THE LARGEST MASS MURDERER IN AMERICAN HISTORY
Press Sec Psaki: Trump Doesn’t Deserve Vaccine Credit After 500K COVID Deaths

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki speaks during the daily press briefing in the Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House on March 4, 2021, in Washington, D.C.SAMUEL CORUM / GETTY IMAGES

BYChris Walker, Truthout

PUBLISHED March 4, 2021


While fielding questions during the daily White House press briefing on Thursday, Press Secretary Jen Psaki was asked how much credit former President Donald Trump should get regarding the rollout of coronavirus vaccines across the United States.

“I don’t think anyone deserves credit when half a million people in the country have died from this pandemic,” the press secretary said.

ABC News senior White House correspondent Mary Bruce asked the question to Psaki on Thursday.

Current President Joe Biden “has been pretty critical of the prior administration’s handling of the pandemic, saying you inherited a mess here,” Bruce began, “but when it comes to vaccinations, you are following some of the same playbook here, so does the prior administration deserve some credit for laying the groundwork?”

Psaki questioned where that question came from. Bruce explained that it was suggested by Trump’s former coronavirus testing czar Brett Giroir, who had claimed Biden’s vaccine plan was 99 percent copied from Trump’s.

“He has said that the prior administration deserves more credit here for at least getting the ball rolling on some of these,” Bruce added.

Psaki rejected that argument outright.

“What our focus is on and what the president’s focus is on when he came into office just over a month ago, was ensuring we have enough vaccines. We are going to have them now,” Psaki added, stating that there were “not enough” vaccines available when Biden initially took office.

Psaki’s response is in line with previous criticisms from Biden, who has said in the past that Trump failed to procure enough doses of coronavirus vaccines before he left office.

The Biden administration purchased 200 million more doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines in February, saying at the time that they had brought the vaccine totals high enough to vaccinate every person in the U.S.

“While scientists did their job in discovering vaccines in record time, my predecessor — I’ll be very blunt about it — did not do his job in getting ready for the massive challenge of vaccinating hundreds of millions,” Biden said in February.

In more recent days, the Biden administration also helped to broker a deal between two competing pharmaceutical companies, Johnson & Johnson and Merck, to produce millions more doses of a third vaccine in the coming months.

The increase in vaccine doses, Biden has said, will mean that every adult in the U.S. will be able to get vaccinated by the end of May.

Far from being helpful in putting a halt to the pandemic, Trump’s actions as president likely made matters worse. A study from the medical journal The Lancet noted Trump’s “appalling response” to the pandemic, which included making the wearing of masks a political issue. The manner in which the former president behaved regarding the virus “expedited the spread of Covid-19,” the report concluded. (The report also concluded that if the U.S. had the same health care system and approach to COVID-19 that other wealthy nations have employed, there could have been 40 percent fewer deaths from the virus than had actually occurred.)

A separate study, which examined 18 of Trump’s political campaign rallies held last year (which featured tightly packed crowds and very few in attendance wearing masks), found that the rallies were connected to at least 700 deaths and tens of thousands of coronavirus infections across the country.

By the time Trump had exited office, more than 400,000 Americans had died from COVID-19 — a stunning number that is worlds apart from what the former president had predicted just over one year ago.

While 118,000 more Americans have died due to coronavirus since Trump’s departure from office, it does appear that numbers are now trending in a better direction. On January 20, the last day Trump was in office, the seven-day average of new daily cases stood at 195,064 cases per day. As of March 3, that number has been reduced to 64,409 cases per day, a decrease of nearly 67 percent.

Social Networks, the New Dominant Media

by Ignacio Ramonet, OPINION, TELESUR

“(…) although the digital revolution has allowed an indisputable democratization of communication – a goal that seemed absolutely unthinkable – this democratization now leads to an uncontrolled and disorderly proliferation of messages, as well as to the deafening noise created above all by social networks”.

The modern Internet, the Web, was invented in 1989, thirty-two years ago. In other words, we are living the first minutes of a phenomenon that is here to stay for centuries. Let’s think that the printing press was invented in 1440, and that three decades later it had hardly changed anything, but it ended up disrupting the world: it changed culture, politics, economics, science, history. It is clear that many of the parameters we know are being profoundly modified, not so much by the current pandemic of Covid-19, but above all by the widespread irruption of technological changes and social networks. And not only in terms of communication – is truth dying – but also in finance, commerce, transport, tourism, knowledge, culture… Not to mention the new dangers of surveillance and loss of privacy.

Now, with the Web and social networks, it is no longer only the state that watches over us. Some giant private companies (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, etc.) know more about us than we do. In the coming years, with artificial intelligence and 5G technology, algorithms will determine the course of our lives more than our own will. Let no one think that such decisive changes in communication will not have consequences for the very organization of society and its political structuring as we have known it up to now. The future is a long way off and the decisive changes have only just begun.

“(…) although the digital revolution has allowed an indisputable democratization of communication – a goal that seemed absolutely unthinkable – this democratization now leads to an uncontrolled and disorderly proliferation of messages, as well as to the deafening noise created above all by social networks”.

We live in a universe in which our privacy is under great threat; we are more under surveillance than ever through biometrics or video surveillance cameras, much more than George Orwell himself imagined in his dystopian novel 1984. Moreover, robotics, drones and artificial intelligence threaten to create an ecosystem from which human beings could end up being expelled; not to mention the “crisis of truth” – in terms of information – replaced by fake news, post-truth, new manipulations or alternative truths. At this point, the future could be approaching our most terrifying past faster than we think.

On the emancipatory aspect of the current digital revolution, the most notable aspect is the “effective democratization of information”. An ideal that constituted a fundamental demand, and to some extent a dream, since the social revolt of May 1968 – i.e. the desire for citizens to take control of the means of communication and above all of information – has to some extent been realized. Today, with the mass equipping of lightweight digital communication devices (smartphones, laptops, tablets and others), individual citizens have more communicational firepower than, for example, the first global television channel, Cable News Network (CNN), had in 1986. It is much cheaper and easier to operate. Every citizen is now what used to be called a mass media. Many people are unaware of it or don’t know the real power at their disposal. Today, in the face of the big media corporations, we are no longer unarmed. Whether we are making optimal use of the communication superpower at our disposal is another matter.

