Deforestation making outdoor work unsafe for millions, says study


Rise in temperatures and humidity linked to forest loss has reduced safe hours for working in the tropics

Labourers (SCAFFOLDERS) at a construction site in Jakarta, Indonesia. 

Photograph: Mast Irham/EPA


Sofia Quaglia
Fri 17 Dec 2021

Deforestation has made outdoor work unsafe for millions of people in the tropics over the past 15 years, a study has found.

The rise in temperatures and humidity caused by tree loss has reduced the number of safe hours in the day for people to work, especially for those performing heavy labour.

“Because of climate change, these areas in the tropics are already on the edge of what’s considered safe or comfortable for working in the late morning to afternoon,” said Luke Parsons, a climate researcher at Duke University in North Carolina and lead author of the paper published in the journal One Earth. “And then you take deforestation on top of that and it pushes these regions over into even more unsafe work conditions.”

A growing body of research has shown that deforestation is linked to an increase in local temperatures, as it decreases the cooling benefits trees bring to an area. For example, in the areas of the Amazon in Brazil which have been heavily deforested, over the past two decades the temperatures have been as much as 10C higher than forested regions.

For this study, the researchers parsed satellite and meteorological data between 2003 and 2018 in 94 countries with tropical forests, looking at temperature and humidity.

They found that almost 100,000 people, 90% of whom live in Asia, have lost more than two hours of work time a day. Almost 5 million people have lost at least half an hour of safe work time each day, the majority of them outdoor workers doing heavy physical labour.

The effects are disproportionately felt in deforested locations; in the Americas, 5% of forested areas lost at least half an hour of safe work time a day, while 35% of deforested areas suffered the same loss.

“We couldn’t go to every single location where people are working and measure when they stopped working,” said Parsons. “We can make this assessment of lost safe work time, but people may often in fact choose to continue to work when it is too hot and humid, at the detriment to their health.”

Continued global heating and forest loss is expected to amplify these impacts, reducing work hours for vulnerable groups even more over coming decades.

Exposure to heat could affect mood and mental illnesses, as well as reduce physical and psychological performance, including lapses in concentration, fatigue, irritability, increasing the risk of accidents, said Beatriz Oliveira, researcher at the Sergio Arouca National School of Public Health in Brazil, who was not involved in this study.

The researchers say their findings provide an economic incentive for local populations to maintain intact local forests on top of the environmental benefits.

Why are US rightwingers so angry? 

Because they know social change is coming

Rebecca Solnit

The American right might win the occasional battle – but they will never win the war against progress

‘We are dismantling the trophies of the ugly old world of sanctified inequality and erecting monuments to heroes of justice and liberation.’ 

Photograph: Steve Helber/AP
Mon 20 Dec 2021 

While their fear and dismay is often regarded as rooted in delusion, rightwingers are correct that the world is metamorphosing into something new and, to them, abhorrent. They’re likewise correct that what version of history we tell matters. The history we tell today lays the groundwork for the future we make. The outrage over the 1619 Project and the new laws trying to censor public school teachers from telling the full story of American history are a doomed attempt to hold back facts and perspectives that are already widespread.

In 2018, halfway through the Trump presidency, Michelle Alexander wrote a powerful essay arguing that we are not the resistance. We, she declared, are the mighty river they are trying to dam. I see it flowing, and I see the tributaries that pour into it and swell its power, and I see that once firmly grounded statues and assumptions have become flotsam in its current. Similar shifts are happening far beyond the United States, but it is this turbulent nation of so much creation and destruction I know best and will speak of here.

When a regime falls, the new one sweeps away its monuments and erects its own. This is happening as the taking down of Confederate, Columbus and other statues commemorating oppressors across the country, the renaming of streets and buildings and other public places, the appearance of myriad statues and murals of Harriet Tubman and other liberators, the opening of the Legacy Museum documenting slavery and mass incarceration and housing a lynching memorial.

There was no great moment of overthrow, but nevertheless we are dismantling the trophies of the ugly old world of sanctified inequality and erecting monuments to heroes of justice and liberation, from the Olympic track medalists of 1968 making their Black power gesture at San Jose State University to the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park in Maryland. All those angry white men with the tiki torches chanting, in Charlottesville in 2017, “You will not replace us” as they sought to defend a statue of Gen Robert E Lee were wrong in their values and actions but perhaps not in their assessment.

White people are not being replaced, but in many ways a white supremacist history and society is. The statue of the general was removed earlier this year and will be melted down to be made into a new work of art under the direction of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center. They call the project “swords into plowshares”, a phrase suggesting that this marks the end of a war – perhaps the civil war in which the north never fully claimed its victory, the south never accepted its defeat.

What’s happening goes far beyond public monuments. The statues mark the rejection of old versions of who we are and what we value, but those versions and values matter most as they play out in everyday private and public life. We are only a few decades removed from a civilization in which corporal punishment of children by parents and teachers was an unquestioned norm; in which domestic violence and marital rape were seen as a husband’s prerogative and a wife surrendered financial and other agency; in which many forms of inequality and exclusion had hardly even been questioned, let alone amended; in which few questioned the rightness of a small minority – for white Christian men have always been a minority in the United States – holding almost all the power, politically, socially, economically, culturally; in which segregation and exclusion were pervasive and legal; in which Native Americans had been largely written out of history; in which environmental regulation and protection and awareness barely existed.

You have to remember how different the past was to recognize how much has changed. Frameworks such as indigenous land acknowledgments that were unheard of and maybe almost inconceivable a few decades ago are routine at public events.

The Civil Rights Act passed in 1964; in 1965, with Griswold v Connecticut, the supreme court overruled state laws criminalizing birth control and laid the groundwork for Roe v Wade six years later; only in 2015, Obergefell v Hodges established marriage equality for same-sex couples (while equality of rights between different-sex couples had also gradually been established as marriage became a less authoritarian institution). The right is trying to push the water back behind the dam. With deregulation and social service and tax cuts, they have succeeded in reestablishing an economy of extreme inequality, but not a society fully committed to that inequality.

They have succeeded in passing laws at the state level against voting rights and reproductive rights, but they have not succeeded in pushing the majority’s imaginations back to 1960 or 1920 or whenever their version of when America was great stalled out. They can win the battles, but I do not believe they will, in the end, win the war.

While the right has become far more extreme and has its tens of millions of true believers, it is morphing into a minority sect. This has prompted their desperate scramble to overturn free and fair elections and other democratic processes. White Christians, who were 80% of the population in 1976, are now 44%. Mixed-race and non-white people are rapidly becoming the majority. On issues such as climate, people of color are far more progressive; if we can make it through the huge backlash of the present moment, the possibilities are dazzling.

These are relatively concrete changes. Others are subtler and more recent, but no less important. Even in the last decade there has been an epochal shift in our expectations of how we should treat each other, and the casual cruelty and disdain targeting women, queer people, Bipoc, the disabled and those with divergent bodies that pervaded entertainment and daily life are now viewed as repugnant – and are met with consequences in some contexts.

A regular experience of this era (for those of us who were around for the last one) is to revisit a song, a film, a book and find that we have now become people who can see better the insults and exclusions that were so seamlessly woven into it. Some of the old art has not weathered well and will fall out of circulation, as some old culture always does; some will be interpreted in new ways; some neglected treasures will move from margin to center. We – a metamorphosing “we” – are sifting through an old and building a new canon.

Even more profound than this is a shift in worldview from the autonomous individual of hypercapitalism and social darwinism to a recognition of both the natural and social worlds as orchestras of interdependence, of survival as an essentially collaborative and cooperative business. Disciplines from neuropsychology to economics have shifted their sense of who we are, what works, and what matters. Climate change is first of all a crisis, but it’s also a reminder that the world is a collection of interlocking systems. The just-deceased bell hooks talked about a “love ethic” that included “a global vision wherein we see our lives and our fate as intimately connected to those of everyone else on the planet”.

