2 Mar 2017

Ghana, Kenya & Nigeria – University of Stirling International Masters Awards 2017/2018 – Scotland

Application Deadline: 31st August 2017
Offered annually? Yes
Eligible Countries in Africa: Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria
Other countries: Canada, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Malaysia, Norway, Oman, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand, USA
To be taken at (country): Scotland, UK
Eligible Field of Study: Courses offered at the University
About the Award: As part of the University’s ongoing commitment to supporting academic achievement and encouraging student diversity, the University of Stirling is pleased to offer an awards scheme for international postgraduate students.
The University will not make multiple awards to an individual student. In cases where a student qualifies for more than one University scholarship or award, the award of the highest financial value will be confirmed.
Type: Masters  taught
Eligibility: 
  • Candidates who are self-funded and liable to pay tuition fees at the overseas rate.
  • Awards are available for students domiciled in, or nationals of these countries, subject to meeting country-specific academic criteria as outlined below:
    • Ghana – minimum Second Class Honours (Upper Division)
    • Nigeria – minimum Second Class Honours (Upper Division)
    • Kenya – minimum Second Class Honours (Upper Division)
Number of Awardees: Unlimited
Value of Scholarship: £3,000 reduction in the overall tuition fee payable
Duration of Scholarship: Duration of course
How to Apply: Students from eligible countries will automatically be assessed for an International Postgraduate Award as part of the admissions process; there is no separate application required for this award. Students who qualify for award will be notified by Admissions, once academic offer conditions have been met.
Award Provider: University of Stirling, UK
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The War on Marijuana is Ending. Disarm Jeff Sessions.

Thomas L. Knapp

Jeff Sessions doesn’t “think America is going to be a better place when more people of all ages and particularly young people start smoking pot.” He’s worried about the possibility of “marijuana being sold at every corner grocery store.” Because, you see, “good people don’t smoke marijuana.”
America disagrees.
A majority of US states (28) have modified their laws to recognize the medical benefits of cannabis over the last two decades. More recently voters in eight of those states, representing 25% of the population of the United States, have chosen to substantially legalize recreational use as well, and a solid majority of voters in the other states support the idea of doing likewise.
The writing is on the wall: The war on marijuana is ending, and freedom won. Sessions can’t undo that any more than the Ku Klux Klan was able to undo Appomattox.
Unfortunately, as the newly confirmed Attorney General of the United States, he does enjoy a great deal of Klan-like power to continue terrorizing the millions victimized by his side during its 80-year war on a benign and useful plant.
It’s time for Congress to take away that power.
In an ideal world, doing so would entail the repeal of all federal narcotics laws and the elimination of the Drug Enforcement Agency and Office of National Drug Control Policy.
Realistically those developments are probably decades away, but there’s a bare minimum baseline of acceptable congressional response to the will of the people and the prerogatives of the states:
First, Congress must remove marijuana from the DEA’s “scheduling” of drugs under the Controlled Substance Act.
Secondly, Congress must use its power of the purse to de-fund, prohibit, and if necessary punish, any future DEA/ONDCP enforcement or propaganda activity relating to marijuana.
And there’s no time like the president: The new president claimed on the campaign trail to respect the states’ decisions on the matter, and he’s also calling for cuts of “waste, fraud and abuse” from federal discretionary spending. The war on marijuana clearly answers to all three descriptions.
Four US Representatives — Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), Don Young (R-AK), Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) and Jared Polis (D-CO) launched a “Cannabis Caucus” in mid-February to begin the urgent task of winding down the failed federal war on marijuana. That’s four out of 435. If your alleged representative hasn’t joined the caucus yet, maybe you should call his or her district office and ask why.
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Trump’s Military Industrial Complex

Binoy Kampmark 



“This budget will be a public safety and national security budget.”
-President Donald J. Trump, Feb 27, 2017
Humming along the road of American empire to its state of noisy exception, US President Donald J. Trump has promised more money and fuel for a military industrial complex he considers starved and depleted. (As it is, the entire complex remains unbecomingly bloated and far from accountable.) Before the National Governor’s Association on Monday, he suggested that US military spending increase by some 10 per cent, amounting to some $54 billion.
The themes of the promised budget are old and tried: when in doubt, scare the American people into apoplexy; when feeling that patriotism is waning before sagacious voices, encourage more dramatic assessments of threats. White House press secretary Sean Spicer has suggested that Trump will persuade Congress to focus on the theme of “renewal of the American spirit.”
Much of this reeks of Ronald Reagan administration’s efforts to use money and obesely inflated budgets as a cudgel to advance agendas. The difference then was that the threat seemed, at least superficially, more tangible: the apparent satanic evil of the Soviet imperium, getting away under the protective umbrella of Détente. “We were right,” said an oft misguided Vice President Dan Quayle, “to increase our defence budget.”2
“This budget,” claimed Trump, “follows through on my promise to keep Americans safe. It will include an historic increase in defence spending to rebuild the depleted military of the United States.” Display, power, project, all words deemed necessary in Making America Great Again.
There is, unsurprisingly, nothing refined in this. The object is winning, and engaging in wars that the US can win. In recent times, the US military machine has been specialising in the atrophy of counter-insurgency, open-ended conflicts where exit strategies are rebranded draw-downs, where defeat is simply rebranded as continued engagement of another sort. When a war enterprise has failed, use air strikes and send in advisors. The circle continues being re-invented.
“We have to start winning wars again – when I was young, in high school and college, people used to say we never lost a war,” intoned President. “We need to win or don’t fight it at all. It’s a mess like you have never seen before.”
Few would disagree that the Middle Eastern conflagration, characterised by botched interventions and failed visions, has been a calamity of immeasurable proportion, though this, it would seem, would require a clipping of the US military establishment. Trump, as he only knows how, wants to reward it.
This obsession is going to be funded, at least in part, by cuts to the State Department, possibly by up to 30 per cent (a war on experts, perhaps?) of their budget, and the Environmental Protection Agency, ever the enemy of Trumpland. The pointy-heads, it would seem, are being given the heave-ho in favour of the boys and girls with murderous toys. As are those in favour of the softer side of US brutishness: the humanitarian aid budget.
The central feature of such spending is a darkly humorous fiction: to prevent war, it is best to prepare for it with all the resources you have – and more besides. “We must ensure that our courageous servicemen and women have the tools they need to deter war and when called upon to fight in our name, only do one thing: win.”
The merry schizophrenic show continues to cause despair and consternation in the corridors of power. The true enemy of Trumpism remains collective alliances and arrangements that supposedly weigh down on the muscular assertion of US power. The wise counsel of friends is being mocked in favour of the belligerent counsel of the inner circle. Some European states are making a hurried dash to the party, promising an increased military budget in turn.
While Trump has amused and shocked hawks with suggestions that NATO is obsolete, passing into rickety oblivion, while also insisting that allies need to beef up their part of the security bargain, he is happy to keep the empire on its own track, resolutely distant from the fray. Where this fits in the alliance system is the befuddling feature of the enterprise.
The other aspect of the Trump military increase will also foster another delusion: that government can be “lean and accountable to the people,” while doing “much more with the money we spend” even as it seeks to aggrandise and expand the focus of the US defence complex. Many a pig has attempted to fly on this point, and failed (vide the Cold War).
The times are riddled with perverse reflections. President George W. Bush, a president hardly known for his sophisticated awareness of liberties and the US constitution, has hitched his colours to the mast of press freedom.
Hawks are becoming confusingly dovish – or at the very least hypocritically so. The aggressive shake-up from Trump continues, and will re-enact the follies of old: embracing the values of the military at the expense of the Republic.
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China in the Age of Trump and Brexit

