THE NIGERIAN SCAM

EXCLUSIVE: Court document details US agencies defrauded by Abidemi Rufai

 The United States government had submitted 97,000-pages of material in court as part of the evidence to be used against the defendant.

The trial court in the US will make an order of forfeiture of the proceeds of the fraud during the sentencing of Abidemi Rufai, on Monday.


Abidemi Rufai [PHOTO CREDIT: @GaryKIRO7]

ByAmeh Ejekwonyilo
August 14, 2022

A court document has detailed 12 agencies of the United States government defrauded by Abidemi Rufai, a suspended aide of Governor Dapo Abiodun of Ogun State.

The document, obtained by PREMIUM TIMES, is an application filed by the US government at the District Court of Western Tacoma in Washington to seek the forfeiture of proceeds of the fraud.

This newspaper reported that the fraud proceeds amounted to over $600,000.

Mr Rufai, who has been in custody since his arrest at New York’s JFK airport in May 2021, pleaded guilty to the charges in May. At the time of his arrest, Mr Rufai was a Special Assistant to the Governor of Nigeria’s Ogun State.

In the plea bargain agreement he entered into with US prosecutors, Mr Rufai admitted using stolen identities to claim hundreds of thousands of dollars in pandemic-related unemployment benefits.

According to the plea agreement, since 2017, Mr Rufai unlawfully obtained the personal identifying information of more than 20,000 Americans to submit more than $2 million in claims for federally funded benefits under a variety of relief programmes. The various agencies involved paid out more than $600,000.

The largest amount of fraud was committed against the Washington State Employment Security Department, which paid out $350,763 in fraudulent pandemic unemployment claims to accounts controlled by Mr Rufai.

The prosecution says evidence to be produced at the hearing shows that Mr Rufai “participated in the submission of fraudulent claims seeking in excess of $2 million in federally-funded unemployment assistance”.

He was said to have also “submitted claims to the IRS seeking more than 675 refunds totalling more than $1.7 million, and submitted at least 19 fraudulent Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) applications.”

He also, according to the prosecution, “submitted 49 fraudulent disaster claims to FEMA, and personally obtained proceeds from his wire fraud scheme.”

The court document says he obtained the proceeds of the scheme, of at least the following amounts, from the 12 identified sources:Washington Employment Security Department: $350,763

Arkansas Division of Workforce Services: $10,166

Maine Department of Labour: $8,205

Michigan Unemployment Insurance Agency: $44,216

Minnesota Unemployment Insurance Program: $12,967

Missouri Department of Labor and Industrial Relations: $8,756

New York State Department of Labor: $44,524

Ohio Department of Job and Family Services: $3,132

Texas Workforce Commission: $14,154

Internal Revenue Service: $90,877

U.S. Small Business Administration: $10,000

Federal Emergency Management Administration: $6,500

The total, according to the court document, is about $604,260.

“Therefore, the United States is requesting an order of forfeiture in that amount, requesting the total proceeds defendant obtained from his wire fraud scheme,” the document states.

Background

On May 26, 2021, a grand jury approved an indictment charging the defendant with 15 offences.

The charges filed at U.S. District Court for Western Washington at Tacoma, comprise conspiracy to commit wire fraud, nine counts of wire fraud, and five counts of aggravated identity theft.

He was arraigned before the court on 25 June, 2021 when he denied the charges by pleading not guilty to all counts.

PREMIUM TIMES reported how, in preparation for trial, the United States government had submitted a 97,000-page material in court as part of the evidence to be used against the defendant.

“Discovery in this case is voluminous and complex,” the prosecution and the defence said in the document they jointly filed to ask for the postponement of the trial date that was then scheduled for 31 August, 2021.

The trial has been adjourned on different occasions while Mr Rufai remains in detention.

After his initial denial of the charges, the defendant admitted his guilt in the plea agreement filed in the court in May.

Prosecutors have agreed to recommend no more than 71 months (about six years) in prison for Mr Rufai.

The recommendation is not binding on U.S. District Judge Benjamin Settle, a court filing states.

The judge has fixed Monday, 15 August, for the sentencing. He will make the order of forfeiture of the proceeds of the fraud in his sentencing ruling.

Divers find wreckage of first US Navy destroyer sunk by enemy fire 

A GERMAN U BOAT IN WWI

By Andrew Wulfeck,
August 14, 2022 

The USS Jacob Jones location has been unknown since sinking on December 6, 1917.Naval History and Heritage Command

Divers off the coast of England believe they have found the wreckage of a U.S. destroyer that was sunk by a torpedo from a German submarine during the height of hostilities in World War I.

The U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command announced Friday that Darkstar, a group of expert divers from the UK, found wreckage belonging to the USS Jacob Jones off the southwestern tip of England.

The ship was tasked with patrolling and escorting convoys around the United Kingdom from May 1917 until its sinking on December 6.

The destroyer was 60 miles off the coast of England, near the English Channel, when a torpedo struck three feet below the water line.

Historians said in the eight minutes sailors had until the ship sank, less than half the crew found refuge aboard emergency rafts.

It is believed only 46 of the 110 crew members survived the attack.

The USS Jacob Jones sank off the coast of England after being struck by torpedoes.

Naval History and Heritage Command

The NHHC says after the sinking, a German U-boat commander took two prisoners of war from the chilly waters and radioed a nearby American base about the need for rescue ships.

Because of how quickly the over 1,000-ton destroyer sank, its final resting place was a mystery for over a century.

UK divers estimate the ship is at a depth of 400 feet and said they did not remove any items from the wreckage site during the recent excursion.

The surviving crew members of the USS Jacob Jones.

Naval History and Heritage Command

Historians consider the destroyer a workhorse and responsible for rescuing hundreds of survivors from torpedoed ships before it suffered a similar fate.

By the end of the war in November 1918, it is believed Germany was responsible for sinking more than 5,000 merchant ships and around 100 warships.

Historians say despite the efforts, German forces could not overcome the Allies’ sea capabilities and sheer numbers.

The divers intend to work with the U.S. Embassy to determine the next steps for the ship.

The Moral Atrocity of Factory Farming and Why We Must Not Look Away

Journalist Marina Bolotnikova argues that factory farming is a fascist industry in which violence and domination of animals is justified without argument.

Current Affairs
f11 August 2022 in INTERVIEWS

LONG READ

Current Affairs is proud to be a publication that takes animal rights seriously. From our lighthearted looks at manatees, ants, and cats, to our more serious pieces on the Orwellian language of the factory farming industry, the reason animal communication shouldn’t be the justification for animal rights, and the need for “Veticare For All,” we have always believed that left politics and animal welfare go together.

Marina Bolotnikova is a journalist who specializes in animal welfare and animal agriculture. In addition to Current Affairs, she has written for the Intercept, the Guardian, and Vox. She came on the Current Affairs podcast to talk to editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson about two articles she wrote for us. One was about the importance of direct action to the animal liberation movement. Most recently, she wrote about how the factory farming industry has gone from openly admitting that they view animals as profit-maximizing machines to pretending to care about being “humane.” This interview has been edited and condensed for grammar and clarity.

ROBINSON

You have written about animal rights, animal welfare, and animal agriculture. What is it about this topic that is so compelling that you have made it your beat?

 
BOLOTNIKOVA

The subject of factory farming and animal rights is something I’ve been obsessed with for most of my life. I was in maybe fifth or sixth grade when I decided I was going to be vegetarian. I don’t think I had ever even heard of factory farming. I just figured that if we don’t have to eat animals to live, then it’s wrong to do that. I started to read a book about how to be a vegetarian and that was the first time I saw a mention of factory farming. It said that animals raised for food are treated really badly. And I was horrified. I got more and more into it. I watched Earthlings, a documentary narrated by Joaquin Phoenix. I watched that probably when I was too young for it, some time when I was in high school. Like a lot of people who are really devoted to this issue, I found it compelling. It’s an obvious atrocity.

