Trump falsely claims “fraud” as vote counting erases his leads in Georgia and Pennsylvania

Patrick Martin

In an appearance on national television Thursday, President Donald Trump denounced what he falsely called “fraud” as the basis of his impending defeat in the 2020 presidential election. He was reacting to his plummeting leads in Georgia and Pennsylvania as mail ballots, predominantly from Democratic voters, were being counted in both states, despite lawsuits brought by the Trump campaign.

Trump’s televised appearance made clear that, for the first time since the ritual of presidential concessions was established in 1896, the defeated candidate is refusing to concede, introducing into the next two and a half months an element of extreme crisis. Trump’s combative response to his impending defeat contrasts with the stance taken by the Democrats in 2016, when president Barack Obama insisted that Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton concede the very evening of the election even though she had a massive lead in the popular vote.

President Donald Trump leaves the podium after speaking at the White House, Thursday, Nov. 5, 2020, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

While Trump at present lacks the political support to overturn the results of the election, he is laying the basis for a campaign to present himself as the victim of a “stab in the back.” This narrative will be used by himself and members of his family to perpetuate the development of a fascistic movement, which will become a permanent and significant presence in American politics.

The president took the podium in the White House Briefing Room at 6:45 p.m., in the midst of the network evening news broadcasts, but ABC, NBC, and CBS all cut away from his remarks as he began to voice a series of blatantly false and self-contradictory claims about the process of vote counting in the five states where results in the presidential voting remain in question.

The decision of the three networks—all owned by giant media corporations—to cut away from a presidential appearance was unprecedented. It indicated that major sections of corporate America have lost confidence in Trump, and fear that his attempt to defy an electoral verdict will provoke massive popular opposition and destabilize the United States politically.

Similarly, Wall Street continued to rally based on the expectation of a Biden victory, thought to signify increased likelihood of a new federal bailout of big business, along the lines of the bipartisan CARES Act passed last March by Congress.

Another indication of Trump’s increasing isolation was the absence of Vice President Mike Pence at the briefing, or any other significant figure in the Republican Party. After Trump’s adamant declaration, “If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from me,” no leading congressional Republican issued a statement of support.

Trump was reacting viscerally to the sharp decline in his electoral fortunes. In Georgia, where he had a lead of more than 600,000 votes after the counting of in-person votes cast on November 3, the margin between the two candidates had shrunk by Thursday night to only 1,805 votes, with thousands of mail ballots still uncounted. In Pennsylvania, where Trump led by 700,000 votes on Election Day, the counting of mail ballots had reduced his margin to only 26,319 by late Thursday, with several hundred thousand mail ballots still to be counted in the state.

It was clear from the trends that by Friday Biden will be in the lead in both states, which have 36 electoral votes between them, enough to secure the majority in the Electoral College for the former vice president. It is likely that both network consortiums—ABC, CBS and NBC, and Associated Press-Fox News—will declare Biden the victor in the presidential election Friday.

Trump’s remarks were an attempt to preempt this. While emphasizing his campaign’s legal challenges to the vote counting, the initial results have not been promising. Judges in Michigan and Georgia flatly rejected the Trump campaign’s complaints about process violations. He offered not a scrap of evidence to back his charges of vote fraud. Failing to win support in the judiciary, Trump is appealing to sections of the fascist right to take action now to disrupt vote counting and prevent the official validation of his electoral defeat.

Georgia has a Republican governor and secretary of state, the chief administrator of the election process. In Pennsylvania, the majority of the counties now reporting mail ballot votes for Biden are Republican-controlled. Because of Trump’s dismissal of coronavirus fears, Democratic voters predominate in the mail balloting, even in Republican counties.

Trump suggested, without offering any evidence, that large numbers of votes were being “dumped” into the system if they were for Biden and removed if they were for him. But at every level, both Democratic and Republican officials were involved in vote counting.

In the two states where Biden, rather than Trump, is in the lead, the demand of the Trump campaign is to count the votes. In the states where Trump is in the lead, the demand is to “stop the count.” This contradiction only underscores the cynical falsifications of the Trump campaign: count my votes, but not his.

In Nevada, where Biden now leads by 11,428 votes, a small number of votes were counted in Washoe County (Reno) and Clark County (Las Vegas), as well as in the thinly populated rural counties, resulted in a net gain of about 3,500 votes for Biden. The bulk of the uncounted votes, some 51,000, are in Clark County, a Democratic stronghold, and these will be reported sometime Friday.

Only in Arizona is the Trump campaign gaining votes, after continued vote counting in Maricopa County (Phoenix) which accounts for 65 percent of the statewide total. But it was unclear whether Trump would win enough votes among the 400,000 uncounted votes to overcome Biden’s 60,000-vote statewide lead.

In order to win in the Electoral College, Trump must win Pennsylvania (20), North Carolina (15), Georgia (16) and either Arizona (11) or Nevada (6). If the four states—besides North Carolina, which has postponed a final count until next week—fall to Biden, his Electoral College vote would reach 306, the same as Trump’s total in 2016.

The focus on the Electoral College should not distract from acknowledging that Biden has already surpassed the previous record for the popular vote, set by Barack Obama in 2008, of 69.5 million. His vote total has already surpassed 73 million and is likely to approach 80 million votes once the late-counting, heavily Democratic West Coast states of California, Oregon and Washington are fully counted.

All the legal challenges issued by the Trump campaign to the vote-counting process so far have been rebuffed by the judiciary. A superior court judge in Georgia dismissed a lawsuit filed by the Trump campaign against vote counting in Savannah, Georgia. In Michigan, a state judge rejected a lawsuit filed by the Trump campaign over vote counting in Detroit.