Tom Clifford

Beijing.
The harsh winter has passed, the sky is blue, spring is in the air and the store that sells fake DVDs in Beijing is closed. The two sessions is about to start. Beijing goes political and is being spruced up (stores selling fake goods are shut down) from Friday (March 3) for the next two weeks or so as the delegates and deputies of the CPPPCC and the NPC gather for their annual meetings.
The Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, an advisory body drawn from delegates representing a cross-section of society, including the arts, medicine, transport, construction, and the National People’s Congress, the top legislative body, gather to discuss and pass legislation for the coming year.
The two sessions, as they are colloquially known in China, gauge the political mood of the country outside Beijing’s “Beltway” the Fourth Ring Road. This is a one-party state and decisions take place behind tightly locked closed doors. But the two sessions is where many of those decisions will be made with about 3,000 provincial administrators, top businessmen and Chinese Communist Party bigwigs set to attend.
For the duration, smartly dressed delegates and deputies from across the country will pose for photographs on Beijing’s streets.  Ultimate political authority, of course, rests with the Chinese Communist Party, whose Politburo Standing Committee, headed by President Xi Jinping, sets policy. So the NPC’s influence is limited but it has an important input into the decision-making process.
While the deputies to the Congress will sit politely, row-upon-row in the Great Hall of the People, their presence in Beijing allows for forthright discussions on the economy, anti-pollution efforts, and international affairs. In public the NPC, with its bowing heads and demure clapping, may make a rubber stamp look energized but in the tea houses, and restaurants around Tiananmen Square, the issues of the day will be debated long into the night.
Premier Li Keqiang’s “work report,” which is delivered on the opening day of the NPC, will be the headline event, especially as it will forecast China economic growth for the year, presumed to be around 6-7 percent.
China’s official economic statistics are generally considered to be less than fully accurate, but the numbers are expected to give a sense of how dramatically officials expect growth to decline from the glory days of double-digit expansion.
At the end of the session, the premier’s closing news conference sometimes reveals insights into the leadership’s thinking, either by what he says or does not say.
The backdrop to this year’s two sessions is intriguing. At the end of the year, many of the seven members of the standing committee of the politburo will be replaced as Xi starts his second five-year term and is able to place his own men (they will be men) into the top positions. The sessions could give an indication as to what the priorities of the new leadership, for the next five years, will be.
On top of this the Trump presidency, with all its uncertainties, may, the feeling in Beijing goes, provide China with opportunities, or at least more leeway. According to this viewpoint the new administration in Washington, will not pay too much heed to human rights and view relations with China in a more pragmatic vein. In other words, it will be good for business.
The same goes for Europe, already dealing with Brexit, and possibly facing a National Front victory in France that would shake it to its foundations. Beijing senses greater opportunities here.
The feeling in Beijing is that anything that weakens its rivals is bound to make China stronger. That old Chinese curse, “may you live in interesting times’’ has a certain resonance these days.
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Issues At Stake In Syria’s Peace Talks

