Diabetes in Pregnancy Photo Contest for Photographers in Developing Countries 2018

Application Deadline: 17th December 2017

About the Award: Diabetes triggered by pregnancy affects 1 in 7 births — and the vast majority of women affected live in low-and middle-income countries. Women with unmanaged diabetes in pregnancy run a higher risk of having infants with excessive birth weight, or macrosomia, which can lead to complications such as obstructed labor and an increased risk for maternal and newborn death and disabilities. In the long term, unmanaged diabetes in pregnancy will contribute to the rising global burden of non-communicable diseases (NCDs), as more than half of all women with gestational diabetes (or onset of diabetes only during pregnancy) will develop type 2 diabetes within five years of delivery.

Though evidence begs for intervention, diabetes in pregnancy remains overlooked as a major maternal, newborn, and child health priority. Advocacy that translates evidence into action is an urgent and necessary step towards:

1.  Improving the health of women and their families through promoting prevention, universal screening, and treatment;
2. Tackling the rise of NCDs through improving influencing intergenerational health; and
3. Ultimately accelerating progress towards Sustainable Development Goal 3: promoting healthy lives and wellbeing for all at all ages by 2030.

All photos entered must highlight subjects, scenes, etc., from one of the following three countries:

1. India
2. China
3. Nigeria

Type: Contest

Eligibility: The Diabetes in Pregnancy Photo Contest is open to all photographers who are 18 years old or older. Women Deliver will determine winners’ eligibility in its sole discretion.

The following submissions are ineligible:

•  Photos that violate or infringe upon another person’s rights, including but not limited to copyright and photographs of persons without the necessary consent required by law in your jurisdiction. The Nature Conservancy reserves the right to require entrants to submit evidence of the subject’s legal consent to be photographed for the submitted photograph, which may include a signed waiver from the subject.
• Photos that contain sexually explicit, nude, obscene, violent or other objectionable or inappropriate content.
•  Images that involve putting any individual in danger.

Women Deliver shall determine entry eligibility in its sole and absolute discretion.

Submissions may be watermarked if desired, but the watermark should be inconspicuous enough to not interfere with the judging of the photo. A watermarked photo might not be honored by the competition (at the judges’ sole discretion) if the photographer is unable or unavailable to provide a pristine, watermark-free version of the image when asked.

Selection Criteria: 

• Photo entries will be judged based on creativity, quality, originality, and responsiveness to the prompt.
• Each entry must tell the story of someone who has experienced diabetes during pregnancy in some capacity. Examples include a woman who has, or has had, diabetes during her pregnancy; health workers who work with women diagnosed with gestational diabetes; spouses of women who have experienced diabetes during pregnancy; or children whose mothers have experienced gestational diabetes.

Value of Award: 15 prizes will be awarded, as follows:

Grand Prizes: $1,000 awarded to three photographers — Women Deliver will choose one photo from each country (China, India, and Nigeria)
Honorable Mentions: 12 photographers will receive $250 — Women Deliver will choose 4 photos per country (China, India, and Nigeria) submission
Online Features:  Women Deliver will select photos for highlight on its website, on social media channels, or display in a publicly accessible contest archive; such selections will be made at Women Deliver’s sole discretion.

How to Apply: ENTER YOUR PHOTO

It is necessary to go thriough the Application instructions on the Program Webpage (see Link below) before applying.

Visit the Program Webpage for Details

Award Providers: Women Deliver

Continued Use of toxic Glyphosate has Left Greens’ Strategy in Tatters, What Now?

Jonathan R. Latham

The ecology of Planet Earth is rapidly collapsing under a rising tide of toxic pollution and plastic waste as, in every sector of the economy, natural products and methods are replaced with synthetics.

One example, just recently reported, is that in 1974 non-organic wheat production in the UK required 2 sprays per year. In 2014 UK wheat required 20.7 sprays.

The chief strategy of the environmental movement to stem the toxic tide is to challenge specific “bad actor” chemicals and force their withdrawal from the market. Occasionally, this has been successful.

Chemical testing

Many countries no longer spray DDT or lindane, for example. But given that there are 70-100,000 man-made chemicals on the market, most of which aren’t tested and may be toxic, this effort is likely to be successfully concluded in approximately the year 1 million AD.

Assuming that is, the chemical industry doesn’t invent any new products in the meantime, and that removing a toxic chemical only takes ten years of campaigning effort, both of which assumptions are very optimistic.

There is another problem with this environmental approach. It assumes that carefully conducted tests, honestly done, can separate toxic and nontoxic chemicals in a meaningful way.

In fact, the evidence suggests the opposite. It can easily be shown that chemical testing is a pointless procedure.

The potential serious harms from toxic chemicals are essentially endless, whereas chemical testing assesses these harms: carcinogenicity, neurotoxicity, liver toxicity, reproductive toxicity, multigenerational effects, one at a time.

Epidemiological evidence

A whole city’s worth of rats would have to be tested to even begin to work out if just one chemical was harmful, and that is just harmful to rats. Whether that chemical was harmful to people would still be open to considerable question.

The conventional extrapolation by toxicologists from rodents and other animals to humans is not scientific. It is an arbitrary convention that frequently turns out to be wrong.

This wrongness is tacitly accepted even by regulators. The IARC of the World Health Organisation, which has come closest of all official regulators to damning glyphosate, has toxicological categories that distinguish between human and animal toxicity; this concedes that animal experiments do not, after all, predict human toxicity.

Leaving aside the ethics of testing millions of animals to no purpose, this kind of fuzzy logic on the part of regulators is manna to the chemical industry.

Whenever a chemical is found irrefutably toxic to animals, it simply moves to insisting on epidemiological evidence in humans. On the school playground it’s called moving the goalposts.

