Open Society Fellowship for International Scholars 2018

Application Deadline: 15th July 2018

Offered annually? Yes

Eligible Countries: All

About the Award: The Open Society Fellowship was founded in 2008 to support individuals pursuing innovative and unconventional approaches to fundamental open society challenges. The fellowship funds work that will enrich public understanding of those challenges and stimulate far-reaching and probing conversations within the Open Society Foundations and in the world. The fellowship funds work that will enrich public understanding of those challenges and stimulate far-reaching and probing conversations within the Open Society Foundations and in the world.
For the current application round, applicants for the Open Society Fellowship are invited to address the following proposition:
New and radical forms of ownership, governance, entrepreneurship, and financialization are needed to fight pervasive economic inequality.
This proposition is intended as a provocation—to stimulate productive controversy and debate—and does not necessarily represent the views of the Open Society Foundations. Applicants are invited to dispute, substantiate, or otherwise engage with the proposition in their submissions. Though the proposition deals with economic issues, those without an economics or business background are welcome to apply, provided they have a relevant project in mind.

Offered Since: 2008

Type: Fellowship

Eligibility:

• Ideal fellows are specialists who can see beyond the parochialisms of their field and possess the tenacity to complete a project of exceptional merit.
• Proposals will be accepted from anywhere in the world, although demonstrable proficiency in spoken and written English is required.
• Applicants should possess and demonstrate a deep understanding of the major themes embedded within the statement for which they wish to apply and be willing to serve in a cohort of fellows with diverse occupational, geographic, and ideological profiles.
• Successful applicants should be eager to exploit the many resources offered by the Open Society Foundations and be prepared to engage constructively with our global network.

Selection: The fellowship seeks “idea entrepreneurs” from across the world who are ready to challenge conventional wisdom.
Letters of inquiry should address the following questions:

• What is the central argument of your proposed project as it relates to the statement?
• How does your project advance or challenge current thinking?
• Who is/are the intended audience/s?
• What are the potential work products?

Number of Awardees: Not specified

Value of Scholarship: 

• One year fellows will receive a stipend of $80,000 or $100,000, depending on work experience, seniority, and current income. Stipends will be prorated for shorter term fellows. The stipend does not necessarily equal the applicant’s current salary. In certain cases, fellows will receive additional financial support to enable them to meet the residency expectation.
• Open Society fellows produce work outputs of their own choosing, such as a book, journalistic or academic articles, art projects, a series of convenings, etc. In addition, fellowship cohorts may develop a joint work product of some sort. Fellowship staff will assist cohorts in brainstorming possible outputs if needed.
• In addition to the stipend, fellows will receive a project budget. That budget may include expenses such as travel (including airfare and hotel), visa costs, part-time research assistance, conference fees and health insurance.

Duration of Fellowship: Fellowships are granted for one year, six months, and, in a small number of cases, for three months.

How to Apply: 

• Applicants are asked to submit a letter of inquiry online by midnight (EDT) on July 15, 2018 that outlines the topic of the project, proposed work product, and relevance to the statements above. A CV should accompany the letter of inquiry.
• Letters of inquiry will be reviewed within five weeks. Applications showing promise will be invited to submit a full proposal.
• Any questions may be directed to osfellows@opensocietyfoundations.org.

Visit Fellowship Webpage for details

Award Provider: Open Society Fellowship

Important Notes: 

• The fellowship does not fund enrollment for degree or nondegree study at academic institutions, including dissertation research.
• This is a fellowship for individuals only; proposals from organizations or individuals acting on behalf of organizations will not be accepted.

On Gun Violence and Control, a Political Gordian Knot

Ted Rall

On the one hand, because it’s the 18th school shooting so far this year, the news that another psychologically damaged man shot 17 schoolchildren to death with an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle is not news. Put it on page 27 below the fold, maybe?

On the other hand, you have to be shocked because these are kids and who do we become if we stop being shocked? Congress and the president should put their heads together and act now.

On the one hand, the Second Amendment is an essential safeguard against government tyranny. While an authoritarian state (any state) will always have police and troops with better training and arms than its enemies at its disposal, owning a weapon will give many resistance fighters of the future the courage they need to fight back.

On the other hand, the population of Americans who live in rural areas was 95% when the Founding Fathers ratified the Constitution. Now it’s 15%. Once a major source of food necessary for survival, hunting today is mere sport. Considering the daily carnage of gun violence, the Second Amendment may be as obsolete as the flint-lock rifle. Perhaps we should repeal?

On the one hand, military-style weapons like the current mass shooters’ gun of choice, the AR-15, were designed for one purpose: to kill people efficiently. Until 2008 they were banned. Why not renew the assault weapons ban?

On the other hand, people really do use them to hunt. Having been on the receiving end of more than my fair share of death threats, I’d rather defend my homestead with an AR-15 than a less efficient, less accurate gun. Sorry, liberals, but gun rights people have a point: ban AR-15s and the next step will be a push to ban other weapons. Slippery slopes are a real thing; look how the pro-life movement has rolled back abortion rights via incremental, reasonable-seeming moves like bans on late-term terminations.

On the one hand, there are 270 million guns in the United States — almost one for every man, woman and child. Even if we banned guns, how would we force the gun genie back into its bottle of death? Send government goons to kick down every door in the country to search for them?

On the other hand, existing guns could be grandfathered into a ban on the manufacture and sale of new guns (including from one individual to another). Guns would get old. They’d rust. Those used for target practice would wear out. Trigger mechanisms are often the first to go. Like the fairly effective ban on ivory, the effect would become evident over time: a nation awash in weaponry would become less so with the passage of time.

On the one hand, states like Florida seem crazy for not requiring gun purchasers to register their weapons. Florida actually bans such regulations. Cars, boats, even bicycles and cats and dogs, must be registered. Why not devices that kill people?

On the other hand, gun ownership is different. It’s a constitutional right. Automobile ownership, operating a boat and having a pet are privileges guaranteed by state and local laws. Mandatory gun registration would be no more constitutional than forcing media outlets to apply for a state license before publishing (they do this in other countries).

On the one hand, many if not most mass shooters are mentally ill. Wouldn’t it make sense to prohibit sales of firearms and ammunition to people suffering from mental illness?

On the other hand, who gets to define what constitutes mental illness? Federal law bans sales to anyone who “has been adjudicated as a mental defective or has been committed to any mental institution.” New York, where I live, goes further, banning sales of guns to one “who has stated whether he or she has ever suffered any mental illness.” That’s very broad: “Heathers” and “Stranger Things” actress Winona Ryder, singer Mariah Carey, artist Yoko Ono and actress Roseanne Barr were all institutionalized. But no one thinks they’re going postal anytime soon — frankly, I’d trust Winona with the nuclear codes more than Trump. The metric is also highly subjective. Gays were officially classified as mentally ill until 1987. Transgender people are still on the list.