I’ve worked in journalism for a while. For the vast majority of that time, I really didn’t focus on animal agriculture at all. Even though it’s so important to me, out of self-protection, I chose not to have it be the subject of my work. I found it traumatizing to have to engage with it. It’s upsetting as a subject matter. And one has to confront the fact that most people don’t care about it as much as you do. So as a freelancer, I wrote about a lot of different things. And then pretty soon, my beat found me. I was listening to a podcast by Wayne Hsiung. He’s a prominent animal rights activist and has a podcast called The Green Pill. He had a guest on his show, Matt Johnson, who is a direct action activist in the group Direct Action Everywhere. And he was talking about facing trial in Iowa, facing up to eight years in prison for an undercover investigation he did into a horrific thing that happened at pork factory farms early in the pandemic in 2020.

There was a supply chain crisis in the meat industry because COVID was affecting slaughterhouse workers. There were shutdowns and there was reduced slaughterhouse capacity. As a result, there were all of these surplus animals that couldn’t be processed into food on time, and in the pork industry, a method that they use to quote unquote depopulate these animals—which is a euphemism for exterminating them—involves essentially cooking them to death using temperatures of around 140 or 150 degrees. They pump in heat and steam.

Matt Johnson took undercover recordings. He got this incredible two-hour recording of the pigs shrieking throughout this process. It was a huge media story and was really embarrassing for the pork industry. Instead of prosecuting the pork industry bosses who carried all of this out, the state of Iowa put Johnson on trial.

I thought, “Oh my God, obviously I have to cover this.” I live in Wisconsin; I’m within driving distance. I can cover this. What could I possibly be doing or writing about that’s more important than this? So that’s how it started. Before then, I had written a little bit about veganism and animal rights. But I got really into it after writing about Johnson’s case. I had a lot of momentum to keep going. I think it’s what I’m meant to be writing about.
ROBINSON

It’s very hard to think about and confront the reality of what is done on a mass scale to sentient creatures every day in this country and around the world. And it’s easy to try to avoid it. People don’t like thinking about it, and they don’t want to talk about it even though they kind of know at some level that there’s something bad that goes on or something horrible with animal agriculture. But something happens where, when you do confront it, instead of drawing further away, you decide you’re going to go closer, and you’re going to try to find the truth. Once you do that, it makes it difficult to go back to looking away. When you start to peel back the layers of what is done, you realize that there is a deep horror that is going on all the time. I think it becomes hard to justify to yourself not working on exposing this.
BOLOTNIKOVA

I think that’s very true. It’s really under-covered. This is kind of perverse, but it means it’s not that difficult to distinguish yourself in the field. I certainly wish I had more competition and that there were more people interested in factory farming from the perspective of the animals. There is more interest in it from a climate perspective.
ROBINSON

When you meet someone who hasn’t thought about animal welfare or who has spent their entire life looking away or trying not to confront this, what do you wish that such people knew about what actually goes on?
BOLOTNIKOVA

A lot of people have this idea that raising animals for food is natural, that it’s what we have always done. How could we go on without it? I have a friend who is really smart, but he said this strange thing about how undoing animal agriculture would somehow be a backwards development for human civilization. People have this idea that it’s the circle of life, right? And farming and slaughtering animals is just what life and death is all about. The deeper you get into understanding how the industry works, the more clear it becomes that that’s a preposterous idea. You know, it’s almost surreal. Factory farming gets its name because these places are factories. Animals never see the outdoors. They don’t touch grass.

In the pork industry, I think one of the most vivid and shocking things is the treatment of female pigs. They’re locked in tiny crates that are barely bigger than their bodies. The crates are designed to prevent them from being able to turn around. It really limits their mobility. They’re unable to turn around their whole life. They’re artificially inseminated to produce litter after litter of piglets who are soon taken away from them and slaughtered at six months of age. You can see images of giant warehouses full of these gestation crates side by side. Aerial views. It’s really haunting. These are animals who never reproduce naturally in their lives. This practice couldn’t be farther from “natural.”

People may not know this, but the number of land animals slaughtered for food is almost unfathomable. It’s almost 10 billion, just in the United States, in one year. That’s a crazy number. I hate the word natural because it’s meaningless. But if people were sustaining themselves on what they think of as any kind of “natural” animal population, it wouldn’t approach anything near 10 billion animals available to eat. Pigs are known to be really smart and social animals. They’re often compared to dogs. I think there are reasons to doubt this kind of hierarchy of intelligence. But there’s no doubt that pigs are similar to us in many ways. They’re social and active. To immobilize and lock them up and snatch away their newborns—they bond with newborns just like humans do—is just really the most diabolical thing imaginable.
ROBINSON

When you start to try and empathize, to think what it’s like to be these creatures, and when you start to accept that they have emotions—they feel pain and fear—and then when you start to look at what they are put through, taken together with the huge numbers that you cited, you start to feel a sense of deep disquiet and disturbance. No wonder you want to pull away from it. If this is so “natural,” then why do none of us want to go anywhere near it or even contemplate it? Why have we built a system that we cannot even bear to look at or think about?
BOLOTNIKOVA

I think that’s a great way of putting it. The industry definitely benefits from and promulgates these narratives about what’s natural. There are these scam labels on animal products: “humanely raised.” Companies are profiting from exploiting this image that people have of a pre-industrial kind of agriculture that I would argue never really existed. But these mythologies are really powerful.
ROBINSON

They’ve got pictures of the green pastures on the label.
BOLOTNIKOVA

I just continue to be surprised by how dishonest people are willing to be. You know what I mean? I just don’t expect people to lie or to do things like that for profit. And one of the things that’s been different for me about reporting on animal agriculture is that I have to get in contact with and correspond with people who represent and defend the industry. It can drive you crazy sometimes to think, How are human beings doing this? It’s evil at its most banal.

Your latest article for Current Affairs discusses euphemisms and propaganda and the way in which the true atrocities that are conducted are covered with nice and pleasant words. Depopulation is a euphemism for extermination. In the article, there’s this incredible ad about sows as mothers.
BOLOTNIKOVA

It’s from United Animal Health. People should read that article. Farm animal research is devoted to breeding farm animals and manipulating their bodies in a way that maximizes productivity. That’s the goal. And that’s another thing that makes this idea of animal agriculture being natural, just bizarre and perverse. Every part of the system is human engineered.
ROBINSON

Talk a little bit more about the way in which the truth is obscured through elaborate euphemisms.
BOLOTNIKOVA

Euphemisms. This is what you were referring to with the extermination method. Matt Johnson got audio of the extermination method where pigs were being roasted to death. That’s a method that’s called ventilation shutdown. It’s farm animal extermination. It’s also being used widely in the poultry industry this year to exterminate animals due to bird flu. There’s really no question that it’s a horrible way to die. It’s death by heatstroke, which is understood as probably one of the worst animal cull methods. And yet, there’s this whole infrastructure of animal science research departments and poultry science departments that exists to create research for the meat industry to validate whatever they want to do and slap the label “humane” onto anything. That’s something I’ve been kind of surprised by. The label ‘humane’ is slapped onto ventilation shutdown with no justification whatsoever. By “humane” they just mean that it’s something the industry wants to do. So we’re going to say it’s humane enough. There’s no need to even think very deeply about it. It’s just a way of rubber stamping things.

