Australian Labor Party’s decay further revealed at anti-corruption hearing

Mike Head

Further evidence of the advanced rot of the Australian Labor Party, the country’s oldest party of capitalist rule, emerged this week during hearings by the Victorian state Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission (IBAC).

On Monday, the opening day of an IBAC public hearing, a key senior federal Labor parliamentarian admitted “stacking” local party branches by paying for bulk false memberships, hiring taxpayer-funded “ghost” electoral staff who did no work because they were deployed for the use of party factional powerbrokers, and participating in rigged party ballots.

Victorian Labor Premier Daniel Andrews (Screenshot ABC News)

Anthony Byrne, who is deputy chairman of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, testified that he had been involved in such activities for more than 22 years—ever since he entered parliament in 1990. Asked by counsel assisting the inquiry, Chris Carr SC, whether he had been involved in branch stacking, Byrne said: “I certainly have.”

Byrne said he used a “kitty” to pay for party memberships, and estimated that he had paid about $2,000 in annual membership fees during the past five years alone.

Some of the evidence provided a picture of how extensive ballot-rigging is inside the Labor Party. Faction bosses altered ballot papers to ensure the election of their candidates for pre-selection for parliamentary seats or for party conference delegates.

If branch members voted for the wrong candidate, reissued ballots were re-completed to support the preferred candidate, signed off and submitted to the party’s head office. When Carr asked Byrne if about 40 percent of the ballots issued in his Melbourne southeastern electorate of Holt had to be reissued, he replied: “I wasn’t aware it was such a huge figure.”

Another means of boosting votes was to have members sign envelopes containing blank ballot papers. These would be collected by ministerial and electorate staff, completed and submitted to the head office.

The inquiry was shown a text message from Byrne to faction powerbroker Adem Somyurek asking him to send over one of Somyurek’s parliamentary staff members, Adam Sullivan, to complete ballot papers.

“We have 210 ballot papers that need to be filled out today from what I’ve just heard,” Byrne texted. “I think we need Sullivan to come to my office to complete otherwise they won’t be done. “Then papers need to go to head office.”

The text was believed to have been sent during delegate elections for the 2018 Labor Party national conference. Byrne told the inquiry: “If you’re saying that somebody else filling in that ballot paper is forgery then that’s forgery.”

IBAC’s “Operation Watts” is a joint investigation with the Victorian Ombudsman into branch stacking, misuse of parliamentary staff for political purposes and misuse of public money, granted by the state Labor government to community associations, to fund party political activities.

When IBAC commissioner Robert Redlich asked how “nothing seemed to have altered” after a 2018 Ombudsman’s report had criticised the party for misusing public funds to pay staff members to perform such factional work, Byrne said the practices had been enmeshed in the party’s fabric since the 1990s. “I don’t think the system ever stopped,” he said.

Byrne’s testimony quickly triggered the resignation of a former right-wing factional colleague, state Child Protection Minister Luke Donnellan. That made Donnellan the fourth Victorian state cabinet minister to quit over the current IBAC allegations, which were first aired in June 2020 by Nine Entertainment media platforms.

However, Labor’s federal leader Anthony Albanese has refused to call for the resignation of Byrne, who is closely connected to the US and Australian intelligence and military establishment through his role on the parliamentary security committee. Albanese insisted that the IBAC “process” had to be completed first. He even denied any knowledge of the branch-stacking, despite last year’s media exposures.

Significantly, IBAC commissioner Redlich thanked Byrne for his testimony. Byrne hosted secret cameras in his office for the Nine Network operation, filming Somyurek and his staff members enrolling and paying for bulk party memberships. Reportedly, at least 4,500 of Labor’s claimed 16,000 members in the state of Victoria were falsely registered this way.

Massive inflation and manipulation of party membership numbers and votes is far from new in the Labor Party. Two decades ago, a report by former Labor Prime Minister Bob Hawke and ex-New South Wales (NSW) Premier Neville Wran described it as a “cancer” eating away at the party. Despite such token damage-control operations, the branch stacking has only gotten worse, and the party’s actual membership has continued to collapse.

For decades in fact, Labor has been a rotted-out hollow shell. It has virtually no real working class members, just parliamentarians, staffers, union officials and careerists. That enables branch stacking by factional powerbrokers and allied trade union bureaucrats to control pre-selections for parliamentary seats and access to other lucrative posts. Similar methods are used to inflate union memberships, which also have shriveled, in order to give union bosses voting blocs at party conferences.

Somyurek’s power base, for example, was an alliance formed in 2018 between right-wing factions and associated unions and an “Industrial Left” grouping of supposedly militant unions, such as the Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union.

Much more may yet emerge from the IBAC inquiry. A major concern in ruling circles, after more than a decade of political instability, is to fashion a political instrument able to fully impose the assault they demand on working class jobs and conditions—an offensive intensified as a result of the global COVID-19 pandemic.

Yesterday’s editorial in the Murdoch media’s Australian demanded that Albanese stop “ducking questions” about Byrne’s evidence and “clean up” the Labor Party. “Business as usual will not be good enough,” it warned.