Technical knowledge

So what seems to be a moderately successful environmental strategy, of challenging chemical approvals with science, is really just a poor tactic and a losing strategy; not least because it seems to imply that all other chemicals are safe.

And even when it appears to succeed it really fails. One chemical is phased out (or exported) and is merely replaced by another. Atrazine for glyphosate anyone?

Opponents of chemical pollution might instead want to borrow from anti-GMO campaigns. These have more-or-less successfully kept GMOs out of Europe, China and Asia, and Africa, and made GMOs a pariah even where they are grown.

The secret of this campaign has been to not distinguish between different GMOs. Opposing GMOs carte blanche allows diverse people and interests to unite behind one banner—whether they oppose patents on life, corporate control, or chemical pollution, or simply hazards specific to GMOs.

It is a broad tent, and it doesn’t require detailed technical knowledge on the part of the public.

Fair trial

Which is easier, to get behind a banner saying “NO GMO”, or one saying “I oppose the active ingredient 1-methonomethyl-2-arbitrazine because of its cumulative hyperplastic effects on the ovaries and vestigial glands of certain species of frogs at doses between 1 and 0.1ng/ml (Doolittle and Dally, 1983)”?

As I showed once before, opposing chemicals on narrow scientific grounds wrongly and disastrously concedes the efficacy of conventional toxicological testing. It concedes the partiality and often open dishonesty of government-picked regulators.

It concedes regulatory reliance on industry-generated evidence. It concedes that industry guided the development of chemical toxicology regulations from the beginning. It concedes the ethics of animal experimentation. It concedes the use of GLP guidelines that compel regulators to ignore the peer-reviewed scientific literature that taxpayers so expensively payed for.

It concedes that companies can conceal their evidence behind “Confidential Business Information” claims. It concedes that most chemical testing by independent laboratories is likely to be fraudulent; and it concedes the narrowness of chemical trespass being a scientific question in the first place.

So while it is true that campaigners will grouse about such unfair and unethical practices, to campaign against specific chemicals like glyphosate is to imply to the public that such defects are, ultimately, acceptable, when the reality is that they doom from the outset any real possibility of a fair trial in the court of science.

Synthetic chemicals

So while anti-GMO campaigns have their own challenge of gene editing as an end run around the definition of a GMO, this is a fine complement in comparison to being laughed at by the chemical industry, which is tonight celebrating the reapproval of glyphosate with copious quantities of Belgian beer having persuaded the EU to ride roughshod, and probably fraudulently, once again over the niceties of chemical regulatory rules and the democratic process and to approve glyphosate for five more years.

The solution to the issue of chemical pollution is therefore an oppositional strategy that is equal to the existential nature of the threat at hand. The environment movement needs to end single chemical campaigns and hit the chemical industry where it hurts.

Ban all synthetic chemicals from agriculture. Ban all synthetic chemicals from schools and school grounds. Ban them from public areas, or your entire municipality (it can be done), including from food contact.

Some such campaigns have already been tried, and where they have succeeded, unlike the banning of individual chemicals, the results make a real difference. But the environment movement could go further: How about making regulators liable for their decisions? How about proposing to end subsidies to industries that use synthetic chemicals in or on foods?

How about automatically compensating individuals whose bodies contain toxic chemicals and who become unwell from a fund provided by the industry which made that chemical? Now that would get the attention of the chemical industry, it might energise the public too.

Crisis in Germany?

Victor Grossman

The impasse in forming a government in Germany has dragged on since election day, September 24th – often like a traffic gridlock, hardly moving forward. But Germany is Europe’s main central power – and with no proper government! Angela Merkel still acts as boss, the old ruling cabinet holds on as caretakers, but it’s all on borrowed time, with no legitimacy.

This old cabinet was called a “Grand Coalition”, with the biggest parties, former foes, joining to form it. Five ministers were from Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and two from its purely Bavarian sibling, the Christian Social Union (CSU). The two usually stick together to form the “Union” (the word has nothing to do with labor unions in German). Counting Chancellor Merkel that makes eight while the junior partner, the Social Democrats (SPD), hold five cabinet ministries. All three did miserably in the election, but since the Union remained the strongest, Merkel is the one to form a new government – if she can! But the SPD lost so miserably – down to 20.5 % – that Martin Schulz, its leader, declared bluntly: “Never again will we be junior partners in a Grand Coalition. We will again become an opposition party until we can rebuild our strength”.

But his SPD may well have to swallow those words, and his position may get swallowed up as well!

The problem is that a majority of delegates in the Bundestag is needed to pass laws or actions the government decides upon. With only two parties this would be easy; winner takes all! With one more, a smaller third party can choose which big one it favors and tip the seesaw in that direction. For years this tilting element was the Free Democratic Party (FDP), a strange “libertarian” party founded by both civil rights liberals and former Nazis, but now basically a secular big business party fighting against both environmental or workers’ rights restrictions and regulations.

In 1983 the Greens squeezed past the required 5% minimum to win seats in the Bundestag. They were a pretty radical bunch then, reflecting a giant West German peace movement which led over a million people on one day (with many labor unions) in demonstrations against stationing missiles in Germany. Those first Green deputies resembled the American SDS, defied conservative traditions, wearing and even knitting wool sweaters during Bundestag sessions and in one case wearing sneakers to a swearing-in ceremony (and having more than 50 % female delegates).

With four factors in the Bundestag, a balance was possible: one side was a so-called “center-right” with the twin “Christian Union” plus the FDP. Opposing them was what some called a “center-left”. The SPD kept its union ties but the leaders of both were mostly well-off and tame. As for the Greens, after German unification former dissident groups from the defunct German Democratic Republic joined them and pushed them rightward. They still stressed ecology and were good on gay rights, immigrants and equality for women. But on foreign policy they became the most belligerent of all, and they had almost no contacts with working class folk, who rarely voted for what became a party of well-off intellectuals. But it could help form governments; the Greens and the SPD alternated with the Union and FDP.

