Tibetan Parliamentary Elections in Exile: Glitches and Prospects

Apa Lhamo


The preliminary round of the direct election to elect the 'Sikyong' (prime minister) and 'Chithue' (members) of the Tibetan Parliament-in-exile was held on 18 October 2015. The final round is scheduled for 20 March 2016. How much has the concept of democracy evolved among Tibetans in exile? How has the ongoing election year progressed so far? What are the prospects for the final round?

Democracy in Tibet: A PrimerAlthough conceived inside Tibet, the idea of democratic governance among Tibetans was essentially implemented in exile in India. The 13th Dalai Lama had tried to initiate numerous democratic reforms in Tibet, but his efforts were mitigated by conservative sections of the society at the time. In 1950, the incumbent Dalai Lama too, after assuming the spiritual and political leadership of Tibet, introduced a number of progressive changes, and inculcated ideas of direct democracy via his Reform Committee. However, the Committee and its introduction of democracy were soon thwarted with the 1959 Chinese invasion and occupation of Tibet that subsequently resulted in the Dalai Lama's exile. Therefore, while there was an indigenous progression towards democracy in Tibet, direct involvement in democratic governance was first experienced by Tibetans in exile.

The Tibetan example of top-down introduction of democracy is unlike most conventional examples, wherein people had to demand and struggle to achieve it. This unique democracy was born in exile in India with the 1963 formalisation of the 'Draft Constitution for the Future Tibet', and the subsequent adoption of the 'Charter of the Tibetans in Exile' in 1991. Although unique, this nascent democratic movement does share characteristics similar to those of other fledgling democratic movements.

The Election Commission: Progress and ProblemsThe Central Election Commission (CEC) of Tibetans in exile made set rules for the candidates; their campaign procedures; and set limits on campaign expenditures in accordance with the Charter of the Tibetans-in-Exile. Many lauded the CEC's efforts towards managing the Tibetan Diaspora that is scattered world over, during in the preliminary election. However, the Commission incurred criticism for its incompetence on certain matters, its authoritarian nature, and its questionable enforcement of election rules. Some critics even alleged that the Commission deliberately manipulated election rules to give advantage to two candidates.

The CEC was severely criticised for its failure to respond when institutions affiliated to the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) banned a Sikyong candidate from campaigning for the polls. The Commission garnered even more criticism for issuing a circular on 20 October 2015 - a day after the preliminary round  - on the eligibility rules. The circular stated that for a third candidate to qualify to contest in the final round, the difference of votes between the second and third candidate must be at least 20 per cent.

As many analysts noted, the number of candidates to be shortlisted for the final should be decided in a more reasonable timeframe. There were five candidates vying for the post, of which only two could make it to the final. Critics claim that the new rule was a deliberate attempt by the CEC - which is allegedly at the beck and call of those in the CTA - to keep a certain candidate from competing, due to his strong position of total independence from the Chinese government.

In the 2011 election, five candidates were allowed to campaign for the finals, and all happened to support the Tibetan Government-in-Exile's position, i.e. middle-way. The CEC's questionable actions, coupled with its incompetence, are of concern, particularly to the wider Tibetan Diaspora. A group of 27 "long-time Tibet Supporters" too published an open letter to the CTA, expressing their worries and disappointment.

Participation in ElectionsTibetans world over enthusiastically engaged in rigorous debates and discussions on Sikyong candidates. These intense debates and discussions, in almost every household to social gatherings to both online and offline platforms, indicate progression in the nascent Tibetan democracy.

The scale of participation in the 2015 preliminary elections, both in numbers and intensity, demonstrates an impressive rise when compared with the 2011 election. Also impressive is the youthful demographics and natures of competition between the candidates.

What Next?Although their positions and agendas are somewhat divergent, incumbent Sikyong Dr. Lobsang Sangay, and Speaker of the CTA, Penpa Tsering - both advocates of the middle-way approach - are the only two finalists for the 20 March election. The discussions, debates and the election itself would have been more energised, interesting, and democratic, had the CEC not twisted the rules at the last minute and had allowed the third candidate, Lukar Jam Atsock - a former political prisoner and a Rangzen (independence) advocate vis-a-vis China - to campaign in the finals.

Although Atsock had garnered considerable support for his radical views, his intellectual depth, and his political savvy, he faced opposition from many for his stand and his alleged criticism of the Dalai Lama's position of political compromise with China towards resolving the issue of Tibet. Regardless, the results of the preliminary polls suggest that incumbent Sikyong Sangay is likely to retain his post for another term; but his competitor, Tsering, is not far behind.

Australia: Job cuts threaten Sydney water safety

Richard Phillips

The Sydney Catchment Authority (SCA), which oversees the dams, water catchments and the overall health of water supplied to Australia’s largest city, has axed five out of six of its senior scientists’ jobs.

Those to lose their positions include the director of science, two scientists specialising in microbiology and catchment management, and the principal scientist for physical chemicals. Another senior scientific testing position has been downgraded to an advisory role.

Academics and water management experts have denounced the cuts, which wipe out decades of water monitoring expertise. They have warned that the decision could lead to a serious degradation of water supplies to Sydney’s 4.5 million residents.

Last year the New South Wales (NSW) state government merged the SCA with the State Water Corporation, which is responsible for rural and regional water in NSW, to form WaterNSW. The new agency has eliminated over 80 jobs, including those of the five senior scientists, as well as project management personnel, administrative workers, senior economists and engineers, during the past six months.

None of the unions or professional organisations covering these workers—the Australian Professionals, the Australian Services Union or the Community Public Sector Union—has issued a statement opposing this job destruction or warned of its implications.

University of NSW Associate Professor Stuart Khan, a water contamination expert, told the Sydney Morning Herald that the job destruction was “the worst thing to happen [to water management] in decades … It will take one more emergency … to remind us what a stupid mistake this is.”

The newspaper reported that four scientists from WaterNSW’s Penrith facility, in Sydney’s western suburbs, decided to take redundancy packages after being told that their responsibilities would be “significantly diminished” and their annual salaries cut by up to $50,000.

The SCA was established in 1999 by the state Labor government after dangerous chlorine resistant pathogens—Giardia and Cryptosporidium—were discovered in the Warragamba Dam, Sydney’s main water supply.

The SCA’s task was to monitor water quality in the catchment and deal with possible biological and chemical contaminants, including those from the agricultural and coal mining industries that may degrade water supplies. The Sydney catchment area has 21 dams and covers more than 16,000 square kilometres of land in the south and west of the metropolitan area, including several large towns.

