Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation Program (ITEC) for Developing Countries 2017

Application Deadline: 10th June 2017

Eligible Countries: Developing Countries

To be taken at (country): India

About the Award: The ITEC Programme, fully funded by the Government of India, has evolved and grown over the years. Under ITEC and its sister programme SCAAP (Special Commonwealth African Assistance Programme), 161 countries in Asia, Africa, East Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean as well as Pacific and Small Island countries are invited to share in the Indian developmental experience acquired over six decades of India’s existence as a free nation. As a result of different activities under this programme, there is now a visible and growing awareness among other countries about the competence of India as a provider of technical know-how and expertise as well as training opportunities, consultancy services and feasibility studies. These programmes have generated immense goodwill and substantive cooperation among the developing countries.

Type: Training

Eligibility: 

• Academic qualifications as laid down by the Institute for the Course concerned.
• Working knowledge of English required to follow the Course.
• Age between 25 to 45 years.
• Medically fit to undertake the training.

Selection Criteria: 

• Officials in Government, Public and Private Sectors, Universities, Chambers of Commerce and Industry, etc.
• Candidates should possess adequate work experience.

Number of Awards: Not specified

Value of Program: The program covers transportation and visa costs, course fees, accommodation, and living and book allowances for course participants.

Duration of Program: July-August

How to Apply: 

• Applicants can browse the available courses and can apply for ITEC training program by filling up the online application form and take a print out of filled form. This form is to be submitted to the nodal/designated Government Department/Agency of applicant’s country.
• Nodal/designated Department/Agency is, in turn, required to forward the applications to the Embassy/High Commission of India, accredited/concurrently accredited to the nominating country along with undertaking by candidate and certification from employer (Part-II of Application Form).
• Candidates may later check the status of their application by logging-in at www.itecgoi.in .The credentials for log-in may be noted while filling up the form.

Visit Program Webpage for details

Award Provider: Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation

Somalia’s Worsening Drought: Blowback From US Policy

Jerrod A. Laber

The eastern African country of Somalia is currently suffering from a drought that has lasted for more than two years. A drought in an underdeveloped agrarian country that also lacks basic sanitation systems means further complications stemming from a lack of food production, subsequent malnourishment, and outbreaks of bacterial diseases such as cholera.

In fact, Somalia is currently reporting 200-300 cases of cholera a day. It’s a treatable condition, but aid agencies are consistently stifled in getting affected Somalis the care they need because the worst areas hit by the outbreak are in the southern part of the country––areas controlled by a group called Al-Shabaab. Al-Shabaab is a radical Islamist militia that arose as a response to American covert operations in the country, as well as the US backed invasion of Somalia by Ethiopian forces in 2006. As with all policy decisions, there are unforeseen and unintended consequences. US foreign policy provided the catalyst for Al-Shabaab’s formation, who are in turn exacerbating this humanitarian crisis which has claimed over 500 lives so far this year.

In the early 2000s, Somalia was governed by a string of warlords that were supported by the US government, so long as they agreed to help target suspected terrorists that were taking refuge there. Growing tired of the warlords, a group of independent militias joined together to form the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) and took control of the capital Mogadishu, and other parts of the country.

Because of the radical Islamist nature of the ICU, the Bush administration viewed them as an outgrowth of al-Qaida, and therefore could not be allowed to control such large swaths of the country. The US  conducted a proxy war, sponsoring neighboring Ethiopia to invade Somalia and force the ICU out.  What was left of the ICU became Al-Shabaab, a jihadist group that “emerged as the vanguard of the fight against foreign occupation,” according to investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill, author of the 2013 book Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield.

Despite being pushed back from urban areas, Al-Shabaab controls a number of  rural areas – many of the same areas that have been hit the hardest by the drought which is now threatening so many people. The group is reticent, or in some cases entirely unwilling, to allow aid workers into their c territory.

Even if rain does come soon to these regions, it will take time for plants and livestock to re-emerge, and the problem of poor sanitation will not have gone away. The drought is affecting close to 6 million people, and the World Health Organization is predicting the number of cholera cases to reach 50,000 by the end of the summer.

None of this suggests that life would be great if the US took a different approach to Somalia and the War on Terror. Somalia would still not be a developed nation with sustainable institutions of governance, and there have always been struggles with corruption and theft when it comes to aid. The Islamic Courts were ushering in an (admittedly short-lived) era of relative stability and peace, but they were also Islamist and repressive by any reasonable measure. But the fact of the matter is that a militant group whose existence is owed to blowback from American foreign policy is blocking aid to people in need.

This doesn’t shift the blame – responsibility lies with those that are prohibiting aid from reaching the affected populations. But the US should not deny its role in laying the foundation for the emergence of Al-Shabaab either.

As if the civil war in Iraq and the rise of the Islamic State in Libya are not enough, Somalia is another example of the unintended, negative consequences of an aggressive, militaristic foreign policy. The Islamic Courts Union may not have been any liberal-minded person’s ideal of a governing body, but it was so short-lived that we cannot know how it would have behaved long-term. Al-Shabaab, however, is imposing misery on innocent people.

Al-Awamiya: City of Resistance

Rannie Amiri

As the United States prepared to sign a multi-billion dollar arms deal with Saudi Arabia, royal forces laid siege to al-Awamiya, a restive town of approximately 30,000 in the Qatif district of the country’s Eastern Province. Bulldozers, backed by armored tanks and helicopter gunships, systemically leveled homes and put entire families on the street in the historic Mosawara neighborhood. This came under the guise of a development and “renovation” project for the long-neglected and impoverished city although the regime saw fit to post doctored images of allegedly captured weapons to imply was also a security operation.