Then the LINKE party entered the picture (at first under an earlier name). Though at first no others wanted to have anything to do with them and they are still only partially accepted as ”decent democratic citizens”, their very presence, now with 69 seats (out of a total 709) made it harder to find over half the seats and form any coalition. In 2013 this made it necessary for the two biggest parties, the CDU and the SPD, to overcome old-time differences and form the coalition described above. Since both had moved closer politically this was not quite so difficult – for the leaders. But both lost big chunks of their voters, thus landing them in the current quagmire – with the SPD “No”.

To make matters worse in every way, the far-right, Nazi-tinged Alternative for Germany (AfD) soared to 12.6 % of the vote, getting them 94 deputy seats, some ripe to be adorned with swastikas.

No-one would coalesce with them either (as yet?), but their very number made it harder than ever – now with seven parties – to reach that 50% level. To make it, with the Social Democrats proudly resisting a renewed Grand Coalition, Merkel’s Siamese-twin Union parties (with only 246 seats) needed both the Free Democrats and the Greens, who hated each other. But she tried to lure the two onto the ship of state, so the four parties negotiated, bargained, argued, made compromises, rejected them, insulted each other and withdrew the insults, talked and talked for weeks and weeks. As Angela Merkel’s final deadline arrived it seemed they had at last swallowed their differences, with the Greens, the smallest, making the most compromises on its remaining principles. Then suddenly, at the last moment, the head of the Free Democrats called a press conference to say that his party was bowing out. No deal! All hopes for a “Jamaica government” – with party colors like those of the flag of far-off Jamaica, black, green and yellow – were now shattered.

Three possibilities remained. One was a minority government, hitherto unknown on the federal level, with the chances of passing any law or decision dependent on which non-government parties would agree to support it. Angela Merkel rejected this out of hand; she wanted no unstable force, open to pro or con pressures on her plans for Europe and beyond. And new elections? Nobody wanted them; they could end up much the same as the September vote or perhaps bring more gains for an opponent. Worst of all, they might well wind up with even bigger gains for the fascistic AfD, disgracing Germany’s image in all the world.

The third possibility is for the Social Democrats to swallow their pride and their brash words and slink back in again with the Merkel crowd as junior partners. Left-leaning Social Democrats, especially their Young Socialist wing, opposed such a compromise. But then Germany’s otherwise figure-head President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, himself an SPD man, urged his old fellow members to weaken up and come to the rescue of Germany. At the moment this seems the most likely outcome. And the president was happy to find, at last, some role other than just cutting ribbons, shaking hands and making speeches.

Yes, the SPD will probably eat crow “for the good of the nation”, with a return to the “same old same old” of the past four years. There will be quarrels. One courageous woman, the Minister of Environment, a Social Democrat, opposed further use of Monsanto’s herbicide Glyphosat in the European Union. But the Minister of Agriculture, from the Bavarian CSU, went to Brussels and defied her decision, breaking the rules to vote Yes on Glyphosat. Was that on his own or with Merkel’s OK? (And Monsanto pressure?) It’s not known, but it was a bad start by these care-taker ministers even before any new coalition had been agreed upon; no good omen for a possible new cabinet made up of the same parties and perhaps the same ministers. Will the Social Democrats voice valiant words about favoring progressive policies and then once more be satisfied with a few ripples while going along with the conservative tide of Merkel and the toughies behind her?

The LINKE party, with its 64 Bundestag deputies (a majority are women), was never asked and rarely mentioned in all this Ring-around-the-Rosie politics. Although some in the party do dream of someday being asked to join a coalition, this idea was never even vaguely broached by Merkel. And yet, the LINKE remains the only single political factor with principle and conscience. Yes, the Greens (and that one SPD cabinet minister) did hit at environmental issues, but other basic issues were hardly even mentioned. German soldiers are killing and dying in Afghanistan and Mali – and will soon march into Niger. Tanks and troops of the Bundeswehr are maneuvering dangerously near St. Petersburg on the Russian border. The Minister of Defense has set her sights on a super-modern European army with Germany leading the pack. No other party seems worried, all bow down to media anti-Russian attacks all too reminiscent of eighty years ago while the result of that policy then, the defusing of rusted old bombs, is still forcing people to leave their homes for hours, day or night.

Too many are forced to leave their homes more permanently. Görlitz on the Polish border, untouched by the war and called by many the prettiest town in Germany, was told last week that Siemens factories there and in Leipzig are planning to close and to cut jobs in Erfurt and Berlin. In out-of-the way Görlitz this is one of the last two job chances, and the Bombardier railway car factory, the other, is hinting at following suit. Thousands have already left the wilting town. While the LINKE has sadly been unable to reach enough working class people – its vote is about 15% – the AfD got 32.7%, making it the leading party in Görlitz as well as in all of Saxony. Although its program favors forces like Siemens, which is raking in more billions than ever, its clever propaganda, full of hatred, mostly against refugees and often helped by the media, is all too effective, although there are only 157 refugee families in Görlitz. Too many people, faced with such shut-downs, with low-paid, increasingly uncertain but overworked jobs, few chances for their offspring and worries about their retirement, are led to fear invented, non-existent threats like “Islam” instead of real threats from real foes. Merkel still boasts of how good things are going, but her pleasant smiles are increasingly unconvincing.

Unless ways are found to reach large numbers of the worried and dissatisfied, the menaces facing Germany – and perhaps world neighbors, near and far, will hardly be dispelled even if Social Democrats and the Christian Union parties now find their way to a renewed coalition.

