The U.N. issued a new warning this week about acute malnutrition among Yemen’s youngest children that threatens to kill nearly 100,000 children under the age of five:
“Yemen is on the brink of a catastrophic food security crisis. If the war doesn’t end now, we are nearing an irreversible situation and risk losing an entire generation of Yemen’s young children,” said Lise Grande, the UN’s humanitarian coordinator for the country.
“Acute malnutrition among children is hitting the highest levels we have seen since the war started.”
The people of Yemen have been starved for the last five and a half years by a combination of Saudi coalition blockade, economic war, and bombing. The crisis has worsened recently because of shortfalls in international funding, rising prices, and the suspension of U.S. aid to Houthi-controlled areas where the overwhelming majority of Yemenis live. Humanitarian relief organizations called for a resumption of US aid earlier this year to no avail. Restoring that aid is imperative if our government is to help stave off a worse disaster that has resulted from an indefensible policy of backing this war.
The worsening conditions in Yemen are preventable, but it will require sufficient funding to keep the aid projects going:
Funding shortfalls have disrupted the implementation of many aid projects, including emergency food assistance. Malnutrition treatment programs also could be curtailed if funds are not received soon. As of mid-October, only $1.43 billion of the $3.2 billion needed in 2020 had been received, the UNICEF press release said.
U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator for Yemen Lisa Grande said the inability to increase humanitarian efforts in Yemen because of insufficient funding is “heartbreaking.”
The misguided use of humanitarian relief funding to punish the Houthis is only harming innocent and powerless people. The civilian population always bears the brunt of these heavy-handed pressure tactics, and so it is again in Yemen.
Here is a word that risks deterring you from reading on much further, even though it may hold the key to understanding why we are in such a terrible political, economic and social mess. That word is “externalities”.
It sounds like a piece of economic jargon. It is a piece of economic jargon. But it is also the foundation stone on which the west’s current economic and ideological system has been built. Focusing on how externalities work and how they have come to dominate every sphere of our lives is to understand how we are destroying our planet – and offer at the same time the signpost to a better future.
In economics, “externalities” are usually defined indifferently as the effects of a commercial or industrial process on a third party that are not costed into that process.
Here is what should be a familiar example. For decades, cigarette manufacturers made enormous profits by concealing scientific evidence that over time their product could prove lethal to customers. The firms profited by externalising the costs associated with cigarettes – of death and disease – on to those buying their cigarettes and wider society. People gave Philip Morris and British American Tobacco their money as these companies made those smoking Marlboros and Lucky Strikes progressively unhealthier.
The externalised cost was paid – is still paid – by the customers themselves, by grieving families, by local and national health services, and by the taxpayer. Had the firms been required to pick up these various tabs, it would have proved entirely unprofitable to manufacture cigarettes.
Inherently violent
Externalities are not incidental to the way capitalist economies run. They are integral to them. After all, it is a legal obligation on private companies to maximise profits for their shareholders – in addition, of course, to the personal incentive bosses have to enrich themselves, and each company’s need to avoid making themselves vulnerable to more profitable and predatory competitors in the marketplace.
Companies are therefore motivated to offload as many costs as possible on to others. As we shall see, externalities mean someone other than the company itself pays the true cost behind its profits, either because those others are too weak or ignorant to fight back or because the bill comes due further down the line. And for that reason, externalities – and capitalism – are inherently violent.
All this would be glaringly obvious if we didn’t live inside an ideological system – the ultimate echo chamber enforced by our corporate media – that is complicit either in hiding this violence or in normalising it. When externalities are particularly onerous or harmful, as they invariably are in one way or another, it becomes necessary for a company to obscure the connection between cause and effect, between its accumulation of profit and the resulting accumulation of damage caused to a community, a distant country or the natural world – or all three.
That is why corporations – those that inflict the biggest and worst externalities – invest a great deal of time and money in aggressively managing public perceptions. They achieve this through a combination of public relations, advertising, media control, political lobbying and the capture of regulatory institutions. Much of the business of business is deception, either making the externalised harm invisible or gaining the public’s resigned acceptance that the harm is inevitable.
In that sense, capitalism produces a business model that is not only rapacious but psychopathic. Those who pursue profit have no choice but to inflict damage on wider society, or the planet, and then cloak their deeply anti-social – even suicidal – actions.