The Liberal-National Coalition also has been wracked by rampant branch stacking for years. After decades of declining living and working conditions and worsening social inequality, public support for these twin formations of capitalist rule has plunged.

That is why both parties jointly pushed through the federal parliament on August 26 new anti-democratic electoral laws that seek to de-register parties, like the Socialist Equality Party, that currently have no members in parliament.

The IBAC process also could be used to threaten the survival of the Victorian state Labor government of Premier Daniel Andrews, unless it continues to rapidly “reopen” the economy for corporate profit-making, despite record COVID-19 Delta infections. In neighbouring NSW an anti-corruption inquiry was used to replace Gladys Berejiklian as state premier with Dominic Perrottet, who has quickly accelerated the lifting of pandemic safety measures.

IBAC is simultaneously conducting another investigation, behind closed doors so far, into dealings between the firefighters’ trade union and the government of Andrews, who is reportedly part of that inquiry.

French President Emmanuel Macron insults Algeria, provoking diplomatic crisis

Anthony Torres

French President Emmanuel Macron’s recent restriction of visa access from the Maghreb, combined with his insulting of the anti-colonial struggle of the Algerian people, are aimed at legitimizing French colonialism and inciting neo-fascist chauvinism. His actions have provoked a major diplomatic crisis with Algeria and the recall by Algiers of the Algerian ambassador to France.

A statement from the Algerian presidency in response to Macron’s comments said: “Following the undeniable remarks that several French sources have attributed by name to the President of the French Republic, Algeria expresses its categorical rejection of the inadmissible interference in its internal affairs that constitute the said remarks.” This is the second time Algiers has recalled its ambassador to Paris since May 2020, after the broadcast on the France5 television station of a documentary on the “Hirak,” the mass protest movement against the Algerian military regime that began in February 2019.

A family watches French President Emmanuel Macron's televised speech, Monday April 13, 2020, in Lyon, central France. (AP Photo/Laurent Cipriani)

This diplomatic crisis began on September 29. French government spokesman Gabriel Attal announced on Europe1 that the granting of visas by France would be “tightened within a few weeks for nationals of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, who ‘refuse’ to issue the consular passes required for the return of immigrants turned away from France.” The visa restriction, which blocks the movement of people wanting to travel to France to see their families, affects millions of people of North African origin in France itself.

In 2018, the French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies reported that there were 1.9 million immigrants from the Maghreb in the country, as well as 2.4 million direct descendants born in France to at least one parent from the Maghreb, in addition to the grandchildren of immigrants from the Maghreb, estimated at 821,000 in 2011. This makes a total of 5.1 million people of North African origin in France.

The French ambassador to Algeria, François Gouyette, was summoned to the Algerian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and notified of “a formal protest by the Algerian government following a unilateral decision by the French government affecting the quality and fluidity of the movement of Algerian nationals to France,” according to a statement from the ministry.

On September 30, receiving a delegation of 18 young French people of North African origin, dual nationals and some Algerians, French President Emmanuel Macron stated that the “the post-1962 Algerian nation was built on a memory rent.” This was a reference to the heroic and bloody struggle of the Algerian people against the French colonial regime during the Algerian war (1954-1962).

Calling Algeria “a politico-military system that was built on this memory rent,” Macron attacked “an official history” that had been “totally rewritten,” and which according to him “is not based on truths” but on “a discourse based on a hatred of France.” He questioned the historic legitimacy of Algeria: “Was there an Algerian nation before the French colonization? That’s the question… I am fascinated at the ability of Turkey to completely forget the role it played in Algeria and the domination it exercised.”

Four days later, Algiers recalled its ambassador to France for “consultation” and closed its airspace to French military aircraft. In 2013, French airplanes had permission to fly over Algerian territory to fight the war in the Sahel launched with the French intervention in Mali, with which Algeria shares a 1,300-kilometre desert border.

Cynically, Macron reacted to this Franco-Algerian crisis by claiming that he wished there could be an “appeasement.”

But he then defended his earlier statements, saying: “I have the utmost respect for the Algerian people, and I have really cordial relations with President Tebboune. But we have started a work, with the report that we asked [historian] Benjamin Stora to do … with the French and Franco-Algerian youth, and I will continue this work. There will inevitably be other tensions. These are only stories of wounds. The problem is that many people are irreconcilable toward one another. But we are all together in the same country, and therefore we must have a national project that embraces us.”

Stora had been personally commissioned by Macron in July 2020 to prepare a report on the “memories of colonization and the Algerian people.”

The provocations of Macron and his government against Algeria are a warning to workers both in France and the southern shore of the Mediterranean. In fact, it is Macron who is “totally rewriting history” through his statements, seeking to cover up the crimes committed by French imperialism in the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as the crimes already committed or in preparation in France’s neocolonial wars in the 21st century.