Birth can be violent and dangerous, and sometimes one or the other of the two involved die. There is no guarantee about what is to come, and the shadow of climate chaos hangs over it all. We do not have time to build a better society before we address that crisis, but it is clear that the response to that crisis is building such a society. So much has already changed. The river Alexander described has swept away so much, has carried so many onward.

It has come so far; it still has dams to overtop and so far to go.

Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. Her most recent books are Recollections of My Nonexistence and Orwell’s Roses

FASCIST USA ON THE WAY

Millions of Angry, Armed  WHITE  Americans Stand Ready to Seize Power If Trump Loses in 2024

David H. Freedman 

Mike "Wompus" Nieznany is a 73-year-old Vietnam veteran who walks with a cane from the combat wounds he received during his service. That disability doesn't keep Nieznany from making a living selling custom motorcycle luggage racks from his home in Gainesville, Georgia. Neither will it slow him down when it's time to visit Washington, D.C.—heavily armed and ready to do his part in overthrowing the U.S. government.

Millions of fellow would-be insurrectionists will be there, too, Nieznany says, "a ticking time-bomb" targeting the Capitol. "There are lots of fully armed people wondering what's happening to this country," he says. "Are we going to let Biden keep destroying it? Or do we need to get rid of him? We're only going to take so much before we fight back." The 2024 election, he adds, may well be the trigger.

Nieznany is no loner. His political comments on the social-media site Quora received 44,000 views in the first two weeks of November and more than 4 million overall. He is one of many rank-and-file Republicans who own guns and in recent months have talked openly of the need to take down—by force if necessary—a federal government they see as illegitimate, overreaching and corrosive to American freedom.

The phenomenon goes well beyond the growth of militias, which have been a feature of American life at least since the Ku Klux Klan rose to power after the Civil War. Groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, which took part in the January 6th riot at the Capitol and may have played organizational roles, have grown in membership. Law enforcement has long tracked and often infiltrated these groups. What Nieznany represents is something else entirely: a much larger and more diffuse movement of more-or-less ordinary people, stoked by misinformation, knitted together by social media and well-armed. In 2020, 17 million Americans bought 40 million guns and in 2021 were on track to add another 20 million. If historical trends hold, the buyers will be overwhelmingly white, Republican and southern or rural.

America's massive and mostly Republican gun-rights movement dovetails with a growing belief among many Republicans that the federal government is an illegitimate tyranny that must be overthrown by any means necessary. That combustible formula raises the threat of armed, large-scale attacks around the 2024 presidential election—attacks that could make the January 6 insurrection look like a toothless stunt by comparison. "The idea that people would take up arms against an American election has gone from completely farfetched to something we have to start planning for and preparing for," says University of California, Los Angeles law professor Adam Winkler, an expert on gun policy and constitutional law.

Both Democrats and Republicans are rapidly losing faith in the integrity of U.S. elections. Democrats worry that voter suppression and election interference from Republican state officials will deny millions of Americans their say at the polling booths. A PBS NewsHour/ NPR/ Marist poll in early November reported that 55 percent of Democrats saw voter suppression as the biggest threat to U.S. elections. Republicans claim, contrary to the evidence, that Democrats have already manipulated vote counts through fraud to steal a presidential election. An October CNN poll found that more than three-quarters of Republicans falsely believe Joe Biden's 2020 election win was fraudulent.

According to the Constitution, Congress and the Supreme Court are supposed to settle those sorts of dueling claims. Given the growing intensity and polarization of political life, would either side accept a decision that handed a contested 2024 election result to the other?

Such a decision would more likely bring tens of millions of protesters and counter-protesters into the streets, especially around the U.S. Capitol and possibly many state capitols, plunging the country into chaos. Although many Democrats might be inclined to demonstrate, a larger percentage of Republican protesters would almost certainly be carrying guns. If the Supreme Court ruling, expected in mid-2022, on New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen establishes an unrestricted right to carry a gun anywhere in the country, bringing firearms to the Capitol in Washington, D.C. could be perfectly legal. Says Winkler: "The Supreme Court may be close to issuing the ruling that leads to the overthrow of the U.S. government."

If armed violence erupts the 2024 elections, quelling it could fall to the U.S. military, which may be reluctant to take arms against U.S. citizens. In that case, the fate of the nation might well be decided by a simple fact: a big subset of one of the two parties has for years been systemically arming itself for this very reason.

"I hope it's just too crazy to happen here," says Erica De Bruin, an assistant professor of government at Hamilton College, who studies coups around the world. "But it's now in the realm of the plausible."

Enemy at the Gates

Many Republicans are increasingly coming to see themselves less as citizens represented by the federal government, and more as tyrannized victims of that government. More than three-quarters of Republicans reported "low trust" in the federal government in a Grinnell College national poll in October; only a minority of Democrats agreed. From this point of view, peaceful elections will not save the day. More than two out of three Republicans think democracy is under attack, according to the Grinnell poll, which echoes the results of a CNN poll in September. Half as many Democrats say the same.

© Probal Rashid/Getty Security forces respond with tear gas after the US President Donald Trump's supporters breached the US Capitol security. Probal Rashid/Getty

Mainstream news publications are filled with howls of protest over political outrages by Republican leaders, who are reflecting the beliefs of the party mainstream. But the small newspapers in the rural, red-state areas that are the core of the Republican party's rank and file are giving voice to a simpler picture: Politics are dead; it's time to fight. "Wake up America!" reads a September opinion piece excoriating Democrats in The Gaston Gazette, based in Gastonia, N.C. "The enemy is at our gates, God willing it is not too late to turn back the rushing tide of this dark regime." The piece goes on to quote Thomas Paine's exhortation to colonists to take up arms against the British. "We are in a civil war," a letter published in September in The New Mexico Sun likewise warns Republicans, "between the traditional Americans and those who want to impose socialism in this country and thus obtain complete government control of its citizens."

Evidence that a significant portion of Republicans are increasingly likely to resort to violence against the government and political opponents is growing. More than 100 violent threats, many of them death threats, were leveled at poll workers and election officials in battleground states in 2020, according to an investigation by Reuters published in September—all those threat-makers whom Reuters could contact identified as Trump supporters. In October 2020, 13 men were charged with plotting to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat; all of them were aligned with the political right. Nearly a third of Republicans agree that "true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country," according to a September poll conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute, a non-partisan group. That's three times as many as the number of Democrats who felt the same way.

Guns are becoming an essential part of the equation. "Americans are increasingly wielding guns in public spaces, roused by persons they politically oppose or public decisions with which they disagree," concludes an August article in the Northwestern University Law Review. Guns were plentiful when hundreds of anti-COVID-precaution protestors gathered at the Michigan State Capitol in May 2020. Some of the armed protesters tried to enter the Capitol chamber.

Those who carry arms to a political protest may in theory have peaceful intentions, but there's plenty of reason to think otherwise. An October study from Everytown for Gun Safety and the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED) looked at 560 protests involving armed participants over an 18-month period through mid-2021, and found that a sixth of them turned violent, and some involved fatalities.

One indication of how far Republicans may be willing to go in violently opposing the government is their sanguine reaction to the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Republicans by and large see no problem with a mob of hundreds swarming and forcing their way into the seat of American government. Half of Republicans said that the mob was "defending freedom," according to a CBS/YouGov poll taken just after the insurrection. Today two-thirds of Republicans have come to deny that it was an attack at all, according to an October survey by Quinnipiac University. "There's been little accountability for that insurrection," says UCLA's Winkler. "The right-wing rhetoric has only grown worse since then."