Psychopathic demands
A recent film that alludes to how this form of violence works was last year’s Dark Waters, concerning the long-running legal battle with DuPont over the chemicals it developed to make non-stick coatings for pots and pans. From the outset, DuPont’s research showed that these chemicals were highly dangerous and accumulated in the body. The science overwhelmingly suggested that exposed individuals would be at risk of developing cancerous tumours or producing children with birth defects.
There were huge profits to be made for DuPont from its chemical discovery so long as it could keep the research hidden. So that’s exactly what its executives did. They set aside basic morality and acted in concert with the psychopathic demands of the marketplace.
DuPont produced pans that contaminated its customers’ food. Workers were exposed to a cocktail of lethal poisons in its factories. The company stored the toxic waste products in drums and then secretly disposed of them in landfills where they leached into the local water supply, killing cattle and producing an epidemic of disease among local residents. DuPont created a chemical that is now everywhere in our environment, risking the health of generations to come.
But a film like Dark Waters necessarily turned a case study in how capitalism commits violence by externalising its costs into something less threatening, less revelatory. We hiss at DuPont’s executives as though they are the ugly sisters in a pantomime rather than ordinary people not unlike our parents, our siblings, our offspring, ourselves.
In truth, there is nothing exceptional about the DuPont story – apart from the company’s failure to keep its secret hidden from the public. And that exposure was anomalous, occurring only belatedly and against great odds.
An important message the film’s feelgood ending fails to deliver is that other corporations have learnt from DuPont’s mistake – not the moral “mistake” of externalising their costs, but the financial mistake of getting caught doing so. Corporate lobbyists have worked since to further capture regulatory authorities and to amend transparency and legal discovery laws to avoid any repetition, to ensure they are not held legally liable, as DuPont was, in the future.
Victims of our bombs
Unlike the DuPont case, most externalities are never exposed. Instead they hide in plain sight. These externalities do not need to be concealed because they are either not perceived as externalities or because they are viewed as so unimportant as to be not worth factoring in.
The military-industrial complex – the one we were warned about more than half a century ago by President Dwight Eisenhower, a former US general – excels in these kinds of externalities. Its power derives from its ability to externalise its costs on to the victims of its bombs and its wars. These are people we know and care little about: they live far from us, they look and sound different to us, they are denied names and life stories like us. They are simply numbers, denoting them either as terrorists or, at best, unfortunate collateral damage.
The externalities of the west’s war industries are opaque to us. The chain of cause and effect is nowadays obscured as “humanitarian intervention”. And even when war’s externalities come knocking at our borders as refugees flee from the bloodshed, or from the nihilistic cults sucked into the power vacuums we leave behind, or from the wreckage of infrastructure our weapons cause, or from the environmental degradation and pollution we unleash, or from the economies ruined by our plunder of local resources, we still don’t recognise these externalities for what they are. Our politicians and media transform the victims of our wars and our resource grabs into, at best, economic migrants and, at worst, barbarians at the gate.
Snapshots of catastrophe
If we are entirely ignorant of the externalities inflicted by capitalism on victims beyond our shores, we are gradually and very late in the day waking up to some of capitalism’s externalities much closer to home. Parts of the corporate media are finally admitting that which can no longer be plausibly denied, that which is evident to our own senses.
For decades politicians and the corporate media managed to veil two things: that capitalism is an entirely unsustainable, profit-driven, endless consumption model; and that the environment is being gradually damaged in ways harmful to life. Each was obscured, as was the fact that the two are causally connected. The economic model is the primary cause of the environmental damage.
People, especially the young, are slowly awakening from this enforced state of ignorance. The corporate media, even its most liberal elements, is not leading this process; it is responding to that awakening.
Last week the Guardian newspaper prominently ran two stories about externalities, even if it failed to frame them as such. One was about micro-plastics leaching from feeding bottles into babies, and the other about the toll air pollution is taking on the populations of major European cities.
The latter story, based on new research, specifically assessed the cost of air pollution in European cities – in terms of “premature death, hospital treatment, lost working days and other health costs” – at £150 billion a year. Most of this was caused by pollution from vehicles, the profitable product of the car industry. The researchers admitted that their figure was an under-estimate of air pollution’s true cost.