Contrary to Macron’s arrogant assertions about Algerian society before French colonization and even before Ottoman rule, there were various forms of “statehood in this territory of the central Maghreb,” according to historian Gilles Manceron. Manceron adds: “The fact that Algerian national sentiment only became generalized at the time of the war is a reality. But this is like the feeling of belonging to the French nation, which only really took hold after the Revolution.”

French domination of Algeria was reactionary and criminal. France colonized Algeria and the whole of the Maghreb, making its inhabitants second-class citizens, repressed under the discriminatory provisions of the Indigenous Code. During the war for independence, French imperialism tortured and killed en masse, crimes reminiscent of those committed in occupied France a decade earlier by the Vichy collaborationist regime.

Out of 10 million Algerians, France detained 3 million in internment camps and killed half a million. Twenty-five thousand French soldiers died during the war and over 60,000 were wounded. In addition, the French special forces and police assassinated political leaders and pro-independence demonstrators in mainland France. Paris nevertheless suffered a humiliating defeat in the war, in the face of the courage of the Algerian workers and oppressed.

Macron’s statements underscore the nature of the political forces that Macron is nurturing as he pursues a policy of spreading the coronavirus, waging neo-colonial war in the Sahel, and violently repressing strikes inside France.

They underscore his alignment with the extreme right-wing circles who are openly nostalgic for French Algeria. The same forces played a central role in the 1958 putsch that brought General Charles De Gaulle to power and established the Fifth Republic. These pro-“French Algeria” forces sought to change French policy through attacks and an attempted coup d’état after De Gaulle decided to negotiate Algerian independence with the Algerian National Liberation Front.

Now, against the backdrop of rising working class anger at the criminal management of the coronavirus pandemic by the state, the political descendants of this milieu are openly waving the threat of a coup d’état, in the form of a letter written by retired generals close to the family of retired General Pierre de Villiers. Macron’s calculations of their electoral influence in the 2022 presidential elections are no doubt connected to his decision to provoke a crisis with Algiers.

Global energy price surge hits workers

Gabriel Black

Global energy prices have surged this month, compounding inflation and putting further strain on working-class households throughout the world.

Natural gas prices have recorded some of their largest ever increases on record. Both the European and Asian benchmarks for natural gas reached record highs last week. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), they are up by almost 1,000 percent, compared to where they were a year ago—effectively going vertical, in their price increase, the last few weeks.

People take part in a protest against the increase of the price of electricity in Madrid, Spain, Wednesday, Oct. 6, 2021. Banners reads in Spanish: "No to electric robbery" "Electricity at a fair price". (AP Photo/Manu Fernandez)

Coal, which remains a cornerstone of the global economy, has seen massive price increases. Imported coal in the EU is up 420 percent compared to a year ago, according to the IEA. In China, home to 30 percent of global industry, coal prices have reached all-time highs, more than doubling this year.

The price of electricity is surging around the world as well. Dependent, in many places, on the price of both coal and natural gas, electricity prices have risen the most in places like Germany or Spain, which rely on these fuels. The price of power is up by over 500 percent in Germany compared to one year ago, their highest on record.

Crude oil prices are rising as well, however, not by the extremes that coal and natural gas have risen in Asia and Europe.

The price of Brent, the most widely used oil benchmark, has doubled over the last year.

In the United States, average gasoline prices have risen by $1.10 per gallon at the pump. They now average $3.27 nationally, according to the American Automobile Association (AAA). The US crude benchmark (West Texas Intermediate) rose to $80 per barrel, the highest since 2014. Meanwhile, natural gas prices have increased 112 percent in the US since January, causing fears of a bitter winter.

The global surge in energy prices only adds to the already considerable inflation that has occurred last year.

In the US, consumer price inflation is up 5.4 percent from a year ago. That means that every worker has received an equivalent of a 5.4 percent wage cut on whatever they earn, compared to a year ago. If anything, this is a low assessment as the index does not adequately consider the soaring cost of rent and housing.

Food costs have increased 12.6 percent over the last year in the US. It increased by 1.2 percent just last month alone.

Yesterday, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) revised global growth estimates downward in response to these surging costs. The downward revision came also in response to the dysfunction that is occurring in global logistics.

Around the world there are significant crises emerging at major ports and supply hubs. In Los Angeles, for example, dozens of massive container ships—each with 20,000 containers or more—stand, waiting outside its two ports (Long Beach and Los Angeles). Videos posted to social media give a sense of the magnitude of the crisis. Hundreds of thousands of containers are backed up in ports awaiting truck drivers, and dozens of container ships wait to be unloaded. All of this ricochets across the supply chain, backing up production.

Several major exporting nations have already significantly cut back industrial production as a result, laying off workers.

Industrial production in Germany declined by 4 percent in August, compared to the previous month. The German car multinational Opel announced it would halt its operations, in response to both the rising cost of electricity and the semiconductor shortage.

Similarly, in Sweden, the economy shrunk by 3.8 percent in August. In particular, shortages and logistics dysfunction pushed manufacturing output down 4.5 percent. The Volvo Group, which was the seat of a critical strike of workers earlier this year, announced it would shut down production in September, citing the semiconductor shortage.

