Algorithmic Management and Trade Unions

By Thomas KlikauerJ

uly 11, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

janneke staaks - Research Data Management. Flickr.

Ascertaining the role of trade unions is crucial for the debate on algorithmic management. This cannot be restricted to online platforms as used in delivery services, for example.

Instead, when algorithmic management is introduced into traditional companies, it links corporate managers, workers, and trade unions in a fundamentally new way. Perhaps in all of this, three elements are crucial:Big Data: firstly, there is data production which is known as “big data”. Behind the “big” name of big data simply means a lot of data. That is pretty much it. This is a huge volume of data that can also be a complex data set. In general, these are data from a new data source. Almost by definition, big data are data that are more voluminous than traditional data. And oftentimes, conventional processing softwares fail to manage such huge sets of data.
Data Interpretation: secondly, there is data analysis which usually involves human interpretation. In short, it is a human person that makes sense of these newly produced data. For trade unionists, it means that they should not fall into management’s trap of selling those new data as independent, scientific, and objective – despite their appearance of being impartial and unbiased. They are management data, produced, analyzed, interpreted and applied by management for a purpose. In short, they “can” be Weapons of Math Destruction. Worse, they can be used against workers and trade unions.
The Context: thirdly, and as always in labor relations – big data are not produced, analyzed, and used in an organizational vacuum. Instead, they are used in a business organization in which organizational politics exist. This is the unavoidable context in which algorithmic management takes place – in “any” workplaces.

To understand all this, one needs to move significantly beyond the much-trumpeted idea that algorithmic management is mostly about the “surveillance” of workers. As important as surveillance capitalism might be, neither capitalism nor workplace relations are based on surveillance alone.

For one, labor relations at both business organizations and non-business organizations, such as not-yet privatized hospitals and schools always take place inside a regulatory framework that restricts, regulates or, at least, shapes what is known as the digital monitoring of workers.

Instead of overplaying the issue of surveillance, managerial goals are not always – not even under the despotism of algorithmic management – unilaterally oriented towards creating the next super-Orwellian managerialist surveillance regime.

Instead, the outcome of algorithmic management, nevertheless, is likely to be a further centralization of knowledge and power in the hands of authoritarian management. Simultaneously, algorithmic management can, and indeed often does, lead to the disempowerment of trade unions and workers.

Since a few years, algorithmic management has become a crucial topic on debates about the digital transformation of work, algorithmic management, and the role of trade unions and workers in all of this.

Yet, algorithmic management is increasingly used for organizational tasks such as performance evaluation and the disciplining of workers.

Necessarily, one needs to extend the concept of algorithmic management beyond that of an online platform economy and beyond that of monitoring digitally in conventional enterprises.

Overall, algorithmic management is a new technical infrastructure that alters the character of management. Simultaneously, the process of negotiating algorithmic management between management and trade unions has not been fully understood.

All too many people assume that management is using algorithmic technologies simply for watching, surveilling and, subsequently for disciplining workers with management and workers being the only players. This is not always the case.

Worse, algorithmic management does not have a black box against which trade unions’ resistance can do nothing about. Despite the, at times, overemphasis on surveillance, algorithmic systems can still be used in workplaces to record every movement of workers.

In other cases, algorithmic systems are employed by management for – as management often calls it rather euphemistically – “the optimization of work processes” (read: work intensification).

The key to understand what management is, is not that management carries out the surveillance of workers. The only reason why management exists in the first place is that management contributes to profit maximization.

The surveillance of workers is merely a by-product of creating profits or as the language of Managerialism calls it: creating “shareholder value”. To camouflage the truth about management, one of management’s finest, once claimed that, “shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world”.

A very common metaphor presents algorithmic management as an Orwellian panopticon. Such a Big-Brother-like “I am watching you” cements corporate information asymmetries and strengthens managerial control over the labor process – a kind of Orwellian fascism.

In many respects, real fascism is not that much different from an algorithmic dictatorship. Both, political fascism in society as well as managerial-algorithmic dictatorships (MAD) in companies rely on the mobilization, blind compliance, and utilization of people (in a society) and of workers (in a company).

The former can lead to authoritarianism or fascism while the latter assists what is today known as algorithmic management.

Set against such a blind compliance, workers and their trade unions can use their knowledge as a power resource in collective bargaining negotiations about the introduction and operation of algorithmic management.

Such management-union consultations and collective bargaining negotiations can focus on management-vs.-union bargaining over work tasks and roles that are set to be altered in the wake of algorithmic management. This might also include strategies directed towards what became known as organizational misbehavior.

Beyond organizational sabotage and misbehavior, such union collective bargaining negotiations should cover the step-by-step implementation of algorithmic management tools in still conventional-organizational settings such as, for example, warehouses, office work, delivery businesses, marketing, manufacturing, and even consultancies.

Almost self-evidently, algorithmic management is reaching more and more conventional companies. Worse, algorithmic management not just “builds on” long established Taylorist practices, but it also has the potential to significantly crank-up and actually worsen Tayloristic work regimes.

There are many longstanding traditions of despotic Taylorist performance management regimes in conventional companies. There are, however, also recognizable differences between different workplaces, different forms of platform work, and the application of different forms of algorithmic management.

With the rise of algorithmic management, a digital data-based infrastructure is established. This creates new competences to operate algorithmic systems.

Hence, there is a growing importance of managing such data by organizations. In other words, “data production” remains crucial. In contrast to a simple App on a phone, most algorithmic systems cannot simply and easily be applied by management on the micro-surveillance and Uber-monitoring of individual work processes.