But, of course, even that underestimate was arrived at solely on the basis of metrics prioritised by capitalist ideology: the cost to the economy of death and disease, not the incalculable cost in lost and damaged human lives, and even less the damage to other species and the natural world. Another report last week alluded to one of those many additional costs, showing a steep rise in depression and anxiety caused by air pollution.
The other story, on baby bottles, is part of a much bigger story of how the plastics industry – whose products are derivatives of the fossil fuel industry – has long been filling our oceans and soil with plastics, both of the visible and invisible kind. Last week’s report revealed that the sterilisation process in which bottles are heated in boiling water resulted in babies swallowing millions of micro-plastics each day. The study found that plastic food containers were shedding much higher loads of micro-plastics than expected.
These stories are snapshots of a much wider environmental catastrophe unfolding across the planet caused by profit-driven industrialised society. As well as heating up the climate, corporations are chopping down the forests that don’t burn down first, ridding the planet of its lungs; they are destroying natural habitats and soil quality; and they are rapidly killing off insect populations.
These industries’ externalities are, for the time being, impacting most severely on the natural world. But they will soon have more visible and dramatic effects that will be felt by our children and grandchildren. Neither of these constituences currently has a say in how our capitalist “democracies” are being run.
Perception managers
Capitalism isn’t only harming us, it’s double-billing us: taking first from our wallets and then depriving us of a future. We have now entered an era of deep cognitive dissonance.
Unlike a few years ago, many of us now understand that our futures are at grave risk from changes in our environment – the effect. But the task of today’s perception managers, like those of yesteryear, is to obscure the main cause – our economic system, capitalism.
The increasingly desperate effort to dissociate capitalism from the imminent environmental crisis – to break any perception of a causal link – was highlighted early this year. It emerged that counter-terrorism police in the UK had included Extinction Rebellion, the west’s main environmental protest group, on a list of extremist organisations. Under related “Prevent” regulations, teachers and government officials are already required by law to report anyone who they suspect of being “radicalised”.
In a guide explaining the purpose of the list, officials and teachers were told to identify anyone who speaks in “strong or emotive terms about environmental issues like climate change, ecology, species extinction, fracking, airport expansion or pollution”.
Why was Extinction Rebellion, a non-violent, civil disobedience group, included alongside neo-Nazis and Islamic jihadists? A whole page is dedicated to the threat posed by Extinction Rebellion. The guide explains that the organisation’s activism is rooted in an “anti-establishment philosophy that seeks system change”. That is, environmental activism risks making apparent – especially to the young – the causal connection between the economic system and damage to the environment.
Once the story broke, the police hastily rowed back, claiming that Extinction Rebellion’s inclusion was a mistake. But more recently establishment efforts to decouple capitalism from its catastrophic externalities have grown more explicit.
Last month England’s department of education ordered schools not to use any materials in the curriculum that question the legitimacy of capitalism. Opposition to capitalism was described as an “extreme political stance” – opposition, let us remember, to an economic system whose relentless pursuit of growth and profit treats the destruction of the natural world as an uncosted externality.
Paradoxically, education officials equated promotion of alternatives to capitalism as a threat to free speech, as well as an endorsement of illegal activity, and – inevitably – as evidence of antisemitism.
Suicidal trajectory
These desperate and draconian measures to shore up an increasingly discredited system are not about to end. They will get much worse.
The establishment is not preparing to give up on capitalism – the ideology that enriched and empowered it – without a fight. The political and media class proved that with their relentless and unprecedented attacks on Labour opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn over several years. And Corbyn was offering only a reformist, democratic socialist agenda.
The establishment has also demonstrated its determination to cling on to the status quo in its relentless and unprecedented attacks on Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who is locked away, seemingly indefinitely, for revealing the externalities – the victims – of the west’s war industries and the psychopathic behaviour of those in power.
Efforts to end the suicidal trajectory of our current “free market” system will doubtless soon be equated with terrorism, as the Prevent strategy has already intimated. We should be ready.
There can be no escape from the death wish of capitalism without recognising that death wish, and then demanding and working for wholesale change. Externalities may sound like innocuous jargon, but they and the economic system that requires them are killing us, our children and the planet.