On the one hand, people who knew him say they’re not surprised that Florida shooter Nikolas Cruz went berserk. The signs were there all along: violent Internet posts, ties to white supremacists, erratic behavior like threatening people with a BB gun. People saw something; why didn’t they say something?

On the other hand, this isn’t “Minority Report.” You can’t jail someone for what they might do. People are entitled to their opinions, no matter what they are. If you jailed everyone who acts strange or right-wing or loopy, half the country would be locked up. And anyway, who trusts the police or the government to decide which half?

On the one hand, if anyone deserves to die, it’s Nikolas Cruz.
On the other hand, what kind of society executes a “broken child,” possibly autistic, almost certainly emotionally damaged, absolutely wrecked by the recent death of his mother, his last surviving parent?

How does killing a killer send the message that killing is wrong?

People Care More About the OXFAM Scandal Than the Cholera Epidemic

Patrick Cockburn

The earthquake that devastated Haiti on 12 January 2010, killing 220,000 people, produced a terrible and disgusting failure by those who came from abroad to help the survivors. Among these were UN soldiers from Nepal, which was then in the middle of a cholera epidemic, who brought the disease with them and allowed it to enter the rivers that provide Haitians with their drinking water.

Cholera, previously unknown on the island, killed 7,568 Haitians over the next two years, though the UN denied responsibility for the outbreak. This was despite a report by its own experts in 2012 that showed that the spread of cholera downstream from the Nepalese soldiers’ camps was predictable and avoidable. It was only in 2016 that the UN finally accepted responsibility for starting the epidemic, though it claimed legal immunity and refused to pay compensation.

Compare the lack of interest shown by the international media, politicians and assorted celebrities to this man-made calamity, leading to the death of thousands of Haitians, to the hysterical outrage expressed about Oxfam officials consorting with prostitutes in Haiti in 2011. Though nobody died in the Oxfam sex scandal, it is described as “terrible” and “heart-breaking”, words normally reserved for tragedies such as the enslavement and rape of thousands of Yazidi women by Isis in Iraq.

It would certainly be better if the Oxfam aid workers did not use prostitutes, but how high does this really rate on the Richter scale of moral turpitude? Oxfam was discreet about the punishment of those involved, as are all organisations about in-house scandals, but suddenly the word “cover-up” is used, as though we were dealing with Richard Nixon disclaiming responsibility for the Watergate burglary. This coverage of a minor scandal systematically exaggerates wrongdoings and abandons any sense of proportion in order to discredit Oxfam as a whole.

Few commentators, though bellowing their shock and sense of moral outrage, bother to ask what Oxfam was doing in Haiti at the end of 2010 and the beginning of 2011. This was when The Times and other organs critical of the Oxfam leadership should have been devoting more attention to monitoring the morals and behaviour of their local Oxfam representatives in the capital Port-au-Prince.

In fact, Oxfam was trying with some desperation to stem the cholera epidemic, the first outbreak of which was detected in central Haiti in October, from spreading further. By the following month, it had reached Port-au-Prince and Oxfam was trying to provide uncontaminated water to 315,000 people already rendered homeless by the earthquake. An Oxfam statement on 10 November describes how “Oxfam continues to strengthen water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) infrastructure and activities in the camps/communities where we are working. A cholera strategy is being developed to guide our activities for at least the next three months. At this time, we are reinforcing our water, sanitation and hygiene programmes in camps where we already work in Port-au-Prince, and in Artibonite. We are currently reaching over 400,000 people with water, sanitation and hygiene programmes, and another 100,000 individuals mostly through our emergency food security and vulnerable livelihoods (EFSVL) programmes.”

None of this is as titillating as the sort of thing we have been reading or watching over the last week about the sexual misconduct of Oxfam employees in Haiti, but these do seem to have kept a lot of people alive who would otherwise have died. Curiously, though foreign journalists and politicians claim concern about the alleged exploitation of Haitian sex-workers, few of them seem to have noticed that there was cholera epidemic raging in Haiti at the same time as the sex scandal.

Why has The Times story produced such a media feeding frenzy? The story has the attraction to press and television of being about those who take a superior moral tone, such as aid agencies or the churches, and who are then caught committing sins that other organisations might get away with. The public enjoys revelations showing moral giants to have much the same feet of clay as everybody else.

Aid agencies are easy to attack because there is usually a disparity between the way these officials live compared to the misery of those they are meant to assist. Sometimes, the disparity is grotesque as in the case of aid consultants in Kabul in 2010 who were earning between $250,000 (£178,000) and $500,000 in a country where 43 per cent of the population were living on a dollar a day. Yet such excessive salaries are rare and a more substantive charge is that aid agencies spend too much on administration.

Yet these reasons do not quite explain the lynch mob hysteria with which Oxfam is currently being attacked for what, in the middle of a cholera epidemic, were fairly minor failings. The explanation for this probably has more to do with the public and media mood in the wake of the allegations that the Hollywood film mogul Harvey Weinstein harassed and assaulted women for decades, using his power to make or break their careers. The story was first printed in October last year and provoked a wave of accusations against men in senior positions who used their power to exploit women. The Haiti Oxfam story can be fitted into the same general picture of those in charge exercising their authority for sex, though the circumstances are very different.

In the post-Harvey Weinstein era it is difficult to defend Oxfam because all excuses sound self-serving and all episodes of sexual exploration tend to be regarded as equally grave. This obscures the degree of guilt and the gravity of the crime, though in the Oxfam villa in Port-au-Prince it is not even clear that there really was a crime.

The great 19th-century British historian Macaulay famously said that “we know of no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality”. The same could be said today of the Oxfam sex scandal in Haiti, but the word “frightening” should be substituted for “ridiculous” because the multiple sources of information – internet, television and press – have pumped up the speed with which there is a collective rush to judgement. This is made without regard to the evidence and is almost impossible to reverse once it has gained momentum.

It is doubtful that Oxfam will survive the scandal in its present form as it is being buried under so many imputations of guilt that people might well imagine that the organisation was being run by a combination of Harvey Weinstein and Jimmy Saville. Given Oxfam’s need for public and governmental financial support, it has probably – and to my mind unfairly – suffered a fatal wound. If it does go down then it will be a triumph for hypocrisy, in which pundits and politicians are destroying Oxfam for mistreating Haitians, about whose fate they suddenly express great concern, although few of them have even heard of the Haitian cholera epidemic Oxfam tried to stop.