France’s New Religious Wars

Serge Halimi

France has experienced a moment of political and media madness following the Harvey Weinstein affair. And all the ingredients are there for more of the same: disproportionate comments triggered by a cartoon in Charlie Hebdo of Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan (accused of rape); Twitter providing the ideal tool for reacting without thinking and starting the fire; religion-related issues providing fuel for it; grandstanding by a discredited politician (ex-prime minister Manuel Valls) who thinks a wholesale attack on Muslims will revive his political career. And to top it all, the now established rule that every subject, even the sexual harassment of American women, will eventually come round to the question of Muslims in the French Republic.

Such disruption has a history. In October 1989, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Islam became a theme of public confrontation in France with the ‘headscarf affair’. Controversies of this sort, incessantly pushed by the growing number of private television stations thirsting for ratings, could be linked to the very real global expansion of a politically conservative form of Islam, then strongly backed by the US and Saudi Arabia: throughout the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan (1979-89), the western press and its pundits expressed keen support of jihad. And spoke of the relegation of Afghan women under sharia as almost endearingly exotic.

The recent media dust-up between Edwy Plenel (publisher of online journal Mediapart) and ‘Riss’ (Laurent Sourisseau, cartoonist and publishing director of Charlie Hebdo), two senior journalists who agree on many things (and played their part in getting the current French president elected), omits this context, and so shines no new light on the issue. Impulsive and egocentric, Plenel was so offended by an (unfair) cartoon that shows him denying all knowledge of Ramadan’s alleged offences that he called it a ‘war on Muslims’ and dared compare his own plight to that of French Resistance members killed by the Nazis. Riss, taking advantage of Plenel’s outburst, accused him of issuing a ‘call to murder’ that ‘will absolve those who will kill us tomorrow’.

Plenel’s phrase ‘war on Muslims’ (meant metaphorically) might have been misunderstood by Riss, who saw many of his Charlie Hebdo colleagues gunned down before his eyes two years ago. But his overreaction was supported, and repeated, by several prominent columnists who didn’t have personal tragedy as an excuse. Le Figaro even came up with a quote from the head of an antiracist organisation in the guise of a criticism of Plenel: ‘The reason why there isn’t a single Jewish pupil in Seine-Saint-Denis’s state schools is Islamo-leftism’.

In France, wars of religion have not always stayed metaphorical. Doesn’t an already widely discredited press have better things to do than prepare for the next one?

Australian banking inquiry backflip intensifies political crisis

Mike Head 

After 18 months of fervently opposing calls for a royal commission into the predatory practices of Australia’s banks and other financial institutions, the Liberal-National Coalition government was yesterday forced to announce such an inquiry.

The extraordinary political about-face points to a long-developing and deepening crisis not just of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s government but the political establishment as a whole.

Just 24 hours after again opposing such proposals and insisting that his government would not countenance them, Turnbull hurriedly convened a 9am media conference to declare that a $75 million inquiry was a “regrettable but necessary action.”

Most immediately, the government faced defeat in the House of Representatives next week, possibly calling into question the government’s survival. Disgruntled members of the Coalition’s rural-based National Party had signalled their readiness to vote for a Senate bill, backed by the Labor Party, the Greens, One Nation and other right-wing populist senators, to conduct a parliamentary inquiry into the operations of the major banks.

Last week, Turnbull sought to stall such a move, or any other vote against the government, by suddenly cancelling this week’s sitting of the lower house. But on Wednesday night, the country’s four big banks sent an unprecedented joint letter to the government declaring it had to end the “political uncertainty” by holding an inquiry.

The letter, publicly released to the financial markets half an hour before Turnbull staged his media conference, revealed considerable nervousness about the economic and political situation. The “political uncertainty” was “hurting confidence in our financial services system, including in offshore markets, and has diminished trust and respect for our sector and people.”

Echoing these words, Turnbull told the media that speculation about an inquiry was “moving into dangerous territory where some of the proposals being put forward have the potential seriously to damage some of our most important institutions.” An inquiry was essential to ensure “confidence and trust in the financial system.”

Turnbull’s statement itself reveals the fraudulent character of the proposed royal commission. Its purpose is not to lay bare the profiteering operations of the financial elite, which have ruined the lives of many thousands of heavily-indebted homebuyers, farmers and small business operators, but to conduct a whitewash that will seek to instil “confidence” in the banks.

Turnbull also insisted that the inquiry could not recommend compensation for any of the individual victims of the finance industry.

Quite blatantly, the government has moved to head off moves towards an inquiry that the government would not itself appoint and control. “This will not be an open-ended commission, it will not put capitalism on trial, as some people in the parliament prefer,” Turnbull said.

No one in the parliamentary establishment had any intention of putting capitalism on trial. All its members are equally concerned to shore up the financial system, while cleansing its public reputation. As Labor’s shadow treasurer Chris Bowen told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s “7.30” TV program last night, Labor “wants profitable banks.” Likewise, Greens finance spokesperson Senator Peter Wish-Wilson rejected Turnbull’s allegation, saying the Greens are not socialists.

The Labor Party first called for a royal commission in April 2016. It was always intended as a means of placating and diverting back into official channels public hostility toward the rapacious operations of the banks and other finance houses, especially since the 2008 global financial breakdown.

Over the past two decades, the combined annual profits of the top four banks have risen almost 600 percent from $5.4 billion to just under $30 billion. These profits are largely gouged via predatory lending, exorbitant fees and interest rates, foreclosures on homes, businesses and farms, and the elimination of thousands of finance sector jobs.

The country’s largest bank, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, was privatised by the Hawke and Keating Labor governments during the 1990s. Its record alone has included official allegations it broke anti-money laundering legislation more than 53,000 times; a life insurance regime that used outdated definitions of heart attacks to deny claims; financial planners selling poor advice; and the bank’s 2009 liquidation of Storm Financial, a bank-funded financial advice company that caused thousands of people to lose their homes.

Far from being aberrations, these practices are bound up with the ever-more destructive and parasitic character of the financial markets, whose mega-profits internationally derive from speculation and market manipulation, not economic production.

