About the Award: The world-renowned initiative aims to connect global social enterprise leaders with business executives to offer more sustainable, scalable market-based solutions to the problems of impoverished people across the globe.
In supporting the UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5, Miller Center positions itself to support women’s economic growth.
Investing in women’s economic empowerment (WEE) across the globe is pivotal in engendering gender equality, poverty eradication, and inclusive economic development.
The goal of this initiative is to assist social enterprises that support women-owned businesses employing a vigorous and holistic approach to get their desired goals.
In addition, the upcoming accelerator programs serve as a platform whereby social enterprises with a gender-focused strategy are brought together to offer mentorship as well as help build sustainable and scalable businesses.
This first-ever Women’s Economic Empowerment GSBI Virtual Accelerator Cohort will commence in February 2021. GSBI provides 6 months of highly personalized mentorship and quality content.
Eligible Field(s): Agribusiness, Business services, Clean technology and energy, Utilities, Construction and manufacturing, Creative, media and entertainment, Education, Financial services, Healthcare, ICT, Leisure and travel, Retail and wholesale, Consumer durables, Consumer non-durables, Transport and logistics, Water, sanitation and hygiene, Automotive, Clothing and textiles production, Computer hardware, Electronics, Food production, Furniture
Type: Entrepreneurship
Eligibility: To qualify, interested social enterprises must meet all of the specified criteria:
Address gender issues and promote gender equity by having: Women-owned and/or women-led teams Products or services that improve the quality and lives of women and girls substantially
A focus on ensuring workplace equity in staffing, management, and boardroom representation
Be workplace equity focused along their supply chain
Be focused on serving the poor and underserved communities with a commitment to be open to an earned revenue model with potential for scalability
Be in operation for a minimum of one year
Be willing to devote 3-6 hours per week to complete program deliverables and work with mentors virtually.
Eligible Countries: in Africa, Americas, Antarctica Region, Asia, Europe, Oceania
To be Taken at (Country): Online
Number of Awards: Not specified
Value of Award: The programs offer many benefits to hand-picked social entrepreneurs such as:
PROVEN PROGRAM: Miller Center’s structured, proven curriculum has a proven track record of helping over 1,000 social enterprises attain operational excellence and prepare for investment.
MENTORS: Each participant will be accompanied by executive mentors with expertise in innovation and entrepreneurship
NO CHARGE: All Miller Center GSBI accelerator programs are offered without charge to selected social enterprises.
Duration of Award: 6 months
How to Apply: Interested applicants can sign up here. The deadline for applications is Tuesday, December 1, 2020.
It is important to go through all application requirements in the Award Webpage (see Link below) before applying.
“Making billions from arms exports which fuel the conflict while providing a small fraction of that in aid to Yemen is both immoral and incoherent.”
So thundered Oxfam’s Yemen Country Director, Muhsin Siddiquey after consulting figures from the Stockholm Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) showing that members of the G20 have exported over $17 billion worth of arms to Saudi Arabia since the Kingdom entered the conflict in Yemen. “The world’s wealthiest nations cannot continue to put profits above the Yemeni people.”
They do, and will continue to do so, despite the cholera outbreak, coronavirus, poorly functioning hospitals, and 10 million hungry mouths. The latest illustration of this is the Trump administration’s hurried $23 billon sale of 50 F-35 fighter aircraft, 18 MQ-9B Reaper drones, air-to-air missiles and various other munitions to the United Arab Emirates. The UAE used to be a more enthusiastic member of the Saudi Arabian-led coalition that has been pounding Yemen since 2015. Despite completing a phased military withdrawal from the conflict in February 2020 to much fanfare, Abu Dhabi remains involved in the coalition and an influential agent. Amnesty International has issued a grim warning that such weapons might well be used in “attacks that violate international humanitarian law and kill, as well as injure, thousands of Yemeni civilians.”
With the imminent change of administration in the United States, there is a moral flutter in Congressional ranks, though much of it remains meek and slanted. Democratic Senators Bob Menendez (NJ) and Chris Murphy (Conn.), along with Republican Senator Rand Paul (Ky) intend introducing separate resolutions disapproving of President Donald Trump’s sale. Menendez felt morally mighty in warning the Trump administration that “circumventing deliberative processes for considering a massive infusion of weapons to a country in a volatile region with multiple ongoing conflicts is downright irresponsible.”
Murphy expressed his support for “the normalization of relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), but nothing in that agreement requires us to flood the region with more weapons and facilitate a dangerous arms race.”
The US President-elect, Joe Biden, has thrown a few titbits of promise to critics of the US-Gulf States circle of love and armaments. During the Atlanta Democratic debate held in November last year, he entertained a departure from a policy embraced during the Obama administration, certainly with regards to Saudi Arabia. “I would make it very clear that we were not going to in fact sell more weapons to them.” A Biden administration would “make them pay the price, and make them in fact the pariah that they are.” Specifically on the Yemen conflict, he promised to “end the sale of material to the Saudis where they’re going in and murdering children.” Fighting words, easily said when a candidate.
This view was reiterated to the Council on Foreign Relations in August this year. “I would end US support for the disastrous Saudi-led war in Yemen and order a reassessment of our relationship with Saudi Arabia.” The Trump administration had issued the kingdom “a dangerous blank check. Saudi Arabia has used it to extend a war in Yemen that has created the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, pursue reckless foreign policy fights, and repress its own people.”
Progressive groups have picked up a scent they find promising. Policy director for Win Without War, Kate Kizer, expressed hope “that [Biden] starts by immediately undoing as many of the just-notified sales to the UAE as possible, and by putting the brakes on transfers that Congress has previously tried to reject under Trump.”