In that sense, even though the digital revolution has allowed for a new solution to the problems of information and communication, has it solved them? The answer is no, because in life every solution creates a new problem. This is the tragic human condition. The ancient Greeks illustrated it with the myth of Sisyphus, condemned to push a huge boulder to the top of a mountain; once he reached the top, the boulder slipped out of his hands and tumbled back down to the foot of the mountain. Then Sisyphus had to pull it back up to the top, where it slipped again, and so on until the end of eternity.

In this sense, although the digital revolution has allowed an indisputable democratization of communication – a goal that seemed absolutely unthinkable – this democratization now leads to an uncontrolled and disorderly proliferation of messages, as well as to the deafening noise created above all by social networks. This is precisely what constitutes the new problem. As we said, truth has now been diluted. If we all have our truth, what then is the real truth? Or is it, as Donald Trump said, that “truth is relative”?

At the same time, the objectivity of information (if it ever existed) has disappeared, manipulations have multiplied, intoxications proliferate like another pandemic, disinformation dominates and the war of narratives spreads. Never before have fake news, delusional narratives, “emotional information” and plots been “constructed” with such sophistication. To make matters worse, many surveys show that citizens prefer and believe fake news more than real news because the former corresponds better to what we think. Neurobiological studies confirm that we adhere more to what we believe than to what goes against our beliefs. It has never been easier to fool ourselves.

More than a “new frontier”, the Internet, i.e. cyberspace or digitalandia, is our “new territory”. We live in two spaces, our usual, three-dimensional space and the digital space of the screens. A parallel space, as in science fiction or quantum universes, where things or people can be in two places at the same time. Obviously, our relationship to the world, from a phenomenological point of view, cannot be the same. The Internet – and tomorrow Artificial Intelligence – gives our brains unprecedented extensions. Certainly the new digital sociability, accelerated by socializing networks such as Facebook or Tinder, is profoundly modifying our relational behavior. I don’t think there can be any “turning back”. Networks are simply the defining structural parameters of contemporary society.

We must also be aware that the Internet is no longer the decentralized space of freedom that made it possible to escape dependence on the mainstream media. Without most Internet users realizing it, the Internet has become centralized around a few giant companies that we have already mentioned – the GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon) – which monopolies it and which almost no one can do without. Their power is such, as we have just seen, that they even allow themselves to censor the president of the United States when Twitter and Facebook cut off his access and silenced Donald Trump himself at the beginning of January.

We did not understand in the early 2000s that the economic model of “advertising versus free” would create a dangerous phenomenon of centralization, because advertisers have an interest in working with the biggest, with those who have the largest audience. We must now succeed in going against this logic in order to decentralize the Internet again. Public opinion must realize that free access leads to such a centralization of the Internet that, little by little, control becomes stronger and surveillance becomes generalized.

In this regard, it should be pointed out that surveillance today is essentially based on technological, automatic information, much more than on human information. It is a matter of “diagnosing the dangerousness” of an individual on the basis of more or less proven elements of suspicion and the surveillance (with the complicity of the GAFA) of his or her contacts in networks and messages; with the paradoxical idea that, to guarantee freedoms, we must begin by limiting them. Let it be understood: the problem is not surveillance in general, but mass clandestine surveillance.

In a democratic state, the authorities are fully legitimized to monitor any individual they deem suspicious, relying on the law and making use of a judge’s prior authorization. In the new sphere of surveillance, every person is a priori considered suspicious, especially if the “algorithmic black boxes” mechanically classify them as “threatening” after analyzing their network contacts and communications. This new security theory considers that human beings are devoid of true free will or autonomous thought. It is therefore pointless to try to retroactively intervene in the family environment or social causes in order to prevent possible aberrations. All that is desired now, with faith in the surveillance reports, is to repress as soon as possible before the crime is committed. This deterministic conception of society, imagined some sixty years ago by the American science fiction writer Philip K. Dick in his novel Minority Report, is gradually gaining ground. It is the “favorite” that is now being pursued, under the pretext of “anticipating the threat”.

To this end, commercial companies and advertising agencies search our lives. We are increasingly being watched, spied on, monitored, controlled, and put on file. Every day, new technologies are being perfected to track our footprints. The online giants secretly compile exhaustive files of our personal and contact data, extracted from our activities on social networks via various electronic media.

However, this generalized vigilance does not prevent the awakening of some long-silent and now interconnected societies. Undoubtedly, what was called in 2011 the “Arab Spring”, like the “Indignados movement” in Spain and “Occupy Wall Street” in the United States, would not have been possible – in the way they developed – without the communicational innovations brought about by the internet revolution. This is due not only to the use of the main social networks, which were then only just spreading – Facebook was created in 2006 and Twitter was launched in 2009 – but also to the use of email, messaging, and simply the smartphone. The impact of the popular demonstrations provoked by these communicational innovations was very strong in 2011, regardless of the nature of the political systems (authoritarian or democratic) against which they clashed.

Of course, in the Arab world, which had been “frozen” for various reasons for half a century, the “shock” had spectacular consequences: two dictatorships (Tunisia and Egypt) collapsed, and in two other countries (Libya and Syria) painful civil wars began which, ten years later, have still not ended. Even within democratic systems – Spain, Greece, Portugal, and the United States – there were considerable shocks that year that definitively changed the way politics was conducted. Take Spain, for example, where, in the heat of this movement, a new left-wing party, Podemos, emerged, which voters eventually propelled to power in 2019, in coalition with the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE). This is not a small thing.

I would like to add two thoughts. First, that these communicational innovations soon gave rise to a political use of social networks. We cannot be naïve. There are manuals for using the networks with subversive intentions. They have been used against Cuba countless times, as well as against the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela and against the government of President Nicolás Maduro. Let us also remember that between 2003 and 2006, in an organized and planned manner, with financing from powerful interests, what were called “color revolutions” had already taken place in Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004), Kyrgyzstan (2005), etc.; with the undisguised intention of breaking these countries’ alliances with Moscow and diminishing Russia’s power.

Secondly, we will comment that in the autumn of 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic spread to the entire planet, the world – from Hong Kong to Chile, via Iraq, Lebanon, Algeria, France, Catalonia, Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, Colombia, among other nations – was experiencing a trail of large popular protests driven and accentuated by the use of social networks. All the governments of these countries, theoretically democratic, did not know, in most cases, how to deal with this new type of social protest except with brutal repression.

