‘No Propaganda on Earth Can Hide the Wound That Is Palestine’: Arundhati Roy’s PEN Pinter Prize Acceptance Speech

'I refuse to play the condemnation game. Let me make myself clear. I do not tell oppressed people how to resist their oppression or who their allies should be.'

By Arundhati Roy

October 14, 2024

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

Arundhathi Roy accepts the PEN Pinter Prize 2024. She is holding a portrait of Alaa Abd el-Fattah, British-Egyptian writer and activist, named Writer of Courage by her. Photo: www.englishpen.org



Writer and activist Arundhati Roy has been awarded the PEN Pinter Prize 2024. This is an annual award set up by English PEN in the memory of playwright Harold Pinter. Shortly after having been named for the prize, Roy announced that her share of the prize money will be donated to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund. She named Alaa Abd el-Fattah, British-Egyptian writer and activist, a ‘Writer of Courage’ who she would share her award with. The following is her acceptance speech for the prize, delivered on the evening of October 10, 2024, at the British Library.

I thank you, members of English PEN and members of the jury, for honouring me with the PEN Pinter Prize. I would like to begin by announcing the name of this year’s Writer of Courage who I have chosen to share this award with.

My greetings to you, Alaa Abd El-Fattah, writer of courage and my fellow awardee. We hoped and prayed that you would be released in September, but the Egyptian government decided that you were too beautiful a writer and too dangerous a thinker to be freed yet. But you are here in this room with us. You are the most important person here. From prison you wrote, “[M]y words lost any power and yet they continued to pour out of me. I still had a voice, even if only a handful would listen.” We are listening, Alaa. Closely.

Greetings to you, too, my beloved Naomi Klein, friend to both Alaa and me. Thank you for being here tonight. It means the world to me.

Greetings to all of you gathered here, as well to as those who are invisible perhaps to this wonderful audience but as visible to me as anybody else in this room. I am speaking of my friends and comrades in prison in India – lawyers, academics, students, journalists – Umar Khalid, Gulfisha Fatima, Khalid Saifi, Sharjeel Imam, Rona Wilson, Surendra Gadling, Mahesh Raut. I speak to you, my friend Khurram Parvaiz, one of the most remarkable people I know, you’ve been in prison for three years, and to you too Irfan Mehraj and to the thousands incarcerated in Kashmir and across the country whose lives have been devastated.

When Ruth Borthwick, Chair of English PEN and of the Pinter panel first wrote to me about this honour, she said the Pinter Prize is awarded to a writer who has sought to define ‘the real truth of our lives and our societies’ through ‘unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination’. That is a quote from Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

The word ‘unflinching’ made me pause for a moment, because I think of myself as someone who is almost permanently flinching.

I would like to dwell a little on the theme of ‘flinching’ and ‘unflinching’. Which may be best illustrated by Harold Pinter himself:

“I was present at a meeting at the US embassy in London in the late 1980s.

“The United States Congress was about to decide whether to give more money to the Contras in their campaign against the state of Nicaragua. I was a member of a delegation speaking on behalf of Nicaragua but the most important member of this delegation was a Father John Metcalf. The leader of the US body was Raymond Seitz (then number two to the ambassador, later ambassador himself). Father Metcalf said: ‘Sir, I am in charge of a parish in the north of Nicaragua. My parishioners built a school, a health centre, a cultural centre. We have lived in peace. A few months ago a Contra force attacked the parish. They destroyed everything: the school, the health centre, the cultural centre. They raped nurses and teachers, slaughtered doctors, in the most brutal manner. They behaved like savages. Please demand that the US government withdraw its support from this shocking terrorist activity.’

“Raymond Seitz had a very good reputation as a rational, responsible and highly sophisticated man. He was greatly respected in diplomatic circles. He listened, paused and then spoke with some gravity. ‘Father,’ he said, ‘let me tell you something. In war, innocent people always suffer.’ There was a frozen silence. We stared at him. He did not flinch.”

Remember that President Reagan called the Contras “the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.” A turn of phrase that he was clearly fond of. He also used it to describe the CIA-backed Afghan Mujahideen, who then morphed into the Taliban. And it is the Taliban who rule Afghanistan today after waging a twenty-year-long war against the US invasion and occupation. Before the Contras and the Mujahideen, there was the war in Vietnam and the unflinching US military doctrine that ordered its soldiers to ‘Kill Anything That Moves’. If you read the Pentagon Papers and other documents on US war aims in Vietnam, you can enjoy some lively unflinching discussions about how to commit genocide – is it better to kill people outright or to starve them slowly? Which would look better? The problem that the compassionate mandarins in the Pentagon faced was that, unlike Americans, who, according to them, want ‘life, happiness, wealth, power’, Asians ‘stoically accept…the destruction of wealth and the loss of lives’ – and force America to carry their ‘strategic logic to its conclusion, which is genocide.’ A terrible burden to be borne unflinchingly.

And here we are, all these years later, more than a year into yet another genocide. The US and Israel’s unflinching and ongoing televised genocide in Gaza and now Lebanon in defence of a colonial occupation and an Apartheid state. The death toll so far, is officially 42,000, a majority of them women and children. This does not include those who died screaming under the rubble of buildings, neighbourhoods, whole cities, and those whose bodies have not yet been recovered. A recent study by Oxfam says that more children have been killed by Israel in Gaza than in the equivalent period of any other war in the last twenty years.

To assuage their collective guilt for their early years of indifference towards one genocide – the Nazi extermination of millions of European Jews – the United States and Europe have prepared the grounds for another.

Like every state that has carried out ethnic cleansing and genocide in history, Zionists in Israel – who believe themselves to be “the chosen people” – began by dehumanising Palestinians before driving them off their land and murdering them.

‘What can possibly justify what Israel is doing?’. Photo: X/@UNRWA

Prime Minister Menachem Begin called Palestinians ‘two-legged beasts’, Yitzhak Rabin called them ‘grasshoppers’ who ‘could be crushed’ and Golda Meir said ‘There was no such thing as Palestinians’. Winston Churchill, that famous warrior against fascism, said, ‘I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time’ and then went on to declare that a ‘higher race’ had the final right to the manger. Once those two-legged beasts, grasshoppers, dogs and non-existent people were murdered, ethnically cleansed, and ghettoised, a new country was born. It was celebrated as a ‘land without people for people without a land’. The nuclear-armed state of Israel was to serve as a military outpost and gateway to the natural wealth and resources of the Middle East for US and Europe. A lovely coincidence of aims and objectives.

The new state was supported unhesitatingly and unflinchingly, armed and bankrolled, coddled and applauded, no matter what crimes it committed. It grew up like a protected child in a wealthy home whose parents smile proudly as it commits atrocity upon atrocity. No wonder today it feels free to boast openly about committing genocide. (At least The Pentagon Papers were secret. They had to be stolen. And leaked.) No wonder Israeli soldiers seem to have lost all sense of decency. No wonder they flood the social media with depraved videos of themselves wearing the lingerie of women they have killed or displaced, videos of themselves mimicking dying Palestinians and wounded children or raped and tortured prisoners, images of themselves blowing up buildings while they smoke cigarettes or jive to music on their headphones. Who are these people?

What can possibly justify what Israel is doing?