Water NSW management last week declared that the job cuts were part of “structural changes” at the agency, designed to “achieve greater efficiency.” NSW Water Minister Niall Blair insisted there would be “no deterioration” in Sydney’s water quality or water safety monitoring in the state.

Blair’s assurances are worthless. The job destruction is a cost-cutting measure to make the water industry a more attractive proposition for privatisation. Finance industry corporations and others seeking to profit from any sell off of the industry regard senior scientists and others involved in the evaluation of water catchment areas as an impost on potential profits.

Over the past two decades consecutive governments throughout Australia have sold off or corporatised various state-owned assets—electricity, gas, airlines, public transport, insurance and other key industries. The privatisation agenda was set in train by the Hawke and Keating federal Labor governments from 1983 to 1996 and carried forward by federal and state governments—Labor and Liberal-National Coalition alike—backed by the trade unions.

While the water industry is one of the last remaining state-owned and run essential services, it is being systematically undermined in line with growing demands from the finance industry in Australia and internationally.

State governments have increasingly contracted out maintenance and other key aspects of the water industry, including large capital works—dams, desalination plants and other facilities—to the private sector. Between 2010 and 2013, Sydney Water, the state-owned agency that delivers Sydney’s water, slashed 450 jobs, including by outsourcing 135 maintenance positions at six Sydney locations.

In December 2013, the federal government’s Infrastructure Australia released a paper identifying 10 Australian water assets that could be privatised at an estimated enterprise value of $37.5 billion. It recommended Sydney Water be sold off. Other calls have been made for the privatisation of the Queensland Bulk Water Supply Authority, the Water Corporation of Western Australia and South Australia’ SA Water.

Former Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chairman Graeme Samuel last year called for all Australian governments to consider privatising water assets.

“There is no logical reason why governments need to own the maintenance companies that maintain the supply of water to customers,” Samuel told the Australian Financial Review. “They don’t need to own the companies that install the pipes, they don’t need to own the pipes, they don’t need to own the dams, they can all be owned by the private sector …”

Encouraged by the unions, which have rubberstamped outsourcing and other privatisation measures, NSW Liberal Premier Mike Baird’s government announced plans in 2015 to sell off another $20 billion in public assets.

Late last year, the NSW government moved to privatise the last remaining state-owned electricity assets and passed legislation ending Sydney Water’s monopoly.

The NSW government is currently investigating private involvement in the state’s 28 wastewater facilities and last year the state-owned Hunter Water Authority, north of Sydney, outsourced the maintenance and operation of its 25 treatment plants to the multinational company Veolia.

The elimination of water scientists’ jobs is another step toward privatisation of this essential service and will be followed by further job cuts.

                                                  * * *

The World Socialist Web Site spoke this week to one senior scientist whose job was axed. Concerned about any future victimisation, the scientist wished to remain anonymous. He began by explaining the impact of the SCA’s merger into WaterNSW.

“We hoped that the SCA’s science component would not just be preserved but expanded. We wanted the lessons learnt from the Sydney water crisis of 1998, not just about monitoring Giardia and Cryptosporidium and that sort of thing, but our scientific understanding of the catchment, modelling, downstream river movements and other important processes to be applied across the state. Instead of that we were told that it was necessary to improve efficiency and they cut work on catchment, environment and science.

“This is really wrong, not just because I lost my job, but because the skill levels have declined and this is going to have an impact on the community. It may not happen straight away but as soon as there is a drought, major bushfires or something else, it will open up the catchment to all sorts of issues and create another water crisis.

“In the past there was a multiple barrier approach to water safety: catchment, river, reservoir and treatment. This has been mostly reduced to the water treatment barrier. The science component has been heavily cut—from a 15-member science program group to a 6-member group—which means we don’t have the knowledge base, and important development projects will not be carried out.”

Asked about the NSW Water Minister Blair’s reassurances that there would be no degradation of water quality or frontline services, the scientist said: “Of course he says that, but if there are serious problems in the catchment areas caused by mining, coal seam gases, bacteria or even a big bushfire—there’ll be nobody to deal with it.

“We were overworked, in some cases doing the work of three people, but we kept things under control. Now there are none. If something happens in ten months, who will be responsible? No one. The water minister and other politicians who have destroyed people’s lives will probably be gone and whoever is left will say, ‘Oh dear, mistakes have been made and we have to change this.’

“In this industry there has to be a proactive approach. It’s about high capacity knowledge development and preparation for the safety of the entire community. The disappearance of five scientists is not going to produce an immediate collapse, but it’s like a building. If you remove five pillars from the building it will stand until there is heavy wind or a flood and then it will collapse.

“Water quality advisors are needed, not just for day-to-day operations but to look at trends. Previously we were dealing with the Sydney catchment area. Those that are left have to deal with the whole state. More toxins and other things are being disposed into the catchment areas and they will not be properly monitored.

“At the end of the day, SCA had a $120 million operating budget. The scientists they cut probably cost about $1 million per year and the catchment people might take it up to about $3 million, which is probably less than 2 percent of the budget.

“I’m not interested in scare-mongering or exaggerating, and I’m not opposed to change, but we’ve gone back by about 20 years and I’m worried and disturbed about it. The people still there will work very hard but standards will drop and this is going to produce a problem sooner or later and people need to be warned about it.”

UK immigration policy inflicts more damage on National Health Service

Sascha Woods

The UK Conservative government’s immigration policies are exerting mounting pressure on the already stretched resources of the National Health Service (NHS).

Set up to be an “Independent, non-statutory, non-time limited, non-departmental public body that advises the government on migration issues,” the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) is anything but independent. Last year, Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservatives asked the MAC to look into ways of restricting the most popular route of workers into the UK—the Tier 2 (skilled workers) visa.

Many nurses from outside the European Economic Area (EEA) would fall into this category. Since 2011, the Tier 2 visa system has an annual cap of only 20,700 visas that can be issued. The rich can come and go as they please under the Tier 2 visa system, as anyone earning over £150,000 is exempt from the cap.

Nursing was placed onto the shortage occupation list for Tier 2 visa entry in November 2015 by the MAC, which is supposed to fast-track visa applications. However, the Royal College of Nursing recently released figures showing that 2,341 nurses were refused the right to work in the UK last year alone. This exposed the fact that placing nursing on the shortage occupation list has been nothing but a cynical gesture.

Any worker hoping to gain employment in the UK with a Tier 2 visa must already have a job and be sponsored by his or her employer, who pays a fee. In the case of the NHS, it supplied workers with a job offer (nursing) and sponsorship and had actively recruited from the shortage occupation list. But, at the last hurdle, many nurses had their visa application denied.