Until the advent of algorithmic management, productivity management in the area of manual labor and blue-collar work, for example, relied mainly on traditional concepts like Taylorist time and motion studies. Later, it was cranked up by lean production and work process optimization – controlling managers with stopwatches on hand.

That changes under algorithmic management. Yet, efforts to apply algorithmic management can run up against pre-existing forms of organizational hierarchies, workplace bargaining, and external labor regulation by the state.

Given this, digital or algorithmic monitoring of work can collide with a range of normative, legal, organizational-bureaucratic, and other managerial practices.

In any case, many traditional workplaces generally introduce “only some” elements of algorithmic management – often, these are “not” the most widely condemned forms like those restricting worker behavior, the sanctioning of workers, and for dismissal.

Still, algorithmic management system can – and often do – alter organizational power relations between management, IT-engineers, workers, and trade unions. This occurs during the entire phase of introducing algorithmic management which is often done in stages:The initial stage is that of creating “goals” (read: management goals – not the goals of workers). At this stage, collective bargaining negotiations focus on what management likes to call “shared” (read: their) objectives for the implementation of algorithmic systems.
In the second step, the production data takes center stage. This process also involves measuring instruments. These are installed and measuring takes place.
Thirdly, data analysis and the “human” (read: manager) interpretation of newly generated and rather vast amount of data that have been produced occur. This is the ultimate goal of management. It leads to what managers like to call “optimization” (read: work intensification).

In all this, the data and increased options to control workers that are generated by algorithmic management also raises a dilemma for management. This is Foucault’s knowledge-power dynamic. This might challenge the authority of management.

In this dilemma, management depends on “other (non-managerial) actors” like IT-workers to produce and make sense of the data that algorithms have produced. This creates the following dilemma for management: On the one hand, management depends on the involvement of IT-workers in developing knowledge from algorithmic systems.
On the other hand, management can use digital tools to centralize knowledge in their hands in order to bypass workers, which is, ultimately, next to impossible.

In any case, the introduction and eventual operation of algorithmic management can alter the significance of knowledge and that can re-shape existing power relations in a company.

Algorithmic management systems can also fortify existing information asymmetries between management and workers/unions.

Ultimately, algorithmic management always depends on knowledge contributions from workers and that creates spaces for organizational resistance by workers and trade unions.

Yet, management increasingly uses data generated by external actors or external companies. In that way, managerial control over data production is strengthened. To counter or at least shape this, workers’ representations like European style works councils and trade unions can force management to negotiate these setups.

Most importantly, management is never a monolithic and single actor. There can be divisions within management at the horizontal as well as the vertical level:Horizontal Divisions are divisions between different management functions, such as, for example, between marketing and operations management, between accounting and HRM, between sales and organizational development, between strategic management and day-to-day management, and so on.
Vertical Divisions are divisions between different hierarchies inside a company: between top- middle-, and line-management, for example. Yet they can also be between head office and subsidiaries or a division (in a multi-divisional company, for example).

In any case, all companies have various hierarchical levels of management and different power dynamics among different management areas.

Top management does not necessarily agree with middle-management and shop floor management on the introduction of algorithmic systems. We know that algorithmic management does challenge, in particular, the power of middle management.

Inside companies, algorithmic systems will virtually assure that new groups of IT workers like AI experts and data scientists are increasingly getting more relevant.

In turn, this is likely to diminish the role of classical middle management. Simultaneously, top management may lose control over whether top-apparatchiks need to maintain – or at least appear to maintain – to be “the” master of the rising levels of organizational knowledge that is created by algorithmic systems.

Yet, algorithmic management might also impact on operations management as industrial-process engineers may become ambivalent and insecure about their role inside a company. They might even face what is known as: technostress.

Up until the event of algorithmic management, such engineers have been asphyxiated inside a mode of thinking set in motion by Taylor’s rather un-scientific management.

With algorithmic management, an entire new relationship between Tayloristic engineers and data scientists may well be one that creates tensions and frictions inside companies.

Despite all the integrated technicalities of algorithmic systems, algorithmic management is still a socio-technical, human-created, and political-economical issue. This is filled with power struggles and potentials for resistance.

Despite this, new technologies like algorithmic systems are almost always introduced into profit-making companies.

And these, in turn, operate inside capitalism. In short, the goal of profit-making will guide the introduction of algorithmic systems. It has done so ever since the pin factory (Adam Smith) and the Spinning Jenny (Karl Marx).

On the one hand, algorithmic systems are causing shifts in knowledge and power relations as they reconstruct new organizational knowledge.

On the other hand, the introduction of algorithmic management makes collaboration with an external service provider and/or internal IT-workers necessary to implement algorithmic management.

During the introduction of algorithmic management, organizational relationship often remains ambivalent regarding the organizational power relations between central and middle management.

In any case, it is rather likely that line management might be undermined because of the implementation of algorithmic management.

All in all, top management should support line management in implementing algorithmic management to safeguard the approval of algorithmic management by line management.

Beyond that, the position of workers and trade unions as well as the power relations between workers, unions, engineers and management is often contested during the implementation phase of algorithmic management.

On the side of workers, trade unions need to make sure that workers are aware that the introduction of algorithmic management is always embedded in an existing regulatory framework.

This offers trade unions a series of opportunities to prevent corporate bosses from using algorithmic management for the Uber-monitoring of individual workers and to increase work pressure on workers to perform.

Collective bargaining negotiations between management and trade unions can lead to a strategy that forces management to abstain from downsizing employment and algorithmically enforce managerially set performance targets.