The answer, according to Israel and its allies, as well as the Western media, is the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7th last year. The killing of Israeli civilians and the taking of Israeli hostages. According to them, history only began a year ago.

So, this is the part in my speech where I am expected to equivocate to protect myself, my ‘neutrality’, my intellectual standing. This is the part where I am meant to lapse into moral equivalence and condemn Hamas, the other militant groups in Gaza and their ally Hezbollah, in Lebanon, for killing civilians and taking people hostage. And to condemn the people of Gaza who celebrated the Hamas attack. Once that’s done it all becomes easy, doesn’t it? Ah well. Everybody is terrible, what can one do? Let’s go shopping instead…

I refuse to play the condemnation game. Let me make myself clear. I do not tell oppressed people how to resist their oppression or who their allies should be.

When US President Joe Biden met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli war cabinet during a visit to Israel in October 2023, he said, ‘I don’t believe you have to be a Jew to be a Zionist, and I am a Zionist.’

Unlike President Joe Biden, who calls himself a non-Jewish Zionist and unflinchingly bankrolls and arms Israel while it commits its war crimes, I am not going to declare myself or define myself in any way that is narrower than my writing. I am what I write.

I am acutely aware that being the writer that I am, the non-Muslim that I am and the woman that I am, it would be very difficult, perhaps impossible for me to survive very long under the rule of Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Iranian regime. But that is not the point here. The point is to educate ourselves about the history and the circumstances under which they came to exist. The point is that right now they are fighting against an ongoing genocide. The point is to ask ourselves whether a liberal, secular fighting force can go up against a genocidal war machine. Because, when all the powers of the world are against them, who do they have to turn to but God? I am aware that Hezbollah and the Iranian regime have vocal detractors in their own countries, some who also languish in jails or have faced far worse outcomes. I am aware that some of their actions – the killing of civilians and the taking of hostages on October 7th by Hamas – constitute war crimes. However, there cannot be an equivalence between this and what Israel and the United States are doing in Gaza, in the West Bank and now in Lebanon. The root of all the violence, including the violence of October 7th, is Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land and its subjugation of the Palestinian people. History did not begin on 7 October 2023.

I ask you, which of us sitting in this hall would willingly submit to the indignity that Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have been subjected to for decades? What peaceful means have the Palestinian people not tried? What compromise have they not accepted—other than the one that requires them to crawl on their knees and eat dirt?

Israel is not fighting a war of self-defence. It is fighting a war of aggression. A war to occupy more territory, to strengthen its Apartheid apparatus and tighten its control on Palestinian people and the region.

‘Polls show that a majority of the citizens in the countries whose governments enable the Israeli genocide have made it clear that they do not agree with this.’ Photo: Ahmed Abu Hameeda/Wikimedia commons

Since October 7th 2023, apart from the tens of thousands of people it has killed, Israel has displaced the majority of Gaza’s population, many times over. It has bombed hospitals. It has deliberately targeted and killed doctors, aid workers and journalists. A whole population is being starved – their history is sought to be erased. All this is supported both morally and materially by the wealthiest, most powerful governments in the world. And their media. (Here I include my country, India, which supplies Israel with weapons, as well as thousands of workers.) There is no daylight between these countries and Israel. In the last year alone, the US has spent 17.9 billion dollars in military aid to Israel. So, let us once and for all dispense with the lie about the US being a mediator, a restraining influence, or as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (considered to be on the extreme Left of mainstream US politics) put it, ‘working tirelessly for a ceasefire’. A party to the genocide cannot be a mediator.

Not all the power and money, not all the weapons and propaganda on earth can any longer hide the wound that is Palestine. The wound through which the whole world, including Israel, bleeds.

Polls show that a majority of the citizens in the countries whose governments enable the Israeli genocide have made it clear that they do not agree with this. We have watched those marches of hundreds of thousands of people – including a young generation of Jews who are tired of being used, tired of being lied to. Who would have imagined that we would live to see the day when German police would arrest Jewish citizens for protesting against Israel and Zionism and accuse them of anti-Semitism? Who would have thought the US government would, in the service of the Israeli state, undermine its cardinal principle of Free Speech by banning pro-Palestine slogans? The so-called moral architecture of western democracies – with a few honourable exceptions – has become a grim laughingstock in the rest of the world.

When Benjamin Netanyahu holds up a map of the Middle East in which Palestine has been erased and Israel stretches from the river to the sea, he is applauded as a visionary who is working to realize the dream of a Jewish homeland.

But when Palestinians and their supporters chant ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’, they are accused of explicitly calling for the genocide of Jews.

Are they really? Or is that a sick imagination projecting its own darkness onto others? An imagination that cannot countenance diversity, cannot countenance the idea of living in a country alongside other people, equally, with equal rights. Like everybody else in the world does. An imagination that cannot afford to acknowledge that Palestinians want to be free, like South Africa is, like India is, like all countries that have thrown off the yoke of colonialism are. Countries that are diverse, deeply, maybe even fatally, flawed, but free. When South Africans were chanting their popular rallying cry, Amandla! Power to the people, were they calling for the genocide of white people? They were not. They were calling for the dismantling of the Apartheid state. Just as the Palestinians are.

‘Neither the ballot boxes not the palaces or the ministries or the prisons or even the graves are big enough for our dreams’. Photo: Shome Basu in Dhaka.

The war that has now begun will be terrible. But it will eventually dismantle Israeli Apartheid. The whole world will be far safer for everyone – including for Jewish people – and far more just. It will be like pulling an arrow from our wounded heart.

If the US government withdrew its support of Israel, the war could stop today. Hostilities could end right this minute. Israeli hostages could be freed, Palestinian prisoners could be released. The negotiations with Hamas and the other Palestinian stakeholders that must inevitably follow the war could instead take place now and prevent the suffering of millions of people. How sad that most people would consider this a naïve, laughable proposition.

As I conclude, let me turn to your words, Alaa Abd El-Fatah, from your book of prison writing, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated. I have rarely read such beautiful words about the meaning of victory and defeat – and the political necessity of honestly looking despair in the eye. I have rarely seen writing in which a citizen separates himself from the state, from the generals and even from the slogans of the Square with such bell-like clarity.


“The centre is treason because there’s room in it only for the General…The centre is treason and I have never been a traitor. They think they’ve pushed us back into the margins. They don’t realize that we never left it, we just got lost for a brief while. Neither the ballot boxes not the palaces or the ministries or the prisons or even the graves are big enough for our dreams. We never sought the centre because it has no room except for those who abandon the dream. Even the square was not big enough for us, so most of the battles of the revolution happened outside it, and most of the heroes remained outside the frame.”

As the horror we are witnessing in Gaza, and now Lebanon, quickly escalates into a regional war, its real heroes remain outside the frame. But they fight on because they know that one day—

From the river to the sea

Palestine will be Free.

It will.

Keep your eye on your calendar. Not on your clock.

That’s how the people – not the generals – the people fighting for their liberation measure time.


ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers.  Donate

Arundhati Roy
(born November 24, 1961) is an Indian novelist, activist and a world citizen. She won the Booker Prize in 1997 for her first novel The God of Small Things. Roy was born in Shillong, Meghalaya to a Keralite Syrian Christian mother and a Bengali Hindu father, a tea planter by profession. She spent her childhood in Aymanam, in Kerala, schooling in Corpus Christi. She left Kerala for Delhi at age 16, and embarked on a homeless lifestyle, staying in a small hut with a tin roof within the walls of Delhi's Feroz Shah Kotla and making a living selling empty bottles. She then proceeded to study architecture at the Delhi School of Architecture, where she met her first husband, the architect Gerard Da Cunha.The God of Small Things is the only novel written by Roy. Since winning the Booker Prize, she has concentrated her writing on political issues. These include the Narmada Dam project, India's Nuclear Weapons, corrupt power company Enron's activities in India. She is a figure-head of the anti-globalization/alter-globalization movement and a vehement critic of neo-imperialism.In response to India's testing of nuclear weapons in Pokhran, Rajasthan, Roy wrote The End of Imagination, a critique of the Indian government's nuclear policies. It was published in her collection The Cost of Living, in which she also crusaded against India's massive hydroelectric dam projects in the central and western states of Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat. She has since devoted herself solely to nonfiction and politics, publishing two more collections of essays as well as working for social causes.Roy was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize in May 2004 for her work in social campaigns and advocacy of non-violence.In June 2005 she took part in the World Tribunal on Iraq. In January 2006 she was awarded the Sahitya Akademi award for her collection of essays, 'The Algebra of Infinite Justice', but declined to accept it.

Op-Ed: Underpaid, understaffed, wage theft, and prices out of control. Happy?


By Paul Wallis
September 19, 2024

DIGITAL JOURNAL


UK nurses will stage a second unprecedented strike amid an increasingly acrimonious fight with the government for better wages

- Copyright AFP/File ISABEL INFANTES

If you search the words “underpaid, understaffed, and wage theft” you’ve given yourself a lifetime job researching them. The words mean a totally dysfunctional environment where organizational failure is unavoidable. This is global. It’s also happening with a backdrop of out-of-control prices for just about everything.

The word is “systemic”. It can’t be any sort of coincidence that these things are so common. That’s particularly the case in the ultra-cheapskate US, where “employment at will” apparently means a license to gouge workers.

It goes well with the mantras of “hate the public, hate the staff and hate the customers”, though. There’s that adorably delicate subtle ambience of sleaze and greed.

Meanwhile, in the unreal world, CEO wages have risen 1085% since 1978, where workers’ wages have risen 24%, according to one source. That’s probably a massive underestimate. Many people have asked why so few people who do so little make so much.

There’s no rational answer to that question. There’s no particular reason why a herd of deformed meeting-dwellers should get paid anything. They don’t actually do their own jobs. They delegate to lesser cretins, and that’s all they need to do.

In the days of Rent A Meaningless Degree, it’s inevitable that the talentless take over. (A degree is meaningless when given to an idiot.) As long as no competent people are involved, everything’s sweet until it all inevitably falls over. This is underperformance on a truly colossal scale.

It’s also hyper-obstructionist by intent. Cheaper tech, better time management, better productivity, better business models, you name it; they just don’t happen. For example – There’s no good cost-effective business reason for “back to the office”. Those places cost millions, and all that’s likely to happen is that diseases spread a lot faster. The upkeep of the buildings is obscene, the liabilities endless, and you’re paying for it.

If there was ever a species of serial underachievers on Earth, this is them. They have political ideologies to back them up. They’re in luck, too. In a deregulated environment, you can’t pull the plug on insane prices and unearned wages. This isn’t socialism; it’s common sense and business best practice, and you can guess how popular that is right now.

Why the cheapskate stuff, you may wonder in your palatial hollowed-out grain of rice? To create entirely fictional numbers, and maybe rip off some poor people. The appearance of success isn’t success, but it looks like it. Most of these guys can’t even make sense of their own balance sheets.

Most of the stockholders in this cartoon can’t read them either. So, everyone’s happy. They get paid for this fictional fantasy. World Com, Enron, Lehmann Bros, you live or die by the numbers. It’s more likely you create the numbers and vanish before the crash and burn kicks in.

Many businesses are going broke and being exposed to serious legal actions thanks to this culture. A lot of businesses are basically doing business for their inner parasites, not for themselves. Eventually, long afterward, it shows on the balance sheets, but you can see the problem.

Never mind the rhetoric. More outraged verbiage is hardly enough. The fact is that there are plenty of simple solutions to this mess:

All of these things are breaches of applicable laws in some form. Therefore, as a business, you have a perfect in-house excuse to sue and sack the parasites.

Fines don’t scare anyone. Therefore, you shut down the business until compliance. That’ll scare the guys who own the businesses out of these bad habits fast enough.

You create a nice bonny bouncing stack of case law and penalties to cover underpayment, understaffing, and wage theft, This is “strategic” case law for pests. At the moment you could get any number of cases for all these issues, preferably class actions.

It’s all easily fixable. Now let’s see what happens.

Machine learning technique predicts likely accounting fraud across supply chains

Tsinghua University Press

 

image: 

Overview of the FraudGCN approach. The researchers constructed three types of ‘sub-graphs’ depending on the type of relationships between companies: with accounting firms; along supply chains; and throughout an industry. The training direction of the machine learning model is depicted by red arrows. Grey circles (‘nodes’) represent fraudulent firms and white circles represent normal firms

view more 

Credit: Big Data Mining and Analytics, Tsinghua University Press

As the perpetrators of accounting fraud become ever more sophisticated in their techniques, fraud detection needs to step up its game. Thankfully, a group of researchers have devised a new machine learning ‘detective’ that is able to analyze not just fraud at a single firm, but predict likely fraud across whole supply chains and industries.

 

A paper describing the team’s approach was published in the journal Big Data Mining and Analytics on August 28.

 

Financial statement fraud, or, more commonly, accounting fraud may be a less frequent form of corporate fraud, but it is by far the costliest crime in the world. Perhaps the most famous cases of white-collar crime are at base such accounting fraud, when an enterprise manipulates the figures on its financial statements or other valuation date in order to make it appear more profitable than it is.

 

The collapse of US energy firm Enron, the largest bankruptcy in US history, came from their cooking of the books in collusion with their accounting firm. In 2008, Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy due to insolvency, having concealed approximately $50 billion in debt through balance sheet fraud. In the late 2010s, American investment advisor Bernie Madoff managed to cheat clients out of a whopping $65 billion.

 

It is not only investors who are hurt by financial statement fraud. Hundreds of thousands of jobs can be lost, communities devastated, and, in the most extreme cases, through knock-on effects, it can threaten the stability of national economies.

 

Despite the threat that such fraud poses, it remains very hard for authorities to catch. Red flags such as a sudden surge in a company’s performance just before the end of a reporting period, or soaring sales growth while competing firms’ sales remain sluggish could turn out to be just the result of good luck or a superior product. And so for decades forensic auditors have used statistical analysis to spot manipulation.

 

But such efforts are enormously labor intensive and require trawling through huge volumes of data. As a result, authorities tend to depend upon random audits, but this means that most firms most of the time go unchecked.

 

“Making matters even worse, in recent years, fraudsters have become increasingly sophisticated in the techniques they deploy,” said Chenxu Wang, lead author of the paper and an associate professor with the School of Software Engineering and the Key Lab of Intelligent Networks and Network Security at Xi’an Jiaotong University. “It’s an unending, mathematical arms race between the authorities and the fraudsters.”

