development Vehicle, partly
delivered by a property developer. Here lies the big crack in city politics:
Manchester are completely at odds with the emerging anti-corporate Labour
Party.
Of course, there are complaints about how
‘elected councillors’ are being over-ruled, but those councillors have also
voted austerity through for years. There isn’t a direct line between the vote
and support of individual councillor actions.
This is going to be a big part of future right-left
slanging matches. Corbynism will of course be vilified by the tabloids, a
simplistic hammering of the ‘authoritarian state’.
But this will also be a big part of
internal Labour wrangling as well: A leading researcher on the city told me
that Manchester is like Kiev after the Russian revolution, the last stronghold
of the Tsarist Whites (or New Labour) under siege by the red masses
(Corbynistas). This researcher is currently preparing work on the city that
contains unexploded ordnance.
Burnham is not completely in agreement with
Leese’s vision of the city, and he is setting himself up to charge
every citizen of the city an extra £10 ‘precept’ to fund his active mayoral
role. But he needs to use that well, and through a very different strategy
to the one currently pursued by Manchester City Council, or his term will be up
with little to show for it. He may be good at making people like him, but
unless he can change the dreadful state of housing in the city, he has failed.
However, I suspect that Labour or not,
Leese, Burnham and the other centrists need to go before real change can take
place. We cannot wait for the young Momentum candidates to slowly seep into the
Council. It could take a decade. Meanwhile, over in Salford everyday radicalism
is being attempted against the odds.
On a conference call announcing earnings for the fourth quarter of 2017 on Thursday, Aflac CEO Dan Amos defended his company against a series of allegations reported by The Intercept in a trio of federal lawsuits against the company’s sales, recruiting, and financial disclosure practices.
“When the false allegations were made recently by a very small group of independent contractors in the United States, we responded in a very transparent manner that represents our way of doing business,” said Amos, unprompted, at the beginning of the earnings call. He cited a 73-page board of directors report that responds to a portion of the allegations, labeling them “without merit.”
Amos also said a second report was due at the end of February. He didn’t say whether that would be conducted by internal audit, compliance teams, or an independent third party.
Aflac stands accused, in complaints and exhibits filed in three federal lawsuits, of making misleading promises of lucrative rewards in recruiting sales associates, misclassifying tens of thousands of sales associates as independent contractors, signing up customers to policies without their authorization or consent, transferring commissions from those who sell policies to managers, manipulating key operational metrics to demonstrate company growth to investors, and retaliating against whistleblowers.
Several stock analysts peppered Amos and his management colleagues about the allegations. Nigel Dally of Morgan Stanley asked whether the situation has had an impact on sales, to which Amos replied it was too early to tell. “We will be able to handle any of the issues that were brought forth and resolved in our favor,” Amos said.
Tom Gallagher of Evercore ISI asked if Aflac changed any of its business practices as a result of the board of directors’ review of the allegations. Amos said that the first report “spoke for itself,” a line echoed by Aflac spokesman Jon Sullivan in responses to The Intercept. Amos added, “We’re always looking to see if there’s a better way to regulate things…We’re trying to make sure we run this company in the most ethical manner possible.”
Amos cited an “Aflac Trust” hotline that associates with complaints can call directly, as well as a Special Investigations Unit to look into complaints. The plaintiffs in the federal lawsuits allege that complaints from sales agents were not addressed, and that the individuals who made the complaints faced retaliation, including demotion and the loss of accounts.
Other analysts seemed to question some of the operational sales metrics mentioned in the allegations. John Barnidge of Sandler O’Neill mentioned that the most recent average weekly producer metric, which the plaintiffs have alleged is manipulated by placing production credit in the names of associates who had nothing to do with selling policies, looked outsized. “It doesn’t seem like it was that high previously,” Barnidge said. Theresa White, president of Aflac U.S., pivoted to talk about productivity per worker. “Our focus has been on productivity, training…working with producers to become productive agents,” she said.
The plaintiffs have alleged that the typical entry-level Aflac sales associate working full-time lasts less than a year and makes under $10,000 in sales commissions.
White also repeatedly highlighted new annualized premium sales, which the plaintiffs have also said can be gamed by converting older individual accounts into group accounts, and booking them as new sales. When Suneet Kamath of Citi asked what percentage of sales represent conversions that aren’t actually new customers, White said, “it’s a very small amount, about 1 percent.”