The setting up of institutional arrangements – union-management committees – are an almost necessary precondition for the advancement of a pro-worker arrangements and the enforcement of workplace rights during the introduction of algorithmic management.

In addition, workers also have their own resources particularly during the “data production” phase to gain power. On the downside, however, is the fact that once “data” are collected, all too often management no longer relies on the direct support of workers.

In other words, once management gets what it wants, it can use new data, new knowledge, and new algorithmic systems against workers. This makes corporate “optimization” or work intensification feasible for management “without” any further involvement of IT-workers.

In short, management is forced to reach compromises with worker and unions during the “data production” phase. But – and this is a very serious “BUT” – after that, there often is a strengthening of managerial power, knowledge, and information asymmetries.

This is further enhanced by algorithmic management that reduces the need for worker involvement.

In the end, algorithmic management can very easily give management even more power to act at will and management – throughout the history of labor relations – will use the knowledge and power it gains from algorithmic management against workers. As long as capitalism exists, workers will need to fight this.


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Thomas Klikauer has over 800 publications (including 12 books) and writes regularly for BraveNewEurope (Western Europe), the Barricades (Eastern Europe), Buzzflash (USA), Counterpunch (USA), Countercurrents (India), Tikkun (USA), and ZNet (USA). One of his books is on Managerialism (2013).

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for MANAGERIAL REVOLUTION 

Trump's White House ignored advice on COVID-19 that could've saved over 130,000 lives, Birx said

John Haltiwanger

Then-President Donald Trump speaks with Dr. Deborah Birx, Dr. Robert Redfield, and members of the White House coronavirus task force during a COVID-19 briefing on April 22, 2020.

 Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Trump's COVID-19 response led to many preventable deaths, Deborah Birx told House lawmakers.

 
Over 130,000 lives could've been saved if Trump's White House followed the science, she said.

 
Birx also testified that the 2020 election distracted Trump from the pandemic.

Dr. Deborah Birx, the former White House COVID-19 response coordinator, in testimony to the House select subcommittee on the coronavirus crisis said that former President Donald Trump's approach to the pandemic led to a massive number of preventable deaths.

"No," Birx said when asked if Trump did everything in his power to curb the spread and save lives, per excerpts of her testimony released by the committee on Tuesday.

"And I've said that to the White House in general, and I believe I was very clear to the president in specifics of what I needed him to do," she added.

Birx, who testified before the committee in mid-October, said that over 130,000 lives could've been saved in the early stages of the pandemic had Trump's White House adhered to the science and pushed for measures advocated by experts.

"I believe if we had fully implemented the mask mandates, the reduction in indoor dining, the getting friends and family to understand the risk of gathering in private homes, and we had increased testing, that we probably could have decreased fatalities into the 30% less to 40% less range," Birx said.

She also suggested that the 2020 election distracted Trump and took attention away from the nation's pandemic response.

"The governors and mayors and others that were campaigning, as well as the White House that was campaigning, just took people's time away from and distracted them away from the pandemic in my personal opinion," Birx said. "They were actively campaigning and not as present in the White House as previously."

Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider.

From the earliest days of the pandemic, Trump downplayed the threat of COVID-19 and repeatedly spread misinformation on the virus. He routinely pushed against public health recommendations, including wearing a mask or face covering. Trump during an interview with veteran journalist Bob Woodward admitted that he deliberately sought to downplay the dangers of the virus in an effort to avoid inducing "panic."

Top public health experts have excoriated Trump over his pandemic response, saying that his approach led to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths.

By the time Trump left office, there had been over 400,000 reported COVID-19 deaths in the US.

Scott Atlas defends COVID work, slams Deborah Birx testimony as 'Orwellian attempt to rewrite history'

Birx testified before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis earlier this month

By Brooke Singman | Fox News

EXCLUSIVE: Former Trump COVID special advisor Dr. Scott Atlas slammed Dr. Deborah Birx for her reported testimony to congressional investigators as "an Orwellian attempt to rewrite history," defending his work on the Trump COVID-19 task force, and telling Fox News that history's "biggest failure of public health policy lies directly at the hands of" officials who recommended lockdowns during the early months of the coronavirus pandemic.

Birx testified before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis earlier this month, saying that officials in former President Trump's White House did not take steps to push mask-wearing, social distancing and other mitigation steps that could have prevented thousands of COVID-19 deaths.

MORE GOP BS
SCALISE SAYS GOP MEMO ON CLOSED-DOOR BIRX TESTIMONY CONFIRMS WORLD WAS 'MISLED' ON COVID

Birx also reportedly slammed Atlas, saying he advocated for letting COVID-19 spread through the population to reach herd immunity. The New York Times reported Birx testified that she repeatedly raised her concerns about Atlas' positions and theories to other doctors on the task force.

Deborah Birx, coronavirus response coordinator, speaks during a Coronavirus Task Force news conference at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Tuesday, April 7, 2020. 

Photographer: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Atlas, defending his work to Fox News, said during his time at the White House, he recommended policies "designed to reduce both the spread of the infection to the vulnerable and the harms of the policies themselves to those impacted the most-- low-income families, the working class of America, and our children."

Atlas, delivering a point-by-point rebuttal to reports of Birx's testimony about his role, told Fox News that her claim that he advised Trump to "let the infection spread widely without mitigation to achieve herd immunity," telling Fox News that "is false."

"I never advised the president, the Task Force, or anyone else while in Washington to allow the virus to spread," Atlas said. "Dozens of my writings and interviews during my Washington service explicitly called for specific mitigations, including social distancing, extra hygiene, and masks when not able to socially distance, and 'focused protection,' a heightened protection of those at risk, to allow a safe opening and end the public health destruction from lockdowns."