The New York Times reported Thursday that Attorney General William Barr had sent a memo to federal attorneys suggesting that they had the power to send armed federal agents into vote-counting centers across the country to suppress fraud. But Trump made no reference to such measures in his remarks at the White House Thursday evening.

2020 election results explode the identity politics narrative

Eric London

An initial examination of the voting data in the 2020 presidential election exposes as false the racialist narrative of American politics that is relentlessly promoted by the Democratic Party. Several aspects of the election data are particularly significant in showing the predominance of socioeconomic factors in the outcome.

A comparison of the results of the 2016 and 2020 elections shows that the major factor that turned the election was the impact of the pandemic and the economic crisis on a substantial section of working-class whites who cast their vote for Biden.

There was a substantial increase in turnout in the working class as well as sections of the lower middle class hard hit by the coronavirus pandemic. This helped Biden widen the margin of his popular vote victory, which is expected to rise to an estimated 6 or 7 million votes—double the margin Clinton beat Trump by in 2016. Over 66 percent of eligible voters cast votes this year, the highest since 1900, before women had the right to vote. Turnout has not reached 60 percent since 1968 when it was 60.7 percent.

There was a pronounced increase of votes against Trump among men, white men and whites without college degrees. In states that were decimated by the coronavirus pandemic—including Wisconsin, Michigan and Arizona—this shift among white men accounted for Biden flipping the state.

Biden won the votes of an estimated 8.6 million more men (of all races) than Hillary Clinton did in 2016, while Trump’s vote among men increased by roughly 2.2 million from 2016. Among all white voters, Trump won 57 percent of the vote, the same as in 2016. Biden, however, won 42 percent of white voters, an increase from the 37 percent won by Clinton in 2016. Overall, an estimated 6.4 million more white people voted for the Democrat in 2020 than in 2016.

Votes by Gender in the 2020 US elections

Among white men, Trump suffered a slight decline in 2020, winning an estimated 28.77 million votes in 2020, down from 28.83 in 2016 despite the overall increase in white male turnout. While Biden still failed to win a majority of this cohort overall, he won roughly 5.4 million more votes from white men than Clinton won in 2016.

Votes by Gender and Race in the 2020 US elections

In 2020, both Trump and Biden increased votes from white people without college degrees. While Trump was supported by an estimated 3.1 million more such voters in 2020 than he did in 2016, Biden turned out roughly five million more than Clinton did. In other words, Biden won the votes of “new” voters in this category by a 60-40 margin. Trump’s share of the vote fell slightly from 2016 while the Democratic share increased from 29 to 35 percent.

The 2020 results also show a shift against Trump in the working class.

There were roughly 23 million more votes cast for either Biden or Trump by voters with family incomes below $100,000 than were cast for Clinton or Trump in 2016. Among workers with family incomes less than $50,000, Trump won an estimated 2.1 million more votes than he did in 2016, but Biden won 4.9 million more than Clinton. This increased the share going to the Democrats from 53 percent in 2016 to 57 percent in 2020.

Among the wealthier cohort, Trump significantly increased his support. In 2016, Clinton and Trump tied among those with family incomes above $100,000, with each winning roughly 21.8 million votes. But in 2020, several million affluent people switched to support Trump. Wealthier voters supported Trump because his policy of “herd immunity” has fed the rising stock market and enriched this parasitic layer.

But as a share of the electorate, voters with family incomes over $100,000 declined substantially from 34 percent to 28 percent, an estimated 3 million vote decline from 2016 to 2020.

This is not so much the product of a decline in turnout among the rich, who always vote with far higher consistency. It primarily reflects the worsening economic position of substantial sections of the lower middle class, who went from having family incomes above $100,000 in 2016 to falling into the $50,000-$100,000 range in 2020. This layer, seriously impacted by mass unemployment caused by the pandemic, now makes up 38 percent of the electorate, a massive increase from 30 percent in 2016.

The “new” voters in the $50,000-$100,000 category (that is, those who either were in the higher bracket in 2016 or did not vote for either of the two main parties in 2016) cast an estimated 14.1 million votes for Biden versus 5.2 million for Trump. While Trump won this category by a 49-46 percent margin in 2016, Biden won it in 2020 by a 56-43 margin.

Votes by Income in the 2020 US elections

Particularly significant is the fact that Trump substantially increased support among women, the rich, and wealthier sections of the African-American, Latino, Asian-American and LGBT populations.

Among African-American men, Trump increased his share of the vote from 13 percent in 2016 to 18 percent in 2020, accounting for an increase of roughly 500,000 overall votes. Democrats only increased black male turnout by some 600,000, meaning Trump and the Democrats split all “new” African-American male votes almost 50-50.

Among African-American women, Trump more than doubled both his vote total and his share of the vote. Trump won just four percent of African-American women in 2016, a total of about 383,000 votes. In 2020, Trump won eight percent, or 868,000 votes. These are unprecedented gains.

While exit polls do not break down the African-American vote by income category, it does break the overall “nonwhite” vote based by education, which is the closest proxy for income available. And Trump won an estimated 1.5 million more votes from this generally wealthier section of the population—a total of 5.4 million—than in 2016. He increased his share of the vote from 22 percent in 2016 to 27 percent in 2020.

Votes by Education in the 2020 US elections

The figures among Latino voters are similar to those for African-Americans and Asian-Americans. Among LGBT voters, Trump tripled his total votes and doubled the share of the overall LGBT vote. In 2016, Trump won roughly 950,000 votes from LGBT people—14 percent of the total to the Democrats’ 77 percent. In 2020, Trump won about 3 million votes, or 28 percent of the total to the Democrats’ 61 percent.

Although there was not an increase in turnout among young voters (aged 18-29), Trump lost 600,000 votes from this cohort compared with 2016, while the Democrats gained nearly two million. Young people made up slightly less of the electorate than in 2016, but the turn against Trump was very substantial.