 

“What is needed is an effective and accurate algorithm to automatically identify accounting fraud, and leave the days of random auditing behind,” said Mengqin Wang, also of Xi’an Jiaotong University.

 

A number of mathematicians and computer scientists specializing in the topic have achieved some success in this regard by the use of machine learning. But up to now, this approach has only been applied to individual firms.

 

“This overlooks the often-intricate relationships between different firms that may also offer up indicators of fraud,” said Yi Long, another team member, but from Shenzhen Finance Institute, at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. “An accounting firm that colludes in financial statement fraud with one company has an increased likelihood of engaging in fraudulent activities with other companies.”

 

And it is not just between accounting firms and their clients where the fraudulent relationships are propagated. Accounting fraud practices can spread up and down supply chains, or, be perpetuated horizontally across industries.

 

But to incorporate data beyond a single firm means a commensurate increase in the computational expense. Moreover, existing machine-learning approaches suffer from a severe imbalance in the samples used to train the computer model how to classify something as fraudulent because normal, non-fraudulent samples significantly outnumber actual fraud cases. This imbalance can lead to biased computer models that prioritize the majority “class,” the non-fraudulent cases, making it difficult to accurately detect fraudulent activities.

 

To overcome all of these challenges, the research team developed a machine-learning technique combined with mathematical methods taken from the realm of graph theory.

 

The cutting-edge artificial intelligence financial-fraud ‘detective’ they devised involves a “graph,” a structure that mathematically represents the connections or relations (described as “edges”) between different companies, individuals and products (described as “nodes”). And multi-relational graphs allow for multiple types of edges, allowing the representation of diverse relationships between nodes, and offer a more comprehensive representation of the complexity of connections among them.

 

And the detective itself, called “FraudGCN” is a graph convolutional network, or GCN, a type of neural network designed to operate on graph-structured data. Unlike traditional neural networks that operate on grid-like data such as images, GCNs can operate on data represented as graphs.

 

FraudGCN itself constructs a multi-relational graph representing various industry connections, supply chain links, and shared accounting firm auditing practices, and by doing so capture rich information arising from these relationships, in particular details uncovered in particular ‘neighborhoods’ of nodes in the graphs. By aggregating such information, FraudGCN not only enhances the ability to identify patterns indicative of existing likely fraudulent activities, but also predict where they are likely to arise.

 

Finally, unlike previous efforts at machine-learning assisted fraud detection, FraudGCN is able to handle addition of new nodes without the need for the model to be retrained, enhancing its adaptability and scalability.

 

The team trialled FraudGCN on a real-world dataset from Chinese listed companies to assess its performance, and found that it beats state-of-the-art approaches by between 3.15% and 3.86%.

 

Moving forward, the team hope to develop their approach to be able to deal with medium-sized enterprises, not just larger ones.

 

---

About Big Data Mining and Analytics

Big Data Mining and Analytics (Published by Tsinghua University Press) discovers hidden patterns, correlations, insights and knowledge through mining and analyzing large amounts of data obtained from various applications. It addresses the most innovative developments, research issues and solutions in big data research and their applications. Big Data Mining and Analytics is indexed and abstracted in ESCI, EI, Scopus, DBLP Computer Science, Google Scholar, INSPEC, CSCD, DOAJ, CNKI, etc.

About SciOpen 

SciOpen is an open access resource of scientific and technical content published by Tsinghua University Press and its publishing partners. SciOpen provides end-to-end services across manuscript submission, peer review, content hosting, analytics, identity management, and expert advice to ensure each journal’s development. By digitalizing the publishing process, SciOpen widens the reach, deepens the impact, and accelerates the exchange of ideas.

---

Journal

Big Data Mining and Analytics

DOI

10.26599/BDMA.2024.9020013 

Article Title

Multi-Relational Graph Representation Learning for Financial Statement Fraud Detection

Article Publication Date

28-Aug-2024

How The 2024 Election Is Normalizing Corruption

David Sirota

ROLLING STONE
Fri, August 30, 2024


Last week’s Democratic convention was the crescendo of an unprecedented period in American history: The Republican presidential nominee survived an assassination attempt, the Democratic president ended his reelection bid, and the vice president became her party’s nominee without a single primary vote. But the summer was equally extraordinary for how it capped off the plot that we expose in The Lever’s new investigative series Master Plan — a scheme to normalize and legalize corruption, transforming graft from a crime into the widely accepted way politics is now conducted.

In just a few months, the U.S. Supreme Court’s billionaire–coddled justices made it legal for politicians to accept gifts from beneficiaries of government favors; Donald Trump promised to enrich fossil fuel industry donors in exchange for $1 billion in campaign donations, while his running mate J.D. Vance begged a tech billionaire to bankroll their campaign; moguls funneling cash to Democrats demanded the firing of the antitrust regulator scrutinizing their businesses; both parties held corporate–sponsored conventions that prominently featured billionaires and CEOs as keynote speakers; and spending by Super PACs and other shadowy groups crossed the $1 billion mark.

In an election purporting to be about the survival of the American Way Of Life™, this miasma of transactional cash is the real threat to democracy — one harming us all.

Money is why popular, desperately needed legislation rarely ever passes — it is why both parties colluded to kill off a minimum wage increase; why Americans have no guaranteed right to medical care; why oil companies are permitted to incinerate the climate; and why corporations are allowed to fleece us in myriad ways with no consequences.

Money is why Trump has abandoned much of the anti-corporate rhetoric that once distinguished him as a heterodox conservative, and almost certainly why he has reversed himself on key policies of interest to a new crop of donors.

Money is why Vice President Kamala Harris seems more comfortable avoiding press attention and running on vague platitudes rather than endorsing initiatives that might provoke the ire of well-funded Super PACs.

Money is why Democratic leaders started telling reporters that even if Harris wins the election promising voters a crusade against corporate profiteering, her anti-price-gouging initiatives are dead on arrival in the next Congress. And money is why a new study shows most Democratic candidates up and down the ballot avoid explicitly criticizing corporations and billionaires — the forces who are creating the problems that Democrats diagnose, but who will spend those Democrats into the ground if they make too much noise.

Whatever your preferred label for this dystopia — oligarchy, plutocracy, kleptocracy — you might assume it is just a naturally occurring inevitability, but nothing could be further from the truth.

This era of corruption — in which elections are glorified auctions — was manufactured by a cadre of oligarchs and operatives whose agenda could only be implemented by deregulating the campaign finance system so that cash could short circuit democracy.

“Political Power Is Necessary”

This untold story began a half century ago amid a golden age of democratic reforms. As America’s government was responding to public discontent by creating Medicare, Medicaid, environmental regulation, and a war on poverty, a genteel tobacco industry lawyer authored a 1971 manifesto sounding an alarm.

In his now-famous memo, the soon-to-be Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell cast corporations and oligarchs as persecuted victims, and urged them to use their outsized resources to assume “a broader and more vigorous role in the political arena” to halt a government becoming too responsive to popular demands.