So we could, in effect, say that on the one hand, social networks and messaging of a new kind (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, Signal, Snapchat, WhatsApp, Zoom, TikTok and others) have undeniably expanded the space of our freedom of expression, but at the same time they have multiplied infinitely the capacities for manipulation of minds and surveillance of citizens. It is classic. We could say, to paraphrase Marx, that history is the history of technological innovations. Each technological innovation provides a solution to a problem, and in turn, as we have already stressed, each solution creates a new problem. In other words, whenever there is a leap forward in communication technologies, we are indeed faced with progress in terms of the capacity for expression, but also with the danger of confusion, confrontation and new mental intoxications. This is normal. There is nothing new in this respect. Every power that has a monopoly on public expression despairs at the appearance of any democratizing communication technology that threatens its solitary use of the word. Think again of the invention of the printing press in 1440, and the panic of the Church and the throne at a machine that would suddenly take away their monopoly on truth.

Faced with the dilemma of dangers vs. advantages, the question remains: what to do? It depends on who is asking the question. If it is the people, it is foreseeable that they will want to make immediate use of the excessive power conferred by the networks, without taking the precaution of being wary of the second aspect: the manipulation to which they may be subjected. Disappointment can therefore be strong.

If it is the powers-that-be who are asking the question, I would say that they must keep their cool; they cannot dream that, by some miracle, the networks that are already here for goodwill disappear. It too must adapt to this new reality, to this new communicational normality. Censorship, denial or blindness are of no use, they would only aggravate the problem, seen from the point of view of those in power. The rigid breaks, while the flexible resists. Therefore, power must understand that the networks are a new space for debate and confrontation, and constitute perhaps, in the political field, the main contemporary space for dialectical confrontation. It is today’s agora, and it is there, to a large extent – as it was in the pages of newspapers for a long time – where the major disputes and controversies are now being settled. Anyone who does not want to be the big loser of our time must be present in this central space of debate.

Yes, social networks are the dominant media, just as television, radio, cinema or the press were in the past. It is a considerable revolution, as there has never been before in the field of communication. Once again, any major change in the field of communication will inevitably have a decisive impact on social and political issues. There are no exceptions. From the invention of writing to the Internet, via the printing press.

In any country, the networks are forcing all other mass media (print media, radio, cinema, television) to rethink themselves. A media Darwinism is underway. The media that does not adapt to the new ecosystem will disappear. Adapting does not mean that the other media must do what the networks do. No. The networks are also the territory, as we have already said, of manipulation, intoxication, fake news, “emotional truths”, “alternative truths”, conspiracy stories. The written press, for example, must concentrate on its qualities: the quality of the writing, the brilliance of the story, the originality of the subject matter, the reality of the testimony, the authenticity of the information, the intelligence of the analysis and the guarantee of verified truth.

Tim Wu, the ‘father of net neutrality,’ is joining the Biden administration

One of Big Tech’s biggest critics joins the White House

By Chaim Gartenberg@cgartenberg Mar 5, 2021

Photo: New America / Flickr

Tim Wu — the Columbia law professor who coined the term “net neutrality” — is joining the Biden administration, where he’ll be working on technology and competition policy at the National Economic Council.



Wu is a prominent voice online, as one of the most well-known advocates for a free and open internet. He’s spent years arguing for the concept of net neutrality — the idea that the internet should be free of throttling or control from the government or companies that provide it.

He’s also been a prominent voice in recent years on the subject of antitrust regulation against big tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon, arguing that these companies have gotten too large and lack competition.

His 2018 book, The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age, argues for a return to 20th-century antitrust breakups in the style of Teddy Roosevelt. “I think everyone’s steering way away from the monopolies, and I think it’s hurting innovation in the tech sector,” said Wu in a Vergecast interview at the time.

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The choice of Wu is a significant one, signaling that the Biden administration is looking to more aggressively try to curb the ever-growing power of big technology companies like Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook. In a statement, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) applauded the choice: “I look forward to working with Tim to modernize antitrust enforcement, strengthen our economy, and protect workers and consumers.”

Biden Sets Stage for Tech Crackdown With White House Adviser Wu

David McLaughlin and Mario Parker
Fri., March 5, 2021

(Bloomberg) -- Timothy Wu, a Columbia University law professor and outspoken advocate for aggressive antitrust enforcement against U.S. technology giants, is joining the White House an adviser, signaling that the Biden administration is preparing to square off against the industry’s biggest companies.

Wu will join the National Economic Council as a special assistant on technology and competition policy, the White House said Friday.

Wu’s appointment elevates to a senior position in the administration a leading antitrust expert, favored by progressives, who has assailed the power of dominant tech companies like Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Facebook Inc. Both companies were sued by U.S. antitrust enforcers last year for allegedly abusing their monopoly power.

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Wu would help advance Biden’s agenda of addressing the “economic and social challenges” posed by tech platforms, tackling monopoly power, and expanding access to broadband service for low-income and rural communities.

“The president has been clear on the campaign, probably more recently, that he stands up to the abuse of power and that includes the abuse of power from big technology companies and their executives,” she said.

After the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general sued Facebook in December, Wu wrote a column in the New York Times comparing Facebook’s strategy of buying competitors to Standard Oil’s tactics in the 19th century.

“What the federal government and states are doing is reasserting a fundamental rule for all American business: You cannot simply buy your way out of competition,” Wu wrote. “Facebook, led by its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, has taken that strategy to a smirking and egregious extreme, acquiring multiple companies to stifle the competitive threat they pose.”

Wu joins the Biden administration as tech giants are grappling with a reckoning in Washington that could transform the industry. The Facebook lawsuit could lead to the breakup of the company, while the Justice Department’s complaint against Google targets the heart of its business -- internet search. Antitrust enforcers have also opened investigations of Apple Inc. and Amazon.com Inc.

On Capitol Hill, Democratic lawmakers are working on legislation that could place new restrictions on how the companies operate and make it harder for the companies to continue their spree of acquisitions. Republicans and Democrats also want to change the law that protects tech platforms from lawsuits over what users post online and which is at the center of a debate on content moderation and free speech.