The undermining of the racialist narrative infuriates those who make it their professional responsibility to promote racial divisions, claiming that the United States is based on “white supremacy” and that Trump is the natural representative of white men. Maintaining the racialist narrative is critical to the social interests of privileged layers of the upper middle class that use it to advance their own interests.

The New York Times’ Charles Blow wrote a column Wednesday pointing to some of the shifts in the votes of African Americans indicated above but concluding that it merely underscores “the power of the white patriarchy” and its ability to “reach across gender and sexual orientation and even race.” That is, Blow absurdly claims, a growing section of (wealthier) African Americans and other minorities voted for Trump in order to uphold white supremacy.

The dominant factors influencing shifts in voting patterns are socioeconomic in character, but this does not automatically mean that workers are conscious of their independent class interests. Workers are subjected to all sorts of influences and manipulations, including those voting for Trump, who in his own noxious way sought to appeal to economic uncertainties and capitalize on hostility to the Democratic Party, which is as much the party of bank bailouts, war and social inequality as the Republicans.

The great danger is that, within the framework of the existing political system, controlled by two capitalist parties, there is no genuine expression of the social and economic interests of the vast majority of the population, the working class of all races and genders.

The task of socialists is to develop within the working class a genuine class consciousness and to build a political movement based on their common class interests in opposition to the capitalist system.

India: How COVID-19 Accelerates Malnutrition in Women and Children

Akanksha Khullar

The COVID-19 pandemic and measures to contain it have had inevitable negative impacts. Rising unemployment, food supply disruption, a downturn in international trade, etc, pose serious challenges to the already precarious Indian food and nutrition security. Women and children will continue to bear a disproportionate burden of the pandemic-accelerated health and food crisis.

India’s Malnutrition Profile

There are about 189.2 million undernourished people in India; a majority of whom are women and children. Malnutrition and the widespread prevalence of stunting, wasting, and nutritional deficiencies among women and children are well-recognised elements of India’s profile in the Global Hunger Index.

According to government figures from the year 2015-2016, 22.9 per cent of women in the 15-29 age group are underweight, as compared to 20.2 per cent of men in the same age group. Further, according to The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2020 report, in 2016, nearly 51.4 per cent of women of reproductive age in India were suffering from anemia.

The prevalence of undernutrition and anemia among almost half of the women in India, especially pregnant women, puts a serious burden on the country’s food security. This is predominantly because undernourished mothers can trigger cycles of undernutrition by passing on nutrient and vitamin deficiencies to newly born babies.

In fact, approximately 60 million—which is roughly about half—of all children in India are underweight, about 45 per cent are stunted, 21 per cent are wasted, 57 per cent are vitamin A deficient, and 75 per cent are anemic.

Malnutrition has thus become the most significant contributor to the under-five mortality rate in India. While India’s under-five mortality rate for males is 38.4 per cent, it is approximately 40.4 per cent for males.

These statistics indicate that undernutrition in India is a gendered problem. The root cause for these male-female differentials can be found in native socio-cultural norms and mindsets. Such norms, rooted in patriarchy, would suggest that distribution of resources—including food—should be done in a hierarchical manner, with male members of the family typically at the top of the ladder.

This perception problem is compounded by factors such as poverty, access to public health facilities, decision-making power, etc, which widen the gender gap in access to food and nutrition.

COVID-19's Impact

The pandemic has threatened India's food security landscape across all four indicators: availability, access, stability, and utilisation of resources. It could in turn further intensify the existing problem of malnutrition among women and children.

The country-wide lockdown led to a sudden cessation of economic activity and triggered large-scale unemployement. According to a joint report by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and the Asian Development Bank (ADB), nearly 4.1 million Indians have lost their jobs during this time.

People often adopt coping mechanisms such as purchasing less food, substituting wholesome food with less nutritious alternatives, and decreasing the number of meals eaten on a day-to-day basis to deal with the crisis and reduced incomes. A reduction in financial security risks increasing gaps in intra-household distribution of resources, which could further negatively impact women in the household. Further, women account for 81 per cent of the country’s workforce employed in the informal sector. The pandemic's impacts also cut off their access to steady jobs and salaries.

The disruption of food supply chains, labour shortages, limited production, and restricted mobility also have a direct bearing on pregnant women's food and nutrition consumption. For instance, a shortage of fruits, vegetables, meat, fish, eggs, etc could potentially compromise nutrient supply to pregnant women and new mothers. This in turn accelerates undernutrition and lowers immunity in the midst of a pandemic, making them more prone to infections and diseases.

COVID-19 has also substantially affected the network of government-run health and development centres, popularly known as Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS). These centres are responsible for providing food and primary healthcare, among others, to children below six years of age, and mothers—especially those from low-income-families—through anganwadi workers.

Although the Delhi government on 25 August announced the resumption of work by ICDS centres and anganwadi workers, it also noted that issues related to hunger and malnutrition would not be covered in the scope of activities.

Conclusion

There are clear pathways in which the pandemic intersects with a fragile food and nutrition security landscape in India. Together, this will very likely have a disproportionate impact on women and children, as detailed above. Conversations around how resiliency can be built into addressing the widening gender gap in access to nutrition must thus play a bigger part in policy considerations.  

Police Violence: a Crisis of Masculinity?

David Rosen

The numbers tell the sad story.

As of September 2020, 721 people have been shot to death by the police and, of them, 96 percent (694) were male and 4 percent (27) were female. This was same percentage of police killings in 2019 when, out of a total of 1,004 people who were killed, 96 percent (961) were male and 4 percent (43) were female. A similar pattern is evident in the breakdowns of police killings for 2017 and 2018.

