Application Deadline: 17th September 2024 (20:00 EDT)
Offered Annually? Yes
To be taken at (country): Canada
Fields of Research:
Health research
Natural sciences and/or engineering
Social sciences and/or humanities
About the Award: The objective of the Banting Postdoctoral Fellowships program is to:
attract and retain top-tier postdoctoral talent, both nationally and internationally
develop their leadership potential
position them for success as research leaders of tomorrow
Fellowships are distributed equally among the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)
Type: Fellowship
Eligibility:
Canadian citizens, permanent residents of Canada and foreign citizens are eligible to apply with the stipulations stated in the Program (Link below)
Applicants to the 2024-25 Banting Postdoctoral Fellowships program must fulfill or have fulfilled all degree requirements for a PhD, PhD-equivalent or health professional degree:
between September 15, 2021 and September 30, 2025 (inclusively), and
before the start date of their award.
Applicants who have not fulfilled all requirements for their degree at the time of application must submit proof no later than October 15, 2025.
For applicants who have completed more than one PhD, PhD-equivalent or health professional degree, the eligibility window applies to the most recent of these degrees.
Selection Criteria: The Banting Postdoctoral Fellowships program is unique in its emphasis on the synergy between the following:
applicant – individual merit and potential to launch a successful research-intensive career
host institution – commitment to the research program and alignment with the institution’s strategic priorities
An applicant to the Banting Postdoctoral Fellowships program must complete their application in full collaboration with the proposed host institution.
Number of Awards: 70 fellowships are awarded annually
Value of Program: $70,000 per year (taxable)
Duration of Program: 2 years (non-renewable)
How to Apply: It is important to go through the Application Guide before applying for this Fellowship
Eligible Countries: All countries in The Americas, Europe, Africa, Oceania and Asia
To be taken at (country): United Arab Emirates
Categories of the Prize: The Zayed Future Energy Prize awards 5 categories:
Health
Food
Energy
Water
Global High Schools (1 award for each of the below regions)
The Americas, Europe, Africa, Oceania and Asia
About the Award: The Prize fund comes from the Abu Dhabi Government as a way to honour and continue the legacy of the late founding father of the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan. Masdar, Abu Dhabi’s renewable energy company, manages the Zayed Future Energy Prize. A dedicated team works on the Prize all year round.
This annual award celebrates achievements that reflect impact, innovation, long-term vision and leadership in renewable energy and sustainability. You are invited to be a part of this vision and commitment to finding solutions that will meet the challenges of climate change, energy security and the environment.
Offered Since: 2008
Eligibility: The Zayed Future Energy Prize is open to all entrants other than: (a) board members and employees of Masdar; and (b) anyone who has been involved in organising, promoting or judging the Prize.
Selection Criteria: The Prize criteria for all categories are: Innovation, Impact, Leadership and Long-Term Vision.
Number of Awardees: several
Value of Awards: The total Prize fund is US $3 million, distributed as such:
Health – US$ 600,000 (Six hundred thousand dollars)
Food – US$ 600,000 (Six hundred thousand dollars)
Energy – US$ 600,000 (Six hundred thousand dollars)
Water – US$ 600,000 (Six hundred thousand dollars)
In order to start your entry, please register an account with the Prize. An email will be sent to you to verify your email address. After the verification, you can start your entry by logging into the system. For your convenience, you will be able to save and return to your submission form for editing at a later time. However, you will not be able to edit your entry after you have submitted it.
Important Notes: The submission should be sufficiently detailed and clear to enable the judges to analyse properly and to form a view on all elements of the submission and the nominee.
The detection of H5N1 viral particles by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in commercially sold milk last week has prompted the US Agriculture Department (USDA) to issue an order (effective April 29, 2024) to the dairy industry to begin testing dairy cows for the virus before they are moved between states.
The federal agency remarked that PCR testing showed one in five milk samples from retail stores nationwide had genetic traces of the virus. Such testing only confirms that the virus was in the milk but not necessarily that the virus was live and infectious. To date, there have been no confirmed cases of H5N1 infections from people drinking pasteurized milk.
The FDA has continued to assure the public that the commercial milk supply is safe, emphasizing that more than 99 percent of commercial milk supplies come from farms that follow the pasteurized milk ordinances.
The pasteurization process, which requires the milk to be raised to a specific temperature for a set time to destroy any potential pathogens, is highly effective at inactivating bacteria and viruses in milk. Preliminary work with egg inoculation tests, where milk samples are injected into eggs, haven’t shown any viruses replicating thus demonstrating that pasteurization is effective in inactivating HPAI.
Cattle in a feed lot near Rocky Ford, Colorado [Photo by Billy Hathom / CC BY-NC-SA 3.0]
It does, however, raise the question of how pervasive is the outbreak among dairy cows if milk from infected cows is readily entering the commercial supply? Although rules are in place that milk from infected cows be discarded, if the animal is asymptomatic and there is no universal testing of the milk in place, then it is clear the problem is far larger than authorities had anticipated.