Last month, anticipating such a move, United Nations experts on poverty, culture and housing rights, “ … called on the Government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to immediately halt the planned demolition of a 400-year-old walled neighborhood in the village of Awamia. The UN experts warned the development plan for the Al-Masora quarter threatens the historical and cultural heritage of the town with irreparable harm, and may result in the forced eviction of numerous people from their businesses and residences.

“The area is of importance not only to local people and the entire cultural landscape of Awamia, but also has national significance for the history and cultural heritage of Saudi Arabia,” said the UN Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights, Karima Bennoune. “The planned demolition would erase this unique regional heritage in an irreversible manner.” As the report makes clear, the project did not provide for the construction of residential buildings in place of those destroyed.

Awamiya was home to the late Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, the fiery cleric who nonetheless peacefully demanded equal rights for the marginalized, oppressed Saudi Shia community. He was ultimately executed by the government in January 2016 after his capture in July 2012. Awamiya is no stranger to aggression, but this past week’s attack and ongoing siege is a new escalation by those yet to be satiated by the killing of Sheikh al-Nimr.

The city’s planned “development” was marked by blocking ambulance access, cordoning off entrance to Mosawara with concrete barriers, cutting power and shooting at residents. As one said, “It is really painful to demolish a historic and archaeological city like Almosara whose lifespan extends for hundreds of years. Some people who want to close their eyes to the truth and are not affected by the demolition will believe in the lie of development.”

The action comes on the heels of an interview by deputy Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman’s interview on state television in which he vowed to take the country’s standoff with Tehran inside of Iran’s borders. The offensive was still against Shia Muslims but instead within Saudi borders and the victims his fellow citizens.

It is erroneous and somewhat simplistic to frame the assault strictly in sectarian terms or as a move to appease the religious establishment’s anti-Shia proclivities.  Rather, it was meant to send a message to all in the Kingdom of the fate of those who would oppose the authority and the legitimacy of the monarchy. It was to widen the narrow streets of Mosawara to allow tanks easy passage for future operations. It was a reminder to those in the Qatif who might still be emboldened by Sheikh Nimr’s famous declaration, “A century of oppression … enough, we will not be silent and we will not fear. We will call for separation even from this country and let be what will be. Our dignity is dearer than the unity of this land.”

Most importantly, it was to demonstrate that even when the President of the United States visits Saudi Arabia to speak about combating extremism, the regime itself can be extremist without consequence or reproach.

Qana, Lebanon has been the subject of two vicious Israeli attacks and massacres. Gaza withstood untold suffering from a suffocating blockade followed by attack from land, sea and air. The poor villages outside of Manama, Bahrain, have withered under the pervasive repression of the al-Khalifa dynasty. Now another has joined their ranks.

Al-Awamiya: city under siege, city of resistance.

A Gathering of Autocrats: Trump Puts US on Sunni Muslim Side of Bitter Sectarian War with Shias

Patrick Cockburn

It was crude stuff. President Trump called on 55 Muslim leaders assembled in Riyadh to drive out terrorism from their countries. He identified Iran as a despotic state and came near to calling for regime change, though Iran held a presidential election generally regarded as fair only two days previously.

He denounced Hezbollah and lined up the US squarely on the side of the Sunni against the Shia in the sectarian proxy war that is tearing apart the Middle East.

The impact of US presidential visits and speeches abroad are generally over-rated and turn out to have far less influence than was claimed at the time.

Barack Obama’s speech in Cairo in 2009 about the conflicts in the region was more sophisticated than anything Mr Trump said in Riyadh, but it turned out to denote no new departures in US policy. The same may turn out to be true of Mr Trump’s address.

The most important aspect of Mr Trump’s two-day visit to Saudi Arabia is that it took place at all. He chose to go first to the world’s most thorough-going autocracy where his speech will be lauded by the state-controlled media.

But the radicalism of what he said can be exaggerated because so far his policies towards Syria, Iraq, Turkey and other countries in the region are little different from what Mr Obama did in practice.

Almost all of the 55 Muslim rulers and leaders in the vast hall in Riyadh will have breathed a little easier on hearing Mr Trump’s repeated call “to drive out terrorism”, since they have always described anybody who opposes their authority as “terrorists”.

This will be a green-light to people like Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi to go on imprisoning and torturing Muslim Brotherhood members. American pressure on the ruling Sunni minority in Bahrain to stop persecuting the Shia majority was always tame, but Mr Trump’s praise for the island’s rulers may make the situation even worse.

Mr Trump’s failure to refer to human rights’ abuses was criticised by some observers, but more serious than his words was his presence in Riyadh before an audience of autocrats.

Saudi leaders will be pleased by Mr Trump’s condemnation of Iran as the fountainhead of terrorism. This was the most substantive part of speech and is the one most likely to increase conflict.

The Saudis will see it as a licence to increase their support for proxy wars being waged against Shia movements and communities in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and beyond. Houthi militiamen in Yemen and Shia militiamen in Iraq and Syria are often referred to as “Iranian-backed”, which may or may not be true, but it is their Shiism which is by far the most important determinant of their political identity.

In targeting them, Mr Trump is plugging the US into the ferocious sectarian conflict between Sunni and Shia.

This is not a war that is going to be won by either side, but the stance of the Trump administration will help ensure that it goes on being fought. Ever since Mr Trump was elected, Iraqi leaders in Baghdad have been concerned that a deeper confrontation between the US and Iran will further destabilise Iraq, just as the Iraqi security forces are getting control of the last enclaves of Isis control in Mosul.