This contradicts what the plaintiffs, as well as numerous current and former sales agents, have told The Intercept about individual-to-group conversions. The derivative shareholder complaint filed last December states, “The individual-to-group conversion has become widespread in recent years, allowing Aflac to report ‘new’ business that is nothing more than the old business cannibalized by Aflac to the severe detriment of its Sales Associates, and in deceit of its shareholders.”
On Wednesday, the plaintiffs amended that derivative shareholder lawsuit, which was filed in U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York. The amended complaint notes that Aflac’s board of directors report only covers a handful of its allegations. “In sum, the…report itself is false and misleading, just another element of the Defendants’ coverup,” the amended complaint states.
On Wednesday, President Donald Trump welcomed an Aflac employee into a White House meeting and received a pair of socks with the corporate mascot, a duck, plastered on them. Trump noted that his wife, Melania, had a history with the company. “Your chairman I know very well and he’s done a fantastic job,” Trump said. “He actually a long time ago hired my wife to do a big commercial, an Aflac commercial, and think it was a successful commercial, too.”
Top photo: Aflac Chairman and CEO Dan Amos speaks during the company’s annual shareholders meeting Monday morning, May 7, 2012 at The Columbus Museum in Columbus, Ga.
Few things get journalists — especially investigative journalists — more jazzed than impact. That is, when we write a story that leads to reform or sparks a reaction from a government agency, law enforcement officials or business: an investigation is launched, someone is forced to resign because of malfeasance, corruption or abuse, a law gets changed.
One recent example is the Wall Street Journal investigation that uncovered allegations of sexual misconduct against billionaire casino mogul Steve Wynn. The story, which detailed a $7.5 million settlement with a manicurist who said Wynn forced her to have sex with him, dropped like a bomb.
Beginning last year, I wrote a series called “The Tax Divide,” which revealed deep inequities in Cook County’s property tax assessments. It triggered a bunch of impact.
And I have to admit: It made me proud.
But pride is a dangerous thing in this business. It can blind you to truth, which is what we strive to capture. That’s why it’s important to bring the same level of scrutiny to impact stories that we bring to the stories that sparked the impact. Too often, officials try to take steps that seem as if they’re taking action, when really they’re blowing smoke.
Since the series was published, ProPublica Illinois and the Chicago Tribune have collaborated on two stories that have examined the fallout from our series.
A couple of weeks ago, Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner referred to our work when he issued an executive order barring lawmakers from practicing before a state board that hears property tax assessment appeals. Among the findings from our series was that the tax appeal law firm of House Speaker Michael Madigan — Rauner’s arch enemy — does more business in Cook County than any other tax firm.
Usually, if a governor issues an executive order in response to one of your stories, your first instinct is to trumpet it. Instead, we took a step back and looked at the data.
Turns out, the governor’s executive order was largely symbolic. It wouldn’t do much to move the needle on reforming the county’s flawed assessment system because relatively few appeals are handled by the Illinois Property Tax Appeal Board, or PTAB, which is what Rauner targeted; most appeals go through the Cook County Assessor, the Board of Review or the Cook County Circuit Court. So we reported that.
On Thursday, we did another story that raised questions about County Board President Toni Preckwinkle’s move to commission an independent study of the assessment system, an announcement triggered by our series. Again, if a story results in a blue ribbon panel or an independent commission, that’s some juicy impact.
But Preckwinkle made the announcement nearly seven months ago. Since then: crickets.
So rather than wait around, we started reporting why the study is taking so long. We also asked whether the study is even necessary. Some critics of Assessor Joseph Berrios suspect it’s a smokescreen or delaying tactic until after the March primary, when Berrios — a Preckwinkle political ally — faces a tight re-election.
Doing this kind of work requires discipline. You have to bring skepticism to every story, even those that might otherwise make you look like a hero. Our job is to hold people in power accountable even after they pledge to make changes. Especially after they pledge to make changes. The job doesn’t end after the first splash of stories.
From the Archive: In his State of the Union address Tuesday, President Trump announced that he had signed an executive order to keep the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay open. On this occasion, we republish an article from 2012 by Nat Parry marking Guantanamo’s ten-year anniversary.
When the Guantanamo prison camp, originally dubbed by the U.S. military Camp X-Ray, opened in January 2002, the United States came under international criticism that was nearly unprecedented in its intensity.