Colombia: If We Do Not Get Engaged With Politics …

Farooque Chowdhury

Renewed initiative for a peaceful and decent Colombia is facing fatal hurdles as assassinations and assaults are being unleashed against the Revolutionary Alternative Force of the Common (Fuerza Alternativa Revolucionaria del Común, acronym FARC), the political party formed by the former FARC leaders and activists. Blood of progressive activists is being spilled by the ultra-rightist/conservative forces in the land with immense possibilities.

Despite this old, conventional politics of murder and hatred FARC leadership is trying its best to convey its message of hope, peace, democracy, dignity and decent life to the people. The new party is carrying on its active participation in the electoral process although it was recently compelled to suspend its election campaign in the face of deteriorating political and law and order situation.

FARC announced its leader, popularly known as Timo, as a candidate for the coming presidential election.

In late January, in a speech, Timo, actual name is Rodrigo Londoño, launched the “With the Force of the Common”. The campaign speech broadly outlined the existing Colombian politics and FARC’s vision for a new Colombia. It’s not only a significant message on behalf of the exploited and oppressed in the country, but also an indicator to other exploited and suppressed peoples in other lands struggling against the dominant class powers in respective countries. It indicated the political message to be conveyed to the broad and wide majority of the poor, the exploited, the toilers instead of getting bogged down into a sectarian trench – concerned only with a particular community or sect. Overwhelmed by concern only for a sect or a community makes the community or sect more vulnerable as that community or sect isolates itself from the broader masses of people, who stand on one side of the line that divides the exploited and the exploiters. Timo, in his speech, addressed the broader constituency – the people, the poor, the forgotten, the marginalized, the victims of inequality and exploitation. His message was against the exploiters, the rich, the privileged.

The FARC leader sketched a broader context in his speech: In this structure, dirty propaganda is carried out against those defending the poorest and the forgotten. Our country occupies second place in the ladder of inequality between rich and poor in our continent. In addition to poverty and misery here is a situation full with dangers. All evils exist here. Here is a total absence of the state. Gangs, drug addiction, micro-trafficking, para-militarism, forced displacement and all types of violence are here. Communities are threatened by unemployment. Irresponsible mining is threatening the environment. The state apparatus is designed to enrich the elites, the privileged of always, the rich, the owners of the greatest fortunes. The economy is organized in such a way that the big capitals, the banks, the insurers, the construction firms, the large landowners and the mafias increase their fortune daily.

He described the state machine and dominant politics of the powerful: Here is the control exercised by professional politicians of deceit and lies. A corrupt and clientele ruling machinery has been built up over decades. Here is a market of favors. Here are the old and corrupt parties, the liberal or the conservative, always headed by the leaders of the same collectives. They hardly renew Colombian politics, because in reality, they plunged it deeper into the mud of rot. Only forty percent of Colombians participate in politics, that is, only 4 out of 10 compatriots decide the future of all the rest. And, we know many of them sell their votes, or change it for small favors or big promises that remain in the air. It is urgent that 60 percent of absentees make presence and be respected.

Timo presented further facts: Millions of Colombians lack the minimum possibilities of getting ahead. The peasants migrate to the cities swelling misery while the large agro-industrial export projects multiply profit. The profiteers blame the poor: “The fault is in the poor’s laziness.”

A voice of hope resounded as he presented the reality: It’s an agonizing collective struggle for survival, for a dignified life, for overcoming of enormous difficulties. We are an immense stream of women and men dreaming a better future.

He vowed to break that present logic in politics, which is made to enrich oneself with the money of the people. “The FARC arrives to inaugurate a new way of politics that puts ordinary people at the center of the state.”

The FARC leader reminded: “We obtained the right to make politics with full guarantees of our life and freedom. Despite the guarantee, persecution does not stop. He cited murder of more than 50 and imprisonment of more than 500 of his comrades.

He said: In this reality, we do not draw our arms. The difficulties will not stop the march of the common people. The seed of popular organization is maturing.

The former guerrilla leader added: Only by liberating the state from the hands of the elites can the poor and needy have a future. Colombia needs a new policy that puts main emphasis on the working people, on their condition and human dignity, on their economic, social, political and cultural rehabilitation.

He stated: Our party does not come to present itself as the magic formula of salvation. We propose a general awakening, awareness, in the sense that changing things is possible. Politics will be transformed from what it is today into a noble and benevolent activity, when ordinary Colombians are its real protagonists.

He explained: If we do not get engaged with politics, we will always be dominated by the minority that deals with it. We offer ourselves for organization and unity of the people. We are the Colombians who left everything to fight for the cause of people. We risk everything, even life, to change things in people’s favor.

The FARC leader said: Every Colombian has the right to enjoy a dignified life. Every citizen has the right to a Vital Income of Existence, and we will guarantee it if we are in government. There cannot be a single Colombian whose work will not be recognized. The nation will ensure that domestic work done by women, and some men also, has recognition and economic retribution. It’s that invisible and silent work of so many mothers that deserve a payment. We know there is no peace with hunger; so, we are going to fight it. It can be done with the strength of the common.

The political leader said: We do not want a country of hatreds and resentments. We want a reconciled country, in which difference is respected and debated in a civilized way. This requires a cultural transformation. To achieve this we will make serious effort to practice science, to scientific and social research, to art and culture. He said: sport and recreation are rights, not luxuries. Efforts will be made to materialize this.

He said: Enough of the death strolls. The people are in need of health centers, housing, schools, power lines, roads and other transportation systems, water system and aqueducts. These require a great national effort, in which the armed forces can contribute with the love of a homeland. Health is a vital right, not a business for private capital. The class that governs Colombia has converted health care into a business of private capital. The technical and university education should be public and free. Only education for change will make us a free country.

The FARC leader said: We stand for a government that will represent the interests of the poor, will work for them without any truce; equitable redistribution of the product of national labor; fight against corruption; obtaining the resources that the poor require to live with dignity; never allowing the state to serve the richest; an effective change from war and violence to a state of peace, reconciliation and social justice that puts an end to the murderous hand in Colombian politics; and,opposing traditional politics.

The revolutionary leader said: Colombia requires a true democracy. May the voice of those below, those millions and millions of poor people who have never been counted, never been heard and never been able to decide their future, that their clamor for social justice be echoed, that their defense of their rights as women, as sexual diversity, for water and the healthy environment, be taken care of and remedied.

He cited Colombia’s great poet Carlos Castro Saavedra’s a dream of villages, where lives shine more than weapons, where freedom enters homes with daily bread, with beautiful letter, where the people meet, where we can say: we have a homeland.

But, the forces of exploitation and privilege are intensifying their assaults.

At the last week of January the political campaign headquarters of the FARC in Chocó was attacked.