An escalation in the war in Yemen by the Saudi backed forces could close the port of Hodeida on the Red Sea coast through which is imported much of the food reaching the 17 million Yemenis on the verge of famine.

In the last years of Mr Obama, US public opinion was increasingly focussed on Saudi Arabia as the country most to blame for 9/11 because 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis as was Osama bin Laden and, according to a CIA report, the private financing for the operation. Senior US officials have repeatedly pointed to financing from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf as essential to the rise of Isis and al-Qaeda type organisations in Iraq and Syria.

Mr Trump himself blamed Saudi Arabia for 9/11 during the presidential election campaign, but this was all forgotten when he spoke in Riyadh. This might have two serious consequences: leaders of the Shia community fear that Isis may be nominally destroyed but the bulk of its fighters could simply join other anti-Shia paramilitary movements in Iraq and Syria.

As for driving out “terrorism” from Muslim societies for which Mr Trump called, one important aspect of the growth of al-Qaeda type movements has been the way in which Saudi Arabia has used its oil wealth for half a century to spread Wahhabism, its puritanical and fanatical variant of Islam. This has become an increasingly predominant influence over mainstream Sunni Islam, increasing its sectarianism.

Manchester Attacks: What Price Hypocrisy?

John Wight 

The lack of a coherent anti-terrorism strategy in Washington and by extension the West, as emergency services deal with the devastating aftermath of yet another terrorist atrocity in Europe – this time a suicide bomb attack at a concert in Manchester, England – has been thrown into sharp relief during President Trump’s tour of the Middle East.

Specifically, on what planet can Iran be credibly accused of funding and supporting terrorism while Saudi Arabia is considered a viable partner in the fight against terrorism? This is precisely the narrative we are being invited to embrace by President Trump in what counts as a retreat from reality into the realms of fantasy, undertaken in service not to security but commerce.

Indeed those still struggling to understand why countries such as the US, UK, and France consistently seek to legitimise a Saudi regime that is underpinned by the medieval religious doctrine of Wahhabism, which is near indistinguishable from the medieval religious extremism and fanaticism of Daesh and Nusra in Syria – those people need look no further than the economic relations each of those countries enjoy with Riyadh.

The announcement that Washington has just sealed a mammoth deal with its Saudi ally on arms sales – worth $110 billion immediately and $350 billion over 10 years – is all the incentive the US political and media establishment requires to look the other way when it comes to the public beheadings, crucifixions, eye gouging, and other cruel and barbaric punishments meted out in the Kingdom on a regular basis.

The sheer unreality of Saudi Arabia’s King Salman, as he stood shoulder to shoulder with President Trump during the latter’s state visit to the country recently, lamenting the chaos and carnage in Syria, which he described as having been “one of the most advanced countries” prior to a conflict that has wrought so much death and destruction, the sheer unreality of this is off the scale – and especially so considering the role the Saudis have played in providing material, financial, and ideological and religious support to groups engaged in the very carnage in Syria as has just been unleashed in Manchester.

There are times when the truth is not enough, when only the unvarnished truth will do, and in the wake of the Manchester attack – in which at time of writing 22 people have been killed and 60 injured – we cannot avoid the conclusion that neither principle nor rationality is driving Western foreign policy in the Middle East, or as it pertains to terrorism.

Instead it is being driven by unalloyed hypocrisy, to the extent that when such carnage occurs in Syria, as it has unremittingly over the past 6 years, the perpetrators are still described in some quarters as rebels and freedom fighters, yet when it takes place in Manchester or Paris or Brussels, etc., they are depicted as terrorists. Neither is it credible to continue to demonize governments that are in the front line against this terrorist menace – i.e. Iran, Russia, Syria – while courting and genuflecting at the feet of governments that are exacerbating it – i.e. Saudi Arabia, previously mentioned, along with Qatar, Kuwait, and Turkey. Here, too, mention must be made of the brutal and ongoing injustice meted out to the Palestinians by an Israeli government that shares with the Saudis a doctrine of religious exceptionalism and supremacy, one that is inimical to peace or the security of its own people.

Ultimately a choice has to be made between security and stability or economic and geopolitical advantage, with the flag of democracy and human rights losing its lustre in recent years precisely because the wrong choice has been made – in other words a Faustian pact with opportunism.

As the smoke clears, both literally and figuratively, from yet another terrorist atrocity, we are forced to consider how we arrived at this point. And when we do we cannot but understand the role of Western extremism in giving birth to and nourishing Salafi-jihadi extremism. Moreover, in the midst of the understandable and eminently justifiable grief we feel at events in Manchester, it behooves us not to forget the salient fact that Muslims have and continue to be the biggest victims of this terrorist menace, unleashed in the name of religious purity andsectarianism, and that it is Muslims who are also doing most to confront and fight it, whether in Syria, Iraq, Libya, or Afghanistan. It should not escape our rendering of the issue either that what each of those countries have in common is that they have all been victims of the Western extremism mentioned earlier.

It bears repeating: you cannot continue to invade, occupy, and subvert Muslim and Arab countries and not expect consequences. And when those consequences amount to the slaughter and maiming of your own citizens, the same tired and shallow platitudes we are ritually regaled with by politicians and leaders intent on bolstering their anti-terrorism and security credentials achieve little except induce nausea.

Enough is enough.

Return to Realpolitik: Trump in Saudi Arabia

Binoy Kampmark

“You are a unique personality that is capable of doing the impossible.”

— President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to President Donald Trump, New York Times, May 21, 2017

The business of making money on property, badly, has shifted to the business of making money, greatly, for the US industrial arms complex.  This is the technique of President Donald Trump, who has been making various gestures, sword and wallet in hand, to various selected allies in the Middle East.

