France Fines Google $120 Million, Amazon $42 Million for Tracking Users
France’s data protection agency CNIL has fined Google $120 million, and Amazon $42 million, for dropping tracking cookies without consent. Google’s revenue in the third quarter of 2020 reached $46.2 billion.
The regulator has been investigating Google and Amazon over the past year and discovered tracking cookies were automatically dropped when a user visited the domains, which is in breach of France’s Data Protection Act, according to a report by Tech Crunch.
“As this type of cookies cannot be deposited without the user having expressed his consent, the restricted committee considered that the companies had not complied with the requirement provided for by article 82 of the Data Protection Act and the prior collection of the consent before the deposit of non-essential cookies,” wrote CNIL of Google in the penalty notice.
The report added that under French and European law, site users should have been clearly informed before the cookies were dropped and asked for their consent.
Google was found to have three consent violations related to dropping non-essential cookies, while Amazon was found to have made two violations.
In Amazon’s case, its French site displayed a banner informing arriving visitors that they agreed to its use of cookies. But CNIL says this did not comply with transparency or consent requirements, because it was not clear to users that the company was using cookies for ad tracking. Users were also not given the opportunity to consent.
As for Google, when a user selected to deactivate personalized advertising, it only partially worked, as one advertising cookie remained stored on the user’s machine and continued to process data in violation of France’s consent law.
Both Google and Amazon disagreed with CNIL’s decision, but nonetheless made changes to their sites. Amazon updated its French site in September so that it stops automatically dropping the tracking cookies.
Google also stopped automatically dropping the cookies on its Google.fr domain after an update in September. However, the CNIL says that a new cookie notice presented to users still does not provide the appropriate information about what the cookies are used for nor inform users that they can refuse them.
Due to this, the CNIL has also slapped Google with an order, giving the tech giant three months to correct the cookie notices so they provide adequate information to users, or else risk further fines of €100,000 per day until the violation stops.
CNIL says that its $120 million fine is justified due to the severity of Google’s three violations related to dropping non-essential cookies.
In the third quarter of 2020, Google reported revenues of $46.2 billion, and revenue from advertising stood at $37.09 billion, which is up from $33.79 billion in the third quarter of 2019, according to Exchange 4 Media.
“We had a strong quarter, consistent with the broader online environment,” said Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, on Parler at @alana, and on Instagram.
This is because
despite all its declarations, the Democratic Party is not a party of workers.
It, as Biden’s transition team attests, is a party of Wall
Street, big banks, Amazon, and the military-industrial
complex.
Amazon
is entangled not only with Wall Street, but also with the US military and
intelligence apparatus. Amazon was awarded a $600 million contract with the CIA
in 2013, followed by a $10 billion contract with the Department of Defense last
year to move government data onto the cloud. Meanwhile, Amazon’s
facial-identification software “Rekognition” is being marketed to federal and
local police.
“Amazon is a massive
wrecking machine consuming American retail. It's looting the economy and
leaving behind rubble.”
DANIEL GREENFIELD
Traditional book publishers were decimated by the arrival of
Amazon, which aggressively pursued them, in the words of Bezos, “the way a
cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle.”
Amazon, the
multinational online retail conglomerate, is importing more foreign workers to
the United States to take coveted tech industry jobs than Facebook and Google
combined. JOHN BINDER
Amazon is
entangled not only with Wall Street, but also with the US military and
intelligence apparatus. Amazon was awarded a $600 million contract with the CIA
in 2013, followed by a $10 billion contract with the Department of Defense last
year to move government data onto the cloud. Meanwhile, Amazon’s
facial-identification software “Rekognition” is being marketed to federal and
local police.
THE BILLIONAIRE CLASS WAGES WAR ON AMERICA!
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/09/bill-gates-zuckerberg-jeff-bezos.html
"GOP estb. is using the $5 billion border-wall fight
to hide up to four blue/white-collar cheap-labor programs in
lame-duck DHS budget. Donors are worried that salaries are too
damn high, & estb. media does not want to know."
TOP EVIL
CORPORATIONS LOOTING AMERICA
Goldman Sachs TRUMP CRONIES – CLINTON CRONIES
JPMorgan Chase OBAMA CRONIES
ExxonMobil
Halliburton BUSH CRIME FAMILY CRONIES
British American Tobacco
Dow Chemical
DuPont
Bayer
Microsoft
Google CLINTON CRONIES
Facebook OBAMA CRONIES, BIDEN CRONIES
Amazon WORKS FOR BIDEN, OR DOES HE WORK FOR JEFF BEZOS?
