Saturday, April 16, 2022
The Ways Agencies Will Evade Giving You Information
By Janine Jackson, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting.
April 14, 2022
https://popularresistance.org/you-have-to-laugh-at-the-ways-agencies-will-evade-giving-you-information/
CounterSpin interview with Dave Maass on transparency and journalism.
Janine Jackson: A functioning democracy relies on an informed citizenry. But what you read in a high school textbook, and what you see when you look up from it, are different things. Importantly, transparency—a free flow of information—should be the norm. But it isn’t. That makes even more important the role of journalists who dig out critical information the public needs to hear, whether we know it or not: information we need to challenge the powerful. And it reminds us of the need to protect that role and that ability.
Our next guest is all about transparency and public knowledge. Dave Maass is director of investigations at Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the prime mover behind the Foilies, a project out of EFF and MuckRock news involving tongue-in-cheek awards given to government agencies and others that thwart the public’s right to access information. He joins us now by phone from Reno, Nevada. Welcome to CounterSpin, Dave Maass.
Dave Maass: Oh, glad to be here.
JJ: Some folks, and especially CounterSpin listeners, may know about Sunshine Week, the yearly effort by news organizations to promote and to celebrate open government and access to information. The Foilies are connected to Sunshine Week in a way that’s funny, but kind of “laugh instead of cry” funny, because it’s about everything that matters in our lives and our relationship to power.
DM: Exactly. I think if you work in a space where you’re filing public records requests, and you’re filing Freedom of Information requests, you have a certain personality where you love the gratification of receiving records, but you also take a little bit of—I mean, you have to laugh at the various ways that government agencies will try to evade giving you that information. And the Foilies are our annual way to provide some solace, through a little bit of humor, to those who file requests, but also to make sure that the people who are using these tricks don’t get away with it, that they are publicly in the light during Sunshine Week.
JJ: Absolutely, which is what sunshine is all about. So it’s about conveying absurdity at the same time as you’re highlighting these real issues.
So what, then, for 2021, what are some recent awardees that represent the problems you’re talking about? I know, for example, that Trump and the toilet stuffed with documents was a little too “fish in the barrel” for you. Maybe that’s—maybe that metaphor’s more complicated than I realized. But in other words, you’ve done Trump, and we get that. What are some of the other things that you’re trying to lift up?
DM: We’ve tried to make sure that we have a range of awards that go to local agencies and national agencies and things that are in the news, as well as things that are kind of pop culture–related. One that, from the very beginning, we knew was going to make it into the Foilies this year was the Wu-Tang Clan–related FOIA request filed by BuzzFeed reporter Jason Leopold. Now, if folks remember, there was a particular pharma bro whose name I can’t really pronounce, it’s gonna be a little embarrassing, but I think his name is Martin Shkreli.
JJ: Close enough.
DM: Before he was convicted of federal crimes, he successfully bid to win this Wu-Tang Clan one-of-a-kind, super-amazing album that there would only be one copy. And then he was convicted, and the US Marshals seized it. And in went some FOIA requests to find out more information about this secret Wu-Tang album that was eventually sold by the US Marshals, and the US Marshals refused to release how much money they got for this new Wu-Tang album. And they redacted a bunch of photos, so that we couldn’t see the pictures that they took in order to try to sell this on the open market. So immediately, whenever you can get Wu-Tang Clan in—the Wu-Tang Clan ain’t nothing to F with, unless the F stands for FOIA.
JJ: Right. I can see why that would grab people, which it totally—it’s absurd. And I, at the same time, and as I know you do, know that some folks would hear that and be like, that’s rich versus rich, and I’ve got nothing to do with that. So let’s take a look at some of the other things. A street-level surveillance taking a picture of your face, and there’s all kinds of stuff that, you don’t need to be Wu-Tang, you don’t need to be Martin Shkreli, it still involves you.
DM: Right. So the one that I think is probably the most offensive of the year went to a company—now, we often get these out to government agencies, but then sometimes we give these to companies that really tried to chill the public’s access to information.
So, specifically, the company that we called out is called Clearview AI. This is a facial recognition company that has scraped the internet for photos that you have published online in order to create a database that law enforcement can use to identify you.
We know that face recognition is racially biased and makes mistakes, can pull people into the criminal justice system. This Clearview system is more offensive than others because it grabs the images that we put on the internet to share with one another to communicate with ourselves, and it uses those against us.
Now, the only reason that we know Clearview AI exists is because a couple of researchers, named Freddy Martinez and Beryl Lipton, filed public records requests around the country related to it. And Freddy Martinez, specifically, works for an organization called Open the Government, and he also is involved with a local organization called Lucy Parsons Labs in Chicago. And he had found out about Clearview and started filing tons of requests.
They pass this information on to the New York Times. It became a huge story. You’re seeing attorney generals take action on it. You’re seeing lawsuits over it. You’re seeing them being fined, both in the US and abroad. Huge controversy.
And so what does Clearview decide to do? It decides to go after Freddy Martinez. So, he had never been involved in a lawsuit with Clearview AI, but Clearview used one of the other lawsuits it’s involved in to file subpoenas to try to get all of the information that Freddy Martinez had gathered, all the journalists he’d spoken with, all the communications with journalists and nonprofit organizations, in a very clear attempt to chill Freddy Martinez’s right to get access to information, and to retaliate against him.
Now, after public outcry, Clearview withdrew those subpoenas, withdrew those legal requests. But nevertheless, you just know that they, a big company, were trying to bully an everyday researcher.
JJ: Absolutely. And, you know, you’re describing a critical relationship, which is that open-government advocates, whistleblowers, can pitch, but they do rely on journalists to catch. Folks reveal information at great effort, sometimes at peril, and I can only imagine how disappointing it is to then see journalists dismiss that information, or not run with it, in the way that is so important, and that is so necessary in terms of getting the information out to the public.