Tech’s Liability Shield Under Fire: 26 Words and What’s at Stake

Beyond tech, many competition policy experts are calling for a broad rethinking of how antitrust enforcers police mergers and conduct by dominant firms across the economy. They point to evidence that increasing concentration across industries is contributing to broader economic woes like reduced innovation and stagnant wages for workers.

Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee’s antitrust panel and is pushing a legislative overhaul of competition laws, praised Wu’s hiring.

“America has a major monopoly problem that must be urgently addressed,” she said. Wu’s appointment makes “clear this administration is serious about promoting competition in the United States.”

The tech industry criticized the move. Carl Szabo, vice president and general counsel of NetChoice, which represents Facebook, Amazon, Google and other companies, said creating an antitrust position in a political office like the White House is “a recipe for weaponization of antitrust law for political purposes.”“I worry he will not search for evidence but will start with a conclusion and try to prove it,” Szabo said about Wu. “I also worry that he has a fundamental opinion that success should be disallowed.”

Wu argued in his book, “The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age,” that rising concentration across the economy has led to concentrated wealth and power as well as radicalized politics that threatens American democracy. Wu, who coined the term “net neutrality,” previously served as senior enforcement counsel to the New York attorney general and as a senior adviser at the Federal Trade Commission.

Wu’s hiring still leaves key antitrust positions unfilled. Biden has yet to nominate a chief of the Justice Department’s antitrust division or a permanent chairman for the FTC. Progressives are pressuring the administration to appoint nominees without ties to the tech industry. They say a revolving door between the antitrust agencies and lawyers who have represented tech companies has led to lax enforcement.

The American Economic Liberties Project, an anti-monopoly group that has joined other organizations in calling for Biden to reject nominees with ties to Silicon Valley, applauded Wu’s appointment and called for similar choices for other positions. Sarah Miller, the group’s executive director, credited Wu with reviving the idea that antitrust and competition policy is a tool for “decentralizing corporate power for the benefit of working people.”

“The Biden administration has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to turn this idea into action -- and Tim, hopefully in concert with additional appointments who bring similar intellect and vision to this work, is an outstanding choice to lead the way,” Miller said.

©2021 Bloomberg L.P.

DISCUSSION 

The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age (Wu, 2018) – New Antitrust (wordpress.com)

The Curse of Bigness Antitrust in the New Gilded Age CHAPTER 2 PDF

https://econ.utah.edu/antitrust-conference/session_material/Curse of... · PDF file

THE CURSE OF BIGNESS to combine some 336 firms, including Boston’s local rail-road, the Boston and Maine, to forge a new system. Brandeis 

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The Curse of Bigness Antitrust in the New Gilded Age From the man who coined the term “net neutrality,” author of The Master Switch and The Attention Merchants, comes a warning about the dangers of excessive corporate and industrial concentration for our economic and political future.

The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age by ...

globalreports.columbia.edu/books/the-curse-of-bigness/

A call to save democracy by battling monopolies


By Benjamin C. Waterhouse

Dec. 28, 2018 

Two decades into the 21st century, capitalism is huge and getting huger. Three-quarters of all industries became more concentrated between 1997 and 2012. About 10 pharmaceutical companies control the production and sale of the world’s medicine; three chemical firms dominate the supply of seeds and pesticides, and thus global agriculture; and one combined corporation produces nearly every non-craft beer for sale on the planet. At the same time, tech giants Facebook, Google and Apple dominate their markets, controlling not just commerce but access to news and our personal information.

As Tim Wu argues in “The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age,” global economic concentration is now at levels unseen in more than a century — since the early days of industrial capitalism. A policy advocate and law professor at Columbia University, perhaps best known for coining the term “net neutrality” in 2003, Wu offers a vital diagnosis: America has abandoned its rich tradition of anti-mon­opoly, or antitrust, law. And while the very term “antitrust” may strike many as dreadfully dry, Wu manages to make this brisk and impressively readable overview of the subject (the entire text runs about 140 pages) vivid and compelling. (Columbia Global Reports)

America’s antitrust history began with the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, passed “as a reaction to the rising power of monopoly trusts.” The law lay dormant for a decade until “activated” by President Theodore Roosevelt against J.P. Morgan’s Northern Securities railroad company and John Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. Despite his trustbuster image, Wu argues, Roosevelt had little problem with bigness itself. He even offered Rockefeller the chance to keep his monopoly as a public trust, subject to government supervision. What’s more, during his campaign to reclaim the White House in 1912, Roosevelt argued (unsuccessfully) for “regulated monopoly” — a system in which “commerce would be controlled by a small group of monopolists, who would be, in turn, controlled by government.” It was a model later implemented by Italy and Germany in the 1930s.

The standout figure in antitrust was jurist Louis Brandeis, the architect of the vision that did triumph in 1912: Woodrow Wilson’s “regulated competition.” Born in Louisville to immigrant, small-business-owning parents, Brandeis cut his legal teeth defending small-business clients in Boston and emerged as a leading opponent of monopolies in the two decades before Wilson named him to the Supreme Court in 1916. For Brandeis, industrial size was the chief problem. Large companies, whether strictly monopolies or not, thwarted individual initiative, restricted competition and thus innovation, and used their size to obscure economic inefficiencies. Most important, large corporations could not be reconciled with democracy and liberty, either for small businesses trying to compete or workers out to make a living. The biggest threat, Brandeis wrote in 1914, was “the suppression of individual liberty, indeed of manhood itself.”

The view that fighting monopoly meant defending democracy triumphed after World War II with what Wu calls “Peak Antitrust.” Democratic Sen. Estes Kefauver minced no words linking a competitive economy with political freedom. “Through monopolistic mergers the people are losing power to direct their own economic welfare,” he said. Putting such power in too few hands, he continued, “results in a Fascist state or the nationalization of industries and thereafter a Socialist or Communist state.” Passed in 1950, his Anti-Merger Act gave the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission new authority to prevent anti-competitive mergers, nipping industrial giants in the bud.

Peak Antitrust endured through the 1970s, culminating in the breakup of AT&T in 1982 after eight years of litigation. The end of that regulated monopoly led, in Wu’s view, to a proliferation of advances in communications technology, including modems that linked home computers over a network, thus “producing the Internet revolution.”