Walmart
“Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned
an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility
to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy
alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the
statesmanship of today.” THEODORE
ROOSEVELT
Graph from
the Economic Policy Institute
Decades of decaying
capitalism have led to this accelerating divide. While the rich accumulate
wealth with no restriction, workers’ wages and benefits have been under
increasing attack. In 1979, 90 percent of the population took in 70
percent of the nation’s income. But, by 2017, that fell to only 61
percent.
Millionaires projected to own 46 percent of global private
wealth by 2019...watch those numbers go up with Bidenomics!
While the
wealth of the rich is growing at a breakneck pace, there is a stratification of
growth within the super wealthy, skewed towards the very top.
At the end of
2014, millionaire households owned about 41 percent of global private wealth,
according to BCG. This means that collectively these 17 million households
owned roughly $67.24 trillion in liquid assets, or about $4 million per
household.
By Gabriel Black
The massive increase in the value of the stock market,
which only a small segment of the population participates in, means that
the top 10 percent of the population controls 73 percent of
all wealth in the United States. Just three men—Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet and Bill
Gates—had more wealth than the bottom half of America combined last
year.
The father of US Treasury Secretary
Steven Mnuchin just completed the most expensive purchase of a living
artist’s work in US history, spending over $91 million on a
three-foot-tall metallic sculpture. Ken Griffin, the founder of hedge fund
Citadel, recently dropped $238 million on a penthouse in New York
City, the most expensive US home ever purchased. And Amazon’s Jeff Bezos,
the world’s richest man, has invested $42 million in a 10,000-year
clock (BEZOS OWNS ABOUT $300 IN RESIDENTIAL PROPERTIES
HE CONSIDERS HIS HOMES THESE INCLUDE $135 MILLION MANSION IN BEVERLY HILLS, A
$40 MILLION DOLLAR TOWNHOUSE IN D.C. AND $100 MILLION IN CONDOS IN NYC).
Amazon’s 25th anniversary: A conglomerate based on parasitism
and exploitation
Last
week, Amazon commemorated its 25th anniversary. From its beginnings in a garage
in Seattle, Washington, Amazon has grown into a multinational technology
conglomerate with a market capitalization of nearly one trillion dollars.
In 1994, future Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos left
his job at hedge fund D.E. Shaw to get out in front of the possibilities opened
up by the accelerating development of the internet, beginning with the modest
idea of an online bookstore. Bezos went on to become the wealthiest man on the
planet, his hoard by one estimate peaking at a record $157 billion before his
assets were divided in a divorce earlier this year.
Now
considered one of the “Big Four” technology monopolies alongside Apple, Google
and Facebook, Amazon controls the largest marketplace on the Internet:
Amazon.com. The conglomerate’s reach extends from Whole Foods Market, which
Amazon purchased in 2017 for $13.4 billion, to consumer electronics such as the
Kindle reader and the voice-controlled Alexa. Amazon subsidiary Kuiper Systems
announced in April of this year that it will spend a decade launching 3,236
satellites into space to provide broadband internet.
Traditional book publishers were decimated by the arrival of
Amazon, which aggressively pursued them, in the words of Bezos, “the way a
cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle.” Using its vast flows of cash, Amazon ruthlessly
undercut its rivals, from neighborhood stores to diaper manufacturers,
accepting losses in order to drive competitors out of its way. Meanwhile,
Amazon demanded and obtained free money from state and local governments in the
form of tax breaks and other concessions.
Amazon’s annual revenues reached $233 billion in 2018, on which
the conglomerate is expected to pay zero federal income tax. To put this figure in
perspective, these revenues are nearly at the level of the annual tax revenue
of Russia, which amounted to $253.9 billion in US dollars in 2017. Amazon’s
revenues are higher than the government revenues of Turkey ($173.9 billion),
Austria ($197.8 billion), Poland ($90.8 billion) and Iran ($77.2 billion).