Eric Zuesse

Syria’s peace-talks are about settling a horrific six-year-long war, but this is more of an international war that’s being waged on the battlefields of Syria, than it is a civil war within Syria itself. This fact is often ignored by the press, but the peace-talks are really more between the foreign powers than between their proxies who are killing each other (and Syria’s civilians) within Syria. These peace-talks are international because the principals in this war are international. And, because the principals are international, the principles that are being fought over are, too — they are so basic that the end-result from these talks will be not only some sort of new peace, but some sort of new Constitution for Syria: really a new nation of Syria.
The main issues which are being negotiated at the Syrian Peace Talks that resumed on February 23rd in Geneva, are constitutional in nature: whether Syria is to be governed under Sharia (or Quran-based) law, or whether instead it is to be a multi-ethnic democracy. The Sharia-law side is supported by the United States, Turkey, and the Arabic royal families, who own Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Oman, all of which royal families are fundamentalist Sunnis. The multi-ethnic democracy side is supported by Bashar al-Assad (Syria’s current leader), Russia, and Iran.
Some proponents of the Sharia-law side are advocating that Syria be broken up into at least three separate ethnically-defined nations, which then would be Kurdish, Sunni, and Shiite, each of which would be ruled only by its majority ethnicity, just as Israel is ruled by its majority ethnicity, which in Israel’s case is Jewish. (Another prominent recent example was apartheid South Africa, except that in that particular case, it was the White minority who ruled over the Black majority. Of course, those racial laws ended when Blacks there became allowed to vote.)
In essence, the contested polarity is between whether the future of Syria will be as a religious-ethnic dictatorship, versus as a multi-ethnic (including multi-religious) democracy.
(In recent years, those findings by the main polling-firm, WIN/Gallup, can be seen here:
Syrians are the most secular nation in the entire Middle East. The effort by the U.S. and its allies to impose a jihadist government there is not popular with the Syrian people.
Agence France Presse reported, on February 12th, that (boldfaces and links here are by me):
Syria’s opposition on Sunday announced its 21-member delegation, including 10 rebel representatives, for a new round of UN-sponsored peace talks in Geneva scheduled for February 20 [subsequently rescheduled for the 23rd].
The delegation will be headed by Nasr al-Hariri (pictured), a member of the National Coalition, replacing Assad al-Zoabi, who led the opposition at several previous rounds of talks in Geneva last year.
The delegation’s chief negotiator was named as Mohamed Sabra, a lawyer who was part of the opposition’s technical team during negotiations in Geneva in 2014.
He replaces Mohamad Alloush, a rebel from the powerful Army of Islam faction.
Alloush served as negotiator during three rounds of peace talks in Geneva as well as negotiations in the Kazakh capital Astana in January organised by Turkey and Russia.
Neither Alloush nor the Army of Islam were listed as members of the delegation to Geneva, though it was unclear if the group was boycotting the talks or would be represented by other delegates.
No reason was given for the decision to replace either Zoabi or Alloush.
Alloush had been selected by the Saud family, and so was rejected by Russia, Iran and Syria, at the Astana conference. Turkey at that conference proposed and the others accepted Sabra, who heads the Syrian Republican Party, which was created in 2008 simply to criticize Assad, and didn’t even become active until it received major funding from Turkey and became publicly “founded” in Istanbul in 2014, by members of Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party. So: now, instead of Assad negotiating with an agent of the Saud family (Alloush), as had been the case when the U.S. ran the preparations for the peace-process (the process that U.S. President Barack Obama sabotaged on 17 September 2016 and thus brought to an end), Assad is negotiating this time with an agent of the Erdogan family (Sabra), and Russia instead of the U.S. has been running the preparations for the peace-process, which is currently under way at the U.N. in Geneva.
The National Coalition was created on 12 November 2012 by the Saud family and their Gulf Cooperation Council of all of Arabia’s royal families, who own (other than the Sauds’ Saudi Arabia), Qatar, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Oman. Nasr al-Hariri, who thus represents those families, heads the delegation of ‘Syrian opposition groups’ that Turkey’s Mohamed Sabra will be negotiating on behalf of. So, actually, Assad will be negotiating against representatives of, and who are negotiating on behalf of, all of the Middle East’s leaders of Sunni-run nations.
Furthermore, “Nasr al-Hariri selected 21 opposition delegates during a meeting of the Syrian opposition in Riyadh in preparation for the talks,” and so the entire selection-process for those ’Syrian opposition’ members was done under the Sauds’ watchful eyes (and money).
Magnanimously, a representative of the National Coalition, who spoke about Russia’s allowing ‘the Syrian opposition groups’ to be selected by Turkey, the Sauds, and the other Middle-Eastern Sunni powers, “called it a ‘sacrifice’ that Russia, which backs the Syrian regime, has offered to Turkey in the hope that in return it would win concessions to make room for the so-called Moscow platform, named after the Syrian parties that are under the political influence of the Kremlin.” (Those are generally the strongest supporters of a secular democratic unified Syria.)
However, on February 24th was reported that, “Hariri repeated in his news conference that the opposition’s priority was to begin negotiations on a political transition with a transitional governing body, suggesting it would not back down on its demands that Syrian regime leader Bashar al-Assad step down.” The U.S.-Saudi alliance refused for the person whom all polls showed to be overwhelmingly the top choice by Syrians to lead their country — the only person who was wanted by over 50% of the Syrian public to be Syria’s leader — Bashar al-Assad, to be allowed onto the electoral ballot for Syria’s Presidency; they refused to allow democracy in Syria. So, the Sunni powers (which also includes the U.S. as their core military arm) are as steadfast as always, about overthrowing and replacing Syria’s non-sectarian government. And they all blame the main Shiite nation, Iran, for all problems: “‘Iran is the main obstacle to any kind of political deal,’ Hariri said.” To them, this is really a war to conquer Iran; it’s like Christianity’s 30 Years’ War had been in Europe, back in the 1600s. But, of course, it is also what RFK Jr. has appropriately called it — “Syria: Another Pipeline War.” It’s rooted both in religion and in economics.
On January 24th, at the close of the preparatory talks, in Astana, for the current peace talks in Geneva to end Syria’s war, was issued a “Joint Statement by Iran, Russia, Turkey” asserting that they all:
Reaffirm their commitment to the sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity of the Syrian Arab Republic as a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, non-sectarian and democratic State, as confirmed by the UN Security Council.
Russia was the only one of those three nations that also proposed then a specific draft Constitution for postwar Syria. Perhaps that’s because Russia is the only one of these three whose own government and Constitution is entirely secular. Thus, too, Turkey’s key agent at the current Geneva talks, Mohamed Sabra, was reported, back on 17 November 2016 (two months after the U.S. had ended its participation in Syria’s peace process) to have — as Egypt’s Al-Ahram put it — especially criticized Russia’s proposals for “trying to isolate Islamic groups that disagree with the principles of a democratic and secular state, and thus exclude them from the political process. ‘This will lead to a realignment of forces, change the essence of the military conflict in Syria, and sow the seeds of civil war in the country,’ Sabra remarked.” Assuming that Egypt’s main newspaper was accurately paraphrasing and translating what the chief negotiator for the U.S.-and-Sunni alliance actually said, Russia was being criticized there for insisting that what follows after Syria’s war must be controlled entirely by the people of Syria, and not by anyone outside the country — Sabra, the chief negotiator for the U.S.-Sunni alliance, actually was speaking publicly there, against commitment to “the principles of a democratic and secular state.” It’s actually fitting: twice in one day, the Secretary General of the U.N. had criticized the U.S. position for its opposition to democracy in Syria.
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Australian unions and Labor Party launch bogus campaign over penalty rate cuts