China’s economy will slow this quarter. Surging power costs, the breakdown of massive property developer Evergrande, and general economic dysfunction globally, will all contribute to China scoring just 5.1 percent growth this quarter (down from 7.9 percent the previous quarter). Car sales in China have fallen 20 percent over the last year, indicating pressures confronting better off sections of the working class and its middle class.

The collective mess (energy prices, supply-chain disruptions, food prices, declining industrial output, etc.) spells danger for global capitalism.

The rise of inflation comes as workers in most corners of the globe have sought to challenge their employers. In the US a number of significant strikes, labor actions, and “no-votes” on sell-out contracts have occurred. In particular, 10,000 workers at John Deere just overwhelmingly voted down a concessions contract which the United Auto Workers (UAW) tried to foist on them.

While the wealth of the global financial oligarchy is at all-time highs, evading taxation as it pleases, workers from all countries are stuck in the tightening grip of inflation. Energy and food prices disproportionately affect the poor, because they spend a larger share of their income on them.

The reasons behind high energy prices and the reasons behind the global supply dysfunction

point back to one thing, the inherent anarchy of the capitalist economy.

The IEA has warned for several years on the mismatch between global energy investment and global energy demand. Even before the onset of COVID-19, the agency urged governments to support measures to dramatically enhance investments, particularly in renewables. However, locked in competition and driven by short-term decisions, it is impossible for global energy companies to rationally plan their future. COVID-19 only made worse these pre-existing problems.

Another cause of rising energy prices has been extreme weather events, such as the heavy rains in China and Hurricane Ida. However, such events are the predictable, increasing outcome of climate change, something capitalist politicians have no intention of seriously combatting.

Of course, the other great cause, COVID-19 and its ongoing devastation, is likewise the product of the capitalist system. While a known, science-based plan exists to eradicate the virus, governments throughout the world are giving up on any plan to significantly slow, let alone stop, the spread of the virus. A systematic global effort to eliminate the virus could succeed in a matter of weeks, but the capitalist press, in its profit-driven, nationalist logic denies the very possibility of doing so, suggesting everyone “live with the virus.”

A chief investment officer at Crossman Global Investments told CNBC that he did not expect inflation to be going away any time soon. He stated, “Hopefully, we start solving our supply shortage problem. But when the dust settles, inflation is not going back to zero to 2 [percent] where it was for the last decade.”

This same fear motivated the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to warns the US Fed and other central banks to prepare plans to deal with extreme inflation. They said that there was “high uncertainty” around the issue and urged central banks to begin easing unprecedented injections of cash into global financial markets.

On Wednesday, the Fed responded, suggesting it would begin to draw back its monthly $80 billion injections into financial markets during November. However, such a move threatens to disrupt the mechanisms which keep US markets afloat—risking the bursting of any number of new toxic debt bubbles that have emerged since the 2008 financial crisis.

PEO International Peace Scholarship 2022/2023

Application Timeline: 

• Application closes: 15th December, 2021
• March 1, 2022: Last day to submit completed application materials from applicants already enrolled in the graduate program and school for which their scholarship is intended.
• April 1, 2022: Last day to submit completed application materials from applicants not yet enrolled in the graduate program or school for which the scholarship is intended. Last day to submit completed application materials for applicants who will be attending Cottey College

Offered Annually: Yes

About the PEO International Peace Scholarship: Members of P.E.O. believe that education is fundamental to world peace and understanding. The scholarship is based upon demonstrated need; however, the award is not intended to cover all academic or personal expenses.

Eligibility and Criteria

• An applicant must be qualified for admission to full-time graduate study and working toward a graduate degree in an accredited college or university in the united States or canada.
• A student who is a citizen or permanent resident of the United States or Canada is not eligible.
• Scholarships are not given for research, internships, or practical training, unless it is combined with coursework. Awards are not to be used to pay past debts.
• In order to qualify for her first scholarship, an applicant must have a full year of coursework remaining, be enrolled and in residence for the entire school year.
• Doctoral students who have completed coursework and are working only on dissertations are not eligible as first-time applicants.
• international students attending cottey college are eligible to apply for a scholarship.

Scholarship Worth

• The maximum amount awarded to a student is $12,500. Lesser amounts may be awarded according to individual needs.
• The scholarship is based upon demonstrated financial need; however, the award is not intended to cover all academic or personal expenses. At the time of application, the applicant is required to confirm additional financial resources adequate to meet her estimated expenses. Additional resources may include personal and family funds, tuition waivers, work scholarships, teaching assistantships, study grants and other scholarships.
• Awards are announced in May. The amount of the PEO International scholarship will be divided into two payments to be distributed in August and December

How to Apply for PEO International Peace Scholarship: Click here to access the online eligibility form. 

Visit P.E.O. International Peace Scholarship Fund for Details

ABSA Global Markets Graduate Programme 2021

Application Deadline: Not specified.

Eligible Countries: Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Mauritius, Mozambique, Nigeria, South Africa, the Seychelles, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia.