Nearly
half of American households now have subscriptions to Amazon Prime. The click
of a mouse on a personal computer, or the tap of a finger on a mobile device,
now sets into motion the speedy delivery of commodities from around the world,
or the instantaneous electronic transmission of a film, song or book. Behind
these deceptively simple transactions lies Amazon’s vast and complex
commercial, logistics, distribution and computing empire.
Promising
advances have indeed been made in automation and artificial intelligence. These
technological advances carry with them tremendous liberating potential for
human civilization as a whole. Heavy and repetitive toil by humans can
increasingly be mitigated by robots, and possibilities appear on the horizon
for advanced levels of coordination and integration around the world, assisted
by artificial intelligence.
But under capitalism, new advances in technology have made
possible new techniques of exploitation. Amazon has become a watchword for a
new kind of despotism in the workplace.
In
Amazon “fulfillment centers,” workers are forbidden to carry cellphones or to
talk to each other. They are searched coming in and out, and minute details of
their activity throughout the workday are tracked. Amazon specializes in
putting constant pressure on workers to move as fast as possible, with
electronic devices constantly prompting and prodding them to complete the next
task.
Workers
are instructed to compete with each other to surpass each other’s rates, which
they are admonished constitutes “fun.” Arbitrarily high rates are demanded, and
then raised, and then raised again. A worker who takes a moment to rest, to
drink water, or to go to the bathroom can be criticized for a diminished rate.
The workers who are deemed too slow, or who simply tire out, are replaced.
Amazon
is now the second-largest employer in the United States, and there are around
647,000 Amazon workers worldwide. Journalist John Cassidy, writing about Amazon
in The New Yorker in 2015, commented: “Behind
all the technological advances and product innovation, there is a good deal of
old-fashioned labor discipline, wage repression, and exertion of management
power.”
Over
the past week, we published an article exposing the injury of 567
workers over a two-year period at Amazon’s DFW-7 fulfillment center near Fort
Worth, Texas. In December of last year, the WSWS reported how Amazon had hired a private
detective to spy on 27-year-old worker Michelle Quinones in an effort to block
compensation for her injury.
Amazon
has appeared in the “Dirty Dozen” list maintained by the National Council for
Occupational Safety and Health (National COSH) for two years in a row. The 2019
report highlights six worker deaths in seven months, 13 deaths since 2013, “a high
incidence of suicide attempts, workers urinating in bottles and workers left
without resources or income after on-the-job injuries.”
Amazon’s
techniques are merely a refined expression of conditions being imposed on
workers around the world. In March of this year, Ford Motor Company announced
the hiring of its new chief financial officer, Tim Stone, who previously served
as Amazon’s vice president of finance and the leader of the Amazon’s
acquisition of Whole Foods. Stone was hired as Ford carries out brutal
cost-cutting in the US, Europe and around the world.
There
is no shortage of opposition among Amazon workers. On social media, current and
former Amazon workers are contacting each other, looking for ways to fight
back. In Poland, where Amazon workers make around $5 per hour, Amazon walked
out of negotiations on July 2 with two unions over working conditions, setting
the stage for a strike.
To
fight for their interests, Amazon workers cannot allow their struggles to be
corralled and smothered by the pro-capitalist trade unions, which are doing
everything they can to block a fight against inequality and exploitation.
In
25 years, Amazon produced the biggest individual fortune in history, and it did
so on the backs of hundreds of thousands of workers. Amazon’s trajectory
represents an “accumulation of misery, corresponding with accumulation of
capital.”
Not
just Bezos, but many others have enriched themselves or stand to enrich
themselves from Amazon’s rise. Wall Street has its fingers in the pie. The Vanguard
Group currently owns $55 billion of Amazon stock, BlackRock owns $45 billion
and FMR owns $30 billion.
The
parasitic activities of Amazon, through which it has sought to appropriate for
itself the surplus value accumulated by other companies, have been integrated
with the financial parasitism of the American economy. Amazon’s own stock has
been buoyed ever higher as part of the speculative mania on Wall Street.
Amazon
is entangled not only with Wall Street, but also with the US military and
intelligence apparatus. Amazon was awarded a $600 million contract with the CIA
in 2013, followed by a $10 billion contract with the Department of Defense last
year to move government data onto the cloud. Meanwhile, Amazon’s
facial-identification software “Rekognition” is being marketed to federal and
local police.
In
2013, Bezos personally purchased, and now operates, the Washington
Post, which has been a main media voice for the Democratic Party’s
anti-Russia campaign and the overall interests of American imperialism.