“In terms of political influence with respect to the course of legislation and government action, the American business executive is truly the ‘forgotten man,’” Powell wrote. “This is the lesson that political power is necessary; that such power must be assiduously cultivated; and that when necessary, it must be used aggressively and with determination — without embarrassment.”

Some have cast Powell’s blueprint as little more than a 1970s version of a meaningless Reddit rant rather than the foundational text that some liberals believe it to be. But if anything, the significance of Powell’s screed has been understated.

Documents unearthed by The Lever show that in response to the memo, leaders of the country’s most powerful corporations organized task forces to implement its directives. One of their goals was deregulating the campaign finance system. Why? Because they understood that in a properly functioning one-person-one-vote democracy, they would never be able to gain control of the political system and enact their self-enriching, wealth-concentrating agenda. They knew that to get their way, they must be allowed to buy elections, legislation, court rulings, and public policy.

And so in short order, corporations and moguls inspired by Powell began funding think tanks, political advocacy organizations, and conservative law firms — and victories followed.

First, with the support of conservative philanthropist John Olin’s political machine, Congress quietly added loopholes to the post-Watergate anti-corruption laws allowing for the explosion of corporate political action committees that could buy legislators.

Then in a lawsuit masterminded by American Enterprise Institute legal activists Ralph Winter and John Bolton (yes, that John Bolton!) — and stealthily boosted by then-Solicitor General Robert Bork — conservatives convinced the Supreme Court to endorse a radical legal doctrine equating money with constitutionally protected speech.

Soon after, Powell successfully lobbied his fellow justices to extend those free speech rights to corporations aiming to spend big money to buy elections.

These early wins unleashed a tidal wave of corporate money flooding into politics, which birthed an era of neoliberal tax, deregulatory, and anti-union policies, just as the master planners wanted. It also delivered an attendant epoch of corruption scandals, from Abscam, to the Keating Five, to Enron, to Jack Abramoff and the K Street Project.

The throughline in each sordid episode was money being used to subvert democracy — in specific, to pressure elected officials to use their power to enrich donors at the expense of voters.

Not surprisingly, the influence-peddling imbroglios coincided with other spectacles of institutionalized corruption — the insurance industry’s political spending killed universal health care initiatives and replaced them with a system of government subsidies; the fossil fuel industry’s political spending killed climate legislation and got the greenlight for record production; and Wall Street’s political spending killed New Deal regulations that might have prevented the financial crisis.

With money politics ascending, wealth concentrated, government shrunk, the working class was pulverized, and corporations gained control. At the twilight of the 20th century, Powell’s mission seemed on a glidepath.

Reform And Then Collapse

But amid this grotesquerie, some finally fought back — most prominently and unexpectedly, a scandal-plagued John McCain.

After being humiliated as one of the Keating Five who pressured federal banking regulators on behalf of a donor, the Arizona senator adopted the zeal of a convert to the anti-corruption cause. He waged a yearslong battle for legislation to restrict unlimited corporate spending on politics, eventually using an insurgent presidential bid to shame George W. Bush — the personification of Big Money politics — into signing the first campaign finance reform law in a generation.

But while the Supreme Court briefly upheld that legislation in 2003, it was a short-lived respite.

The Powell Memo had urged corporations and business leaders to fund political infrastructure focused on changing the judiciary. When the seats of Justices William Rehnqist and Sandra Day O’Connor opened up in 2005, that well-financed machine made sure the Bush administration replaced them not with moderates, but with archconservatives committed to the master plan.

Led by the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo, the conservative legal movement ran a multimillion-dollar campaign to install archconservative John Roberts. The same master planners then ran a campaign to convince Senate Republicans to block potential moderate nominee Harriet Miers, prompting Bush to replace her with the far-right Samuel Alito.

In the wake of the duo’s confirmations, liberals consoled themselves with hopes that the seemingly reasonable Justice Anthony Kennedy would maintain a pragmatic equilibrium on the high court.

Kennedy, though, was much like his predecessor, Powell. He cut a moderate profile, but had long been an opponent of tough campaign finance and anti-corruption laws — hardly surprising considering his early career was spent as a corporate lobbyist doling out cash to lawmakers, and as an author of Ronald Reagan’s first anti-tax ballot measure in the Powell Memo years.

And so when one of this generation’s most effective campaign finance deregulators, attorney James Bopp, manufactured a case about a Hillary Clinton documentary, the master plan sprung into action. Rather than crafting a narrow decision, Roberts ordered the case to be reargued on more precedential questions and then assigned the opinion to Kennedy, who authored the expansive 2010 Citizens United ruling that overturned McCain’s campaign finance law.

Building directly off Powell’s earlier ruling on corporate speech, the decision fully legalized unlimited spending in elections, insisting that putatively independent expenditures “do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.”

As election spending by billionaires and corporations subsequently skyrocketed, the same legal machine forged by the Powell Memo manufactured cases designed to prompt the court to deliver additional rulings encouraging even more corruption.

In one such case, conservative justices shamelessly used a mid-20th-century court ruling that protected civil rights groups from Jim Crow thugs to protect billionaire- and corporate-funded dark money groups from disclosing their donors to regulators responsible for enforcing nonprofit laws. Another string of high court rulings then overturned law enforcement officials’ corruption convictions and gutted longstanding federal bribery statutes.

As for the government’s remaining anti-corruption regulators, the master planners made sure they were also defanged: Republicans packed the Federal Election Commission with appointees opposed to enforcing even the most minimal campaign finance laws, and they have bullied the Internal Revenue Service out of policing dark money groups.

“It Doesn’t Have Any Effect On Me”

In the wake of this rampage, master planners today typically argue that everything is fine and democracy is safe, because money supposedly does not buy election results. They cite the occasional outspent election winner or overspending election loser as proof that cash does not determine political outcomes.

But those are rare exceptions in a country where those who spend the most are able to most repetitiously communicate with voters — and therefore almost always win. And that money almost always comes with big donors’ transactional expectations.

“People say, ‘Oh, it doesn’t have any effect on me,'” said now-retired Rep. Barney Frank in a candid interview a few years after Citizens United. “Well if that were the case, we’d be the only human beings in the history of the world who on a regular basis took significant amounts of money from perfect strangers and made sure that it had no effect on our behavior.”

Data about legislative action buttresses Frank’s point. One study found that for every $1 of corporate donations, a business gets more than $6 of state tax breaks. Another study found a correlation between unlimited campaign spending and a reduction in corporate taxes. Still another study found that the more freely corporations are allowed to spend in elections, the more likely lawmakers are to pass laws that protect corporate management.

The same holds true for legislative and political inaction.

Health insurers’ cash explains why Americans have no guaranteed right to medical care, and pharmaceutical industry cash explains why we continue to pay the world’s highest prices for medicine.

Wall Street cash explains why private equity tax loopholes that could be closed with the stroke of a pen remain open, and why bankers who cratered the global economy continued to reap bailouts rather than prosecutions.

Rail industry cash explains why Congress has refused to pass rail safety legislation after the East Palestine disaster, and Boeing cash explains why the company gets a slap on the wrist and even more government contracts after its deadly crashes.

The list of such examples is endless, ultimately confirming Princeton and Northwestern researchers’ conclusion: “Economic elites and organized interest groups play a substantial part in affecting public policy, but the general public has little or no independent influence” over the government operating in its name.