Besieged domestically, Trump did what other predecessors have done: find solace in the turmoil of Middle Eastern politics.  On Saturday, he sealed a $110 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia, one that will include Lockheed Martin missile defence systems, BAE combat vehicles and Raytheon bombs. With characteristic hyperbole, he mentioned the “hundreds of billions of dollars of investments into the United States and jobs, jobs, jobs.  So I would like to thank all of the people of Saudi Arabia.”

Admirably, Trump never lets political awareness of a theocracy, or any state system, however brutal, get in the way of the cash heavy deal.  Whether such an ally deals in punitive amputation, state sanctioned misogyny or the funding of devastating, destabilising wars, a US ally will be well treated.

On Sunday, Trump moved to soften the stance he had taken as an electoral war horse.  Having deemed Islam the threatening bugbear of Western values in the lead-up to his nomination as the GOP Presidential candidate, he was now conciliatory to friends, hard on designated foes.

“This is not a battle between different faiths, different sects or different civilizations.  This is a battle between barbaric criminals who seek to obliterate human life and decent people, all in the name of religion, people that want to protect life and want to protect their religion. That is the battle between good and evil.”

Gone was the fragile, sanctimony of human rights chatter, the hypocrisies that tend to accompany every US delegation prompted by a moral tic or humanitarian reserve.  In such a moral universe, foreign intervention, arms sales and destabilisation can still occur, provided it is deodorised by the cheap trick of humanity.

The moral tic became particularly aggressive when the Obama administration suspended a sale of nearly $400 million in weapons to Saudi Arabia after the bombing of a funeral hall in Yemen’s capital, Sanaa last October.

Did such a move mean much? Kristine Beckerle of Human Rights Watch, writing for The Hill, thought so, mounting a far from convincing case.  “After the funeral bombing, unlawful airstrikes continued, but the decision to suspend arms sales sent an important message to the Saudis.”

Messages, weighed down by their meaningless, should still be sent in the pantomime of human rights discourse, if for no other reason to confirm that great illusion that US foreign policy remains both power and cant.

That particular cant is bound to find form in proposed amendments made by lawmakers requiring the White House to certify that the use of US weaponry be done appropriately.  “Saudi Arabia,” noted Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) in a statement, “is an important partner, but we must acknowledge when a friend’s actions aren’t in our national interest.” Kill with our weapons, by all means, but do so with a tolerable degree of observance for the laws of war.

For Trump, such matters would have been, not so much hypocritical as unnecessary.  What mattered was the sound of money and the elimination of cartoon enemies, even as he spoke to an audience mindful of their achievements in rolling back the Arab Spring.

To combat such enemies as Islamic State required adjustments in tone and speech, avoiding the altogether heavy hooch of “radical Islamic terrorism” for the more watered down brew of “Islamist extremism.”

This purely cosmetic move was no doubt deemed necessary since Trump could hardly tell his hosts and recent purchasers of US hardware that they were progenitors of a species of radicalism as odious as any other.  Those listening were waiting for the verbal dance on what “extremism” he would be talking about.

For all the preparatory caution, Trump could still make the point that the Islamic world, along with the US and its allies, would have to confront “the crisis of Islamic extremism and the Islamists and Islamic terror of all kinds.”  A few in the audience would have been left squirming.

While local press outlets in the United States were churning in transfixed fashion on the latest Comey-Russian saga, a perfect cover had been provided for a deal that tilts the US into a terrain that is less varnished in its brutal aspirations.  This was Trump more controlled than before, one away from the noisy press corps.  (The press were fairly muzzled on this occasion.) Basking in the glow of authoritarianism, he seemed at ease, one might even say, at home.

Australian government demonises “fake refugees”

Max Newman

In a preparation for mass deportations, the Australian government has threatened thousands of asylum seekers with forced removal to their countries of origin if they do not complete complex visa applications by October 1.

Immigration and Border Protection Minister Peter Dutton last Sunday falsely claimed that 7,500 refugees living in Australia were “refusing to provide any detail” about their protection visa claims, referring to them as “fake refugees.” Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull backed his threat.

Escalating the Liberal-National government’s anti-refugee witch-hunting, Dutton declared: “If people think that they can rip the Australian taxpayer off, if people think that they can con the Australian taxpayer, then I’m sorry, the game’s up, and we are not going to allow people to take Australian taxpayers for a ride.”

Dutton’s comments not only blatantly prejudice any prospect of the asylum seekers receiving a fair hearing for their visa applications. The government’s purpose is clearly to mislead and poison public opinion in order to demonise refugees fleeing persecution and wars, mostly victims of the predatory US-led military aggression throughout the Middle East.

Most of the people that Dutton slandered as fraudsters were barred from even applying for visas until late last year. Now, those who fail to lodge their complex 60-page claim forms by October 1 will be stripped of their already minimal welfare rights until their deportations can be executed.

Dutton directed his remarks, in the first instance, against the so-called “legacy caseload” of approximately 30,000 asylum seekers who arrived in Australia by boat under the previous Labor government, which then froze their refugee claims, throwing them into a state of legal limbo.

Labor’s cruel bar on visa applications operated from 2012 until the Coalition government began to permit some members of the group to initiate applications from 2015. However, the ban on applications was not fully lifted until late 2016.

Effectively Dutton is declaring every refugee “fake” who has not yet been able to lodge their visa applications, marking them guilty until proven innocent. Like the Labor government, his media release branded refugees as Illegal Maritime Arrivals (IMAs).