And I just wanted to ask you, with regard to that, I know that as scholar in residence at the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno, you work on something called the Atlas of Surveillance, and you’re very interested in that street-level surveillance that we’re talking about.
I saw you cited in connection with that project a couple years back, and you said, “If our goal is to keep neck and neck with the growth of the surveillance state, we’d lose”; you can’t keep up with it. The opacity is such that it’s difficult for investigators to keep on track of things like surveillance. And so I just wanted to ask you, what do you see as the goal, not just of that project, but of the project of the Foilies, and projects that are aimed at exposing the barriers that governments put up to transparency? What do you see as the hope of this kind of work?
DM: We are kind of engaged in what the military would call asymmetrical warfare, where we are part of a small group of nonprofits and advocates up against a huge tech industry, a whole military policing complex, that just dwarfs us in funding and dwarfs us in resources. But nevertheless, by using things at our disposal, particularly transparency, we are able to have such an outsized impact.
And maybe we’re not able to always result in something that changes everything nationwide. And honestly, with Congress as it is, that, to me, is not even a huge option. To get Congress to pass anything on anything is kind of a lofty notion these days.
But we are able to have these victories in places like San Francisco and Boston. You’re able to get laws passed, you’re able to get new measures in place, that maybe don’t outlaw certain surveillance technologies, but at least gets some controls in place, or at least put the transparency measures in place that allow us to come back and say, “No, look, the police are abusing this technology, we need to stop it.” And we’ve seen it with face recognition: We started to get a lot of traction with governments moving back on it.
It is hard to keep up. But I just don’t think giving up the fight is worthwhile. We have to take the victories that are there. And we have to at least try to inform people about what’s going on. And in the process, we’re going to root out corruption, we’re going to find companies like Clearview that are going to get sued for millions and millions and millions of dollars, and are going to have contracts revoked. So I’m still optimistic, even if I’m also pessimistic, if you get what I mean.
JJ: I understand completely.
We’ve been speaking with Dave Maass; he’s director of investigations at Electronic Frontier Foundation. You can find their work, including around the Foilies, online at EFF.org. Dave Maass, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
DM: Thank you.
Western Dissent From US/NATO Policy On Ukraine Is Small
By Glenn Greenwald.
April 14, 2022
https://popularresistance.org/western-dissent-from-us-nato-policy-on-ukraine-is-small-yet-the-censorship-campaign-is-extreme/
Yet The Censorship Campaign Is Extreme.
Preventing Populations From Asking Who Benefits From A Protracted Proxy War, And Who Pays The Price, Is Paramount. A Closed Propaganda System Achieves That.
If one wishes to be exposed to news, information or perspective that contravenes the prevailing US/NATO view on the war in Ukraine, a rigorous search is required. And there is no guarantee that search will succeed. That is because the state/corporate censorship regime that has been imposed in the West with regard to this war is stunningly aggressive, rapid and comprehensive.
On a virtually daily basis, any off-key news agency, independent platform or individual citizen is liable to be banished from the internet. In early March, barely a week after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the twenty-seven nation European Union — citing “disinformation” and “public order and security” — officially banned the Russian state-news outlets RT and Sputnik from being heard anywhere in Europe. In what Reuters called “an unprecedented move,” all television and online platforms were barred by force of law from airing content from those two outlets. Even prior to that censorship order from the state, Facebook and Google were already banning those outlets, and Twitter immediately announced they would as well, in compliance with the new EU law.
But what was “unprecedented” just six weeks ago has now become commonplace, even normalized. Any platform devoted to offering inconvenient-to-NATO news or alternative perspectives is guaranteed a very short lifespan. Less than two weeks after the EU’s decree, Google announced that it was voluntarily banning all Russian-affiliated media worldwide, meaning Americans and all other non-Europeans were now blocked from viewing those channels on YouTube if they wished to. As so often happens with Big Tech censorship, much of the pressure on Google to more aggressively censor content about the war in Ukraine came from its own workforce: “Workers across Google had been urging YouTube to take additional punitive measures against Russian channels.”
So prolific and fast-moving is this censorship regime that it is virtually impossible to count how many platforms, agencies and individuals have been banished for the crime of expressing views deemed “pro-Russian.” On Tuesday, Twitter, with no explanation as usual, suddenly banned one of the most informative, reliable and careful dissident accounts, named “Russians With Attitude.” Created in late 2020 by two English-speaking Russians, the account exploded in popularity since the start of the war, from roughly 20,000 followers before the invasion to more than 125,000 followers at the time Twitter banned it. An accompanying podcast with the same name also exploded in popularity and, at least as of now, can still be heard on Patreon.
What makes this outburst of Western censorship so notable — and what is at least partially driving it — is that there is a clear, demonstrable hunger in the West for news and information that is banished by Western news sources, ones which loyally and unquestioningly mimic claims from the U.S. government, NATO, and Ukrainian officials. As The Washington Post acknowledged when reporting Big Tech’s “unprecedented” banning of RT, Sputnik and other Russian sources of news: “In the first four days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, viewership of more than a dozen Russian state-backed propaganda channels on YouTube spiked to unusually high levels.”
Note that this censorship regime is completely one-sided and, as usual, entirely aligned with U.S. foreign policy. Western news outlets and social media platforms have been flooded with pro-Ukrainian propaganda and outright lies from the start of the war. A New York Times article from early March put it very delicately in its headline: “Fact and Mythmaking Blend in Ukraine’s Information War.” Axios was similarly understated in recognizing this fact: “Ukraine misinformation is spreading — and not just from Russia.” Members of the U.S. Congress have gleefully spread fabrications that went viral to millions of people, with no action from censorship-happy Silicon Valley corporations. That is not a surprise: all participants in war use disinformation and propaganda to manipulate public opinion in their favor, and that certainly includes all direct and proxy-war belligerents in the war in Ukraine.