Some of the original detainees jailed at the Guantanamo Bay prison, as put on display by the U.S. military.
Some of the loudest complaints came from the staunchest U.S. ally, the United Kingdom, where three cabinet ministers Robin Cook, Patricia Hewitt and Jack Straw expressed concern that international agreements about the treatment of prisoners of war were being breached. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, also objected to the camp and called on President George W. Bush’s administration to follow the Geneva Conventions.
In a Jan. 19, 2002, column in the British Independent, Robinson argued that because the Afghanistan conflict was of an international nature, “the law of international armed conflict applies.” She took issue with the administration’s assertion that the prisoners were “unlawful combatants” and thus outside the protections of the Geneva Conventions.
European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana said that despite the Sept. 11 atrocities, ”changing our values and our way of life would be terrorism’s first victory.”
Amnesty International expressed concern about the tactics being used and the secrecy surrounding the camp. “Keeping prisoners incommunicado, sensory deprivation, the use of unnecessary restraint and the humiliation of people through tactics such as shaving them, are all classic techniques employed to ‘break’ the spirit of individuals ahead of interrogation,” the human rights group said.
The International Committee of the Red Cross — in an unusual deviation from its practice of not publicly criticizing detaining governments — said the United States might have violated Geneva Convention rules against making a spectacle of prisoners by distributing pictures of the detainees being subjected to sensory deprivation, which were published worldwide.
British human rights attorney Stephen Solley said the treatment of the suspects was “so far removed from human rights norms that it [was] difficult to comprehend.”
Seven years later, just two days into his administration, President Barack Obama’s announcement that he would close the Guantanamo camp was greeted with international praise equally intense. An Executive Order Obama signed on Jan. 22, 2009, seemed to unambiguously mandate the closure of Guantanamo within a year:
“The detention facilities at Guantanamo for individuals covered by this order shall be closed as soon as practicable, and no later than one year from the date of this order. If any individuals covered by this order remain in detention at Guantanamo at the time of closure of those detention facilities, they shall be returned to their home country, released, transferred to a third country, or transferred to another United States detention facility in a manner consistent with law and the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States.”
Michele Cercone, spokesperson for the European Union Justice and Home Affairs Commission, said at the time that the commission “has been very pleased that one of the first actions of Mr. Obama has been to turn the page on this sad episode of Guantanamo.”
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay also praised Obama’s Executive Order, saying that it was a good day for the rule of law. “The fact that President Obama has placed such a high priority on closing Guantanamo and set in motion a system to safeguard the fundamental rights of the detainees there is extremely encouraging,” she stated.
“The United States has in the past been a staunch supporter of international human rights law, and this is one of the reasons that the regime that was established in Guantanamo has been viewed as so damaging,” the High Commissioner added.
Now at Guantanamo’s ten-year anniversary and nearly three years after President Obama’s Executive Order there is a palpable sense of disappointment and betrayal from the human rights community. The United States is finding itself on the receiving end of now-familiar criticism of its indefinite detention policies, with human rights organizations and intergovernmental bodies renewing their complaints that for the past ten years, the U.S. has flouted international human rights standards in its practices at the notorious prison camp.
“Human Rights Watch opposes the prolonged indefinite detention without trial of terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere,” said HRW in a statement on Jan. 6. The group reminded the U.S. of its obligations to prosecute terrorist suspects and to compensate detainees who have been wrongly imprisoned and mistreated over the past decade:
“The practice [of indefinite detention] violates U.S. obligations under international law. Human Rights Watch has strongly urged the U.S. government to either promptly prosecute the remaining Guantanamo detainees according to international fair trial standards, or safely repatriate them to home or third countries.
“We have also called for investigations of U.S. officials implicated in torture of terrorism suspects and for adequate compensation for detainees who were mistreated. Human Rights Watch will continue to press for compliance with these obligations. Failure to do so does enormous damage to the rule of law both in the US and abroad.”
On the eve of Guantanamo’s tenth anniversary, Amnesty International said, “Guantanamo has politicized justice internationally by portraying detainees as having no human rights.” Amnesty has described the legacy of the Guantanamo Bay prison as a “decade of damage to human rights” not only in the United States, but across the world.