The FARC Departmental Council of the Communes in Chocó has questioned: Will the acts of systematic murder continue? The council said: It is necessary to provide security guarantees for the development of the political action of FARC within the framework of the electoral process. The council has demanded security for its headquarters and officials.

Complying with the Havana Agreement, FARC is holding meetings in communities with the aim of socializing its political proposal. But, a systematic murder-campaign is being carried on. It is being carried on not only against the FARC members, but also against social leaders and human rights defenders.

Two FARC leaders have been murdered in western Antioquia in mid-January, 2018 while they were holding a community meeting as part of a campaign for the House of Representatives election. The FARC leaders and activists are constantly being targeted for murder by rightist armed gangs. A politics of physical elimination of the political opposition continues in Colombia.

The UN Verification Mission in Colombia has condemned the Antioquia-murders.

The FARC National Political Council said on January 27, 2018 in Bogotá: FARC is against all forms of violence. The party reiterates its conviction with peace. The party said: The country must make collective effort to get out of the swamp of violence, death and fear. The party does not consider that the present situation is for weapons and bloodshed.

The FARC NPC said: FARC was born out of the country’s greatest effort to obtain peace. The party defends peace. The party works to achieve a great national convergence, which is capable of changing the situation for the wellbeing of the nation.

The council said: We trust life and freedom, so we repudiate the blood-acts that hurt the future of the country.

But question haunts: Shall the blood-thirsty rightists allow the downtrodden people and its party to participate in political process? Colombia’s destiny depends on the participation.

West Asia In Flux: Connecting The Dots

Chandra Muzaffar

A series of events linked to West Asia in the last nine months has brought to the surface the under-currents and cross-currents in the region’s perennial struggle between occupation and hegemony, on the one hand, and resistance and liberation, on the other. It is crucial to understand how these events are related to one another, to connect the dots, as it were, in our attempt to make sense of what is unfolding in the world’s most strategic – and most dangerous — region.

We shall show how five events — two in Syria, two related to Iran and one concerning Palestine — driven by some of the same interests and agendas are all inter-connected and how they in turn are linked to Yemen, Qatar and Lebanon. The roles played by Israel and Saudi Arabia, needless to say, will figure prominently in all this. Their roles are intimately intertwined with that of the United States of America, the hegemonic power that has dominated West Asia for at least five decades.

Syria.

One of the most dramatic events in the politics of the region occurred on the 10th of February 2018. Syrian ground to air missiles downed an Israeli F-16 and damaged another F-15 fighter plane. The Israeli planes had infiltrated Syrian air space with the aim of destroying a Syrian drone air base. Since the beginning of the Syrian war in March 2011, Israel had launched no less than eight incursions into Syria seeking to emasculate Syrian military defences. However, this time Israeli air power was confronted with devastating effect. The Syrian ability to retaliate shocked the Israeli military and political elite. As analyst Elias Akleh put it, “Warning sirens wailed in many Israeli towns in the north, Israelis hurried into shelters and Ben Gurion International Airport near Tel Aviv had temporarily halted air traffic. He continues that on Sunday (11th February) Israel spread its iron dome on its northern border “while sending more reinforcements south on the border with Gaza Strip.”

To cover up the embarrassment arising from an act of naked aggression, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu quickly concocted the tale of a drone from an “Iranian drone base” in Syria violating Israeli air space and Israel being forced to retaliate which was how its fighter plane “crashed” within Syrian territory. It should be emphasised that there are no Iranian drone bases in Syria. The tale had to be spun not only to exonerate Israel but also to cushion the shock of Syria’s successful assault on an F-16 equipped with the “latest American defensive Electronic Counter Measures (ECM) that is supposed to defend the plane from missile attacks.”  It is telling that “the very expensive ECM failed to defend the plane against the older 1960s technology of the Russian S-200 missile that hit the planes.”

The implication of this for Israel and the US, its protector, is far-reaching. It is Israel’s air superiority which is at the core of its military superiority that has enabled it to dominate West Asia. Israeli air-power annihilated the Egyptian air-force in the 6 day war in 1967. Israel bombed an Iraqi nuclear facility at Osirakin 1981. In Lebanon, it rained bombs in the 34 day war in July 2006. Gaza has been bombed a number of times, the 2014 assault being the latest. It is not just infrastructure that has been destroyed; thousands of civilians have died because of Israeli air-power. As a result of all this, Israeli air-power had acquired ahalo of invincibility. That halo disappeared in smoke on the 10th of February.  What does this mean for Israel’s ability to continue its military dominance of the region? This question has become critical because strategically situated Syria is now backed to the hilt not just by Hezbollah and Iran but also by militarily powerful Russia. Is this the beginning of a change in the power equation in West Asia?

The other event in Syria also offers some insight.Because US backed rebels in Syria, a substantial portion of whom were part of various terrorist outfits have been defeated by the Bashar al-Assad government supported by Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, elites in Washington sought to save face by finding a foothold at the Syria-Turkey border by arming and financing some 30,000 Kurds tied to the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) which for decades has been fighting the Turkish government. This has naturally infuriated the Turkish government of RecepErdogan. Other governments in the region that have sizeable Kurdish populations such as Iraq and Iran have also condemned the US plan which they fear will pave the way for the establishment of an independent Kurdish state that all four states (Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran) are opposed to. Israel incidentally endorses the idea of an independent Kurdish state since it serves its agenda of fragmenting states in West Asia. The US plan which appears to have been put on hold has been particularly adverse for its relations with NATO ally, Turkey.

Iran

If the US has piqued Turkey, the former’s animosity towards Iran which goes back to the 1979 Islamic Revolution, has reached a new peak under President Donald Trump. In spite of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) re-affirming that Iran is complying with the 2015 nuclear deal that it forged with the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany, Trump insists that Iran has violated the deal which he, in any case, regards as a bad deal that should be re-negotiated. It is only because the European Union refuses to go along with Trump and agrees that there has been Iranian compliance, that Trump has re-certified the deal for the time being. The Iranian nuclear deal is not the only issue on which serious differences are developing between US and Europe. The question of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel which will be analysed shortly is yet another major global concern on which Europe has a different take. Are challenges in West Asia prompting Europe to adopt a different course in international relations — a course which will make it more independent of the US?

The US’s negative attitude towards Iran is also reflected in its never-ending machinations to oust the government in Tehran.  The Washington elite, backed by Israel and Saudi Arabia tried ‘regime change’ again in late December 2017 by eagerly endorsing demonstrations in a few cities focussing initially on unemployment, inflation and corruption. The demonstrations fizzled out partly because they lacked mass appeal. Their failure proved — if proof was needed — that regime change through external manipulation is stupid and infantile. It has undermined further the credibility of the US and its anti-Iran partners in West Asia.