This kind of research becomes the basis for guidelines by respected institutions like the American Veterinary Medical Association, which then becomes the basis for USDA policy on whether it’s okay to cull farm animals. It’s garbage all the way down. No one cares. There’s no meaningful political pressure put on federal regulators.
ROBINSON

For example, in this article that you did for the Intercept in April about the ventilation shutdown for killing chickens, there is this “research” that took place at North Carolina State University, a really innocuous-sounding place. There’s a video embedded in the article. I’ll just quote your description of it here: “A hen, hooked up to electrodes, stands alone in a glass cage. She starts panting, thrashing, slumping over, and lunging at the enclosure’s walls, appearing to look for an escape. Outside the cage, researchers point, take notes, and watch her die.” Everyone should watch this video. Unless you’re perhaps one of these researchers, someone who has desensitized themselves to the suffering of animals—if you’re a normal, empathetic person and you really put yourself in the place of this chicken, you see the extreme levels of pain that this method of killing causes. But you also notice that without the video, this kind of bland, bureaucratic language of “VSD +” (ventilation shutdown) would not give you any sense of the reality of the pain that is being inflicted here.
BOLOTNIKOVA

Absolutely. North Carolina is a big agriculture state. North Carolina State University has a lot of agricultural research. The Poultry Science Department was where these experiments took place in order to validate this torture method for killing egg-laying hens. The Poultry Science Department advertises its ties to industry. It reminds me of when people make fun of the Soviet economists whose work validated the Soviet economy. That’s what this is. It’s interesting to see this kind of doublespeak in this North Carolina State University research paper. They use the term “humane” and don’t define it. It’s just thrown in there. It’s kind of what consumers expect, but it’s just thrown in there. It’s fake.
ROBINSON

In your most recent article, you document the way in which things used to be a little more honest. You found these incredible notes from industry publications from a couple decades back where they would say quite directly that the pig is a machine and that you are trying to maximize the outputs and minimize the inputs. And that is the way you ought to think about this creature. And that is the only thing you need to think about this creature. It is a piece of a mechanical process. Now there has been this kind of shift—not in methods, which are clearly still horrendous and based on widespread torture—but a shift in the way in which these things are presented in order to add a veneer of the humane and the compassionate.
BOLOTNIKOVA

Yes. You’re referring to pork industry journals from the ‘70s that I quoted. They were fascinating because they just directly instruct the reader to treat the animal just like a machine in a factory. I was just amazed when I first saw that earlier this year. I thought it was fake. Well, I didn’t really think it was fake, but part of me doubted it and I was like, Could this really be real? The factory farm model has really taken over the pork industry since the ‘70s. The idea presented to farmers was almost as though it was genuinely novel. Throw out all the ideas you have about animals and animal farming and think of it as like a car factory or something. Since there was no internet, I doubt anyone other than a pork farmer would have been seeing these things. They didn’t need to worry about the public seeing these things. It’s a great resource for seeing how the industry operates.
ROBINSON

You have this fascinating point in the article where you draw parallels with fascism and Donald Trump. You describe how the system of factory farming is kind of like a fascist industry. I’ve written about Holocaust comparisons, which I think everyone needs to be careful of; it’s easy for them to be offensive. But we see the same tendency to ignore the suffering of those who have been deemed not to matter. And we also see the methods of industrial killing. The system operates so that the weakest are just trampled upon and killed and treated as having no value except to the degree that their lives are useful for those who exploit them. Factory farming is like that kind of system perfected.
BOLOTNIKOVA

Yes. I think it absolutely is a fascist industry. And I think I took this idea from a philosopher named John Sanbonmatsu. He’s a friend of mine and a very smart critical animal studies scholar. I think I sent you one of his books. It’s a collection called Critical Theory and Animal Liberation. It’s a great collection. It was really influential to me. In the introduction, he talks about this idea that our relationship with non-human animals is a kind of fascism. It’s violent. It has its own justification. And it really resonated with me much more than this kind of bloodless animal welfare/animal rights philosophy that you read. I don’t want to say anything negative about anyone working in that space, but it’s like, Let’s talk about animals as though they’re just inputs for pleasure and pain, utility or whatever. Fascism is a great model for understanding animal agriculture and animal exploitation more broadly. You know, if someone’s talking about animal suffering, or factory farming on Twitter or in real life, someone will just laugh or be like, “bacon.” That’s an example, right? You don’t need reasons or real arguments or any kind of reasonable discourse. It’s just violence and domination that justifies itself.

Recently I read David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth. One of the things he says early in the book is, I’m never going to be vegan. If you’re at the top of the food chain, you should flaunt it. That’s almost verbatim what he said. And that’s another example of what I mean. It’s domination justifying itself. Might makes right.
ROBINSON

He’s an intelligent person. But you hear people who have normally somewhat rigorous standards for the arguments that they put forth just abandoning all of that and saying things that obviously don’t hold up to scrutiny. Being at the top of the food chain? How does that in any way respond to this serious moral question of whether tearing away a pig’s little piglets from her is justifiable? You can only make these arguments if you don’t talk about what we’re really talking about, or if you talk about the eating of animals on your plate and not the way they’re treated somewhere far away. And that gets me to the article that you wrote for us about direct action. One of the only ways in which we can start talking about what we’re really talking about, is to see things like that video that you have in the article of the chicken being killed. You write about the critical importance of animal welfare activists who are willing to violate laws in order to expose the truth.
BOLOTNIKOVA

Earlier, I was talking about the trial of the activist Matt Johnson in Iowa. The germ for this piece kind of came out of that. Matt Johnson was in Iowa facing trial, and many of his fellow activists from Direct Action Everywhere were there to support and protest. They used their time there to do more investigations and more work on the ground. Iowa is ground zero for pork factory farming.

There was a group of activists driving around rural Iowa. There are pork factory farms everywhere, and they passed by one. It’s pretty normal outside of pork farms to see piles of dead bodies. They go through so many animal bodies—it’s the cost of doing business. So you often see animals outside that have been discarded because they’re runts. And they found a piglet still alive and breathing. The temperature was in the single digits, and there was this piglet there covered in blood and among these other bodies. Horrible. These conversations were happening over Signal and there were a lot of messages going back and forth in real time. I was deeply affected by it. And they rushed this piglet to the vet. He survived for a few days but ended up dying. It was a sad story. Maybe the piglet could have survived and lived out his life at a farm sanctuary if they’d gotten to it sooner.

The story of Charlie the piglet impacted me very deeply. It was the opening to the piece I wrote. It’s the most tragic story you could imagine about this system, right? This little baby animal was unsuccessfully killed and thrown in the trash alive. No doubt this happens routinely. If it weren’t for activists who risk criminalization to trespass and document this stuff, we would have no idea that it happens. Most people will never get close to a factory farm or get close to the animals in them and see what it’s like. Having activists who do it is a critical antidote to the industry lies and euphemisms and abstractions.

It’s a way of staying close to the powerless and vulnerable—beings that are utterly and totally crushed in this system—and seeing what really happens to them. I think it’s incredibly powerful.
ROBINSON

The industry is willing to wage war on activists to prevent their practices from being exposed, and is willing to wage war on any effort that, in any way, requires them to adopt meaningful, humane standards that might be costly. These are corporations that are ruthless in trying to maintain the very worst and most disturbing aspects of the system they’ve created.
BOLOTNIKOVA

And the absurd severity of the criminal charges brought against activists-–it definitely says a lot about how much of a threat the industry thinks that they are, and also how much influence they have over prosecutors. There’s another trial coming up in September in Utah that I will be writing about. It’s a similar story. Activists are facing years in prison for going to a massive Smithfield pig factory farm in Utah. I’m not positive, but it might be the single biggest factory farm in the U.S. It has massive rows of mother pigs and gestation crates. They went in either 2017 or 2018 and took out two small, sick piglets, arguing they were on the verge of dying and wouldn’t have survived. They’re arguing that the animals wouldn’t have had value to the industry anyway considering the condition they were in. If this were a normal situation, it wouldn’t even be worth the criminal justice system’s time. Utah has a law. I think if you steal $500 or less of property, it’s a misdemeanor unless it’s a farm animal.