US President Donald Trump (L) listens to White House coronavirus adviser Dr. Scott Atlas speak during a press conference in the Brady Briefing Room of the White House on September 23, 2020, in Washington, DC. (Photo by MANDEL NGAN / AFP) (Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)

Atlas told Fox News that "it is not a surprise that Dr. Birx, the official Task Force Coordinator of the White House Coronavirus Task Force from late February, 2020 through January 19, 2021, might want to blame others for the failure of her policies," adding that, in her position, she "held the authority over the official federal advice on medical policy."

Atlas said Birx "personally detailed the state of the pandemic" during all task force meetings, and COVID meetings attended by top Trump advisors, adding that Birx "composed in writing and communicated all recommendations from the Task Force to every state."

"I visited only one state, Florida, during my time in Washington," Atlas said.

HISTORICAL REVISIONISM OF THE ANTI VAX/ANTI MASKER

"It is an Orwellian attempt to rewrite history to blame those who criticized the lockdowns that were widely implemented for the failure of the lockdowns that were widely implemented," he said, adding that Birx's recommendations "were implemented by governors throughout nearly the entire nation during 2020."

"Those policies failed to stop the dying, failed to stop the infection from spreading, and inflicted massive health damage and destruction, particularly on working class and lower-income families and on our children," Atlas told Fox News. "History's biggest failure of public health policy lies directly at the hands of those who recommended the lockdowns and those who implemented them, not on those who advised otherwise. Period."

Atlas jointed the Trump White House COVID-19 Task Force in August 2020 as a special government employee, serving just a 130-day detail. Atlas' role expired in November 2020.

 

Dr. Deborah Birx, White House coronavirus response coordinator, speaks about the coronavirus in the James Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House, Friday, April 3, 2020, in Washington.

 (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

Atlas was criticized throughout his time at the White House for advocating for a reopening, while blasting COVID-19 lockdowns as "extremely harmful" to Americans.

MORE LIES 
Meanwhile, last week, Republican House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., said a memo by Republican leadership on the House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis outlining Birx’s closed-door congressional testimony confirms the world was "misled" on the origins of COVID-19.

"President Biden and Democrats have politicized Covid from the start and refused to acknowledge its origins from China," Scalise told Fox News in a statement. "Republicans have been sounding the alarm on these issues for well over year, and Dr. Birx’s closed-door testimony confirms that the world was misled."

The memo highlights several of Birx’s testimonial revelations, including that there were preventable deaths and that "neither the federal government or state and local governments are doing everything that they could at this moment." According to Republicans on the committee, Birx also testified about the importance of coordinating with state and local leaders.

According to the memo, Birx took aim at China’s role in suppressing information on the virus to the World Health Organization (WHO) at the onset of the pandemic, saying she believes "that there had to be evidence of human-to-human transmission weeks before the WHO or the world was notified" and that China "misled" the world on the virus.

The doctor also said she believed that China was giving false information to the WHO on the virus, resulting in a delay of two weeks before worldwide confirmation of human-to-human transmission of COVID-19.

Fox News' Houston Keene contributed to this report.

“Is That Orwellian Or Kafkaesque Enough For You?”

The Guardian Removes Bin Laden’s "Letter To America"   

by Media Lens / November 28th, 2023

The Guardian has long promoted itself as a valiant publisher of news and analysis that holds the powerful to account. It is a thing of wonder that the Guardian appends the following comment beneath news pieces:

Our quality, investigative journalism is a scrutinising force at a time when the rich and powerful are getting away with more and more.

For over twenty years, Media Lens has shown how false is this claim.

A new, significant example occurred just last week. On 15 November, the paper removed Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America” which it had hosted on its website for almost 21 years. What was suddenly so problematic about the letter that it had to be abruptly removed by the Guardian after being on its website for so long (an archived version can be seen here)?

The deleted text was an English translation of bin Laden’s letter, first published on a Saudi website linked to al-Qaeda, in November 2002, over one year after the 9/11 attacks on the United States. The Guardian website published a full translation on its website on 24 November 2002. The letter, addressed to the American people, contains a detailed list of grievances against the US shared by many in the Muslim world, explaining what motivated the 9/11 attacks.

The letter has been ‘rediscovered’ during Israel’s current genocidal assault against Palestinians in Gaza, with people around the world discussing relevant issues online. The Guardian link to the letter went viral, particularly among young people on TikTok, with 14 million views of videos tagged with #lettertoamerica. Many of these videos were posted by young Americans, shocked to find that people around the world hate their country because of strong grievances rooted in real issues.

To properly understand why this response is so remarkable, and why it was quickly followed by an Orwellian act of Guardian censorship, requires some vital context.

‘They Hate Us For Our Freedoms’

In a recent edition of System Update, a widely-watched online politics programme, the US journalist Glenn Greenwald summed up the belief system of most Americans, of all ages:

The people who live in the United States believe and are told that we are a nice, good, benevolent, democratic, free country. We don’t want to bother anyone in the world. We’re not here to conquer anyone. To the extent that we involve ourselves in the world, it’s to help; like we’re doing now in Ukraine, we’re told. We just want to spread democracy, want to defend people…So, why would anyone possibly want to perpetrate an attack on the United States of that brutality and savagery? Americans rightly wanted to know.

Greenwald continued:

And they were fed a complete bullshit answer: by the neocons, by the media, by the government: “They hate us for our freedoms”.