Yet there is little to no censorship — either by Western states or by Silicon Valley monopolies — of pro-Ukrainian disinformation, propaganda and lies. The censorship goes only in one direction: to silence any voices deemed “pro-Russian,” regardless of whether they spread disinformation. The “Russians With Attitude” Twitter account became popular in part because they sometimes criticized Russia, in part because they were more careful with facts and viral claims that most U.S. corporate media outlets, and in part because there is such a paucity of outlets that are willing to offer any information that undercuts what the U.S. Government and NATO want you to believe about the war.
Their crime, like the crime of so many other banished accounts, was not disinformation but skepticism about the US/NATO propaganda campaign. Put another way, it is not “disinformation” but rather viewpoint-error that is targeted for silencing. One can spread as many lies and as much disinformation as one wants provided that it is designed to advance the NATO agenda in Ukraine (just as one is free to spread disinformation provided that its purpose is to strengthen the Democratic Party, which wields its majoritarian power in Washington to demand greater censorship and commands the support of most of Silicon Valley). But what one cannot do is question the NATO/Ukrainian propaganda framework without running a very substantial risk of banishment.
It is unsurprising that Silicon Valley monopolies exercise their censorship power in full alignment with the foreign policy interests of the U.S. Government. Many of the key tech monopolies — such as Google and Amazon — routinely seek and obtain highly lucrative contracts with the U.S. security state, including both the CIA and NSA. Their top executives enjoy very close relationships with top Democratic Party officials. And Congressional Democrats have repeatedly hauled tech executives before their various Committees to explicitly threaten them with legal and regulatory reprisals if they do not censor more in accordance with the policy goals and political interests of that party.
But one question lingers: why is there so much urgency about silencing the small pockets of dissenting voices about the war in Ukraine? This war has united the establishment wings of both parties and virtually the entire corporate media with a lockstep consensus not seen since the days and weeks after the 9/11 attack. One can count on both hands the number of prominent political and media figures who have been willing to dissent even minimally from that bipartisan Washington consensus — dissent that instantly provokes vilification in the form of attacks on one’s patriotism and loyalties. Why is there such fear of allowing these isolated and demonized voices to be heard at all?
The answer seems clear. The benefits from this war for multiple key Washington power centers cannot be overstated. The billions of dollars in aid and weapons being sent by the U.S. to Ukraine are flying so fast and with such seeming randomness that it is difficult to track. “Biden approves $350 million in military aid for Ukraine,” Reuters said on February 26; “Biden announces $800 million in military aid for Ukraine,” announced The New York Times on March 16; on March 30, NBC’s headline read: “Ukraine to receive additional $500 million in aid from U.S., Biden announces”; on Tuesday, Reuters announced: “U.S. to announce $750 million more in weapons for Ukraine, officials say.” By design, these gigantic numbers have long ago lost any meaning and provoke barely a peep of questioning let alone objection.
It is not a mystery who is benefiting from this orgy of military spending. On Tuesday, Reuters reported that “the Pentagon will host leaders from the top eight U.S. weapons manufacturers on Wednesday to discuss the industry’s capacity to meet Ukraine’s weapons needs if the war with Russia lasts years.” Among those participating in this meeting about the need to increase weapons manufacturing to feed the proxy war in Ukraine is Raytheon, which is fortunate to have retired General Lloyd Austin as Defense Secretary, a position to which he ascended from the Raytheon Board of Directors. It is virtually impossible to imagine an event more favorable to the weapons manufacturer industry than this war in Ukraine:
Demand for weapons has shot up after Russia’s invasion on Feb. 24 spurred U.S. and allied weapons transfers to Ukraine. Resupplying as well as planning for a longer war is expected to be discussed at the meeting, the sources told Reuters on condition of anonymity. . .
Resupplying as well as planning for a longer war is expected to be discussed at the meeting. . . . The White House said last week that it has provided more than $1.7 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since the invasion, including over 5,000 Javelins and more than 1,400 Stingers.
This permanent power faction is far from the only one to be reaping benefits from the war in Ukraine and to have its fortunes depend upon prolonging the war as long as possible. The union of the U.S. security state, Democratic Party neocons, and their media allies has not been riding this high since the glory days of 2002. One of MSNBC’s most vocal DNC boosters, Chris Hayes, gushed that the war in Ukraine has revitalized faith and trust in the CIA and intelligence community more than any event in recent memory — deservedly so, he said: “The last few weeks have been like the Iraq War in reverse for US intelligence.” One can barely read a mainstream newspaper or watch a corporate news outlet without seeing the nation’s most bloodthirsty warmongering band of neocons — David Frum, Bill Kristol, Liz Cheney, Wesley Clark, Anne Applebaum, Adam Kinzinger — being celebrated as wise experts and heroic warriors for freedom.
This war has been very good indeed for the permanent Washington political and media class. And although it was taboo for weeks to say so, it is now beyond clear that the only goal that the U.S. and its allies have when it comes to the war in Ukraine is to keep it dragging on for as long as possible. Not only are there no serious American diplomatic efforts to end the war, but the goal is to ensure that does not happen. They are now saying that explicitly, and it is not hard to understand why.
The benefits from endless quagmire in Ukraine are as immense as they are obvious. The military budget skyrockets. Punishment is imposed on the arch-nemesis of the Democratic Party — Russia and Putin — while they are bogged down in a war from which Ukrainians suffer most. The citizenry unites behind their leaders and is distracted.