One thing I haven’t mentioned is that the charges against Matt Johnson were dropped at the very last minute. It was surprising. We’ll probably never know for sure why, but I think it had to do with the media attention that it was attracting.
ROBINSON

Having a big public trial is a way to draw attention to the practice and I’m sure they’re constantly trying to figure out what’s in their interest. If they go too far, it might actually help the activists’ cause. Let’s finish by talking briefly about the way in which animal welfare is often not treated as an issue of sufficient seriousness by leftists or environmentalists, people who have values where you would think this would naturally be an issue that was at the core of their politics.
BOLOTNIKOVA

I think it’s also feminized, so it can make me a little self-conscious if people perceive it as this kind of unserious womanly thing and not a real political issue. It’s been really hard for animal advocates to build political power; it’s still such an isolated movement. A few years ago, California passed a ballot measure, one of the strongest farm animal protection laws in the country. It bans the gestation crates that we’ve been talking about and other kinds of extreme confinement on factory farms. That’s called Prop 12. It took a massive amount of effort and organizing to get that on the ballot and passed. It looks likely that the Supreme Court will strike it down. I haven’t seen much of anyone outside of the animal movement stand up for it. And I think it’s really sad. But I don’t want to be all doom and gloom. I think giving up is not an option.

I think animal advocates have gotten much better at not being so single issue. Prop 12 passed by an overwhelming margin. Well, it depends on how you define overwhelming. I think it passed by 63 percent of voters by ballot measure. That suggests that people want farm animals to be treated well. But when it’s time to actually defend these laws from the Supreme Court or to hold politicians accountable to enforce them, you don’t see a lot of people show up beyond those in the animal movement.
ROBINSON

What’s hopeful is that when these practices are brought to light, most moral human beings are revolted by them. It requires a hell of a lot of effort and money on behalf of the meat industry to keep the public in the dark. It would be a much more pessimistic and sad situation if it were the case that everyone did know and didn’t care. The fact that people don’t know opens the possibility that we can, in fact, through a more widespread discussion and through activism build some more serious public opposition.

The Correction
What This Mother Jones Story Got Wrong on Primate Testing
By Marina Bolotnikova
August 10, 2022

Jo-Anne McArthur / We Animals Media

For years, U.S. scientific institutions have been warning of a “shortage” of monkeys used in animal testing, as though nonhuman primates were like the bottles of Sriracha that have gone missing from supermarket shelves. Because scientists are one of the few classes of people that reporters regard with credulity, most science journalism about primate experimentation has recapitulated this narrative.

I was struck by a particular recent case of this in a long story by Jackie Flynn Mogensen on the lab monkey shortage in Mother Jones, a magazine that usually shines a light on abuses of power and its victims, unless those victims are not human.

Last month, another piece of primate news surfaced, which got almost no media coverage — Long-tailed (also known as cynomolgus) macaques are now endangered, and a primary reason is that they’re abducted from their habitats in Southeast Asia and trafficked for biomedical research in rich countries. This species makes up the vast majority of primates imported to the U.S. for vivisection.

If we’re “following the science,” to paraphrase a tweet by my husband, are we supposed to believe conservation science or the biomedical community? Only the latter appears content to look the other way as wild-caught primates are shipped to their labs.

The Mother Jones story acknowledges — as animal experimenters do — that using wild monkeys instead of lab-bred ones is bad. But it doesn’t put the blame where it obviously lies — on the animal testing industry, for driving up the price for a macaque to as much as $20,000 per head.

Under those circumstances, of course wild animals are going to be kidnapped and laundered as purpose-bred. Cutting off macaque imports until real oversight is in place is not an idea that’s ever considered, nor, I suspect, would it be embraced by people who believe in animal testing at any cost.

In the story, Mogensen asks Deepak Kaushal, the head of the federally-funded Southwest National Primate Research Center in Texas, about allegations from animal rights activists on the abuse of lab animals. “As employees are working really hard to take care of the animals, sometimes mistakes are made. And these are very rare,” he replied.

Whether or not this is true is not probed any further, but finding violations of the Animal Welfare Act (which is already notoriously weak and under-enforced) at primate labs is trivially easy. In any case, Deepak Kaushal just last week admitted to faking data in applications for taxpayer-funded research grants. So much for his credibility.

The deeper problem with the Mother Jones story, though, is one that I worry is too hard to bridge. Even journalists, the people who are supposed to question entrenched narratives and surface the stories of the powerless, are too afraid to face what it means to treat animals as lab equipment. Because Mogensen doesn’t articulate any theoretical limits to primate testing, it reads as suggesting that she’s okay with using monkeys this way if it can benefit humans in any way at all. She makes much of the harassment and fear faced by vivisectors, but not once does she consider the terror of a macaque who has the same needs for love and safety that we do, torn from her relatives, caged and not permitted to have any life at all except as an appendage to human desires.

I was reminded of a quote by Madeline Krasno, a former student employee at the University of Wisconsin’s primate lab who’s now an anti-vivisection activist: “When you work in an environment where life is viewed as disposable, you either start to believe it’s true or dissociate and emotionally shut down to survive.”

Equal pay deal for US women's soccer approved by judge
By Associated Press | 12h ago

United States' Megan Rapinoe celebrates after winning the CONCACAF Women's Championship final soccer match against Canada in Monterrey, Mexico, Monday, July 18, 2022. (AP Photo/Fernando Llano)

The proposed $24 million settlement between U.S. women soccer players and the sport’s American governing body was given preliminary approval Thursday by a federal judge, who scheduled a Dec. 5 hearing for final approval.

U.S. District Judge R. Gary Klausner granted the motion for approval filed by the players.

“Most significantly, the unopposed settlement agreement accomplishes the plaintiffs’ goal for litigation: equal pay,” he wrote. “The court is satisified that the settlement is a fair and reasonable resolution.”

Players, including Megan Rapinoe, Becky Sauerbrunn and Alex Morgan, filed a complaint with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in April 2016. The players sued three years later, seeking damages under the federal Equal Pay Act and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

The sides settled the working conditions portion in December 2020, dealing with issues such as charter flights, accommodations and playing surfaces.

They agreed in February to settle the remainder for $22 million to be split into individual amounts proposed by the players. In addition, the settlement calls for the U.S. Soccer Federation to establish a fund with $2 million to benefit the players in their post-soccer careers and charitable efforts aimed at growing the sport for women.

Klausner wrote the parties agreed that settlement funds will be distributed to players based on playing time and their lawyers anticipated requesting “no more than approximately 30% of the common fund.”

The settlement was contingent on the USSF reaching collective bargaining agreements to pay its men’s and women’s teams equally. The federation in May announced separate labor contracts through December 2028 with the unions for both national teams.


Klausner told the USSF to send the players’ lawyers a list of eligible players within 14 days and then gave the players’ lawyers 21 days after that to notify eligible players of the settlement.

Klausner set a Dec. 1 deadline for the filing of motions for attorneys’ fees and for final approval.

US Secretary of State came to SA, blinked and left

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, accompanied by South Africa's Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor (not seen), speaks to members of the media after meeting together at the South African Department of International Relations and Cooperation in Pretoria.

 Andrew Harnik/POOL/AFP

In yet another “lightning diplomacy” visit, the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken (aka Minister of Foreign Affairs), spent about 10 working hours in South Africa on August 8. His mission was to break South Africa’s resistance to joining the US-led economic war on Russia.

Biden’s America wants South Africa to impose total sanctions against Russia and demands that South Africa should condemn Russia’s occupation of the eastern and southern parts of Ukraine. Like German Chancellor Scholz before him, during his visit on May 24, Blinken failed to deliver.

His South African counterpart, Naledi Pandor, reminded Blinken that international law requires conflicts to be resolved peacefully by the means of diplomacy and without the threat or use of force. Funding and arming one side in a military conflict can never end the fighting and the devastation of war.

At the press conference, Blinken looked tired when he referred to his visit to the Hector Pieterson Museum. Maybe he had come to realise that apartheid existed because it was armed and bankrolled by the West.