This is a direct violation of the 1951 Refugee Convention, which upholds the rights of people to flee persecution without discrimination, and forbids them being deported to face the risk of death, torture, punishment or oppression.

As a result of the Labor government’s anti-refugee measures, thousands of asylum seekers who reached Australia by boat after August 2012 have been living ever since on temporary bridging visas, with no right to family reunion.

Under legislation introduced by the current government in late 2014, some of these refugees can apply for two types of short-term visas: Temporary Protection Visas (TPVs) or Safe Haven Enterprise Visas (SHEV). These visas also violate basic rights and international refugee law, denying permanent protection from persecution.

TPVs must be reviewed every three years, so refugees constantly fear deportation and find it difficult to secure work and accommodation. SHEVs are even more oppressive. They turn asylum seekers into cheap labour, forced to obtain work in rural or regional areas, under immense pressure to accept sub-standard pay and conditions.

The Liberal-National government introduced a “Fast Track Assessment” regime in 2014, which deprived asylum seekers of any right to appeal to a tribunal against visa refusals, instead subjecting them to “on papers” reviews by an Immigration Assessment Authority.

With no government-funded support to complete the applications asylum seekers rely on pro bono legal firms to help complete the forms. Community legal centres have thousands of clients on their books awaiting assistance with protection claims, which require the completion of 184 questions and a detailed written statement.

Refugee lawyers denounced the government’s announcement, explaining that the deadline is arbitrary and unfair. Dutton immediately attacked the lawyers, saying they “can rant all they want.” His remark underscores the official contempt for basic legal rights.

Dutton’s announcement comes amid a mounting social crisis. The May 9 federal budget has been met with widespread hostility by working people, who face falling wages, increased taxes, cuts to education, attacks on health care and a new assault on welfare recipients and unemployed workers.

In an attempt to channel this social anger along reactionary nationalist lines, Dutton tried to blame asylum seekers for the budget deficit. “This is a very serious situation,” he said, “that’s costing Australian taxpayers hundreds of millions dollars a year—money that could be spent on education, on health, on police, on other services in the community.”

The Labor Party’s immigration spokesperson Shane Neumann hypocritically criticised Dutton’s use of the term “fake refugees” but indicated Labor’s support for the deportation deadline, insisting “it’s important the people make their application as soon as possible.”

Labor has a long record of vilifying refugees, starting with Prime Minister Bob Hawke’s denunciations of boat arrivals as “queue jumpers” during the 1980s. It was the Keating Labor government that first introduced mandatory detention of all asylum seekers in 1992, during a period of the wholesale privatisation of state assets and destruction of thousands of jobs.

In 2012, the deeply unpopular Gillard Labor government, which faced a landslide election defeat the following year, reopened the barbaric refugee prison camps on Nauru and Manus Island, Papua New Guinea. That government was kept in office by the Greens, with whose backing Labor formed a minority government in 2010.

The Greens offered a token criticism of the October 1 deadline. Greens immigration spokesperson Senator Nick McKim called it “deeply unfair and a denial of natural justice.” However, the Greens entirely support the underlying system of enforcing national borders.

Governments around the globe—from Donald Trump to his European counterparts—are scapegoating asylum seekers to direct social tensions outward. As the refugee crisis worsens, mainly due to the imperialist wars of aggression led by the US and supported by Australia, they are attempting to dehumanise the most vulnerable layers of the working class to ram through anti-democratic and draconian austerity policies.

New South Korean government pushes sham “chaebol” reform

Ben McGrath

New South Korean president Moon Jae-in, who came to office on May 10, has outlined a number of governmental and economic reforms to give his administration a progressive veneer.

One of the main thrusts of Moon’s government and the ruling Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) is ostensibly directed against South Korea’s family owned-conglomerates, known as chaebol, which dominate economic life in the country. The president has promised to strengthen the rights of shareholders, give more power to the Fair Trade Commission (FTC) and raise the corporate tax rate from 22 percent to 25 percent, reversing the 3 percent tax cut made by the former Lee Myung-bak administration. Moon said during his inauguration: “I will take the lead in reforming chaebol. The phrase ‘collusive ties of politics and business’ will completely vanish under the Moon Jae-in administration.”

The immense power and resources of the chaebol, which is backed by their close ties with the government and the state bureaucracy, has led establishment figures to criticise their owners for running the companies like personal “fiefdoms.” Investors and stockholders who want to obtain a larger share of corporate profits often complain that chaebol families use company funds for personal expenses. This is the discontented layer for which Moon Jae-in speaks.

At the same time, the administration is attempting to head off anger in the working class before it can grow into a larger, anti-capitalist movement. During the massive anti-Park rallies this past December, demonstrators denounced the chaebol and the bribes they had given to the former president and her colleagues. The rallies, which attracted millions of participants, were a focal point for social and economic discontent, but were never allowed outside of the pro-capitalist confines established by the DPK and its hangers-on in the trade unions and pseudo-left.

To supposedly deal with corruption, Moon has promised to reestablish a bureau within the Fair Trade Commission to investigate the chaebol. First established under Kim Dae-jung, the bureau was dissolved by Noh Moo-hyun under pressure from the conglomerates. Moon served as senior secretary and the chief of staff in Noh’s government.

The administration announced on May 17 that Kim Sang-jo, considered a sharp critic of the chaebol, would head the FTC. He is an economics professor at Hansung University and a shareholder activist. He also served on the so-called tripartite committee of government, business, and labor during the 1997–1998 Asian financial crisis that forced the burden of the economic collapse onto the backs of the working class.