How Central Banks could stem inflation without crushing the poor or killing off the Green Transition
https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2022/04/16/here-is-what-central-banks-could-do-to-stem-inflation-without-crushing-the-poor-or-killing-off-the-green-transition-the-guardian/
Here is what Central Banks could do to stem inflation without crushing the poor or killing off the Green Transition – The Guardian
16/04/2022 by Yanis Varoufakis
Inflation is a disease that disproportionately afflicts the poor. Even before Vladimir Putin unleashed his brutal war on Ukraine, whose byproducts include soaring energy and food prices, inflation was already over 7.5% in the US and above 5% in Europe and the UK. Calls for its taming are, therefore, fully justified – and the interest rate rise in the US, with the same expected in the UK, comes as no surprise. That said, we know from history that the cure for inflation tends to devastate the poor even more. The new wrinkle we face today is that the supposed solutions threaten not only to deal another cruel blow to the disadvantaged but, ominously, to snuff out the desperately needed green transition.
Two influential camps dominate public discourse on inflation and what to do about it. One camp demands that the inflationary flames be smothered immediately by the monetary policy version of shock and awe: raise interest rates sharply to choke expenditure. They warn that delaying a little monetary violence now will only necessitate “Volcker shock” levels of brutality later – a reference to Paul Volcker, the Federal Reserve chair who quelled the hyperinflation of the 1970s with sky-high interest rates that scarred the American working class to this day. The second camp protests that this is unnecessary, counter-proposing a steady as she goes stance for as long as wage inflation is kept on a leash.
The two camps agree that rising wages are the real threat, their disagreement focusing only on whether it is prudent to act before or after they start picking up. They agree also that, to fight inflation, the supply of money and credit must be dealt with in a two-step sequence: central banks must first stop creating new money and only then raise interest rates. The two camps are dangerously wrong on both counts. First, wage inflation should be welcomed, not treated like public enemy number one. Second, it is precisely when interest rates are rising that central banks should continue to create money. Except this time, they should press it into the service of green investments and social welfare.
Since 2008, inequality has been allowed to rise. A dozen years of central bank support for the rich, coupled with punitive austerity for the many, has led to chronic underinvestment and low wages. Central banks plucked the money tree ferociously to boost share and house prices, while wages languished. Asset-price inflation and mind-numbing inequality thus became the order of the day. Eventually almost everyone agreed, including many of the mega-rich, that wages had to rise not just in the interests of workers but also because low wages underpinned underinvestment and created societies bristling with low productivity, low skills, low prospects and poisonous politics.
Remarkably, all it took for this consensus to vanish was a modest, by historical standards, wage inflation brought on by a post-lockdown labour shortfall. After a decade of turning a blind eye to rampaging asset-price inflation (even celebrating it, in the case of crazy house prices and boisterous stock markets), a whiff of wage inflation threw the authorities into an almost uncontrollable panic. Suddenly, the prospect of rising wages turned from an objective to a menace – prompting Andrew Bailey, the governor of the Bank of England, to ask workers to place their wage demands under “quite clear restraint”.
But this isn’t a rerun of the 1970s, when the working class was the only casualty of interest rate rises. What’s critically different is that, today, a Volcker shock may well smother the green transition along with a large part of labour’s share of national income.
The counter-argument is, of course, that neither workers nor society’s capacity to invest in the green transition will benefit from wage rises that are overtaken by rising prices. True. What is also true, however, is that a monetary policy that prioritises the prevention of wage inflation will, even if successful at nipping inflation in the bud, only lead to another wasted decade marked by underinvestment in people and nature. While the working classes may rise up 10 years from now to claim the share of aggregate income that they deserve, it is arguable that another 10 years of underinvestment in the green transition will push us all to the brink of, if not extinction, irreparable damage to humanity’s prospects.
So how do we deal with inflation without jeopardising investment in the green transition? What is the alternative to a class war in the form of a blunt interest-rate policy that squeezes the supply of money across the board either violently (as the advocates of shock and awe propose) or more gently (the steady as she goes suggestion)?
A decent alternative policy must have three goals: first, to repress asset prices (such as house and share prices) so as to stop scarce financial resources being wasted in building up paper values. Second, to push down the prices of basic goods while allowing for higher returns to investment in green energy and transport. Third, to deliver massive investment in energy conservation and green energy, transport, agriculture – as well as social housing and care. The following threefold policy agenda can achieve these three goals.
First, raise interest rates substantially. Ultra-low interest rates have failed to boost investment – and, in any case, were never available to those who either needed to borrow money or wanted to borrow to do things society needed. All ultra-low rates did was to boost house prices, share prices, inequality and all those things that divide society.
But, second, this must be done in concert with a massive central bank-supported green public investment drive. Naturally, raising interest rates will not boost investment, even if it is true that next to zero interest rates also did little to help investment. To escape the low-investment quagmire, the central bank should announce a new type of quantitative easing: it should stop financing the financiers and, instead, promise to stand behind (by buying, if needs be) public green bonds that raise funds to the tune of 5% of national income annually – a sum that will be invested directly into the green transition, giving society a fighting chance to do what it must to stabilise the climate.
Third, extend the same public finance model (that is, getting the central bank to stand behind public bonds) to invest in social housing and care.
In short, what I am proposing is a reversal of the toxic policies implemented since 2008. Instead of central banks providing free money and low interest rates to the rich, while the rest languish in the prison of austerity, the central bank ought to make money more expensive for the rich (through significant interest rate rises) while providing cheap money for investing into the things the majority and the lived environment both need and deserve.
The silent phase of the COVID-19 pandemic: Biden administration does nothing as US cases begin to rise
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/04/16/pand-a16.html
Benjamin Mateus
9 hours ago
Attempting to characterize the official response to the third year of the pandemic in the United States, it might be helpful to consult a textbook in psychiatry to find an appropriate diagnosis. Perhaps a criminal justice handbook would be more prudent.