NHS hospitals were relying on these nurses to take up the strain caused by a chronic lack of staffing. An example is the high-profile Addenbrookes Hospital in Cambridge, which was placed into special measures in 2015 by the QCC (Quality Care Commission), due to concerns over “serious staff shortages.” Addenbrookes had over half of the visas it applied for denied (66 of 123).

Between April and November 2015, East Lancashire Hospitals NHS was hit with the highest number of refusals—300 out of 300 applications.

Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals and North Cumbria University Hospitals both had around 240 refusals. The Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Kings Lynn had more than half its requests refused, with 157 applications made and 82 denied. Central Manchester University Hospitals had 195 applications and 75 refusals. Bedford Hospital applied for 150 visas and had 45 refused, and Luton and Dunstable Hospital had 31 applications and 15 visas refused.

These numbers stack up as a stark reminder of the cuts that have ravaged the NHS. In total, the NHS has lost out on the hiring of more than 1,000 desperately needed trained nurses due to this immigration policy.

What is posed is not a short-term staffing crisis, however, as a six-year employment limit is placed upon applicants of the Tier 2 visa, before they have to leave the UK. The final blow comes in the form of the £35,000 minimum pay packet that a worker must be in receipt of if he or she is to obtain a visa. No ordinary nurse can hope to be paid this wage under the regime of austerity, where nurses’ pay has fallen by 14 percent in real terms since 2010.

Cameron was unabashed in spouting nationalist rhetoric to justify restricting visas in June 2015 when he said, “As part of our one-nation approach, pushed forward by my Immigration Taskforce, we have asked the Migration Advisory Committee to advise on what more can be done to reduce levels of work migration from outside the EU.” [emphasis added]

Seven thousand fewer nurses came to the UK in 2014-2015 compared with 2003-2004, according to Christie & Co, a consultancy.

Cameron is bowing to the most right-wing elements of his party, seeking to gain favour with supporters of the anti-European Union UK Independence Party. The crisis created in a vastly overstretched NHS benefits the propagandists of the ruling elite who routinely denounce the UK’s public health care system as “outmoded” and “inefficient,” to argue for a privately run health care system.

Another important factor in the government’s policy of refusing visas to overseas nurses was revealed in a Guardian report in January. It detailed how many hospital trusts were being told to cut staffing levels in a bid to save millions of pounds, even though ministers had been giving advice just three years earlier to increase them after the Mid-Staffs care scandal. The King’s Fund estimates that in order to save £1 million, a health care trust would have to sack 25 nurses.

Michael Hodges, director at Christie & Co., described the shortage of nurses as a “homegrown problem. … Essentially we are suffering poor workplace planning as a result of austerity measures in recent years.”

According to research published in the Sunday Mirror last October, up to 35,000 doctors and nurses—4 percent of the total workforce—could be made redundant to cut costs, based on the current expected NHS deficit.

Monitor, which regulates Foundation Trust Hospitals that are semi-independent of NHS control, found that most of their hospitals have been identified as “financially challenged.” Between April and June of last year, an overall deficit of £930 million was reported across England’s 241 NHS hospital trusts, with three out of four trusts in the red.

In an attempt to quash criticism, a spokesperson for the Department of Health said, “We want more home-grown staff in the NHS and our recent changes to student funding will create up to 10,000 more nursing, midwifery and allied health professional training places by 2020.”

This is an outright lie. The government is stripping away bursaries from nurses and turning them into student loans. With the spiraling costs of tuition fees and loan repayments, this will only serve to deprive students from a working class background from entering the medical profession without first amassing huge amounts of debt.

The decision to deny working visas to overseas nurses must be opposed by all workers. Cutting staffing levels to demonstrate the government is “tough on immigration” and is driving down wage costs is incompatible with any conception of public health care. Restricting skilled workers’ rights to work where there is an urgent demand for their skills demonstrates the callous attitude of the ruling elite towards those who are employed in and use the NHS.

The total dismantling of the NHS is under way, with many hospitals stacking up huge debts with no way of making further savings other than to cut staffing levels to dangerous levels.

Widening social inequality exacerbates housing crisis in California

Kevin Martinez

According to a recent study published by the California Budget & Policy Center, almost all income gains in the state since 1989 have gone to the top 1 percent of income earners.

In every geographic region, both urban and rural, the bottom 99 percent of households fell behind. The most unequal areas of the state included San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and Los Angeles, where the top 1 percent of household made on average more than 30 times the amount of money made by the bottom 99 percent.

The study, titled “The Growth of Top Incomes Across California” looked at three metrics: the growth of inequality between the top 1 percent and the bottom 99 percent, the change in average incomes between the two groups since 1989, and the share of the total income captured by the top 1 percent since 1989.

The wealthiest Californians fared the best in regions that saw economic growth over the last few decades, especially the San Francisco area. In the largest and richest urban centers like San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Jose, inequality was the highest in the state. The top 1 percent of households in the San Francisco metro area made on average $3.6 million in 2013, 44 times what the average income was for the bottom 99 percent at $81,904.

Over the past generation, the wealth of the top 1 percent has soared over the rest of the population in nearly all of the state’s regions. Even in areas with smaller income gaps, like the Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario metropolitan area, the top 1 percent’s income was nearly 13 times the average income of the bottom 99 percent.

In some areas, the only segment of society to see any significant income gains since 1989 was the top 1 percent. In San Jose, the top 1 percent increased their wealth by 248 percent, while the bottom 99 percent increased their wealth by only 23 percent. In the Los Angeles area, the top 1 percent increased their wealth by 55 percent, but the rest of the metropolitan area saw their average income plummet by 12 percent.

Even more troubling is that the top 1 percent has increased their share of the total growth in incomes over the last 25 years. With the exception of the Easter Sierra region, mostly rural Alpine, Inyo, and Mono counties, the share of income going to the top 1 percent increase in every region of California.

The highest share of income going to the top 1 percent was in the San Francisco metropolitan area, with 30.8 percent of the region’s income going to the wealthiest households in 2013, double the 1989 share of 15.8 percent.

A significant contributing factor to rising inequality is the rising cost of rent, especially in the large urban areas like Los Angeles and San Francisco. A study by Apartment List found that California had the fastest growing rents in all the US. A spokesman said, “California rents are growing nearly twice as quickly as the national average,” adding, “Rents have increased 5.7 percent over the last year compared to 3.3 percent nationwide, based on two-bedroom units.”