The moral wash on this is, however, thin. Menendez, for instance, is hardly giddy about the fate of Yemeni civilians in the context of such arms sales, citing “a number of outstanding concerns as to how these sales would impact the national security interests of both the United States and of Israel.” Priorities, priorities.
Biden’s top foreign policy advisor, Tony Blinken, seems less concerned about who will be the target of the weapons in the UAE sale than any upset caused to that most unimpeachable of allies, Israel. Sales of the F-35, for instance, were intended as a US-Israeli preserve. Selling it to other powers in the Middle East might well compromise the “qualitative military edge” doctrine Washington adopts towards the Jewish state. “The Obama-Biden administration made those planes available to Israel and only Israel in the region,” explained Blinken in an interview with the Times of Israel. The new administration would have to “take a hard look” at the F-35 sale. Was it, he wondered, a quid pro quo for the normalisation deal between Israel and the UAE?
Mammoth arms sales continue to remain matters of business and politics, with business tending to be the crowing representative. Halting or curbing arms sales is only ever trendy and never permanent. Oxfam reminds us of that blood-soaked truth. “When arms exports by G20 nations to other members of this [Arab] coalition are included, the figure of $17 billion rises to at least $31.4 billion between 2015 and 2019, the last year for which records are available.”
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has announced an additional £16.5 billion in military spending over the next four years—a 10 percent annual increase, and the largest boost in real terms in 30 years.
The funding is in addition to the Conservative Party’s manifesto pledge to increase defence spending by 0.5 percentage points above inflation each year. Combined, the two measures will lift the UK’s defence budget by £21.5 billion by March 2025, to £63 billion.
A soldier with the 4th Mechanised Brigade is pictured engaging the enemy during Operation Qalb in Helmand, Afghanistan. (Wikimedia Commons)
Johnson’s announcement is the starkest confirmation that the ruling elite are stepping up their plans for military confrontations in pursuit of their geo-strategic aims.
The promised billions will be used to create a National Cyber Force and Space Command, establish a military artificial intelligence agency, and develop the UK’s next-generation fighter jet and drone programmes. The Royal Navy will take the bulk of the money “to restore Britain’s position as the foremost naval power in Europe,” said Johnson. This would allow plans for 13 new frigates and replace support ships for Britain’s new aircraft carriers.
Introducing the increased spending, Johnson reveled in the death and destruction enabled by “technologies that will revolutionise warfare”. Artificial intelligence would be able to offer “a soldier in hostile territory” an “array of options, from summoning an air strike to ordering a swarm attack, by drones or paralysing the enemy with cyber weapons.” “Our warships and combat vehicles would “carry ‘directed energy weapons’, destroying targets with inexhaustible lasers.” For the military “the phrase ‘out of ammunition’ will become redundant.”
Summarising the militarist agenda behind his statement, Johnson told Parliament, “Reviving our armed forces is one pillar of the government’s ambition to safeguard Britain’s interests and values by strengthening our global influence, and reinforcing our ability to join the United States and our other allies to defend free and open societies.
“The international situation is more perilous and more intensely competitive than at any time since the Cold War and Britain must be true to our history and stand alongside our allies. To achieve this we need to upgrade our capabilities across the board.”
The timing of the move is significant, coming shortly after the US presidential elections. Johnson is trying to extricate his government from its foreign policy crisis over Brexit—with just a few weeks remaining before Britain’s Brexit “transition” period expires on December 31 and no agreement yet reached with the European Union on a trade deal. The crisis is intensified by the US election victory of the anti-Brexit Joe Biden.
The Financial Times notes, “The new financial deal comes just a week after Mr Johnson promised US president-elect Joe Biden that Britain was determined to remain a valuable military ally.” According to Sky News, former Tory defence and foreign office minister Tobias Ellwood “said the news would not be lost on the incoming [Biden] administration...”
The Guardian reports that details of the defence spending were “put together at breakneck speed” as Downing Street sought “to reassert control after last week’s No 10 meltdown, which led to the departure of chief aide Dominic Cummings and his ally Lee Cain.” Cummings and Cain were leading figures in the Brexit campaign.
Johnson’s decision was also made with an eye on the Scottish National Party’s loudening calls for Scottish independence in the wake of Brexit. Defence Secretary Ben Wallace commented Wednesday, “It plays a very strong role—defence—in the Union… The United Kingdom, as the United Kingdom, is the only scale big enough to support such a broad and deep group of defence forces.”
At the same time, the spending announcement leaves open the door to a continuing alliance with Donald Trump’s administration, if he is able to remain in office as part of his ongoing coup operation. Trump’s fascistic appointee to the position of US defence secretary, Christopher Miller, responded to the news by saying, “The UK is our most stalwart and capable ally, and this increase in spending is indicative of their commitment to NATO and our shared security. With this increase, the UK military will continue to be one of the finest fighting forces in the world.”
Johnson intends to salvage the UK’s global position post-Brexit through a slavish embrace of American imperialism, centred on escalating aggression towards Russia and China. Coupled with transforming the UK into a low-wage, “Singapore-on-Thames” platform, militarism is pivotal to his “Global Britain” agenda.
The Conservatives’ DailyTelegraph house organ crowed yesterday, “Johnson has set his sights on transforming the UK into Europe’s leading military power, an aspiration that will have a significant bearing on post-Brexit Britain’s global standing…
“With a military equipped for the warfare of the future, Britain will be a prized ally throughout the world.”
Setting the tone for much of the British ruling class following the US elections, Dr Robin Niblett CMG, the Director and Chief Executive of the influential Chatham House foreign affairs think tank, called on the Johnson government to join a Biden administration in “defending democracy” and countering “the authoritarian alternative”. He cited the UK’s cynical and provocative offer of citizenship to Hong Kong residents—used to up the ante against China—and the introduction of the largely anti-Russian “Magnitsky provisions” into the UK Sanctions Act as positive examples.