Sitting next to a stoic but still motherly, bemused Pandor, Blinken asked: “But if we allow a big country to bully a smaller one, to simply invade it and take its territory, then it’s going to be an open season not just in Europe but around the world.” Who doesn’t remember the schoolyard fun when a little guy is induced to insult and kick up dust against a bigger one, to provoke a reaction that can be used to get a teacher to reprimand and punish the unloved big guy?

Blinken’s imagery of an “open season” implies the coming of a “hunting season”. It hints at some stereotype “Russian Slayer” and it is childish and reflective of the “flat” view of the world that is so characteristic of American politicians.

The only “open season” known in Africa is the continually unhindered access to cobalt and other minerals that are critical for all battery-powered phones and vehicles. They are mined in sub-Saharan Africa at near zero cost, with reliance on the worst forms of child labour and exploitation.

Coinciding with Blinken’s visit, the US State Department issued a document titled “US Strategy Towards sub-Saharan Africa. It contains two critical and fundamental statements. First, the document puts on record the Biden administration’s decision to “work with the Congress on the future of Agoa (African Growth and Opportunity Act), which expires in 2025”.

No undertaking is given that the administration will defend the extension of Agoa, let alone make its continuation a cornerstone of future US-Africa relations. Agoa, by giving preferential access to the US markets to goods manufactured in southern Africa, is essential for the continuation of South Africa’s small but vital manufacturing industries, in particular car manufacturing.

By implication, Biden’s Africa Policy document raises the question of “the future of Agoa”. It is thus inviting sub-Saharan Africa to look with great urgency for alternative arrangements within the BRICS. The other key policy direction given in the US Strategy Toward Sub-Saharan Africa document concerns the expansion of the work of Africom, the United States Africa Command.

Says the document: “In line with the 2022 National Defence Strategy, the Department of Defence will engage with African partners to expose and highlight the risks of negative PRC and Russian activities in Africa …. In addition, we will engage the US defence private sector via Prosper Africa to support sustainable technology and energy solutions for African militaries.”

This must be read together with the promise inserted on page 7 to “counter harmful activities by the PRC, Russia, and other foreign actors”. In effect, Biden’s new Africa Policy has added to the usual development aid conditionalities of a particularly American view of democracy, the countering of “harmful activities by China and Russia and others”.

Blinken’s visit to South Africa, the DRC and Rwanda happens against the backdrop of visits in May by the new head of Africom, General Stephen Townsend, to Somaliland, Somalia, Djibouti, Kenya, Angola and Rwanda. They all served the objective of expanding the US military footprint and influence in the officer ranks of defence forces throughout Africa.

Townsend is well experienced in underpinning American interests with a military influence, having been posted to Grenada, Panama and Haiti in the 1980s and 1990s and later in Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria. In Somaliland, Townsend secured the return of 500 US special forces to Somali soil, after they had been withdrawn by president Donald Trump in early 2021.

The US contingent will support and train the African Union Transition Mission in Somalia (Atmis). In Djibouti, Townsend welcomed Major General Jami Shawley as commander of the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA).

Shawley is a US Air Force helicopter pilot and the first female officer to oversee the 5 000 US forces stationed at Camp Lemonnier, in a continual stand-off with China’s People’s Liberation Army’s naval base in Djibouti. In Kenya, Townsend promoted the deployment of US attack drones from Kenyan soil to hit and “eliminate” (extra-judicially of course), suspected Al-Shabaab followers in Somalia.

In Angola, Townsend’s boosted naval co-operation with the US by assuring President João Lourenço, shortly before the forthcoming August elections, of unwavering US support. To oversee the elections, Congolese-born US Ambassador Tulinabo Mushingi is in Luanda.

A former executive director for Hillary Clinton, Mushingi has been the Democrats’ man in Africa for many years, in Ethiopia, Mozambique, Morocco, Tanzania, Burkina Faso and Senegal. Biden’s Africa policy is presenting itself as a military expansion strategy.

Forgotten is the promise of President Barack Obama, made during his 2013 speech in Cape Town, to bring “light to darkness” by investing a total of $16 billion into the region’s power grids. Instead of more light, southern Africa experienced more power blackouts. America’s new foreign relations with Africa appear more exclusionary and forceful than ever.

* This article was published first in www.theafrican.co.za

** Thomashausen is a German attorney and Professor Emeritus for International Law at Unisa

More on this

Women’s Month: Women in science lauded by Naledi Pandor and her US counterpart

US strategy for Africa just a stunt to smear China, says Chinese embassy

Everything you need to know about the US Strategy Toward Sub-Saharan Africa

Blinken blind to China’s positive influence in Africa

President Cyril Ramaphosa receives courtesy call by US Secretary of State Antony J Blinken

DNC on the 87th Anniversary of Social Security

GOP STILL FIGHTING IT AS SOCIALISM

AUGUST 14, 2022

DNC Chair Jaime Harrison and DNC Senior Council Chair Steve Regenstreif issued the following statement marking the 87th anniversary of the signing of legislation that established Social Security:

Eighty-seven years ago, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed legislation that established Social Security. In the years since, this program has kept millions of seniors, children, people with disabilities, and low-income Americans out of poverty. It is one of our nation’s greatest achievements.

The GOP’s plan to cut Social Security — which goes hand-in-hand with their proposals to cut Medicare and threaten our health care, and their opposition to lowering costs for families — is proof that every step of the way, Republicans side with the special interests and push an extreme MAGA agenda that costs the American people.

While Republicans would put Social Security on the chopping block, Democrats will always fight to protect it. We will work to improve the benefits it provides and build on the legacy of this essential government program. We know that Social Security is too important to millions of Americans to do anything else.

Saudi Aramco Sees Profits Jump 90% in 2nd Quarter Compared to 2021

Saudi Arabia is currently producing around 10 million barrels per day, with much of that exported to Asia and its largest customer, China.

By Aya Batrawy •

AP Photo/Amr Nabil
FILE – Saudi Aramco engineers and journalists look at the Hawiyah Natural Gas Liquids Recovery Plant in Hawiyah, in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia on June 28, 2021. Saudi oil company Aramco’s half-year profits peaked just shy of $88 billion for the first half of the year as oil prices remain high globally. The oil and gas company, which is nearly entirely state-owned, said Sunday, Aug. 14, 2022, it also saw a 90% surge in net profits for the second quarter of 2022 compared to the same time last year.

Saudi energy company Aramco said Sunday its profits jumped 90% in the second quarter compared to the same time last year, helping its half-year earnings reach nearly $88 billion. The increase is a boon for the kingdom and the crown prince's spending power as people around the world pay higher oil prices at the pump.

Aramco's net profits for the first half of the year were helped by strong second-quarter earnings that hit $48.4 billion — a figure higher than the first full half year of 2021, when profits reached just $47 billion.

The oil and gas company, which is nearly entirely state-owned by Saudi Arabia, said this sets a new quarterly earnings record for Aramco since it first floated around 5% of the company on the Saudi stock market in late 2019.

Aramco said profits were helped by higher crude oil prices and volumes sold, as well as higher refining margins. The vast oil reserves belonging to Saudi Arabia are among the cheapest to pump and produce in the world.

Aramco’s financial health is crucial to Saudi Arabia’s stability. Despite years of efforts to diversify the economy, the kingdom continues to rely heavily on oil and gas sales for revenue in order to pay public sector wages, subsidies, generous benefits to Saudi citizens, keep up its defense spending and carry out Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's Vision 2030 infrastructure goals.

Brent crude has been trading at around $100 a barrel, even as OPEC, led by Saudi Arabia, and non-OPEC producers, led by Russia, have incrementally increased production levels that had been cut during the height of the pandemic.

