With Microsoft Purchase of TikTok, US Tightens Grip Over International Media

https://citizentruth.org/with-microsoft-purchase-of-tiktok-us-tightens-grip-over-international-media/


(By: Alan Macleod, Mintpress News) 

Following Donald Trump’s Friday announcement that he would ban the popular Chinese-owned video platform, Microsoft has today swooped in to hoover up TikTok after it received “personal assurances” from the president himself that he would back such a move. Trump has given the two parties up to 45 days to hash out a deal. ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, values its U.S. operations at $50 billion, but it is not at all certain they will receive fair compensation, given their predicament. The platform is by far the most downloaded app in Apple’s app store, with over 800 million active users worldwide, including over 100 million in the United States, primarily members of Generation Z.

The move comes amid growing American aggression towards Beijing, ostensibly over its handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, its treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang province and demonstrators in Hong Kong, and, above all, its uneasiness at its growing economic power. Early last month the Trump administration began floating the idea of a TikTok ban, citing potential national security issues. When asked by Fox News anchor Laura Ingraham if Americans should use the app, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo responded: “only if you want your private information in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party.” TikTok has strenuously denied that it works with the Chinese government, noting that American users’ data is stored in the U.S., with strict controls on employee access.




News of the imminent purchase excited the stock market, with Microsoft shares surging by five percent on their Friday totals. Given that the company is worth over $1 trillion, the news added $77 billion to Bill Gates’ company’s value, suggesting that traders believe they are receiving the deal of a lifetime. “Microsoft appreciates the U.S. Government’s and President Trump’s personal involvement as it continues to develop strong security protections for the country,” the tech giant said in a statement today.

The company is already a preferred partner of the administration and has a lot to be thankful to Trump for. In November it received a lucrative $10 billion contract to partner with the Pentagon to develop a cloud computing network that sees it instantly become one of the world’s largest military contractors. The decision to award Microsoft (and not Amazon) the deal was allegedly made on the behest of Trump himself, who disliked how he was being treated by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post. Microsoft also has a long history of intimate collusion with government agencies, enabling them to spy on U.S. citizens. Documents leaked by Edward Snowden revealed that it worked with the FBI and NSA to allow them to circumvent their own encryption methods to gather information on hundreds of millions of worldwide users of its platforms, such as Skype and Outlook. Today, Microsoft said it is “committed to acquiring TikTok subject to a complete security review and providing proper economic benefits to the United States, including the United States Treasury.”



The Internet is the new battlefield

“What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century, technology and cyber-security companies will be to the twenty-first,” wrote Google executives Eric Schmidt and Larry Cohen, suggesting that the Internet is the new battlefield and offering their company’s services to the White House.

Although giant new social media companies are thought of as transnational entities, most are, in fact, very much American corporations. While billions of people around the world rely on them for their news and entertainment, they are subject to strict American laws. In January, for instance, Facebook and its subsidiary platforms like Instagram and WhatsApp banned all positive mentions of General Qassem Soleimani, an Iranian leader assassinated in a U.S. drone strike. This was because the Trump administration deemed the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), an official extension of Iran’s military, a terrorist organization. “We operate under U.S. sanctions laws, including those related to the U.S. government’s designation of the IRGC and its leadership,” Facebook explained. This is particularly problematic as Soleimani was Iran’s most popular living figure, with an over 80 percent approval rating, meaning that Iranians were banned from sharing a majority opinion online with other Iranians in Iran, speaking in Farsi, because what Trump had decided from the other side of the planet.

In its drive against fake news, Facebook also partnered with the Atlantic Council to decide what news to promote and what to censor and remove. The Atlantic Council was born out of NATO and has a board of directors including high government officials like Henry Kissinger, Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, ex-Generals like Wesley Clark and David Petraeus, and CIA chiefs like Leon Panetta, Michael Hayden, and Robert Gates. Similarly, Reddit’s Director of Policy is a former Atlantic Council deputy director, ensuring the popular website aligns with Western foreign policy goals. Meanwhile, a senior Twitter executive is an officer in the British Army’s 77th Brigade, a unit dedicated to information warfare and online psychological operations. U.S. government-funded think tanks also advise Twitter and other platforms on which websites to blacklist and which accounts to delete, leading to a huge reduction in traffic for alternative media and hundreds of thousands of critical voices silenced. Effectively then, the U.S. government is in control over much of what America — and the rest of the world — see online, creating something coming to resemble a global state-controlled media apparatus.