The letter was written by bin Laden, who was loudly blamed for the attacks by the US and other governments, and who was extrajudicially executed by US special forces in Pakistan in May 2011. Greenwald pointed out that there are interviews with bin Laden where he had spelled out the grievances explaining the actual reasons why many in the Muslim world hate the United States.

Greenwald added:

And yet, after 9/11, the US government instructed the television networks – ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, Fox – do not show any speeches or interviews with Osama bin Laden, because they didn’t want the American population hearing from him what their actual grievances were. They didn’t want Americans to think that maybe we had done things in that part of the world that caused it to happen, that causes “blowback”, to use the CIA’s term.

As with any statement from an influential or powerful figure, bin Laden’s letter needs to be read critically. There is much to revile in the letter, not least its antisemitism and homophobia. But consider some of the grievances he detailed against the US government, summarised below:

• Palestine was ethnically cleansed to allow the state of Israel to be set up in 1948. Since then, the Palestinians have been subjected to an Israeli military occupation, suffering for decades as a result of massacres, imprisonment, torture, shootings, bombs, destruction of homes and livelihoods: all backed with massive military, economic and diplomatic support from the US.
• Sanctions against Iraq, pushed heavily by the US, led to the deaths of 1.5 million Iraqis, 0.5 million of them children under 5.
• US attacks in Somalia, support for Russian atrocities in Chechnya, and support for Israeli aggression against Lebanon.
• Oppression of the populations of US client states in the Middle East, ruled by authoritarian monarchs, or where democratically elected leaders were removed and replaced by US-friendly dictators.
• The exploitation of the Middle East’s natural resources, especially oil, by Western corporations at paltry prices secured through economic and military threats.
• US military bases spread across the region, protecting what the US sees as its own assets.
• The leading US role in destroying climate stability – in particular, its refusal to sign the Kyoto agreement made at the 1997 UN Climate Summit – in order to preserve the profits of US fossil fuel giants.
• US power and influence has been used, not to defend universal humanitarian principles and values, but to secure US geostrategic interests and profits.
• The dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even though Japan was ready to negotiate an end to the war.

The now blatant US support for Israeli ethnic cleansing of Gaza – and the genocidal nature of Israel’s attacks on Palestinians – seemingly underpins the explosion on social media of attention directed towards bin Laden’s letter. Young Americans are waking up to the fact that the US has long supported Israel in its oppression of the Palestinians.

Another significant factor is the awful realisation among young American people, especially, that US government policy has made them targets as retribution for the crimes committed by Washington.

“Removed Document”: Guardian Censorship

So why did the Guardian, which proclaims its credentials in supposedly enabling readers to understand the world, remove bin Laden’s letter from its website? The decision was ‘explained’ in a piece by Blake Montgomery, the tech editor for Guardian US in New York City. In fact, the headline, and most of the article, focused on TikTok:

TikTok “aggressively” taking down videos promoting Bin Laden “letter to America”.

The Guardian quoted TikTok:

Content promoting this letter clearly violates our rules on supporting any form of terrorism. We are proactively and aggressively removing this content and investigating how it got on to our platform.

But what did the article report about the Guardian itself?

In response to the letter’s renewed spread, Guardian News and Media removed it on 15 November 2023, replacing it with the statement: “The transcript published on our website had been widely shared on social media without the full context. Therefore we decided to take it down and direct readers instead to the news article that originally contextualised it.”

Significantly, the Guardian article closed with a statement from the White House, as though this should be literally the last word on the matter:

There is never a justification for spreading the repugnant, evil, and antisemitic lies that the leader of al Qaeda issued just after committing the worst terrorist attack in American history.

As Greenwald observed, US ‘Big Tech’ companies – Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter) – are already subjected to censorship in accordance with the dictates of the US security state, as the ‘Twitter files’, a cache of leaked documents, showed. TikTok, a Chinese company, was the only major platform outside the reach of the US. But, noted Greenwald, they were told that, as a condition of being able to continue to operate in the US, they would have to agree to the censorship demands of the US government. Hence, TikTok’s determination to ban TikTok clips discussing #lettertoamerica.

In other words, the censorship actions taken by both TikTok and the Guardian align with the requirements of the US government. This should come as no surprise to anyone who is familiar with the long history of the Guardian acting as a liberal gatekeeper for establishment power. Moreover, the paper’s ever-closer relationship with UK state security services, themselves subservient to US state power, is abundantly clear.

Piling irony upon irony, one article that the Guardian has not removed from its website, is the fake front-page ‘news’ story in November 2018 claiming that Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, supposedly held secret talks with WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Such reprehensible journalism unjustly besmirched Assange’s reputation and may well have been part of a state-sponsored propaganda campaign in advance of his forcible removal from the embassy by British police in April 2019, to be thrown in Belmarsh Prison where he remains to this day, awaiting likely extradition to the US.

What about the Guardian’s decision to redirect readers to their 2002 news article that ‘contextualised’ the letter? The article was titled, ‘Osama issues new call to arms’, and was written by Jason Burke, then the Guardian’s chief reporter and now the paper’s international security correspondent. The opening sentence made explicit the state-friendly pitch adopted throughout:

A chilling new message from Osama bin Laden is being circulated among British Islamic extremists, calling for attacks on civilians and describing the “Islamic nation” as “eager for martyrdom”.

Burke continued:

Britain, with its close support for America in the war on terror and Iraq, is a prime target and analysts believe any military action against Saddam Hussein would provoke a spate of revenge attacks by Islamic militants. Sources described the mood in Whitehall and at Scotland Yard as “jumpy”.