Even as the AT&T case made its way through the courts, however, a conservative backlash undercut the antitrust movement, principally by severing the intellectual and moral link between monopoly and democracy. Beginning in the 1960s, conservative scholars at the University of Chicago argued for applying economic analysis, particularly theories about prices and allocative efficiency, to legal questions like antitrust. Most influential was Robert Bork, who argued that the original Sherman Act intended to deal with only a specific problem: higher prices for consumers. Historians largely discount Bork’s interpretation, which Wu condemns as “laissez-faire reincarnated,” albeit “clad in the costume of economic rigor.” It appealed, Wu asserts, by oversimplifying complex problems and presuming economic rationality — that “the existing structure is the efficient structure.”

Yet Bork’s narrow interpretation of Sherman transformed antitrust. First published in 1966 and elaborated in a book called “The Antitrust Paradox” in 1978, Bork’s thesis reshaped how antitrust was taught in law schools and practiced by judges. Despite pushback by liberal legal scholars in the 1990s, the “judiciary continued to drift toward Bork,” and antitrust had entered a “deep freeze” by the George W. Bush presidency. The denouement came in 2004, when Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia argued that monopoly power was not only legal but a positive good. “The opportunity to charge monopoly prices . . . induces risk taking that produces innovation and economic growth.

Wu is an unreconstructed Brandeisian, and his book — whose title comes from Brandeis — sees America’s last hope in a robust antitrust policy. His agenda calls for enforcing the 1950 Anti-Merger Act as its authors intended, by preventing anti-competitive moves like Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram and Google’s purchase of YouTube. When that fails, he calls for vigorous prosecutions of companies whose size and influence block competition, erect barriers to entry or otherwise hurt the general welfare. Such a case tradition was once at the core of Sherman Act enforcement but has gone unused since AT&T’s breakup more than 35 years ago.

Finally, Wu challenges the legal community to invest the energy to make those judgments and to repudiate the too-easy solutions offered by Bork and the Chicago School, as well as the false notion that capitalism self-regulates in the public interest. Real political freedom and economic justice demand it.

The Curse of Bigness
Antitrust in the New Gilded Age
By Tim Wu
Columbia Global Reports. 154 pp. $14.99 paperback

Benjamin C. Waterhouse is an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of “Lobbying America: The Politics of Business From Nixon to NAFTA” and “The Land of Enterprise: A Business History of the United States.”

A Look at Competition in Business Urges Us to Think Small
Jennifer Szalai NYT
Dec. 12, 2018




Credit...Alessandra Montalto/The New York Times

These are fraught times, and while you may be scared, Tim Wu suggests that you may not be scared enough. Like Michael Lewis’s “The Fifth Risk,” a recent book that shows how something most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about — government bureaucracy — is consequential (and potentially terrifying), Wu’s “The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age” is a surprisingly rousing treatment of another presumably boring subject: mergers and acquisitions.

Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School and a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, argues that the M&A arcana that lawyers and economists haggle over have effects that spill far beyond their rarefied areas of expertise. “Extreme economic concentration yields gross inequality and material suffering, feeding an appetite for nationalistic and extremist leadership,” he writes, by way of introduction and warning. “The road to fascism and dictatorship is paved with failures of economic policy to serve the needs of the general public.”

Unlike Wu’s previous books, “The Master Switch” (2010) and “The Attention Merchants” (2016), “The Curse of Bigness” is skinny, more of a dip with a snorkel than a deep dive. But the pithiness of this new volume is ideally suited to its subject. Wu doesn’t want to get into all the intricacies of antitrust law; if anything, an enormous book on the problem of enormity would only fool us into believing that the subject is more impenetrable than it really is — and stoke the confusion and apathy that have allowed decades of corporate consolidation to flourish in the first place.

Wu’s point is simple. Giant corporations, seeking to protect their advantage, try to turn their outsize economic power into political power. So to break their grip on American democracy, the government needs to break them up in turn. That this proposal might sound outrageously radical to certain ears is, Wu says, just one sign of how unprepared we are for our current moment. To show how busting up big businesses into smaller parts was once a veritable American tradition, he charts how antitrust law emerged in response to the grotesque inequality of the 19th-century Gilded Age.

When the Sherman Antitrust Act was signed into law in 1890, it had unanimous support in the House, though the language it deployed was both sweeping and severe, stating bluntly that “every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize” any area of business “shall be deemed guilty of a felony.

Enforcing the law turned out to be another matter. A decade later, J .P. Morgan — “history’s greatest monopolizer,” as Wu calls him — created the behemoth U. S. Steel by merging hundreds of smaller firms, even buying out his fellow tycoon Andrew Carnegie in 1901 for an exorbitant sum ($480 million back then) that would make Carnegie the richest man in the world.



Tim Wu

Credit...Miranda Sita

Wu is an able guide through the history — from Theodore Roosevelt’s campaign against “bad trusts” all the way to the expansive bloat of AT&T and Microsoft’s competition-crushing ambitions of more recent memory — but it’s on the level of ideas that his book comes into its own. Similar to the tech moguls of today, the monopolists of a century ago “liked to portray themselves as part of a progressive movement, striving toward a better age,” Wu writes, even if the endgame they were pursuing — essentially “pure economic autocracy” — was a direct rebuke to the foundational values of the republic.

But then competition can feel menacing — a grueling free-for-all that anyone with grand ambitions in business would prefer to do without. The venture capitalist Peter Thiel said as much in the pages of The Wall Street Journal in 2014, in an article with the piquant title “Competition Is for Losers.” “Capitalism and competition are opposites,” Thiel declared. “Only one thing can allow a business to transcend the daily brute struggle for survival: monopoly profits.”

No doubt the most die-hard Marxist would agree — as would Thiel’s fellow disrupters in Silicon Valley, though they tend to play down the allure of profit-making while talking a lot about how much value and “connection” they bring to the public.

Wu, who advised the Federal Trade Commission on competition issues during the Obama administration, doesn’t buy all the piety; nor should he or anyone have to, he says. Trying to distinguish between gigantic corporations that bring value to consumers from gigantic corporations that don’t is ultimately a mug’s game. Competition is a process, and the process should be protected; to fixate too much on the other stuff is to expect the legal system to make distinctions it isn’t equipped to make — pushing up the standard of proof and allowing enforcement to go slack.