Aramco President CEO Amin Nasser said the latest financial results reflect increasing demand for oil, even as countries around the world, including Saudi Arabia, pledge to cut their carbon emissions to avert catastrophic global warming levels driven by the burning of fossil fuels.

“The world is calling out for affordable, reliable energy and we are answering that call," he said, before adding that Aramco expects oil demand to continue to grow for the rest of the decade, despite downward economic pressures and inflation.

“At a time when the world is worrying about energy security, you are investing in the future of our business. Our customers know that whatever happens, Aramco will always deliver,” Nasser said in a short video released with the financial results.

Saudi Arabia is currently producing around 10 million barrels per day, with much of that exported to Asia and its largest customer, China. The crown prince said last month that the kingdom's maximum production capacity is 13 million barrels per day, and Aramco said it is working to expand its scope to one day reach that ceiling.

The company will pay a dividend of $18.8 billion for the second quarter to shareholders, as it has promised to do since its IPO. The higher profits bode well for the Saudi government, which is the main shareholder of Aramco.

Copyright AP - Associated Press

IRAN LOVES FOX & TUCKER

Ex- (DEMOCRAT) Congresswoman: 

Biden Wants Regime Change in Russia

TEHRAN (FNA)- US President Joe Biden is using the conflict in Ukraine to engineer “regime change in Russia” and feed the military-industrial complex, former US representative and 2020 presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard told Fox News viewers on Friday.

Meanwhile, America’s European allies are paying the price as Biden builds his “New World Order”.

Filling in for Fox host Tucker Carlson on Friday, the former Congresswoman from Hawaii issued a scathing condemnation of the Biden administration’s anti-Russia sanctions, which she said have only hurt the US and Europe while Russia rakes in record energy profits.

“Europe is in a massive energy crisis right now,” she stated, citing record power prices in France, public lighting cutbacks and impending heating shortages in Germany, and restrictions on home and business energy usage in the UK and Spain

“Why is all this happening?” she continued, before answering, “Because of Joe Biden’s sanctions, which are nothing short of a modern day siege. This is a supply problem that Joe Biden created, one that Russia is now profiting from.”

The US and EU have imposed multiple rounds of economic sanctions on Russia following the launch of Moscow’s military operation in Ukraine in February. The US has also ended imports of Russian oil and gas, while the EU has begun a phased withdrawal from Russia’s energy exports. However, with several European countries refusing to pay for Russian gas in rubles – as Moscow has demanded – and with the bloc’s sanctions impeding maintenance on gas pipelines, the EU, which depends on Russia for around 40% of its gas, is facing soaring energy costs and inflation.

Meanwhile, Russia is expected to double its gas profits this year.

With the US concurrently pumping tens of billions of dollars worth of weapons into Ukraine, Gabbard argued that the conflict there has “never been about morality”.

“It’s not about the people of Ukraine or ‘protecting democracy’,” she declared, adding, “This is about regime change in Russia and exploiting this war to strengthen NATO and feed the military-industrial complex.”

“To Joe Biden, it’s even about bringing about a new world order. ‘We’ve got to lead it,’ he says, and he’s trying to do just that, even if it means bringing us to the brink of nuclear catastrophe,” she said.

Biden has publicly stated that Russian President Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power”, a comment that the White House later had to backtrack on. In March, the US leader also told reporters that “there’s going to be a new world order out there, and we’ve got to lead it”, a statement later echoed by his advisor, Brian Deese, who described high energy costs as the price of forging “the future of the liberal world order”.

Gabbard has long opposed US involvement in and funding of foreign conflicts. During her four terms in office from 2013 to 2021, she advocated a combination of dialogue with America’s rival superpowers and a hardline policy on terrorism. She ran for the Democratic Party’s nomination in the runup to the 2020 election, and was accused without evidence of being a “puppet” of Russia by some media outlets and her fellow Democrats.

Since leaving Congress in 2021, Gabbard has continued to serve in the Army Reserves, while appearing regularly as a guest on Fox News.

REIFICATION

What are Our Phones Doing to Us?

Are smartphones destroying our focus, our relationships, and even our humanity?

Thomas Moller-Nielsen

CURRENT AFFAIRS
filed 14 August 2022 in TECH

LONG READ

Let’s consider a few data points on America’s relationship with the smartphone. First, a recent survey published by SellCell, a cellphone price comparison company, found that 54 percent of Americans answered “yes” to the question “Would you rather spend time on your phone than in your partner’s company?” with 71 percent reporting that they do in fact spend more personal time with their phone than their partner. Another survey, conducted by independent reviewing site Reviews.org, found that 41 percent of Americans “say they’d rather give up sex for a year than give up their phone for a year.” Should one doubt the methodological rigor of SellCell, gold-standard research firm Pew found in 2021 that over half of Americans say their partner is often or sometimes distracted by their phone when they are trying to have a conversation with them, and that nearly one in three adults now says they are “almost constantly” online. It is not difficult to find plenty more troubling statistics: most people now sleep next to their phones, never turn their phones off, report a sense of panic when their battery is low, check their phones within minutes of waking up, are uneasy leaving their phones at home, touch their phones thousands of times a day, and use their phones while using the toilet.

Most 18-year-olds admit to having texted while driving. Nearly half of people sometimes text others who are in the same house. A similar number consider their phones their most valuable possessions, and polls have found anywhere between half and three-fourths of Americans confessing to phone addiction. Nearly half of Americans reported spending 5-6 hours a day on their phones. Furthermore, the number of people who don’t have smartphones is growing smaller and smaller: 85 percent of Americans now report having a smartphone, while 97 percent own a cellphone of some kind.

The reports about the way smartphones have impacted romantic relationships are perhaps the most disquieting. Though, arguably, sexual desire and love for one’s partner aren’t drives quite as biologically basic as the will to stay alive, there is no disputing the fact that for the vast majority of people, love and sexual desire are—or, until relatively recently were—extraordinarily deeply entrenched aspects of their identities. (Indeed, even the small number of Americans who are asexual, and who thus experience little to no sexual attraction to others, are often still willing partners in romantic relationships.)

One might be tempted to attribute many of the extraordinary recent findings to the coronavirus pandemic, which temporarily made everyone much more online. But reports of the replacement of relationships with phones began streaming in years ago. (NBC News, 2011: “Survey: One third would rather give up sex than phone”; CNBC, 2013: “Sex or Smartphone? Women Prefer the Gadgets”; Bloomberg, 2015: “Give Up Sex or Your Mobile Phone? Third of Americans Forgo Sex.”) Furthermore, the decline in sexual frequency is well documented. A study in the Archives of Sexual Behavior found that “American adults had sex about nine fewer times per year in the early 2010s compared to the late 1990s.” That might not sound like too much of a difference, but the numbers are particularly extreme among younger people, as another study in the same journal showed: “Between 2009 and 2018, the proportion of adolescents reporting no sexual activity, either alone or with partners, rose from 28.8 percent to 44.2 percent among young men and from 49.5 percent in 2009 to 74 percent among young women.” One of the study authors, Tsung-chieh (Jane) Fu of the Indiana University School of Public Health, explained that “for young people, computer games, increasing social media use, video games—something is replacing that time.”