“These steps,” Niblett said, “can now serve as the foundation for a more modern, 21st century ‘special relationship’ between the UK and the US…”
British aircraft carriers HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Queen Elizabeth moored at Portsmouth harbour, November 2020 (credit: WSWS)
Britain already has troops deployed as part of NATO formations across much of Russia’s western border and in the Middle East against Russia’s ally, Syria. Next year, the UK’s new £3 billion HMS Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier will make its maiden voyage to the Far East, at the head of a nuclear-armed strike group, to take part in US-Japanese military exercises against China. Johnson’s spending announcement, and the proposed new US-UK “special relationship”, are preparations for even more aggressive manoeuvres. The carrier, announced Johnson, “[W]ill lead a British and allied task group on our most ambitious deployment for two decades, encompassing the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean and East Asia.”
These criminal adventures will be paid for with the lives and livelihoods of the working class. Besides the casualties of any military operations, the expansion of British militarism must bring with it an assault on living standards. The government is refusing to consider extending a miserly £20-a-week increase in Universal Credit welfare payments beyond next April—at a cost of £9 billion. Even more significant, it emerged just hours after Johnson’s announcement that Chancellor Rishi Sunak plans to freeze public sector workers pay for another three years in next weeks’ spending review. It is no coincidence that the projected £23 billion saving from the pay freeze is almost exactly the same as the military budget increase (£21.5 billion).
Johnson revealed his £20 billion-plus injection for the military just days after plans emerged to cut foreign aid spending from 0.7 to 0.5 percent of GDP.
In its Wednesday editorial, “This welcome boost to military spending will strengthen the UK's post-Brexit global role”, the Telegraph intoned. “If, as a nation, we want to spend more on defence then savings must be made in other programmes.” A spokesman for the Institute for Fiscal Studies warned that the commitment “will make funding health, pensions and social care in face of [an] ageing population even harder.”
The Labour Party warmly endorsed Johnson’s “long overdue” expansion of British militarism, seeking to outflank the Tory government on the right.
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer responded in parliament, “We welcome this additional funding for our defence and security forces and we agree that it is vital to end what the prime minister calls…an ‘era of retreat’.” Shadow Defence Secretary John Healey attacked the Tories for their decade in power, during which “the size of the armed forces has been cut by a quarter, defence spending was cut by over £7 billion”.
The cross-party enthusiasm for a surge in British militarism is a mark of the explosive geopolitical tensions building up under the pressure of the pandemic and its economic fallout. Just two weeks ago, the UK’s most senior military commander, General Sir Nick Carter, made the extraordinary warning that a third world war was “a risk”. Describing the world as “a very uncertain and anxious place”, he continued, “you could see escalation lead to miscalculation.
“We have to remember that history might not repeat itself but it has a rhythm and if you look back at the last century, before both world wars, I think it was unarguable that there was escalation which led to the miscalculation which ultimately led to war.”
On Wednesday, a federal judge in New York’s Eastern District acceded to an unprecedented request by the US Department of Justice to drop all charges, including drug trafficking and money laundering, against retired Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos Zepeda, Defense Secretary of Mexico from 2012 to 2018.
The release and backstage maneuvers highlight, above all, the submissive relationship between the Mexican government and US imperialism, as well as the grave dangers this raises for the native and immigrant workers and youth in both countries.
The request was announced in a joint statement by US Attorney General William Barr and his Mexican counterpart, Alejandro Gertz Manero, who explain that the case is being handed over to Mexico “in the interests of demonstrating our united front against all forms of criminality.”
General Cienfuegos in 2018 receiving award at Pentagon's Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies (Credit: NDU Audio Visual)
Cienfuegos “may be investigated and, if appropriate, charged, under Mexican law,” reads the statement.
On November 11, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) handed Mexican authorities a 743-page package of evidence against Cienfuegos. The US indictment, now closed, claimed that prosecutors had thousands of incriminating BlackBerry Messenger communications between Cienfuegos and the H-2 Cartel.
These exchanges allegedly show that Cienfuegos received bribes to locate ocean freight for drug shipments, introduce cartel leaders to other Mexican officials, and attack rival organizations. This helped the H-2 drug cartel expand its reach to Mazatlán and the entire state of Sinaloa.
Nonetheless, after a US government airplane dropped him off in Mexico on Wednesday, Cienfuegos was given a medical test and allowed to walk out of the Toluca Airport as a free citizen, under no travel restraints.
The General Prosecutor’s Office (FGR) in Mexico issued a statement indicating that “the agent of the Public Ministry of the Federation notified Gen. Cienfuegos formally of an existing investigation involving him,” based on the information received from the US government.
However, his lawyer in Mexico, Rafael Heredia, explained to CNN on Thursday evening that Cienfuegos has not been informed of any investigation “against him” and that he is not facing any charges in Mexico.
During his last court hearing before being released, Cienfuegos brazenly said he was not worried about getting prosecuted in Mexico. In the Mexican media, several legal experts have indicated that the evidence in the US case gathered through phone tapping operations will be considered illegal and invalid in Mexican courts.
Cienfuegos is widely expected to enjoy his retirement as an immensely wealthy four-star general.
On Thursday morning, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Foreign Secretary Marcelo Ebrard, held a press conference to deny claims that Mexico pressured Washington in any way to release Cienfuegos. Ebrard claimed the US simply made the decision to acknowledge that it had violated a 1992 information-sharing agreement.
While the indictment was issued by a Brooklyn grand jury on August 14, 2019, US officials have said they feared the Mexican Army would cover for Cienfuegos, and that an extradition request would die in the Mexican bureaucracy. For all practical purposes, this was the ultimate result.