In a report released on Dec. 16, 2011, Amnesty stated:
“The USA speaks the language of human rights fluently on the global stage, but stumbles when it comes to applying human rights standards to itself. The Bush administration promised to put human rights at the centre of its counter-terrorism strategy, but singularly failed to do so. The Obama administration has promised the same thing, but the USA continues to fall short of this commitment, despite what were undoubtedly positive initial steps in the right direction.”
“From day one,” said Amnesty, “the USA failed to recognize the applicability of human rights law to the Guantanamo detentions.”
Ambassador Janez Lenarcic, the Director of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), also expressed dismay over the failure to close the Guantanamo facility.
“Universal human rights standards require that the detention of terrorist suspects shall be accompanied by concrete charges and the persons detained under these charges shall be immediately informed of them and brought before a competent judicial authority,” Lenarcic said.
“As a participating State of the OSCE, the United States has committed itself to respect human rights in the fight against terrorism and to ensure the right to a fair trial within a reasonable time before an independent and impartial tribunal. In the OSCE Bucharest Document of 2001, participating States expressed their determination to protect their citizens from security challenges such as terrorism ‘while safeguarding the rule of law, individual liberties, and the right to equal justice under law.’”
Lenarcic regretted that the practice of indefinite detention without trial has been codified into U.S. law with the recent adoption of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). He called for a swift closure of the Guantanamo detention center and urged the authorities to prosecute promptly the remaining Guantanamo detainees in accordance with international fair trial standards, or release them.
Moazzam Begg, a 43-year-old British Muslim who was wrongly detained at Guantanamo for three years two of them in solitary confinement until British authorities negotiated his release in January 2005, is more despondent about the prospects of closing the prison camp.
“Gitmo will never close. That is a fantasy,” Begg recently told CNN. “I’ve stopped wishing for it. Even if it closes its doors, it will be only symbolic. The detainees who are still there will go somewhere else to be held and be treated possibly worse, and still not get their time in court. And Gitmo, in a way, will always be open. It will be in my memory, in my head, just like everyone else who experienced that hell.”
Colonel Morris Davis, a chief prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay during the Bush administration, concurs with Moazzam Begg, saying that Obama “doesn’t have the balls” to close Guantanamo.
On Wednesday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a notice outlining extraordinary plans by the social media company to monitor all the postings and messages of its users, censor independent journalism, and use artificial intelligence (AI) to report users to the police and intelligence agencies.
Zuckerberg began his post, released in conjunction with the company’s quarterly earnings report, by declaring that 2017 was a “hard year” for Facebook. “The world feels anxious and divided—and that played out on Facebook. We’ve seen abuse on our platform, including interference from nation states, the spread of news that is false, sensational and polarizing, and debate about the utility of social media.” Facebook, he writes, has the responsibility to “amplify the good and prevent harm. That is my personal challenge for 2018.”
In Facebook’s “newspeak,” this means that the company will act aggressively this year to suppress the spread of information online and censor content, under the guise of combatting “fake news” and “Russian meddling.”
The truly ominous implications of this project are outlined in Zuckerberg’s post. Among Facebook’s initiatives, he writes, is “new technology to detect suicidal posts that has helped first responders reach more than 100 people who needed help quickly, and we’ve built AI systems to flag suspicious behavior around elections in real time and remove terrorist content.”
In other words, Facebook has introduced AI systems to collect, monitor and interpret all the information posted on its social media platform. As always, the introduction of such a sweeping system of mass surveillance is justified with seemingly praiseworthy motivations. After all, who could object to measures aimed at stopping suicides or terrorist attacks? The actual purpose of the new systems, however, is very different.
Zuckerberg points to the sweeping scope of the company’s artificial intelligence plans later: “Our goal with AI is to understand the meaning of all the content on Facebook.” Every single post, photo, video, message, comment, reaction and share will be fed into the company’s increasingly powerful computer systems to be analyzed for “harmful” content, and reported to the police and intelligence agencies as deemed necessary.
The real—and sinister—aim of Facebook’s actions is also made clear by the other initiatives that the company is taking. Most significantly, Zuckerberg stressed the company’s determination to make sure that “the information you see on Facebook comes from broadly trusted and high-quality sources, in order to counter misinformation and polarization.”