A similar pattern of police killings was evident during the period of 1980 thru 1998 when 98 percent of those killed were males. Of those killings, over half (56%) were White people while about two-fifths (42%) were Black people. During the period of 1976 to 1998, the FBI reports “8,578 felons were justifiably killed by police”; killings by police were referred to as “justifiable homicides” and the persons that police killed were referred to as “felons.”

A revealing study by two Columbia University law professors, Jeffrey Fagan and Alexis Campbell, examines the racial character of police killings. They found that between 2015 and 2018, there were 3,757 “police-involved fatalities.” They note that just over half (51.9%) of those killed were White and about one in four (25.2%) were Black. In addition, just under one in five (18.7%) were Latinx and the remaining 4 percent were Asians, Pacific Islanders, Native Americans and Others.

Killing of civilians is endemic to policing. But are police killings of males a social ritual or an expression of a deeper aspect of masculinity?

Aurelia Terese Alston points out, “Policing is a male dominated field with a culture of hyper-masculinity.” The FBI reports for 2017 there were a total of 956,941 “law enforcement employees” in the U.S and, of these, 73 percent were male and 27 percent were female. In 2013, 88 percent of full-time law enforcement employees were men.

More disturbing, as the American Psychology Association reports, “men commit 90 percent of homicides in the United States and represent 77 percent of homicide victims. They’re the demographic group most at risk of being victimized by violent crime.”

There is a tragic dialectic between masculinity and policing killings that has peculiar meaning today as the rate of police killings – especially of Black and Latino males — remain high. How this dialectic plays out may suggest the deeper changes now remaking American society.

***

Being a “man” today is a challenge. Once upon a time, American culture was grounded in a traditional notion of “hypermasculinity” that some have referred to as “hegemonic masculinity.” It has been defined as follows:

… a set of values, established by men in power that functions to include and exclude, and to organize society in gender unequal ways. It combines several features: a hierarchy of masculinities, differential access among men to power (over women and other men), and the interplay between men’s identity, men’s ideals, interactions, power, and patriarchy.

Some suggest that the concept derives from Antonio Gramsci and reflects “a position of dominance attained through relative consensus rather than regular force, even if underpinned by force.” It is a tension that is grounded in a belief that links masculinity to the traditional notion of the “breadwinning,” the family provider.

In the good-old days – which, of course, never truly existed – pure masculinity was grounded in patriarchy and the authoritarian power of the male, be he a god, king, warrior, boss, husband or simply the guy next door. In those days, the architype “man” was without question heterosexual, physically strong and muscular, sexually dominant, unemotional, stoic and non-communicative, and committed to the hierarchal power of the status quo.

However, the relentless, grinding commodification of daily life under capitalism has stripped most of traditional patriarchy of its power. The reducing of nearly all social relations to market-mediated exchanges contributed to the slow but determined rise female power that helped erode the once-mythologized and real power of the hyper-masculine male. One consequence is that the 21^st century male is “sensitive,” emotional, multi-sexual and questioning of the status quo. However, males often earn less than females and women are earning more higher education degrees then males.

Sadly, the traditional link between patriarchy and hypermasculinity has come to be represented by blue-collar or working-class men, represented by construction and factory employees, fireman and policemen. Frank Rudy Cooper, a law professor at University of Las Vegas, points out, “Working class men who take orders or lack status in other ways often resort to hypermasculinity in an attempt to regain social status.”

Cooper links masculinity to policing: “Not surprisingly, given the working-class backgrounds of most policemen, there is a close association between hypermasculinity and police work.” He warns, the “association is seen in the qualifications for the job: the size requirements, upper body strength prerequisite, and the ability to beat someone into submission.” Susan Martin, an authority of women and policing, adds, “Since a key element of policing — gaining and maintaining control of situations — remains associated with manhood, male officers do gender along with doing dominance.”

Some analysts note the same link between patriarchy and hypermasculinity among poor and working-class men of color. Ann McGinley, a law professor at University. of Nevada, notes that “young black men from poor urban neighborhoods who adopt the ‘cool pose’” expresses a version of hypermasculinity that “emphasizes toughness and invincibility.”

The link between patriarchy, hypermasculinity and policing is grounded in what Cooper identifies as “command presence.” “An officer has command presence when he projects an aura of confidence. … He demonstrates it [hypermasculinity] by showing people that he is in charge [that is] antithetical to policing based on negotiation and problem-solving.” In this way, he decisively shows that he is not acting in a “feminine” manner.

Hypermasculinity in policing is most clearly expressed through the “punishment of disrespect.” Cooper claims such punishment “stems from the fact that police officers demand deference to the badge. In doing so, they often act more out of a desire to preserve their authority to enforce the law.” Harlan Hahn grounds a police officer’s “authority” in his ability “to enforce a law.” Cooper argues that such notes that the “political opportunity to control other men to be a major attraction of the job.” He adds, a “policeman’s fear that a challenge to his authority is a challenge to his manhood ….”

***

During the Cold War era of the 1950s, masculinity was in flux. The old model of post-Civil War era notion of masculinity was based in a man’s ability to produce and declined in the wake of WW-II. It was superseded by the new “white collar” model of masculinity based on managerial authority, service-based output and family-oriented lifestyle. in influence. As Thomas Andrew Joyce observed, “One’s manliness was communicated to other men through visible success in the marketplace.”

The postwar period saw a second challenge to traditional notions of masculinity. The sociologist Michael Kimmel, in “Masculinity as Homophobia,” identifies this challenge as “homophobia.” It was not a fear of homosexuality but “the fear that other men will unmask us, emasculate us, and reveal to us and the world that we do not measure up … the fear of being seen as a sissy dominates the cultural definitions of manhood.”

A half-century late, masculinity is being increasingly split between hypermasculinity and the more “sensitive” male. This tension seems to be reverberating within the law-enforcement establishment as reflected by the high level of police killings and the growing efforts to humanize policing. These efforts are being promoted by those championing such efforts as “community policing” and “defunding police.”