In the face of another tide of the highly contagious BA.2 subvariant of Omicron, the response by the Biden administration is to see nothing, say nothing and do nothing. As Politico recently wrote, “The White House is publicly arguing that the country has finally arrived at a promising new stage in the pandemic fight—one that a recent spike in COVID cases won’t spoil.” This goes completely against any sane public health advice and, as some experts have noted, is being done quite openly on the basis of political calculation.
Unabashedly, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the president’s medical adviser, and Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), have openly endorsed the White House’s view to allow the population to face another surge of infections, suggesting people can make individual choices on the amount of risk they want to take. Fauci recently said on ABC , “What’s going to happen is that we’re going to see that each individual is going to have to make their calculation of the amount of risk they want to take.”
Such comments, however, do not qualify as sound medical advice for a highly contagious, rapidly evolving airborne pathogen in a highly mobile, interconnected, global society. In the final analysis, the political motivation of Fauci’s statement shows it is threat to the working class, which has always assumed the largest burden of the pandemic.
Dr. Maureen Miller, professor of epidemiology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, observed to ABC News, “We’re at a time when US public health authorities are basically declaring ‘People, you’re on your own when it comes to determining how to co-exist with COVID-19.’ Sadly, the tools we’ve relied on to determine risk levels are being discounted at best and discontinued at worst.”
There has been a revolving door between the demands of the White House and guidance supplied by the CDC that have, in a stepwise fashion, all but eliminated the ability of the public to track the spread of COVID in any meaningful way.
Perhaps even more asinine are recent comments by public health expert Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House’s new COVID-19 response coordinator. Commemorating his recent appointment by kicking off his celebrity tour of the news programs last week, he told NPR, “If you think about where we are as a country, we are at a really good moment.”
By “a really good moment” Jha is not referencing the recent lull in cases after the last wave of infections that killed nearly 180,000 people since mid-December, of which 41 percent were vaccinated based on data tracked by the CDC.
Nor the fact that one million have died due to the criminal policies that have enjoyed bipartisan support. They do not speak to the 200,000 children who have lost a parent or caregiver, or the millions debilitated by Long COVID who face a dim prospect for their future earnings and treatment.
Nor do his comments speak to the millions of uninsured who can expect a steep out-of-pocket expense for COVID-19 tests, vaccines and any treatments because all the public funding for such programs has been allowed to run dry.
Instead, Jha, a personification of the complete submission of science and public health to the diktats of Wall Street, is referencing the abandonment of all meaningful metrics for tracking COVID-19 and, therefore, its imposition on economic activity. The decimation of the entire public health infrastructure and reconfiguring it into an apparatus of the policy of profits before lives has been the “really good moment” that both Republicans and Democrats have been salivating over.
Indeed, what objectively characterizes the third year of the pandemic is obfuscation. It has become a politically silent pandemic.
Politico’s report is critical because it shows that behind the scenes, government employees close to the White House acknowledge that new COVID-19 cases are being grossly undercounted. So, why isn’t the public being warned?
On the issue, a person close to the Biden administration told Politico, “They’re like, ‘We don’t know if this is something to be worried about or not.’ But you can’t tell the public that.” A more damning admission would be difficult to find when in the balance are the health and welfare of millions of people who have already suffered repeated disastrous waves of the virus.
By all official indications, the BA.2 surge is gaining visible momentum after several weeks of low reported daily cases.
According to the New York Times’ COVID tracker, 32 states and Washington D.C. are reporting a positive 14-day change of new cases. The Northeast faces the initial impact, with Vermont, Rhode Island and Washington D.C. seeing the highest case rates.
The Johns Hopkins COVID dashboard noted that the seven-day average of COVID-19 cases in the US, which had stalled for most of March, began to uptick in early April. Daily reported cases nationwide are at 35,272, up 25 percent over the last two weeks. However, these figures are inconsistent with what the daily COVID-19 death rate would suggest. The seven-day average has retaken an upward turn after a consistent decline from mid-February until recently, with just over 500 dying on average each day from their infection. As death is a lagging indicator by a few weeks, the upturn implies a significant rise in unrecognized infections over the last few weeks.
Placing these into context, last week, former US Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration Dr. Scott Gottlieb told Margaret Brennan, host of CBS’s Face the Nation, “There’s no question that we’re experiencing an outbreak in the northeast, also the mid-Atlantic, [and] parts of Florida as well … It’s driven largely by BA.2, and I think we are dramatically undercounting cases. We’re probably only picking up one in seven or one in eight infections. So, when we say there are 30,000 infections a day, there’s probably closer to a quarter of a million infections a day.”
The observation by Gottlieb is supported by wastewater data which has seen a divergence from SARS-CoV-2 concentrations seen in sewage water and confirmed COVID-19 cases. On March 9, 2022, viral concentrations were around 104 copies per milliliter, and the average in cases had declined to 37,590 per day. While wastewater levels have jumped nearly threefold, confirmed COVID-19 cases remained largely unchanged. The highest concentrations are in the Northeast with 472 copies, though all regions of the country are seeing a rise.
The BA.2 subvariant of Omicron now accounts for more than 85 percent of all sequenced infections. When this version of the virus dominated France, Germany and the UK, hospitalizations and deaths climbed once more despite assurances from their political leadership that the pandemic was over.
On April 13, 2022, the UK reported 658 deaths, with a seven-day average reaching close to 400 per day and climbing. By comparison, the death toll during the BA.1 surge peaked at around 270 daily deaths. The death toll from BA.2 in Germany matched the BA.1 surge, and in France, the death toll is climbing again. These experiences are relevant to the US, especially as population vaccination rates are lower than in these countries.
Dr. John Brownstein, an epidemiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital, told ABC News , “An effective public health response depends on high quality, real-time data. Underreporting, driven by changes in testing behavior, lack of public interest and severely underfunded local public health departments, create a perfect storm of misleading case counts and hospitalizations.”