By Caitlin Johnstone, an independent journalist based in Melbourne, Australia. Her website is here and you can follow her on Twitter @caitoz
Just like Democrats and the liberal media peddled Russiagate against Donald Trump, Biden is now the target of a budding Chinagate – the conservatives and Trumpists eager to adopt their foes' shrillness and disregard for facts.
Ohhh god. It’s happening again.
The same exact low rumble, slowly rising toward the same fever-pitch crescendo. First you get a few unexpected comments showing up in your notifications, then a few more, then a lot more, then a whole lot more. It’s one news story, then it’s 10, then it’s 100, then it’s completely dominating half of US political discourse.
The increasingly shrill shrieking from rightists about China having leverage over Joe Biden is alarmingly similar to what I experienced from liberals at this exact point in time in 2016 about Russia having leverage over Donald Trump. When I point out these similarities, I always get a bunch of Trumpists telling me that their CIA-friendly conspiracy theory about a US-targeted Asiatic nation having leverage over a presidential candidate in the form of blackmail and financial ties is completely different from the liberal CIA-friendly conspiracy theory about a US-targeted Asiatic nation having leverage over a presidential candidate in the form of blackmail and financial ties, but it’s the same. It’s exactly the same.
And it’s being directed in remarkably similar ways.
It started to pick up steam a week-and-a-half ago when the New York Postpublished a follow-up to its notorious Burisma emails publication purporting to show corrupt and nepotistic dealings between Hunter Biden and China’s largest private energy company which also involved Joe Biden at some level. Then last week a business associate of the younger Biden named Tony Bobulinski told the press that he had discussed deals with Chinese business entities with both Bidens.
These dealings would be inappropriate if true, and in a government that isn’t unfathomably corrupt like Washington they might even be remarkable. What they absolutely are not is evidence that Joe Biden is controlled in some way by the Chinese government.
Yet the notion that Biden may be owned by Beijing is being amplified and promoted by rightists like Nigel Farage and CIA applicant Tucker Carlson. It’s no more indicative of covert loyalties to a foreign government than the Gish gallop of weak arguments presented for the theories of Trump’s loyalty to Moscow, which after years of investigation and sweeping subpoena powers failed to see a single American indicted for conspiracy with the Russian government. Yet right-wing pundits are pushing this baseless claim with the same fervor we saw liberals beginning to push Russia conspiracy theories at this point in 2016, and their followers are showing up in my mentions telling me I’m a CCP agent for expressing skepticism.
We have been here before.
If Biden is elected we can expect to see these claims get louder and more shrill, surpassing the force with which Republicans pushed Benghazi many times over. It will dominate political discourse in the same way Russiagate has, and anyone expressing skepticism on social media that a virulent China hawk is actually a Chinese asset will be labeled a CCP propagandist by Trumpists.
We can expect this to create political pressure on the Biden administration to escalate Cold War aggression against Beijing, which Biden will happily do since, again, he is a virulent China hawk. We can expect Republicans to ignore those escalations and keep claiming Biden is suspiciously soft on China, while Democrats don’t object to them because he’s their president and they want him to show that he’s not a Chinese asset.
And of course neither Democrats nor liberal media platforms will have a moral leg to stand on to protest against these fact-free conspiracy theories, since they just spent four years doing the exact same thing. They chose to enter into a battle of conspiracy theories and McCarthyism with the Republican Party, which is a bit like challenging Tyson Fury to a boxing match. Russiagate will magically morph into Chinagate, and hysterical McCarthyite Sinophobe Tucker Carlson will become the new Rachel Maddow.
And of course the only winners of this nonsense will be the spies and Cold Warriors who are driving it all from behind the scenes. It started out with the contents of a laptop getting to the New York Post under very suspicious circumstances which nobody really believes the official story of, and it’s going to end up advancing the neoconservative goal of unipolar global hegemony. They got their new cold war against one half of the Russia-China tandem, and now they’re getting it against the other half.