The
increasing integration of Amazon with the repressive apparatus of the state,
while its tentacles stretch into every corner of society.
Amazon
must be placed under public ownership and democratic control. It must be taken
out of the hands of the financial oligarchy and transformed into a public
utility. The technology and infrastructure behind Amazon’s meteoric trajectory
and the biggest individual fortune in modern history must be turned towards the
needs and aspirations of the world’s population as a whole.
This
program can only be achieved through the mobilization of the working class on
an international scale on the basis of a fight to overthrow the capitalist
system and establish a democratically-controlled socialist economy, run on the
basis of social need, not private profit.
ASSAULT ON THE AMERICAN WORKER…. Amazon’s JEFF
BEZOS PLAN FOR A NEW AMERICAN SLAVERY
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/11/amazon-billionaire-jeff-bezos-says-fuck.html
"Amazon is a massive wrecking machine
consuming American retail. It's looting the economy and leaving behind rubble.
" --- DANIEL GREENFIELD FRONTPAGE MAG
Traditional book publishers were
decimated by the arrival of Amazon, which aggressively pursued them, in the
words of Bezos, “the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle.”
AMAZON’S ASSAULT ON AMERICA CONTINUES
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/05/modern-slaver-jeff-bezos-of-amazon.html
Amazon, the multinational online
retail conglomerate, is importing more foreign workers to the United States to
take coveted tech industry jobs than Facebook and Google combined. JOHN BINDER
"Today, each of the top 5 billionaires owns as much as
750 million people, more than the total population of Latin America
and double the population of the US."
“A comprehensive new report released Sunday by the New York-based labor
rights watchdog China Labor Watch (CLW) has shed new light on the barbaric and
illegal practices that Amazon employs to boost its profits by driving down
production costs on the backs of factory workers at the company’s electronics
assembly plants in China.”
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/06/hundreds-of-miserably-paid-employees-at.html
“A comprehensive new report released Sunday by the New York-based labor
rights watchdog China Labor Watch (CLW) has shed new light on the barbaric and
illegal practices that Amazon employs to boost its profits by driving down
production costs on the backs of factory workers at the company’s electronics
assembly plants in China.”
Amazon, the multinational online
retail conglomerate, is importing more foreign workers to the United States to
take coveted tech industry jobs than Facebook and Google combined. JOHN BINDER
AMAZON’S JEFF BEZOS IS THE FACE OF MODERN SLAVERY!
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/06/the-face-of-evil-jeff-bezos-assault-on.html
The gains for employees are a novel pain for the investors and employers who have been
able to hold down wages for decades because the federal government is trying to
grow the economy via cheap-labor legal immigration.
“INVESTORS”
HAVE AND WILL DESTROY THIS NATION IF IT WOULD IMPACT THE NEXT QUARTER’S
EARNINGS!
Amazon, the multinational online
retail conglomerate, is importing more foreign workers to the United States to
take coveted tech industry jobs than Facebook and Google combined. JOHN BINDER
"Amazon is a massive wrecking machine consuming American
retail. It's looting the economy and leaving behind rubble. " --- DANIEL
GREENFIELD FRONTPAGE MAG
Hunger and evictions surge in the US
The worst social
catastrophe to befall the US working class since the Great Depression of the
1930s continues to leave millions of people hungry, jobless and facing
eviction.
Feeding America, the
second-largest food charity in the US, estimates that upwards of 54 million
people, including one in four children in the US are facing food insecurity.
People line up
and check-in for a food giveaway at Harlem's Food Bank For New York City, a
community kitchen and food pantry, Monday, Nov. 16, 2020, in New York. Over
five hundred turkeys and produce food boxes were given away by lottery to needy
families for Thanksgiving. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)
The growing need for food among millions of
workers and their families is coinciding with record levels of COVID-19
infections reported in states across the country. In Texas, over 1 million have
contracted the coronavirus, with over 20,000 perishing, the second highest
tolls in the country behind New York. The Institute for Health Metrics and
Evaluation forecasts roughly another 190,000 deaths by March 1, 2021 if current
trends continue.
On top of food insecurity, between 11 and 13
million renter households across the country are at risk of eviction, according
to research by Stout, an investment bank and global advisory firm.