Kim joined Moon’s presidential campaign as an economic advisor in March and spoke with the Joongang Ilbo newspaper on May 9 to outline the incoming president’s agenda. He made clear that the real motivation is not to benefit the working class, but to assist weaker sections of big business compete against the top four companies—Samsung Group, Hyundai Motors Group, SK Group, and LG Group.

Kim stated: “We are in an era where chaebol reform can’t happen just through presidential reform. We need to respect the strength of the market. Forcing a regulation will only make standards ambiguous. It will not be effective on the top chaebol, and there is a high likelihood it will only result in overregulation for lower-ranking chaebol.”

Kim stressed the primary concern of Moon’s government is the profitability, and therefore survival, of smaller companies. He asserted: “Growth itself has slowed. Chaebol that bring in such (excessive) profits are a minority. The gap in size has also widened—the assets of the top four conglomerates is half those of the top 30. Companies below the top 10 are struggling to stay afloat.”

While some big business layers with ties to the top chaebol are wary of Moon’s plans, other sections of capital have applauded them. Mark Mobius, executive chairman of Franklin Templeton Investments, expressed excitement at “exploring potential opportunities in Korea.” He predicted that “better corporate governance could lift the prices of many Korean companies.”

The concept of chaebol reform is not new. Since General Chun Doo-hwan came to power in 1979, successive governments have attempted to implement changes that would help smaller companies compete.

Chun’s government in the 1980s recognized two points: First, the enormous wealth concentrated in the hands of the chaebol owners had generated immense anger in the working class and threatened both the legitimacy of the government and capitalist relations. Secondly, the bloated conglomerates, with influence and control over various economic sectors, represented a danger to the economy as whole if they collapsed in a major crisis.

The 1997–1998 Asian financial crisis, during which Hyundai and other chaebol faced potential bankruptcy, verified this second point. The response of President Kim Dae-jung, however, the first Democratic Party president, was to rush to the assistance of the major conglomerates and the wealthy. With the support of the trade unions, Kim Dae-jung imposed the crisis on the working class by removing obstacles to the large-scale sacking of workers. He presided over the creation of an irregular labor force which is paid significantly less than their regular counterparts. Since then, companies have been able to sack employees by arguing they face financial trouble.

Structural changes were introduced that affected the chaebol, but in the interests of international finance capital, not the working class. Kim Dae-jung accepted the demand by the International Monetary Fund that South Korean companies be opened up to as much as 50 percent foreign ownership, as part of a $57 billion bailout deal during the crisis.

The mass sackings under Kim and the further growth of irregular work under Noh Moo-hyun completely discredited the Democrats in the eyes of workers, allowing the conservatives to return to power under Lee Myung-bak in 2008.

From 2001 to 2010, spanning the Kim, Noh, and Lee governments, the top five chaebol increased their sales as a portion of South Korea’s GDP from 59 percent to 70.4 percent.

Caterpillar, Butterball to close factories in Montgomery, Illinois, laying off 1,400 workers

Marcus Day & George Marlowe 

Butterball, the turkey product manufacturer, announced plans last week to close its meat processing plant in Montgomery, Illinois, located in suburban Chicago, by July 17.

The closure will wipe out some 600 jobs and comes on the heels of the announcement last month that construction equipment giant Caterpillar will shut down its Aurora production facility, also located in Montgomery, laying off over 800 workers.

The dual factory closures, taking place in an area already hard hit by decades of deindustrialization, further undermines the fraudulent claims put forth by the media and Trump administration that the US economy has reached “full employment” amidst a manufacturing renaissance.

Butterball LLC, based in North Carolina, operates plants in that state, Illinois, Missouri and Arkansas, and is co-owned by Maxwell Farms Inc. and the Seaboard Corporation, the agribusiness multinational. In the US, the company sells over 1 billion pounds of turkey annually and employs approximately 7,000 people.

Butterball facility in Illinois

A “vertically integrated” turkey processor, Butterball purchased its Montgomery plant just four years ago from Gusto Packing Company, a small pork product producer founded in 1972. It is the company’s only production facility in Illinois.

Butterball COO Jay Jandrain cited the timeworn justifications of changing “market conditions” and “consumer needs” in announcing the shutdown. Jandrain claimed disingenuously that Butterball was “committed to retaining as many of our Montgomery employees as possible” and would offer relocation assistance to employees—if there was an available position at one of the company’s plants hundreds of miles away.

The company also announced earlier this year that it would combine two shifts at its Carthage plant in western Missouri, laying off 75 workers.

The closure of the Butterball plant in Illinois will compound the painful situation workers in the area already confront following the announcement of job losses at Caterpillar in April. Both plants are located next to Aurora, a far-western suburb of Chicago and the second-largest city in Illinois.

The state has hemorrhaged 300,000 factory jobs since 2000, and currently has fewer jobs than in that year, according to the site Illinois Policy. The trend has continued and even accelerated up to the present, with 5,000 manufacturing jobs lost in 2015, 7,700 in 2016, and 800 in the first three months of this year.

The trade unions, including the United Auto Workers (UAW), the United Steelworkers (USW) and the International Association of Machinists (IAM), have facilitated this disaster, working with corporate management to slash labor costs, shut down one factory after another, and thereby inflate “shareholder value.”

As has now become a standard procedure in union-company negotiations, Caterpillar first floated the possibility of closing the Aurora plant at the opening of contract negotiations at the beginning of this year, thus seeking to intimidate workers who were determined to regain past concessions. The proposal also contained a wage freeze for older workers and new attacks on health care, among other givebacks.

Caterpillar plant in Aurora, IL

Despite the UAW’s efforts to ram through the contract without allowing members to study the full agreement, there was immense opposition among workers, with the largest local, in Peoria, voting it down by at least 55 percent.