Even worse, an electorate pining for reform is typically given few political choices that promise any escape from it.

The 2024 campaign exemplifies the sad reality. On one side is the choice are policy-free vibes that pretend working-class voters’ and elite donors’ conflicting interests can both coexist under the same big tent. On the other side is a 900-page manifesto promising an explicit corporate takeover and final gutting of whatever’s left of campaign finance laws — all written by a group whose seed funding was originally prompted by the Powell Memo.

“The Election Of Federal Officials Is Not A Private Affair”

In the two years it has taken to report out Master Plan, our reporters discovered documents illustrating just how deliberate the attack has been on America’s anti-corruption and campaign finance laws. Beholding a never-before-unearthed 1971 photo of Philip Morris’ CEO giving Powell a judicial robe emblazoned with corporate logos, you can’t help but see the image as a prophecy of all that would come to pass.

And yet even as we live in Powell’s world and democracy teeters amid this year’s multibillion-dollar election extravaganza, there is a silver lining: The fact that this present reality came from a plan means it can be reversed, especially because the solutions are so obvious and straightforward.

First and foremost, every political jurisdiction can pass laws forcing the disclosure of those who spend money to influence elections and policy. States have already started doing this, and the federal government could, too. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) has already written the DISCLOSE Act, which was co-sponsored by Harris, who as California attorney general tried to force dark money groups to disclose their donors. In 2025, she could be in a position to make a disclosure bill the law of the land.

This shouldn’t be a partisan or ideological issue: After all, the Citizens United decision explicitly touted the necessity of robust transparency, and even ultraconservative Justice Antonin Scalia agreed with such notions, writing in a separate case that “requiring people to stand up in public for their political acts fosters civic courage, without which democracy is doomed.”

Beyond transparency, there is what Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) had the temerity to bellow at the Democratic convention’s corporate suites.

“Billionaires in both parties should not be able to buy elections, including primary elections,” he said in his keynote address last week. “For the sake of our democracy, we must overturn the disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision and move toward public funding of elections.”

Immediately after Sanders made that demand, the DNC handed the microphone to Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who bragged about being a billionaire, and then to the chairman of a venture capital firm for a speech insisting that Harris will be “both pro-business and pro-worker” — as if there never needs to be a choice between the two. It was a scheduling juxtaposition that undoubtedly reassured the convention’s corporate sponsors that (to use Joe Biden’s donor-speak) nothing will fundamentally change. But it should.

Overturning Citizens United will be a slow constitutional amendment process — but one that’s already making progress, and could over time generate some bipartisan support.

The latter is already happening in states and cities across the country. It may seem like a pipe dream at the federal level, but remember: The idea twice came within a hair of happening in response to corruption scandals that rocked Washington.

“The election of federal officials is not a private affair. It is the foundation of our government,” said the Senate report that accompanied the chamber’s passage of a public financing bill in the mid-1970s. “We shall not finally come to grips with the problems except as we are prepared to pay for the public business of elections with public funds.”

By today’s standards, such a clear statement from Congress’s upper chamber seems unfathomable — but it didn’t happen because senators were more altruistic back then. They came so close to game-changing anti-corruption reform because the public was so enraged by the Watergate scandal that their representatives felt the need to try to act.

Watching convention-goers stroll the United Center halls and barely notice the corporate brands advertising their ownership of the Democratic Party, it is difficult to know if such rage can be mustered anymore. Even as today’s corruption makes the scandals of the 1970s seem quaint, such disgust seems absent from an electorate inured to the dominance of money politics.

Whereas the Watergate scandal prompted the first major campaign finance reforms of the 20th century, and the fundraising excesses of the 1980s and 1990s prompted McCain’s crusade against the master plan, today’s corruption seems on the verge of becoming like the water in David Foster Wallace’s parable about fish — many are so accustomed to swimming in it, they have stopped noticing it. Worse, some even demand contrition from those who dare to identify it as a problem.

In 2020, there was Sanders feeling compelled to apologize for a surrogate invoking the word “corruption” when rightly criticizing Joe Biden’s all-too-close relationship with corporate donors.

In 2024, there was Rep. Katie Porter being vilified for pointing out that billionaires spent millions to “rig” her primary contest.

As this election season heads into its final two months and produces a new president, there will be even more such pressure to keep quiet, conform, and insist on repentance from those who dare mention the corruption that America is drowning in.

Succumbing to that code of silence is exactly what the master planners want — and exactly what will end whatever’s left of democracy.

Collective Bargaining in Europe – Recent Developments

By Thomas Klikauer

July 29, 2024

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

"Labor Solidarity has no Borders." This mural by Mike Alewitz was painted in Los Angles in 1992 to advocate for immigrant worker's rights. The green monster- "the green monster of capitalism" was also seen in a 1985 mural for Hormel strikers painted by the same artist.

In terms of recent collective bargaining successes, the situation of workers in Europe can be summed up as: real wages still need to catch up after the severe income losses during the recent “crises of high inflation” hitting European workers. In short, it is more than likely that more strikes will be needed in the near future.

The latest upwards shift on high inflation in the Eurozone’s 20 member states of Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Spain was caused by the tightening of energy markets that had been privatised in recent decades.

This was secured under Hayek’s neoliberal belief-system when a corner-shop daughter with limited understanding (Thatcher) married a third-class US actor with an equally limited intellectual capacity (Reagan) in the 1980s.

Guided by neo-liberalism, politicians kickstarted a relentless drive towards “the privatisation of everything” that was flanked by the all-encompassing ideology.

Unsurprisingly, the ideology of neo-liberalism and privatisation has spread through European politics like the plague that swiped through Europe.

All of this has converted energy delivery into a tradeable good exposed to the whims of “high-octane” energy speculations of markets – as shown by Enron. This assisted the recent crises of high inflation that impacted on European workers.

Despite some recent successes in collective bargaining, real wages throughout the European Union continued to fall between late 2022 and 2023. This came, notwithstanding the fact that inflation started to drop around October 2022.

Yet, a very slow recovery of wages is emerging for the current year of 2024. Still, this sluggish growth in wages might have the capacity to stabilise the already rather unequal distribution of income between labour and capital in favour of capital.

Europe’s corporate media will sell a “modest” or even “no” wage increases as “look, the system is working” and “wages are growing”.

Never mind that any wage increase will only asphyxiate the structural asymmetries between labour and capital. This is important for capitalism’s drive towards stability – with trade unions, as long as unions are not eliminated altogether.

This, of course, is never openly admitted. The idea of “incorporating” (read: using, manipulating, and moulding) unions into the apparatus of capitalism is commonly sold as “social partnership”.

Meanwhile, any upswing in wages will, almost by definition, strengthen the domestic demand side of capitalism’s consumerism. This assists consumer capitalism on the “spending side” by providing disposable income that translates into shopping and consumerism.

Yet, this does not work on the “expenses side” where companies seek to push wages down. These two out of the 17 unsolvable contradictions of capitalism are conflicting forces. In short, “high wages” conflicts with “cost-cutting”.

From a workers’ point of view, the current crisis “again” shows that workers have been made to cover the vast amount of the real income losses associated with what became known as “the energy price shock”.