Even as the government attempts to frame the debate over the banning of Chinese companies like TikTok and Huawei over privacy concerns, it continues to try to ban the encryption of data and communications at home. This would essentially end even the pretense of online privacy, giving state agencies virtually unfettered access to any data it wished to see. Thus, it is possible that the forced transfer of TikTok to Microsoft may have far more to do with control over the means of world communication than genuine worries about our own civil liberties.

Right-Wing Star Sides With Black Lives Matter, Slams Police

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXB7vQ7Rrf8&feature

Billionaires Want to Reopen Schools Amid a Pandemic. They Might Unleash a Teacher Strike Wave.

BY

ERIC BLANC

Business interests are eager to reopen schools so they can get the economy running again and turn a profit. But teachers across the country are insisting that schools should only be reopened when it can be done safely — and they might just go on strike to fight back against the billionaires.


https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/07/billionaires-want-to-reopen-schools-amid-a-pandemic-they-might-unleash-a-teacher-strike-wave




Last week, the Wall Street Journal published a revealing editorial titled “The Case for Reopening Schools.” In it, the editorial board reiterates the most common arguments in favor of immediately returning students and educators to the classroom this fall. But they also make clear that when and how to reopen schools reflects a fundamental conflict between educators and working people, on the one hand, and billionaires on the other.

To be sure, the official mouthpiece of big business is savvy enough to frame school reopening as beneficial to the average American, not just the ruling rich. The WSJ points to the very real damage of remote learning, arguing for instance that “[y]ou don’t need a degree in child psychology to know kids have struggled with virtual education.” And working-class families, the editorial correctly notes, suffer from shuttered schools more than those who are richer (and, I would add, whiter).

Teachers want to return to their classrooms. But any serious assessment of the relative costs of keeping schools closed must also honestly grapple with the health risks posed by opening them up amid a raging pandemic. Unsurprisingly, the editorial entirely fails on this score.

According to the editorial board, “the relative immunity of young children to the disease . . . should reassure parents.” Yet the most recent and extensive research has concluded that while small children under ten spread the disease less than adults, they can still infect others. And even more dangerously, children between the ages of ten and nineteen are just as likely as adults to transmit the virus.

The disastrous results of rushing to reopen schools in Israel should be a cautionary tale for the United States. In May, when Israel’s infection numbers were much lower than the United States’ today, the government decided to send teachers and students back to the classroom. By June, outbreaks were spreading in schools across the country, contributing to a major infection spike in the population as a whole. A Health Ministry study found that about one-third of new virus contractions occurred in educational facilities between July 10 and July 16.

Like Donald Trump, the WSJ claims that since countries like Denmark and Singapore have safely reopened schools, so too can the United States. But when it comes to school reopenings, experts agree that the single most important factor is the degree of infection beyond the schools.

Countries in Europe and Asia have been able to open schools without major outbreaks because they have flattened the curve of the virus in society as a whole. The United States has not. The daily number of confirmed cases is still spiking. While Germany has about 440 new cases daily, the US average is over 66,000.

COVID-19 continues to devastate the United States far more than other industrialized countries due to the criminal negligence of governmental officials, the US’s failed for-profit health care system, a weak welfare state, the irrationalities of American federalism, and a decades-long, billionaire-backed decimation of governmental capacities. No matter what creative administrative recommendations are made for classroom social distancing, mask-wearing, student pods, and staggered class times, opening schools in the throes of a pandemic risks triggering a public health catastrophe, particularly for low-income black and brown families.

Such considerations matter little to the Journal’s editorial board, and the business interests they speak for, because the real reason they want to reopen schools lies elsewhere. At the end of their piece, they finally say the quiet part out loud: “Millions of parents can’t return to work if their children can’t attend school.” Schools, among other services provided, serve as childcare centers, enabling parents to sell their labor to employers. An op-ed published two weeks earlier in the WSJ spells out this economic logic:


If the schools aren’t open, many parents will lack child care and be unable to return to work. If parents can’t work, the economy can’t recover. Teachers unions are thus in a position to hold the economy hostage.