Palestine

An even bigger blow to the US and Israel was Trump’s public announcement that his country recognised Jerusalem as the capital of Israel — a recognition that the US Congress had  accorded in 1995 —and intended to move its embassy to that city.The opposition to the announcement was massive with 128 countries out of 193 in the UN General Assembly demanding that the US government withdraw the declaration. They rejected it because it violated international law, was unjust to the Palestinians and would subvert any peace effort.

The question one should ask is whether this announcement is actually a preliminary step towards a so-called ‘Peace Plan’ that will witness Palestinians being given small pieces of land in the West Bank  over which they would exercise limited authority— apart from keeping Gaza— while effective control of all these fragments, would remain in Israeli hands. It is quite conceivable that to implement this Bantustan, the Israeli elite will seek the cooperation of the Saudi elite. One can be absolutely certain that such an unjust move will be rejected outright by the Palestinians, other Arabs, the Muslim masses, and indeed, people everywhere who cherish fairness and human dignity.

If the Saudi elite colludes with the Israeli elite on this, it would be partly because it needs the material support of the US in the pursuit of its agenda in Yemen, Qatar and Lebanon. In each of these countries, its explicit goal is to establish its dominance and curb what it perceives as “Iranian influence.”  Both US and Israel have given approval to the Saudis. In Yemen, the US has been supplying weapons to the Saudi-led coalition that has been bombarding one of the poorest countries in the world. Israel is uneasy about Qatar’s ties with Iran. The Israeli elite is even more determined than the Saudi elite to crush the Hezbollah in Lebanon.

There is therefore a convergence of motives among the elites of the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia.While their individual and collective determination to perpetuate their power in West Asia has a lot to do with this convergence, their enmity and antagonism towards Iran is also the glue that holds them together. It is connecting these dots that link the various actors in the region that is crucially important at this juncture.

However much the desire to perpetuate their power, our analysis has shown that the unfolding scenario in West Asia is not in favour of the US or Israel or Saudi Arabia. The events in Syria and Iran are major setbacks for all three of them. The Jerusalem-Palestine debacle is a huge blow to the US and Israel while the imbroglio in Yemen, the quagmire in Qatar and the failure to force the Hezbollah out of government in Lebanon through the botched resignation of Prime Minister Saad Hariri,all testify to Saudi recklessness. These events taken together have made a significant dent upon the politics of occupation and hegemony in West Asia.

But let’s make no mistake about this. Neither occupation nor hegemony is about to end anytime soon. Genuine liberation is still a distant horizon. Nonetheless, it is incumbent upon us to recognise that the power equation in the region is changing. The situation is in flux. A new pattern of relations is emerging which will marginalise some of the existing actors. Russia’s more purposive role, Iran’s positive and growing influence, the ability of the Syrian people and their leaders to hold the fort in the midst of great adversity, the Hezbollah’s strategic astuteness and most of all the sacrifice and suffering of the courageous people of Palestine and the region as a whole will be the determinants of a new and bright future for West Asia.

New Zealand government makes false promises to address Maori poverty

Tom Peters

The corporate media used New Zealand’s national day, Waitangi Day, on February 6, to again glorify the Labour Party-led government and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.

Ardern spent five days touring Northland, the second most impoverished region of the country, before delivering a speech at the Waitangi Treaty Grounds on February 5. She repeated her government’s empty promises to address poverty, inequality and homelessness, including among indigenous Maori, who make up 15 percent of the population.

She told her largely Maori audience: “[W]hen we return in one year, in three years, I ask you to ask of us ‘what have we done?’ Ask us what we have done to improve poverty … hold us to account.”

The government’s populist stance is an attempt to placate widespread anger over the social crisis created by nearly a decade of austerity under the previous National Party government.

In the lead-up to last September’s election, the media, trade unions and pseudo-left organisations sought to trap disenchanted workers and young people behind the Labour Party by promoting Ardern, the newly-installed 37-year-old leader.

The Labour Party gained only 36.9 percent of the votes and was forced to form a coalition with the Greens and the right-wing populist NZ First. However, in the special Maori electorates, Labour received 59 percent. The Maori Party and its ally the Mana Party, which represent indigenous business interests, failed to gain any seats in parliament.

The Maori Party is discredited after spending nine years in coalition with National and supporting its regressive measures, including a Goods and Services Tax increase and the partial privatisation of power companies and state housing. Mana split from the Maori Party in 2011 and was fraudulently promoted as progressive by pseudo-left organisations. It lost its only seat in parliament in 2014 after a short-lived alliance with the pro-business Internet Party.

Virtually the entire media is seeking to drum up illusions in Ardern’s government. A New Zealand Herald editorial on February 9 asserted that Labour “is the party that represents the real interests and aspirations of Maori and those are the same as the interests and aspirations of all the lower paid or unemployed and underprivileged in New Zealand.”

Commenting on Ardern’s Waitangi speech, the newspaper fawned: “Our Prime Minister is young, female and about to have a baby. She is the epitome of the new confidence in New Zealand among the young as well their social and environmental values. Alleviating child poverty is her personal priority.”

Pro-Labour columnist Chris Trotter wrote that the Labour Party ran “an unabashedly class-based campaign” in the election, telling Maori workers that the Maori Party “sold you out to the corporate warriors of the Iwi Leadership Group,” the organisation representing tribal leaders, which worked closely with the National government.

Claims that the Labour Party will lift workers out of poverty are a fraud. Its election promise to halve child poverty by 2021 by increasing welfare payments was discredited last month when Treasury revealed it was based on inaccurate calculations.

On January 31, Ardern announced a revised “target” of halving child poverty in 10 years, i.e., after three more elections. The target is meaningless: no details were given as to how it would be achieved. Labour has ruled out increasing taxes on the rich and is committed to a tight cap on public spending, while increasing funding for the military and the police.

In response to a housing crisis that has left more than 41,000 people, including 14,000 Maori homeless, the government plans to build only 1,000 new state houses per year and 16,000 houses over the next three years—to be sold at market prices. Economist Shamubeel Eaqub, who authored a “housing stocktake” for the government, estimated that the country needs 500,000 more houses.

Far from opposing Maori capitalists, Labour and National-led governments alike have for decades enriched this thin layer at the expense of the working class.

The tribal elites have swung behind Ardern’s government. Her speech at Waitangi was the first time a prime minister spoke at the Treaty Grounds without any protest by Maori nationalist activists. Waitangi National Trust committee chairman Pita Paraone told Radio NZ there was broad support from Northland tribes for protocols to ensure no demonstrations would disrupt Ardern’s visit.

Waitangi Day commemorates the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 by representatives of the British Empire and hundreds of Maori chiefs. For decades, the treaty was widely regarded as a confidence trick, which facilitated Britain’s colonisation of the country based on fraudulent promises that Maori would be treated equally and their property rights preserved.