What the existing data points seem to show is that vast swaths of the U.S. population would prefer to spend time with their personalized high-tech gadgets rather than attempt to foster meaningful human relationships and/or engage in one of life’s most biologically basic activities. Is this healthy? We might be tempted to dismiss the trends as benign, or the product of individual choices to maximize happiness. But as journalist Glenn Greenwald wrote in a 2020 article called “The Social Fabric of the U.S. is Fraying Severely, if Not Unravelling, “there are “very troubling [new] data that reflect intensifying pathologies in the U.S. population—not moral or allegorical sicknesses but mental, emotional, psychological, and scientifically proven sickness.” Greenwald cited a 2020 Centers for Disease Control (CDC) survey, which assessed the mental health of American adults. Among other discoveries, the report found that 10.7 percent of American adults, equating to roughly 20 million Americans, had “seriously considered suicide” in the past 30 days—that is, “not fleetingly considered [suicide] as a momentary nor thought about it ever in their lifetime,” as Greenwald elaborated, “but seriously considered suicide at least once in the past thirty days.” Among younger Americans, the figures were even more disturbing: more than a quarter (25.5 percent) of American adults between the ages of 18-24, and 16 percent of adults between the ages of 25-44, had thought seriously about taking their own lives during the previous month. Greenwald commented:

“In a remotely healthy society, one that provides basic emotional needs to its population, suicide and serious suicidal ideation are rare events. It is anathema to the most basic human instinct: the will to live. A society in which such a vast swath of the population is seriously considering it as an option is one which is anything but healthy, one which is plainly failing to provide its citizens the basic necessities for a fulfilling life.”

It is certainly possible to point to the pandemic to explain some of the increase in anxiety and depression. But as U.S. News & World Report documents, among children “anxiety, depression, and behavioral problems appear to be on the rise, while the amount of time kids spent being physically active or getting preventive care has been on the decline,” plus “parental emotional well-being and mental health … [were found] to be suffering in tandem.” The magazine notes that “that was all pre-pandemic,” with the pandemic making an already bad situation worse. A 2018 article in the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH) notes that “Sociologists have observed the decline in various measures of psychosocial well-being in the United States for some time” and “alarming declines in measures such as trust have been documented for decades.” Happiness, trust, sex frequency, and life expectancy have all been in decline, while despair has increased, which leads the AJPH researchers to conclude that “the United States has experienced what amounts to a social crisis that dates back to at least the 1980s.”

In the context of this social crisis, we should be cautious about what we attribute to technology alone. We must also disentangle cause from effect: has addiction to phones torn us apart, or has an already-suffering society turned to the narcotic of smartphones to relieve the pain? (The same caution applies when trying to analyze the opioid epidemic and understand the degree to which the drugs are a cause rather than a symptom of other problems in people’s lives.) We do know that material deprivation is clearly a major part of the story—the AJPH cites rising medical costs as a major culprit in declining mental health. But it’s also worth appreciating just how monumental a shift in our living patterns we have undergone as smartphones have become ubiquitous. It is a fact that most of us now spend a significant portion of our day that would once have been spent around physical human beings in an artificial world (there are those in Silicon Valley who even anticipate that we will soon live almost full-time in a dystopian place they call the Metaverse). Surely the switch of huge portions of daily activity from in-person to online has significant effects on us. Smartphone use appears to have a played a major role in reshaping the “internal environment” of the human individual: in particular, it appears to have radically restructured what we take to be most important in life—a restructuring which, at least prior to the smartphone era, many of us would have regarded as overwhelmingly negative.

In fact, many Americans seem to recognize the current state of affairs as inherently problematic. According to one survey, 73 percent of Americans said that they would be “happier if they spent less time” on their phones, with only slightly fewer (70 percent) admitting that smartphones are adversely impacting their relationships with those closest to them. Smartphone use has been credibly linked to a variety of mental and physical afflictions, including anxiety, depression, loneliness, short attention spans, reduction in reading ability, reduced in-person socializing, stunted childhood growth, general lower intelligence, obesity, poor eyesight, and even suicide. Indeed, there is little doubt that smartphone use has in many ways exacerbated and reinforced many of the pathologies confronting contemporary American society. In a country in which, for instance, more than three-fifths of the population report being lonely (with the figure rising to four-fifths for Gen Z), it is not difficult to understand how spending one’s time on one’s phone addictively scrolling through social media, as opposed to forming and sustaining meaningful human relationships, is unlikely to alleviate, and indeed is much more likely to exacerbate, such feelings of desperation. U.S. children now spend a lot of time online (the overwhelming majority of young children spend more time in front of a screen than experts recommend). Parents certainly don’t have terribly high opinions of smartphones. Technology is the number one factor parents cite as making parenting harder today than it used to be, and Pew research found that 71 percent of parents think “smartphones will hurt [their] children’s abilities to develop healthy friendships and learn social skills” and the “potential harm [of smartphones] outweighs the potential benefit.”

This does not mean that the parents are necessarily right, of course. We also have to acknowledge that even though Americans worry about their addiction to smartphones, they also like their phones. One Gallup study found that 70 percent of smartphone users say that smartphones have “made their lives better.” Many may well recognize they are addicted but feel it’s an addiction they’re happy to live with. On this interpretation, maybe people really do prefer to be on Instagram rather than spend time with loved ones. Given the choice between having or sustaining a meaningful human relationship and being on their phones, they would willingly choose the latter over the former, without regrets.

Not all of the smartphone’s effects on human society have been negative. Indeed, according to a 2019 Pew poll, a significant majority of people in developing countries report that their lives have improved enormously as a result of acquiring cellphones (due to, for instance, online banking). These results, however, should be juxtaposed with the fact that the same poll found that significant majorities of people in emerging economies believe that mobile phones “have had a bad influence on children in their country,” as well as by the fact that the people in the developing world who actually manufacture smartphones typically work in abominable conditions. Moreover, even in the developed world, smartphones have certainly made life more convenient in various ways: they allow us to instantly look up an elusive fact at a moment’s notice, to almost instantly order food and transport, and yes, occasionally, to talk to loved ones on the other side of the globe. The question is: at what cost?

Johann Hari’s book Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention and How to Think Deeply Again is a useful addition to the conversation around technology, addiction, and social crisis. Hari’s first book, Chasing the Scream, focused on the science of addiction and the War on Drugs. His second, Lost Connections, examined depression. Stolen Focus addresses our current “attention crisis”: according to data cited by Hari, a typical office worker today focuses on tasks for just three minutes at a time; college students fare even worse, switching tasks on average every sixty-five seconds.

Hari’s interest in the subject is personal as well as scientific. He describes his own experience:


“The sensation of being alive in the early twenty-first century consisted of the sense that our ability to pay attention—to focus—was cracking and breaking. I could feel it happen to me—I would buy piles of books, and I would glimpse them guiltily from the corner of my eye as I sent, I told myself, just one more tweet. I still read a lot, but with each year that passed, it felt more and more like running up a down escalator.”

This mixture of scientific and personal curiosity—as in Chasing the Scream and Lost Connections—leads Hari on a journey all over the world, “from Miami to Moscow, from Montreal to Melbourne,” interviewing more than 250 experts on human attention. His conclusion is that there are twelve “deep forces” responsible for harming our attention. His goal in the book is to explain what they are, and what we need to do to “get our attention back.”

Hari does not attempt to dispel, or even downplay, the significance of the obvious candidate responsible for our attention crisis, namely modern technology: smartphones, email, social media, and, more specifically, Facebook, Google, and other tech platforms’ contemporary model of “surveillance capitalism,” the term used to describe the capturing and analysis of user data in the service of user manipulation and monetization. Indeed, Hari spends large portions of the book emphasizing just how debilitating much of modern technology has been both for individual consumers and for wider society: it has arguably made us (mentally) unhealthier, angrier, and more politically divided than at any point in modern human history.

But Hari draws a clear distinction between the technology itself and the incentive structures underlying them. It is the latter, he notes, which constitute the real, fundamental problem:

“The arrival of the smartphone would always have increased to some degree the number of distractions in life, to be sure, but a great deal of the damage to our attention spans is being caused by something more subtle. It’s not the smartphone in and of itself; it is the way the apps on the smartphone and the sites on our laptops are designed […] It’s not just the internet: it’s the way the internet is currently designed—and the incentives for the people designing it. You could keep your phone and your laptop, and you could keep your social media accounts—and have much better attention, if they were designed around a different set of incentives.”