Nonetheless, after delaying announcing the results of the vote, the union claimed a ratification, and within days, Caterpillar formally announced the planned closure of the Aurora plant by the end of 2018. Nearly two months later, the UAW has yet to release either a vote total or the full contract, or even issue a comment on the plant shutdown.

Reporters from the World Socialist Web Site recently distributed copies of the Autoworker Newsletter at the Aurora plant and spoke to workers about the impact of the job cuts and the aftermath of the contract vote.

“It’s absolutely not good,” said Charles. “I’ve worked here 45 years and I’ve been through a lot. I still can’t understand why in the world they are going to close the Aurora plant since they are making money. ”

“Back in the early 1970s,” Charles added, “the UAW was a very strong union. By the ‘90s things started to go to pot. Now it seems like they do nothing. They just collect dues. And I’m not the only one who feels like that.”

Charles and others noted that workers at the plant were either retiring or leaving for other jobs as soon as they could, and that Caterpillar was actually hiring more temporary workers in the interim.

“It’s very disturbing and I was going to be retire anyway. They said that at the end of next year they are going to close. It’s just mind-boggling.”

A temporary Caterpillar worker also spoke about the impact of the Butterball shutdown to his family. “My mother works at Butterball. It’s going to be very bad for our economy here. I used to work at that plant before it got bought by Butterball and it had very bad management then. I used to be a top worker there and the supervisors would always try to find something wrong with what I did. And so I left there.”

“I was going to call him to tell him about Butterball,” a Caterpillar worker with three years chimed in. “I thought, ‘Oh, no. Not his mother!’”

“Many of the workers [at the Caterpillar plant in Aurora] are leaving to find other jobs,” he added. Referring to the massive new fulfillment centers that Amazon is planning to open this year in Aurora—where workers will be paid a fraction of the wages at Caterpillar—he said, “Some are applying to Amazon. But I hate to see our jobs go. We are not valued as an asset to Caterpillar. We are just workers and the stockholders come before us. They’ve got the money and control things, but we are the backbone.”

Brazil crisis threatens second impeachment in less than a year

Miguel Andrade

Brazil’s influential Bar Association (Organização dos Advogados do Brasil, OAB), has called for the impeachment of President Michel Temer, increasing the odds that Latin America’s largest nation will see its second change of power in less than nine months.

The move came as details continue to emerge on the plea-bargain agreement negotiated by Joesley Batista and other executives of the J&F private investment holding company directly implicating President Temer in Brazil’s sweeping political corruption scandal.

The 25-1 vote by the OAB’s governing council is a barometer of the mood within Brazil’s ruling circles, echoing similar votes taken preceding the country’s last two impeachments: in 2016 of Dilma Rousseff of the Workers Party (PT), handing power to Temer; and previously in 1992, when the darling of the IMF, President Fernando Collor de Mello, resigned after his ouster became inevitable.

The Bar Association also gave its consent in 1964 to the toppling of the bourgeois reformist President João Goulart in a US-backed military coup, signaling the capitulation of the so-called bourgeois-democratic forces to the imposition of a brutal dictatorship that was to last for 21 years.

J&F controls JBS, considered the world’s leading animal protein processing company,

and has reported 170 billion reais (US$54 billion) in revenues in 2016, a 35-fold increase since 2007, during the first term of the Workers Party’s 13-year rule. The formation of such a monopoly was made possible largely through the PT federal government’s aid via the National Development Bank (BNDES) and the anti-trust oversight agency, CADE. The company was a target of multiple Federal Police (PF) investigations stemming from the ever-widening Operation Car Wash (Lava Jato) investigation into illegal government contracts, bribes and kickbacks in major industrial areas such as oil extraction and refining, shipbuilding and hydro-electric projects.

According to the influential financial daily Valor, the Brazilian market now accounts for only 10 percent of the company’s revenues. J&F owns 54 meatpacking plants in the US alone, operates in 22 countries and exports to 150. As part of its growth, J&F was able to buy thermoelectric plants and pine forests and negotiate lucrative energy contracts with state-owned and private providers, linking it directly with other major targets of the Car Wash and related investigations.

Against this backdrop, President Temer was taped by the company’s CEO and owner, Joesley Batista, consenting to payoffs to buy the silence of Eduardo Cunha, the former head of the lower house of Congress. Temer is also recorded indicating that Batista should “speak in his name” when asking for favors from the CADE anti-trust agency, and being told that Batista was paying off prosecutors and judges involved in investigations into his company. Furthermore, Batista received privileged information on impending changes in the country’s public debt interest rates, giving him an insider’s advantage in negotiating trades in government bonds.

After the conversation with Temer was handed over to the investigators, a sting operation was set up by federal prosecutors to have Batista ask Paraná state federal representative Rodrigo Loures to negotiate favors with the CADE and later tape him picking up money to pay for them.

With hard evidence of Loures’s access to high officials, and since Temer failed to report the conversation to the police or the Attorney General, Supreme Court Justice Edson Fachin last Friday authorized the opening of an investigation against the president on the grounds that he consented to multiple crimes. According to the Brazilian Constitution, while in office, the president may only be investigated for crimes committed during the current term. Previously, Temer had been shielded from prosecution on evidence that, before taking the reins as president, he was involved in the ubiquitous bribery and kickback scandal.

The lifting of this protection underscores the depth of the current crisis, which has been underscored by the timeline of events since the newspaper O Globo leaked information on the tapes last Wednesday.