Most Republican leaders are circumspect when it comes to supporting violence against the government, but not all. Former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, a controversial character who remains popular among many Republicans, reportedly told an enthusiastic gathering of Trump supporters in October that if and when a "serious" insurrection springs up, "there's very little you're going to be able to do about it."

Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, another prominent Republican popular with the rank and file, opined that the January 6 insurrectionists were simply doing what the Declaration of Independence tells true patriots to do, in that they were trying to "overthrow tyrants." The real threat to democracy, she added, are Black Lives Matter protesters and Democratic "Marxist-communist" agents. Greene and Representative Madison Cawthorn, a Republican from North Carolina, have referred to some of the insurrectionists as "political prisoners."

Trump himself, of course, has nurtured a constant undercurrent of violence among his supporters from the beginning of his first presidential campaign. In 2016 he publicly stated he could shoot someone in the street without losing any of his political support, and he went on to encourage attendees at his rallies to assault protesters and journalists. When demonstrators at a rally in Miami were being dragged away, Trump warned that next time "I'll be a little more violent." At a 2016 rally in Las Vegas, he openly complained to the crowd that security wasn't being rough enough on a protester they were removing. "I'd like to punch him in the face, I'll tell you," he said.

Today Trump openly declares the January 6 rioters to be "great people." In October, he suggested that Republicans might not want to bother to vote in the 2022 or 2024 elections because of their concerns over fraud in the 2020 election. At the same time, he declared that he would achieve an "even more glorious victory in November of 2024." The notion that Republicans could turn their backs on voting booths while sweeping Trump to glory only makes sense if Trump envisions a path to taking power that doesn't require votes.

Republicans approve of that sort of talk. The October Quinnipiac poll found that while 94 percent of Democrats insist Trump is undermining democracy, 85 percent of Republicans say he's protecting it.

Where the Guns Are

In his acclaimed history of the early days of the American Revolution, "The British Are Coming," author Rick Atkinson explains one major reason why America became the first British colony to succeed in winning freedom, where others had failed. "Unlike the Irish and other subjugated peoples," he writes, "the Americans were heavily armed." Muskets, he points out, were "as common as kettles" among the colonists, and American riflemen were among the world's finest marksmen. That possession of and skill with guns, combined with the colonists' deep passion for ridding themselves of what they saw as government tyranny, would help carry the day against otherwise long odds.

© Chuck Liddy/Getty On display at a gun shop in Wendell, N.C., an AR-15 assault rifle manufactured by Core15 Rifle Systems. Chuck Liddy/Getty

Today the many Republicans who have convinced themselves that they, too, must cast off a tyrannical government have plenty of guns. Americans own about 400 million guns, according to the Switzerland-based Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. (The U.S. government doesn't track gun ownership.) The vast majority of those guns belong to Republicans. Gallup found that half of all Republicans own guns, nearly three times the rate of gun ownership as among Democrats. Gun owners are overwhelmingly male and white and are more likely to live in the rural south than anywhere else. Those demographics mesh neatly with the hard-core segment of the Republican party.

Gun sales have spiked wildly in the past two years. About 17 million people, or more than six percent of the population, bought 40 million guns in 2020 alone, according to research from Harvard and Northeastern Universities. Sales for 2021 are on track to add another 20 million to the total, according to gun-industry research firm Small Arms Analytics & Forecasting.

While there's data to suggest Democrats are stepping up their modest share of the gun-buying, recent history suggests that the great majority of these guns are going to Republicans. According to a 2017 Pew Research Center survey, Republicans and Republican-leaning independents were more than twice as likely to own a gun as their Democratic counterparts.

Former Iowa Representative Steve King, long known as someone unafraid to say out loud what many other Republicans are thinking, is confident that his party is better armed. "Folks keep talking about another civil war," he posted to Facebook in 2019. "One side has about 8 trillion bullets... Wonder who would win?"

The impulse for violent insurrection among Republicans is getting some of its energy from the mostly Republican gun-rights movement, and vice-versa. That's a relatively new phenomenon. The right to own guns was long a passionate cause of conservatives, without ever posing much apparent threat to democracy. But that's changing fast.

In 2000, 60 percent of gun owners cited hunting as the reason they bought guns, according to a Gallup poll. Many of the rest listed "sport," which generally means target shooting. But by 2016, 63 percent were saying they bought guns for self-defense. That shift was brought on by growing paranoia about street crime and mob violence, a fear constantly pumped up on Fox and other right-wing media, which have long been conjuring up the notion that urban gangs and other trouble-makers are increasingly running rampant through suburbs and beyond.

Over the past four years those fears have been blurring into anti-government, pro-Trump, and in some cases white-supremacist movements. "We've seen the flourishing of a different view of gun rights, one that focuses on the necessity of owning guns in order to fight a tyrannical government," says Winkler. "The promotion of that idea has made it all the more likely that some people will come to see the government as a tyrannical one that needs to be overthrown." The resulting gun-rights-driven, anti-deep-state radicalism echoes throughout Republican-heavy social media and other communications channels.

The gun industry didn't create that conflation of gun ownership and an imminent patriotic armed uprising, but it has amplified it. A 2020 article on the website of AZ Big Media, Arizona's largest business-news publisher, advised readers this way: "If you're waiting to buy the firearm you've been eyeing for a while, now is the time. Don't wait until the presidential election. We don't know what's going to happen, but regardless of who is elected into office, the chaos and violence are likely to grow larger."

Palmetto State Armory, a gun-parts manufacturer and gun retailer out of Columbia, South Carolina, puts it this way on their website: "Our mission is to maximize freedom, not our profits. We want to sell as many AR-15 and AK-47 rifles as we can and put them into common use in America today," adding that doing so "safeguards the rights of the people against tyranny." A 2019 Drew University study noted that one out of four of gun manufacturers' most-viewed YouTube videos invoked patriotism. "There's a commercial interest feeding that sense of needing guns to defend against the government," says Risa Brooks, a political scientist at Marquette University.

The National Rifle Association played a big role in pumping up the "own guns to protect America from leftist tyranny" theme. "If the violent left brings their terror to our communities, our neighborhoods, or into our homes, they will be met with the resolve and the strength and the full force of American freedom in the hands of the American people," said NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre in 2017. That same year, an NRA spokesperson railed against Trump's opponents, adding: "The only way we stop this, the only way we save our country and our freedom, is to fight this violence of lies with the clenched fist of truth." There wasn't much question about what that fist would be clenching.

The NRA also put out the notion that gun-control policies enacted by Nazis and aimed at Jews were a critical enabling element of the Holocaust. That claim has been thoroughly debunked by historians, but Ben Carson, Trump's secretary of housing and urban development, publicly tied gun control to the Holocaust. Texas Senator Ted Cruz has also explicitly linked gun rights to fending off federal menace, stating that guns "serve as the ultimate check against governmental tyranny." Trump himself hinted at the darkest of connections between gun ownership and taking down a Democrat-led government, proposing during his first presidential campaign that the "Second Amendment people" might be able to stop Hillary Clinton if she won.

How It Might Go Down

What might lead to large-scale armed threat or even violence around the 2024 elections? There may be only one narrow path to avoiding it: A comfortable, incontestable win by Trump, assuming he's the Republican candidate. Democrats might despair at the loss, but it's not likely that they will go into mass protests against what could be seen as a legitimate election win.