According to a study from the Brookings Institution, every month of closed schools could cost the United States over $50 billion dollars. That’s why Forbes magazine insists that “[e]conomic considerations . . . trump health concerns” when it comes to a return to class.

For the sake of corporate profits, billionaires and the politicians they’ve bought are willing to sacrifice educators, students, and parents alike. Our lives are on the line. United Teachers Los Angeles put it well: “When politicians exhort educators and other workers to ‘reignite the economy,’” we should ask, “who are you planning to use as kindling?”
Refusing to Return to Unsafe Schools

An ability “to hold the economy hostage” gives organized educators a tremendous amount of power at this moment of crisis. And this is a very good thing, no matter what the Wall Street Journal and Forbes would have us believe.

“Emboldened by successful strikes in 2018 and 2019,” notes the WSJ op-ed, educator unions “appear to be in a strong position,” having already shaped some of the instruction criteria implemented since the lockdown began. Militant teacher unions and an unprecedented nationwide rank-and-file upsurge organized in large part over Facebook have already succeeded in pressuring many districts — including in Denver, Houston, and most parts of California — to extend remote learning until local infection rates drop significantly. Activists across the country have raised the benchmark of no new local cases for fourteen days before they will return to school.

Yet numerous Republican-led states such as Florida, as well as Democratic cities such as Chicago and New York City, are still pushing for a full or partial physical reopening at the beginning of the fall semester. Given the lost profits involved, corporate America and its representatives are not going to back down without a fight. The editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, like Trump and his secretary of education Betsy DeVos, are insisting that districts should be pressured to reopen:


Republicans in Congress should condition additional funding in a fifth virus-aid package on schools physically reopening five days a week. If some public schools or districts refuse to reopen, make the money available to charter or private schools that are open.

Since the pandemic continues to rage, the first responsibility of every educator and every teachers’ union is to fight to prevent an unsafe reopening. This, of course, does not mean keeping schools shuttered indefinitely. On the contrary, educators can use their social leverage to force politicians to finally take the urgent measures needed to bring students safely back to school and, no less importantly, to flatten the pandemic’s curve.

As the success of the 2018 and 2019 strikes demonstrated, teachers and school staff are most politically effective when they raise demands not only for themselves, but on behalf of students, parents, and the community at large. In this spirit, the Demand Safe Schools Coalition — which brings together unions and organizations such as the Chicago Teachers Union, United Teachers Los Angeles, and Journey For Justice — has called for a “National Day of Resistance” on August 3.

The mobilization is not only fighting premature reopenings and demanding more nurses and counselors, personal protective equipment (PPE), cleaning, and virus testing services to keep students and staff safe once they are back in the classroom, but it has also raised demands on behalf of community members, including police-free schools, a moratorium on evictions and foreclosures, and direct cash assistance to those unemployed or unable to work.

The reason these reforms haven’t been implemented is not that they are unfeasible, but that they are expensive. As long as we remain within an austerity framework, the only options on offer for school this fall will be bad — continued remote learning — or horrific — premature reopenings. Since local and state governments on their own cannot adequately fund the measures necessary to keep all of us safe and solvent, the coalition has called for a “[m]assive infusion of federal money to support the reopening funded by taxing billionaires and Wall Street.”

The interests of educators and working families stand in direct contradiction with the ruling rich and the politicians in their pay. They want us immediately back at school and work, to restore their bottom line. We want to make them pay their fair share, to ensure the physical and economic health of the working-class majority.

No segment of the population is better positioned than organized educators to lead a successful fightback against our government’s catastrophic pandemic response. From West Virginia to Oklahoma to California, educators have proven over the past three years that they have the power and momentum to take on the billionaires and win. We desperately need them to do so again. The stakes could hardly be higher.

How Mitch McConnell's Republicans are Destroying America

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14p0PpDaqR4

Casualties in Beirut, MORE Police Lies About Breonna Taylor & George Floyd

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrYGiLa7hLk&feature

Medicare For All Support Keeps Skyrocketing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fE75mAjwdRQ&feature

Can Soda Save a Dying Fish?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRo3ZFyvYvs&feature