Recall that this article was published in November 2002, as the West was mounting a propaganda blitz to ‘justify’ its imminent invasion of Iraq which began in March 2003.

Burke added:

Most of his letter comprises a lengthy list of grievances against the West.

But which grievances? Surely the Guardian would spell out several examples from this ‘lengthy list’? Amazingly Burke did not cite any of them, other than bin Laden’s ‘sustained attack on the “immorality” of Western society.’

In other words, the Guardian article that supposedly ‘contextualised’ bin Laden’s letter, which the paper has now removed, does nothing of the sort, obscuring US crimes in Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, Somalia, Japan and elsewhere.

Because the letter had gone viral, but then been removed, the most viewed link on the Guardian at one point last week (on 15 November) was actually, ‘Removed – document’; the place-marker with its risible ‘explanation’ that the Guardian had provided.

As Greenwald noted:

Is that Orwellian enough, or Kafkaesque enough, for you? The article in which most people had an interest in reading was the [letter hosted by the] Guardian [which], precisely because too many people were interested in it, [the editors] decided to remove, so that people couldn’t read it any longer. It’s a document by a major historical figure. The person we’re told was responsible for the 9/11 attack explaining to Americans why people in that part of the world were angry enough with America to do that.

And the Guardian decided, even though it had been up on their website for 21 years, that now that people were discussing it in connection with the war in Gaza from Israel, and US support for it, you can no longer read it.

One of our recent media alerts focused on the phenomenon of Orwellian ‘memory-hole journalism’. That the Guardian had been caught in the act, arguably attracting even more attention to what it had tried to conceal (known as the ‘Streisand effect’), is noteworthy.

What is so encouraging about the fact that this went viral among young people is that it suggests they are beginning to look beyond the benevolent platitudes of US government public relations and are seeking to understand the reasons why so many people around the globe hate, not US ‘freedoms’, but US foreign policy.

Media Lens is a UK-based media watchdog group headed by David Edwards and David Cromwell. The most recent Media Lens book, Propaganda Blitz by David Edwards and David Cromwell, was published in 2018 by Pluto Press. Read other articles by Media Lens, or visit Media Lens's website.

 

The Collapse of Industrial Farming

BY ROBERT HUNZIKER   

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Photograph Source: U.S. Department of Agriculture – CC BY 2.0

The most upending event of the past 10,000 years is the advent of engineered food as fermentation farms displace factory farms. “We are on the Cusp of the Fastest, Deepest, Most Consequential Disruption of Agriculture in History.” (RethinkX.com)

“Modern foods will bankrupt the cattle industry within a decade.” (RethinkX)

More on that to follow, but first: Industrial farming, alongside global warming, ranks at the top of the list of existential risks this century. And, similar to the dangers attendant to excessive greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, industrial farming is dangerously out of control, but in contrast to global warming, it is not followed at all by corporate media, begging the Orwellian question whether media other than corporate media truly exist?

All of which serves to highlight George Orwell’s concerns as expressed in his famous novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (Secker & Warburg Publishers, 1949) wherein he explained the primary consequences of “media manipulation” described as: (a) “loss of a critical thinking faculty” and (b) “diminished capacity for self-expression.”

More than 70 years post-Orwellian, his words ring true as corporate media skims over the tragic news of a world in such a dangerous state that only the collapse of industrial agriculture itself, along with cutting GHG emissions, can help to stop the pronounced ongoing collapse of ecosystems throughout the world, especially evident at the extreme latitudes, north and south.

According to Forest Trends, as of 2021, clear-cutting of forests for commercial agriculture purposes, principally for beef and soy production, within the past couple of years increased by a rip-snorting +50%, mostly illegal, to 27 million acres a year. (Source: Trees Fell Faster in the Years Since Companies and Governments Promised to Stop Cutting Them Down, Inside Climate News, May 19, 2021).

That huge acceleration of clear-cutting follows in the footsteps of the New York Declaration on Forests signed in 2014 by 200 endorsers to cut deforestation in half by 2020 (ahem!) and stop it altogether by 2030 (lol).

Industrial farming is destroying the planet’s resources with clear-cutting as well as spewing tons upon tons of toxic chemicals that subtly destroy major ecosystems throughout the world, including wetlands, floral meadowlands, and precious farmland as toxic chemicals turn rich black soils into useless dirt.

The Center for Biodiversity and the World Animal Protection-US orgs in February of 2022 released a major report “Collateral Damage” documenting the deadly harm of toxic chemicals used by factory farms. Clearly, humans are poisoning the planet, and in a mind-blowing “tip of the hat” to Orwell’s prognosis about human dullness, it is legal! Yes, poisoning the planet is legal! Which suggest that Orwell’s concern about “loss of a critical thinking faculty” is understated.

That amazing fact is underscored by the frightening knowledge that within only a few decades industrial farming, assuming it can be called “farming,” displaced thousands of years of family farming that husbanded nature, displaced by rapacious corporate models of stern-minded profit-oriented callous mass slaughter to satisfy the gluttonous fast-food craze that’s unique to the decadent 21^st century.

This sudden emergence of CAFOs or concentrated animal feed operations is so gruesome and so powerful and so outlandishly disparate from traditional family farming that only a fantasy comparison can approximate its oddity via the passing of a magical wand that morphs Tinker Bell into Hannibal Lecter.

On the other hand, a turning point may be at hand. Factory farming is about to be disrupted via better foods, tastier foods, cheaper foods, healthier foods, and a much healthier environment. That future, sans institutional slaughterhouses and sans widespread use of chemicals and the end of clear-cutting has been theorized in detail by the independent think tank RethinkX.