Since the 1970s, however, successive Labour and National governments have elevated the Treaty to the status of a national founding document that established a “partnership” between Maori and European New Zealanders.

The Labour Party, in particular, assisted by the trade unions and pseudo-left organisations, has promoted identity politics to divide the working class along racial lines and undermine resistance to the pro-market onslaught launched by Labour in the 1980s. Tens of thousands of workers in meat processing, transport, auto manufacturing and other industries were made redundant as government services were privatised and the economy opened up to global competition.

Through Treaty of Waitangi settlements, beginning in the 1990s, a layer of Maori entrepreneurs was cultivated to act as a buffer against the Maori working class. Governments have paid a total of $2.2 billion to Maori tribes, ostensibly to redress the crimes of colonialism. These have been used to establish profitable businesses in fisheries, tourism, property and other industries.

The Maori working class remains deeply impoverished. According to researcher Max Rashbrooke, wealth inequality within the Maori population is now twice as high as among white New Zealanders.

In 2013, the median income for an individual Maori person was $22,500 per year, a decline in real terms of $2,200 compared to 2006. Unemployment for Maori is officially 9 percent, twice the overall rate. Maori are more likely to be homeless, have a suicide rate 1.6 times that of non-Maori, and make up half the prison population.

By contrast, over the past decade, Maori capitalists, along with the ruling elite as a whole, have continued to profit. Total Maori business assets are estimated at $50 billion, up from $36 billion in 2010.

Since being installed, the Labour-led government has given extra payments to two of the country’s richest tribes. In mid-December, Waikato-Tainui and Ngai Tahu received $190 million and $180 million respectively, on top of previous payments that began in the mid-1990s.

Relativity clauses in the Treaty settlements mean other tribes will receive extra payments as the total amount paid to all tribes increases. There are 47 other settlement negotiations underway with various tribes. In her Waitangi speech, Ardern stressed her commitment to reaching a settlement with Ngapuhi, the country’s largest tribe.

Labour will expand the previous government’s Whanau Ora scheme, devised by the Maori Party, which privatised some health and welfare services to the benefit of tribal corporations. Tribal-based companies will also profit from the government’s policy to “partner” with private developers to build so-called affordable houses. These will be sold at $500,000 to $600,000, which is beyond the reach of most families.

Workers and youth should be under no illusion. The Labour-NZ First-Greens government will deepen the pro-corporate assault of National and the Maori Party at the expense of the entire working class. Workers can defend their interests only by uniting their struggles on the basis of a socialist program, in opposition to every capitalist party, including Labour and its allies.

The US signals tougher stance against Burma on Rohingya crisis

John Roberts

For months, Washington and its allies have ignored or downplayed the Burmese military’s brutal operations in the Rakhine state against the Muslim Rohingya minority, which have been underway since last August.

According to UN figures, 688,000 people have fled Burma [Myanmar] and are crowded into unsafe and unhealthy camps in the Cox’s Bazar region of Bangladesh, where they face new hardships if the monsoon season from June to October hits as hard as expected.

The US attitude to the humanitarian disaster is not determined by concern for the suffering of the Rohingya, but by geo-political interests, particularly its efforts to undercut and isolate China in the Indo-Pacific region.

Once again, Washington is exploiting the bogus banner of “human rights” to put pressure on the Burmese military and the National League for Democracy (NLD) government of Aung San Suu Kyi government to distance itself from Beijing.

In a speech last week, the US ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, adopted a harsher stance, calling on the Security Council to appoint a special envoy to investigate what she said was the military’s “cruel and barbaric” campaign against the Rohingya.

While Haley tried to distinguish between Suu Kyi and the military, she delivered an implicit warning: “This council must hold the military accountable for their actions and pressure Aung San Suu Kyi to acknowledge these horrific acts are taking place in her country.” Haley added: “No more excuses.”

Haley said it was time for the government to act and allow the international media, a UN fact-finding mission and a special rapporteur into the country. In other words, time is running out for Suu Kyi and, if she does not do Washington’s bidding, the “icon of democracy” will find herself the target of US condemnations.

For decades, the US and its allies denounced the Burmese junta as a rogue state and imposed harsh economic sanctions. In 2011, however, as part of its “pivot to Asia” against China, the Obama administration embraced the regime after it signalled its willingness to loosen its longstanding ties with Beijing.

Amid a media fanfare, Burma suddenly became “a developing democracy.” Sanctions were eased and Suu Kyi was elevated as a roving ambassador for the military to encourage foreign investment. Having won the 2016 election, the NLD formed government but the military continues to hold key ministries and a bloc of unelected parliamentary seats.

The US and its allies largely ignored the Burmese military operations against the Rohingya, defended by Suu Kyi and the NLD government, as long as the regime kept its distance from Beijing. However, the growing international outrage over the humanitarian crisis, along with the country’s economic problems, has compelled Burma to turn to China for assistance.

Without a doubt, as reflected in Haley’s remarks, the Trump administration has become increasingly concerned at the high-level exchanges between Burma and China, including:

* Last April, Suu Kyi’s handpicked President U Htin Kyaw visited Beijing for talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping and other senior officials that resulted in the signing of the Kyaukphyu-Kunming oil pipeline agreement.

* In the same month, Suu Kyi met with Chinese state investment officials to discuss the $US7.3 billion Kyaukphyu deep water seaport project in Burma.

* In May, Suu Kyi travelled to Beijing for the Belt and Road Forum to discuss Burma’s part in Xi’s grand plan to link the Eurasian landmass. She held meetings with Xi and Premier Li Keqiang and signed five Memoranda of Understanding.

* In June, Suu Kyi received in Burma General Fang Fenghui of China’s Central Military Commission to discuss bilateral military ties.

* In November, Burmese military chief Min Aung Hlaing visited China and met Xi. He Hlaing expressed thanks for China’s support at the UN in pressing for non-interference over the Rohingya humanitarian crisis. Xi offered assistance in resolving the issue and other ethnic conflicts.

Haley’s remarks at the UN followed public comments by Yohei Sasakawa, Japan’s special envoy for Burma. Speaking in New Delhi, Sasakawa told the Indian media that India and Japan had to cooperate more fully to help Burma resist Beijing’s attempts to exploit the Rohingya crisis to reinforce its influence in Burma. He warned that any attempt to reimpose sanctions on Burma over its brutal treatment of the Rohingya would leave the Suu Kyi government with no choice but to reforge close relations with Beijing.

“The Trump administration is unclear what their approach to Myanmar should be,” the Japanese envoy said. “The Japanese government is supporting the Myanmar government. We would like India to do more. Because of the US attitude, India must step up.” He added that India and Japan had to keep the door open for Burma, given its geopolitical importance in relation to the Indian Ocean.