However, without humanize the “masculinity” associated with policing, with uphold “law and order,” police killing of other men will not fundamentally change.

U.S. is Doing Its Best to Lock Out China From Latin America and the Caribbean

Vijay Prashad

On August 20, 2018, El Salvador’s leftist president Salvador Sánchez Cerén announced on national television that El Salvador would break its ties with Taiwan and recognize the People’s Republic of China. This was in accord with international law, said Sánchez Cerén, and it would bring “great benefits for our country.”

Not long after, U.S. Senator Marco Rubio took to Twitter to announce that this move “will cause real harm to relationship with U.S. including their role in #AllianceforProsperity.” Earlier, both the Dominican Republic and Panama had made the shift, but Rubio said that El Salvador would be specially punished because it was ruled by the left-wing Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). It did not seem to matter to Rubio that his own country, the United States, had shifted its ties to China from Taiwan in 1979.

The “Alliance for Prosperity,” which was Rubio’s hashtag, referred to U.S. President Barack Obama’s deal with several Central American countries to provide some modest development aid in exchange for a beefed up police force and the prevention of transit of migrants toward the United States; this was border enforcement dressed up as development. Rubio’s threats were inconsequential; the money was too little, and the price paid by the populations of Central America was too steep.

In November 2018, Sánchez Cerén went to Beijing where he met with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Trade relations were front and center of the discussion, including encouragement for El Salvador to participate in China’s growing Belt and Road Initiative. A year later, in December 2019, Sánchez Cerén’s successor—Nayib Bukele—arrived in Beijing to reaffirm the ties between El Salvador and China, as well as the desire of his center-right government to develop Belt and Road projects. It did not seem to matter if the president of El Salvador was from the right or the left; both were eager to acknowledge the importance of China’s role in the region, and both were willing to “harm”—as Rubio put it—their relationship with the United States.

As news of the Chinese deals were announced, Bukele was criticized for getting El Salvador into a “debt trap.” He responded firmly on Twitter. “What part of ‘non-refundable’ do you not understand?” he asked, referring to the fact that China was giving El Salvador grants and not loans.

America Crece

But the game was not over. On January 30, 2020, Bukele stood beside Adam Boehler, the head of the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC), to sign an agreement to implement “America Crece” in his country.

En route back to El Salvador from China in December, Bukele stopped in Tokyo, where Prime Minister Shinzo Abe warned him not to allow Chinese companies to invest in the La Unión port. China’s Asia Pacific Xuan Hoa Investment Company had been in talks to invest a considerable amount of money in the port. The U.S. government had campaigned against this, and now Abe whispered the U.S.’s warning into Bukele’s ear. The chill of the tensions between Washington and Beijing stopped Bukele’s hand; it was inevitable that he would seek to placate the United States as far as possible without breaking with China.

The instrument used is America Crece, or “Growth in the Americas,” a U.S. project that was launched in 2018. The U.S. says that China is not transparent with its deals, but there is almost nothing available on America Crece (and the U.S. State Department and the DFC did not immediately respond to requests for comment). An FAQ on the U.S. State Department website says that the program “seeks to catalyze private sector investment in infrastructure in Latin America and the Caribbean.” The U.S. government will operate to open doors for U.S. (and at least in one case, Israeli) companies.

In October 2018, the U.S. Congress passed the Better Utilization of Investment Leading to Development (BUILD) Act, which joined the Overseas Private Investment Corporation and the Development Credit Authority into the DFC. U.S. President Donald Trump placed Boehler—Jared Kushner’s former roommate—as its head. The budget for the agency is $60 billion. In September 2020, a bipartisan consensus drew up the America Labor, Economic Competitiveness, Alliances, Democracy, and Security (America LEADS) Act to undermine Chinese investments. Both Democrats and Republicans are committed to this anti-China agenda.

One of the main DFC projects in El Salvador is the construction of a natural gas plant in Acajutla, which is owned by the U.S. energy firm Invenergy and its Salvadorian subsidiary Energía del Pacífico. U.S. Ambassador Ronald Johnson said that the DFC will provide financing for the project (it will be about $1 billion). Eyebrows have been raised in El Salvador about the lack of concern for the environmental impact of the plant as well as the subsea pipeline on marine life and on the coastal habitat.

Ugliness of America Cerce

America Cerce funds have been promised across the border in Honduras to build the Jilamito hydroelectric plant. On August 13, 2020, U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar and 27 other representatives wrote a letter to Boehler, in which they pointed out that the project “has met a sustained campaign of opposition from affected local communities since it was announced.” An attorney for the communities—Carlos Hernández—was assassinated in April 2018, following the attacks that killed activist Ramón Fiallos in January 2018.

In late July 2020, armed men entered the home of Sneider Centeno in Triunfo de la Cruz and abducted him. They did the same to three other leaders of the Garífuna community. The U.S. representatives wrote that the DFC is cutting deals with Honduras’ President Juan Orlando Hernández who “has a record that includes gross human rights violations, credible accusations of electoral fraud, deep connections to narcotrafficking and organized crime, and corruption.” There is ugliness in America Cerce.

$1 Trillion Versus $60 Billion

The U.S. has committed $60 billion to the DFC. Meanwhile, China plans to spend at least $1 trillion on the Belt and Road Initiative. Part of the Chinese money comes, as Bukele wrote when he left Beijing, as grants.

All of this irks Washington. David Malpass, U.S. undersecretary for international affairs, said in February 2018 that the U.S. faced a serious challenge from “China’s non-market activities.” China invests and provides grants, Malpass said, with no insistence that the recipient countries “improve” their “macroeconomic policies”; in other words, China does not make it a habit to place conditions on the loans such as to undermine labor laws or to cut subsidies for health and education (as the International Monetary Fund and the U.S. Treasury Department often do); nor does China privilege the private sector. These are the “non-market activities.”