About the Award: As Absa has evolved, so too has our Rising Eagles Graduate Programme, which is now proudly named the Gen A Grad Programme. This unique name captures a new generation of A+ achievers; those who are on their A-Game, who are proudly African. Those who are a perfect fit for Absa.

A new name for a new group of tomorrow’s leaders.

If you’d like to be part of Gen A; if you too have the vision of not just building your career, but also building your continent, we have a customised programme built for your talent and unique capabilities.

It’s time for a new generation of go-getters with exceptional IQ – and EQ – to collaborate with our continent’s smartest young minds, working with advanced technology, to change the game.

We invite you to apply for the Global markets Grad Programme, today!

Type: Internship

Eligibility:

• A postgraduate qualification (minimum NQF Level 8) obtained before January 2021 (with the exception of Computer Science, as these students do not need a postgraduate qualification)
• Less than 24 months’ permanent work experience (this excludes temporary work during full-time studies)
• You must be a citizen of the country you are applying, or have the necessary permits and documents to prove you’re eligible to work in that country (you will be required to upload these documents with your application)

Number of Awardees: Not specified

Value of Programme:

• A structured development journey in the first year of employment
• Permanent employment at Absa from day one, with a competitive package
• Vehicle and home finance at staff rates
• Reduced banking fees
• Exclusive access to WorkInProgress*: our global innovation hub
• Bringing your solutions from the Human Quantum Computer to life
• A dedicated Young Talent Team to support you
• The opportunity to be a part of initiatives affecting real change in Africa
• A strong support network of alumni
• Access to a vast networking of opportunities in Africa

Duration of Programme: One year

How to Apply: To apply for this scholarship, candidates should decide which career path suits their ambitions, then apply online with full academic results/transcripts and CV.

1. Online application
Applications are screened to ensure they meet our minimum academic requirements. How you approach and answer the application questions will also play a role in our selection process.

2. First round interview
As a quick way to get to know you, interviews will be done over the phone or face-to-face.

3. Psychometric assessment
An online assessment will be sent to you to complete.

4. Assessment centre
Depending on the business area you have been shortlisted for, you’ll be invited for further assessments, which may include a variety of group exercises, role-plays, case studies and interviews.

Visit Internship Webpage for details

Why Is Stalking Legal?

Ted Rall

Activists harass White House officials and senators as they eat dinner at restaurants. Another senator was recently stalked into the ladies’ room, where her pursuers shouted derision at her stall. Many other politicians have suffered protest demonstrations at their homes.

Now that they’re beleaguered, this may be the perfect time to convince lawmakers to act to protect Americans’ most personal information: their home address and phone number.

Type your name into a search engine. Odds are, a few of the results will include private companies that reveal your home address or part thereof, your phone number or part thereof, employment and education history, along with information about “known associates” like your friends and family members. For a fee, these personal search services offer to fill in the gaps with data culled from public records such as those of the Department of Motor Vehicles, marriage records, voter registration rolls and consumer credit reports.

Easy access to mountains of personal data is such a gold mine for identity thieves, stalkers and other predators that women’s shelters spend much of their time helping their clients to navigate convoluted state-run programs which allow victims of abuse to replace their home addresses with P.O. boxes in public databases like those run by the DMV. Trying to disappear from the Internet is an uphill battle. Millions of Americans report having been stalked.

It’s a murder pandemic: 54% of female homicide victims were killed by former romantic partners who stalked them first, many by using public-records searches.

You can ask each of these companies to opt out by deleting their listings for you. But the processes are cumbersome and make you reveal more information, like your current phone number, that could increase your exposure. It’s like Whack-a-Mole; every time you get one taken offline, another pops up. And there are lot: 121 companies registered to comply with a 2019 Vermont law set up to monitor the data brokerage business. Preventing predatory purveyors of personal information from selling your safety shouldn’t be a full-time job.

Nor should you have to install a VPN or script-blocker or, as privacy experts advise, avoid posting anything on the Web.

Pre-Internet, you controlled access to your contact information. If you didn’t want strangers to know your digits, you could request that the phone company keep you unlisted from 411 information and the white pages. One too many late-night raids by students wielding toilet paper convinced my mother, a high school teacher, to avail herself of that service. It worked.

The system wasn’t perfect. A determined stalker could follow you home. Announcements of home purchases, including the name of the buyer, were listed in local newspapers. But dead-tree publications weren’t keyword-searchable from anywhere on the planet. It took considerable effort to track a person to their residence.

Privacy was central to American culture. A high-profile, high-risk celebrity, the Soviet dissident author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn relied on an unlisted number and the respectful attitude of his neighbors in a small town in Vermont to keep KGB assassins and the innocuously curious at bay. “No Restrooms, No Bare Feet, No Directions to the Solzhenitsyn Home,” read a sign at the local general store. Nowadays they’d track him all the way to the gulag.