The initial response of López Obrador to the arrest of Cienfuegos at the Los Angeles Airport on October 15 was generally supportive, promising to not “cover for anyone” as part of the central pretense of his administration of combating corruption.
Then he met his current Secretary of Defense, Gen. Luis Cresencio Sandoval, who reportedly described a brewing rebellion in the high command of the Army, who considered the arrest an affront against them. La Política Online reported at the time a growing “anti-US climate” within the Mexican military brass as well as discussions about suspending cooperation with the DEA.
Two days after the arrest, López Obrador changed his tone and began airing his displeasure. He denounced the DEA for “being entirely entangled with the Navy Secretariat” when the alleged crimes were perpetrated.
“The DEA should be open about its own participation in all of these cases, because they undoubtedly cohabited with [Genaro] García Luna and the Gen. Defense Secretary [Cienfuegos] during the last administration,” he explained, referring to former Secretary of Public Security García Luna, who remains under US custody, accused of protecting the Sinaloa Cartel.
Yet, López Obrador immediately added: “I thank President Donald Trump because, whenever we have had difficult issues, he has called to offer help. … Of course, he doesn’t do it to interfere in Mexico, to rule over Mexico, he does it to help, cooperate, but it’s important to say that Mexico is an independent, sovereign country.”
López Obrador then instructed Foreign Secretary Ebrard to send a protest note to the US State Department. Ebrard also held repeated conversations with Barr, reportedly to express that “trust” had been breached, and that Mexico was considering retaliatory measures regarding national security cooperation.
The New York Times, the Washington Post and Vice all reported anonymous claims by US officials that attribute the release of Cienfuegos chiefly to threats by Mexico to expel DEA officials. Such claims, however, must be taken with a grain of salt, especially amid efforts to appease widespread discontent reported within the DEA and other agencies over the decision.
Reuters writes that Mike Vigil, a former DEA chief of international operations, “expressed skepticism Mexico would prosecute Cienfuegos, and suggested the dismissal was a ‘gift’ from U.S. President Donald Trump to reward López Obrador for not recognizing Joe Biden as U.S. president elect.”
Acting US Attorney Seth DuCharme told the federal judge Carol B. Amon at the hearing Wednesday that “the broader interest in maintaining that relationship in a cooperative way outweighed the department’s interest in pursuing this particular case.”
The Cienfuegos case has not only increased suspicions toward the López Obrador administration and the Mexican military, whose leadership is still largely composed of generals appointed by or close to Cienfuegos. The cases of García Luna and Cienfuegos, as well as the latter’s release, have also further exposed the utilization by consecutive US administrations of Mexico’s catastrophic drug war for bolstering its neocolonial control over Mexico and building up the country’s repressive apparatus.
Throughout the Cienfuegos affair, López Obrador displayed the extent of his deference to the military, upon which the Mexican ruling class and US imperialism are increasingly relying for enforcing social austerity and the “herd immunity” coronavirus policy.
The release of Cienfuegos foreshadows a new escalation in the repression of Mexican workers and youth, as well as migrants escaping state and gang violence, catastrophic storms and economic devastation wrought by the pandemic in Central America.
While López Obrador’s offers nothing but subservience, Trump has insulted Mexicans repeatedly, made threats to impose debilitating tariffs and invade Mexico with US troops, and elevated fascist forces within the United States that are violently hostile to immigrants as part of his drive to establish a presidential dictatorship.
In the face of this reality, López Obrador boasted on Wednesday that the release of Cienfuegos meant: “No more meddling violating our sovereignty ever again. Of course, [we’ll have] cooperation, and I say this again, this has been understood very well under the Donald Trump administration.”
Labour Party-run Croydon Council in south London has effectively declared bankruptcy. On November 11, it issued a Section 114 notice under the 1988 Local Government Finance Act, which councils are required to do if it appears they do not to have sufficient financial resources to be able to carry on.
Consequently, all spending must cease, apart from for statutory services and to safeguard vulnerable people. In addition, existing commitments and contracts continue to be honoured. Following the announcement, the council must meet within 21 days and draw up proposals to cut non-essential spending and balance the books. Unlike central government, local authorities are not permitted to borrow to fund their day-to-day running costs and must keep to balanced budgets or use reserves.
Croydon Council headquarters (Wikimedia Commons)
Following a report by its own auditors, Grant Thornton, the council was placed under a government review in October. The report highlighted, “collective corporate blindness to both the seriousness of the financial position and the urgency with which actions needed to be taken” and further noted that financial problems dating back to 2017/18 had not been addressed.
According to the Evening Standard, “In her letter issuing the Section 114 notice, the council’s director of finance Lisa Taylor warned of a £66 million budget black hole for the current financial year. This includes £36 million in ‘undeliverable’ income from the council’s in-house property developer, Brick by Brick.”
This is only the second use of a Section 114 notice in recent times since Conservative-run Northamptonshire County Council (NCC) issued one in 2018. NCC, which serves a population of nearly three quarters of a million people, effectively declared bankruptcy in February that year when it disclosed a £70 million budget shortfall. At the time, NCC was the first local authority to issue a Section 114 notice for 20 years.
The Local Government Association (LGA)—the national membership body for local authorities—is to investigate the actions of senior management at Croydon Council to see if there is any justification for disciplinary action.
A LocalGovernmentChronicle article November 16 reported that the investigation would look at the period from April 2017 to September 2020 covered by the recent public interest report on the council. “This criticised the council for failing to act to bring spending under control over a number of years while borrowing and investing large amounts of money without proper scrutiny from councillors,” the paper said.