But if Trump loses, by any margin, and is unable to overturn the results through legal or political means, it seems likely Republicans will declare the election fraudulent. In 2020, the conviction—against all evidence—that Trump had the presidency stolen from him brought an insurrectionist mob to the U.S. Capitol. The mob was mostly unarmed, undoubtedly thanks to Washington D.C.'s strict gun-control laws

.

© Michael Reynolds/Getty U.S. President Donald Trump (L) sits beside Executive Vice President and CEO of the National Rifle Association (NRA) Wayne LaPierre (R), during a meeting on Trump's Supreme Court nomination of Neil Gorsuch in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on February 1, 2017 in Washington, DC. Michael Reynolds/Getty

In 2024, that sort of mob, which will have been fed for four years on false claims of a "Big Steal" and exhortations to fight back against tyranny, will likely be far, far larger. If gun-control laws are weakened by the Supreme Court, they will also likely be heavily armed. In addition to Washington, D.C., the ACLED report found that Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Oregon face the largest risk of armed uprisings in contested elections, followed by North Carolina, Texas, Virginia, California, and New Mexico. But shortly after the January 6 insurrection, the FBI warned that all 50 state capitols were at risk. "There has been a recent and worrisome effort to frame showing up with guns as an appropriate way to challenge an election result you don't like," says Marquette's Brooks.

If Trump wins, but by a small margin that Democrats can attribute to Republican laws and tactics aimed at suppressing Democratic votes, massive protests around the country are inevitable. Democrats won't have to stretch their imaginations to make that claim: In 2021, 43 states proposed more than 250 laws limiting voting access. Georgia slashed the number of ballot boxes, a practice almost always aimed at communities with high percentages of minority residents. Iowa closed down most early voting. Arkansas upped the requirement for voter ID. And Utah made it easier to selectively purge voters from its lists.

If Trump loses on votes, but the loss is overturned by the actions of partisan state election officials, legislatures or governors in key battleground states, and that reversal is protected by a Republican Congress or the Supreme Court, protests are again inevitable. And again, that sort of reversal is far from implausible: There are 23 states where Republicans control both the legislature and the governorship, including several of the battleground states. In 2022 Republicans stand to gain control of three more key states—Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Any state controlled by one party is in a good position to try to overturn an election vote, as Trump and many Republicans urged state officials to do in 2020. "We've seen a trend of Republican governors and legislatures appointing party officials more willing to claim voter fraud, and giving themselves more power to undermine elections at a local level," says Hamilton College's De Bruin. For these and other reasons, America has been steadily dropping on the widely cited Freedom in the World ranking of countries by how democratic they are. The US has fallen from the company of large, Western European countries to end up today alongside Ghana and Mongolia.

Whatever the circumstances that might bring on large-scale protests from Democrats in 2024, their presence in the streets could bring out armed Republican counter-protesters bent on protecting Trump's nominal win and, in their minds, defending democracy against left-wing mobs. "It's a fair concern that If Trump called on them to come out and suppress the mobs, they might respond," says Lindsay Cohn, associate professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College.

Nieznany, the Vietnam vet, insists that if Democratic protests include any violence, as was the case with several Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 in mostly isolated instances, then right-wing counter-protesters will be justified in shooting. "Rocks, bottles and bricks can kill you as fast as a bullet will," he says. That's the sort of logic that in August 2020 brought Kyle Rittenhouse and his AR-15-style rifle to a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where he shot three protesters, killing two, claiming self-defense. A jury acquitted him of all charges.

Based on their actions at protests in recent years, police forces can be counted on for a strong response—against the Democratic protesters, that is. The ACLED found that the police used force in Black Lives Matter protests more than half the time but only a third of the time at right-wing demonstrations. In any case, few police forces are prepared to effectively come to grips with tens of thousands of armed protesters.

Enter the Military

If police can't or won't deal with an armed uprising, the last hope for a peaceful resolution would probably be the National Guard and military. Only the governor can call out the National Guard in a state, and only the president can deploy the military. To send in the military to quell disturbances on U.S. soil, the president must invoke the Insurrection Act, last used in 1992 by then-President George H. W. Bush to help restore order during the Los Angeles riots.

Joe Biden would likely still be president at the initiation of election-related violence, so if the National Guard were unable to quiet things down in one or more states—or if a governor refused to call in the Guard—it would fall squarely on Biden's shoulders to make that call. He wouldn't need any state government cooperation to do it. "It would be an entirely legitimate role for the American military in those circumstances," says Kori Schake, director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

The National Guard or military would almost certainly prevail in shutting down the worst of the violence and protecting the government. But two key questions arise: Would military leadership accept Biden's orders to deploy against an armed uprising? And if it did, would the rank and file follow their commanders' orders to take up arms against fellow Americans whose motivations might resonate with many of their own?

The military leadership still feels chastened by the outcry after Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, accompanied Trump to a photo op across a Lafayette Square forcibly cleared of peaceful protesters in June 2020, says Brooks. "They're going to be reluctant to get involved," she says. "The military takes an oath to the Constitution, not to a particular president." Biden, too, is likely to see calling in the military as a last resort, she adds. But if the situation is dire, and Biden seems justified in making the call, the leadership will comply, whatever their misgivings, she says.

As for the possibility that the Guard or military rank and file might refuse to follow orders to take up arms against armed Trump supporters, the Naval War College's Cohn deems it unlikely. "There isn't a ton of evidence that the rank and file are solidly behind Trump," she says. "But whatever their beliefs, they're highly professional. No more than a tiny percentage would refuse."

She points out that Trump worked hard to align himself with the rank and file, even while distancing himself from military leadership. And yet there was little sign of overt support from the rank and file when Trump was trying to whip up mobs in January to support his baseless claims of election fraud—even though former Trump National Security Advisor and retired Army General Michael Flynn was at the same time openly calling for the military to take control of the government.

Absent a strong response from some combination of police, National Guard and military, it's easy to see how Republicans would be in a position to essentially take control of the country simply by virtue of their massive arsenal. "Both sides might be equally convinced of the illegitimacy of the other's actions," says Winkler. "What's asymmetric is the capability to inflict violence."

Let's hope it doesn't come to that, and that there's a relatively peaceful resolution to what's likely to be a contentious, hotly disputed election. But that result isn't assured. And even if any conflict ends quietly before it gets too far, experiencing a near-miss might leave our already fragile democracy more weakened and vulnerable. It's hard to say what it would take to repair it.

Nieznany may speak for millions when he insists it's too late. "There are too many of us ready to give our lives to take the country back," he says. "We need a civil war."

The AP Interview: Nikole Hannah-Jones' warning on democracy


NEW YORK (AP) — Following a year of professional milestones born of her work on America’s history of slavery, Pulitzer Prize-winning Black journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones said she is clear-eyed about her mission to force a reckoning around the nation’s self-image.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

The New York Times Magazine writer began this year in a protracted tenure fight with her alma mater in North Carolina — the dispute ended when she announced in July that she’d take her talents to a historically Black university — and is closing it as a national best-selling author.

“I’ve gone from being just a journalist to becoming some sort of symbol for people who either love me and my work or revile me and my work,” she said.

Hannah-Jones recently spoke to The Associated Press in an exclusive interview about the ongoing controversy over The 1619 Project, a groundbreaking collection of essays on race that first appeared in a special issue of The New York Times Magazine in 2019. Now in book form, the project has become a touchstone for America’s reckoning over slavery and the reverberations for Black Americans.

“The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story,” and “Born on the Water,” a picture storybook collaboration with co-writer Renée Watson and illustrator Nikkolas Smith, each have spent consecutive weeks atop the Times bestseller list since their Nov. 16 release. A TV documentary on the work is due out later in 2022.

Still, Hannah-Jones said the backlash to her work is evidence that the U.S. is approaching a make-or-break crossroads on its global standing as a democracy.