The royal commission’s terms of reference are designed to exclude any examination of these underlying features. They speak only of “misconduct” that falls below undefined “community standards and expectations.” In particular, they exclude “macro-prudential policy, regulation or oversight.” Thus, there will be no probe of the funding guarantees that the government provides to the banks, which rescued them in 2008 and which enable them to borrow on global markets at low rates.

In fact, the inquiry is intended to open up new exploitative opportunities for the banks by specifically targeting the industry superannuation funds on whose boards trade union officials currently sit. The banks have long eyed these funds, with assets totalling around $1.5 trillion, regarding them as barriers to their expansion in this lucrative field.

Despite the contrived and narrow nature of the inquiry’s terms of reference, the global credit ratings agencies—Fitch, Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s—voiced concerns that the exercise could undermine investor confidence. They warned that rises in international interest rates could trigger a fallout in Australia’s property market, where household debt levels are among the highest in the world.

Of even greater concern in ruling circles is that Turnbull’s backflip demonstrates that his government has lost political control. “The cave-in further enfeebles Mr Turnbull’s tenuous hold on leadership and undermines his government’s authority,” today’s editorial in Murdoch’s Australian declared. The Australian Financial Review said it was “a case study in loss of government authority.”

In the short-term, the government has lost the one-seat majority it barely managed to hold after last year’s double dissolution election. That is because of the disqualification of two government members of the lower house, including deputy prime minister and National Party leader Barnaby Joyce, as part of an ongoing nationalist witch-hunt against MPs holding dual citizenship.

Even if Joyce wins a by-election this Saturday to regain his seat, the government’s unravelling is likely to worsen next week. Next Tuesday is the deadline set by the government for all members of parliament to lodge documents proving they are not entitled to citizenship of any other country.

An unknown number of MPs may be ejected, including government members, ending its majority and perhaps its survival, or at least forcing a destabilising series of by-elections.

Beneath this instability, only partly reflected in the popular anger toward the banks, is the intense antagonism of millions of people toward the corporate and political establishment, which has mounted decades of attacks on working class jobs, living conditions and basic services.

The citizenship witch-hunt, based on demands that MPs must owe “undivided loyalty” to the Australian nation state, combined with accusations of “disloyalty” directed against Labor Senator Sam Dastyari for alleged links to China, is a bid to divert these explosive social and political tensions outward against a foreign “enemy”—China.

Undocumented workers in Houston face hazardous conditions and unpaid wages

Trévon Austin

According to a report published by the University of Illinois at Chicago, day laborers in Houston are being exploited amid recovery efforts in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey. The report highlights the economic exploitation of these workers and the hazardous working conditions they face.

The report surveyed 361 workers in the Houston area in October, approximately one month after the hurricane. The vast majority of them engaged in disaster relief in the area were from Mexico and Central America, 72 percent of them undocumented.

In Houston, undocumented workers are hired on an as-needed basis for manual labor in construction, landscaping, loading and moving. In most cases, undocumented workers are hired at some 20 informal hiring sites in the Houston area, located near building supply stores, gas stations and along major roads and intersections.

According to the report, 26 percent of undocumented workers reported wage theft—nonpayment of wages for work completed—in the period following Harvey. The unpaid wages among the 361 workers surveys exceeded $20,000, with an average of $212.48, a median of $85 and a maximum amount of $2,700. Furthermore, 44 percent of undocumented workers reported wage theft in previous months, and 57 percent in the past year.

The report establishes that workers did not know where to report wage violations and wage theft. The Texas Workforce Commission (TWC) is the agency responsible for assisting workers in recovering denied wages. Among all workers surveyed, including both documented workers and American citizens, not a single one identified the TWC as an organization to seek assistance with wage claims.

The workers have also been forced to work under hazardous conditions and do not receive training needed to protect themselves from hazards during disaster relief. Eighty-five percent reported that they have not received any training for the worksites they are involved in. Eighty-seven percent have not been informed about risks related to unsafe buildings, 85 percent have not been informed about risks of mold and working in contaminated water and 83 percent have not received training for working around fallen trees and electrical lines.

More than one-third of workers reported being injured while employed in Houston. Of those injured, 67 percent said the workplace was unsafe, 63 percent said the injury was due to lack of protective equipment and 52 percent said that they were injured due to pressure to work faster.

The report also indicates that most undocumented workers in Houston do not have proper safety equipment. Forty percent of undocumented workers in Houston do not have protective eyewear, 61 percent reported not having a respirator to protect them from mold and chemicals and 64 percent reported not having a hard hat. These items are all basic safety equipment imperative to the type of work the laborers are asked to do.

The study is limited and cannot capture the full scope of exploitation, as there are over 600,000 undocumented immigrants in Houston alone. After the hurricane, many immigrants were afraid to ask for government assistance or evacuate damaged homes for local shelters. Although local officials, such as Mayor Sylvester Turner, assured immigrants that they would not be targeted during disaster recovery, many still feared deportation. Of the undocumented workers surveyed in the report, 64 percent said they were not comfortable seeking government assistance after the disaster.

Texas Senate Bill 4, which went into effect in September, prohibits the adoption of policies that prevent police from questioning the immigration status of someone they have detained. Officials who fail to comply with the law could face jail time and a fine up to $25,000 for repeated violations. The law, aimed at outlawing “sanctuary cities” in Texas, has been upheld by an appeals court and is the source of much fear in undocumented communities.

The wage theft and abysmal working conditions relief workers are facing in Houston further reveal the criminality and gross negligence of the response of the American ruling class to natural disasters. The xenophobic mass deportation program, intensified under the Trump administration, subjects already exploited immigrant workers to police state repression and abuse.