But we’ve been conditioned to think that the only goal of antitrust law is to protect consumer welfare; as long as a business like, say, Amazon delivers lower prices on doodads for your home and diapers for your kid, it isn’t supposed to pose a monopoly threat, even as it gobbles up its competitors. This idea was once “considered absurd and even insane,” Wu writes. But its fiercest advocate, the rejected Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, knew how to make it seductive to legal minds, offering a simple theory that allowed judges to make decisions with apparent precision and rigor. Explaining the theory’s journey from heresy to orthodoxy, Wu is gently scathing: “Bork’s antitrust economics are easy.”

Against Bork’s strictly minimalist idea, Wu advances another, more complex one, which was proposed in the early 20th century by the lawyer and eventual Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. Worrying about the tendency of giant corporations to “exterminate” the competition in their inexorable march toward domination, Brandeis believed that the economy, and the businesses that are part of it, needed to operate at a human scale.

“What Brandeis really cared about was the economic conditions under which life is lived,” Wu writes, “and the effects of the economy on one’s character and on the nation’s soul.” It’s a big idea for a little book, but Wu knows how to keep everything concise and contained. “The Curse of Bigness” moves nimbly through the thicket, embracing the boons of being small.


Follow Jennifer Szalai on Twitter: @jenszalai.

The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age
By Tim Wu
154 pages. Columbia Global Reports. $14.99.

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A version of this article appears in print on Dec. 13, 2018, Section C, Page 3 of the New York edition with the headline: Think Small When Too Big Poses a Danger. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

F.B.I. Finds Contact Between Proud Boys Member and Trump Associate Before Riot

A leader of the far-right group separately said he had been in touch with Roger Stone, but an official said it was not the same contact investigators found through electronic communications records

Supporters of President Donald J. Trump outside the Capitol

 during the mob attack on Jan. 6.

Credit...Kenny Holston for The New York Times


By Katie Benner, Alan Feuer and Adam Goldman
March 5, 2021

THE NEW YORK TIMES


WASHINGTON — A member of the far-right nationalist Proud Boys was in communication with a person associated with the White House in the days just before the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, according to a law enforcement official briefed on the investigation.

Location, cellular and call record data revealed a call tying a Proud Boys member to the Trump White House, the official said. The F.B.I. has not determined what they discussed, and the official would not reveal the names of either party.

The connection revealed by the communications data comes as the F.B.I. intensifies its investigation of contacts among far-right extremists, Trump White House associates and conservative members of Congress in the days before the attack.

The same data has revealed no evidence of communications between the rioters and members of Congress during the deadly attack, the official said. That undercuts Democratic allegations that some Republican lawmakers were active participants that day.

Separately, Enrique Tarrio, a leader of the far-right nationalist Proud Boys, told The New York Times on Friday that he called Roger J. Stone Jr., a close associate of former President Donald J. Trump’s, while at a protest in front of the home of Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida. During the protest, which occurred in the days before the Capitol assault, he put Mr. Stone on speaker phone to address the gathering.

A law enforcement official said that it was not Mr. Tarrio’s communication with Mr. Stone that was being scrutinized, and that the call made in front of Mr. Rubio’s home was a different matter. That two members of the group were in communication with people associated with the White House underscores the access that violent extremist groups like the Proud Boys had to the White House and to people close to the former president.

Mr. Stone denied “any involvement or knowledge of the attack on the Capitol” in a statement last month to The Times.

Mr. Tarrio was arrested in Washington on Jan. 4 on charges of destruction of property for his role in the burning of a Black Lives Matter banner that had been torn from a historic Black church during a protest in Washington in December. He was asked to leave the city, and was not present when the Capitol was attacked. 

His case is pending.

The Justice Department has charged more than a dozen members of the Proud Boys with crimes related to the attack, including conspiracy to obstruct the final certification of President Biden’s electoral victory and to attack law enforcement officers.

In court papers, federal prosecutors have said groups of Proud Boys also coordinated travel to Washington and shared lodging near the city, with the intent of disrupting Congress and advancing Mr. Trump’s efforts to unlawfully maintain his grip on the presidency.

The communication between the person associated with the White House and the member of the Proud Boys was discovered in part through data that the F.B.I. obtained from technology and telecommunications companies immediately after the assault.

Court documents show F.B.I. warrants for a list of all the phones associated with the cell towers serving the Capitol, and that it received information from the major cellphone carriers on the numbers called by everyone on the Capitol’s cell towers during the riot, three officials familiar with the investigation said.

The F.B.I. also obtained a “geofence” warrant for all the Android devices that Google recorded within the building during the assault, the officials said. A geofence warrant legally gives law enforcement a list of mobile devices that are able to be identified in a particular geographic area. Jill Sanborn, the head of counterterrorism at the F.B.I., testified before a Senate panel on Wednesday that all the data the F.B.I. had gathered in its investigation into the riot was obtained legally through subpoenas and search warrants.

Although investigators have found no contact between the rioters and members of Congress during the attack, those records have shown evidence in the days leading up to Jan. 6 of communications between far-right extremists and lawmakers who were planning to appear at the rally featuring Mr. Trump that occurred just before the assault, according to one of the officials.

The Justice Department is examining those communications, but it has not opened investigations into any members, the official said. A department spokesman declined to comment.

The F.B.I. did, however, say on Thursday that it had arrested a former State Department aide on charges related to the attack, including unlawful entry, violent and disorderly conduct, obstructing Congress and law enforcement, and assaulting an officer with a dangerous weapon.

The former midlevel aide, Federico G. Klein, who was seen in videos assaulting officers with a stolen riot shield, was the first member of the Trump administration to face criminal charges in connection with the storming of the Capitol. His lawyer declined to comment on Friday.



Members of the Oath Keepers, a militia group, escorting Roger J. Stone Jr., a longtime associate of Mr. Trump’s, during a protest the day before the attack on the Capitol.

Credit...Michael Reynolds/EPA, via Shutterstock


Right-wing extremists, including members of the Oath Keepers, a militia group that mainly comprises former law enforcement and military personnel, have been working as security guards for Republicans and for Mr. Trump’s allies, such as Mr. Stone.

Mr. Stone, who was pardoned by Mr. Trump after refusing to cooperate with the investigation into the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russian intelligence, has known Mr. Tarrio for some time and used Oath Keepers as bodyguards before and on the day of the assault on the Capitol.