“I think that we are in a very frightening time,” she said in the interview at AP’s New York City headquarters.

“People who are much, much smarter than me, who have studied this much, much longer than I have are ringing the alarm,” Hannah-Jones said. “I think we have to ask ourselves … the narrators, the storytellers, the journalists: Are we ringing the alarm in the right way? Are we doing our jobs to try to uphold our democracy?”

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

AP: If anything, what did this year teach you about where we are in our country currently, when it comes to racial justice and our reckoning with history?

HANNAH-JONES: This year, to me, is just reflective of what I’ve always understood about this country. And that is that steps forward, steps towards racial progress, are always met with an intensive backlash. That we are a society that willfully does not want to deal with the anti-Blackness that is at the core of so many of our institutions and really our society itself.

AP: Can you point to any progress in how the discourse has developed or evolved?

HANNAH-JONES: Certainly the fact that very powerful people are so concerned about a work of journalism called The 1619 Project that they would seek to discredit it, that they would seek to censor it, that they would seek to ban it from being taught, does speak to the fact that there are millions of Americans who want a more honest accounting of our history, who want to better understand the country that we’re in, who are open to new narratives.

AP: Do you think this country is poised to make any progress on issues of racial justice, and especially around education?

HANNAH-JONES: Many in mainstream media got caught up in the Republican propaganda campaign, which tried to conflate the teaching of a more accurate history, the teaching of structural racism, with trying to make white children feel badly about themselves or guilty. And so much of the coverage was driven by that. … I hope that there’s going to be some serious examination of the role that we as media played (in) really putting forth and legitimizing what was a propaganda campaign.

AP: The 1619 Project is now a book. For people who don’t understand, how is it different from what was published in The New York Times Magazine?

HANNAH-JONES: We all know that there has been a tremendous amount of scrutiny of the 1619 Project. … I think those who had questions can now go and actually see the source material, can see the historiography that undergirds the work. For anyone who comes to it with an open mind, it is going to be deeply surprising. They’re going to learn so much about both the history of their country, but also the history that shapes so much of modern American life.

AP: Some people would say that this is all an agenda-driven piece of work.

HANNAH-JONES: And they’d be right.

AP: Why are they right?

HANNAH-JONES: Because it is. The agenda is to force a reckoning with who we are as a country. The agenda is to take the story of Black Americans in slavery, from being an asterisk to being marginal to being central to how we understand our country. When people say that, though, I know that they’re saying it in disparaging ways. I’m just being honest about the nature of this work. … We’ve been taught the history of a country that does not exist. We’ve been taught the history of a country that renders us incapable of understanding how we get an insurrection in the greatest democracy on Jan. 6.

AP: What issues do you see as dominating our politics in 2022?

HANNAH-JONES: I try to never predict the future. And I’m also not a political reporter. … We, as Americans, are going to be severely tested in the next year or two to decide, what are we willing to sacrifice to be the country that we believe that we are? And whose rights do we hold as fundamental in this country? And are all Americans worthy of having those same rights? I don’t think we know the answer to that. But I think what is important for us to know is we decide.


AP Race and Ethnicity writer Aaron Morrison is a member, trainer and mentor for the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting, which Hannah-Jones co-founded. Follow Morrison on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/aaronlmorrison.

Aaron Morrison, The Associated Press

Regulating Big Tech is not enough. We need platform socialism

Facebook won't let state oversight trump shareholder interest, so alternatives – based on common ownership and community control – are needed

James Muldoon
8 December 2021

Many companies put profit ahead of workers and local communities



Facebook whistleblower, Frances Haugen described the company as “morally bankrupt” before a panel of the US Senate Commerce Committee on 5 October. From her position on the company’s civic misinformation team, she witnessed its leadership consistently resolve conflicts between the company’s profits and users’ safety in favour of the former. This was true across a range of issues from hate speech to teenage mental health, ethnic violence and differential treatment for VIP users.

She has also called for greater government regulation and oversight but has dismissed claims that tougher action is needed against the tech giant. In Europe, greater oversight is fast approaching. The proposed Digital Services Act will change the rules for how digital platforms handle content that has been flagged as illegal and will regulate digital gatekeepers to prevent anti-competitive behaviour.

Haugen’s evidence confirmed long-standing suspicions that the problems of the company go to the core of its business model, which requires constant engagement, growth and data harvesting.

The lesson, however, is that calls to regulate these companies are an insufficient response that fail to acknowledge the depth of the crisis.

This is not a failure of morality. The company is structurally conditioned to respond to competitive market pressures by adapting its strategies to maintain its dominance.

In the data-driven sphere of social media, this means prioritising growing engagement and reach above other objectives. For instance, Facebook cannot put an end to “engagement-based ranking” designed to elicit strong reactions, and inevitably leading to polarisation and division, because the company needs to serve shareholder interests.

We need to stop talking about ‘fixing’ Facebook or taking solutions from people whose worldview has been shaped within Big Tech firms

The problems of the tech world are not limited to the ‘data for a free product’ business model. Many companies put profit ahead of workers and local communities –from Uber and Deliveroo paying riders below minimum wage to Airbnb destroying affordable housing and gentrifying previously diverse neighbourhoods. We shouldn’t be surprised that companies have been willing to take advantage of vulnerable workers, exploit grey areas in the law and place their own interests ahead of the communities they claim to serve.

In fact, we need to stop talking about ‘fixing’ Facebook or taking solutions from people whose worldview has been shaped within Big Tech firms. The problem is not simply about restoring competition to the tech sector or replacing a few heartless CEOs.

Instead, we should look to the many alternatives that currently exist – and which could be further grown and developed – based on social ownership, common interests and solidarity.

Platform socialism

In a forthcoming book, I call this idea platform socialism – referring to the social ownership of digital assets and the democratic control over the organisations and digital infrastructure that have become so critical to our everyday lives.

Platform socialism is about reclaiming collective self-determination through new forms of participatory and decentralised governance that ensure we no longer put profits over human needs. It focuses on how we can foster citizens’ active participation in the design and governance of digital platforms rather than relying on top-down regulations by a technocratic elite.

Participation and decision-making by ordinary citizens are important because we currently have no say in how these platforms are governed. We do not even have access to the data to hold meaningful public debate on issues because key aspects of how the platforms operate are held as closely guarded trade secrets.

When data is released, it is usually carefully curated by the companies to shine a positive light on their activities. The release of the Facebook Files by the Wall Street Journal demonstrates how the company regularly shelved uncomfortable findings of internal research teams.

There is now a vast array of digital tools for people to participate in governance issues that make democratising the workplace more viable than ever before. Software such as Decidim and Liquid Democracy give people an opportunity for deliberation and decision-making without face-to-face meetings.

Customers, workers and local community members from diverse geographic locations and with different interests can all be affected by a platform and should have a say in how it operates. Multi-stakeholder governance structures allow members with different interests in the platform to have varying levels of involvement in how it operates.
Alternatives are possible

When we imagine forms of public ownership of digital platforms we should worry about questions of censorship and state surveillance. Many states have a long history of using data to identify activists and crush dissent. Platform socialism is about instituting a broad ecology of alternative ownership models based on different sizes and types of digital services. Many of these would not be simply state-owned and could be managed by diverse communities.

For example, at the local level there are already handiwork, courier services and domestic-cleaning platforms run by platform co-operatives – enterprises owned and managed by the workers themselves.

Up & Go is one example. It is a digital marketplace for professional home services that enables workers to keep 95٪ of their wages from jobs obtained on the platform rather than the usual 50-80%. Workers don’t only receive higher wages, they also have an ownership stake in the platform and can vote on matters of platform governance.