Jeffrey Duchin, a health officer for Seattle and King County, Washington, speaking on the CDC’s new COVID-19 metrics, “The hospitalization threshold that the CDC came up with is too high. To wait for that high level to implement a measure … defeats the purpose of early action.”
These warnings are being made at a moment when new variants of Omicron are being reported by the World Health Organization (WHO). Specifically, two strains, BA.4 and BA.5, are rising as a proportion of new cases in South Africa. They have also been detected in Denmark, Scotland and England.
They harbor two new mutations seen in previous variants of concern called L452R and F486V, which possibly can make the virus more capable of evading the immune system. Jeremy Kamil, associate professor of microbiology and immunology at Louisiana State University Health Shreveport, told Newsweek, “These are interesting new lineages. What is most interesting and concerning to me is the spike mutation F486V. This amino acid substitution escapes many of the broadly neutralizing antibodies people have that can protect from several variants.”
For now, there is insufficient data or experience with these versions to know how they will behave during rampant community spread. But the constant emergence of COVID-19 variants underscores the complete indifference the ruling elites have to the dangers posed by allowing the virus to continue to assault the world’s population.
New Zealand escalates involvement in NATO war against Russia over Ukraine
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/04/15/nzuk-a15.html
Tom Peters
11 hours ago
On April 11, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced a “significant contribution” to the Ukrainian military. An air force C-130 Hercules with 50 Defence Force personnel has been deployed to Europe, along with eight more “logistics personnel” in Germany. Nine intelligence personnel are already in Europe as part of the war effort. These forces are being integrated into NATO’s war machine, which is flooding Ukraine with high-powered weapons, aimed at inflicting a decisive military defeat on Russia.
For the first time, New Zealand’s Labour Party-led government is also providing funding for “lethal aid.” According to a government statement, $7.5m will be used to “contribute to weapons and ammunition procurement by the United Kingdom.” A further $4.1 million will “support commercial satellite access for the Ukrainian Defence Intelligence.”
These amounts are in addition to $11 million that New Zealand has already contributed to “non-lethal” aid. NZ has also joined sweeping international sanctions aimed at crippling the Russian economy.
Air Marshal Kevin Short, NZ’s Chief of Defence Force, said the new deployment was the largest to Europe since about 250 personnel were sent to Bosnia from 1992–1996, following the bloody war that broke up Yugoslavia.
In a press conference, Ardern said New Zealand troops would not enter Ukraine, but would provide “logistical support and people power” to help distribute the “enormous quantities of military support that countries are contributing” to Ukraine’s military. She framed the intervention as defensive, saying it was part of a “global effort to support Ukraine against Russia’s invasion… [a] violent breach of international law.”
In reality, the European and US imperialist powers deliberately provoked the Russian invasion. They supported the coup in Kiev in 2014 that overthrew the elected, pro-Russian government and triggered a civil war. Since then, the same powers have flooded Ukraine with weapons, many of which have gone into the hands of neo-fascist militias that are playing a major role in the fighting against Russian forces.
The US-NATO powers are now using the war as a pretext for escalating their military build-up against both Russia and China. The US ruling elite is seeking to reverse its long-term economic crisis, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, through military means. It views Russia and China as the major obstacles to US hegemony over Eurasia and the world.
The European powers, and other imperialist allies such as Australia and New Zealand, are supporting the US war effort to secure their seats at the table for the new redivision of the world. In the Pacific region, NZ and Australia are seeking US support to push back against China, which is seen as a threat to their neo-colonial dominance.
Without any democratic process, or even the fig-leaf of a debate in parliament, the Ardern government has taken New Zealand into a war, which threatens to escalate into a direct conflict between nuclear-armed powers.
In an interview with Newshub on April 12, NZ Defence Force Commander of Joint Forces Rear Admiral James Gilmour was asked: “Is New Zealand technically at war?” He replied that this was for the government to say, but then basically confirmed that it is the case, saying: “I think it’s reasonably clear that our status as a neutral country has shifted.”
Ardern emphasised that the war was continually changing, and that NZ’s deployment could be boosted again: “We will continue to answer the calls of Ukraine, with regular reviews of how we can keep making the greatest difference from here in Aotearoa New Zealand.” On April 13, Defence Minister Peeni Henare told Newshub that New Zealand would be “ready to respond” if called upon to play a more active role, and he did not rule out entering Ukraine.
Having participated in the criminal US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq over the last two decades, New Zealand is now fully integrated into US-led preparations for “great power” conflict. In 2016, the then-National Party government announced $20 billion worth of military spending over the next 15 years, to improve New Zealand’s “interoperability” with the US and other allies. In 2018, the Labour Party-Greens-NZ First coalition government issued a major defence strategy document that copied the Pentagon in identifying Russia and China as the major threats to the global order.
The political establishment and corporate media, joined by pseudo-left groups like the ISO, are involved in a full-blown propaganda campaign in support of the war. As in the US and other countries, the demonisation of Russia serves to divert attention from soaring social inequality at home, and the Ardern government’s decision to allow COVID-19 to spread. The virus is killing more than 10 people per day in NZ, but this has been significantly downgraded as a news story, in favour of blanket coverage of Ukraine.
On April 12, the opposition National Party defence spokesman Gerry Brownlee expressed bipartisan support for the latest deployment of troops, telling Newshub it was “a good step.” He added that the government should send javelin missiles to Ukraine and expel the Russian ambassador Georgii Zuev, who he accused of spreading “misinformation about the Russian aggression in Ukraine.”
Newshub’s interviewer Ryan Bridge blamed “Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook” for allowing the Russian Embassy in Wellington to post material about the war in Ukraine—essentially demanding that its posts be censored.