Edward Snowden’s revelations that the NSA intercepts our phone calls, emails, texts and spies on us through the cameras on our computers erased Americans’ expectations of privacy from their government. Yet many people aren’t scared of the feds, figuring that they have nothing to fear since they’re not doing anything illegal.

But that doesn’t mean we want everyone to have access to our personal records. At least nine out of ten people tell pollsters that they want control over their information and that it’s important to them.

Information brokerage is a $200 billion a year industry, one that offers obvious benefits to marketers and entrepreneurs researching the viability of a start-up. They wield influence in Washington, where they dropped at least $29 million in lobbying campaigns in 2020, as much as Facebook and Google combined. And for the most part, data brokers follow the law.

That’s the problem.

Information brokerage is basically unregulated. Attempts to require opt-outs, require transparency in calculations of consumer creditworthiness and ban the collection of data under false pretenses have repeatedly died on Capitol Hill. We need legislation that protects vulnerable people, like women and men whose lives are ruined and sometimes ended because their addresses are made freely available online. But privacy shouldn’t just be for victims. Everyone deserves the right to eat dinner and go to the bathroom in peace, or relax at the end of the day without having to deal with a mob of angry demonstrators outside their house.

Even a senator.

US Intervention and Capitalism Have Created a Monster in Honduras

W.T. Whitney Jr.

Chilean author and human rights advocate Ariel Dorfman recently memorialized Orlando Letelier, President Allende’s foreign minister. Agents of dictator Augusto Pinochet murdered Letelier in Washington in 1976. Dorfman noted that Chile and the United States were “on excellent, indeed obscenely excellent, terms (like they are today, shamefully, between the United States and the corrupt regime in Honduras).”

The Honduran government headed by president Juan Orlando Hernández does have excellent relations with the United States. The alliance is toxic, however, what with the continued hold of capitalism on an already unjust, dysfunctional society. Hondurans will choose a new president on November 28.

Honduras, a dependent nation, is subject to U.S. expectations. These center on free rein for businesses and multi-national corporations, large foreign investment, low-cost export goods, low wages, foreigners’ access to land holdings and sub-soil resources, and a weakened popular resistance.

Meanwhile, the U.S. government casts a blind eye on Hernández’s many failings. These include: fraud and violence marking his second-term electoral victory in 2017, an illegal second term but for an improvised constitutional amendment, testimony in a U.S. court naming him as “a key player in Honduras’ drug-trafficking industry” and, lastly, his designation by U.S.  prosecutors as a “co-conspirator” in the trial convicting his brother Tony on drug-trafficking charges.

Some 200 U.S. companies operate in Honduras. The United States accounted for 53% of Honduras’s $7.8 billion export total in 2019. U.S goods, led by petroleum products, made up 42.2 % of Honduran imports.

Honduras’s Economic Development and Employment Zones (ZEDE) reflect planners’ exuberant imagination. They envision privately owned and operated “autonomous cities and special investment districts” attracting foreign investment and welcoming tourist and real estate ventures, industrial parks, commercial and financial services, and mining and forestry activities.

Banks and corporations active in the ZEDEs will appoint administrative officers,  mostly from abroad and many from the United States. They, not Honduras’s government, will devise regulations and arrangements for taxation, courts, policing, education and healthcare for residents.

The first ZEDEs are taking shape now. The idea for them cropped up following the military coup in 2009 that removed president Manuel Zelaya’s progressive government. Hernández, as congressional leader and as president from 2014 on, led in promoting them. Honduras’s Congress in 2013 amended the Constitution to legitimize legislation establishing the ZEDEs. The recent end of litigation before the Supreme Court resulted in their final authorization.

For most Hondurans, who are treated as if they were disposable, capitalism has its downside.

Honduras’s poverty rate is 70%, up from 59.3% in 2019. Of formally employed workers, 70% work intermittently; 82.6% of Honduran workers participate in the informal sector. The Covid-19 pandemic led to more than 50,000 businesses closing and almost half a million Hondurans losing their jobs. Some 30,000 small businesses disappeared in 2020 owing to floods caused by hurricanes.

Violence at the hands of criminal gangs, narcotraffickers, and the police is pervasive and usually goes unpunished. Victims are rival gang members, political activists, journalists, members of the LGBT community, and miscellaneous young people.  According to insightcrime.org, Honduras was Latin America’s third most violent country in 2019 and a year later it registered the region’s third highest murder rate. Says Reuters: “Honduras has become a sophisticated state-sponsored narco-empire servicing Colombian cartels.”

Associated with indiscriminate violence, corruption, and narco-trafficking, Honduras’s police are dangerous. President Hernández eight years ago created “The Military Police for Public Order” (PMOP), the Interinstitutional National Security Force, and the “Tigres” (Tigers). These are police units staffed either by former soldiers or by “soldiers … specializing in police duties.” Police in Honduras numbered 13,752 in 2016 and 20,193 in 2020.