Oscar Grenfell 

Over the past week, Labor and the trade unions have launched an utterly fraudulent campaign, posturing as opponents of the Fair Work Commission (FWC) ruling to slash the penalty wage rates of up to 700,000 low-paid workers.
The FWC decision covers employees in the retail, fast food, pharmaceutical and hospitality industries. Some of those affected by the ruling, which cuts weekend and public holiday wage rates by between 25 and 50 percent, are set to lose over $70 per Sunday shift, or as much as $6,000 a year.
The ruling sets a wider precedent that will be used against millions of workers, especially young workers.
The decision has created widespread anger among workers, students and young people, many of whom depend on penalty rates to survive. However, the attempts by Labor politicians and union bureaucrats to present themselves as champions of workers’ rights display staggering hypocrisy. They are the ones most responsible for this historic wage cut.
Labor Party leader Bill Shorten, as workplace relations minister in the last Labor government, included penalty rates in a list of award issues to be reviewed by the FWC in 2013. During last year’s election campaign, he pledged that Labor would accept the outcome of the FWC review, as part of a broader pitch to establish Labor’s pro-business credentials.
The trade unions have already imposed a host of enterprise agreements and backroom deals with the major employers slashing, or entirely eliminating, penalty rates for some of the impoverished sections of the working class. Shorten, a former national secretary of the Australian Workers Union, was directly involved in such deals.
More broadly, the FWC ruling is a direct product of the entire “Fair Work” laws regime set in place by the last Labor government, with the support of the trade unions, to ban or suppress industrial action and enable the unions to work closely with employers to dismantle workers’ conditions.
Successive Labor governments have played the central role in implementing the dictates of the corporate elite over the past three decades for the decimation of jobs, wages and hard-won conditions.
Responding to the FWC decision, Labor made an empty pledge to introduce legislation to amend the Fair Work Act, supposedly to prevent any wage reduction. Liberal-National government ministers, and the bulk of the parliament’s right-wing crossbenchers, have indicated they will block such a bill, rendering it a dead-letter.
Asked last Sunday about Labor’s previous promises not to challenge any ruling to cut penalty rates, shadow treasurer Chris Bowen declared that the party reversed its position in January. Summing up the opportunist character of Labor’s posturing, which is aimed at diverting the enormous anger back behind the parliamentary set-up, Bowen said “when circumstances change, you change your position.”
Likewise, the unions cynically denounced the FWC ruling as “the biggest wage cut since the Great Depression” and backed Labor’s manoeuvre. A complete record of the pro-business deals and attacks on workers’ wages and conditions carried out by the unions would span volumes.
Agreements imposed on its members by the Australian Workers Union (AWU), which Shorten headed in the state of Victoria from 1998, and nationally from 2001 to 2007, provide a picture of how the unions have worked hand-in-glove with employers to cut wages.
In 1998, for example, the AWU signed a secret deal with Cleanevent, a major cleaning company, to slash the wages and conditions of hundreds of low-paid workers. It eliminated all penalty wages, establishing an hourly base pay rate of around $16, and saved the company up to $400 million over more than a decade.
In 2001, the AWU established an agreement with the Olympic Parks Trust that stripped up to 850 workers of all award conditions and entitlements. It provided unprecedented workplace “flexibility,” with cleaners and others at sports stadiums paid just $14.70 an hour, including for night and weekend work.
A 2003 agreement between the AWU and engineering contractor Cut & Fill entirely eliminated penalty rates for many of the company’s workers. A deal in 2004 with Chiquita Mushrooms, a farming company, reclassified hundreds of low-paid workers as “independent contractors,” stripping them of any rights.
Hosts of other unions have enforced similar arrangements. In 2015, the Shop Distributive and Allied Employees Association (SDA) signed agreements with retail and fast food chains, including Coles, Woolworths, KFC and Hungry Jacks, that cut or eliminated penalty wages and resulted in 250,000 low-paid employees receiving below poverty-level award rates. In the same year, Labor and other unions hailed as a model an agreement between the SDA and Business South Australia that slashed Sunday penalty rates for 40,000 shop assistants by 50 percent.
The posturing of the Greens is no less hypocritical. In 2013, Senator Peter Whish-Wilson, now the party’s treasury spokesman, described penalty rates as “outdated” and called for a “national discussion” on their abolition.
The pseudo-left organisations, which function as the attorneys of the unions, play a particularly pernicious role. Some, such as Socialist Alliance, have been entirely silent on the record of Labor and the unions in dismantling penalty rates.
Others, like Socialist Alternative, seek to draw a distinction between the AWU and the SDA and “militant” unions, such as the Construction Forestry Energy and Mining Union (CFMEU). The fraudulent character of these claims was underscored by the CFMEU’s role in pushing through a 5 percent pay cut last week affecting up to 900 workers at the Maryvale paper mill in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley.
In 2007, Labor, the unions, the Greens and the pseudo-left groups came together in a diversionary campaign against the Liberal-National government’s WorkChoices industrial laws, channeling the intense opposition of workers behind the election of a Labor government. The result was the Rudd government’s introduction of the equally draconian and pro-business Fair Work legislation.
This record demonstrates that a genuine struggle against the cuts to penalty rates and other attacks on working class jobs, conditions and basic rights, can only go forward in a direct political fight against Labor, the unions, the Greens and all their backers, including the pseudo-lefts.
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IMF head to visit Sri Lanka to demand more austerity measures