Another National Party MP, Simon O’Connor, has proposed that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky be invited to address New Zealand’s parliament. Zelensky’s speeches to parliaments in Australia, the UK, Germany, the US and Japan, among other countries, have been used to glorify the right-wing, pro-NATO Ukrainian government and justify further military support.
Green Party defence spokesperson Golriz Ghahraman told Radio NZ the government should fund “humanitarian relief” instead of weapons. She made clear that this didn’t signal any opposition to the NATO war effort. Rather, such aid was “where New Zealand is best-placed to get engaged in this war,” whereas providing weapons was “contributing to something that we understand less of.”
On Twitter, Ghahraman joined the National Party in calling for the Russian ambassador to be “expelled” because he refused to appear before a parliamentary committee to face questions about the war in Ukraine. She declared that “his continued presence in NZ will only validate a war criminal’s regime.”
The Green Party is an integral part of the Labour-led coalition government, with four ministerial positions. It fully supports the decision to take New Zealand into the war in Ukraine, and is playing its role in stoking anti-Russia hysteria. Its suggestion that New Zealand “humanitarian” rather direct military aid in no way changes its backing for the predatory US-NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine that can rapidly escalate into a direct clash between nuclear-armed powers.
White House says “nothing will dissuade” US from arming Ukraine
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/04/16/lead-a16.html
Andre Damon
@Andre__Damon
6 hours ago
On Friday morning, the Washington Post reported that Russia has submitted a formal diplomatic note, protesting the US transfer of billions of dollars in military hardware to Ukraine, and raising the prospect of Russian retaliation against US/NATO arms shipments.
Russia’s diplomatic note accused the United States of “adding fuel” to the conflict and warned of “unpredictable consequences.”
It said, “We call on the United States and its allies to stop the irresponsible militarization of Ukraine, which implies unpredictable consequences for regional and international security.”
Responding to these statements, US State Department spokesperson Ned Price told CNN, “The Russians have said some things privately, they have said some things publicly; nothing will dissuade us from the strategy that we’ve embarked on.”
Price said that if Russia is concerned that the White House is “providing billions of dollars worth of security assistance to our Ukrainian partners … then we’re guilty as charged.”
These reckless statements came amid a major intensification of the war this week. On Thursday, the Moskva, the flagship of the Russian Black Sea fleet, sank, after allegedly being struck by Ukrainian anti-ship missiles.
On Friday, the Pentagon backed the account of the Ukrainan government, saying the sinking of the vessel was the result of a Ukrainian strike, and not, as Russia had claimed, an accident.
A White House official told the Washington Post, “What the Russians are telling us privately is precisely what we’ve been telling the world publicly — that the massive amount of assistance that we’ve been providing our Ukrainian partners is proving extraordinarily effective.”
The Post also quoted George Beebe, former director of Russia analysis at the CIA and Russia adviser to former vice president Dick Cheney, as saying “They have targeted supply depots in Ukraine itself, where some of these supplies have been stored.”
Beebe continued, “The real question is do they go beyond attempting to target [the weapons] on Ukrainian territory, try to hit the supply convoys themselves and perhaps the NATO countries on the Ukrainian periphery” through which US supplies are transferred.
Beebe warned that if Russia suffers further military setbacks, “then I think the chances that Russia targets NATO supplies on NATO territory go up considerably… There has been an assumption on the part of a lot of us in the West that we could supply the Ukrainians really without limits and not bear significant risk of retaliation from Russia… I think the Russians want to send a message here that that’s not true.”
The US weapons being shipped to Ukraine include 300 “kamikaze drones” known as “Switchblades,” 300 armored vehicles, and 11 Mi-17 helicopters, as well as land mines, radar, thousands of anti-tank weapons and nuclear protective equipment. Announcing the action, the Pentagon declared, “The United States has now committed more than $3.2 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since the beginning of the Biden Administration.” This includes $2.6 billion just within the past two months, since the beginning of the war.
The intensification of the war occurs against the backdrop of the militarization of Eastern Europe. Finland is “highly likely” to join NATO, the country’s Minister of European Affairs Tytti Tuppurainen said in an interview on Friday, just days after Finland’s prime minister said the country would consider joining NATO in a matter of weeks.
On Friday, Reuters reported that German Chancellor Olaf Scholtz announced another $2 billion in military spending, with over $432 million going to arms shipments to Ukraine.
In the aftermath of the sinking of the Moskva and Russian allegations of Ukrainian attacks on its soil, there were reports of missile strikes inside the Ukrainian capital city of Kiev.
As the war rapidly escalates, there is increasingly open talk of the use of nuclear weapons. On Thursday, William J. Burns, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, said Russia could respond to the escalation of the war with the use of nuclear weapons.
“Given the potential desperation of President Putin and the Russian leadership, given the setbacks that they’ve faced so far, militarily, none of us can take lightly the threat posed by a potential resort to tactical nuclear weapons or low-yield nuclear weapons,” Burns said at a question and answer session at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Asked to comment on Burn’s statement, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told CNN Friday, “Not only me — all of the world, all of the countries have to be worried.”
The combination of Burn’s warning of the potential use of nuclear weapons and Price’s statement that “nothing will dissuade” the US from escalating the war paints a picture of staggering recklessness. The United States is massively expanding its aims in the conflict, seeking not just to “bleed Russia white” over months and years, but to impose a strategic defeat on Russia with the aim of overthrowing its government and installing a puppet regime.
A major contributing factor to the desperate and reckless policy of the Biden administration is the internal crisis in the United States. This week, Politico published an article entitled “Bidenworld projects calm about Covid but bite their nails in private,” which admitted that the Biden administration, having totally dismantled the infrastructure to track the COVID-19 pandemic in order to create a climate of “normalcy” has no idea how widespread the pandemic is in the US.