The ideological message is that it is just a “shock”, a distress, a disturbance, and something that “came out of the blue” like an earthquake. It is all natural and has nothing to do with capitalism.

The second ideology that camouflages the usual crisis of capitalism is to associate high inflation with the Russian war against the Ukraine – everything will do, except capitalism.

As a result of these factors and the ideological smokescreen, workers suffered a reduction in real wage levels. This forces trade unions into catching-up in order to contribute to a “fairer” burden sharing between labour and capital.

Ever since the arrival of capitalism, there has never been a “fair burden sharing” between labour and capital. Once unions have caught up in wages increases, they – most likely – will be blamed for “cranking up inflation” by those who seeks to hide those that really crank up inflation: companies and corporations.

As a consequence of a workable ideology, we are frequently told about “the inflation shock of 2022”. Yet, it forces the hand of trade unions.

Overall, there will be more trade union engagements into collective bargaining and more strikes. We could also see what might be called a “normalisation of European collective bargaining policy”.

With more strikes on the horizon, trade unions might balance out the power asymmetries of capitalism. Of course, on all of this, corporate media will focus on the impact of strikes – causing “travel chaos” and “strike madness”, etc. Explaining the causes of strikes to the public can be dangerous.

It might make people support trade unions more and that is something corporate mass media (that are businesses themselves) do not want.

Meanwhile, inflation is slowly declining and thanks to rising nominal wages, the purchasing power of European workers is slowly “stabilising” (read: not really increasing). However, much of this has “not yet” offset the drop in real wages since “Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine”.

This was not caused by Russia (a country) but by companies and corporations cranking up prices. It is known as “price-gouging”. Blaming Russia for ‘providing’ the ideological cover for Uber-profitmaking. In the manageralisitic language of a CEO, it becomes as Kimberly-Clark’s CEO said,

the company has “a lot of opportunity” to expand margins over time.

Expanding “margins” is the managerialist codeword for “profits”. For the corporate apparatchiks who run corporations, the word “profit” remains a dirty word that must be avoided. Instead, it is way better for the apostles of neo-liberalism and Managerialism to speak of “margins”, “shareholder value” etc.

Meanwhile, on the workers’ side of the equation, the jacking up of prices by companies and the resulting inflation led to deep cuts in the available income of workers. This has far-reaching consequences for the “functional” (read: unequal) distribution of income between labour and capital.

Overall, collective bargaining continues to face the task of correcting the undesirable developments of recent years, and thereby, contributes to easing the burdens on workers. Yet, for almost half a decade, collective bargaining has been domesticated by calling it a “crisis” and “chaos”.

Meanwhile, the idea of “rapidly changing economic conditions” is also used to house-train and tame trade unions. Much of this is done to push trade unions into the defensive.

The short phase of economic recovery at the end of the Corona pandemic was abruptly ended by the inflation crisis in the wake of the Russian’s attack on Ukraine.

Terms like “economic recovery” are staunchly avoided by the apostles of neo-liberalism and adjacent pro-business writers as this might give unions “ideas” like we demand our share of the cake. The apostles of neoliberal capitalism seek to avoid this.

Meanwhile, the corporate jacking up of energy and consumer prices has put pressure on private consumption. It also increased production costs in energy-intensive industries.

At the same time, many companies have been able to increase their profits by rising prices, which in turn has contributed significantly to domestic inflation.

As in almost any crisis, this time too, an upward redistribution of wealth at the expense of wage earners and in favour of capital and profits was the result.

It works under one of the more cynical mottos of neo-liberalism: “never let a crisis go to waste” – in short, use it to extract even more wealth from the working class. The not-so-socialist RAND corporation estimates this to be in the vicinity of $2.5tr.

Worse, stagnating private consumption and an increase in private savings that was driven by uncertainties and was paired with a restrictive monetary policy of the European Central Bank (ECB) have sharpened the edges of economics in recent years. In other words, it has made life for workers harder.

Notwithstanding, GDP in EU countries grew by an average of 3.5% in 2022. It came in the wake of re-opening of businesses after the easing of Corona restrictions.

Yet, growth slumped significantly to 0.4% in 2023. Worse, the increase in interest rates by the ECB that reached a spike in September 2023 at 4.5% – lowered to 4.25% in June 2024 – also contributed to the economic slowdown.

Meanwhile, in Ireland’s strongly cyclical economy, GDP shrunk by a full 3.2%. This was caused by the weak development in some sectors dominated by multinational corporations.

In Germany and Austria, GDP decreased by 0.3 and 0.8%, respectively. Yet, Belgium’s economy grew slightly by 1.4%. France largely stagnated with a small increase of 0.7%, as restrained investments slowed growth down.

All of this continues to impact on the labour market in the EU-27. Despite all this, it was still characterised by, albeit slow, employment “growth” particularly in the service sector. In the last quarter of 2023, the EU documented a new record with an “employment rate” of a whopping 75.3% among 20-64-year-olds.

Despite weak orders, many EU companies keep their current workforce to secure and ensure availability of required workforce in the event of an economic upturn.

With an unemployment rated in Poland (2.8%), the Czech Republic (2.6%), and Germany (3.1%), these EU countries had “almost” full employment in 2023 – on “official” (read: cleaned up / manipulated) statistics.

Overall, the EU expects Europe’s unemployment rate to remain as low as 6.1% in the EU-27 countries for 2023 and 2024.

This alone should significantly strengthen the collective bargaining position of trade unions. However, some also expect a slight increase in unemployment in 2024 – particularly in some northern and Western European industrialised countries.

Against this background, European collective bargaining is set to move towards “at least rudimentarily fair” (read: less unfavourable to workers) outcomes in the near future.

The previous rather sharp increases in corporate profits will serve as a corporate buffer in case wage gains are made by trade unions.

Meanwhile, workers and trade unions are set to “make up” for previous losses in the form of rising real wages by achieving improved collective bargaining outcomes.

At the same time, it is to be expected that this will be blamed by the corporate press on the so-called “wage-price spiral” that insinuates that trade unions – and not corporate bosses cranking up prices – are responsible for inflation.

In any case, further wage growth is strongly required in the current phase of economic recovery. This is the only way to – at least partially! – compensate for the sharp slump in real wages during the recent crises of high inflation that put wages on a downward spiral.

Those who have dared to forecast what might happen during the second half of the current year, agreed that a modest wage rise with next to no compensation for capitalism’s recent high inflation is what is likely to occur.

Meanwhile, the neoliberal and anti-union European Commission expect wages to grow by a measly 2.0% for the Eurozone.

Worse, there is currently absolutely “no sign” of wages growth to be “re”-coupled to productivity. Perhaps, the “decoupling” of wages from productivity was one of the most significant feats achieved by neo-liberalism.

It permanently made workers poorer and poorer while corporate profits rose and rose. Workers worked hard and others cashed in, big time!

Until the year 2025, productivity is set to grow by 1.2% while wage growth is expected to slow down. In other words, the gap between “productivity / profits” and “wages” will grow.

Despite unions achieving wage gains, the decoupling of wages from productivity is set to continue. And this will make corporations – in the long run – much richer and workers comparatively much poorer.

At first glance, it seems that Europe has, as presented by corporate media, taken a “just” way out of the crisis. On closer inspection however, the situation is more complex than the ideologues of the pro-business press want us to believe.