Rent increased in Los Angeles by 6.7 percent since the start of this year according to Apartment List. The two cities with the highest rent growth were San Jose with 8.9 rent increase and Anaheim at 9.2 percent.

An average two bedroom apartment in San Francisco costs $4,760; in San Jose, $2,700; and in Los Angeles, the average two bedroom apartment costs $2,650. In Los Angeles, the low median individual income was $27,749, making rent there and in California the least affordable in the United States, according to UCLA researchers, a result of the wide gap between income and costs.

In San Francisco, authorities have made clear their callous attitude toward the poor and homeless. City workers there cleared out a tent city under the Central Freeway this week after a deadline announced by public health officials passed last week. The homeless were told to leave the area within 72 hours before the San Francisco Police Department arrived to remove anyone who stayed behind.

The city moved 25 homeless people to Pier 80, a homeless shelter that can only house up to 150 people. The city also offered to take their belongings, dump them, or leave their things with the city’s operations yard, where they would be held for up to 90 days. Democratic Mayor Ed Lee said the city would remove at least two more tent cities in the coming weeks.

In Los Angeles, local authorities have promised millions of dollars to fight homelessness, but revealed their true aim with recent plans to crack down on tiny houses provided for free by private individuals. Although far from a solution to the problem of homelessness, the tiny houses are shelters the size of a garden shed which many homeless prefer over tents and sleeping bags.

City officials declared the tiny homes to be a threat to public health and safety and used allegations of drug use and crime to begin tearing them down. Many of the homeless were not told where to go upon losing their shelters.

While the city has pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to house the homeless, it has never been specified where the funds would come from, making the proposal untenable, at best. The homeless population in Los Angeles, the largest in the country, increased by 12 percent in the last two years, according to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. The number of makeshift encampments has increased by 85 percent in the same time.

The rise in homelessness can be directly attributed to economic factors, especially the rising costs of renting an apartment or home, in addition to falling wages and mass unemployment. Politically, this process has been facilitated and, in fact, accelerated by the policies pursued by both the Democrats and the Republicans in federal, state and local governments, whose common goal is to ensure the protection of the interests of capital at the expense of the vast majority of society.

From the slashing of vital social programs that provide assistance to the poor to the bailout of banks for the enrichment of a tiny parasitic financial oligarchy, such policies have only exacerbated the immense class divide in California.

European Union threatens summary mass deportations of refugees

Alex Lantier

Yesterday, European Council President Donald Tusk issued a blunt warning that the European Union (EU) intends to seal off its borders and summarily deport masses of desperate refugees fleeing imperialist wars that are devastating the Middle East.

Speaking from Athens after meeting with Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, Tusk said: “I want to appeal to all potential illegal economic migrants, wherever you are from. Do not come to Europe. Do not risk your lives and your money. It is all for nothing. Greece, or any other European country, will no longer be a transit country.”

Tusk then traveled on to Turkey. At a joint press conference with Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu in Ankara, he called for setting up a system for summary mass deportations of refugees from Europe. “We agree that the refugee flows still remain far too high,” Tusk said. “To many in Europe, the most promising method seems to be a fast and large-scale mechanism to ship back irregular migrants arriving in Greece.”

Tusk’s attack on refugees as “irregular” or “illegal economic migrants” is a slander against hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children fleeing bloody conflicts stoked by the US and European powers. Such attacks are designed to allow the EU to shift far to the right, adopting policies previously associated with neo-fascistic forces. Fundamental democratic rights, like the right to asylum, are to be trampled, and extrajudicial deportations based on racial or national origin are to become EU policy.

The flow of refugees from war-torn Syria and Iraq is continuing to increase, with 131,724 arriving in Greece in the first two months of 2016 alone. This is more than the number that fled to Europe in the first six months of 2015. Under these conditions, the hostility of all factions of the European bourgeoisie to the refugees is coming fully into the open.

Tusk’s comments came a day after NATO commander General Philip Breedlove accused refugees of being enemies of NATO in the service of Russia and Syria, which are “deliberately weaponizing migration in an attempt to overwhelm European structures and break European resolve.”

No fabrication is too grotesque for the EU powers. A conference organized by Austria and nine Balkan countries agreed to designate all refugees fleeing Afghanistan, a country devastated by an ongoing civil war and NATO military occupation, as “economic migrants.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who at the beginning of the refugee crisis tried to falsely align herself with popular sympathy for refugees by stating that Berlin would welcome large numbers of them, signaled her agreement with a hard line against immigrants on Tuesday.

“There is not a right for a refugee to say: ‘I want to get asylum in a particular country in the European Union,’” she declared. Berlin’s support for the Schengen treaty of free movement of people inside Europe is based on Greece not allowing refugees into Europe in the first place, she stressed: “When I say we have to return to the Schengen system, then that means of course that Greece has to protect the borders.”

Tens of thousands of refugees seeking to travel north towards Germany are now trapped in Greece, as Austria and the Balkan states refuse to admit more than a handful of refugees through the border each day. Greek authorities estimated that the number of refugees trying to reach central Europe but trapped in Greece could soon rise to 70,000.

Thousands of refugees have arrived at the Greek-Macedonian border since Macedonian police brutally cracked down on migrants trying to cross the border on Monday. Approximately 12,000 to 15,000 immigrants are therefore blocked at a camp near the border crossing at Idomeni.

“This is a makeshift camp. The transit camp is already at full capacity so people are setting up their tents wherever they can,” Al Jazeera’s Hoda Abdel-Hamid reported from Idomeni. “They’re going to the woods to set up fires when the temperatures fall dramatically. … People are frustrated with each day that passes, they’re getting more and more tired.”

A class gulf separates the chauvinist reaction to the refugee crisis by the European ruling elites from the sentiments of masses of working people. In Athens, workers are donating food and toys, and unemployed workers are donating their time in soup kitchens.

Ethnic conflicts and resentments inside the EU are continuing to build, however, as each national government is seeking to block as many refugees as possible from arriving on its territory and is attempting to send as many of them as possible to other countries.

Greece’s Syriza (“Coalition of the Radical Left”) government, which last year imposed a savage austerity package on Greek workers at the behest of the EU, is again playing a reactionary role.

Greek officials are forcing refugees stopped at the Macedonian border to head south to camps in Athens. Media coverage of the camps has been blocked as the government deploys the army to build them and police the refugees trapped there.

After Greece took the unprecedented step of withdrawing its ambassador to Austria to protest Vienna’s role in preventing refugees from leaving Greece, divisions are now erupting over a German-led plan to deploy warships to stop the flow of refugees from Turkey across the Aegean Sea to Greece.