“The PNAC plan envisions a strategic confrontation with China, and a still greater permanent military presence in every corner of the world. The objective is not just power for its own sake but power to control the world’s natural resources and markets, power to privatize and deregulate the economies of every nation in the world, and power to hoist upon the backs of peoples everywhere-including North America-the blessings of an untrammeled global ‘free market.’ The end goal is to ensure not merely the supremacy of global capitalism as such, but the supremacy of American global capitalism by preventing the emergence of any other potentially competing superpower.”
PNAC is of course the Project for the New American Century, the highly influential neoconservative think tank whose insane ideology of preserving US-centralized planetary dominance at all cost rose to real power with the paradigm-shifting George W. Bush administration. Their ideology never went away, it just gradually became the mainstream orthodoxy and is now seldom seriously questioned in mainstream circles.
The goal of stopping the rise of China has been in the works for many years, and Joe Biden was part of the administration whose “pivot” laid a major part of the groundwork for that agenda. Yet fact and narrative are so loosely related that no amount of evidence will dissuade the allegation that he is secretly a puppet of Xi Jinping, no matter how many economic sanctions and nuclear escalations he rolls out as president.
I was so looking forward to Russiagate being over and done with if Trump gets out, but it looks like I’m going to wind up accused of shilling for Biden and of being a secret CCP agent just like I’ve been accused of shilling for Trump and being a Kremlin agent for the last four years as I yell over and over again that the Cold Warriors are recycling the exact same goddamn script.
Oh well. Russian agent to Chinese agent. I guess it’s good to change things up with a new career move now and then.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
Photograph Source: US Army photo/Spc. Robert H. Baumgartner – CC BY 2.0
In 2016, Australian Major General Jeff Sengelman approached the then chief of the Australian army Lieutenant General Angus Campbell with a nagging worry. The concern lay in allegations that Australian special forces had committed various war crimes in Afghanistan. Sengelman was then special forces commander; Campbell was chief of the army. Sociologist Samantha Crompvoets was duly commissioned to write a report on “Special Operations Command Culture interactions”. It was leaked in 2018, and claimed that Australia’s special forces had engaged in the “unsanctioned and illegal application of violence on operations” aided by a timorous leadership and perception of impunity.
Campbell duly tasked the inspector-general of the Australian Defence Force, James Gaynor, with the role of investigating war crimes allegations connected with the Special Operations Task Group during stints in Afghanistan between 2005 and 2016. Paul Brereton, a New South Wales Supreme Court judge and major general in the Army Reserve, was given the task of leading the inquiry. For four years, it has been conducted under conditions of utmost secrecy. The instrument directing the inquiry, and the terms of reference of the inquiry, remain unpublished.
The report is expected to be completed by year’s end, though some preparations for softening the blow are already being made. The IGADF annual report of 2018-9, tabled in parliament in February, at least alludes to the fact that more than 338 witnesses have been examined since March 2016, noting “55 separate incidents or issues under inquiry covering a range of alleged breaches of the Law of Armed Conflict, predominantly unlawful killings of persons who were non-combatants or were no longer combatants, but also ‘cruel treatment’ of such persons.” Exclusions are already clear: decisions made during the “heat of battle,” for instance, are of no concern. Focus, instead, “is on the treatment of persons who were clearly non-combatants or who were no longer combatants.”
In an interview with journalist Stan Grant in an online conference series, Defence Minister Linda Reynolds was not optimistic about what would be unearthed. “I think that will make some very significant findings, ones that I’m certain will make Australians uncomfortable and also dismayed at. So, I think we do need to prepare ourselves for that.” While she had not seen the report, she felt that there was enough to be troubled by, though “that in no way reflects on our current serving men and women both here and overseas who are doing an extraordinary job for your nation.”
The Senator is keen to push the point that things have improved since those dark days. Army Commander Lieutenant General Rick Burr also made the point in a note to Australia’s soldiers that, “This is not who we are and not what we stand for.” He seemed to show some fondness for the bad apple theory, “concerned about the impact of those findings on those of you who served in Afghanistan and other operations and who served as professionals with pride and integrity. You did the right thing.”
The ADF establishment has been particularly concerned with what is seen as the isolation of the special unit arm from the rest of the army. Over the course of 20 rotations over 11 years in Afghanistan, “catastrophic and cultural shortfalls” have been identified within the Special Operations Command. The Special Air Service Regiment and commandos have also been at each other’s throats in what can only be described as competitive viciousness.