The Justice Department is looking into communications between Mr. Stone and far-right extremists to determine whether he played any role in plans by extremists to disrupt the certification on Jan. 6, according to two people familiar with the matter who were not authorized to speak about the investigation.

Should investigators find messages showing that Mr. Stone had any connection to such plans, they would have a factual basis to open a full criminal investigation into him, the people said.

Mr. Stone said last month that he was “provided voluntary security by the Oath Keepers,” but noted that their security work did not constitute evidence that he was involved in, or informed about, plans to attack Congress. He reiterated an earlier statement that anyone involved in the attack should be prosecuted.

The Justice Department has charged more than 300 people with crimes stemming from the Jan. 6 assault. It has used evidence gathered in its broad manhunt for assailants — including information from cellular providers and technology companies — to help piece together evidence of more sophisticated crimes, like conspiracy.

It is also looking at possible charges of seditious conspiracy, according to two people familiar with the investigation.

Katie Benner and Adam Goldman reported from Washington, and Alan Feuer from New York. Jennifer Valentino-DeVries contributed reporting from New York.

The G.O.P. and the Riot

Connections between Capitol attackers and Republicans are numerous.

First They Guarded Roger Stone. Then They Joined the Capitol Attack.

A midlevel member of the Trump State Dept. has been arrested on charges related to the Capitol attack.

March 4, 2021

Before Capitol Riot, Republican Lawmakers Fanned the Flames
Jan. 11, 2021

Fallout

Tracking the Arrests
Visual Timeline
Inside the Siege
The Lost Hours
The Oath Keepers


Katie Benner covers the Justice Department. She was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for public service for reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues. @ktbenner

Alan Feuer covers courts and criminal justice for the Metro desk. He has written about mobsters, jails, police misconduct, wrongful convictions, government corruption and El Chapo, the jailed chief of the Sinaloa drug cartel. He joined The Times in 1999. @alanfeuer

Adam Goldman reports on the F.B.I. from Washington and is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner. @adamgoldmanNYT

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M IS THERE ANY OTHER KIND?

Antivirus software pioneer McAfee charged by U.S. with cryptocurrency fraud

By Jonathan Stempel and Chris Prentice
2/5/2021

© Reuters/DARRIN ZAMMIT LUPI John McAfee, co-founder of McAfee Crypto Team and CEO of Luxcore and founder of McAfee Antivirus, speaks at the Malta Blockchain Summit in St Julian's

NEW YORK/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - John McAfee, the antivirus software pioneer whose former company still bears his name, has been indicted on fraud and money-laundering conspiracy charges stemming from two cryptocurrency schemes, the U.S. Justice Department said on Friday.

Authorities accused McAfee and his bodyguard, Jimmy Gale Watson Jr., of exploiting McAfee's large Twitter following to artificially inflate prices of "altcoins" through a so-called pump-and-dump scheme, and concealing payments McAfee received from startup businesses to promote initial coin offerings.

The Justice Department said McAfee and his accomplices reaped more than $13 million from the schemes. The charges were brought in Manhattan federal court.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission filed related civil charges concerning the alleged pump-and-dump scheme.

Manhattan U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss said in a statement: "As alleged, McAfee and Watson exploited a widely used social media platform and enthusiasm among investors in the emerging cryptocurrency market to make millions through lies and deception."

Lawyers for McAfee could not immediately be identified. McAfee is being detained in Spain following his arrest there on tax evasion charges announced in October, the Justice Department said.

Watson was arrested on Thursday night in Texas, the department added.

Watson's attorney Arnold Spencer said in a statement: "Jimmy Watson is a decorated veteran and former Navy Seal. He fought for other people's rights and liberties, and he is entitled to and looks forward to his day in court to exercise some of those very rights."

Both also face civil charges by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which in October accused McAfee of concealing more than $23.1 million he made from boosting seven cryptocurrency offerings on Twitter.

In the cryptocurrency cases, authorities said McAfee touted assets including Verge, Reddcoin and Dogecoin as part of a "Coin of the Day" or "Coin of the Week" tweet from around December 2017 through February 2018.

Authorities said McAfee held himself up as an expert on cybersecurity and cryptocurrency through his tweets, speeches and his role as a CEO of a publicly traded cryptocurrency company. They also accused him of telling followers he had no stake in the coins, even as he touted how they "will change the world."

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York and Chris Prentice in Washington; Editing by Matthew Lewis and Will Dunham)

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M

Pharma Bro Martin Shkreli hit with class action suit for creating drug ‘monopoly’


By Ben Feuerherd

March 4, 2021


Martin Shkreli and his company Vyera Pharmaceuticals increased the price of the HIV drug Daraprim by over 4,000 percent in 2015.Seth Wenig/AP

Pharma Bro Martin Shkreli was slapped with a class action lawsuit Thursday from health insurers who claim he engaged in a scheme to create a pharmaceutical monopoly that allowed him to raise the price of an HIV drug by more than 4,000 percent.

In the Manhattan federal court suit, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota, said Shkreli — and his company Vyera Pharmaceuticals — created the monopoly on the drug Daraprin in 2015 by, among other tactics, preventing “competitors from obtaining the Daraprim samples they needed to launch a generic product.”

Shkreli and his company then covered up the scheme, according to the suit, by publicly denying the effort to block competitors from taking samples.

With no competition, Shkreli hiked the price of the drug — which is used to treat toxoplasmosis and also given to HIV patients with compromised immune systems —from $17.50 to $750 in 2015.

“Defendants determined they could impose monopoly prices and reap significant profits at the expense of Plaintiff and Class members, who were forced to pay inflated prices in violation of the federal antitrust laws,” the suit states.

The companies are seeking unspecified damages to be determined at a jury trial.

Shkreli drew headlines after inflating the price of the life-saving drug in 2015 — and was convicted of securities fraud in an unrelated case stemming from two hedge funds he managed.

He’s currently serving a seven-year sentence after his 2017 conviction.

Shkreli returned to the headlines in 2020 after a former Bloomberg News reporter admitted she’d fallen in love with the Pharma Bro while covering his trial in Brooklyn federal court.

Christie Smythe, 38, told Elle Magazine that she “fell down the rabbit hole” in her relationship with Shkreli — and ended up splitting from her husband and moving out of their Brooklyn apartment.