The deployment, which threatens to cut off Russian access to the Mediterranean, was announced early in February in the context of NATO’s broader military buildup against Russia over the Syrian and Ukraine crises. It came only weeks after a Turkish fishing vessel nearly rammed a Russian warship in the Aegean Sea.

While it was aimed at Russia, the deployment has run afoul of escalating divisions among the NATO powers themselves. Last week, NATO officials were still trying to determine the parameters of the naval deployment, amid bitter territorial disputes between Greece and Turkey. After violations of Greek air space by Turkish fighters, during which Greek and Turkish planes engaged in mock dogfights, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg announced that “Greek and Turkish forces will not operate in each other’s territorial waters and airspace.”

On Wednesday, AFP cited multiple anonymous diplomatic sources as stating that Turkish authorities were blocking the deployment to the Aegean. One said that “the Turks refused” to allow NATO vessels into their territorial waters, demanding that the operation’s German commander, Rear Admiral Jorg Klein, “go to Ankara to determine the area where [NATO warships] might deploy.”

The source also denounced Turkey for “showing little to no interest” in taking back migrants picked up by NATO warships at sea as they attempt the crossing to Greece.

Turkish and German government sources denied the AFP report.

China and Brazil: Two expressions of the deepening capitalist breakdown

Nick Beams

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008 and the rapid downturn in the global economy that followed in 2009, various bourgeois economists and pundits put forward the notion that the so-called BRICS economies—Brazil, Russia, China, India and South Africa—could provide a new basis for the expansion of world capitalism.

The last remnants of this myth collapsed this week with reports that the Chinese government is planning to slash millions of jobs in basic industries amid vast overcapacity, and that Brazil has entered a recession, possibly the deepest contraction in its history.

The assertion that the BRICS group, a series of lower- and middle-income countries beset with problems of economic backwardness and dominated by the centres of imperialist finance capital, could somehow provide a new advance for global capitalism was always economic fiction.

It was able to be sustained for a brief period by the massive stimulus package initiated by the Chinese government, including government spending of half a trillion dollars and the most rapid expansion of credit in economic history.

The China construction boom and the expansion of industrial capacity lifted the price of commodities and provided a boost to commodity-exporting countries. But the collapse of the so-called commodities “supercycle”, reflected most immediately in the plunge in the price of oil since 2014 and extending across the range of industrial raw materials, combined with the outflow of capital from “emerging markets”, has unleashed a wave of economic destruction.

On top on the worsening economic situation in China and Brazil, Russia is in recession as a result of the fall in oil prices. South Africa, hit by the fall in metal prices and the cuts of thousands of jobs in the mining industry, is expected shortly to enter recession. India is still touted as a “bright spot”, with growth rates of more than 7 percent, but its economy is weighed down by bad loans, falling export markets and stagnant wages and private investment.

The contraction in Brazil, amounting to 3.8 percent for 2015, is accelerating, with data released yesterday showing that the economy shrank by 5.9 percent in the fourth quarter of the year compared to a year earlier, as “all of the components of internal demand showed falls,” according to the country’s statistics agency. It is on track to suffer the worst recession since official records began, with another contraction of at least 3 percent expected for this year.

The full significance of the announcements in China and Brazil cannot be grasped by considering these countries in isolation. They are expressions of the deepening crisis of the global capitalist economy as a whole and underscore that the breakdown that began with the crash of 2008 has entered a new stage.

The total meltdown of the global economy, in the wake of the worst financial crisis since the 1930s, was only prevented by the injection of trillions of dollars of cash into the financial system by the world’s central banks in order to prop up the banks and finance houses, along with the economic expansion of China.

This process has come to a shuddering halt. As the BRICS “growth model” disintegrates, so the conditions are emerging for another financial disaster. The former governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, recently warned that the collapse of 2008 was the “failure of a system,” and that without a resolution of the “disequilibrium” in the world economy a new catastrophe was likely “sooner rather than later.”

Instead of a return to so-called “normal” conditions, the financial system is becoming ever more dysfunctional, with the program of “quantitative easing” (i.e., the flooding of markets with cash) now extending to the introduction of negative interest rates and negative yields on bonds.

Around a quarter of global gross domestic product is being produced in countries experiencing negative interest rates, following the decision at the end of January by the Bank of Japan to start charging for money deposited with it.

Instead of providing a boost to the financial system, the decision by Japan has thrown markets into turmoil. There are growing concerns over how long the business models for major banks, pension funds and insurance companies, which invest in government securities, can remain sustainable in what a Financial Times article characterised as the “La La Land” of negative rates. “Investors are supposed to buy super safe bonds to avoid the risk of making losses on riskier bets. Now, they’re lining up to make a guaranteed loss on that super safe paper,” the article noted.

The mounting economic and financial crisis is bringing violent political upheavals. This week, in the wake of further evidence of deflation and continuing stagnation, and the possibility of the exit of Britain from the European Union, economists at Credit Suisse warned in a research note entitled “Close to the Edge” that recession in Europe could bring about the collapse of the eurozone. “If the euro area were to relapse back into the recession, it is not clear it would endure,” they said.

In Latin America, the downward spiral of the Brazilian economy is part of the shipwreck of the “left turn” in bourgeois politics, which was dependent on exports to China. In the US, the deepening crisis of the economic and political system has led to the emergence of a fascistic contender, Donald Trump, as the leading presidential candidate for the Republican Party.

Nowhere is the utter bankruptcy of the capitalist order more graphically expressed than in China. The Chinese Stalinist regime pledged that the restoration of capitalism would open the way for the country’s “peaceful rise” and overcome the legacy of decades of economic backwardness. Its program has turned into a disaster.

On the one hand, China’s economic growth has placed it directly in the crosshairs of the American military juggernaut, which regards its rise as a threat to US military and political dominance. On the other, Chinese capitalism does not have “special characteristics” but has turned out to be beset with the same contradictions that afflict the system as a whole and which now directly threaten the jobs and livelihood of hundreds of millions.

As last weekend’s meeting of the G-20 demonstrated, the bourgeoisie and all its agencies have no economic solution to the mounting crisis. Rather than collaboration in the face of mounting problems, the world capitalist system as a whole is characterized by increasingly bitter conflicts. But on one thing they are agreed: that the working class must be made to pay for the chaos of the system over which they preside.

There is no solution to the economic breakdown within the present political order. Global capitalism is heading for a catastrophe, a fact increasingly recognised even in ruling economic and political circles. But as Marx explained, no problem ever arises in the course of mankind’s development without at the same time the material conditions emerging for its resolution.