What are these “broadly trusted” sources? “For example, take the Wall Street Journal or New York Times,” wrote the multibillionaire CEO. “Even if you don’t read them or don’t agree with everything they write, most people have confidence that they’re high quality journalism. On the flip side, there are blogs that have intense followings but are not widely trusted beyond their core audience. We will show those publications somewhat less.”
In other words, corporate media sources will be promoted, while other publications, even those that “have intense followings,” will be demoted. As for being “shown somewhat less,” what Zuckerberg means is that they will be blocked from reaching a broader audience. More simply, they will be censored.
In addition to censoring news from alternative sources, Zuckerberg states at the beginning of his post that Facebook is working to “show fewer viral videos” because such content is not “good for people’s well-being and for society.”
The viral videos Zuckerberg is referring to include footage of police violence, social exposures like reporting on last year’s Grenfell Tower inferno that exposed social inequality in London, and documentation of the war crimes carried out by the US military. Any such content will be “demoted,” which Zuckerberg later notes “reduces an article’s traffic by 80 percent.”
Zuckerberg’s central pretense—that Facebook will promote sources that “people have confidence” in—is a fraud. In fact, according to a Gallup poll published last year, Americans’ trust in the mass media “to report the news fully, accurately and fairly” reached its lowest level in poling history, with only 32 percent of participants saying they have a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust. At the same time, the use of social media to read news has been growing exponentially, reaching two-thirds of the US population according to a poll by the Pew Research Center.
The growth in the popularity of Facebook and other social media networks was in large measure due to the fact that they allowed their users access to information and viewpoints unavailable through mainstream media outlets. Now, Facebook has reversed course and declared that its intention is to promote the official narrative and block independent news sources that question it.
Facebook, Google, Twitter and other giant social media companies—working closely with intelligence agencies and governments—are seeking to leverage their role as mechanisms of communication to become instruments of censorship and repression. In the process, they are turning one of the most important and liberating technological advances of the 21st century, the growth and expansion of artificial intelligence, into a mechanism for police control and dictatorship.
The fight against Internet censorship is an urgent task facing workers all over the world. The World Socialist Web Site is leading the fight against the greatest threat to free speech since the Second World War. On January 23, it published an open letter calling for an international coalition of socialist, antiwar, left-wing and progressive websites, organizations and activists to fight Internet censorship.
The principles for this coalition are:
• Safeguarding the Internet as a platform for political organization and the free exchange of information, culture and diverse viewpoints, guided by the principle that access to the Internet is a right and must be free and equally available for all.
• Uncompromising insistence on the complete independence of the Internet from control by governments and private corporations.
• Unconditional defense of net neutrality and free, unfettered and equal access to the Internet.
• The banning and illegalization of government and corporate manipulation of search algorithms and procedures, including the use of human evaluators, that restrict and block public visibility of websites.
• Irreconcilable opposition to the use of the Internet and artificial intelligence technologies to carry out surveillance of web users.
• Demanding the end to the persecution of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden and the complete restoration of their personal freedom.
• Advocating the transformation of the corporate Internet monopolies into public utilities, under internationally coordinated democratic control, to provide the highest quality service, not private profit.
• The fight against Internet censorship and the defense of democratic rights cannot be conducted through appeals to capitalist governments and the parties and politicians who serve their interests, but only in uncompromising struggle against them. Moreover, this struggle is international in scope and totally opposed to every form and manifestation of national chauvinism, racism and imperialist militarism. Therefore, those who are truly committed to the defense of democratic rights must direct their efforts to the mobilization of the working class of all countries.
Dozens of autoworkers participated in a call-in meeting called by the WorldSocialistWebSiteAutoworker Newsletter on Wednesday night to discuss the corruption scandal engulfing the United Auto Workers union (UAW). The event generated intense interest among autoworkers who shared news about the call-in on social media and in the factories.
Jerry White, editor of the newsletter, opened the discussion, reviewing the plea agreement released last week by a former top Fiat Chrysler labor negotiator who acknowledged that FCA executives had bribed top UAW officials “to obtain benefits, concessions and advantages” in bargaining agreements between 2009 and 2015.
Workers had correctly rejected the lies by UAW President Dennis Williams who claimed the bribery scheme had no effect on the contracts, White said. “If you hired an attorney and later found out he had been on the payroll of the opposing party, you would fire him and tear up any bogus agreement he reached.” Autoworkers should adopt the same attitude towards the UAW and the contracts it signed with FCA and at Ford and GM, too.