Lying behind such lines of inquiry is a policy of containment: the idea that atrocities can be stemmed, cordoned off, and identified as the work of a few rotters within a rotten culture. Identify the culture and its advocates; neutralise them. Burr is confident that this has already taken place, using the insufferable language of organisational management in describing “substantial cultural and professional transformation.” The question as to why such outfits should be deployed in the first place is never asked, leaving politicians and commanders immune and smug from the horrors of war and the stupidities of armchair planning.
While the IGADF inquiry has been moving slowly along, the exposes have come thick and fast. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation has become the main font of disturbing revelations, its Afghan Files a trove of bloody and brutal adventurism. The impact of their exposure led to investigations by the Australian Federal Police, not into allegations of such atrocities, but those who wrote about them. Only this month, ABC journalist Dan Oakes received the comforting, if cold news, that he would not be prosecuted by the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions in the aftermath of raids conducted on the national broadcaster last year. The CDPP waved the magic wand of public interest, and thought it poor form to be pursuing a journalist for exposing the misdeeds of Australia’s military effort in Afghanistan. But more troubling for Oakes, the CDPP thought that any prosecution would have stood a reasonable chance of success.
Another matter of concern regarding the future efficacy of the inquiry has also surfaced. This month, the ABC obtained an internal Defence Department bulletin noting the placing of an embargo on the shredding of any records relating to ADF operations in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2015. The embargo stemmed from the Afghanistan Inquiry Task Force established with the “primary role” of preparing “Defence to receive and respond to the IGADF Afghanistan Inquiry report.” Startling that this should have taken four years, but the Defence Department saw little trouble with it. According to the dull formulation of a spokesperson, “In accordance with these requirements, key operational records relating to planning and conduct become eligible for destruction after 20 years.”
This should have caused a flurry of consternation. For Rawan Arraf, director of the Australian Centre for International Justice, the timing of the embargo raised “serious questions about whether the Defence Department has had the proper processes in place; whether it has been complying with its regulations and international guidelines on record keeping and data protection, especially where it’s relevant to investigating any potential violations of international humanitarian law or the laws of armed conflict.”
While the findings of such inquiries will duly fill the books of military history, they will not alter the central problem in Australian military and foreign policy: that constant craving to deploy personnel to harsh foreign theatres without obvious strategic necessity. Australia’s SAS and the commandos can rightly be seen to be the Ghurkhas of the US military, an elite annexe serving as auxiliaries for foreign power.
Troubled and ruined, Afghanistan has been killing, maiming and driving the imperially minded insane for centuries. It has mocked and derided invaders, swallowed up armies. The tag of military professionalism is mere dinner table formality in the face of unconventional warfare; when engaged in such areas of battle, the rules will go out the window. By all means, hold the soldiers to account for such cruelties, but the same could be said about those who sent them there in the first place, decision makers who remain perennially immune from a prosecutor’s brief.
Binoy Kampmarkwas a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com
From a Wealthy Socialite to an Israeli Govt Censor, Facebook’s New “Free Speech Court” Is Anything but Independent
Freedom of speech on the Internet is all but extinct, and on the eve of the 2020 US elections, a de facto “free speech court” is going to make sure it never comes back. On Facebook at least.'
Days away from the most polarized electoral contest in American history, social media companies like Facebook have vowed to censor any voices which they and their partners in the federal government consider inconvenient. According to the Wall Street Journal, Facebook is ready to implement election information strategies that have been in the works for years.
Company spokesman Andy Stone told the WSJ that the social media giant will be applying the “lessons” learned from previous elections in accordance with the designs of “hired experts” and vague references to “new teams,” who are leveraging their “experience across different areas to prepare for various scenarios.”
Mark Zuckerberg’s de facto monopoly over online peer-to-peer communication tools has given Facebook an inordinate amount of influence over the political narratives at both national and regional levels, which it has shown a willingness exercise with topics like the Philippines and Palestine.
Last week, the company took a major step in solidifying its grip over the content purveyed on its platform with the official launch of the Facebook Oversight board. A body that is to function like a ‘Supreme Court’ for chat rooms, if you will, with the power to review any decisions regarding post removals or deplatforming and to make policy recommendations. Members have been drawn from “law experts… rights advocates” and journalists from around the world. The oversight board currently boasts 20 members.