That is the significance of the massive growth of the international working class over the past three decades—the outcome of globalisation of capitalist production. This includes an increase of 265 million new workers in China, Brazil and India alone between 2000 and 2010. The enormous objective strength of the working class, however, can only become actualised through the political struggle for its unification on an international socialist program, carried forward through the building of the International Committee of the Fourth International as the World Party of Socialist Revolution.

Notes on London’s housing crisis

Allison Smith

Surging London home prices decimate living standards

Recent employment growth and low inflation helped increase overall incomes in London by 2.9 percent since 2008. However, the high cost of housing in the capital city has pushed the region to the bottom of the league table for living standards in the United Kingdom.

Most Londoners have in fact suffered falling living standards, especially when the slant towards rising incomes for the wealthy is taken into account.

Matthew Whittaker, chief economist at Resolution Foundation remarked, “Londoners have experienced some of the strongest income growth in recent years, with typical household incomes now well above pre-crash levels, but the wider picture on living standards changes completely once housing costs are included. On this measure living standards have actually fallen over the last seven years, and by far more than anywhere else in the UK.”

House prices leapt 9.4 percent last year, pushing the average cost of a London home to a record £536,000, while average rents jumped up to an average all-time high of £1,301, far outpacing every other U.K. region.

In many areas of London, landlords are renting out sheds and rooms without windows, smoke detectors, or hot water—and even, as in one case in east London’s Newham borough, a converted walk-in freezer.

Record number of evictions nationally, with most in London

The Ministry of Justice reports that tenants living in 42,728 rented households across England and Wales were forcibly removed from their homes last year—a 53 percent increase since 2010 and a record number since statistics began to be reported in 2000.

Most of the evictions took place within 16 London Boroughs—mostly by social landlords. This is a result of stagnating or declining wages and cuts to benefits, at the same time that the cost of living is skyrocketing, especially rent. Councils have a dwindling supply of social housing units available due to the forced selloff of high-value council properties.

Increasingly, poor tenants are finding it unaffordable to move and forced eviction is fast becoming the only way they can secure new housing, as councils require them to demonstrate they are homeless before they are allocated emergency housing.

Emergency housing is often bed and breakfast or hostel accommodation that are unsuitable for families with children. The charity Shelter reports that nearly 4,000 families are now living in hostels and the most dramatic rise is in central London.

22,000 London homes left empty

A Freedom of Information request revealed that 22,000 houses lay empty in 31 out of 33 London boroughs. However, this could be considerably higher as local authorities do not require owners to declare their properties uninhabited.

Helen Williams, chief executive of the charity Empty Homes, told the Guardian, “With so many people priced out of decent housing across London it makes sense to make the most of existing properties as we build new homes to address the capital’s housing needs.”

London’s free newspaper City A.M. reported that one offender, the Crown Estate, “is sitting on over £800m worth of empty properties in London alone… exposing the scale of the developer’s property footprint in the capital. The monarchy’s portfolio of property and land includes 312 vacant properties in the Greater London area, according to a Freedom of Information request, ranging from rooms on Regent Street and other prime central London locations to garages and commercial space.”

Housing charity sells off affordable housing to developers

Glasspool Charity Trust auctioned off apartments currently occupied by low income and benefits tenants at the Butterfields Estate in the north London borough of Walthamstowe.

A statement said, “As trustees of the Glasspool Charity Trust we sought assurances regarding our tenants, their rights and protection from our selling agents at the time of the negotiations. We were assured that they would be protected within the law. We have no power to prevent a new owner from reviewing their position with the existing tenancies post-sale.”

In 2012, the Shelter housing charity found that in 25 percent of all London areas, rents increased by an average of £300 a year. As demand grows for rented accommodation, many more residents are being priced out of decent homes and forced into deplorable conditions and, increasingly, homelessness. Last year, Shelter researched the huge emotional and financial costs of the lack of affordable housing on low income households.

Nearly 30 percent of renters moved three times in five years

According to a Shelter and YouGov study, 27 percent of renters in the United Kingdom have moved three or more times within the last five years—the equivalent of 400,000 families.

One report described it as almost a nomadic form of existence. Alarmingly, nearly half of parents in rental accommodations were forced to borrow money to move or had fallen behind on rental payments. Sixty-five percent of families report having to change schools after their last move, and one in four parents say that moving causes distress and feelings of insecurity in their children.

Shelter CEO Campbell Robb said, “With short-term contracts, sudden rent hikes and expensive moving costs putting huge pressure on family life, it’s no wonder that millions of parents are battling to give their children a stable home.”

He added, “We know the vast majority of parents are crying out for longer term tenancies, so it’s about time the government turned this into a reality and gave England’s 11 million private renters a better deal.”

A 2010 study by Queens University in Belfast found that children who move five or more times are at least three times more likely to experience serious mental health issues.

Record low home ownership among young Londoners

Resolution Foundation’s Living Standards 2016 report shows there continues to be a sharp decline in new entrants to the U.K. housing market, with home ownership rates between 2001 and 2014 down an average of 11 percentage points for people under 60 years of age.

Millennials (born between 1982 and 2004) experienced the sharpest home ownership decline—a 49 percent reduction since 1998 and a full 16 points lower than residents in the Generation X group (born between 1965 and 1981).

The figures for young Londoners are devastating, with home ownership among low-to-middle income residents under 35 years of age plummeting by 67 percent to just 13 percent of residents in 2014. The percentage living in private rented accommodation has increased 87 percent, from 37 percent in 2000 to 70 percent in 2014. Londoners in this age group are also more likely to live in social housing as opposed to owning their own home, with 17 percent living in council properties.

Record wait time for council housing

According to recent figures provided by the Department for Communities and Local Government, up to 25 percent of households in some areas of London are on a waiting list for social housing. Although the overall number of applications for housing is down, nearly all those on the list are waiting a record period to be placed into social housing.

In 2015, Camden had the highest percentage of residents waiting for social housing—nearly one-in-four residents, totaling 24,644—up 10 percent from 2014. In Islington, nearly 20 percent of households were on a waiting list, and the equivalent of one-in-six residents were waiting for housing in Barking and Dagenham, Brighton, Bolton, Tower Hamlets, Medway and Reading in 2015.

The overall decrease in the number of households waiting for housing isn’t due to fewer residents needing assistance. Rather, cuts to housing benefits and other government policies, such as the Localism Act 2011 and Right to Buy, have given local councils the power to restrict eligibility for social housing, especially for those residents who cannot prove a connection to the area.