The determination to overturn these rotten deals, he said, was part of a growing mood of militancy among workers around the world, evidenced by the recent wildcat strike by Romanian Ford workers and the ongoing strikes by German workers at VW, BMW, Ford and other corporations. After more than a decade of stagnant wages and the spread of low-paid temporary labor, even as corporate profits and stock markets hit record levels, workers are determined to win substantial improvements.
The WSWS Autoworker Newsletter urged workers to form rank-and-file committees in every factory, independent of the corrupt UAW, to campaign for the widest mobilization of workers to overturn the contracts. Workers should formulate and fight for their own demands, White said, including the abolition of the two-tier system, a 25 percent across-the-board wage increase and the restoration of all the concessions handed over by the UAW.
In the discussion, autoworkers reviewed their own experiences with the UAW and raised questions about the newsletter’s call for the establishment of rank-and-file committees.
Gladys, a retired General Motors (GM) worker from Flint, said, “It’s not only what the UAW has done to workers in the last two contracts, they have also allowed GM to shed the benefits of retirees. The UAW is so corrupt you can’t even get any response from them when you go to the UAW union hall. They didn’t have any dental for years because the UAW took over retiree health care. Copays and deductibles have gone up so high, retirees don’t even go the doctor. They have left GM retirees worldwide without.”
She also pointed to the “underhanded” way that the UAW and GM concealed the Flint water crisis, remaining silent after the company stopped using city water because it was corroding its engine parts. “I believe what happened to the labor force is capitalism at its worst. The UAW has turned its back on generations of workers.”
A retired General Motors worker from St. Catherines, Ontario, said the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW), now called Unifor, had degenerated just like the UAW, and had pushed through a historic concession deal in 2016.
Eric London, a writer for the WSWS, said, “What workers need to realize is that nobody is going to solve this problem for them—not the FBI, not the courts. Workers have to take matters into their own hands. There is no savior. This is going to take a fight, like it took for our great grandparents. The solution is going to come from the working class itself.”
A Toledo Jeep worker said he liked what was being said about uniting and getting together, especially through social media. “But here in Toledo,” he said, “you have the company and the UAW looking at everything we write. How would we go about protecting ourselves and preventing retaliation by the union and the company?”
Every measure should be taken to protect workers from company and union spies, White said, pointing to the decision by GM workers in St. Louis to ban UAW Vice President Cindy Estrada from their Facebook page months after she imposed the 2015 sellout contract on GM workers. But the self-defense of workers, he said, was inseparable from building new organizations, independent of the UAW, which would genuinely represent workers and mobilize their collective strength to oppose management abuse.
Another worker said, “I heard you say the courts aren’t going to save us, and that the NLRB [National Labor Relations Board] isn’t going to save us, and there’s nothing we can do from within the UAW. I’m not so sure I agree with that. There is the reform caucus. They are clearly talking about eradicating the corruption from the UAW. Do you know much about that?”
White said there had been many “reform” movements in the UAW, including the New Directions faction in the 1980s and 1990s. But all of them failed to change anything. That was because the cause of the problem wasn’t simply the personal corruption of this or that union leader but the vast economic changes over the last four decades that have led to the transformation of the unions into tools of the corporations.
The UAW and other unions, not just in the US but around the world, are based on economic nationalism, and “had no progressive response to globalization.” Facing corporate threats to shift production to lower wage countries, the UAW abandoned any resistance to the corporations and joined the capitalist owners to drive down the wages and conditions and convince the corporations to stay in the US.
In Canada, union leaders split from the UAW in the mid-1980s, hoping the cheaper dollar and government-paid health benefits would induce automakers to remain. The concessions imposed by the UAW and the opening up of Mexico for even cheaper labor, however, undermined the “Buy Canadian” strategy, and the CAW responded in kind, introducing two-tier wages and betraying strikes, including last year’s month-long battle at GM’s CAMI plant in Ingersoll, Ontario.
Gladys said David Yettaw, who had been a leader of New Directions, was the president of her union local, Local 599 in Flint. “He allowed GM to shut the Buick City complex,” she said, referring to the massive industrial complex in Flint, which once employed 30,000 workers and was closed in 1999.