K. Ratnayake

International Monetary Fund managing director Christine Lagarde will arrive in Sri Lanka on Sunday to insist on the implementation of the remaining IMF austerity measures. During this first-ever visit by an IMF head, Lagarde will use the economic and financial problems faced by the Colombo government to dictate terms.
In order to “avert a balance of payment crisis,” the IMF approved a $US1.5 billion loan last year, to be paid in six installments, subject to the government meeting the IMF’s targets. The government pledged to reduce the fiscal deficit to 3.5 percent of gross domestic product by 2020, which is half the deficit for 2015. The target is to be achieved by restructuring state-owned enterprises, including through their privatisation, and by slashing subsidies and increasing taxes.
During 2016, IMF released two installments worth $325.2 million. The government increased the value added tax (VAT) from 11 percent to 15 percent, sending the price of essentials skyrocketing, and cut expenditure for education and health by about 46 and 8 percent respectively.
Lagarde is arriving after the IMF said that the government had “missed key benchmarks” which were to be implemented by December, the Economy Next reported. These “benchmarks” included restructuring six of the largest state-owned ventures—the Ceylon Petroleum Corporation (CPC), Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB), Sri Lankan Airlines, National Water Supply and Drainage Board (NWSDB), Airport and Aviation Services, and Sri Lanka Ports Authority. The finance ministry was also required to introduce automatic fuel and electricity pricing mechanisms for the CPC and CEB in order to push retail prices above cost-recovery levels and finance their debts.
To prepare for Lagarde’s intervention, an IMF team led by senior staffer Todd Schneider is currently conducting discussions with officials in Colombo. Finance Ministry Secretary R.H.S. Samaratunga told the Daily News the team held talks with Finance Minister Ravi Karunanayake and Treasury officials last Friday about “how to improve the performances of state-owned institutions.” Samaratunga said: “The requirement is to get them at least to the break-even level of performance.”
Among other items discussed was the sale of “non-strategic” assets such as the Colombo Hilton Hotel, Lanka Hospitals, the Hyatt Hotel and Sri Lankan Airlines. The IMF has estimated their sale could earn the government $1.5 billion.
Automatic pricing formulas and “break-even levels of performance” mean massive price increases for electricity, fuel and water, and the slashing of jobs. For instance, the government has prepared a plan to increase water charges by 300 percent.
The pro-US government in Colombo is not averse to implementing these measures. In a bid to overcome public opposition, President Maithripala Sirisena organised a seminar for some government ministers recently, in which Central Bank officials reportedly presented detailed overviews of the domestic and foreign debt and associated debt-servicing problems.
The government’s main concern is that the IMF’s measures will immediately trigger struggles of workers and the poor. The government is already facing protests by workers, farmers and students against reduced living conditions and the privatisation of education.
The government also fears that the opposition, led by former President Mahinda Rajapakse, will exploit the popular anger. Rajapakse formed an organisation last week under the fraudulent name of the National Assets Protection Center, supposedly to oppose privatisations.
However, Rajapakse’s government, which was in power from 2006 to 2014, was widely discredited for freezing wages, eliminating jobs, cutting living conditions and tearing up democratic rights in order to impose the burden of its war against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). After the LTTE’s defeat, and the international crisis triggered by the 2008–2009 financial turmoil, Rajapakse was forced to seek an IMF loan, which also required austerity measures.
Notwithstanding the political crisis in Colombo, Lagarde will demand a pound of flesh. The IMF, together with the European Union and European Central Bank, imposed similar measures in Greece, causing social devastation. Last month, Lagarde insisted on even more draconian measures in Greece, saying the IMF was a “ruthless truth teller.”
This is nothing but the dictatorship of finance capital. The “truth” is that, as in Greece, the IMF is asking the government to make the working class and poor pay for the economic breakdown of capitalism.
The Syriza government in Greece came to office in 2015, with the help of pseudo-left groups, by promising to oppose IMF and EU austerity measures. It has since enforced the measures and suppressed the resistance of workers.
Sri Lanka is being battered by the global capitalist slump. The country’s trade deficit is likely to have reached a new peak of more than $9 billion last year, exceeding the deficits of $8.4 billion in 2015 and $8.3 billion in 2014. In 2015, foreign direct investment totalled only $600 million and further deteriorated to $300 million in 2016. Recent reports revealed that the official foreign reserves dropped to $5.5 billion in January, a fall of half a billion dollars over the previous 12 months.
There has been an increasing flight of capital in recent weeks, in response to the US Federal Reserve hinting it would increase interest rates and President Donald Trump’s threats of trade war. US firm Franklin Templeton, one of the world’s largest investment management firms, has been withdrawing funds invested in Sri Lankan government securities. The US has been the main source of investment in such securities.
Among the IMF’s concerns is that the Sri Lankan government’s problems could lead to a loan default. The government is seeking to raise $3.6 billion for the settlement of loans and interest payments this year, almost double last year’s requirement of $1.82 billion.
Lagarde’s intervention will set the stage for explosive social and class struggles. Last week, Prime Minister Wickremesinghe told a public meeting the government will not “tolerate strikes and protests or any obstacle to economic development.”
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Peruvian president wanted in Odebrecht corruption scandal