Japan’s concern is that a tougher line by the US will cut across growing economic interests in Burma. Tokyo has ambitions to become the largest investor in Burma and plans to establish special economic zones to exploit the country’s large, young cheap labour force and its natural resources. Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Kono visited Rakhine state last month.

India also has plans for Burma, including completing a major highway that will connect India to South East Asia via Burma and Thailand. The highway is part of New Delhi’s “Act East” strategy designed to boost India’s economic, diplomatic and military ties in East Asia at the expense of China.

Burma is being drawn into the geo-political cauldron that is setting the stage for trade war and war between the US and China. The last concern of any of the countries involved is the plight of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees.

France to sign basing deal with India, drawing Europe into drive to war in Asia

Athiyan Silva

As French President Emmanuel Macron called for a return to the draft and air strikes against Syria last week, he was also pushing to expand Europe’s role in the war drive in Asia.

Under Trump, Washington has intensified its efforts to build up India as a counterweight to China in the Indian Ocean—Beijing’s lifeline for Persian Gulf oil and the pivotal channel for trade in manufactured products between Europe and Asia.

France is also escalating its military relations with India and plotting to expand its role in the Indian Ocean. With Paris working with Berlin to transform the European Union into a military machine, France’s strategic thrust into South Asia and the Indian Ocean region must be taken as a warning regarding the size of the European imperialist powers’ appetites and the scope of the wars they are preparing behind the backs of the population.

Macron is to visit India next month. While there, he is expected to sign off on a reciprocal agreement granting French naval vessels access to Indian ports for repair and resupply and Indian vessels the right to make routine use of France’s Indian Ocean military bases.

Although France’s colonial empire collapsed decades ago, it retains an extensive network of strategically-located Indian Ocean military bases. Indeed, France has recently expanded this network to the Persian Gulf, cashing in on the backing Paris has provided Washington in various US-led Middle East wars.

France has bases at Djibouti on the Horn of Africa, at Réunion island near Madagascar, in the United Arab Emirates, and in Mayotte off Mozambique. France and India are also preparing to build a military base in the Seychelles.

The latter will be part of a network of Indian Ocean bases India is developing as it integrates itself evermore completely into US plans to seize Indian Ocean and South China Sea chokepoints so as to impose an economic blockade on China.

Indian ships now routinely patrol the Straits of Malacca and India’s military exchanges intelligence with the Pentagon on Chinese ship and submarine movements in the Indian Ocean.

Under the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement (LEMOA) between New Delhi and Washington that was signed in 2016 and activated last summer, Indian and American warships and warplanes gained the right to routinely access each other’s military bases. Indian ships, for example, can now anchor at the Pentagon’s pivotal Indian Ocean base in Diego Garcia.

India has also set up military observation centers in the Maldives, Madagascar and Mauritius and earlier this month, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Oman, obtained rights to use that country’s key Arabian Sea port, Duqm, for supplying Indian Navy vessels.

India is also expanding its naval presence into the Pacific Ocean, including the South China Sea. Toward that end, New Delhi has dramatically enhanced its military-security cooperation with Singapore, including gaining the right to service its naval vessels there.

The Indian Ocean more and more resembles a powder keg that could explode into war at any time, with competing nuclear-armed powers setting up rival networks of bases to surveille and threaten each other.

India presents the expansion of its Indian Ocean presence as defensive, given its dependence on Mideast oil and the importance of the waterway for its foreign trade. But such claims are clearly bogus.

Since the beginning of the current century, India has dramatically expanded its military might, embarking on a crash-program to build a blue water navy and developing a nuclear triad, that is the capacity to launch nuclear weapons from land, air, and underwater.

The Indian bourgeoisie see its growing military capacities as a key means of compensating, in the great power struggle for markets, resources, and profits, for its chronic economic weakness and for securing the support of American imperialism.

India’s burgeoning navy and naval base network allows New Delhi in tandem with Washington to threaten to cut off Chinese oil imports from the Middle East, bring the Chinese economy to a halt, and force Beijing to its knees.

China, the world’s biggest oil importer, receives 60 percent of its oil from the Middle East and transports 80 percent of that through the Indian Ocean, as well as other raw materials from the Middle East and Africa.

Beijing has responded to the moves to strategically encircle it, by advancing its One Belt-One Road (OBOR) project for trade routes on land and sea across Eurasia, financed by Beijing's Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB).

With Pakistan, its ally and longstanding rival of India, China launched in 2015 the $50 billion China Pakistan Economic Corridor project (CPEC). It links western China to Gwadar, a strategically-located Pakistani port on the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean. When fully operational, the CPEC will enable China to transport Middle East oil and gas to China via a land route through Pakistan, thereby diminishing the threat of a US-Indian naval blockade in the Indian Ocean and cutting 16,000 km from the distance Chinese goods must travel to the Middle East and Africa.

China has also secured a rival military basing deal in Djibouti, and it is developing deep-water ports across the Indian Ocean, including with a 99-year lease on Hambantota port in southern Sri Lanka and the development of the Chittagong port in Bangladesh. It has also made major investments in the Maldives, including a development project that India claimed was in “listening distance” of its military bases.

The great-power tensions surging beneath the surface exploded into view this month, when it emerged that India might invade the Maldives to oust Chinese-backed President Abdulla Yameen. Beijing responded to reports that India’s military is ready for any eventuality in the Maldives, by urging all powers to respect state sovereignty. China's state-owned Global Times went considerably further, declaring in an editorial, “China will not interfere in the internal affairs of the Maldives, but that does not mean Beijing will sit idly by if India breaks the principle. If India one-sidedly sends troops to the Maldives, China will take action to stop New Delhi.”

Such conflicts underscore the explosive implications of Macron's decision to allow Indian forces onto French bases and Paris’ assertions that France is an Indian Ocean power. Any of a number of strategic rivalries or unresolved border conflicts in the Indian Ocean region could escalate into a global war between nuclear-armed powers including India, Pakistan, China, the United States and now France.

This also underscores the significance of the call by the German section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei, for the publication of agreements underlying the proposed conservative/social-democratic coalition government in Berlin that would work with Macron. Amid the relentless drive to war by the major powers, workers have a right to know what war plans are being formulated to advance the strategic and commercial interests of European imperialism.

Last November, France’s Ambassador to India, Alexandre Ziegler, boasted, “We have a growing cooperation in the Indian Ocean, where both India and France have focal positions, and we are in the process of forming a defence and security partnership in the Indo-Pacific.”