The not-so-secret formula to better, tastier, cheaper, healthier, more prevalent food is the production of microorganisms. Already over past centuries humanity has shown the value of controlling microorganisms through fermentation, producing bread, cheese, alcohol, as well as preserving fruit and vegetables.

“Moving food production to the molecular level promises a more efficient means of feeding ourselves and the delivery of superior, cleaner nutrients without the unhealthy chemical/antibiotic/insecticide additives required by current industrial means of production.” (RethinkX)

The capability to create foods with exact attributes of nutrition, structure, taste, and texture is advancing whereby ordering food will be similar to installing software on your phone but via databases of engineered molecules, as fermentation farms displace factory farms.

Impossible Foods is an example that utilizes fermented (heme) to create a higher-performing product. (Source: A Rainbow of Opportunity: How Fermentation Biotech is Creating “Agricultural 2.0”, Food Navigator, March 25, 2021)

According to RethinkX: “By 2035, 60% of the area currently allocated to livestock and food production will be freed for other uses. This is enough land that if it were dedicated to the planting of trees for carbon sequestration, it could completely offset U.S. greenhouse emissions.”

Moreover, it is anticipated that rapid uptake of engineered foods means water consumption for cattle will drop by 50% within a decade. And destruction of rainforests for cattle-raising and soy oil production will plummet.

And most importantly for human health concerns, toxic chemicals will be unnecessary. The current industrial food supply chain, from A to Z, is loaded with chemicals. For starters, pesticides used to grow food and livestock end up in human bodies one way or another, and in high enough concentrations proven to influence cancers, brain, nerve, genetic and hormonal disorders, kidney and liver damage, asthma and allergies. (Source: Julian Cribb: Earth Detox, Cambridge University Press, August 2021)

In addition to pesticides, some 3,000 chemical ingredients added to food are permitted by the FDA to enhance freshness, taste, and texture. Preservatives, for example, which extend shelf life, are chemicals that poison the bacteria and moulds that cause food to rot: “Common chemical preservatives such as sodium nitrate and nitrite, sulphites, sulphur dioxide, sodium benzoate, parabens, formaldehyde and antioxidant preservatives, if over-consumed in the modern processed food diet, may also lead to cancers, heart disease, allergies, digestive, lung, kidney and other diseases and constitute a further reason for avoiding or reducing one’s intake of industrial food.” (Earth Detox, pg 70)

Two hundred million (200,000,000) or more than 50% of Americans have at least one chronic disease. (Rand Corporation, 2017) Prompting the query, what causes chronic disease? Answer: Mainstream medical sites blames tobacco, secondhand smoke, poor nutrition, alcohol and lack of exercise, sinful-related stuff. Yet, there are several books and science papers published that point the finger at toxic chemicals in our environment as the cause of chronic diseases. Here’s one recent publication: Stephanie Seneff, PhD: Toxic Legacy: How the Weedkiller Glyphosate Is Destroying Our Health and the Environment, Chelsea Green Publishing, London, UK, 2021)

“Interestingly enough, Europe only permits the use of 400 out of the 3000 food additives permitted in the US (ed.- the EU has only one-half the US rate of chronic diseases). Essentially, Europe has banned 4/5ths of the chemicals allowed in the US food chain. Europe outlaws any chemicals that do not meet its criteria for ‘non-harm to humans or the environment.” (Earth Detox, pg. 73)

The Center for Biological Diversity in conjunction with World Animal Protection-US report Collateral Damage (February 4, 2022) studied the impact of an estimated 235 million pounds annually of herbicides and insecticides applied to feed crops for factory farms. The chemicals are applied to corn and soybeans for farmed animal feed in the US. Roughly 50% of toxic pesticide use on a global basis is for corn and soy for factory farms… hundreds of millions of pounds of chemicals are applied to corn and soy crops as pesticides in the US.

If only two out of the thousands of toxic chemicals could be eliminated, i.e., glyphosate (herbicide) and atrazine (pesticide); it would be a major health benefit to complex life and ecosystems.

Glyphosate, the king of toxic chemicals, is the most widely used herbicide worldwide. Already 13,000 lawsuits have been filed claiming it causes non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. WHO claims it is “probably carcinogenic to humans.”

Atrazine is one of the most widely used pesticides, especially in the US. To date, thirty-five (35) countries have banned its use, including the EU because of persistent groundwater contamination and dangerous levels of toxicity.

“Atrazine is a potent endocrine disruptor and is linked to a variety of human health issues, including different types of cancer, Parkinson’s disease, and harm to the reproductive system. After just six hours of exposure an increase in cell death and DNA damage were observed. The same level of damage from exposure to Gamma radiation would take a full 15 minutes. Atrazine also alters the levels of dopamine and norepinephrine in the brain and decreases the electrical activity of certain cells in the cerebellum (the region of the brain that controls motor function). As an endocrine disruptor it can interfere with the balance of hormones in the body, significantly impacting overall physiology and development.” (Source: Collateral Damage: How Factory Farming Drives Up the Use of Toxic Agricultural Pesticides by World Animal Protection, New York, NY, February 2022).

It’s not at all surprising that 35 countries, including the EU, banned atrazine. But, it’s enormously popular in the US.

Time after time, the brilliance of Orwell’s mass media prognosis of “loss of a critical thinking faculty” shows up on the shores of the United States.

It’s probably a good idea to reread Nineteen Eighty-Four:

“IT WAS a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind… at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week… On each landing, opposite the lift shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.” (1984, pg. 1)

Robert Hunziker lives in Los Angeles and can be reached at rlhunziker@gmail.com.