The authorization of the investigation was followed by the official release not only of the full content of the tapes but also of videos with confessions by Batista and his associates to officials of the Attorney General’s office, in which they claimed to have put more than a thousand leading politicians on both the local and federal level on their payroll. They also confessed to having made illegal payments of almost $50 million to former PT presidents Rousseff and Lula da Silva through negotiations with former Finance Minister Guido Mantega in exchange for political favors.

As further details became known, Valor reported on Thursday that the taping of Temer was part of the sting operation from the start, but then retracted the claim on Saturday. Later, Folha de São Paulo reported on Saturday, May 20, that a close Batista associate had met a Federal Police investigator and a federal prosecutor to be “lectured” on the subject of plea bargains two weeks before the meeting in which the president was secretly recorded.

The meeting of Batista with the prosecution reported by Folha indicates that rogue elements inside the state might have been behind a bid to topple the president, since, according to Brazilian law, Batista should have had no prior advice on the conditions for a plea bargain before handing himself over to the investigators.

Temer’s defense also claims that the tape is not valid evidence since Batista aimed to provoke the president, rather than to protect himself, as would be required by law.

Moreover, it was revealed on Monday that the Supreme Court accepted the tapes as evidence without even having them evaluated by experts as to possible editing. After Folha de São Paulo reported that the tape could contain more than 50 edits, and at the insistence of Temer’s attorneys, it was returned by the Supreme Court to the Federal pPlice and the investigation put on hold until a new evaluation is made. These developments have set the tone for the São Paulo papers, especially Folha and Estado de São Paulo, in urging calm and a halt to calls for Temer’s ouster, while the powerful Globo media conglomerate continues to move against the government.

Meanwhile, it was revealed that Batista traveled to New York with his family with authorization from the investigators in order to put in place plans to transfer his company to another country, probably the Netherlands. This move comes after he reaped US$80 million in profits after buying a billion dollars the day before O Globo leaked his story and the currency went up by 8 percent against the real—the sharpest devaluation for the Brazilian currency since the Asian crisis in 1999. The revelations implicating Temer also triggered the sharpest drop on the Sao Paulo stock exchange since the global financial meltdown of 2008.

The intensification of the Brazilian crisis raises vital political questions for the working class. Multiple divisions are emerging within the ruling class, bound up with nervousness over the country’s deteriorating economy and the inability of Congress to pass legislation embodying the toxic agenda of social counterrevolution that was at the heart of the impeachment of Rousseff in 2016.

The acceptance by the Attorney General’s office and the Supreme Court of what was, even without direct initial involvement of state agents, essentially a sting operation against the president, exposes a growing breakdown of constitutional forms of rule.

Congress, threatened by the corruption investigations opened against a third of the Senate, has raised the stakes against prosecutors by threatening to punish them if they fail to prove their charges. A so-called “abuse of power” law is being discussed in Congress in order to make prosecutors “think twice” before bringing charges against politicians. At the same time, the Federal Police have increasingly made use of sting operations after the PT government approved a thoroughly anti-democratic law authorizing them in 2013, and the Supreme Court started validating ill-gotten evidence obtained through their use.

At the same time, the whole political system is thoroughly discredited by the continuous revelations of corruption, and the government’s reactionary agenda is intensifying the popular sentiment that its rule is illegitimate. Similar sentiments were initially directed against Dilma Rousseff in 2015 when her second term began with a sharp turn to the right and to austerity measures, along with the repudiation of her election platform. The hostility to the government only increased after Temer’s reactionary takeover, with growing factions of the ruling class turning against Temer and to alternatives to “legitimize” bourgeois rule, including amending the constitution in order to bring forward general elections, as initially proposed in Congress by the Workers Party after Rousseff was ousted.

Both Folha de São Paulo’s Datafolha polling institute and the union-linked Vox populi institute agreed at the end of April that 80 percent of the population supports early elections, and both Congress and the Supreme Court are set to decide on the matter in the next weeks, with one of the largest parties in Temer’s coalition, the thoroughly bourgeois Brazilian Socialist Party, abandoning the government and backing the proposal.

The demand is set to dominate the “occupy Brasília” march called by the unions in the wake of the April 28 general strike that brought out some 35 million workers. The union organizers of the May 24 march, initially called to protest pension and labor “reforms” proposed by the government, say they intend to bring 100,000 demonstrators to the isolated inland Brazilian capital.

The fundamental political premise of the unions and Brazil’s pseudo left is that the abandoning of the Temer government by growing sections of reactionary press, big business and bourgeois parties is to be hailed, and workers’ struggles must be subordinated to these political maneuvers in order to breathe new life into Brazilian capitalism. This conception was clearly exposed in two contributions published in the PT-aligned Carta Capital.

Editor Mino Carta, in an article published Monday, defended the demand for immediate elections. He contrasted the current situation to the conditions that existed under PT rule, while appealing to business, saying that the magazine was “financially asphyxiated by an illegitimate and knowingly corrupt government and by the abandonment by businessmen who used to show more commitment to diversity and plurality.”

Meanwhile, pseudo-left star Guilherme Boulos, head of the Homeless Workers Movement and one of the organizers of the May 24 demonstration, warned in the magazine that if an indirect election were to follow the fall of Temer “the country would undergo convulsions. The seriousness of the crisis allows for no arrangements. Congress has no authority to elect anyone indirectly and any succession without elections would maintain the instability.”

These elements are emboldened by recent polls showing Lula da Silva leading in the polls on support for likely candidates in the presidential election scheduled for October 2018. Their aim is a speedy restoration of a PT government in order to stabilize bourgeois rule and stifle the growing militancy of the Brazilian working class.