The Eviction Lab at Princeton University
reports that eviction filings increased in several major metro areas following
the expiration of CARES Act provisions at the end of July and before the CDC
eviction moratorium was implemented on September 4. However, even with the
moratorium, Princeton researchers note that evictions have continued across the
country, and Stout estimates that with its expiration at the end of the year,
this could lead to up to 6.4 million eviction filings.
The Eviction Lab data shows that two weeks
after the CDC moratorium was implemented, evictions still continued to be
processed, with 508 in Fort Worth and 1,053 in Houston, Texas. Filings also
increased on a month-to-month basis in several cities, including Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania and in the Florida cities of Tampa, Jacksonville and Gainesville.
In North Carolina, almost 25,000 eviction
cases were filed between July and September, according to data from the North
Carolina Administrative Office of the Courts, with almost 15,000 completed.
Overall, Stout estimates that between 300,000 and 410,000 North Carolina
households are unable to pay rent, with 240,000 expected eviction filings by
January 2021.
In an interview with CNN, attorney Michael
Trujillo commented on the bind that renters will find themselves in come
January 1, 2021. “The pandemic is not going away before the end of the year,”
he said, adding that without additional protections, “a huge wave of evictions”
is on the horizon.
In a Hill-HarrisX poll taken between November
10 and November 13, 77 percent of US voters were in favor of passing a
coronavirus relief package “as soon as possible.” Yet despite massive popular
support for more stimulus, no relief is coming.
After
the House and Senate passed the $2.2 trillion CARES Act at the end of March,
which provided billions to Wall Street, large corporations and the
well-connected, ensuring their financial stability for a lifetime, workers were
left with limited protections and only temporary unemployment relief. Congress has yet to pass another bill long after the
$1,200 stimulus checks have been sent out and enhanced unemployment benefits
have expired. Months of inaction have left millions of workers and their
families without additional stimulus, eviction protection, health care, food or
medicine, exacerbating mental health issues and stress.
Included in the CARES Act was an eviction
moratorium that expired, along with the federal $600-a-week unemployment
supplement, at the end of July. After Congress failed to come to terms on
another bill at the end of July, the Centers for Disease Control, on September
4, implemented a federal eviction moratorium, which required tenants to sign a
declaration and provide a copy to their landlord. This, along with additional
federal unemployment assistance distributed under the Pandemic Unemployment
Assistance (PUA) and Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC)
programs, are set to expire the final week of December, leaving millions of
people who have yet to find jobs or come up with the monies needed to pay back
rent facing eviction in less than 50 days.
As of October, some 13 million people were
receiving benefits through the PUA or PEUC program, more than from state
unemployment insurance, which has also expired for millions of workers.
While the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)
estimates that over 11.1 million people are unemployed, thousands of workers,
primarily low-wage workers, continue to be laid off. Last week, the BLS
recorded over 700,000 first-time unemployment filings for the 34th week in a
row, with first-time unemployment claims exceeding any week throughout the
2008-09 Great Recession.
A Washington Post analysis
found that among higher education workers, low-wage and administrative staff
have seen ongoing monthly job losses or have not been called back to campus,
while higher paid instructors have been hired back. The Post found
that while colleges hired 180,000 workers during the fall semester last year,
only 20,000 jobs were added this year.
Mass unemployment has led workers to apply
for state unemployment benefits, but hundreds of thousands have yet to receive
anything nearly eight months into the pandemic. In Wisconsin, reporters working
with Wisconsin Watch found that nationally only 56 percent of unemployment
claims were paid from March through August, while in Wisconsin the level was
only 42.5 percent. As of November 10, more than 94,000 people in the state were
still waiting for either state or federal unemployment benefits.
For those who were fortunate enough to
receive benefits, their expiration and the inability to find safe well-paying
work have left them unable to afford basic necessities.
The out-of-control spread of the virus
coupled with overcrowded hospitals prompted a flurry of public health declarations
over the past 72 hours from Republican and Democratic governors, such as Iowa
Republican Kim Reynolds and Michigan Democrat Gretchen Whitmer. These included
curfews, mask mandates and calls to limit social gatherings to 10 people or
less. However, not one politician in either party is advancing the necessary
demand to resume lockdowns of all non-essential businesses, with guaranteed pay
for jobless workers and small business owners.