In a recent article, Professor Sun Hongbo of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences wrote that the U.S. government “pressure[d] Latin American countries to cooperate with the U.S. global policy agenda,” so that these countries—such as El Salvador—would have to choose between Beijing and Washington. No such pressure comes from China, wrote Sun.

This is a view echoed in Latin American and Caribbean capitals; they face pressure from Washington to break ties with China, something loathsome to most of the countries, as it has been for El Salvador’s Bukele.

African Women in Media (AWiM) Labour Migration Reporting Programme 2020

Application Deadline: 20th November 2020

About the Award: The programme features the Labour Migration Media AWards, Labour Migration Reporting Training Programme, and research into the lived experiences of labour migration journalists in Africa. As part of our Visibility Project, AWiM is also working with Wikimedia communities in Nigeria, Uganda, Cameroon and Algeria, to train women journalists on how to write on Wikipedia, and create more profiles and articles on labour migration in Africa.

With labour migration becoming an increasingly important policy issue, the Labour Migration Media Awards aims to celebrate and honour African journalists committed to labour migration issues in their reportage. It is envisaged that the project will culminate in the establishment of a community of practice of journalists reporting on labour migration in Africa.

Eligible Fields: The awards are open to all African journalists, and entries must be published or broadcast with an Africa based media organisation. As such, in recognition of the important contributions of journalists to Labour Migration Reporting, we are pleased to announce the following award categories:

1. Migrants’ Rights,
2. Remittance and Diaspora Contributions to Development,
3. Governance of Labour Migration,
4. Gender-based Migration,
5. Economic Impact of Migration,
6. Migration and Health,
7. Intra-African Migration,
8. Fair recruitment, forced labour and human trafficking of migrant workers
9. Labour Migration News Team of the Year

Type: Training, Award

Eligibility:

1. Professional journalists are invited to submit works published/broadcasted between 01 January 2019 – 20 November 2020
2. Participants must have the nationality of a member state of the African Union, and be at least eighteen years of age. They can live anywhere in the world
3. Only works published/broadcast with a media organisation in a Member State of the African Union are permitted.
4. Applicants can submit up to two entries across all categories
5. Joint submissions are permitted provided the submissions are authored by the entrants
6. Participants must be the author(s) of the works submitted in her/his/their name, and own copyright or have been authorized by the copyright holder(s) to submit the entry(s)
7. Submitted works can be in any journalistic format (text, photojournalism, audio, audio-visual, data etc.)
8. Photographic entries must be free of any name or text on the image itself, instead a clear caption, in English, must be provided on submission
9. No entry fee is payable.
10. Only entries submitted between 19 October 2020 – 20 November 2020 will be considered
11. All entries must be submitted via the official contest form, and must comply with the rules and eligibility criteria set. Entries sent in other ways, and/or that do not comply with the rules and eligibility criteria, will not be accepted.
12. Any entries that are late, illegible, fraudulent, or which bring/would be likely to bring the reputation of African Women in Media, African Union, International Labour Organisation, and/or International Organisation for Migration into disrepute will be rendered ineligible to participate in the Awards and will be disqualified.
13. You will grant African Women in Media, African Union, International Labour Organisation, and/or International Organisation for Migration unrestricted, unfettered and irrevocable non-exclusive rights in all works submitted for entry into the Awards (or where such rights are owned by a third party, you shall procure that such third party grants such rights) for African Women in Media, African Union, International Labour Organisation, and/or International Organisation for Migration to use such works in any way it determines in relation to the Awards.
14. The panel of judges will be determined by African Women in Media, African Union, International Labour Organisation, and/or International Organisation for Migration in its/their sole discretion and will meet in November 2020.
15. Judges reserve the right to not select entries that do not meet the required standards.
16. Judges reserve the right to transfer entries for consideration in other categories at their discretion.
17. The judges uphold the integrity and reputation of the Labour Migration Media Awards and, as such, reserve the right to disqualify any piece of work and/or finalist if, in the judges’ opinion, there exists reasonable doubt about the authenticity and/or ownership of the submitted entry and/or the integrity of the finalists.
18. The judges’ decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into.
19. Categories and sponsors of the awards may be subject to change.
20. Finalists will be required to sign affidavits of eligibility, confirming amongst other things copyright ownership and/or clearance of all works submitted, and containing releases granting African Women in Media, African Union, International Labour Organisation, and/or International Organisation for Migration and all sponsors of the Awards, the right to use their names, voices, pictures and work submitted, without compensation, in any media for the purposes of advertising/public relations, training, exhibiting and promotion of all matters related to the Awards
21. You hereby consent that African Women in Media, African Union, International Labour Organisation, and/or International Organisation for Migration may share the information you provide with the partners and judges of the Awards.
22. Three finalists will be announced per category and one winner will be selected per category
23. African Women in Media, African Union, International Labour Organisation, and/or International Organisation for Migration and all sponsors of the Awards disclaim any liability for loss to any person or property relating to the delivery and/or subsequent use of, or participation in, any of the prizes awarded. The winners agree to abide by any and all terms and conditions of the supplier(s) of the prizes. The promoter is AWiM.
24. The Competition shall be covered and construed with international law.
25. You acknowledge that this is only a Competition and the awarding of any prize does not give rise to an employment, agency or joint venture relationship or arrangement between you and African Women in Media, African Union, International Labour Organisation, and/or International Organisation for Migration

Click here to find out more on the awards rules and eligibility

Eligible Countries: African countries

Number of Awards: 200

Value of Award: Winners will be announced on 7 December 2020, and receive a cash prize of $500 each, and access to the five courses under the Labour Migration Reporting Training Programme on AWiMLearning.