Josh, a young worker from Australia, then spoke up, saying, “There are no autoworkers left in this country. The unions did nothing to stop the closing of the plants by GM, Ford, Toyota and other companies. They gave concession after concession, but when it came down to it, the companies said the price of labor was uncompetitive.
“I really agree with what the speakers have said about international unity. The companies say we want to produce this car and we’re going to see which country is going to work cheaper. We can’t organize this on a national basis. The brother talking about this reform program for the UAW—they are talking about going back to the glory days. We don’t need a program for the past but for the future. We live in a global economy, and we’re not going to get anywhere unless we realize that working people don’t have a country.
“We make all the wealth, they need us. We don’t need them. If we took all the factories around the world, we could end hunger in a month. We’ve never been in such a productive era, and yet there’s ongoing poverty. That’s capitalism.”
Sign up for the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter
The WSWS urges auto workers and supporters to sign up for the Autoworker Newsletter for frequent updates and to leave your comments or questions. To do so, click here.
Jan. 26, 2018 | Tom Huizenga — In these days of wireless earbuds, streams and podcasts, the notion of people gathering to hear a lone classical singer (with a pianist) perform densely structured art songs in a foreign tongue seems almost laughably quaint.
Yet the vocal recital, as a performance genre, is still alive. And one of the most memorable recitals I’ve witnessed in a long time sits on this page, in a condensed form, thanks to the extraordinary soprano Barbara Hannigan and her accompanist Reinbert de Leeuw.
The night before this Tiny Desk concert, the two musicians gave a beautiful and intense recital at Washington’s Kennedy Center. The songs, all in German, came from a heady period in Vienna, when music was transitioning from the swells of romanticism to the uncharted waters of modernism. Four of those songs make up this Tiny Desk performance. The bonus here is that these impassioned dispatches become even more intimate.
Consider the opening song, Alexander Zemlinsky’s “Empfängnis” (Conception). The harmonies are sweet, but almost too rich, like overripe fruit, when Hannigan sings lines like, “Und wie ich sehend meine Arme breite” (And as I open my arms with longing). You can hear the end of a musical era.
An indefatigable champion of new and modern music, Hannigan (who is also a conductor) has given the world premieres of more than 80 pieces. The voice is simply gorgeous — silvery, buttery-smooth throughout the registers, with crystalline top notes emerging from thin air and charged with emotion.
In Alma Mahler’s “Licht in der Nacht” (Light in the Night), Hannigan taps into the mysterious sparkle of a little yellow star twinkling through black skies as de Leeuw’s piano explores wayward harmonies. Hugo Wolf’s “Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt” (Only One Who Knows Longing) is a hymn to the yearning heart. De Leeuw explains that the key of G minor, in which the song is written, never materializes. It’s all about the longing for G minor.
The final song, “Schenk mir deinen goldenen Kamm” (the first music by Arnold Schoenberg to grace the Tiny Desk), offers a double dose of sensuality. Hannigan’s beautiful middle register and creamy phrasing paint the scene: Jesus asks Mary Magdalene for her comb because it will remind him every morning that she once kissed his hair. Hannigan calls the song “erotic” and she delivers on that feeling when, at the end, she cries out the name “Magdalena” with a lustrous, silken tone, touched with anguish.
Hannigan told the audience that her Kennedy Center recital felt like “a sacred moment of people coming together in very deep concentration.” At this Tiny Desk recital, it happened all over again.
SET LIST
Alexander Zemlinsky: “Empfängnis”
Alma Mahler: “Licht in der Nacht”
Hugo Wolf: “Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt”
Arnold Schoenberg: “Schenk mir deinen goldenen Kamm”
MUSICIANS
Barbara Hannigan (soprano), Reinbert de Leeuw (piano)
CREDITS
Producers: Tom Huizenga, Morgan Noelle Smith; Creative Director: Bob Boilen; Audio Engineer: Josh Rogosin; Videographers: Morgan Noelle Smith, Alyse Young; Page Turner: Suraya Mohamed; Production Assistant: Salvatore Maicki; Photo: Jennifer Kerrigan/NPR
For more Tiny Desk concerts, subscribe to our podcast.
Visit https://democracynow.org to watch the full independent, global news hour, read the transcript, search our archive and to make a donation to support us.
Democracy Now! is an independent global news hour that airs weekdays on nearly 1,400 TV and radio stations Monday through Friday. Watch our livestream 8-9AM ET: https://democracynow.org