As Democratic President-elect Joe Biden made
clear in his speech yesterday after meeting with corporate executives, the
number one concern of the ruling class is “to get the economy back on track,”
not to stop the spread of the virus, feed the hungry, provide relief or house
the homeless. All policy is focused on ensuing the flow of profits to the
corporations and Wall Street.
Not once in Biden’s speech did he call for
resuming the unemployment benefits in the CARES Act or extending eviction
moratoriums.
This
is because despite all its declarations, the Democratic Party is not a party of
workers. It, as Biden’s transition team attests, is a party of Wall Street, big banks,
Amazon, and the military-industrial complex.
In the latest round of political theater on
Tuesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer
wrote a letter to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell appealing, “for the
sake of the country,” to “come to the table and work with us to produce an
agreement that meets America’s needs in this critical time.”
The letter noted that the negotiations should
begin from the previous failed starting offer of $2.2 trillion, which McConnell
and the Republicans have dismissed, a position from which they have not budged
for the last six months. Despite the intransigence on the part of the
Republicans, the fact is that the Democrats and Republicans in the Senate have
found time to advance several of President Trump’s federal judges past
committee hearings, including Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, allowing
them to be approved.
Ultimately, both parties see the provision of
even the most meager benefits as a “disincentive” for their real aim: getting
workers back on the job in factories and other workplaces amid a raging
pandemic.
This is because despite all its
declarations, the Democratic Party is not a party of workers. It, as Biden’s
transition team attests, is a party of Wall Street, big banks,
Amazon, and the military-industrial complex.
Amazon is entangled not only with Wall Street,
but also with the US military and intelligence apparatus. Amazon was awarded a
$600 million contract with the CIA in 2013, followed by a $10 billion contract
with the Department of Defense last year to move government data onto the
cloud. Meanwhile, Amazon’s facial-identification software “Rekognition” is
being marketed to federal and local police.
Biden names national security team of
right-wing militarists
·
President-elect Joe Biden sent
a clear message to the world and to the American people with the first
announcement of the top appointees to his cabinet and White House staff: the
number one priority of the incoming Democratic administration is to build a
US-led front of imperialist powers in preparation for stepped up military
pressure and outright war on Russia and China.
All six of the appointments
announced Monday in press releases—the nominees themselves will be introduced
to the public later today—are in the sphere of foreign policy and national
security. All are veterans of the Obama-Biden administration, and many
were confirmed in those earlier positions by a Republican-controlled Senate led
by Mitch McConnell, demonstrating that Biden intends to form a government
entirely acceptable to the Republican right.
Former U.S.
Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken speaks during a news conference in Kiev,
Ukraine, Friday, March 6, 2015. (AP Photo/Sergei Chuzavkov)
The six officials named Monday
include:
Antony Blinken, secretary of state: Blinken is a
long-time Biden national security aide in both the US Senate and during Biden’s
vice presidency, and he was deputy secretary of state in 2015-2016.
Jake Sullivan, national security adviser: Sullivan
succeeded Blinken as national security adviser to Vice President Biden, as well
as serving as chief of staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Avril Haines, director of national intelligence:
Haines was on Biden’s staff at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, then on
the Obama-Biden National Security Council before serving two years as deputy
director of the CIA in 2015-2016.
Alexander Mayorkas, secretary of homeland security: a
Cuban-born son of immigrants, Mayorkas is a career domestic security official
who was deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in the
Obama administration, which deported more immigrants than any previous
government.
Linda Thomas-Greenfield, ambassador to the United Nations: the
highest ranking African American in the career foreign service,
Thomas-Greenfield was named ambassador to Liberia by George W. Bush, then State
Department personnel chief under Obama and later assistant secretary for
African Affairs. She was forced out by Trump in 2017 and became a counselor
with the Albright-Stonebridge Group, a foreign policy think tank for Democrats
headed by former Secretary of State Madeline Albright.
John Kerry, special presidential envoy for
climate: the former senator, presidential candidate and secretary of state, now
76, co-chaired Biden’s climate change task force along with Representative
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He will head a US effort to rejoin the Paris climate
accord.
The first and
most obvious fact about all six nominees is that they are dedicated defenders
of American imperialism and the interests of Wall Street. Several are
multi-millionaires, while all are comfortably within the top tier financially.