Honduras’s military has grown. Defense spending for 2019 grew by 5.3 %; troop numbers almost doubled. For Hernández, according to one commentator, “militarism has been his right arm for continuing at the head of the executive branch.”  The military forces, like the police, are corrupt, traffic illicit drugs, and are “detrimental” to human rights. The looming presence of security forces is intimidating as they interfere, often brutally, with voting, protest demonstrations, and strikes.

According to Amnesty International, “The government of … Hernández has adopted a policy of repression against those who protest in the streets … The use of military forces to control demonstrations across the country has had a deeply concerning toll on human rights.”

The U.S. government has provided training, supplies, and funding for Honduras’s police and military. Soto Cano, a large U.S. air base in eastern Honduras, periodically receives from 500 to 1500 troops who undertake short-term missions throughout the region, supposedly for humanitarian or drug-war purposes.

Not only does serious oppression exist, but, according to Reuters, severe drought over five years has decimated staple crops [and] … Nearly half a million Hondurans, many of them small farmers, are struggling to put food on the table.” The UN humanitarian affairs agency OCHA reports that as of February 2021, “The severity of acute food insecurity in Honduras has reached unprecedented levels.”

For the sake of survival, many Hondurans follow the path of family and friends: they leave. Among Central American countries, Honduras, followed by Guatemala and Mexico, registered the highest rate of emigration to wherever between 1990 and 2020. The rate increases were: 530%, 293%, and 154%, respectively. Between 2012 and 2019, family groups arriving from Honduras and apprehended at the U.S. border skyrocketed from 513 in 2012 to 188,368 in 2019.

The undoing of Honduras by U.S. imperialism follows a grim pattern, but is also a special case.  Rates of migration from Central American countries to the United States correlate directly with levels of oppression and deprivation in those countries. As regards hope, the correlation is reversed.

Differing rates of apprehension of Honduran and Nicaraguan migrants at the U.S. southern border are revealing. Capitalist-imbued Honduras specializes in oppression, while optimism is no stranger in a Nicaragua aspiring to socialism.

Department of Homeland Security figures show that between 2015 and 2018 the yearly average number of Nicaraguans apprehended at the border was 2292. The comparable figure for Hondurans was 63,741. Recently the number of Nicaraguan migrants has increased; 14,248 presented themselves at the border in 2019 – as did 268,992 Honduran refugees.

Recent reflections of Carlos Fonseca Terán, the FSLN international secretary, show why hope has persisted in Nicaragua. He points out that, since 2007, poverty, inequality, illiteracy, infant mortality, and murders have dropped precipitously. Citizens’ safety, electrification, renewable energy sources, women in government, healthcare funding, and the minimum wage have increased, markedly. Fonseca adds that the “percentage of GDP produced … under associative, cooperative, family and community ownership went from less than 40% to more than 50%.”

The UK and the Pandora papers: A cesspit of the super-rich

Thomas Scripps

No one in the UK needed to be told that the Johnson government is beholden to the interests of the super-rich. Indeed, it is a government significantly made up of the rich and the super-rich.

Chancellor Rishi Sunak has a reported personal wealth of £200 million, mostly in property. His wife has £430 million, mostly in shares in technology corporation Infosys, making her richer than the queen.

Leader of the House of Commons Jacob Rees-Mogg’s hedge fund has brought him a personal fortune of well over £100 million.

Some way behind, new Education Secretary Nadim Zahawi has an estimated property portfolio of £25 million. Health Secretary Sajid Javid clocks in at £8 million.

What the Pandora papers add to this picture are the sordid details of the world in which such fortunes and ones vastly larger are made, hoarded and hidden with the UK at the centre of a network of legalised criminality. They confirm the utterly parasitic character of a ruling class which lives by looting the rest of society, to the tune of billions of pounds, while tossing chump change to its “elected representatives” for favours.

Three major donors to the Conservative Party have come under particular scrutiny.

Corporate lawyer and businessman Mohammed Amersi has donated £525,000 since 2018. His partner, Nadezhda Rodicheva, donated £250,000 in 2017 and 2018.

Mohamed Amersi speaking at an online meeting of the Horasis think tank (Creative Commons)

The Pandora papers show that Amersi was working for Swedish telecoms company Telia during its involvement in one of Europe’s biggest corruption scandals, involving millions of pounds paid to Gulnara Karimova, daughter of the then president of Uzbekistan, through an offshore company to secure influence with the country’s mobile licensing regulator.

Amersi handled the negotiations with Karimova’s offshore company. A Telia invoice for “success fees” for “Project Uzbekistan” records a payment of £500,000.

BBC Panorama has seen internal Telia documents referring to a consultant named as “Mr XY” paid more than $65 million over six years, including between one and two million a year for “lavish corporate entertainment”. Former Telia executive Michaela Ahlberg told Panorama that the consultant was Amersi.

In 2006, according to the Financial Times, Amersi was accused of seeking to “extort” $2 billion from a businessman on behalf of a Russian oligarch. In 2005, he received $4 million dollars for helping First National Holding acquire St Petersburg-based telecoms company PeterStar. The deal involved the “misappropriation” of Russian state assets, according to a Swiss arbitration tribunal. First National Holding was owned by Leonid Reiman, then Russia’s telecoms minister.