Also, there are economic pressures to produce milk which lower incentives to take cattle out of commission and discard their milk. In such instances, an infected cow may be in quarantine for three weeks. Sick cows also tend to produce less milk. Estimates suggest that anywhere from five to 20 percent of the animals in the affected herd can become ill.
There has been a steep decline in the number of dairy herds over the last two decades from 70,375 to 29,842 in 2021. By 2022, that figure had dropped a further six percent to 27,932 herds. On average, that is a loss of 2,300 dairy herds per year. However, herd size has reached a record-high of 337 head in 2022 up from 129 cows in 2003. Also, production per cow has increased by 138 pounds from year to year with an average production of over 24,000 pounds per head of cow.
According to Farm Progress, total milk production has climbed 169 million pounds to a record total of 226.4 billion pounds in the US, or 12.5 percent since 2013. The largest current producers of milk by state are California, Wisconsin, Idaho, Texas, New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Minnesota. By tonnage, the US ranks second in milk production globally, behind India.
In light of the missteps of the COVID pandemic, many scientists following these developments have pointed to paucity of details in their reports which do not indicate how many samples were taken, which markets were inspected, and if the affected milk came from areas of the country affected by the bird flu outbreak among cattle. Also, little if anything is known about the viral load present in milk sample.
Dr. Tom Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, told the New York Times, “the days when it was seen as a good plan or acceptable for a government agency to keep all data to manage on its own are gone long ago.” Others have also pointed out that USDA’s position as both promoter of agricultural business and its regulator places it at odds with the public health interests of the population.
The evidence is clear that infected birds were the source of introduction into these herds, but how specifically the virus was transmitted remains under investigation. Birds can shed the virus through their secretions or oral and nasal passages. The virus could have been transmitted through direct contact in contaminated feed or water. The cattle could have inhaled the virus.
The milk of infected cows can have high viral loads. But the USDA is doing little testing of animals with nasal swabs and is not testing the manure. Additionally, milk equipment and milkers’ gloves can be contaminated and transmit to other cows. However, these epidemiological investigations need to be conducted with a sense of urgency to determine the scale of the infection and modes of transmission that include airborne routes. These also include systematic surveillance of other farm animals, such as pigs, and their handlers.
A microscopic photo of H5N1 Bird Flu virus (gold). [Photo: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention]
On Saturday, the USDA issued a clarification that the order did not apply to the interstate movement of these animals to a sale barn. They added, “Subsequent interstate movement for a lactating dairy cow from a sale barn directly to a slaughter facility requires only a Certificate of Veterinary Inspection (CVI) stating that the animal is clinically healthy; no testing is necessary.”
It was late in March 2024 that the USDA, FDA, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and state veterinary and public health officials had issued statements confirming the presence of the Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) H5N1 virus in dairy cows.
Since then, the virus has been detected in 34 dairy herds across nine states—Texas, Kansas, Michigan, New Mexico, Idaho, Ohio, North Carolina, South Dakota, and, most recently, Colorado. Additionally, they have confirmed the presence of the same genotype of the HPAI detected in dairy cattle among eight poultry premises across five states—Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, and Texas.
However, based on the genetic analysis of 239 bio-samples from the ongoing outbreak of the H5N1 clade (strain) 2.3.4.4b influenza A virus among US cattle shared by the National Veterinary Services Laboratory (NVSL), Dr. Michael Worobey, professor and head of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona, indicated there was a single origin of the virus that occurred in late 2023 or early 2024. This would mean that the HPAI H5N1 virus spilled over into bovines several months before it was detected. (Dr. Worobey is well-known for his important contribution to the study of the COVID origin with the epicenter of the outbreak beginning around the Wuhan wet market.)
If this is the case, it could explain why so much of the milk in retail stores recently tested by the FDA demonstrated fragments of the influenza virus.
As explained in a recent pre-print study by the Iowa State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine, examining samples of the HPAI H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b virus detected in dairy cows, migratory birds have played a significant role in transmitting the virus across long distances.
The origins of this clade can be traced back to 2020 at the height of the COVID pandemic when this lethal strain of the virus was detected in domestic poultry in Southeast Asia. Although the initial outbreak was confined to bird species, it demonstrated tremendous geographic spread and adaptation in multiple different wild animals, with at least 37 new mammal species infected since 2021. The virus was eventually introduced into North America via Eurasia in late 2021.
With respect to the initial detection of H5N1 among dairy cows, the report states, “Texas lies within the Central Flyway, a major migratory flyway stretching from Canada to Mexico in North America. Additionally, Texas experiences some overlap in bird migration with neighboring states that belong to the Mississippi Flyway. This convergence of flyways heightens the risk of HAPI viral transmission, as migratory birds traverse diverse landscapes and habitats, including dairy cattle operations.”