Blinken, for example, is the son of a founder of Warburg Pincus investment
bank, Donald Blinken, who was for 12 years chairman of the board of the State
University of New York.
For all the hosannas in the
media over the “diversity” of these initial appointees—one African American,
one Hispanic, two women—these facets of their identities are entirely
irrelevant. It doesn’t matter to the victim of torture in a CIA secret prison
that the torturer (or her boss in Washington) is female. It doesn’t matter to
refugee children separated from their parents by immigration agents that the
DHS secretary is Hispanic. It doesn’t matter to the victims of US military
aggression that the diplomat who defends this violence before the world is
black.
The emphasis on diversity is
used to distract from the reactionary character of the foreign policy
orientation of the incoming Biden administration, which his apologists seek to
disguise using the skin color, gender and national origin of the personnel who
will carry it out.
There has been little
discussion in the media of the significance of Biden choosing, in the midst of
a nationwide and worldwide public health catastrophe that has already taken the
lives of a quarter million Americans, to announce his foreign policy team
first. If victory over coronavirus was the number one priority, as Biden
claimed during the fall campaign, why not announce those who will head up the
Department of Health and Human Services and other agencies with the main
responsibility for the fight against the pandemic?
This is a signal that the real
point of difference between the Democrats and Trump is not his catastrophic
performance in relation to COVID-19. While Trump now openly embraces “herd
immunity” and dismisses the death toll as inconsequential, the Democrats will
pursue essentially the same policy, and Biden has flatly rejected any new
lockdown of the US economy.
Ever since Trump took office,
the focus of Democratic Party opposition has been on foreign policy,
particularly Trump’s allegedly “soft” line on Russia and his pullout, albeit
largely rhetorical, from US commitments to Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Now
that Biden expects to be in control of US foreign policy in less than 60 days,
he is demonstrating that this will be the initial focus of policy changes.
BLOG
EDITOR: THE WASHINGTON POST IS OWNED BY BIDEN CRONY JEFF BEZOS.
Both major pro-Democratic Party
newspapers emphasized this in their coverage of the Biden team’s rollout. The Washington
Post wrote, “Biden is planning to prioritize
foreign policy as a major pillar in his administration, with vows to reassemble
global alliances and insert the United States into a more prominent position on
the world stage.”
The New York Times was even
blunter, identifying China as the main target of the new administration. In a
front-page profile, the Times described
Blinken as “a defender of global alliances” and said that he “will try to
coalesce skeptical international partners into a new competition with China…”
It identified trade in the Indo-Pacific region, technology investments, and
Africa as areas in which the US would be “competing with China.”
Other profiles have noted that
Blinken and Biden were generally aligned on foreign policy issues during the
Obama administration, except on two occasions—the US attack on Libya, and US
policy towards Syria—where Blinken favored more aggressive US intervention and
Biden was more cautious.
The two were completely in step
in relation to Ukraine, where Blinken played a key public role in turning the
Crimean secession and reunification with Russia into a major international
crisis. Blinken was the main US spokesman advocating heavy sanctions on Russia,
to punish not only the Putin government, but also the population of the country
as a whole. In a speech at the time, he said sanctions were needed to
“demonstrate to the Russian people that there is a very hefty fine for
supporting international criminals like” Putin.
Of the other appointees, Avril
Haines is also a close personal associate of Biden, serving on the staff of the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee when he was chairman, then moving to the
National Security Council in the Obama-Biden White House before her two years
at the CIA. After leaving the government
when Trump came in, Haines joined Blinken at the newly formed WestExec
Partners, a national security think tank peddling advice to US corporations. Another
partner was Michele Fluornoy, the former Pentagon official under Obama who is
widely expected to be Biden’s choice as secretary of defense.
Late Monday, after the rollout
of the group that Biden called the “crux” of his national security team, the
Biden transition revealed that his next major cabinet pick would be former
Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen to serve as Treasury secretary. This underscores the absolute subservience of the incoming
administration to Wall Street, since Yellen was identified with the Fed policy
of unrestrained opening of the financial spigots to support the financial
markets during the 2008-2009 Wall Street crash.
Yellen was a top Fed official
from 2004 on, working with then-chairman Ben Bernanke, moving up to vice chair
in 2009 and appointed by Obama to succeed Bernanke in 2013. Trump declined to
reappoint her to a second term in 2017.
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