DeSantis blasted for 'Orwellian' vaccine investigation

Alexander Nazaryan
·Senior White House Correspondent
Thu, December 15, 2022 

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis at a news conference in Miami on Dec. 1. 

(Ronen Tivony/SOPA Images via ZUMA Press Wire)

One day after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced a push to investigate alleged harms caused by coronavirus vaccines, Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser, criticized the move as a pointless exercise that would only undermine public confidence in efforts to boost and maintain protection against the circulating pathogen.

“We have a vaccine that, unequivocally, is highly effective and safe and has saved literally millions of lives,” Fauci said Wednesday on CNN. “What’s the problem with vaccines?”

The problem is vaccines have become part of America’s polarized politics. Since the advent of COVID-19 vaccines late in the Trump administration, skepticism of the established medical science has become a kind of creed for many conservatives, as well as for some on the far left. Political disagreements about lockdowns, mask mandates and vaccine requirements have hardened into antipathy toward the vaccines themselves.


Seizing on rare adverse side effects and diminishing effectiveness — the result of new variants and low booster uptake — vaccine critics have dismissed inoculation as ineffective and potentially dangerous.

Some have also embraced outlandish conspiracy theories about vaccines as a form of government and corporate control.

Anti-vaccination activists at a rally at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., in January. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

During a pandemic-related hearing in the House, Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland progressive, called the proposed grand jury an “Orwellian” development. “These actions are transparently designed to falsely suggest that coronavirus vaccines, and not the coronavirus itself, are dangerous,” he said Wednesday.

Widely expected to seek the Republican nomination in 2024, DeSantis played open to those concerns on Tuesday, when he announced that he would call for Florida's Supreme Court to empanel a grand jury “to investigate crimes and wrongdoing committed against Floridians related to the COVID-19 vaccine.” He is also seeking “further surveillance into sudden deaths of individuals that received the COVID-19 vaccine in Florida.”

Such deaths are rare, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, whose vaccine surveillance statistics indicate that 17,868 people — or 0.0027% of vaccine recipients — died after their shots. But those reports unquestionably include thousands of deaths that happened after vaccination but had nothing to do with the vaccines themselves.

Vaccine skeptics have often used reports of supposed side effects — such as those to a vaccine database that does not require confirmation — to exaggerate supposed dangers. And such critics invariably downplay the fact that vaccines are exceptionally effective at stopping serious and critical COVID-19 illness, which has killed more than 6.6 million people globally.

A health care worker administers a COVID-19 vaccine 

at a drive-through site in Miami in December of last year. 

(Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

And with online misinformation and partisan politics exercising strong pressures on the American public, vaccine fears have been easily exploited, leading to low uptake among Republicans. As a consequence, heavily Republican areas have had higher death rates than Democratic ones.

In Florida, more than 83,000 people have died from COVID-19, and cases there have been rising recently. DeSantis, who has decried what he describes as “Faucism” (the echoes of “fascism” are difficult to miss), downplayed the seriousness of the pandemic from the start, though he has also been credited for opening schools and other businesses well before Democratic counterparts, some of whom remained in a cautious crouch well into 2021.

Earlier this year, DeSantis clashed with former President Donald Trump for supporting vaccination, refusing to say whether he received a booster shot; Trump shot back by calling DeSantis “gutless.”

DeSantis has also regularly attacked Fauci in personal terms. “Someone needs to grab that little elf and chuck him across the Potomac,” he said earlier this year of Fauci, who has been the face of the pandemic for both the Trump and Biden administrations. (He was eventually sidelined by the former in favor of experts closer in line with DeSantis’s views.)

In late 2021, DeSantis hired Dr. Joseph Ladapo as Florida’s surgeon general. Ladapo has had no experience with infectious diseases and has routinely attacked vaccination and masking. “With these new actions, we will shed light on the forces that have obscured truthful communication about the COVID-19 vaccines,” Ladapo said after Tuesday’s event.

Florida’s surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, 

with Gov. Ron DeSantis looking on, in Brandon, Fla., 

in November 2021. (Chris O'Meara/AP)

The announcement by DeSantis comes days after new Twitter owner Elon Musk attacked Fauci on Twitter, calling for his prosecution. A supporter of DeSantis, Musk has argued that prior to his ownership, Twitter executives suppressed information on the coronavirus that presumably undermined public health messaging.

Last week, he invited Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya — an outspoken critic of pandemic precautions — to Twitter’s headquarters. Bhataccharya, who has advised DeSantis in the past, will be on the governor’s new public safety committee, along with Dr. Martin Kulldorff of Harvard (a co-author, with Bhatacharrya, of the pro-reopening Great Barrington Declaration) and Bret Weinstein, a quasi-celebrity on the so-called Intellectual Dark Web with no professional experience in vaccinology.

“I’m not sure what they’re trying to do down there,” Fauci said in the Wednesday CNN interview. Though he is about to retire after four decades of federal service, he is likely to face calls to testify from House Republicans, who continue to accuse him of making misleading statements on masks, vaccines and the origins of the coronavirus.

As his retirement has approached, Fauci has been increasingly vocal and defiant about the challenges revealed by the nation’s faltering coronavirus response, which has left more than a million people dead in the U.S.

In a New York Times essay, Fauci lamented the role “disinformation and political ideology” have played in sowing doubt about masks, vaccines and other measures.

Dr. Anthony Fauci on Dec. 9 during a virtual event to urge 

Americans to get vaccinated ahead of the holiday season.

(Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)