Their analysis suggests that, presently, the strains derived from dairy cattle appear to pose a low overall risk to human health. But the authors warned, “It is imperative to recognize that influenza viruses have the capacity for rapid evolution within their host environments post-infection. A recent human case with direct contact with infected dairy cattle revealed a genetic change (PB2 E627K), indicating the potential for adaptation or transmission events. This underscores the dynamic nature of influenza viruses and the importance of continued surveillance and vigilance in monitoring potential threats to human health.”
On April 8, Geoffrey van Leeuwen of the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), a former national security adviser to outgoing prime minister Mark Rutte and the acting Dutch foreign minister for trade and development cooperation, gave a warmongering speech at the University of Leiden. His address was given in the context of the Dutch ruling elite’s full endorsement of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its deep and direct involvement in NATO’s proxy warfare against Russia.
Van Leeuwen bluntly disclosed the geostrategic aims behind Dutch militarism, stripping away the “peacekeeping” and “humanitarian” pretenses of the last decades. The Dutch bourgeoisie, like its NATO allies, is preparing to escalate and instigate wars, specifically against Russia, China, and Iran. Leeuwen insisted that “getting your hands dirty is therefore inevitable” and that the Dutch population should “get used to... civilian casualties and body bags” Workers “must be prepared to pay a price for freedom and prosperity”.
Geoffrey van Leeuwen [Photo by souffle 1 - Own work / CC BY 1.0]
The blanket silence on the part of official media and the political establishment about Leeuwen’s remarks is a serious warning.
By “freedom and prosperity”, Leeuwen means the decades of imperialist war and rampant exploitation since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The current war in Ukraine, and planned wars against Iran and China, are the result of the geopolitical strategy that the US and other leading European imperialist powers have been pursuing ever since.
The Dutch military, for its part, participated in the first Persian Gulf War (1990–1991), the war against Serbia (1999), the invasion of Afghanistan (2001), the second war against Iraq (2003), the wars against Libya and Syria (2011). It now contributes to the proxy war in Ukraine and this year participated in airstrikes against the Houthi rebels in Yemen led by the US and the UK.
Dutch military personnel have been deployed to Kosovo, Romania, Lithuania, Mali, Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, as well as to the Strait of Hormuz economic choke point that divides Iran from the Arabian Peninsula.
“We will defend our interests”, Leeuwen stated baldly. “We should not underestimate the effect on spectators such as Russia, China, and Iran… if we do not dare to act here, it is an invitation to those countries to test us further. These are difficult situations, where every choice is difficult and has high costs.”
This would require “toughness,” said Leeuwen, “otherwise it will be difficult to defend our interests in the world. To quote German Chancellor Scholz: it is time for a mental Zeitenwende.” The term, roughly meaning an “historic turning point”, was used by Scholz in a February 27, 2022, speech to announce a €100 billion special military fund, as part of an end to any restraints on German imperialism imposed by its Nazi past.
The Dutch foreign minister spelled out the “interests” he was referring to: “a third of global container shipping passes through the Suez Canal – a route that is in danger of being closed by the Houthis. The Netherlands is the fifth maritime power in the world… But it is unimaginable that the Netherlands can protect it on its own. We rely on our partners to keep our container ships safe and the routes open.”
Leeuwen’s speech followed the publication of a 72-page defense strategy white paper, “A stronger Netherlands, a safer Europe”, which calls for the expansion of the Dutch military, enabling it to play a more aggressive role within NATO.
Hand-in-hand with plans for a military buildup abroad, the Dutch ruling class—aided by all the establishment parties including those nominally on the left, the trade unions and affiliated satellite pseudo-left outfits, as well as the media—are waging a relentless war at home, whipping-up anti-immigrant and pro-war propaganda. They aim to create a reactionary political climate and divert the working class from a struggle against the true causes of their social distress.
In the parliamentary elections in November last year, the extreme right-wing party of Geert Wilders (Party for Freedom-PVV) took the largest number of votes (23.5 percent). As in other European countries and internationally, the election victory of the PVV shows a sharp move to the right by the entire political establishment, and the role played by the political bankruptcy of the “left” in paving the way.
The militarization drive cannot be divorced from the simultaneous onslaught on social spending carried out by successive governments. Under the guise of economic necessity, social spending on healthcare, education, and housing have faced relentless cuts even as new fighter jets, artillery, drones, naval fleets, cyber units, and an expanded special forces staff have been provided for.
In addition to the billions already allocated to Kiev, the 2024 defense budget is expected to rise by nearly 43 percent, a war-budget that is expected to continually rise each year to reach an initial sum of €21.4 billion euros, or roughly 2 percent of the Dutch GDP by 2030.
This sets the government on a collision-course with an increasingly militant working class. A wave of strikes in the public and private sectors has rocked the Netherlands since the beginning of 2023, unprecedented in the country’s recent history. Despite the obstacles put up by the bourgeoisie and the trade union bureaucracy, Dutch workers have begun a fight for better wages, and working and living conditions, taking their place in an international movement.