Prices are soaring, real wages are plummeting, and there is increasingly open talk of an imminent recession. Under these conditions, the Biden administration sees war as a desperate means to enforce “national unity” in the face of a growing movement of the working class not only in the United States, but internationally.
The Biden Administration’s intensification of US involvement in the war will, however, only deepen and intensify the crisis and spur the emergence of working-class opposition.
Mass demonstrations spread worldwide as food, gas costs spiral
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/04/16/pers-a16.html
Eric London
@EricLondonSEP
6 hours ago
The intolerable increases to the cost of living triggered by the US/NATO war against Russia in Ukraine are producing a massive wave of working-class protests throughout the world. Two years into a pandemic that has killed 20 million people and still rages on, social anger that has been building up around kitchen tables and on shopfloors is now boiling over into the streets. Masses of people of all racial, ethnic and linguistic backgrounds are reaching the same conclusion: life cannot continue in the old way.
Fifty days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, protests are now taking place on every continent as demonstrators defy states of emergency and respond to police repression by growing in size and intensity. Initial protests in Peru, Sudan and Sri Lanka are not only continuing, but are now spreading to heavily populated and more urban countries. In the major imperialist powers, the same governments that plotted the present war crisis now confront growing strike movements that the trade union bureaucracies are desperately trying to hold back.
In recent days, municipal workers, government employees, oil workers, telecommunication workers and teachers in Iran have walked off the job to demand massive increases to wages and pensions. Economist Ibrahim Razzaqi told Shara newspaper that “every day society is becoming less tolerant of all its problems” and that Iran was witnessing “a popular outburst over critical living conditions.”
In Indonesia, the world’s fourth largest country by population, large student demonstrations erupted last week over the rising price of cooking oil and the recent announcement by President Joko Widodo that he intends to stay in office for another term. Demonstrators in Jakarta, South Sulawesi, West Java and other areas confronted brutal police repression, with one protestor suffering life threatening injuries.
In Pakistan, concerns within the ruling class over protests against rising prices are at the heart of the recent parliamentary removal of former Prime Minister Imran Kahn. The Diplomat wrote Thursday that food prices have increased 15 percent over the last year, and that, like Sri Lanka and Peru, “Pakistan is the latest victim of political instability. The existence of panic in the commodity and financial markets; a global inflationary spiral, rising food prices, and a surge in protests especially in emerging markets, shows that this process will not be confined to Pakistan or Sri Lanka only.”
In Latin America, a region once thought relatively shielded from declines of Russian and Ukrainian exports, mass demonstration took place in Buenos Aires, Argentina last week as a trucker’s strike has choked the country’s grain exports. El PaÃs noted Thursday that “the conflict in the street is growing together with the loss of purchasing power of the local currency” as inflation soared in April to 6.7 percent from March, with year-to-year inflation increasing to 55 percent.
A strike of truckers, taxi drivers and bus drivers shut down Honduras last week, to which the government of Xiomara Castro responded by raising fees for working class passengers.
Social discontent is also growing in the centers of world imperialism. In the United States, where inflation has surged to an annual rate of 8 percent, 30,000 doormen at luxury apartments in New York City authorized a strike Thursday. This powerful sign of opposition comes as contracts for hundreds of thousands of workers in critical industries are set to expire in the coming weeks.
In the United Kingdom, The Guardian warned in an editorial last week that the UK “is sliding into a social and economic crisis, the likes of which its people have not seen for decades. Household fuel bills are on course to top £2,400 by this autumn, while the price of a grocery shop is rocketing.” Inflation in the UK hit 7 percent last month, the highest rate since 1992.
The Guardian noted, “On one projection, one in three Britons – 23.5 million people – will be unable to afford the cost of living this year.”
In every country, strikers and protestors are fighting over matters of life and death. Global food prices have risen 34 percent since last year. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is brutal and reckless, but who can believe the crocodile tears from NATO governments and their corporate media propagandists when it is their prolongation of the war that is forcing billions to confront hunger at varying degrees of immediacy.
In impoverished West and East Africa, tens of millions face starvation. In the Middle East and North Africa, already-low food reserves will run dry in a matter of weeks. All of these are regions devastated by the impact of US wars of the past thirty years. And as the war in Ukraine drags on into the spring harvest, crops that would have fed billions of people will now lie fallow. In the months ahead, cuts to fertilizer exports from Russia and Belorussia will reduce global staple crop yields by up to half.
Last week, the United Nations published a stark warning of the emerging upsurge of the global working class. The document, titled “Global impact of war in Ukraine on food, energy and finance system” states that “the war in Ukraine, in all its dimensions, is producing alarming cascading effects to a world economy already battered by COVID-19 and climate change, with particularly dramatic impacts on developing countries.”
The UN warned that 60 percent of governments in developing countries are so heavily indebted to the world’s banks and corporations that they will be unable to provide subsidies to those effected by rising prices. Another key factor in the explosiveness of recent protests, the UN acknowledged, is the devastating impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the working class, which has produced “great social and economic scarring.”
What is now emerging, the UN wrote, is a “perfect storm” of social discontent. “In an environment of already high levels of socioeconomic stress due to the impacts of COVID-19, the rise in food prices threatens knock-on effects of social unrest.”
These nervous statements from the major institutions of capitalist rule show that the imperialist governments have failed in their effort to use war to deflect from growing domestic tensions. On the contrary, the escalating drive to world war is producing social explosions.
The spontaneous eruption of protests throughout the world is an objective process, produced by the enormous crisis of the world capitalist system. The transformation of this objective process into a conscious movement for socialism is a question of the building of the revolutionary leadership, the International Committee of the Fourth International.
The ICFI, its affiliated Socialist Equality Parties, the International Youth and Students for Social Equality and the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees are holding an online rally May 1, May Day, the day of international working-class solidarity.
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