How to Apply: Click here to submit your entry

• It is important to go through all application requirements in the Award Webpage (see Link below) before applying.

Visit Award Webpage for Details

The link between tobacco and cancer

Pradeep Krishnatray

One in four cancer patient is a tobacco consumer in India. And if you honestly say that you have not seen any smoker suffer from cancer, as is likely, you may still be right because you have seen the other three.

You may even agree with Mr. Shyam Charan Gupta, a beedi baron, one of the BJP MPs, and the former head of the parliamentary committee of subordinate legislations that examined the provisions of Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products Act 2003. In 2015, Mr. Gutpa had said that he could produce a lot of people who are chain smokers of beedi and have had no disease.

However, lack of exposure to tobacco-related cancer does not mean absence of such cases. The recently released ICMR’s 2020 Report of National Cancer Registry Programme (NCRP) estimates that by the year 2025 the number of tobacco-related cancer cases will exceed 4 lakhs and will constitute 27 percent of all cancers in India. In fact, tobacco-related cancer cases will exceed all major forms of cancer such as cervical, breast and gastro-intestinal tract, etc.

NCRP is a repository of data for surveillance of cancers in the country. The 2020 report includes data for four years (2012 – 2016) from 28 Population Based Cancer Registries (PBCRs) and 58 Hospital Based Cancer registries (HBCRs) in India.

The population based cancer registries shows that South India performs better than other parts of the country. Among males, with slightly over 40 percent relative proportion of sites of cancers associated with tobacco use, Hyderabad district and Chennai fall much behind most other parts of the country. Similarly, among females, lower proportion have cancers associated with tobacco use in Hyderabad district and Chennai (about 14 percent) than in cities such as Ahmedabad (urban), Bangalore, Bhopal, Kolkata, Mumbai, Nagpur and Pune.

Broadly speaking, tobacco consumption is of two types: Smoking and smokeless. In India, people smoke tobacco in the form of cigarettes, bidis, hooka, hookli, chillum, chutta, and dhumti. While cigarette and bidi are predominant forms of tobacco smoking, hooka use is catching up in the form of hooka bars, especially in urban areas.

According to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), an hour of smoking hookah is even more harmful than that of cigarette. This is mainly because an hour-long session of hookah involves 200 puffs as compared to cigarette which requires 30 puffs in an hour. In August 2020, Covid 19 forced the Delhi government to ban belatedly the use of hookahs, with or without tobacco, in all public places, including hotels, restaurants and bars.

Dhumti, on the other hand, has a gender twist. Used mostly in Goa, both male and female smoke it. However, males smoke dhumti in conventional manner, but females smoke it in reverse manner — by keeping the burning end inside the mouth.

The smokeless form of tobacco use in India includes betel quid chewing, mawa, mishri, khaini, gutka, snuff, and as an ingredient of pan masala.

Whether smoking or non-smoking type, tobacco-induced cancer affects several parts of the body: Lip, tongue, mouth, pharynx, oesophagus, larynx, lung and urinary bladder. However, the picture is not as clear as may seem.

Cancer adversely affects different parts of the male and female body depending on where the person lives. In the south, north and east, lung is the most common site of cancer among males. Of the total number of cancer cases in these regions, lung cancer affects around 30 percent of males. In the western and central regions, cancer mostly affects the mouth. In the northeast, the site is the hypopharynx — part of the throat (pharynx) that lies beside and behind the larynx.

However, among females in the central, east and western regions of the country, tobacco-induced cancer affects the mouth. In the north, cancer oesophagus and cancer lung have the highest proportion among the cancers associated with use of tobacco. Cancer oesophagus is common in the north eastern region.

In all of this, the villain of the piece is the tobacco. It is one of the top 10 risk factors driving both death and disability in the country. It is a behavioural risk meaning if they will it, tobacco users can stop its consumption.

India is the third largest producer of tobacco in the world. With revenues exceeding $6 billion in 2019, ITC, an Indian multinational conglomerate, is part of the top 10 leading tobacco companies in the world in terms of net sales. Besides cigarettes, the company has diversified into several product lines and services. However, cigarettes constitute only a very small percentage of total tobacco consumption in the country. Despite this, the increase in (real) price of cigarettes is much larger than increase in the price of chewing tobacco and bidis that are consumed in far greater quantity. Since 2008, the price of a packet of cigarette with 10 sticks has increased by over Rs. 20 but a bundle of bidis of 25 sticks has increased by about Rs.6 and that of chewing tobacco (10g) by about Rs. 2.

Tobacco use contributes to more than 13 lakh deaths in the country. Although tobacco-related morbidity and mortality continue to be high, the prevalence of any form of tobacco use has decreased by six percentage points in the last 10 years or so. This is mainly due to aggressive government action in the form of increase in the price of cigarettes and prominent display of pictorial health warnings on packs.

About 29 percent of Indians consume tobacco either in smokeless or smoke form. Nineteen Indian states have tobacco consumers less than 29 percent. The five southern states — Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka and Kerala belong to this category.

In Tamil Nadu, 20 percent of adult population consumes tobacco. In nearby Puducherry, that number declines to almost half of that in Tamil Nadu. The worst off are the seven northeast states with Tripura topping them all with 65 percent of population consuming tobacco.

Interestingly, over 90 percent of the 76, 750 adult respondents of the all-India Global Adult Tobacco Survey-2 survey said they believed that tobacco causes serious illness. This fact indicates that many of such people are ready to change their behaviours. The question who will nudge them to lead a cancer-free life.

Macron’s Incitement: ‘Crisis in Islam’ or French Politics?