Cesar Uco

Last week, on February 24, Peru’s right-wing President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski (PPK) became the first Latin American head of state to stage a state visit to the Trump White House.
The trip by Kuczynski, a Wall Street investment banker, specializing in private equity funds, received scant coverage in the US media. During a brief appearance before the White House media, Trump described Peru as a “fantastic neighbor” and referred to the US sale of military vehicles to the Peruvian armed forces, telling Kuczynski “use them well, use them well.” There is no doubt that the main use of such equipment will be repressing struggles of Peruvian workers.
There was no mention in the public appearance of an ongoing judicial matter pending between the two countries, which Kuczynski afterwards said he and Trump discussed “for no more than a few seconds.”
The issue at hand is the extradition of Peru’s fugitive former Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo (2001-2006), who is believed to be hiding on US territory. Earlier this month, Kuczynski asked Trump in a phone conversation to deport the former president instead of going through the legal process of arrest and extradition.
Toledo faces charges of bribery, money laundry and influence trafficking in pocketing US$20 million in bribes paid by the Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht to secure contracts for building the expensive Transoceanic Highway.
In a parallel development, on February 18, SUNAT (The National Superintendence of Customs and Tax Administration) began seizing 260 million Peruvian soles (US$80 million) from Brazilian construction companies associated with Odebrecht, which is deeply implicated in the “Lava Jato” (Car Wash) bribes-for-contracts scandal surrounding Brazil’s state-run oil conglomerate Petrobras.
By Odebrecht’s own account, it paid US$788 million in bribes in 12 countries other than Brazil; $29 million for $10 billion in contracts went to pay Peruvian high officials during three consecutive presidencies: Alejandro Toledo (2001-2006), Alan Garcia (2006-2011), and Ollanta Humala (2011-2016).
The current President Kuczynski (popularly known as PPK) is also facing investigation for having approved contracts with Odebrecht while he was Toledo’s Minister of Economy and Finance in 2005.
Already a number of leading figures from major Peruvian bourgeois parties have been arrested. The continuing exposures of the ever-wider web of associations with the Odebrecht bribes has had serious repercussions for Kuczynski, who has seen his approval ratings drop to 29 percent.
The Odebrecht corruption scandal and resulting political crises extend throughout Latin America. In Brazil itself, the bribes for contracts operation is believed to have siphoned some US$2 billion out of Petrobras. The company’s billionaire CEO Marcelo Odebrecht and scores of others have been convicted on corruption charges and have agreed to cooperate with the Brazilian Justice Department to secure lighter sentences.
• In the Dominican Republic, where there have been mass protests over the corruption revelations, the company paid US$92 million in bribes to secure a power plant contract.
• In México, El Financiero reported that between 2010 and 2014, under current President Enrique Peña Nieto of the corrupt Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), Odebecht paid US$10 million in bribes in exchange for a 300 percent return from public contracts.
• According to La Prensa, in Panama, Odebrecht spent US$59 million in bribes to government officials and other individuals to win mega-construction projects. Former Panamanian President Ricardo Martinelli’s family companies and his children’s residences were raided as part of the investigation into bribes by the Brazilian construction company.
• In Venezuela, Noticias24 reported that the Public Ministry denounced Henrique Capriles, the right-wing governor of the Miranda State and the favored US favorite presidential candidate for regime change, for having received US$3 million in bribes from Odebrecht.
• According to El Tiempo, in Colombia, between 2003 and 2006 Odebrecht paid US$399 million in bribes and obtained US$ 1.9 billion in contract overcharges.
• According to Expreso, in Ecuador, the Brazilian construction company paid out bribes “for 30 years on contracts with seven governments.” At least 18 politicians and officials have been charged with receiving bribes in secret bank accounts, while other money went to finance election campaigns. The total amount in Odebrecht bribes paid out in Ecuador is believe to be US$33.5 million.
• El Pais reported last December that “In 2012, Odebrecht was one of the main public works contractors for the government of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner [Argentina]. At that time it contributed US$35 million to intermediaries in Buenos Aires that allowed the [Brazilian company] to access contracts for ‘approximately US $ 278 million,’ according to a document signed in a Federal court in Brooklyn, New York.”
• Folha de Sao Paulo reports that Odebrecht is ready to reach an agreement to collaborate in the investigation of briberies in Latin America. The proposal was made in Brasilia during the first week of February to prosecutors from Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador, México, Panamá, Perú, República Dominicana and Venezuela.
• But Odebrecht lawyers wanted to condition the agreement on the authorities of the various countries allowing the company to continue operations and reversing decisions to seize its assets.
• Toledo is emblematic of the corruption pervading all of these countries, which were proclaimed, in the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s to constitute the “emerging market” and a source for huge profits for international finance capital. All of them pursued policies of wholesale privatization of state-run enterprises, in the course of which a layer of the bourgeoisie and bourgeois politicians of every stripe enriched themselves through bribes and outright theft.
Toledo won the elections in 2001 after posing as the anti-corruption candidate, opposing the seven-year dictatorship of Alberto Fujimori. His presidential campaign always enjoyed the support of Washington, and the CIA saw him as their man in Peru. His entire economic program was based on the continuity of the free-market policies written into Fujimori’s constitution of 1993 and imposed through bloody repression. During his five-year presidency he favored privatizations of national resources and market liberalization.
Toledo may be the first to fall, but the Peruvian “Lava Jato” Congressional Commission has already called Alan Garcia to testify. The former Aprista president spent two days dodging questions before returning to Spain. He admitted that there were “rats” in his Apra party who are now in prison, but claimed he knew nothing about it.
In the end, Odebrecht’s bribes were paid for through over-charges on contracts that were passed on to the people of Peru and Latin America as a whole. For example, the construction of the Peruivan gas-pipeline—oleaoducto, one of the most visible government investments—cost US$1.7 billion more than the original $7.5 billion deal signed with Odebrecht.
The issue of corruption has been seized upon by right-wing bourgeois parties and movements, beginning in Brazil with the campaign to oust the Workers Party (PT) government of President Dilma Rousseff, to pursue wholly reactionary political aims. In Ecuador, the failure of the ruling party’s candidate, Lenin Moreno, to defeat a right-wing challenger was largely bound up with public anger over the involvement of leading officials in the bribery scandal.
The reality is that all of these parties, from bourgeois “left” parties like the PT, Venezuela’s ruling PSUV and the Argentine Peronists, to right-wing parties ruling countries like Colombia and Panama, are steeped in corruption, reflecting the relation of the Latin American bourgeoisie to international finance capital. The solution to this problem will come not from court cases and prosecutions of individual state criminals, but only through an independent movement of the Latin American working class, in alliance with workers of North America and internationally, for the nationalization of the banks and basic industries and the socialist transformation of society.
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UK Supreme Court upholds minimum income immigration rule