French campaign on violence against women intensifies police repression

Francis Dubois & Alex Lantier 

President Emmanuel Macron's announcement Saturday of a campaign to end violence against women marks a further shift to the right in his now six-month-old administration. His initiative comes amid the media campaign accusing US film producer Harvey Weinstein and other US celebrities of sexual crimes, and a media campaign in France encouraging women to denounce inappropriate or abusive sexual acts by men on Twitter.

The goal of this campaign is not to defend women's rights. It aims to stabilize the French political regime—which has been staggered by the disintegration of the two main big-business parties, the Socialist Party and The Republicans, and the collapse in the polls of Macron, now despised as the “president of the rich”—by building up censorship and the police.

Macron’s proposal, as he himself put it, is to “reinforce our repressive arsenal.” He proposed to spend €420 million in 2018 on measures that include:

*Building a new “daily security police,” which would be focused on working class neighborhoods, and the creation of a “crime of sexist contempt” which would be “immediately punishable by a dissuasive fine.”

*Having the national Superior Audio-visual Council (CSA) censor the Internet to eliminate all content the state believes could “lead to violence against women.”

*Creating courses and activities to fight sexism among children in schools and nurseries.

*Increasing financing for medical and social care of battered women, and the creation of Internet communications systems allowing women to directly denounce sexual abuse to military police or local police from home.

Macron also promoted French imperialism's neo-colonial interventions in the Muslim world, giving them a feminist coloration by dedicating them to the struggle against female genital mutilation. He swore to “hunt down all those who practice this barbaric act,” and to pay “particular attention to migrant women fleeing their country, because they are also trying to flee genital mutilation for themselves and their small daughters.”

Macron, who earlier denounced the majority of the French population that opposes his labor law decrees as “lazy,” began his speech on Saturday by denouncing the French people as sexist. “It is our entire society that is sick with sexism,” he declared, holding a minute of silence to commemorate the 123 women killed last year in France by their partner or ex-partner. He said the treatment of women in France should provoke “horror and shame.”

This presentation of the foreign and social policy of the French government is a grotesque travesty. What Macron is unleashing is a right-wing and repressive campaign that barely masks its hostility to the working class. The idea that France's Foreign Legion and its targeted assassination program will facilitate a moral crusade against female genital mutilation is absurd. As for refugees, which the European Union has left to drown in the Mediterranean by the thousands, they are fleeing decades of imperialist wars by France and its allies across the Middle East and Africa.

Within France itself, in the nightmarish vision laid out by Macron, only the army and the police, aided by state censorship, can protect women against an epidemic of sexual assault carried out by a male population that is uncontrollable and “sick” with misogyny.

This is a flagrant lie. According to the National Observatory of Violence Against Women, around 223,000 women (0.6 percent of France's female population) fall victim to sexual violence or assault by their domestic partners each year; 84,000 women (0.2 percent) are victims of rape or attempted rape. In 2014, law enforcement actually reported 82,635 cases of domestic assault, of which 88 percent targeted women, and 31,825 cases of sexual violence of which 85 percent targeted women.

These figures give a cold indication of social reality in a country devastated by falling living standards, mass unemployment and the obscene rise of the net worth of the billionaires. However, Macron's offensive denunciation of French sexism notwithstanding, the vast majority of the people are not engaged in criminal sexual conduct.

Macron's measures aim to whip up a right-wing atmosphere aimed at controlling the population via terror and humiliation. Young boys in elementary schools or even nurseries are to be told they must repress their own shameful sexist tendencies. The Paris subway is also becoming a venue for this campaign: a widely spread sign there declares, “Hands on buttocks are a crime punished by law, 5 YEARS IN PRISON–€75,000 FINE.”

It is not to excuse inappropriate behavior, much less criminal sexual abuse, to observe that such signs have a chilling effect. Actions that take place in the course of normal, consensual sexual relations are now fraught with enormous social and legal risks. If either member of a couple decides to bring a lawsuit, his or her partner faces possible sentences that would ruin the professional future and the finances of the vast majority of workers.

Le Monde attacks the 1995 book of (female) historian Mona Ozouf, The Words of Women, which it said “contrasted the 'mild commerce' between the sexes supposedly existing in France, to the puritan traditions of American feminism that supposedly explained the 'war between the sexes' in the United States.'” For Le Monde, however, it is time to call off the truce in the war between the sexes. Current events, it said, “have exploded the rhetoric” of Ozouf.

Why does the ruling elite want France, which in the 20th century imported jazz and mass production from the United States, want to import puritanism in the 21st?

To answer this question, one must examine the political situation. Since the Stalinist bureaucracy's dissolution of the USSR in 1991, the European bourgeoisie has waged an escalating attack on basic social rights. After the European Union (EU) decimated health care and education in Greece and imposed wage cuts averaging 40 percent, Macron aims to impose a similar counterrevolution in France. Faced with deep social anger and a collapse of the traditional political parties, he wants to blow up the legal edifice of labor law and democratic rights as it emerged from World War II and the end of the Nazi Occupation.

Faced with mass anger among workers, Macron and the financial aristocracy are trying to divide the workers and develop support among its remaining bases of support. It is appealing to the security forces and the milieu of petty-bourgeois Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), especially feminist NGOs whose budgets depend on the state subsidies laid out in Macron's plan.

Les Inrockuptibles gave a telling portrait of this anti-worker social layer, to which parties that emerged from the post-1968 student movement like the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA) also belong. An Inrockuptibles journalist went to a café to watch the reaction to Macron's speech of members of “women's rights NGOs … those who for several months have been contacting the president about the violence.” Particularly since July, Les Inrockuptibles added, these forces have feared “a cut in funding to the NGOs.”

Indifferent to democratic rights and essentially favorable to police repression, they agree with Macron's denunciation of French sexism and are intensely focused on obtaining funding: “Sitting on little clear-colored sofas, the young women are focused. … From the get-go, the central question is posed by the first person to speak, who comes from the NGO world: that of the funding allocated by the state to associations for the defense of women. This budget is the central issue in the war, and it will be invoked constantly throughout the rest of the day.”