Antiwar demonstrations have taken place regularly since the start of the Israeli genocide in Gaza. In fact, one of the hubs for the anti-war demonstrations is the University of Leiden, where Geoffrey van Leeuwen was invited by its administration to deliver a pro-war speech.
While hundreds of millions of workers and rural poor in India struggle to make ends meet and some two hundred million people suffer from malnourishment, the income share of India’s wealthiest 1 percent has risen to among the highest anywhere in the world.
According to the latest World Inequality Database Paper on India, which was published last month under the title “Income and wealth inequality in India 1922-2023,” India’s top 1% now gorge on a larger share of the national income than do their counterparts in many of what have hitherto been considered among the world’s most unequal countries, including South Africa, Brazil and the US.
A girl stands in her shanty home on the outskirts of in Guwahati, India, Friday, Feb. 10, 2023. [AP Photo/Anupam Nath]
The report was authored by Nitin Kumar Bharti, Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty and Anmol Somanchi, economic experts at World Inequality Lab (WIL). It demonstrates that the fruits of India’s capitalist “rise” over the past three decades have been almost entirely monopolized by the Indian bourgeoisie, the more privileged sections of the middle class, and global capital, while the mass of the population remains mired in squalor, deprivation and extreme economic insecurity.
This constitutes a searing indictment of the entire political establishment and governments at every level—above all the successive Union governments led by the principal parties of Indian big business, the Congress Party and the Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which under Prime Minister Narendra Modi has held office since 2014.
As the title indicates, the report found that contemporary India, supposedly “the world’s largest democracy,” has higher levels of economic inequality than prevailed at the height of the British Raj, which systematically looted India for the benefit of British-based investors and British imperialism’s wars.
The top 1 percent of India’s population (or 9,223,448 individuals) held 22.6 percent of national income and 40.1 percent of national wealth in 2022-23. Compared to this, the bottom 50 percent (or over 461 million adults) received only 15 percent of India’s national income. The middle 40 percent (or around 369 million adults) had an income share of 27.3 percent. In relation to the share of wealth, the bottom 50 percent owned just 6.4 percent in 2022-23, while the middle 40 percent had 28.6 percent.
To give a sense of the staggering level of income inequality, the report states, “The top 1% earn on average INR (Indian Rupees) 5.3 million (US $63,580), 23 times the national average of INR 0.23 million. Average incomes for the bottom 50% and the middle 40% stood at INR 71,000 (US $853) or 0.3 times national average and INR 165,000 (0.7 times national average) respectively. At the very top of the distribution, the richest 10,000 individuals (of 920 million Indian adults) earn on average INR 480 million (US $5.7 million or 2,069 times the average Indian). To get a sense of just how skewed the distribution is, one would have to be at nearly the 90th percentile to earn the average income in India.”
The following are some of the key figures presented in the report:
*“According to Forbes billionaire rankings, the number of Indians with net wealth exceeding 1 billion US$ at Market Exchange Rate (MER) increased from 1 to 51 to 162 in 1991, 2011 and 2022 respectively. Not only that, the total net wealth of these individuals as a share of India’s net national income boomed from under 1 percent in 1991 to a whopping 25 percent in 2022.” In other words, India’s 162 richest individuals own the equivalent of almost a quarter of India’s net national income.
* “In 2022-23, 22.6% of national income went to just the top 1%, the highest level recorded in our series since 1922, higher than even during the inter-war colonial period. The top 1% wealth share stood at 40.1% in 2022-23, also at its highest level since 1961 when our wealth series begins.”
* “As per the annual Forbes rich list, the net wealth of (US dollar) billionaire Indians has grown by over 280% cumulatively between 2014 and 2022 in real terms, 10 times the growth rate of national income over the same period (27.8%).” The period referred to here corresponds to the first eight years of the Modi-led BJP government, underscoring how its pro-investor policies have massively benefited the super-rich at the expense of the workers and rural toilers.
In 1961, the report found that the wealth share of the top 10 percent of India’s population was 45 percent. During the subsequent two decades, this did not change much, as this was the period when “socialist policies” were at their “peak” causing wealth concentration to be “more-or-less brought to a stand-still.” Contrary to the report’s characterization, the economic policies carried out by Congress-led Indian governments during this period had nothing to do with socialism. They were nationally regulated capitalist policies that kept a state monopoly on certain big corporations in key industries and highly restricted the entry of foreign capital, so as to boost indigenous Indian capitalist development. Those policies led to the enrichment of a tiny super-rich elite at the expense of the vast majority of the population, as underscored by the fact that even during this period, the top 10 percent controlled 45 percent of all national wealth.
However, according to the report, India’ social inequality began to grow sharply with the initiation of pro-investor/pro-market economic reforms in 1991, aimed at attracting international capital and fully integrating India into the US-led world capitalist order. Just over three decades later in 2022, the wealth share of the top 10 percent had reached 63 percent. This demonstrates emphatically that it was the Indian bourgeois that have been the primary beneficiaries of the “open” economic policies carried out by successive governments led by Congress and the BJP since 1991.