Four members – two of which have extensive experience in the U.S. judicial system – serve as the board’s co-chairs and were handpicked by Facebook, according to The Guardian. Other board members include former Danish prime minister, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, who is also a co-chair and is perhaps only remembered outside of Denmark for her selfie faux pas at Mandela’s funeral in 2013 when she was photographed taking a group photo with Barack Obama and David Cameron during the commemoration.
Thorning-Schmidt’s insensitive moment at the laying-in-state of one of the most significant figures of the 20th century may be less damning to her presence on a social media oversight board than the tax-evasion scandal involving her husband – a British MP –, which ended up costing her re-election. When confronted over the accusations, she retorted that if her intention had really been to evade taxes, she would have done so “much more elegantly.” Despite these questionable instances and her reputation as an “extravagant” woman with expensive tastes, Thorning-Schmidt remains among the least objectionable figures on the oversight board.
Emi Palmor, for example, presents a much more alarming profile. One of 16 non-chair members of the board, Palmor is a former General Director of the Israeli Ministry of Justice, she was directly responsible for the removal of tens of thousands of Palestinian posts from Facebook. Before being fired from that job, Palmor had created the so-called “Internet Referral Unit” at the ministry; a cybersecurity team that deliberately targeted and took down the aforementioned content, and whose nomination to the Facebook oversight board was loudly protested by pro-Palestinian advocacy groups back in May.
Palmor posing with Israeli Prime Ministers Benjamin Netanyahu in 2016. Photo | Israeli Government Press Office
Inviting a literal state censor from a country with such an atrocious record of oppression and overt ethnic cleansing policies to serve in a supervisory role at one of the largest content networks in the world, should be reason enough for concern. Perhaps, even reason enough to call for the board’s dissolution given that such an egregious choice of personnel reveals an unacceptable political bias in an ostensibly impartial quasi-judicial body.
A look at the other co-chairs on the oversight board leaves no doubt as to which interests Facebook intends to further through its sham social media traffic court. It might not be a surprise to learn that an American company would tap American legal minds to form part of a dispute resolution body, as Jamal Greene, an oversight board co-chair, describes it.
Greene is a Dwight Professor of Law Columbia Law School who served as an aide to Sen. Kamala Harris during the highly-controversial Senate confirmation hearings of Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Prior to this, he was a law clerk for late Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who wrote the 1997 Internet decency controls decision that shot down legislation that sought to regulate online speech. An auspicious sign, perhaps, but tempered by Steven’s own pragmatist views on free speech, leaving the door open to context when protecting the “public interest” surrounding the first amendment.
Sitting alongside Greene and Helle Thorning-Schmidt on the oversight board’s co-chairmanship is Michael McConnell; a constitutional law scholar who served seven years as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit court. McConnell wrote the dissenting opinion in the seminal “Ten Commandments” case, which centered around the government’s authority to decide which monuments can be erected in a public park.
Judge McConnell, who has been floated as a potential Supreme Court nominee more than once and is “highly regarded for his writing on church-state law,” argued in favor of the government’s discretionary powers, claiming that private donations to public facilities – like the ten commandments monument in a public park in Utah, that spurred the case – became “government speech” and, therefore within the purview of governmental authority.
Rounding out the co-chair suite is Catalina Botero Marino, a Colombian attorney and former special rapporteur for freedom of expression at the Organization of American States (OAS); an organization well-known for being Washington’s mouthpiece for D.C.-aligned policy in Latin America.
Botero expressed her position on the very topic she will be dealing with first-hand in her new position as co-chair of the Facebook oversight board in a 2019 paper titled “Towards an Internet Free of Censorship: standards, contexts, and lessons from the Inter-American Human Rights System.” In it, Botero reveals why she was tapped to join the make-shift panel of social media judges when she defines freedom of expression as “individual and collective self-government” and highlights her “utmost concern” over the “deliberately false circulation of information, created and put into circulation with the purpose of deceiving the public” in electoral processes.
Raul Diego is a MintPress News Staff Writer, independent photojournalist, researcher, writer and documentary filmmaker.