According to the magazine, their conclusion after listening to Macron's speech was: “He's trying to make friends with us, but from the point of view of the budget it doesn't cut it.”

To claim that the activities of Macron and of this social layer constitutes a defense of women is to perpetrate a political fraud, laying the basis for a broad shift to the right in official politics.

Xenophobic attack on mayor of German city

Marianne Arens

The knife attack on the mayor of the German town of Altena, north of Cologne in the state of North-Rhine Westphalia, is the product of the anti-refugee climate created by the political parties and media in Berlin.

On Monday evening, mayor Andreas Hollstein (Christian Democrats, CDU) had just ordered a Döner kebab from a takeaway in Altena when a 56-year-old resident asked him, “Are you the mayor of Altena?” When he said yes, the man struck him from behind and attempted to stab him in the neck with a knife.

Only the selfless intervention of the store’s owner and his son saved the mayor’s life. They pulled the attacker away and restrained him until the owner’s wife called the police.

The mayor could have easily become the latest victim in a series of politicians who have been attacked by right-wing extremists. Cologne Mayor Henriette Reker was stabbed by a neo-Nazi and only barely survived. In Britain, a right-wing extremist brutally murdered Labour MP Jo Cox in June 2016.

Hollstein was in the crosshairs of xenophobic forces after he declared Altena’s readiness to accept 100 more refugees than the city was obliged to under the distribution regulations. The successful integration, the housing of refugees in empty private apartments rather than emergency centres and the placing of refugees into regional workplaces secured several awards for the city and its mayor.

On Monday evening, the attacker shouted, “You leave me to die of thirst and bring 200 refugees to Altena.” The city had recently cut off the unemployed bricklayer’s water supply.

“For me, this person is not the attacker,” said Hollstein on Tuesday. “Instead, those who poison the well are the perpetrators.” The changed climate in Germany is responsible, he added. For years, he said, he has observed a “decline of cultural values.” The mayor firstly expressly thanked the owners of the takeaway, the Demir family, saying, “I was very lucky that the two came immediately to my aid.”

The mayor said he would stick to his liberal refugee policy. He also rejected a personal bodyguard. A mayor who does his job properly cannot accept police protection when dealing with people, he said.

These statements make Hollstein a great exception in the CDU. The well-wishes by other politicians and warnings against the threat posed by Pegida, the AfD and neo-Nazis are thoroughly hypocritical. Politicians of all parties, from the Left Party to the AfD, are responsible for the changed political climate criticized by Hollstein, as well as the media, which has been systematically agitating against refugees for years.

This began in 2010 with long-serving Berlin finance Senator Thilo Sarrazin (Social Democrats-SPD), and his book Germany Abolishes Itself. The xenophobic hack work was hyped by the media, making racism once again an acceptable feature of public discourse.

In the summer of 2015, when hundreds of thousands of refugees sought to flee the hellish conditions in Syria, Iraq, Libya and other countries caused by proxy wars, a wave of sympathy greeted them as they crossed the German border. Even Chancellor Merkel allowed herself to be caught up in it for a brief moment.

The counter-reaction was all the more bitter. Not only Pegida and the AfD agitated against refugees, but also Left Party politician Sahra Wagenknecht, who declared, “Whoever abuses the right to hospitality has lost the right to hospitality.”

Humboldt University Professor Jörg Baberowski railed in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the Basler Zeitung and other media outlets against refugees and the “talk of a welcoming culture.” In a despicable commentary in the F.A.Z. published on September 14, 2015, Baberowski wrote, “Why should an immigrant be maintained for free when those who live here have worked hard for decades for this?”

Baberowski was defended against the accusation of being a right-wing extremist, not only by the Social Democrat president of Humboldt University, but also by numerous professors and media outlets.

The events in Cologne on New Year’s Eve 2015-16 played a central role in the campaign against the “welcoming culture.” Incidents and assaults which unfortunately occur regularly at major events where much alcohol is consumed were systematically exaggerated so as to brand all refugees as rapists, violent criminals and potential terrorists.

During the election campaign, the parties sought to outdo each other to see who could deter refugees most effectively and deport them. This issue dominated the election campaign and the subsequent negotiations on the formation of a Jamaica coalition (CDU/CSU, FDP and Greens). The conflict was not over whether the borders should be closed and refugees sent back to their home countries, but by what means this can be accomplished most effectively and without provoking opposition.

Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière (CDU), who told the injured mayor of Altena after the assault how shocked he was at the “contemptible attack,” told the Heilbronner Stimme a few days before the federal election that it is necessary to bluntly tell the refugees, “If you are economic migrants, you have no chance of being able to stay in Germany or Europe.” He also promised that he would personally ensure that family reunification for refugees remains banned.

Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel (SPD) made a highly personal intervention following a new situation report by the Foreign Office to ensure that the halt to deportations to Afghanistan was lifted and deportation flights recommenced.

In the exploratory talks between the CDU/CSU, FDP and Greens, the enforcement of an upper limit for refugees and the banning of family reunification were the dominant topics, and they were reinforced daily by the media. The Greens ultimately stated that they had crossed their pain barrier and largely accepted the right-wing refugee policies of the CSU and FDP.

As a result, right-wing and racist perpetrators of violence feel strengthened and protected against criminal prosecutions. The Federal Criminal Office estimated that in 2016 there were 1,800 criminal acts by right-wing extremists against public officials, and 450 in the first half of 2017. The federal domestic intelligence agency did not refer to the right-wing extremist motives of the perpetrators by name in its official report, instead giving them the euphemism “asylum-critical.”