On November 18, independent news website insidecroydon quoted a council insider saying, “If it wasn’t for the fact that those councillors involved have such little understanding of business and economics, it would be a case of corruption and a referral to the Director of Public Prosecutions.”
Both council leader Tony Newman and Labour cabinet member for finance Simon Hall stood down before the issue of the Section 114 notice. In August, the former Croydon Council Chief Executive Jo Negrini left the council after allegedly negotiating a £440,000 severance package.
As with every other local authority, Croydon’s financial fragility has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 crisis. An article in the Guardian November 13, noted that although bankruptcy “came suddenly” the origins of the council’s plight went back years. The article pointed to “heady dreams of making Croydon a major housing developer”, and “a culture of lax financial controls and poor governance”. This had resulted in a budget shortfall of £67 million and a £47 million projected overspend in 2021. With only £10 million in reserves, the council has almost £2 billion in capital loans, “many tied up in risky property investments.”
“The final straw seems to have been the coronavirus pandemic. As costs spiraled, Croydon’s income from council tax and business rates collapsed. Government compensation schemes failed to cover outgoings.”
Following the financial crisis of 2008, the incoming Conservative/Liberal Democrat government elected in 2010 imposed massive austerity measures, including severely cutting central government financing of local government. This now means that local authorities are almost entirely dependent on council taxes raised on residents, business rates and other local charges, compared to 2010 when central government funding provided 80 percent of local authority income.
Like Croydon, many Labour-led councils resorted to property investments to try and make up for revenue losses, doing risky deals with property developers. Often, this meant public housing being cleared to make way for expensive private residences, pushing lower-income working class families out in social cleansing operations.
As reported by the World Socialist Web Site, Labour-run Haringey council in London planned to hive off £2 billion in council assets to property developer Lendlease. “London’s Labour-controlled boroughs are a battleground because council estates and social housing exist side by side with some of the most expensive property in the country.
“According to a London Assembly report in 2015, 50 previous council regeneration schemes resulted in a loss—estimated at more than a quarter—in the number of homes for social rent, despite an increase in the overall number of homes.” In 2015, it was estimated that more than 50,000 families had been silently shipped out of London due to welfare cuts and soaring rents.
Just months after his election as Labour Leader in September 2015, Jeremy Corbyn and his closest political ally, Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, sent a letter to all Labour councils demanding they abide by the law and impose the Tories’ austerity cuts. They have followed his instruction to the letter.
Government changes to planning legislation, known as “ permitted development ” (PD), enable developers to turn redundant office and commercial properties into substandard “rabbit hutch” housing.
Hypocritically, Croydon Central Labour MP Sarah Jones called on the government to scrap PD, despite Croydon having the largest number of office-to-residential conversions in the country, some of which have been commissioned by the council itself. Cabinet member for housing Alison Butler said the council was considering further such conversions.
Many other local authorities are in a similar precarious financial position as Croydon. In June, a study by the Centre for Progressive Policy thinktank calculated that 80 percent of English councils were at risk of bankruptcy, with the majority in the so-called “red wall” in northern England and the Midlands, which went to the Conservatives in the 2019 general election.
“Leeds city council said it faced a… shortfall, forcing it to freeze vacancies and all non-essential spending. Manchester Liverpool, Luton and Wiltshire have also signaled that they face serious difficulties,” it reported.
On Thursday, Leeds City Council announced it was cutting 200 jobs on top of the 600 revealed in October and declared it would have to sell off £18 million worth of council property and land. The council faces a shortfall of nearly £120 million over the next two year. While half was due to the impact of COVID-19, half had accrued prior to the pandemic.
It is not only metropolitan local authorities that are in danger of bankruptcy. A survey by the County Councils Network shows increasing concern over financial difficulties, with only 22 percent confident they can deliver a balanced budget next year. More than 50 percent said reductions in services would adversely affect efforts to tackle the coronavirus pandemic, and 60 percent stating financial difficulties would result in a “fundamental reduction” in frontline services.
Writing in the LocalGovernmentChronicle November 6, Professor Tony Travers, a local government expert at the London School of Economics, warned that the pandemic would lead to deeper austerity. “The (significantly smaller) impact on the economy of the 2008-09 banking crisis took a decade to get over. COVID-19 will affect GDP, borrowing, taxation and public spending for 15 to 20 years into the future.”
With local government revenue spending still 20-25 percent below 2010 levels, “Any return to austerity will mean further reductions to provisions such as children’s services, roads, planning, libraries, culture and leisure,” Travers said.
“It is hard to exaggerate the gravity of the situation now facing the UK government: the public borrowing and debt situation is far worse than in 2010, while the economy may not return to 2019 levels of output for three or more years. Councils should prepare for another decade of cuts.”
Steelmaker Thyssenkrupp is set to destroy 5,000 more jobs. These massive job cuts come on top of the 6,000 job losses already underway, which the company’s Board of Directors agreed with the IG Metall trade union and its works council representatives. The heavy sheet metal plant in Duisburg-Hüttenheim is to be closed, costing 800 jobs. Compulsory redundancies can no longer be ruled out.
ThyssenKrupp Steel (Wikimedia Commons)
Following the sale of its elevator division in the spring, which employed more than 50,000, Thyssenkrupp still has around 100,000 workers. The reduction of 11,000 jobs therefore affects more than one in ten employees—3,600 jobs have already been cut.
Thyssenkrupp boss Martina Merz announced the figures on Thursday when presenting the company results for the past fiscal year, which ended on September 30. She attributed the losses in many areas of the group to the coronavirus crisis.
The fact is, however, that the sale of the elevator division brought the company €15 billion [$US17.8 billion], resulting in a net profit of almost €9.6 billion. While these profits flow to the shareholders, above all the hedge fund Cevian, the losses are passed on to the workers.