Report warns number of £1 million homes in UK will triple by 2030

A report co-authored by Professor Paul Cheshire of London School of Economics and Santander Bank, forecasts that by the year 2030, the number of £1 million homes in the United Kingdom will triple and the average home price will more than double from £283,565 to £557,444.

The report projects that within fifteen years London home prices will increase by a factor of 16.5 and nearly one-in-four homes across the capital city will sell for £1 million or more. Prices in Kensington and Chelsea and Westminster boroughs are set to increase by 70 percent. Professor Cheshire said, “By 2030, the divide between housing haves at the top and the have-nots at the bottom will be even wider than it is now.”

Young people under 35 years of age are hardest hit by the staggering increase in home prices. The vast majority are only likely to own a property through inheritance. A recent survey of teachers in London reports that one in 10 young teachers still live at home, even after five years of tenure in their career. Sixty-one percent of those surveyed said that the high cost of living might force them to move out of London altogether.

Chinese government prepares to sack millions of workers

John Ward & Peter Symonds

In the lead-up to the National People’s Congress (NPC) starting on Saturday, the Chinese government has announced massive layoffs in state-owned enterprises in coal and steel. Further sackings in other basic industries are being foreshadowed in moves that will result in millions of workers losing their jobs and heightened political and social tensions.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership has delayed taking steps to deal with huge overcapacities in heavy industry and so-called zombie companies—state-owned enterprises (SOEs) kept on life support via low-interest bank loans—for fear of triggering widespread social unrest. However, amid a slowing economy and concerns about mounting debt, the regime has signalled a swathe of sackings.

Premier Li Keqiang told top economic advisers in December: “We must summon our determination and set to work. For those ‘zombie enterprises’ with absolute overcapacity, we must ruthlessly bring down the knife.” Li will present his yearly work report to the NPC which will also deliberate on the 13th Five-Year Plan that sets the economic guidelines for the government.

On Monday, the employment and welfare minister Yin Weimin announced that capacity in the coal and steel industries would be drastically reduced with 1.8 million workers losing their jobs—1.3 million coal miners and 500,000 steel workers. The figure was a sharp increase from just a few days before when industry minister Miao Wei declared that one million jobs would go in coal and steel.

A Reuters report on Tuesday based on unnamed government sources indicated that the government is planning to slash capacity in as many as seven sectors, including cement, glass-making and ship building leading to around six million jobs being destroyed in the next three years.

The emergence of huge overcapacities in China’s basic industries is intimately bound up with the continuing worldwide economic slump that has followed the 2008-09 global financial crisis. The CCP leadership reacted to the collapse of exports and the loss of 20 million jobs with massive stimulus packages and a flood of cheap credit that fueled a speculative property bubble.

Like governments around the world, Beijing calculated that the crisis was temporary and export growth would resume once the major capitalist economies recovered. Basic industry expanded, spurred on by infrastructure projects, construction and a continuous supply of cheap credit. However, export markets have stagnated, property and infrastructure investment is slowing and the much vaunted “transition” to a service economy has failed to prop up growth rates.

The slowing Chinese economy, now the world’s second largest, is already reverberating internationally. Falling Chinese demand for basic industrial inputs has contributed to the collapse in world commodity prices which is now severely impacting on commodity exporting countries such as Brazil, Russia, South Africa, Australia and Canada.

The excess capacities in China are enormous. Estimated steel overcapacity jumped from 132 million tonnes per year in 2008 to 327 million tonnes in 2014—a figure that is more than three times greater than the total output of Japan, the world’s second largest producer. Over the same period, overcapacity for cement nearly doubled from 450 to 850 million tonnes, for oil refining leapt from 77 to 230 million tonnes and for flat glass jumped from 76 million to 215 million weight cases.

According to the Financial Times, 42 percent of all SOEs lost money in 2013. Total profits for such groups fell in absolute terms last year for the first time since 2001. The gap in return on assets between SOEs and private firms is now the largest in two decades. Government intervention to slash overcapacity could place further stresses on the financial and banking system as SOEs account for an estimated 50 percent of all commercial debt.

Already there are deep concerns about mounting bad loans. A report last month by the European Chamber of Commerce in China stated that non-performing loans (NPLs) had risen by $US76 billion during the first ten months of 2015 to about $291 billion, a 35 percent increase.

The Chinese government’s plans to slash overcapacities and jobs will hit some areas of the country much harder than others, exacerbating regional tensions. Provincial and local governments have often kept “zombie” SOEs afloat through the provision of loans so as to avoid mass layoffs and rising social unrest. The so-called rust-bucket region in the northeast of the country where unemployment is already high will be particularly badly affected.

The CCP is seeking to forestall widespread resistance in the working class by providing funds for retraining and job seeking. Industry minister Miao Wei announced last week that 100 billion yuan ($US15.3 billion) would be provided to support displaced steel and coal workers. However, steel worker Gao Jianqiang told the China Daily last week: “There are just too many factories that are not doing well. One-hundred billion yuan sounds like a huge sum, but I do not think it will solve problems for everyone.”

Many of those who lose their jobs will simply not find work elsewhere. In January, China International Capital Corp (CIIC), the country’s largest merchant bank, predicted that 30 percent of the 10 million people employed in the coal, steel, electrolytic aluminium, cement and glass industries would lose their jobs in the next two years.

The CIIC report concluded that a million of these workers would not find a new job. That estimation was based on the results of the last round of mass job losses in SOEs in the late 1990s when 21 million workers were sacked. Only two thirds found work or were transferred to other jobs.

China’s growth rate in the 2000s, however, averaged 10 percent and peaked at over 14 percent in 2007. Now, however, it is officially 6.9 percent and slowing. Jobs are being destroyed not only in heavy industry but also in the manufacturing export sectors. The official unemployment rate is 4 percent but some estimates, such as research by the National Bureau of Economic Research, put the real figure at close to 10 percent.

The Business Insider last week reported that millions of migrant workers were returning after the New Year break to an uncertain future, “as smaller factories in particular struggle to cope with anemic orders and rising inventories.” Exports from Guangdong province, one of China’s major manufacturing hubs, are predicted to grow by just 1 percent this year.

There are already signs of growing opposition among workers to plans for mass retrenchments. Figures produced by the Hong Kong-based China Labour Bulletin have shown a sharp rise in the number of strikes for 2015 to 2,774, twice as many as for 2014. In January, 504 strikes were recorded. The statistics are only a partial record as they rely on media and social media reports as well as local contacts.