Ramzy Baroud

There is no moral or ethical justification for the killing of innocent people, anywhere. Therefore, the murder of three people in the French city of Nice on October 29 must be wholly and unconditionally rejected as a hate crime, especially as it was carried out in a holy place, the Notre Dame Basilica.

However, we would be remiss to ignore the political context that led a 21-year-old Tunisian refugee to allegedly stage a knife attack against peaceful worshippers in Nice. While it is fairly easy to recognize the individual culprit behind such a violent event, it takes much introspection, let alone honesty, to identify the true culprits, who, often for political reasons, fan the flames of hate and violence.

Since his advent to the Elysée Palace, in May 2017, French President Emmanuel Macron, has led an aggressive foreign policy abroad and an equally contentious domestic agenda. These choices were not random, as Macron was dogged by numerous domestic challenges: rising inequality and unemployment, mass protests led largely by the ‘Gilets Jaunes’ – Yellow Vests –  Movement and the unhindered rise of right-wing, anti-immigrant populist movements, such as the National Front (FN) of Marine Le Pen.

It is important that we recall the political atmosphere through which Macron was elected, for the man was meant to be the sensible choice propelled forward by the once-ruling Union for a Popular Movement (UMP).

The latter’s candidate, François Fillon, failed to acquire the necessary votes to decisively win the elections on April 23, 2017. Instead, it was Macron, a relative political ‘outsider’ from the one-year-old En Marche (EM) Party that had the chance to stop the progress of Marine Le Pen’s racist and chauvinistic FN. Indeed, Macron won the second runoff elections on May 7. His victory was decisive.

Judging by the mass protests that soon followed Macron’s election, later exacerbated by the economic crisis that resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic (which, thus far, has killed over 36,000 people in France alone), Macron is no longer popular among his people.

With new elections scheduled for early 2022, Macron and France’s ruling elites are quite nervous. The French economy is unlikely to recover anytime soon, not only because of the coronavirus pandemic – the destructive impact of which is expected to persist over the coming months and years – but also because, in the last three years, there has been no serious structural overhauling of the French economy with the stated aim of sting the pandemics of inequality, unemployment, racism, and political corruption.

As is often the case with inept leaders, Macron has invested in creating political distractions at home and abroad, manufacturing crises and provoking unnecessary confrontations.

The French leader has seized on the opportunity presented to him as a result of the American retreat from various Mediterranean conflicts, namely Libya, Syria, Lebanon, and the East Mediterranean gas dispute. The shift in US foreign policy priorities, coupled with the British abandonment of the European Union – scheduled to go into full effect at the end of this year – led Macron to behave as if the de facto leader of Europe.

Racism in France is rife, and the electoral successes of the various right-wing nationalistic parties are a testament to this assertion. Instead of confronting this protracted disease which has afflicted the French body politic for far too long, Macron has labored to find some kind of a balance, where he continues to appeal to the liberal forces in his country without fully alienating the right-wing chauvinistic constituency. To achieve this delicate balance, Macron has opted for the most politically – and, to state bluntly,  cowardly –  convenient option: targeting France’s most marginalized and impoverished French Arab and African communities in the name of fighting for the ‘values’ of the Republic against ‘Islamic terrorism’ and the dark forces that are lurking within his country.

This is not to argue that domestic terrorism is not a major problem deserving attention and counter-strategies. However, judging by recurring statements made by French officials and media – which tend to demonize entire groups of mostly immigrant populations and their religious values – it seems as if the French government is leading a crusade of sorts against its own Muslim population. It appears as if Macron, himself, is leading a populist march against Islam and Muslims in France and elsewhere. This pathetic display of bad, opportunistic leadership was the true catalyst of today’s crisis.

This brief timeline is sufficient to link Macron to France’s latest violence:

On October 2, Macron assumed the role of the scholarly theologian lecturing his countrymen on Islam. “Islam is a religion which is experiencing a crisis today, all over the world,” he said, laying out a plan to combat Islamic “separatism” in France. This provocative statement had an international dimension which, expectedly, raised the ire of Muslim governments and populations the world over. The domestic component of his comments was even more dangerous, as he practically declared French Muslims a fifth column, whose ultimate aim is to destabilize and to break up the French Republic.

More provocations followed, once more the berating of Islam and the mocking of Prophet Mohammed, African and Arab immigrants and so on, in the name of French values, democracy and freedom of expression. Judging by the bloody attack on the Charlie Hebdo’s magazine in January 2015 and the violence and mosque burning of over 30 mosques in its wake (though the latter received little or no media attention), it should have taken no particular genius to deduce that the latest government-led provocations and anti-Muslim incitement were also doomed to result in violence and counter-violence.

Indeed, on October 16, a French teacher, who displayed images that mocked Prophet Mohammed, was reportedly killed by an 18-year-old Chechen Muslim refugee. The teacher was later declared a French hero and celebrated for his supposed sacrifice for French values.

More mockery and insults of Islam and Muslims continued, this time on a much larger scale. The anti-Muslim incitement was accompanied by acts of violence against French Muslims, particularly women. Again, this kind of violence received little attention in the international media and was hardly seen in France as an expression of a mass movement reflecting religious or nationalistic ideas.

With Turkey, Pakistan and political movements representing every Muslim-majority country in the world jumping into the fray, Macron has managed to make himself the center of international attention as the indefatigable fighter for Western values and democratic ideals – with a subtle emphasis on being the champion of Christianity, as well.

The true crisis is not a crisis in Islam, but in French politics. If anyone deserves mockery, it is not Prophet Mohammed – whose message of nearly 1,500 years ago was that of peace, justice and equality – but, rather, Macron himself, who continues to distract from his unmitigated failure as a politician by pitting the French people, religious or otherwise, against each other. Hopefully, Charlie Hebdo will be satirizing that reality sometime soon.