The report notes another important factor in the process of growing wealth inequality: “greater financialization of wealth as evidenced from a growing stock market (as a % of GDP).” Giving an example of this, the report noted: “The SENSEX (S&P Bombay Stock Exchange Sensitive Index) a free-float weighted stock market index of 30 companies listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange, grew by 7300% between 1990 and 2023.” What this exposes is that these billionaires, like their counterparts across the world, have pocketed huge amounts of money through speculation on the stock market and the privatization of publicly owned corporations (public sector units) while hardly creating jobs or producing anything of value.
The list of dollar billionaires in India shows the impact of the Modi government’s anti-working class policies. According to the Hurun Global rich list, in 2014, when Modi first came to power, India had 70 dollar billionaires. Today, this number has reached 271, with their combined wealth at $1 trillion. Mukesh Ambani, a leading beneficiary of Modi’s pro-corporate policies and now Asia’s richest person, has increased his wealth to $115 billion from $18 billion in 2014.
According to the Hurun Global Rich List, the city of Mumbai, India’s financial capital, officially surpassed Shanghai (87 billionaires) as the Asian city with the most billionaires, with 92 in 2024. This year’s list marked Mumbai’s entry for the first time into the ranks of the world’s top three billionaire home-city, the report noted.
The report “Income and wealth inequality in India 1922-2023: The Rise of the Billionaire Raj” makes the following comment: “[T]he ‘Billionaire Raj’ headed by India’s modern bourgeoisie is now more unequal than the British Raj headed by the colonial forces.” Then it makes a timely warning to the capitalist elite: “It is unclear how long such inequality levels can sustain without major social and political upheaval.”
They then propose some timid reforms be enacted with the aim of preventing such a social explosion: “While there is no reason to believe income and wealth inequality will slow down by itself,” writes Piketty and his co-authors, “historical evidence suggests that it can be kept in check via policy.” The report proposes implementing a “super tax” on Indian billionaires and multimillionaires, along with restructuring the tax schedule to include both income and wealth, so as “to finance major investments in education, health and other public infrastructure.”
Neither Modi nor the Congress and the other opposition parties, which all represent India’s ravenous ruling elite, will pay any heed to such appeals. On the contrary, they will take all possible measures to further enrich the tiny corporate and financial elite, impoverishing the workers and rural poor. They are bitterly hostile to the multi-million Indian working class and the oppressed, as clearly shown during the COVID-19 pandemic. The ruling class’s “profits before life” policy sacrificed between 5-6 million Indians as the virus was allowed to freely spread to protect the profits of Indian and foreign capital. Modi’s refusal to adopt serious public health measures resulted in the collapse of India’s healthcare system during peak periods of infection and death.
India’s ruling elite also fully endorses the spending of billions to make the country a frontline state in US imperialism’s war preparations against China. While millions struggle to find enough food to eat and die from preventable diseases, India invests huge sums of money in modern weapons of death and destruction.
Since the beginning of March, workers at federal education institutions have been on strike in Brazil, challenging the claim by the government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Workers Party – PT) that “there is no money” for public education.
Protest by teachers and staff of federal education in Brasilia on April 17. [Photo: SINASEFE]
The strike movement was launched on March 11 by employees of 66 federal universities. It was followed on April 3 by teachers and staff at 522 federal basic, professional, and technological education units and on April 15 by teachers at 31 federal universities. It is the largest strike against the Lula government since his inauguration at the beginning of last year.
This week, students at several federal universities have also gone on strike for better educational conditions. They are also protesting against a cut of 4 billion reais (782 million dollars) from the health and education budget announced on April 11 by the Lula government.
In the most recent negotiation between representatives of the Lula government and the teachers and staff unions, on April 19, the Lula government maintained the previous year’s proposal for a wage freeze this year, only increasing food, health, and daycare benefits. These benefits do not cover retirees.
The Lula government has also proposed increasing wage increases from 9 percent to up to 13 percent in 2025 and 2026. These figures, however, far from cover losses in real wages, which since 2016 have totaled 39 percent for teachers and 53 percent for employees of federal education.
The staff and teachers’ unions, controlled by the PT and the pseudo-left Socialism and Freedom Party (PSOL), have played a treacherous role not only in launching separate strikes on different dates and isolating the struggles, but also in ignoring past and future wage losses. They are negotiating with the government for an increase of 22.7 percent for teachers and 34.3 percent for staff, divided equally between 2024 and 2026, and disregarding the losses caused by inflation over this period.
After supporting Lula’s candidacy in the 2022 election against the fascistic ex-president Jair Bolsonaro and serving as an important support base for the Lula government, the unions have advanced the claim that “only pressure will get the government out of inertia,” as expressed by the National Association of Higher Education Teachers. In practice, this means subordinating the struggle of teachers and staff to negotiations with the Lula government and covering up the PT’s long-standing attacks on education.