The pandemic is being exploited to speed up long-planned cutbacks and savings measures, and to impose them with brute force. When the decision was taken in May to break up the Thyssenkrupp group, this was not a reaction to the coronavirus outbreak, but rather a result of massive pressure from large shareholders demanding all business units not generating the required returns be spun off and sold or gradually closed down.
The IG Metall, the Thyssenkrupp Works Council and all ten employee representatives on the Supervisory Board agreed to the break-up in the spring. Since then, they have been collaborating even more closely than before with the company’s board to push through the massive job cuts. When CEO Merz announced “hard cuts” on Thursday, she said, “The next steps may be more painful than the previous ones. We will still have to take them.”
Thyssenkrupp head of personnel, Oliver Burkhard, sang from the same hymn sheet. He berated the workforce for not having made sufficient use of the so-called “volunteer programme” for job cuts and declared that given this situation compulsory redundancies could no longer be ruled out.
Burkhard is especially hated by many workers. He was an IG Metall functionary for many years. In 2013, he switched directly from his job as an IG Metall district chief in North Rhine-Westphalia to head of human resources at Thyssenkrupp. He pockets an annual income of several million euros in return for preparing and implementing the company’s rationalization measures, with all their attacks on jobs, working conditions and wages of the workforce.
On Tuesday, the same message from the IG Metall and the company’s board made the rounds—that the Duisburg-Hüttenheim plant with 800 jobs was now finally on the brink of closure. There was no buyer in sight and Thyssenkrupp did not want to continue running the plant itself was the word. For this reason, it was to be closed by September 2021 at the latest. The Works Council and the IG Metall, which are helping to prepare this jobs wipe-out, give these rationalization programmes names that are hard to beat in terms of cynicism: the current jobs massacre is known as the “Future for Steel Pact.”
As is customary in such cases, the IG Metall and the Works Council organized a token protest action on Tuesday in front of the Duisburg-Hüttenheim factory gate. Thyssenkrupp Steel board member Bernhard Osburg, accompanied by his colleague Arnd Köfler and Labour Director Markus Grolms (who also moved directly from IG Metall onto the board), then duly announced the end of the plant and the jobs of 800 workers.
The words of Knut Giesler, IG Metall chief for North Rhine-Westphalia, were no different from those of the board spokesman. In a press release, Giesler announced that after the last potential buyer for Duisburg-Hüttenheim plant had dropped out, there was hardly any chance of preventing the closure of the site, and he used the opportunity to call once again for the state to buy a holding in Thyssenkrupp Steel.
To prevent any industrial action to defend jobs, the news was spread that workers from Duisburg-Hüttenheim affected by the closure could be accommodated in other parts of Thyssenkrupp Steel in the north of Duisburg. Compulsory redundancies in this area were ruled out, at least for the time being, explained Dieter Lieske, IG Metall Duisburg Senior Representative, at the rally in front of the factory gates.
Every worker in Duisburg knows how mendacious such promises are. Jobs are being cut everywhere. In the steel sector alone, 3,000 jobs are on the hit list. Where will replacement jobs come from? The Works Councils are putting pressure on workers to sign termination agreements and thus “voluntarily” give up their jobs. In recent weeks, several workers have reported to the WSWS about such talks and the pressure from the Works Councils.
The call by the IG Metall and Works Councils for state participation at Thyssenkrupp Steel does not serve to secure jobs—quite the contrary. The union is acting as a lobbyist and representative of the interests of the investors and shareholders, who have already taken advantage of the coronavirus pandemic in the spring to collect hundreds of billions of euros in state aid. These funds were used to further enrich the super-rich and, at the same time, to implement already prepared restructuring and rationalization measures.
Moreover, the unions support the policies of the grand coalition government of the Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union and Social Democratic Party (CDU/CSU, SPD), which, in the face of the deep crisis of the capitalist system, exacerbated by the pandemic, is preparing the entire economy for global trade and economic war. At the beginning of last year, Federal Economics Minister Peter Altmaier (CDU) presented his concept for a “National Industrial Strategy 2030.” He emphasized that closer cooperation between state and market was necessary to enable “rapid international expansion … with the clear aim of conquering new markets for one’s own economy and—wherever possible—monopolizing them.”
This is precisely what the trade unions and their works council representatives support. For a long time, they have been demanding protective tariffs, protectionist measures and more initiative from the government to support “national economic interests.” Their call for the state to intervene is directly linked to the use of billions in taxes to implement rationalization programmes aimed at increasing Germany’s global competitiveness.
Just how far the unions are going in this direction was demonstrated last week at national air carrier Lufthansa. Voluntarily, in the form of pre-emptive subservience, so to speak, the three unions responsible there are offering the Lufthansa board of directors a €1.2 billion wage cut and the elimination of one in five jobs. This would include salary reductions of up to 50 percent.
The renewed mass layoffs at Thyssenkrupp make clear how important it is that workers resist the reactionary machinations of the IG Metall and its Works Council representatives. The defence of jobs, wages and other gains can only succeed if it is directed against the logic and constraints of the market economy. It must be anti-capitalist, that is, socialist. It is not company profits that are decisive for the organization of the economy, but the interests and needs of the workforce, their families and society.
COVID-19 infections are spiraling out of control across Sri Lanka with more than 19,000 infections and 73 deaths, most of them since early October. Like its international counterparts, the Sri Lankan government has not taken any serious measure to contain the virus and is blaming the population for the spread of COVID-19.
The refusal of President Gotabhaya Rajapakse’s government to overhaul and boost the health service is creating a disaster with hundreds of thousands workers, including those in the so-called “unorganised” sector, deprived of their jobs and not provided adequate social relief.