We need to act now to reassert our democratic power and reclaim our participatory rights to the digital public sphere

A platform socialist model of social media can draw inspiration from “fediverse”, a group of decentralised publishing platforms that rely on free and open-source software and shared protocols so that users can communicate across different nodes in the network.

One of the most popular examples of these tools is Mastodon, a decentralised alternative to Twitter which uses an open protocol for microblogging and status updates. Each node in the network has its own rules and moderation policies, and allows users greater autonomy over their digital communications.
Investing in public good

It has been difficult for co-operative social networking services to achieve the same smoothness and functionality as larger corporations, but this is something that could quickly change with more investment and interest in the technology.

What is more difficult is getting users to adopt smaller platforms and move away from dominant networks.

Other challenges include data portability of friends lists and privacy concerns about which types of data could be migrated onto a new platform.

Platform co-operatives also need access to capital. This could be resolved if they are supported by local councils through procurement strategies and provision of resources. There is an important role to be played by municipally owned services which could be effectively implemented to provide digital services relating to housing and transportation.

An alliance of local authorities could work with residents to provide a ‘MuniBnB’, a municipally owned and regulated platform that manages short-term accommodation services offered by local residents, to replace corporate services.

Ride hail apps could also be integrated into many cities’ public transport services through public ownership. Publicly operated services could eliminate gamified working conditions for drivers, provide them with a living wage and nudge commuters towards more environmentally friendly options where available.

The New Economics Foundation found that 82% of Uber customers would use a more ethical alternative to the ride hail service and 54% would pay more for their journey to give drivers better pay and conditions.

Nevertheless, from local to international level, different options are open to facilitate new forms of democratic control over digital platforms.

Platform socialism is a systematic alternative to private power in the digital sphere and can help unite different forms of struggle around a shared vision of a democratic future. It is about reclaiming a long-term counter-hegemonic project for challenging capitalist control over technology.

We shouldn’t look to corporate executives to do better on fixing our digital infrastructure when they have no right to control it to begin with. We need to act now to reassert our democratic power and reclaim our participatory rights to the digital public sphere before the tech companies can further solidify their power.

*This piece is part of the RELAY project's 'A digital Europe fit for all' theme. RELAY is coordinated by Maastricht University's Brussels Campus and receives funding from the Erasmus+ programme. The aim of the project is to both raise awareness and critically investigate the European Commission's political priorities. More information is available on the RELAY website."

This article reflects only the authors' view. The European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) and the European Commission are not responsible for the content of this document or any use that may be made of the information it contains.

Fresh blow for Kim Dotcom in US extradition fight


Internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom, seen here in 2015, faces charges of racketeering, fraud and money laundering in the United States (AFP/MICHAEL BRADLEY)

Mon, December 20, 2021

New Zealand's top court rejected Kim Dotcom's latest bid to avoid extradition to the United States on Tuesday, in a fresh blow to the tech entrepreneur's decade-long battle against online piracy charges.

Dotcom, who is accused of netting millions from his Megaupload file-sharing service, faces charges of racketeering, fraud and money laundering in the United States, carrying jail terms of up to 20 years.

The Supreme Court in Wellington ruled the German national and two co-defendants could not appeal aspects of an earlier judgement, dismissing their argument that they were facing a miscarriage of justice.

"We do not consider there is anything more the court needs to do in relation to the proposed appeals, given our conclusion that no miscarriage has arisen," a panel of three judges concluded.

The case began when New Zealand police raided Dotcom's Auckland mansion in January 2012 at the behest of the FBI, triggering numerous court hearings and appeals.

In the decade since, Dotcom has attempted to enter New Zealand politics, sparred verbally at a parliamentary committee with former prime minister John Key and vociferously protested his innocence.

The 47-year-old gave an indifferent response on social media to his latest legal setback.

"Unfazed. I'll start live streaming in January," he tweeted, referring to his latest online venture.

"Join me. 2022 will be fun. Enjoy your holidays."

The FBI accuses Dotcom of industrial-scale online piracy via Megaupload, which US authorities shut down when the raid took place.

They allege the file-sharing service netted more than US$175 million in criminal proceeds and cost copyright owners US$500 million-plus by offering pirated content, including films and music.

Dotcom and his co-accused -- Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk -- deny any wrongdoing, saying Megaupload was targeted because established interests were threatened by online innovation.

The website was an early example of cloud storage, allowing users to upload large files onto a server so others could easily download them without clogging up their email systems.

At its height in 2011, Megaupload claimed to have 50 million daily users and accounted for four percent of the world's internet traffic.

ns/arb/qan

‘Fortress USA’: How 9/11 produced a military industrial juggernaut

Since the September 11 terror attacks, there has been no hiding from the increased militarisation of the United States. Everyday life is suffused with policing and surveillance. This ranges from the inconvenient, such as removing shoes at the airport, to the dystopian, such as local police departments equipped with decommissioned tanks too big to use on regular roads.

This process of militarisation did not begin with 9/11. The American state has always relied on force combined with the de-personalisation of its victims.

The army, after all, dispossessed First Nations peoples of their land as settlers pushed westward. Expanding the American empire to places such as Cuba, the Philippines, and Haiti also relied on force, based on racist justifications.

The military also ensured American supremacy in the wake of the second world war. As historian Nikhil Pal Singh writes, about 8 million people were killed in US-led or -sponsored wars from 1945–2019 — and this is a conservative estimate.

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When Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican and former military general, left the presidency in 1961, he famously warned against the growing “military-industrial complex” in the US. His warning went unheeded and the protracted conflict in Vietnam was the result.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower addresses American paratroopers prior to D-Day in the second world war. Wikimedia Commons

The 9/11 attacks then intensified US militarisation, both at home and abroad. George W. Bush was elected in late 2000 after campaigning to reduce US foreign interventions. The new president discovered, however, that by adopting the persona of a tough, pro-military leader, he could sweep away lingering doubts about the legitimacy of his election.

Waging war on Afghanistan within a month of the twin towers falling, Bush’s popularity soared to 90%. War in Iraq, based on the dubious assertion of Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction”, soon followed.
The military industrial juggernaut

Investment in the military state is immense. 9/11 ushered in the federal, cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security, with an initial budget in 2001-02 of US$16 billion. Annual budgets for the agency peaked at US$74 billion in 2009-10 and is now around US$50 billion.

This super-department vacuumed up bureaucracies previously managed by a range of other agencies, including justice, transportation, energy, agriculture, and health and human services.

Read more: Why is it so difficult to fight domestic terrorism? 6 experts share their thoughts

Centralising services under the banner of security has enabled gross miscarriages of justice. These include the separation of tens of thousands of children from parents at the nation’s southern border, done in the guise of protecting the country from so-called illegal immigrants. More than 300 of the some 1,000 children taken from parents during the Trump administration have still not been reunited with family.

Detainees sleep in a holding cell where mostly Central American immigrant children are being processed at the US-Mexico border. Ross D. Franklin/AP

The post-9/11 Patriot Act also gave spying agencies paramilitary powers. The act reduced barriers between the CIA, FBI, and the National Security Agency (NSA) to permit the acquiring and sharing of Americans’ private communications. These ranged from telephone records to web searches. All of this was justified in an atmosphere of near-hysterical and enduring anti-Muslim fervour.

Only in 2013 did most Americans realise the extent of this surveillance network. Edward Snowden, a contractor working at the NSA, leaked documents that revealed a secret US$52 billion budget for 16 spying agencies and over 100,000 employees.
Normalisation of the security state

Despite the long objections of civil liberties groups and disquiet among many private citizens, especially after Snowden’s leaks, it has proven difficult to wind back the industrialised security state.