MORE ON:
MARTIN SHKRELI
Remorseless ‘Pharma Bro’ Martin Shkreli should stay in prison: prosecutors

Myanmar police attack medics in crackdown on coup protesters

People build barricades to deter security personnel from

 entering a protest area in Mandalay, Myanmar, yesterday. 

Photo: AP

Nicola Smith

March 05 2021

Police have been filmed mercilessly beating a volunteer ambulance crew in one of many social media videos documenting a violent crackdown on pro-democracy protests in Myanmar.

CCTV footage filmed in the commercial city of Yangon on Wednesday showed armed police stopping an ambulance at gunpoint in the city’s north Okkakapa township and forcing three medics out of the vehicle before repeatedly hitting them in the head with rifle butts and kicking them.

Six officers are seen attacking the crew members as they try to protect their heads.

The officers then shoot out the windows of the ambulance.

According to Radio Free Asia, the three medics were detained and sent to the notorious Insein prison.

Footage of the barbaric treatment went viral on social media on the deadliest day of anti-coup protests in Myanmar since the February 1 military takeover.

More than 50 civilians have been killed by police and soldiers since then, and four children are among the latest to die, according to humanitarian group Save the Children.

Despite the risks, protesters took to the streets again yesterday to oppose military rule and demand the release of Aung San Suu Kyi and other civilian leaders.

The formal health system has been hit by the Civil Disobedience Movement, spearheaded by medics who are refusing to work for the junta. Instead, healthcare providers are offering services voluntarily outside of government facilities.

But as a result, medical staff are facing increasing risks from the security forces, especially as they offer first aid to protesters. Boris Johnson yesterday condemned the violence.

“I’m horrified by the escalation of violence in Myanmar and the killing of pro-democracy protesters,” the British Prime Minister said.

“We stand with the people of Myanmar in calling for an immediate end to military repression, the release of Aung San Suu Kyi and others, and the restoration of democracy.”

As the UN Security Council, chaired by Britain, gears up for an emergency closed-door session on the coup today, Tom Andrews, the UN envoy for human rights in Myanmar, urged it to first “view the photos [and] videos of the shocking violence being unleashed on peaceful protesters”.

The 15-member body was previously unable to condemn the coup because of objections from China and Russia.

Whether the images – most too graphic to print – will now move it to act beyond issuing a compromise statement remains to be seen.

Christine Schraner Burgener, the UN’s top official for Myanmar, said she had warned the military it was likely to face strong measures in retaliation for the overthrow of the elected government.

The volatile situation has left experts unsure about which direction events are likely to take.

 

'hypocrisy'

 

Nurses brand proposed £3.50-a-week pay rise 

'insulting' 

An increase pay for nurses and other healthcare staff by 1 per cent has been branded an 'insult' and 'hypocrisy in its greatest form' by NHS workers.

The Unite union, which represents tens of thousands of health service staff, has warned of industrial action amid growing anger at the proposals, while the Royal College of Nursing announced it will set up a £35 million industrial action fund in response.

Holly Turner, a nurse from Colchester, told the PA news agency it is 'absolutely devastating to see (the Government) place no value in us whatsoever'.

She said: 'Strike action would be a complete last resort for us and it would have to be something that could be planned carefully in order to keep our patients safe because, for all NHS staff, patient safety is priority.

'But long term, if we're going to keep our patients safe, if we need to take industrial action in order to do that, I think we will.'

She added: 'We are exhausted, we are demoralised, we are fed up — but there is also an increased level of anger.'

Multiple healthcare staff said the proposal would see them take home around £3.50 extra per week.

Ameera Sheikh, an intensive care nurse and Unite union representative, said increasing costs of living had left people struggling on stagnant wages. She said the support the Government had shown earlier in the pandemic now feels 'fake'.

'We have treated people from the lowest socio-economic backgrounds to quite literally the leader of the country,' she said.

 'We have sacrificed so much since the start of the pandemic, and that includes moving out of our family homes to live close to the hospital and protect our families and live in complete isolation, which is something that I've actually had to do.

'We are facing an increasingly dangerous workload in the intensive care unit, and a lot of staff being redeployed to ICU without basic intensive care training. Also, the lack of PPE and having to reuse PPE or wear expired PPE and risking our lives.'

Health minister Nadine Dorries gave a series of media interviews on Friday defending the Government's position, saying nurses have received a 12 per cent increase in pay over the last three years and the average nurse's salary is around £34,000.

However, frontline workers have branded these claims 'lies'.

Kelly Robbins, a nurse working in primary care in Brighton, said: 'We listen to them on TV and they are lying, and it's just painful and really debilitating to hear them say that.'

She added: 'We know that they make choices, political priorities as to where the money is spent, and so we know that there is money there, effectively to do this, and it just does seem like a massive insult.'

Kirsty Brewerton, a clinical sister from Coventry, said the move is an 'absolute disgrace'.

'How the Government can say there's no money beggars belief. The billions that they spent on Test and Trace, the PPE contracts that were not appropriate for use.'

An experienced nurse, Ms Brewerton believes that this latest blow will lead to senior colleagues leaving the profession.

Mel, a staff nurse, described the Government's proposed 1 per cent pay rise as an 'insult' and 'hypocrisy in its greatest form'.

She said: 'It really isn't true remuneration for the real-time pay cut that we have seen over the last decade.

'We have healthcare staff using food banks, so £3.50 is not going to improve their situation in any way, shape or form.

'I am angry beyond words both for myself but for my colleagues who I see struggle daily.'

She said staff already feel demoralised and warned more will leave the front line without proper recognition.

'The phrase 'NHS heroes' – we are not heroes and we don't want to be hailed as heroes, we are a professional body and we want recognition for the work we have done, not just during the pandemic,' she added.

'We have absolutely tried our best, but there has to be a line. We are still human at the end of the day, we are still people who come home and crumble at the thought of the number of deaths we've seen.'

Eve, a nurse in central London, told PA she and her colleagues are exhausted and coping with 'severe PTSD'.

She said: 'We now have no choice, we must strike now. How else can we get our voice heard? Claps don't pay our bills or feed our families.

'A 15 per cent pay rise is all we are asking for, but 1 per cent is all we are worth to this Government.'