Since the beginning of the last decade, as the commodities boom waned and Dilma Rousseff’s PT government (2011-2016) began to place the growing weight of the capitalist crisis on the backs of the Brazilian working class, teachers and staffs of federal education held countless walkouts and strikes. Under the Rousseff government alone, there were strikes in 2011, 2012 and 2015. In the largest of these, in 2012, teachers went on strike for four months for better salaries and working conditions.
After Rousseff’s fraudulent impeachment in August 2016, a broad movement of student occupations in hundreds of universities and secondary schools took place against the pro-corporate high school reform and a bill that limited social spending by the government of Michel Temer (2016-2018), Rousseff’s successor.
In all the attacks by the Temer and Bolsonaro (2018-2022) governments, such as the 2017 labor reform and the 2019 pension reform, the unions have isolated the struggles of teachers and staff at federal universities from the other sectors of the Brazilian working class, diverting all the walkouts and protests towards Lula’s election in 2022.
As the strikes under the Dilma government show, far from representing a break with the PT government’s previous policy, Temer and Bolsonaro only intensified the attacks begun under Rousseff. Today, in turn, the Lula government is continuing these attacks.
In an attack on the right to strike, on April 10 the Lula government demanded that negotiations with the unions be conditional on the end of the strikes. Faced with a backlash, it was forced to back down. Even so, on April 16, Camilo Santana, the Lula government’s minister of education and defender of both the 2016 high school reform and pro-corporate programs in education, criticized the strikes, insisting that “A strike for me is when there is no more dialogue, when negotiation or any possibility of improvement is over.”
Earlier, on April 10, Lula’s finance minister, Fernando Haddad, bluntly declared that “the federal budget is closed” to the demands of teachers and employees of federal education. Last year, Haddad, on behalf of the Lula government, managed to pass a “new fiscal framework” that replaced the Temer government’s “spending ceiling” to offer “more rational” management of the Brazilian budget and a “zero deficit” target for this year’s budget. Both measures, widely welcomed by the international financial markets, now threaten the constitutional spending floors for health and education.
Committed to establishing a good business environment in Brazil, Lula celebrated on X/Twitter an April 23 report from the economic daily Valor Econômico that the country “has returned to the list of the 25 most attractive countries for Foreign Direct Investment developed by the consultancy Kearney.” Occupying position 19, it is the country’s best result since 2017. Significantly, the Argentina of fascistic president Javier Milei, hailed worldwide as a model of austerity and repression, also returned to the list, ranking position 24.
Almost a year and five months after Lula took office, the reactionary character of his third term has been exposed on a number of fronts.
Last week, the Brazilian media reported that, after ruling out universal vaccination against COVID-19, the Lula government had postponed the COVID-19 vaccination campaign due to a delay in the purchase of doses. This week, organizations of indigenous peoples in Brazil, who were brutally attacked under the Bolsonaro government, excluded Lula’s participation in their annual event because of the delay in demarcating indigenous lands.
The Brazilian pseudo-left has played its part in covering up the Lula government’s attacks on workers and sowing illusions that it and the unions controlled by the PT and PSOL can be pushed to the left. This includes not only Pabloite and Morenoite organizations in the PSOL, but also those that claim to want to carry out an “independent struggle” and end up providing a “left” cover by posing instruments of pressure on the Lula government.
This is the case of the Morenoite Workers Revolutionary Movement (MRT), the sister organization in Brazil of the Socialist Workers Party (PTS) in Argentina. In Esquerda Diario, its youth organization, Faísca Revolucionaria, wrote on April 24 that it is a “mistake” for the unions and youth organizations to concentrate their “demands on budget recomposition, outside the fight against this neoliberal measure [the ‘new fiscal framework’] of the Lula government.”
However, the Lula government’s attacks on education and the Brazilian working class are not just the result of its neoliberal measures, but of the pro-capitalist character of the PT, PSOL and the unions and youth organizations they control as a whole. This, in turn, is ignored by the MRT, which considers the PT a “worker-bourgeois” party and insists that “the trade union federations, as well as the student organizations, can play an essential role in coordinating the struggle nationally in a united front.”
In fact, the PT’s “workers’ base” collapsed as it shifted increasingly to the right since its foundation in 1980. In a period marked by capitalist globalization, it became, from 2003, when Lula was elected for the first time, the preferred governing party of the Brazilian and international bourgeoisie for thirteen years. Today, one of the PT’s main bases is the union bureaucracy and the middle class, of which the MRT itself and other pseudo-left organizations are a part.
Around 700 Australian manufacturing jobs are likely to be destroyed, as petrochemical company Qenos prepares to shut up shop after being placed in administration on April 17. The company produces ethylene and polyethylene at two plants in Australia: Altona in Melbourne and Botany in Sydney.