This is for two reasons: the extent of the investment, and because its targets, both domestically and internationally, are usually not white and not powerful.

Read more: Calculating the costs of the Afghanistan War in lives, dollars and years

Domestically, the 2015 Freedom Act renewed almost all of the Patriot Act’s provisions. Legislation in 2020 that might have stemmed some of these powers stalled in Congress.

And recent reports suggest President Joe Biden’s election has done little to alter the detention of children at the border.

Militarisation is now so commonplace that local police departments and sheriff’s offices have received some US$7 billion worth of military gear (including grenade launchers and armoured vehicles) since 1997, underwritten by federal government programs.

Atlanta police line up in riot gear before a protest in 2014. Curtis Compton/AP

Militarised police kill civilians at a high rate — and the targets for all aspects of policing and incarceration are disproportionately people of colour. And yet, while the sight of excessively armed police forces during last year’s Black Lives Matter protests shocked many Americans, it will take a phenomenal effort to reverse this trend.

Read more: Police with lots of military gear kill civilians more often than less-militarized officers
The heavy cost of the war on terror

The juggernaut of the militarised state keeps the United States at war abroad, no matter if Republicans or Democrats are in power.

Since 9/11, the US “war on terror” has cost more than US$8 trillion and led to the loss of up to 929,000 lives.

The effects on countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, and Pakistan have been devastating, and with the US involvement in Somalia, Libya, the Philippines, Mali, and Kenya included, these conflicts have resulted in the displacement of some 38 million people.



These wars have become self-perpetuating, spawning new terror threats such as the Islamic State and now perhaps ISIS-K.

Those who serve in the US forces have suffered greatly. Roughly 2.9 million living veterans served in post-9/11 conflicts abroad. Of the some 2 million deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, perhaps 36% are experiencing PTSD.

Training can be utterly brutal. The military may still offer opportunities, but the lives of those who serve remain expendable.

Sailor cleaning a fighter jet during aboard the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf in 2010. Hasan Jamali/AP

Life must be precious

Towards the end of his life, Robert McNamara, the hard-nosed Ford Motor Company president and architect of the United States’ disastrous military efforts in Vietnam, came to regret deeply his part in the military-industrial juggernaut.

In his 1995 memoir, he judged his own conduct to be morally repugnant. He wrote,

We of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who participated in the decisions on Vietnam acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of this nation. We made our decisions in light of those values. Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong.

In interviews with the filmmaker Errol Morris, McNamara admitted, obliquely, to losing sight of the simple fact the victims of the militarised American state were, in fact, human beings.


As McNamara realised far too late, the solution to reversing American militarisation is straightforward. We must recognise, in the words of activist and scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore, that “life is precious”. That simple philosophy also underlies the call to acknowledge Black Lives Matter.

The best chance to reverse the militarisation of the US state is policy guided by the radical proposal that life — regardless of race, gender, status, sexuality, nationality, location or age — is indeed precious.

As we reflect on how the United States has changed since 9/11, it is clear the country has moved further away from this basic premise, not closer to it.

Author

Clare Corbould
Associate Professor, Contemporary Histories Research Group, Deakin University
Disclosure statement
Clare Corbould has previously received funding from the Australian Research Council. She is a member of the Australian Greens.

Meet the ex-Googler who’s exposing the tech-military industrial complex

Formed by Jack Poulson and other Silicon Valley dissidents, Tech Inquiry uncovers the tech industry’s role in weaponry and surveillance.

Jack Poulson, cofounder of Tech Inquiry

 [Source images: Mark Sommerfeld; DeSa81/Pixabay]

Jack Poulson has developed an encyclopedic knowledge of how tech companies are evolving into military contractors. Tracking such intricate connections has become a full-time—though unpaid—job for the former Google research scientist as head of Tech Inquiry, a small nonprofit tackling the giant task of exposing ties between Silicon Valley and the U.S. military.

“Google, and tech companies in general, transitioning into weapons development is something that should be paid close attention to,” says Poulson. “And certainly employees of the company should have a voice in whether that work is performed.”

By delving through government contracting information and lobbying disclosures, and filing FOIA requests, Tech Inquiry has produced a set of custom databases for activists, journalists, and other researchers to probe tech-government connections. Its research covers the U.S. government as well as close intelligence allies, such as the U.K. and Canada. The group has also put out three dense reports that have been the foundation for many news articles. And it’s collaborating with advocacy groups to research the complex dealings and structures of tech firms.

Tech Inquiry’s latest report reveals (among many other things) Microsoft’s substantial role in a military drone AI program called Project Maven. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because the same program caused a huge rift at Google in 2018 when thousands of employees objected to the “Don’t be evil” company contributing AI tech to a killer drone program. Google ultimately left Maven, but its peers in tech continued on, with little public notice.


FROM TEAM PLAYER TO DISSIDENT

It was another Google controversy that gave Poulson international status. In 2018, when he was an AI researcher at the company, he encountered source code for Project Dragonfly, a version of Google’s namesake search engine being developed for mainland China. It contained a blacklist of forbidden queries, including the term “human rights.” Google’s facilitation of Chinese government censorship was well known within the company, but Poulson made news by taking a stand against it in a public resignation.

Poulson’s resignation letter quickly made him a spokesperson for tech worker opposition, with appeal to both the left and the right. “It was a reasonably bipartisan issue—actually, if anything, Republicans cared more about it than Democrats,” he says. “I wasn’t criticizing the United States. From my perspective, I was criticizing Google. But I’m sure from a lot of people’s perspectives, they were onboard because it included a critique of China.”

Poulson’s advocacy extended beyond censorship to also opposing Google’s work on military contracts, such as Maven. And he found himself invited to confidential meetings between tech CEOs and senior officials from the Department of Defense and intelligence agencies, who looked to him as the voice of techies opposed to working on weapons systems. “I’m not quite so sure I had any significant impact on what their opinions were,” he says. “But I certainly learned a lot about what sorts of relationships existed and who attended those sorts of meetings.”

Tech Inquiry’s Procurement and Lobbying Explorer allows anyone to probe the connections between companies and several national and state governments–with more to come.

Exposing those relationships became the goal of Tech Inquiry, which Poulson formed in summer 2019 along with four other tech experts. They include fellow Google dissidents Irene Knapp and Laura Nolan, anti-surveillance advocate Liz O’Sullivan, and tech consultant Shauna Gordon-McKeon. “Both Liz and Laura have played very significant roles in the campaign to stop killer robots,” says Poulson. Knapp is also a privacy advocate. And Gordon-McKeon develops open-source software to help groups govern themselves online.

Unsurprisingly given its founders’ backgrounds, the organization employs a fair amount of technology. Working at Google, Poulson specialized in natural language processing and recommendation systems. While we mostly encounter recommendation engines in features, such as Netflix suggestions and TikTok feeds, the tech goes much further. Tech Inquiry sets it loose on data, such as federal procurement records, to understand connections between companies and the government. It also analyzes language on company websites to find similarities between them.

The result is a recommendation system that guides research by Tech Inquiry or anyone who uses its tools. “Maybe they know about [data analysis firm] Palantir, but they don’t know about, say, a Black Cape or a Fivecast or one of those companies,” says Poulson. “Having a recommendation system helps fill in some of those similarities.”

But there’s still plenty of manual labor. Tech Inquiry’s previous report, Death and Taxes, documented how technology and defense companies benefited from the Trump corporate tax cuts and how much they have been able to avoid in federal taxes. The report, which covered 57 publicly traded companies, required reading through and collating over 1,000 financial filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

UNTANGLING THE CONNECTIONS

Tech Inquiry’s latest report, Easy as PAI, reveals complex defense and law-enforcement programs that use publicly available information (PAI), such as social media postings, satellite imagery, and location data. Some of these deals are revealed for the first time. Others, such as Project Maven, are fleshed out in greater detail.