For example, real wages will continue to be well below the 2021 level even in the optimistic scenario outlined above with unions achieving significant wages increases.

A return to 2021 wage levels is “not” expected to be reached again until 2025 – at the earliest.

Worse, real wages in the EU-27 in 2023 were each around 7% below the value that could have been expected if a “normal” development had occurred, i.e. without the high inflation crisis caused by the cranking up of prices by companies and corporations and by exposing energy to the whims of a privatised market.

From this perspective, too, a catch-up movement in wages is therefore bitterly needed. In other words, European trade unions will have to fight even more rigorously to get workers back to that level of wages enjoyed before the “inflation crisis”.

This needs to be done with or without re-linking wages to the classical three demands for higher wages: Inflation: At least, wages levels need to be able to compensate for capitalism’s inflation that is caused by capital – not workers and trade unions.
Productivity: trade unions need to re-link wages to productivity so that workers can enjoy – at least parts – of the fruits they themselves have made possible.
Wealth-redistribution: this is the “returning” some of the Uber-wealth companies and corporations have made under neo-liberalism.


ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers.  Donate



Thomas Klikauer

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

That Big Jan. 6 Supreme Court Decision Is Not the Win for Trump People Think It Is

BY RICHARD L. HASEN

SLATE

JUNE 28, 2024

John Roberts created a big potential legal problem for Trump. Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Samuel Corum/Getty Images, Shawn Thew/Pool/Getty Images, and supremecourt.gov.

This is part of Opinionpalooza, Slate’s coverage of the major decisions from the Supreme Court this June. Alongside Amicus, we kicked things off this year by explaining How Originalism Ate the Law. The best way to support our work is by joining Slate Plus. (If you are already a member, consider a donation or merch!)

In Fischer v. United States, a divided Supreme Court, in an opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, handed Donald Trump a political victory by saying the government overreached in prosecuting some of the Jan. 6 rioters. But it created a potentially big legal problem for him by confirming that the submission of “false evidence” in an official proceeding—as Trump allegedly help orchestrate with the fake electors scheme after he lost the 2020 election—indeed violates federal law. Should Donald Trump ever go to trial on 2020 election interference, and that’s a big if depending on what the Supreme Court does Monday in the pending Trump immunity case, he could well face some serious jail time.

Roberts barely acknowledged the factual circumstances surrounding the Fischer case. For months, Donald Trump had been telling his supporters that the 2020 presidential election was going to be (and eventually was) stolen from him. He encouraged his supporters to come to D.C. on Jan. 6, 2021, for “wild” protests. That was a significant day because it was when Vice President Mike Pence presided over a joint session of Congress and the Electoral College votes were to be counted confirming Joe Biden as the winner. After (and during) Trump’s speech before a boisterous crowd, large segments of that group went to the U.S. Capitol and invaded. The result was a violent insurrection, leaving five dead and 140 law enforcement officers injured. Four officers later died by suicide. It was horrendous.

Roberts sadly doesn’t acknowledge this unfortunate history and ongoing threat to American democracy or take any position on it, other than to state, contrary to the antifa takes, that “a crowd of supporters of then-President Donald Trump gathered outside the Capitol” and eventually invaded. This stands in sharp contrast with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson who, in her concurring opinion, opened by calling out and condemning what happened:


On January 6, 2021, an angry mob stormed the United States Capitol seeking to prevent Congress from fulfilling its constitutional duty to certify the electoral votes in the 2020 Presidential election. The peaceful transfer of power is a fundamental democratic norm, and those who attempted to disrupt it in this way inflicted a deep wound on this Nation. But today’s case is not about the immorality of those acts.

Roberts instead approached the question as an antiseptic one of statutory interpretation, involving a statute concerning the “obstruction” of an official proceeding. There’s no question that the rioters could be charged with certain crimes that are straightforward, like criminal trespass or destruction of government property. Those charges will still stand against many of the Jan. 6 rioters, but the obstruction charges mattered because they raised the potential for much more jail time.

Related From Slate 

DAHLIA LITHWICK AND MARK JOSEPH STERN
Sonia Sotomayor Is Trying to Warn Us About the Supreme Court’s Dirtiest Open Secret

Follow me into the weeds for a moment. Here’s the obstruction statute at issue:


(c) Whoever corruptly—

(1) alters, destroys, mutilates, or conceals a record, document, or other object, or attempts to do so, with the intent to impair the object’s integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding; or

(2) otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so,

shall be fined … or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.

The question was whether Joseph Fischer, one of the Jan. 6 invaders, “otherwise” “obstruct[ed]” or “imped[ed]” an official proceeding. More precisely, how should the legal system read the word otherwise? Does it apply to any way in which a proceeding might be obstructed, or was it limited to doing so in ways like the ways done in (c)(1), which involves the interference or manipulation of evidence? The majority—including Jackson in her concurrence—read the statute in context to apply to doing something with evidence. Congress enacted the statute after the Enron accounting scandal, and the prime concern was about the evidence manipulation and tampering. The dissenters, led by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, read the statute more broadly to apply to all different ways one might obstruct or impede an official proceeding, including through criminal acts of trespass and violence.

Barrett is a committed textualist, and she makes a good case to read the statute broadly. But the chief justice and Jackson, a former federal public defender, had their own arguments for reading it more narrowly. As a matter of statutory interpretation, this was one of those cases that could have gone either way. My own view is that there’s no reason Congress in writing the statute would have wanted to stop obstruction or impeding of official proceedings only through the use of evidence, not violence, and that the statute was fairly applied to people like Fischer, who knew what they were doing was wrong.

So this is a political victory for the Trumpists, who can now claim judicial overreach as a number of Jan. 6 insurrectionists get part of their charges thrown out. Of course, no one is going to be getting into the weeds of statutory interpretation when they debate this in public. The point is that supporters of the rioters can say the Biden Department of Justice overreached in aggressively applying the statute. As I write this, the banner headline on the New York Times website says, “Supreme Court Says Prosecutors in Jan. 6 Case Overstepped.” That surely hands a victory to Trump and his supporters.

But Roberts did one thing that he did not have to do that surely would hurt Trump if he ever goes on trial for election interference. Trump too was charged with interfering with an official proceeding. He did not physically invade the Capitol or destroy property. He instead is alleged to have engaged in election subversion, including causing the submission of fake electors in an effort to swing the election that he lost from Biden to him.

Could that conduct count as a violation of the statute? The majority opinion states that “it is possible to violate (c)(2) by creating false evidence—rather than altering incriminating evidence.” That’s exactly what Trump is alleged to have engaged in a conspiracy to do. If Trump acted corruptly and if the fake slates of electors count as “false evidence,” well then he and others could be in a lot of criminal trouble.


Roberts’ opinion was joined by other conservative justices, including Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Clarence Thomas. Getting them on the record on this is no small thing. And surely the Barrett dissenters would agree too that the statute covers the creation of false evidence.

That’s legally bad news for Donald Trump, should he ever go on trial. Tune in Monday to see if that’s even possible. Trump has argued that the charges against him need to be dismissed because he’s immune from prosecution. The Supreme Court is expected to issue its opinion, and I’m not expecting good news.