Richard Tyler

The UK Supreme Court has sided with the Conservative government in upholding a fundamentally anti-democratic immigration rule, discriminating against those on low incomes who want to bring a foreign partner to live with them.
Five years ago, the then Home Secretary and now Prime Minister Theresa May introduced a so-called “Minimum Income Requirement (MIR).” This clampdown on bringing non-European spouses to the UK is part of an ongoing attack on migrants and refugees conducted by the Conservative government.
In outlining the government’s decision to withdraw the UK from the European Union’s single market, May opposed the EU’s freedom of movement legislation and promised to control immigration.
Under the MIR rule, a British citizen must have a minimum annual income of at least £18,600 if they want a spouse or civil partner born outside the European Economic Area (EEA) to come and live with them in Britain. The EEA comprises the 28 countries belonging to the European Union plus Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway.
Previously, a couple had merely to demonstrate that they could maintain themselves without recourse to public funds. In other words, the calculation was based on the incomes or resources of both partners, or other support provided to them by family members.
Under MIR, the sole criterion is the income of the British spouse. Even if the earnings of their partner would take them above the £18,600 threshold, it is disregarded. Furthermore, if the couple has a child who is not a British citizen, the income requirement rises to £22,400, and by an additional £2,400 for each subsequent child. The MIR also applies to refugees who have been granted a right to remain, and who wish to bring their non-European spouses to the UK to join them.
In 2014, the High Court found the MIR breached human rights protections and amounted to a “disproportionate interference with a genuine spousal relationship.” A subsequent appeal by the Home Office was upheld a year later, resulting in the present case going to the Supreme Court.
In best legal doublespeak, the Supreme Court ruled that the minimum income requirement does not breach Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights—the “right to a private and family life”—while admitting the rule causes “hardship to many thousands of couples, including some who are in no way to blame for the situation in which they find themselves.”
As an example, the judges cited “British citizens who have been living and working abroad, have married or formed stable relationships there, and now wish to return to their home country. Many of these relationships will have been formed before the new rules were introduced or even publicly proposed. They also include couples who formed their relationships before the changes in the rules were introduced, and who had every expectation that the foreign partner would be allowed to come here.”
Nevertheless, the seven Supreme Court judges found “the fact that a rule causes hardship to many, including some who are in no way to blame for the situation in which they now find themselves, does not mean that it is incompatible with the EctHR [European Convention on Human Rights] or otherwise unlawful at common law.”
When the court did find in favour of the original plaintiffs, it was on the grounds that the existing rules and policies were unlawful in that they failed to protect the interests of any children involved.
An article on freemovement.org.uk noted the prevalence of “standardised, templated reasons” being used in refusals, “something the court did not consider inherently unlawful.”
Pointing to the routine, semi-mechanized treatment of immigration cases, the article continued with the following: “The use of standardised reasons is characteristic of modern decision-making practices in fields of public administration where large numbers of applications can be processed more efficiently by employing information technology, using decision templates, drop-down menus and other software. It is also often designed to facilitate internal auditing and management processes.”
The Home Office welcomed the Supreme Court ruling, with a spokesman saying it had “endorsed” the government’s approach in setting an income threshold that “prevents burdens on the taxpayer and ensures migrant families can integrate into our communities.”
“The current rules remain in force but we are carefully considering what the court has said in relation to exceptional cases where the income threshold has not been met, particularly where the case involves a child.”
The effect of the MIR has been to tear families apart, or force the British partner to move abroad to be with their spouse. The case before the Supreme Court revealed that some 30,000 applications to bring a spouse to the UK were refused between 2012 and 2014. In that period, only 26 cases were successful in challenging the refusal. Other reports put the number of refusals at 17,800 non-European spouses a year.
According to the Children's Commissioner for England, there are at least 15,000 children who are separated from a parent because of the minimum income rule.
In one such case reported by the BBC, a 25-year old British women married to her young son’s Egyptian father said, "I feel very guilty towards my baby,” adding, "He hasn't done anything to deserve being without his father."
She works as a part-time sales assistant with earnings below the £18,600 threshold and cannot afford to work full-time as she also needs to care for her infant son.
Figures from the Home Office show the number of partner visas granted fell from 46,906 in the year ending June 2006 to 27,345 in the year ending June 2015, when it says 66 percent of applications were approved.
The MIR rule is patently anti-democratic and discriminates disproportionately against workers seeking to bring their non-European spouse to the UK. According to a recent article by the Global Research website, ignoring the top ten percent of UK earners (those pocketing almost £80,000 plus a year), the average income of the bottom 90 percent is just £12,969, well below the £18,600 MIR threshold.
The Supreme Court ruling follows the decision by the May government last month to bar entry to the UK of lone child refugees languishing in desperate conditions near the port of Calais in France.
Following a public outcry at the plight of thousands of refugees who had fled to Europe from the war zones of the Middle East and north Africa, Labour peer Lord Dubs proposed an amendment to the Immigration Act 2016—to bring 3,000 Calais lone refugee children from Calais to Britain.
Parliament, however, passed a hollowed-out version of the original amendment. The number of children to be helped was left open—the government was to make arrangements with local authorities to relocate not 3,000 but a “specified number” of unaccompanied child refugees from Europe to the UK.
The government finally decided the UK could only accommodate a total of just 350 children—meaning another 150 by March, when the scheme will close—as 200 are already in the UK.
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The Obamas sign reported $65 million book deal