As is well known, the current incentive structures of platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok aim to optimize things like time spent on a given platform, number of clicks, and number of advertisements seen. Their skilful efforts to maximize our use of the platforms are clearly a large part of why we’re so often incapable of removing our dazed stare from our smartphones’ screens. At one point in Stolen Focus, Hari interviews Israeli American tech designer Nir Eyal, the author of a book called Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life. Eyal himself recommends individualist solutions to the attention problem, showing people tips for getting their tech addictions under control and encouraging a “personal responsibility” approach to smartphone use. But Hari points out that Eyal is also the author of a book called Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, which Eyal calls a “cookbook” containing a “recipe for human behavior.” Eyal describes the techniques of “mind manipulation” used to “create a craving” for a product, such as implanting an “internal trigger” in the user’s psychology, an uncomfortable emotional state that can only be relieved by the product and that will keep them coming back over and over. As Hari comments:


“In Hooked [Eyal] talks about using ferociously powerful machinery to get us ‘fiendishly hooked’ and in ‘pain’ until we get our next techno-fix. Yet in Indistractable he tells us that when we feel distracted by this machinery, we should try gentle personal changes. In the first book, he describes big and powerful forces used to hook us; in the second, he describes fragile little personal interventions that he says will get us out.”

As Hari indicates, the addiction-producing incentives built into tech are far from inevitable. As he puts it:


“[Y]ou could design [technology] … to maximally respect people’s need for sustained attention, and to interrupt them as little as possible. You could design the technology not so that it pulls people away from their deeper and more meaningful goals, but so that it helps them to achieve them.”

Thus, not only is Hari surely right to conclude that “banning surveillance capitalism” is an absolutely necessary step toward reclaiming our attention”—people who are being hacked and deliberately hooked [on tech platforms] can’t focus,” as he neatly puts it—but he is also similarly correct in his suggestion that we should want more: we should want technology to be aligned with our interests, rather than being merely not-misaligned with them. We should, as tech ethicist James Williams has put it, want technology not simply to get off our backs, but to be actively on our side

Hari also goes beyond technological causes. Indeed, much of Stolen Focus’s originality, and in fact one of its great strengths, is that it does not restrict itself to a discussion of the attention-sapping nature of modern technology, but rather emphasizes how other crucial factors like our chronic lack of sleep, worsening diets, and increasingly polluted cities have also harmed our ability to focus. He shows how these factors work together to create the attention problem. Take Hari’s beautifully succinct explanation for the measurable decrease in children’s attention spans:


“We don’t let [children] play freely; we imprison them in their homes, with little to do except interact via screens; and our school system largely deadens and bores them. We feed them food that causes energy crashes, contains druglike additives that can make them hyper, and doesn’t contain the nutrients they need. We expose them to brain-disrupting chemicals in the atmosphere. It’s not a flaw in them that, as a result, they are struggling to learn attention. It’s a flaw in the world we built for them.”

The ultimate solutions Hari offers for “healing our attention” are, in my view, extremely reasonable. Some are proffered at the individual level, for instance, “pre-committing” to individual tasks, getting at least eight hours of sleep every night, and taking regular time off social media. Hari himself estimates that, as a result of these individual changes to his life, his own attention was boosted by about 15-20 percent. However, he is clear that such individual solutions can only take you so far; they will not—indeed, cannot—constitute a satisfactory long-term solution. On this point he quotes a telling remark from Williams, who notes that “digital detoxes” and other individual methods are “not the solution, for the same reason that wearing a gas mask for two days a week isn’t the answer to pollution. It might, for a short period of time, keep, at an individual level, certain effects at bay. But it’s not sustainable, and it doesn’t address the systemic issues.”

Thus, Hari believes that it is at the societal level that substantive change must ultimately be made. In particular, other than banning surveillance capitalism, Hari also suggests introducing a four-day work week (to combat physical and especially mental exhaustion) and encouraging children to play freely from the very earliest stages of childhood. Moreover, he makes a persuasive point about how, in the absence of a resolution to our attention crisis, a host of our societal problems will likely remain, including (but not limited to) the climate crisis and the rise in authoritarianism around the world:

“Solving big problems requires the sustained focus of many people over many years. Democracy requires the ability of a population to pay attention long enough to identify real problems, distinguish them from fantasies, come up with solutions, and hold their leaders accountable if they fail to deliver them. If we lose that, we lose our ability to have a fully functioning society. … People who can’t focus will be more drawn to simplistic authoritarian solutions—and less likely to see clearly when they fail.”

Or, to quote Williams: “In order to do anything that matters, we must first be able to give attention to the things that matter.” Indeed, I would be tempted to go further still: to the extent that we are unable to focus, we are, plausibly, unable to meaningfully exist.

One central, inescapable fact remains: for huge numbers of people, smartphones are having a seriously deleterious impact across many aspects of their lives. Not only are they causing mental or physical illness, but, by users’ own admission, they are addictive, and seem to have radically skewed how people spend their time and their conception of what they should consider important in life. But if we conclude—as I think we should—that the costs of smartphone use outweigh the benefits, an obvious question arises: what should we do?

We can answer that question at both the individual and the societal level. At the individual level, the simplest response—which I personally would recommend—would be to get rid of your smartphone. Simple “flip” phones are far less distracting and, typically, also far cheaper than your average smartphone—and, what’s more, they still allow you to call and text your loved ones. Other useful suggestions for minimizing your smartphone use include changing your screen to grayscale, downloading ad blocking software, and even—in the most extreme cases—buying a phone timer “lock box.”

Such individual solutions, however, will not—indeed, cannot—constitute a satisfactory long-term solution to the problem, because the devices in question are being designed specifically to overcome human willpower. As Williams remarked in his 2018 book, Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy:

“What we have … is, on one side, an entire industry spending billions of dollars trying to capture your attention using the most sophisticated computers in the world, and on the other side … your attention. This is … akin to a soldier seeing an army of thousands of tanks and guns advance upon him, and running in a bunker for refuge.”

Thus, it is at the societal level that we must respond. We can first imagine what the most draconian solutions would look like; for instance, regulation of smartphone use in a manner comparable to cigarette use. People could be restricted from using their smartphones except in certain designated areas (comparable to “smoking rooms” at airports). If we followed the cigarette model, warning labels and images would be placed on phones (featuring, perhaps, a helpless child desperately trying to get the attention of their smartphone-addicted parent?) just as some countries place images of dying or deceased smokers on cigarette packets.

Civil libertarians like myself are wary of measures that intrude on freedom, like trying to ban smartphones outright. A more sensible response is possible: we—that is, activists, concerned citizens, relevant NGOs, etc.—could pressure policymakers and businesses to radically overhaul the perverse incentive structures governing the design of these products’ software: those designs which are specifically designed to “hook” the user to the product through the use of features like randomized variable rewards (essentially the same process underlying slot machines) as a means of optimizing metrics like time spent on a given platform, number of clicks, number of advertisements seen, etc. A different set of incentives needn’t have such a deleterious effect on us. More specifically, these designs and underlying incentive structures could be redesigned so as to align more with users’ actual interests and concerns (which might include things like reading more, learning a new language, or fostering genuinely meaningful, i.e., mostly offline interactions with friends and family members). To quote Williams again: “No one wakes up in the morning and thinks, ‘How much time could I possibly spend on social media today?’”

In the absence of any such societal response, however, the onus will be on each individual separately to determine for him or herself what they should do. It is not easy. Anyone uncomfortable with their phone addiction must fight a difficult fight to free themselves from it. But in addition to trying to bring our own personal habits in line with our true values and desires, those of us who believe the social effects are seriously damaging have a responsibility to try to convey our position effectively to those who disagree. We need to make the case persuasively that the increases in convenience, and our occasional use of smartphones to (meaningfully) connect with people, are absolutely not worth the cost of addiction, depression, and, perhaps most importantly, a fundamental rewiring of what makes us human.

Originally published in our magazine’s hallowed print edition 2022MAY/JUNE

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