In this context, New Delhi has in recent years built up its air force and navy with the assistance of France. France has sold India six Scorpene submarines and 36 Rafale fighter jets, which are capable of carrying and firing nuclear weapons, for a cost of about 8 billion euros. France also conducts military exercises with India such as the Varuna (Navy), Garuda (Air Force), and Shakti (Army) exercises.

The two countries have formed a High Committee on Defence Cooperation, and top-ranking defence officials from both countries meet annually.

France, India’s 9th-largest investor, is putting billions of dollars in Indian armament, space, nuclear energy, railways, renewable energy and urban development projects. About 750 French companies, and 39 of the top 40 corporations in the French stock exchange, the so-called the CAC-40—including Areva, Eurocopter, Dassault, Thales, Alstom, Safrane, Renault and SolaireDirect—exploit the cheap labor available in India.

Puerto Rican Investment Summit discusses how to profit from human tragedy

Rafael Azul 

The Puerto Rico Investment Summit took place in San Juan on February 12 and 13. This fifth annual conference of investors and financial interest groups was originally scheduled for last October, but was postponed as a consequence of Hurricane Maria. The summit was first set up in 2013 to deal with the island’s debt crisis in the wake of favorable tax legislation (Actas 20 and 22) to attract what it calls “resident investors,” wealthy settlers, and new capitalist investments.

Oblivious to the hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans who have lost their homes and jobs, the as yet unknown number of deaths from the storm and the 65,000 who have been forced to seek refuge in Florida, New York and other parts of the US, the participants flocked to the summit as an opportunity to discuss both how to profit from this human tragedy and protect their speculative assets from US taxes.

This is certainly the case for crypto currency speculators that are actively looking for homes in the historic Old San Juan section of Puerto Rico’s capital city. The Puerto Rican administration of Governor Ricardo Rosselló has made it clear that it fully supports and will facilitate the importation of wealthy individuals by transforming Puerto Rico into a tax haven for these and other financial and real estate speculators and other potential money launderers.

Addressing the conference were over 40 speakers representing the elite of finance, insurance executives, real estate speculators, hedge and vulture fund managers, members of the unelected Fiscal Oversight Board of Puerto Rico, and government figures.

On Junuary 3, Manuel Laboy Rivera, Puerto Rico’s secretary of economic development and commerce, published an opinion piece headlined: “2018: Starting down Puerto Rico’s road to economic prosperity.”

Laboy celebrated that “more than 1,000 new resident investors already relocated to Puerto Rico and are benefiting from recent policy changes, amounting to more than $500 million in assets held in Puerto Rico” and allegedly creating two and a half jobs “per investor.”

“To investors interested in joining Puerto Rico’s economic transformation by establishing or relocating their companies in Puerto Rico, we invite you to learn more about the many unique business opportunities that Puerto Rico offers and the ways that they can be a part of Puerto Rico’s bright future. …”

Laboy also promised a speedy economic recovery for Puerto Rico, as a tax haven, supposedly “because our paradise performs.”

Brenda Gonzalez, president of this year’s summit, more concretely described the themes of this year’s summit—namely, to promote renewable energy and blockchain technologies (which manage Bitcoin transactions).

Endorsing the view that the savage devastation caused by Hurricane Maria has become a source of profit-making opportunities, Gonzalez declared: “In the end, it has been very interesting because we have been able to work on new approaches that were not contemplated in the beginning of 2017.”

In his speech at the summit, José Carrión III, a wealthy insurance mogul and president of the Fiscal Oversight Board, made it crystal clear that the Oversight Board intended to force Puerto Rico to pay a “reasonable and substantial” part of its $70 billion fiscal debt and additional unfunded pension liabilities of $50 billion.

Carrión made reference to the $17 billion appropriation for Puerto Rico recently approved in disaster funding—a pittance compared to the estimated $95 billion rebuilding needs of the island—and warned that Puerto Rico could not expect to be free of debt payments or that the federal government would solve Puerto Rico’s “significant” problems. The “significant” damages caused by Hurricane Maria include destroyed roads, bridges, sewers, water systems and electricity, along with the ruin of some 75,000 homes and severe damage to 300,000 others.

To revive the economy, Carrión also demanded a draconian labor reform, the slashing of welfare benefits, and continuing corporate tax cuts and subsidies. “We are aware that some reforms are not political palatable,” he said.

In truth, the Oversight Board has broad powers to unilaterally impose many of the “reforms” that Carrion calls for. The rules that established the Fiscal Control Board under the Democratic Party administration of President Obama, the PROMESA Act, give it broad powers. One of its subsections, Title V, grants the board the right to privatize government assets and public services, such the Electric Energy Authority, airports, public buildings and roads. It has the power to impose those and other measures, regardless of the environmental or any other impacts, as evidenced by its recent decision to build the Arecibo incineration plant, despite governor Rosselló’s opposition.

Under the terms of Title V, people are only allowed 30 days to question or oppose the decisions of the Oversight Board, allowing very little time to alert, let alone rally opposition to its decisions.

While the financial elites discussed how best to take advantage of the “opportunity” provided by Hurricane Maria, the island lurched into yet another crisis.

On February 16, the Fiscal Oversight Board announced that the Electric Power Authority (PREPA) now faces a shutdown from lack of operating funds and was requesting an immediate $300 million loan to continue operating through March 2018. The announcement came shortly after a federal judge had denied a $1 billion loan to PREPA on the grounds that neither the Oversight Board nor the Puerto Rican government had provided sufficient evidence to justify the loan.

“Without the loan, and given the potential risk to its operations, we have no other responsible option than to begin implementing a limited operational emergency plan,” declared Ernesto Sgroi, president of PREPA’s governing board. “We fear this setback will result in the exacerbation of human hardship since potable water, power for medical procedures, communications, and open schools are at risk of disappearing again.”

Before dawn Friday, the governing board filed the scaled-back loan request and said Puerto Rico will have to further reduce power generation and personnel if it does not obtain the funds by Tuesday. It also said that the power authority is in jeopardy and that $300 million would allow the utility to operate only until late March.

Gov. Ricardo Rosselló, in Philadelphia, requested that the US Treasury Department release a separate billion-dollar loan that Congress approved in October for disaster recovery efforts, as officials warn the Puerto Rican government is running out of money.

“This is an urgent situation,” he said. “If the power goes out in Puerto Rico, if there’s an inability to buy fuel, it is a humanitarian crisis.”

If there is no loan by this Tuesday, Oversight Board officials indicated that PREPA would have to lay off employees and curtail generation of electricity.

PREPA authorities, meanwhile, announced the rationing of electricity beginning this Sunday, “dialing down” its production and causing rolling blackouts and brownouts. This latest crisis takes place as 400,000 Puerto Ricans still have no electricity five months after Maria wiped out the island’s electric system.