Another donor exposed in the Pandora papers is Viktor Fedotov, a former oil executive, whose companies Aquind and Offshore Group Newcastle have donated £700,000 since 2016. His business partner at Aquind, Alexander Temerko, has also gifted £700,000.

The papers show that Fedotov was a secret owner, through layers of offshore companies, of VNIIST, which several years ago made millions from an allegedly corrupt deal with Russian state-owned oil and gas pipeline company Transneft. VNIIST’s two other owners were Transneft executives.

Aquind is currently seeking UK government approval to build a £1.2 billion undersea power interconnector between Portsmouth and France.

The third Tory party donor cited in the Pandora papers exposure is Lubov Chernukhin, who has given £2.1 million since 2012. Lubov is married to husband Vladimir, a billionaire Russian businessman who served as a deputy finance minister between 2000 and 2002. The pair organise their financial affairs through a huge network of offshore companies.

These exposures follow the revelations earlier this year that Conservative Party co-chairman Ben Elliot has built on the longstanding “Leaders Group” of elite Tory donors, who donate a minimum of £50,000 a year and are rewarded with regular private dinners with senior government ministers. Elliot’s innovation is an even more exclusive “Advisory Board”, open to those who pay £250,000 a year, given access to monthly meetings with Johnson and Sunak.

Elliot, a nephew of Prince Charles, has raised £70 million for the Tory party, including a record £37 million during the 2019 general election. He is named in the Pandora papers in connection with using an offshore company to help fund a cricket documentary he produced with Ben Goldsmith, brother of Tory minister Zac Goldsmith, both heirs to their father Sir James Goldsmith’s billion-pound fortune.

A hue and cry has gone up in the British media over the Pandora papers, “access capitalism”, the offshore industry and the government’s turning a blind eye to corruption. The Guardian, which played a leading role in breaking the story, has insisted on the need “to hold politicians and their backers to account” and expose “conflict of interest when it comes to reforming the offshore economy.”

But there is nothing remotely reformable about the world glimpsed through this latest scandal.

The Guardian cheers the fact that previous leaks, the Panama and Paradise papers, enabled “governments to recoup more than $1.36bn in back taxes and penalties.” But it acknowledges in the same editorial that tax havens cost the world’s governments “anywhere between $400bn and $800bn (£293bn to £586bn) every year”. That is previous devastating revelations of corruption and the supposedly remedial action of the world’s governments clawed back a maximum of 0.34 percent and a minimum of 0.17 percent of the estimated total loss of taxes from global offshore operations.

The paper notes throughout its coverage, “there was nothing illegal about the transaction” and “there is no suggestion of wrongdoing” in reference to the lawful loopholes used to dodge billions in tax and avoid public scrutiny.

The figures named in the Pandora papers are only individual manifestations of a criminal social order, in which theft is routine and what does not count as corruption only reflects the extent of the legal privileges available to corporations, financial institution and the super-rich.

Britain is at the centre of this global racket. More than two-thirds of the companies identified in the Pandora papers are registered in the British Virgin Islands. The Tax Justice Network reported last November that the UK and its “spider’s web” of Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies were responsible for 29 percent of lost corporate tax worldwide. Including private taxes, the UK network is responsible for 37.4 percent of global tax losses.

Billions of pounds worth of dark money are invested in the UK’s property market. The Pandora papers revealed the owners of at least £4 billion worth of real estate held through offshore companies, including the King of Jordan and the president of Kenya.

Several million pounds of proceeds from Unaoil, run by the Ahsani brothers, fixers for multinationals in Asia, the Middle East and Africa involved in the “world’s biggest bribery scandal”, were also found to have been invested in property across the UK.

The family and associates of the president of Azerbaijan, repeatedly accused of corruption, have traded £400 million in UK property through offshore companies in the past 15 years. One £67 million building was sold to the queen’s Crown Estate.

Only a fraction of the truth has been revealed.

Over £170 billion of UK property is held overseas. Last December, a Home Office and Treasury Report moved the risk assessment for money laundering through the property market from “medium” to “high”. The document stated, “Corrupt foreign elites continue to be attracted to the UK property market, especially in London, to disguise their corruption proceeds.”

This is undoubtedly true, but the largest single group of owners exposed by the Pandora papers, over a quarter, were British. Among them is Tina Green, wife of retail billionaire asset-stripper, pension-raider and tax-dodger Sir Phillip Green, who is listed as the beneficial owner of 47 different British Virgin Islands companies.

Also referred to is former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair and his wife Cherie, who quite legally avoided paying £312,000 in stamp duty when purchasing a £6.45 million property in London as an office for her business. The Blairs were able to do this by purchasing the offshore firm that owned it.

Coming on the heels of a major corruption scandal involving former Tory Prime Minister David Cameron, Johnson and many of his senior ministers, the Pandora papers show the true face of capitalist “democracy”. An oligarchy gorging itself on the wealth of society, waited on by drooling politicians scrambling for a tip.