One of the sectors criminally abandoned by the Colombo government is art and culture. Musical performances, theatre, film and teledrama production, book exhibitions and similar activities have almost entirely come to a halt. Thousands of artists and creative workers employed in these activities are without income and many have become destitute.
Notoriously, even in “normal periods,” capitalist governments have little regard for serious art and cultural works. They are hostile toward artists brave enough to question or challenge the official lies and false narratives. The callous attitude of the Sri Lankan ruling elite is reflected in part by the fact there are no proper statistics on how many people even work in the country’s artistic and creative sectors.
Although there are various guilds, these organisations only have several hundred members each and limited financial resources.
The World Socialist Web Site recently spoke with creative workers from the music, theatre and teledrama sector who explained that the government had failed to provide adequate financial support and in some cases just given meagre famine rations.
Kapila Kumara Kalinga is a well-known veteran author, theatre director, lyricist and teledrama scriptwriter. His works, including his latest play Banku Weeraya(Bank Hero), have received awards at literature and drama festivals such as the State Drama Festival.
Kapila Kumara Kalinga
Kalinga endorsed the WSWS’s characterisation of the pandemic as a “trigger event” that had escalated the social, economic and political crises of the capitalist system.
“The issues that have emerged in the field of art and culture were there even before the pandemic hit. The coronavirus has aggravated them,” he said.
“The creation of artistic work in Sri Lanka has been forced to stop because of the pandemic. Tens of thousands of workers, including actors, makeup artists, as well as ‘tea boys’—involved in setting up film and television sets—and drivers, have lost their livelihoods.
“Most of those involved in creative art work do not have adequate bank savings. I was forced to end the staging of my most recent drama BankuWeeraya due to the current disastrous conditions.
“Normally, a drama actor receives a pittance of about 5,000 to 10,000 rupees [$US27 to $US54] for each show. Accordingly, they get about 20,000 to 40,000 rupees if there are four shows a month. Most actors are totally dependent on this, so when a drama is not produced they don’t receive any money.
“These artists are attempting to maintain themselves through the government’s 5,000-rupee [$27] subsidy,” Kalinga said, a reference to the miserly financial compensation provided to families living below the poverty line. “And because many artists do not have other jobs, they have become destitute. Consider a makeup artist for example. They can’t do anything else and there are no other jobs?
“Several months ago, the government boasted that artists and actors would be given a 500,000-rupee [$2,702] loan, but this was just so the government could pretend it was concerned about artists. All of the banks, with the exception of one state bank, refused to provide the loans.
“Many veteran artists are over 60 years old. When they apply for a loan, three people, including one from the applicant’s home has to sign as guarantors. Even in ordinary periods, most people are reluctant to be loan guarantors. Moreover, many people don’t even apply for loans because of the difficulties providing the documents asked by the bank.
“The prevailing uncertain situation has had a huge mental impact on artists and actors,” Kalinga said.
“I’ve been forced to be very cautious about spending my savings during the past period. The pandemic have also forced people to cut their expenses and so I’m not receiving income from sales of my books [novels, short stories and other written works]. The tragic situation now facing artists and actors is not separate in any way from that of working people and I realise that this situation is not limited to this island,” he said.
Malaka Devapriya is an award-winning filmmaker, stage director and radio playwright. His most recent movie, Bahuchithawadiya (The Undecided), has been screened at several international film festivals and won Special Jury award for Best Direction at the 8th South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation Film Festival in 2018.
Malaka Devpriya
Devapriya said the state should be responsible not just for defending and protecting artists from the COVID-19 tragedy, but the entire mass of people. If it is unable to do so, he added, then why it is ruling?
“From the distant past, long before the coronavirus pandemic hit, there has been a deep crisis in the field of art in Sri Lanka. It has only been intensified by the pandemic. Artists have been facing major difficulties for years, particularly in areas such as securing the financial facilities for new creations and in screening their already-produced works.
“Those engaged in stage, radio plays, teledramas and film sectors can be termed workers and the only livelihood of most of them is in the fields they’re engaged in. They don’t have any bank savings.
“The stoppage of artistic productions means that most of my friends have become ‘helpless’ and are fighting to make the daily ends meet. Some ask me for loans, but I also don’t have an income to help them. Many have pawned their jewellery.
“The financial difficulties have become so unbearable that one of my friends in this field even had to sell his library to try and survive. The only wealth of some of my friends is in the art works that they have created. A drama, however, is not like another commodity and so during this period you can’t earn any money by selling a film or teledrama script.
“The government is concealing the real disastrous nature of the pandemic from the people,” Devapriya continued.
“On the one hand, it is promoting black magic and other superstitious things, like spraying pirithpan [holy water prepared by chanting Buddhist recitals], in the name of fighting the COVID-19. On the other hand, the government is attempting to silence the artists and intellectuals who clarify the world against such myths through threats.”
Devapriya voiced his agreement with the World Socialist Web Site’s analysis of the pandemic, which was confronting workers in every country and that historic issues in the field of art and culture could only be solved through the building up of an independent political movement of the working class.
The European Commission (EC) has accused Amazon of violating antitrust rules by using third-party sellers’ non-public data to benefit its own retail business. The charge appears in a November 10 statement following an investigation that the EC’s antitrust regulators initiated in July 2019.
An Amazon box (Flickr/soumit)
The European proceedings against Amazon are a shot across the bow of American imperialism. The national bourgeoisies of Europe are reacting to the provocative “America First” trade war policies of the Trump administration and threatening to retaliate, asserting their own interests.
The EC also has opened a second investigation into whether Amazon selects vendors to appear in its “Buy Box” in a way that benefits its own retail, logistics, or delivery services. The Buy Box appears prominently on Amazon’s site and allows customers to add a specific seller’s item to their shopping carts.