Among the right-wing extremists who prepared death lists which included the names of politicians is the army officer Franco A., who was arrested earlier this year because he created a false identity as a Syrian refugee and hoarded weapons. He was connected to an armed group in Mecklenburg-Pomerania which prepared attacks on Muslims and collected around 100 politicians’ names. But on the same day as the attack on Hollstein took place in Altena, the Federal High Court released Franco A. from custody pending the conclusion of investigations.

Hollstein, who continued to receive death threats after the attack, has ended up in the crosshairs of right-wing agitators because the city of Altena contradicts in practice their inhumane propaganda.

The influx of refugees has not only counteracted the rapidly declining population of the former steel town. Altena also has lower levels of unemployment and fewer empty stores. Of a total population of 17,000 in the small town, approximately 450 refugees have moved in. The majority are people from Syria, Afghanistan and North Africa.

On Tuesday evening, many Altena residents took part in a candlelit march against the knife attack on the mayor. Local residents and refugees joined the demonstration through the city centre.

US initiates trade war investigation into Chinese aluminium imports

Nick Beams

The Trump administration has stepped up trade war measures against China. In a “self-initiated” move, the Commerce Department has launched an investigation into imports of Chinese-produced aluminium alloy sheeting into the United States, worth more than $600 million last year.

The action was the first time in more than a quarter of a century that the Commerce Department has undertaken such a probe without a specific request from the industry concerned.

Announcing the decision on Tuesday, commerce secretary Wilbur Ross said: “President Trump has made it clear from day one that unfair trade practices will not be tolerated under this administration. He made a promise to American businesses, workers, and farmers that he would vigorously enforce our trade laws.… Today’s action shows that we intend to make good on that promise to the American people.”

The investigation will proceed on two fronts: whether “dumping” is being carried out, where goods are sold below what is deemed to be “fair value,” and whether the industry producing the goods is receiving financial assistance in the form of a government subsidy.

The aggressive character of the move is underscored by the fact that it comes just two weeks after Chinese authorities indicated they were seeking to take measures to curb aluminium production, under conditions of global overcapacity.

Speaking at an industry conference in Fuzhou, the deputy director of strategy development at the Aluminium Corp. of China, Chen Xuesen, said the government was striving to keep control of the industry, in order to hold back production, by closing down unlicensed and inefficient smelters. China produces more than half the world’s aluminium, and Chen said that the existing approved capacity of 44 million tonnes would meet demand, at least until 2020.

Under the investigation, the US International Trade Commission will deliver a preliminary “injury determination” within 45 days. If it finds that imports “materially injure” or “threaten material injury” to US domestic industry, it will proceed with further investigation. The results are to be brought down by April next year.

The actions of the Trump administration constitute a continuation and deepening of measures undertaken by the Obama administration, which had complained to the World Trade Organisation about alleged Chinese government subsidies to the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

The Trump administration insists, however, that WTO rules and procedures largely benefit other countries and work against the US. It is determined to bypass the WTO framework under its “America First” agenda.

Speaking to the Financial Times, Chad Brown of the Peterson Institute for International Economics said that while the general use of anti-dumping and anti-subsidy provisions was “normal fare” for the US government, “an administration that self-initiates an investigation is sending an aggressive signal that it is eager to impose import protection.”

Brown continued, “The Trump administration is not simply waiting for US industries to come forward and ask for it—they are showing a desire to provide import protection, perhaps even if American companies themselves do not want it.”

Ross declared that the Commerce Department had worked with the US aluminium industry to develop the case, and that the head of the industry association had taken part in the call to announce the decision.

The move by the Commerce Department is the latest in a series of trade war measures, initiated, but not yet acted upon, by the Trump administration.

Last April, the Commerce Department announced an investigation into steel and aluminium imports on national security grounds, invoking a little-used section of a 1962 law allowing the US government to limit imports that threaten its security readiness.

But implementation of the measures appears to have run into complications. Significant Chinese imports consist of types of steel which America does not produce, and any measures taken by the Commerce Department would impact on steel imports from other countries that are utilised by US industry.

Last September Ross told Bloomberg that a final decision would be delayed until after Congress had considered the administration’s tax cut legislation.

In another measure directed against China, the administration announced last summer that it would investigate alleged intellectual property theft. No action on this front has emerged so far.

However, the latest move appears to flow from an administration decision to move more aggressively on trade war measures, following Trump’s strident declaration at the Asia-Pacific Economic Summit in Da Nag, Vietnam, earlier this month, that henceforth the US was going to put “America first.”

Denouncing what he called unfair treatment by the WTO, the US president insisted that the US had abided by its rules but that other countries—he meant China without specifically naming it—had used “government-run industrial planning and state-owned enterprises” to engage in the “dumping” of subsidised goods as well as “currency manipulation and predatory industrial practices,” leading to the stripping of jobs and factories from the United States.

Whatever the immediate outcome of the latest measures on aluminium, they are a further indication of the breakdown of the system of international trading relations established by the US after World War II, first under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and then under the WTO, which succeeded it in 1995.

Those arrangements were aimed at preventing the kinds of conflicts that characterised the 1930s: the formation of currency and trade blocs that had played no small part in creating the conditions for World War II.

The basis of this system was the application of international rules across the board. Today, however, global economists have characterised the international trading system as resembling a “noodle bowl,” marked by criss-crossing bilateral and restricted trade agreements, rather than multilateral ones. The Doha round of trade negotiations, initiated at the beginning of the century, was aimed at trying to expand the global system. But negotiations effectively broke down in 2008, and there is no sign of them being revived.

The root cause of this situation is not the particular mindset of the present occupant of the White House, but the irrationality of the capitalist mode of production.

In the case of the aluminium industry, like every other area of conflict, the breakdown of the multilateral system is caused by overcapacity—the very growth of the productive forces—creating the conditions where, under the profit system, international trade increasingly becomes a war of each against all in the dog-eat-dog struggle for markets.