A section of the Qenos plant in Altona, Australia [Photo: Qenos Media]
Qenos was placed under administration by LAOP Bidco, a subsidiary of property developer LOGOS, which acquired the company earlier this month. Previous owner China National Chemical had been looking to sell Qenos since at least July last year, after recording financial losses over the past few years, largely as a result of soaring natural gas prices.
Administrators have confirmed the closure of the Sydney plant, which has been out of action since a cooling tower collapsed in February 2023. A planned restart last month, following the completion of extensive repairs, did not go ahead.
While the Melbourne plant will continue to operate for now, administrators have flagged that it too will be shuttered. McGrathNicol administrator Jason Preston told workers this week, “the intention is to continue trading the Altona plant in the near term. We will provide further updates as the timing for the shutdown of Altona becomes clearer.”
In response to the April 17 announcement, Australian Workers Union (AWU) national secretary Paul Farrow said: “Right now there seems to be some uncertainty about the future of the Altona site. If there’s a chance of retaining operations we want every option explored. We will be meeting with the administrators and with Qenos leadership to make sure no stone is left unturned.”
Qenos workers should take this as a sharp warning that the AWU is ready to sacrifice workers’ jobs, wages and conditions in order to make the operation a profitable venture for its new owners.
Accepting that even this is unlikely to reverse the imminent closure, and attempting to hose down workers’ opposition to the destruction of their livelihoods, Farrow continued: “We have been assured that Qenos Group’s new owner, LAOP Bidco, has indicated it will propose a Deed of Company Arrangement that will fund employee’s pre-appointment entitlements, including redundancy.”
In other words, the best workers can hope for is that they are paid what they are owed before they are thrown on the scrapheap. According to the Australian, workers “could be owed more than $100m in leave, redundancy, and other entitlements.”
This is a clear attempt by the AWU bureaucracy to categorically rule out any possibility of workers taking up a struggle against the shutdown.
The union leadership is preparing to deliver yet another “orderly closure,” just as it is doing at the Alcoa alumina refinery in Kwinana, Western Australia, and as it did in the recent partial closure of Molycop’s Newcastle steel plant.
Similar operations have been carried out countless times before, by the AWU and other unions, including with the complete destruction of the Australian car industry.
To avoid the same fate, workers will have to take matters into their own hands. But this does not mean Qenos employees must fight alone.
As Australia’s sole manufacturer of high-density polyethylene, the Qenos shutdown will likely lead to further closures and job cuts around the country.
Business analysts have warned that the demise of Qenos is a sign of things to come and increasing gas prices will lead other energy intensive industries to cease operations in Australia, destroying thousands more jobs.
More broadly, corporate insolvencies are at record levels. More than 1,100 companies appointed administrators in March, 26 percent higher than in March 2023, and the first time a figure of over 1,000 has been recorded in a single month since 2015.
The Australian Securities and Investments Commission anticipates at least 10,000 insolvencies in 2023‒24, the highest in a decade. While the Construction industry is the worst affected, the number of insolvencies in manufacturing has risen to three times that recorded in 2021.
In the same week the Qenos administration was announced, high-tech “green-energy” company Tritium also collapsed. The Queensland-based company that made electric vehicle fast chargers was established in 2001, and when it was floated on the share market in 2022, was valued at $2 billion.
Having already shut down its Australian manufacturing operation late last year, Tritium has now been placed in administration after it failed to secure a $90 million handout from the state government. Around 200 jobs will be lost with the closure of its Brisbane research and development division and headquarters.
Tritium had previously been hailed by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese as an exemplar of the his governments supposed plan to boost Australian manufacturing, especially in the “green” sector. When the company’s financial woes became clear last year, it was flagged by analysts as a likely candidate for funding from Labor’s National Reconstruction Fund. Despite being announced more than a year ago, the fund has not dispensed a single dollar.
The collapse of Qenos and Tritium, and the resultant destruction of hundreds of jobs, exposes the reality behind Labor’s phoney rhetoric on the manufacturing industry. News of their failures emerged just a week after Albanese, announced the “Future Made in Australia Act,” hailed by the Australian Council of Trade Unions as a “historic step forward for workers.”
In reality, it has nothing to do with the interests of workers. Albanese made this clear, underscoring that the growth of Australia’s manufacturing sector was predicated on the reduction in labour costs—that is, the destruction of jobs—made possible by advances in automation.
The real purpose is to hand out billions of dollars to corporations involved in strategic, war-related industries. This is part of the Labor government’s completion of the transformation of Australia into a frontline state for a catastrophic war with China.
The AWU is completely on board with these plans. Farrow declared: “We are currently on a trajectory to lose core elements of our sovereign capability… Without this capability, Australia would be further at the mercy of unstable global supply chains to meet our essential daily needs.”
Workers at Qenos and throughout the manufacturing sector should reject this attempt by the AWU bureaucracy to tie their fate to corporate profits and the war plans of Australian imperialism. They also need to draw lessons from their experiences with the union.