David Walsh

Executives at Penguin Random House, the global publishing giant, announced Tuesday that the firm had reached an agreement to publish books by former President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama. Vanity Fair commented, “The couple will write their books separately but sold the book rights jointly.”
The Financial Times reported that Penguin Random House had won a record-breaking auction between publishing houses and will buy the two books for more than $65 million. It is not known which one of the company’s numerous imprints will publish them. The previous record for a presidential memoir belonged to Bill Clinton—$15 million.
In a press release, Penguin Random House CEO Markus Dohle (the publisher is owned 53 percent by German media conglomerate Bertelsmann) explained: “We are absolutely thrilled to continue our publishing partnership with President and Mrs. Obama. With their words and their leadership, they changed the world, and every day, with the books we publish at Penguin Random House, we strive to do the same. Now, we are very much looking forward to working together with President and Mrs. Obama to make each of their books global publishing events of unprecedented scope and significance.”
A month ago we commented on a study that concluded “the Obamas could earn as much as $242.5 million from speeches, book deals and pensions.” That study estimated a book deal for the couple would be worth $40 million. The Obamas have topped that by $25 million, or 62.5 percent. This pushes their estimated post-White House earnings toward the $300 million mark.
As we noted in early February, Obama is being paid for the services he rendered the financial oligarchy during his two terms in the White House. Sixty-five million dollars—or even $267.5 million—is a small price to pay for the contribution the former president made to enriching the already fabulously rich, defending the American ruling elite’s geopolitical interests around the world and continuing the assault on the wages, benefits and living standards of the working class.
The man who promised “change” and whose election was termed a “transformative event” by the American pseudo-left proved to be an implacable defender of big business.
The WSWS has reported several times that during Obama’s administration the wealth of the richest 400 Americans grew from $1.57 trillion to $2.4 trillion and the stock market enjoyed one of its most successful runs in history.
Now Obama plans to vacation with billionaires, play golf and “cash in.”
The announcement of the $65 million deal has not been accompanied in the media by any criticism, much less shame or revulsion, nor are the Obamas presumably embarrassed in the slightest. On the contrary, the media and Obama’s admirers treat the book deal for the most part as a tremendous accomplishment, something to be immensely proud of, just as the news anchors now gloatingly report record share prices or billion-dollar box office successes.
Political life in the US has reached a stage at which the representatives of the immensely wealthy are immensely wealthy themselves, or the immensely wealthy rule directly, as in the case of Donald Trump. Official American politics is a closed-in, sealed-off universe of money and privilege.
The Chicago Tribune pointed out some years ago that, after completing his term in office, “Thomas Jefferson was forced to sell his 6,000-volume book collection to the government—forming the core of the Library of Congress—to pay off his creditors; his debt-ridden successor, James Madison, pleaded in vain for a loan from the new Bank of the United States; and the next president, James Monroe, was so impoverished upon his death in New York that his family could not afford to send his remains back to his native Virginia.”
None of those ex-presidents requested a pension. “In these early years, with the revolution against King George still a fresh memory, a lifetime government sinecure smacked too much of royal privilege.”
Now we have this, according to the New York Times: “Speculation about the Obamas’ books and how much they would sell for have been circulating in the industry in recent weeks, as executives at the top publishing houses met separately with the former president and first lady. Some publishing executives who followed the bidding process said that the opening offers for Mr. Obama’s book alone were in the $18 million to $20 million range.”
If Barack Obama were to write an honest book, it would be worth something. If he were to reveal the forces that picked him up at a relatively early age, seeing in him a marketable political commodity (both white and black, liberal and conservative, foreign and American), and how those forces assembled and packaged him and carried him into the White House, well, that would be valuable.
Of course, that will never happen. The new book will no doubt be even more repugnant than the last one, The Audacity of Hope (2006). As we observed in our review of that work on the WSWS in February 2007, “Is there a single honest or original thought in Barack Obama’s new book? If so, it does not immediately come to mind.”
We wrote that Obama’s work was “a calculated effort, from its title to its final page, designed to demonstrate his readiness to take the reins of political power in the US. That is to say, while Obama directs portions of his book toward sections of the more well-heeled and complacent Democratic Party faithful, those most inclined to wishful thinking, the audience that primarily concerns him consists of the powerful corporate, financial and media figures who organize and ultimately shape the campaigns of the two major parties’ candidates.”
But Obama’s new memoir will have so much more to cover up or ignore: the multi-billion dollar Wall Street bail-out, the halving of auto workers’ pay, the illegal drone strike murders of thousands, the unprecedented growth of social inequality, the reactionary health care initiative, the disastrous wars or interventions in Libya, Syria, Yemen … And one could add, the election of Trump itself, the fitting climax to two terms during which Obama disappointed, disillusioned and angered tens of millions, opening the door to the most sinister administration in American history.
The Times editors, of course, have only one thing on their collective mind, or rather two, race and money: “A frank discussion of his [Obama’s] time in the White House, and of issues like race relations in America, could reach an even wider audience, becoming a worldwide blockbuster. Penguin Random House, a global publishing house with more than 250 imprints, has worldwide rights to the books, which means the company can make a good deal of money overseas and in translation.”
Meanwhile, contrary to the Obamas and their apologists, Penguin Random House and the corrupt media, great numbers of people will be disgusted by the $65 million payoff and the profound discrediting of the entire American political system, with its ultimately revolutionary implications, will continue apace.
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