In describing Amazon’s anticompetitive practices, the statement specifically refers to France and Germany, which are Amazon’s biggest European markets. As governments have shut down nonessential businesses during the pandemic, customers have increased their online shopping. Among online shoppers, more than 70 percent in France and more than 80 percent in Germany have bought an item on Amazon during the past year, according to Margrethe Vestager, the European Union commissioner responsible for competition.
Amazon is a trillion-dollar multinational conglomerate that not only dominates commerce over the internet, but also develops its own products (such as e-readers, clothing, and toys) for sale on that same market. Since Amazon not only sells products but controls the marketplace where those products compete with those of other businesses, it has a colossal advantage over its competitors.
As a marketplace, Amazon has access to third-party vendors’ non-public business data. It can view, for example, the number of a given product that has been ordered and shipped, a seller’s revenue, information about shipping, and data on sellers’ past performance. The EC found that such marketplace data have been shared with Amazon’s retail business and used as a basis for decisions about its own products. “The use of non-public marketplace seller data allows Amazon to avoid the normal risks of retail competition,” according to the EC.
The other investigation focuses on the Buy Box, which shows a single vendor’s offer for a given product. Vendors compete to have their offers featured in the Buy Box, which allows them to reach users of Amazon Prime (Amazon’s customer loyalty program), who tend to spend more and shop more often than non-Prime customers. About 80 percent of sales on Amazon result from the Buy Box, according to industry experts, and the number of Prime users is growing. The commission is investigating whether the criteria Amazon uses to select sellers for this box favor Amazon’s own retail business or the sellers that use Amazon’s logistics and delivery services.
Not surprisingly, Amazon released a statement expressing its disagreement with the EC’s allegations, denying that it views individual sellers’ data but admitting that it sometimes views “aggregate” data.
The company interprets the terms “individual” and “aggregate” in creative ways. For example, because the company Fortem represented 99.95 percent of sales of car trunk organizers (and not all sales), Amazon considered data related to that company to be aggregate data, according to the Wall Street Journal. Amazon used Fortem’s non-public data to develop its own private-label version of the same product.
What is more, former Amazon employees have admitted publicly that the company engages in this practice. One of the company’s former product management workers told the Capitol Forum, “I used to pull sellers’ data to look at what the best products were when I was there…. That was my job.”
Other public information substantiates the EC’s claims about Amazon’s manipulation of the Buy Box. Jeff Bezos, the company’s CEO and the world’s richest man, admitted during a US Congressional hearing in July that the criteria for spotlighting sellers in the Buy Box “indirectly” favor product offers that can be shipped with Prime.
European regulators are not alone in scrutinizing Amazon. The United States Congress and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) also are investigating the company’s relationship with third-party vendors. In a report that it issued in October, the House Judiciary antitrust subcommittee found that Amazon has monopoly power over third-party sellers. In testimony before the subcommittee, one such seller said that he had been forced out of the business after Amazon copied his products (including even their color scheme), sold its versions at lower prices, and featured them in the Buy Box.
Other third-party vendors told the antitrust subcommittee that they have “no choice” but to pay for Fulfillment by Amazon, the company’s logistics and delivery service. Using this service makes a product eligible to be sold to Prime customers and helps companies “to maintain a favorable search result position, to reach Amazon’s more than 112 million Prime members, and to win the Buy Box,” according to the subcommittee’s report.
Like the subcommittee, the FTC has interviewed Amazon’s third-party sellers. However, few details about its investigation are available, and the FTC has taken no meaningful action to restrain the growth of the conglomerate or its domination over the American market.
The United States has various laws, dating from the late-19th and early-20th centuries, that restrict the formation of monopolies and outlaw unfair competition. But this regulatory framework is effectively a dead letter. There has been little in the way of enforcement action for nearly four decades, after AT&T was broken up in 1982. The Amazon conglomerate, controlled by Bezos, invades and conquers one sector of the economy after another with impunity.
If the EC concludes that Amazon has broken antitrust rules, it could fine the company as much as 10 percent of its annual worldwide revenue. Such a fine would equal $28 billion if based on 2019 revenues and $37 billion if based on the company’s revenue forecasts for this year. For context, the latter figure is approximately equal to the gross domestic product of Paraguay in 2019.
An alternative would be for the EC to demand behavioral remedies in the form of prohibitions on certain business conduct. Amazon could well decide to ignore such remedies and simply pay fines if it is caught. The vast company can afford to treat the occasional fine as a cost of doing business. It also is entirely possible that the EC will come to a settlement with Amazon or drop its case entirely.
The investigations by the EC and by the Congressional subcommittee underscore Amazon’s incredible size and dominance. During the second quarter of 2020, Amazon had an operating profit of $5.8 billion. In October, Amazon’s share price reached approximately $3,000, which gave it a market valuation of about $1.5 trillion. This valuation is greater than that of Wal-Mart, Target, Salesforce, IBM, eBay, and Etsy put together, according to the subcommittee’s report.
Amazon’s dominance is neither the result of Bezos’s genius nor a fluke. It is the result of an objective process. “Free competition gives rise to the concentration of production, which, in turn, at a certain stage of development, leads to monopoly,” wrote Vladimir Lenin in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. “The general framework of formally recognized free competition remains, but the yoke of a few monopolists on the rest of the population becomes a hundred times heavier, more burdensome and intolerable.”
The solution is not to rely on capitalist governments to restrain this process with anti-monopoly regulations. Instead, workers must openly declare as their aim the transformation of technology monopolies like Amazon into public utilities democratically controlled by the working class that can be mobilized to satisfy social need around the world, rather than further enriching the world’s richest man.