One trend is how consumer technologies have migrated into military applications. For example, a company called SmileML made an iOS game in which people win points by mimicking the look of emojis. That produced data to train an AI in recognizing facial expressions—tech that smileML supplies to companies to assess the performance of their salespeople. SmileML also sold the tech for $235,000 to the Special Operations Command, which oversees special ops by four branches of the U.S. military, for projects involving “intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance,” per government documents.

Another case is X-Mode Social, which harvested location data from consumer mobile apps, such as a prayer app called Muslim Pro. The company later won a $200,000 contract to provide location data to the Defense Intelligence Agency, the military intel wing of the Pentagon. (According to a report in Motherboard, it’s unclear what the military did with this data.)

Neither of these deals was publicized, nor was there a direct link between the Pentagon and the companies. Instead, SmileML was a subcontractor to a British defense firm called BAE Systems. And X-Mode Social, which later changed its name to Outlogic, contracted through a company called Systems & Technology Research.

I must confess that my eyes glazed over at times as I struggled through the obtuse structures and relationships detailed in Poulson’s report. The tech-military connections are dense, often involving little-known companies or subsidiaries, running through obscure middlemen, and linking to unfamiliar government agencies in order to fulfill vaguely described, acronym-laden objectives.

But Poulson enjoys the challenge of decrypting these corporate dealings. “If you’re interested in a company, of course you’re interested in who owns them and what’s under them,” he says. “Because if you don’t know those things, then you’re not actually knowing what that company is doing.”

Unraveling the Project Maven ball of yarn was one of the biggest components of Tech Inquiry’s new report. The issue gained prominence because of the Google connection, coming at a time when employee activism, on a number of issues at the company, was spiking. And when Google pulled out of Maven in 2019, the program faded from public view. But it continued under the radar, involving dozens of tech companies. “Press attention given to different companies is kind of wildly off the mark as to what their roles have been in military contracting,” says Poulson.

As usual, these ties were filtered through contractors: Booz Allen Hamilton (Edward Snowden’s former employer) and a tech provider called ECS Federal. The latter managed three contracts that involved 33 tech companies. Microsoft tops the list, receiving $31.6 million last year to supply AI for analyzing video and motion. Other name brands on the list include Amazon Web Services, IBM, and Peter Thiel’s Palantir. But the second-biggest contractor (receiving $25.2 million) was Clarifai, a boutique AI company that’s providing facial recognition tech to the Pentagon. (Unlike some companies, Clarifai has been very up front about its work with the military.)

CHALLENGING THE MEDIA

The press has been key to Poulson’s personal rise as a tech critic, as well as publicizing Tech Inquiry’s research. The New York Times, for instance, has covered Poulson’s Google advocacy, run an opinion piece he wrote, and quoted him in several articles, such as one about Intel and Nvidia’s ties to Chinese government oppression.

But the Times now finds itself under Tech Inquiry’s microscope. Easy as PAI points out the paper’s collaboration with the nonprofit think tank Center for Advanced Defense Studies on an article about North Korean oil deliveries. That organization uses technology from controversial firm Palantir and has also contracted with the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency to provide what the records call “bulk datasets.” The think tank has also collaborated with Buzzfeed News, including on a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation of detention centers in China’s Xinjiang region.

Tech Inquiry also publicizes the links between military contractors and media organizations ProPublica, MIT Technology Review, and The Washington Post. The three are partners in an association called The Center for New Data. The Center also includes two location-tracking data brokers: Outlogic, which harvested data from the Muslim prayer app; and Veraset, a company with ties to Saudi intelligence.

In some cases, news outlets that expose the activities of data harvesting technologies are utilizing the same or similar technologies. “Why is it that journalists are off limits for pointing out their usage of surveillance technology?” says Poulson.

GOING GLOBAL

Critical as he may be, Poulson recognizes the media as a key constituency for Tech Inquiry’s research tool. “I definitely know there are journalists that use it,” he says.

The group also aims to serve advocacy organizations. Recently, it helped the Action Center on Race and the Economy (ACRE) with a project called Big Tech Sells War. Opposed to the military and surveillance projects of the 20-year “War on Terror,” ACRE built a website to document the tech industry’s role in that war. It draws heavily on data collected by Tech Inquiry.

Poulson’s group is currently working on a project to map the global footprint of cloud-computing companies. That’s a paid gig for worker union UNI Global, funded by the German government’s Friedrich Ebert Foundation, and it will bring some much-needed income. Tech Inquiry is very picky about where it gets funding, and doesn’t solicit or accept money from corporations or from foundations linked to tech billionaires, such as the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative or the Gates Foundation. Its most common funding is from individuals sending in $50 per month.

As a result, the organization has been an all-volunteer effort till now. Poulson says that it now has enough money to fund a part-time position, likely his. “That’s exciting to not just be burning cash,” he says, with a laugh. Not that he’s likely to limit his hours to those he’s paid for. “[This is] the only thing I’ve done for the past year,” he says.

And he intends to do a lot more. Tech Inquiry started out providing insight into companies’ dealings with national governments. Now it’s digging into state governments, with information on Florida and New York State procurement and California lobbying filings, for instance. Each state has its own system for making information available, which requires a lot of tweaking to automate data collection

The group is also going international. It already has data on the so-called “Five Eyes” intel alliance of the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Now it’s setting sights on the European Union and China. It’s developing a machine-translation system to render these countries’ complex documents into English, which likely requires training their own AI models to handle the task.

As Tech Inquiry has evolved, it’s had to evaluate the identity it projects. On a personal level, its members favor restrictions on military technologies and on the role of Silicon Valley in developing them. But it wants to be seen as an objective source of data, available to anyone.

“We started out [with] advocacy. And so I don’t think you can ever really fully shake that as an organization,” says Poulson. But he’s trying to strike a neutral tone in his reporting, letting the information speak for itself without commentary. “I find more and more that if you find something that’s actually interesting, you don’t have to really infer anything from it,” he says. “You can just state the facts, and that’s enough.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sean Captain is a business, technology, and science journalist based in North Carolina. Follow him on Twitter @seancaptain.

It’s Time to Break Up the Military-Industrial Complex
Despite the end of two decades of war, a congressional committee just voted to increase the Pentagon’s budget by $24 billion.

By Katrina vanden Heuvel
SEPTEMBER 21, 2021


President Joe Biden speaks from the Treaty Room in the White House about the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan. (RedhoodStudios / Shutterstock)

Two days after the United States withdrew from Afghanistan, the House Armed Services Committee voted to set the Pentagon’s 2022 budget. Given that US officials claim to be winding down decades-long wars, even maintaining current levels of military spending would seem a mystifying choice. But the committee didn’t just vote to maintain current spending levels. It voted to increase them by a whopping $24 billion.

Which prompts the question: Are we spending this money because we need to, even though our military budget is already higher than those of the next 11 largest countries combined? Or are there other incentives at play?

Ties between the government and the private sector—what President Dwight D. Eisenhower famously called the “military-industrial complex”—form the foundations of our national defense. Since 9/11, between one-third and half of the nearly $14 trillion the Pentagon has spent went to for-profit defense contractors. Dozens of members of Congress and their spouses own millions of dollars’ worth of stock in those companies.

Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.


Katrina vanden Heuvel is editorial director and publisher of The Nation, America’s leading source of progressive politics and culture. She served as editor of the magazine from 1995 to 2019.