Significantly on Tuesday, the day after the announcement that 1.3 million mining jobs would be destroyed, hundreds of coal miners in Anyuan in southeastern China marched through the city of Pingxiang. The local state-owned mining company has cut back production, laid off workers and told others to stay home on drastically reduced pay. As reported by the Washington Post, up to 1,000 workers from three mines carried banners declaring: “Workers want to survive, workers need to eat.”

Who Is My Neighbour?

John Scales Avery

Are we losing the human solidarity that will be needed if our global society is to solve the pressing problems that are facing us today? Among the symptoms of loss of solidarity is the drift towards violence, racism and aggressive foreign policy that can be seen in the United States. Another warning symptom is the inhospitable reception that refugees have received in Europe and elsewhere.

Tribalism

Human emotional nature evolved over the long prehistory of our species, when our remote ancestors lived small tribes, competing for territory on the grasslands of Africa. Since marriage within a tribe was much more frequent than marriage outside it, each tribe was genetically homogeneous, and the tribe itself, rather than the individual, acted as the unit upon which the forces of natural selection acted. Those tribes that exhibited internal solidarity, combined with aggression towards competing tribes, survived best. Over a long period of time, tribalism became a hard-wired part of human nature. We can see tribalism today in the emotions involved in football matches, in nationalism, and in war.

The birth of ethics

When humans began to live in larger and more cosmopolitan groups, it was necessary to overwrite some elements of raw human emotional nature. Tribalism became especially inappropriate, unless the scope of the perceived tribe could be extended to include everyone in the enlarged societies. Thus ethical principles were born. It is not just a coincidence that the greatest ethical teachers of history lived at a time when the size of cooperating human societies was being enlarged.

All of the major religions of humanity contain some form of the Golden Rule. Christianity contains an especially clear statement of this central ethical principle: According to the Gospel of Luke, after being told that he must love his neighbour as much as he loves himself, a man asks Jesus, “Who is my neighbour?”. Jesus then replies with the Parable of the Good Samaritan, in which we are told that our neighbour need not be a member of our own tribe, but can live far away and can belong to a completely different nation or ethnic group. Nevertheless, that person is still our neighbor, and deserves our love and care.

The central ethical principle which is stated so clearly in the Parable of the Good Samaritan is exactly what we need today to avoid disaster. We must enlarge our loyalties to include the whole of humanity. We must develop a global ethic of comprehensive human solidarity, or else perish from a combination of advanced technology combined with primitive tribalism. Space-age science is exceedingly dangerous when it is combined with stone-age politics.

The need for global solidarity comes from the instantaneous worldwide communication and economic interdependence that has resulted from advanced science and technology. But advanced technology, our almost miraculous ability to communicate through the Internet, Skype and smartphones, could weld the world into a single peaceful and cooperative unit. But we must learn to use global communication as a tool for developing worldwide human solidarity.

Each week, all over the world, congregations assemble and are addressed by their leaders on ethical issues. But all too often there is no mention of the astonishing and shameful contradiction between the institution of war (especially the doctrine of “massive retaliation”), and the principle of universal human brotherhood, loving and forgiving one’s enemies, and returning good for evil.

At a moment of history, when the continued survival of civilization is in doubt because of the incompatibility of war with the existence of thermonuclear weapons, our religious leaders ought to use their enormous influence to help to solve the problem of war, which is after all an ethical problem.

New Arctic Battlelines Drawn As Industry Exploits Fragile Seas

Lauren McCauley

Rapidly melting Arctic ice has opened up enormous swaths of this pristine and ecologically significant landscape to dangerous industrial threats. And as officials meet this week to hammer out new rules that could potentially protect the region, environmental groups are warning that the area known as the "Arctic Galapagos" is already in grave danger.

Scientists have reported that the Arctic is currently warming at nearly double the global average rate, which is one of the key factors driving an unprecedented level of ice sheet loss. In a troubling development, this January saw a record low for sea ice extent.

These newly-open waters have seen a surge in industrial activity, including fishing and shipping, which heretofore have been left largely unregulated, according to green groups.

Greenpeace on Wednesday released an investigation (pdf) which found that industrial fishing fleets are increasingly moving into Arctic waters, particularly the previously ice-covered Barents Sea, off of Norway.

"Sea ice loss in the northern Barents Sea is turning it into a new hunting ground for industrial fishing," Greenpeace states. "Fishing brings with it the threats of habitat degradation and bycatch, potentially wiping out marine life and putting this whole fragile ecosystem at risk."

The northern Barents Sea, known as the "Arctic Galapagos," is home to "a huge diversity of marine life including bowhead whales, walruses and polar bears, along with rare fish and invertebrates," the report states. It is also currently holds the largest cod stock in the world, which international fishing companies are rushing to exploit.

At the same time, environmentalists are raising concern about the uptick in shipping traffic moving through newly-open Arctic channels. Such traffic, warns John Kaltenstein, a marine policy analyst with Friends of the Earth (FOE), invites "the use of heavy fuel oil, harmful air emissions, and invasive species risk."

Less than 1.5 percent of the entire Arctic Ocean has any form of protected status. And while the International Maritime Organization's recently adopted Polar Code aims to establish a standard of safety for ships operating in Arctic waters, Kaltenstein notes that the actual text—expected to enter into force January 1, 2017—"does little to deal with the most urgent and far-reaching problems we face from Arctic shipping."

"Unfortunately, the shipping industry still behaves as if it were in the 1960s or 1970s, and the sad fact is that many countries both domestically and within international venues, such as the U.N.’s International Maritime Organization, coddle it," he states.

"It only takes one big spill to change everything," he continues, "remember Exxon Valdez. Incredibly, environmental policy surrounding Arctic shipping has become the equivalent of 'fingers crossed,' when it comes to grave threats such as heavy fuel oil spills, climate-warming emissions, and invasive species."

The warnings come as delegates from 15 European countries along with the European Union, known as the OSPAR commission, are meeting in Gothenburg, Sweden this week to discuss the formation of an Arctic Marine Protected Area (MPA) in the international waters north of Greenland.

Greenpeace describes the meeting, and the potential agreement, as a "make or break moment for Arctic protection."

"It is crucial that these areas are protected from destructive industrial activities, as they could be devastating for the species dependent on this area for survival," states the group, which notes that the region under consideration for protection "could be a potential habitat for ice dependent species in the future as the ice melts in other places."

Ironically, Greenpeace notes that as international waters, the Arctic is part of the "global commons, belonging to all mankind." However, "there is no protection at all."