In October 2022, the company locked out 33 workers at its Altona plant in response to strike action over wages, conditions and safety issues. Qenos had offered workers a real wage cut—just a 2 percent pay increase as inflation peaked at 8 percent.
Workers demanded a wage increase of 7 percent in each of the three years of the contract, increased staffing to address safety concerns and the abolition of a two-tier wage structure. After declaring a Fair Work Commission ruling suspending industrial action over the dispute a “huge victory,” the AWU imposed a sell-out deal containing a pay rise of less than 4 percent a year.
For more than two decades, the AWU and all other unions covering workers at the Qenos plants, operating as an industrial police force of management, have presided over a constant restructuring process, in order to boost company profits. This has resulted in the slashing of hundreds of jobs and the continual erosion of working conditions and safety.
In future, Polish schoolchildren are to be indoctrinated in militarism beginning in primary school. Polish Education Minister Barbara Nowacka and Defence Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz presented a program to this effect titled “Edukacja z wojskiem” (”Education with the army”) last Wednesday.
The governing coalition in Poland led by former European Union Council President Donald Tusk, which has been in office since last autumn, is thereby increasing the militarisation of Polish schools.
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, Prime Minister Donald Tusk and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg during a visit to Poland [Photo by Krystian Maj/KPRM / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]
During the pilot programme, Polish soldiers will conduct a three-hour training course in primary and secondary schools. “The main objective of the programme is to raise the awareness of children and young people in the field of security and defence and develop basic habits and skills in the field of defence and civil protection as well as behaviour in crisis situations,” reads the ministry’s statement.
All grades from the first year of primary school to secondary school are eligible to participate. Only the eighth year of primary school and the first year of secondary school are excluded. The PiS (Law and Justice Party)-led government, which was voted out of office in 2022, had already introduced “security training,” i.e., military training including shooting practice, into the curriculum for these grades.
Registration takes place via the local authorities. The program will run from May 6 to June 20 and cover around 3,500 schools. If the program proves successful, it will be permanently established in the curriculum, the two ministers announced.
At the press conference, the ministers made it abundantly clear that the programme is not about imparting neutral knowledge about first aid and disaster control, but instead is aimed at creating a militaristic culture (”showing the army at school”).
“We are increasing the resilience of our society. We live in times in which all measures that can improve security must be taken... From pre-school children to senior citizens, everyone must be prepared for challenges,” emphasised Kosiniak-Kamysz.
The education minister added that patriotism is “the willingness to act for the fatherland, but above all to acquire the skills necessary to serve one’s country and one’s neighbour. And that is exactly what our programme is for.”
The praise for “patriotism” is reminiscent of speeches made by the former PiS education minister Przemysław Czarnek, who introduced military training and a new civics lesson, “History and the Present” (”Historia i teraźniejszość,” HiT), in 2022. According to Nowacka, HiT is to be replaced in 2025 by the subject “political education.”
The controversy surrounding HiT shows just how small are the differences between the old and new governments. While in opposition, the current governing parties criticised HiT’s textbook as a right-wing construct because it demonised feminism, communism and even parts of pop culture as anti-Polish ideologies.
Now, however, Barbara Nowacka, leader of the feminist party Inicjatywa Polska (iPL), is praising the promotion of “patriotic” attitudes among seven-year-olds. Pseudo-left organisations and parties play a key role, not only in Poland but worldwide, in accompanying the return of militarism and war with phraseology embracing feminist and identity politics.
The Tusk government is seamlessly continuing and intensifying the PiS’s war policy, not only in education but also in all other areas. A few weeks ago, Tusk publicly declared that the world had entered a “pre-war era” and had to prepare accordingly. Poland has long played a key role in the NATO war offensive against the nuclear power, Russia. Foreign Minister Sikorski recently refused to rule out the deployment of NATO troops to Ukraine.
Certain disagreements between Tusk’s PO (Citizens Platform) and the PiS are primarily of a tactical nature. For example, President Andrzej Duda, who belongs to the PiS camp, recently confirmed in an interview his willingness to station US nuclear weapons in Poland as part of “nuclear sharing.” Tusk reacted coolly and called on Duda to hold consultations on this issue.
According to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, the military alliance currently has no plans to station nuclear weapons in other member states. Stoltenberg stated this while visiting British troops stationed in Poland alongside British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
This does not mean Stoltenberg and Tusk advocate a less aggressive nuclear policy towards Moscow. According to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), around 150 US nuclear weapons are currently stored in Europe as part of “nuclear sharing”—in Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy and Turkey.
The differences of opinion between Duda and Tusk over the stationing of US nuclear weapons in Poland are primarily about foreign policy orientation. While Tusk favours close cooperation with the major European powers, especially Germany, the PiS is seeking to strengthen its close military alliance with the US—also as a counterweight to Germany’s dominance in the EU. Both camps are prepared to risk and wage a third world war and militarise all of society right down to the schools.
