The Coming Assault on Social Security

Dave Lindorff

The first assault of the new Trump administration and Republican Congress upon Social Security has been launched. It comes in the form of release of a new report by the Congressional Budget Office, which of course these days is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican Congressional Caucus.

Using some financial sleight-of-hand, this CBO report pushes forward by two years the date at which its ideologically driven experts claim Social Security benefits will exhaust the Trust Fund, and since the Social Security program is required to be self-financing, the date at which, barring adjustments by Congress in the program’s funding and/or benefit payment levels, promised benefits would have to be cut by what the CBO claims will have to be 31%.

Such a cut would clearly be a staggering blow to the finances and livelihoods of nation’s retirees, dependents and the disabled.

This end-of-the-year CBO report is at odds with a report issued earlier this year by the Trustees of the Social Security Administration, which projected that the Trust Fund, barring any changes in taxes or benefit payments, would be tapped out in 2033, and that at that point benefits, barring some fixes in Social Security financing, would have to be cut by an also horrific but far lower 21% (with the remaining 79% of benefit payments being covered by current employee FICA taxes being paid into the system).

How did the projection on Social Security move from a cut in benefit payments of by just over a fifth being required in 17 years to a cut by almost a third being required in just 15 years?

Well, the CBO decided, in its wisdom, that the estimates of economic trends being used by the SSA’s Trustees — a group about evenly divided between Republican and Democratic appointees, with Democrats having a slight edge — were too optimistic.

Specifically, for example, the CBO gnomes are projecting that the interest rate on 10-year Treasury notes will only be at 1.7% in 2026, rising to just 2.3% in 2046. Since the Trust Fund — composed of FICA taxes paid by workers — is invested by law entirely in these 10-year notes, that’s a pretty low rate of return to be projecting. In contrast, the Trustees, in their 2016 report earlier this year, projected 10-year rates in 2016 of 2.4%, rising to 2.7% in 2031. For the record, the 10-year rate today is 2.51%, well above even the Trustee’s projection, and almost a percentage point higher than the latest CBO figure for the year.

The CBO is also projecting a slower rate of wage growth than did SSA Trustees, and thus is predicting a lower amount of FICA tax payments into the fund, as well as a further decline in labor participation rates and productivity growth, and other factors that all point to reduced contributions to the Trust Fund going forward.

Remember, though, that the Trump campaign and the Republican Senate and House candidates running for election, have been all about boosting jobs, raising incomes and lowering taxes, all of which should logically, if it were to come to pass, improve Social Security finances, not worsen them.

This leaves us with only two ways to look at the new CBO report, which will now be cited ad nauseam by Republicans in Congress as a reason to cut back on Social Security benefits and on annual inflation adjustments to those benefits, to raise the retirement age for receiving full benefits (a disaster especially for poor workers who cannot continue the hard physical labor many of their jobs require), and to raise the FICA tax rate, already a regressive flat 6.2% for employees and employers. Either Trump and Congress are not really going to try to boost jobs and income, or are going to try using measures like deregulation and trade sanctions on imports that will not work, or the CBO is just providing a fraudulent projection to give a boost to Republican plans to gut Social Security.

So what’s really going on here?

It’s classic scare tactics.

The Republican game, one in which they are, as always, being shamelessly supported by many conservative Democrats, as well as by nearly every financial advisor in the financial industry, and by financial industry lobbyists, is and has been to frighten younger workers into thinking that they are never going to receive Social Security benefits by the time they reach retirement age. The goal is to drive a wedge between older workers and retirees on the one hand, who are looking at Social Security benefits as the mainstay of their lives in retirement (half of all Americans have no retirement savings — no IRA or 401(k) and no pension — and of those with savings, the average amount is $60,000 per family, according to the Economic Policy Institute, enough to pay out just $2400 per year in interest for life), and younger workers, who are being told Social Security will be going bust before they retire.

In 2016, according to the Social Security Administration, 61 million Americans, or about one-fifth of the country’s population and nine out of 10 of the nation’s elderly and disabled, are receiving Social Security benefits. Of these, 48% of couples and 71% of single retirees depend on those benefits for 50% or more of their income. Furthermore, 21% of retired married couples and 43% of single retirees depend on those benefits for 90% or more of their income. Cutting Social Security benefits, or reducing them by stealth through continued under adjustment for inflation each year, will wreak havoc with their lives.

Meanwhile the 75-year-old system, which has never missed a payment, has long been supported by all workers, young and old, first because of confidence that it will pay promised benefits, and equally importantly, because children and grandchildren paying into the system know that it is supporting their parents and grandparents, and helping to keep them out of poverty and also off the backs of their offspring. There is, in other words, an inherent solid logic in seeing Social Security as a national good for people of all ages.

The Republican strategy is to destroy this universal support by convincing the young that their FICA taxes are going into a black hole and that those funds won’t be available for them when it’s their turn to retire.

The idea is to pretend that Social Security is like an investment in stocks and bonds, and that the return is not very good in comparison to investing money in privately managed accounts (that’s what the Wall Street financial community wants: to get their hands on all those FICA funds totalling nearly a trillion dollars a year!).

But Social Security is not like a 401(k) fund. It is a government program funded by taxes and with benefits set by Congress. It is a wholly political construct, and it will be whatever the public demands it to be. Sadly, because most of the corporate media have bought into the Republican-led scam that Social Security is just an investment program with a poor return, many Americans are losing confidence in its future. And so for years, during which, as even now, small tweaks in the funding of the program could have made the program fully solvent right through the period when a large population of Baby Boomers will be increasing benefit outlays, and into the foreseeable future, and that in fact would allow it to be expanded (European public retirement programs pay benefits that are about twice as large as those paid by the US Social Security system!), nothing has been done.

Make no mistake: this CBO report is the opening salvo of an all-out assault on Social Security, as Republicans, now thanks to Trump’s presidential win, seek to take advantage of their full control of the levers of power in Washington for at least the next two or more likely four years, try to do as much damage to the program as possible.

The only answer is for progressives to organize massively in support of this last and most critical piece of the old New Deal legacy of President Franklin Roosevelt. It will require massive protests in Washington and major cities of the country, incessant pressure on all elected officials, and a concerted educational program so that all Americans understand that this program is critical to their and their parents’ and grandparents’ survival.

The truth is that despite a decade of dithering by Republicans and limp Democrats also anxious to cut the program’s cost on behalf of their Wall Street contributors, Social Security could be fully funded for another 75 years or more by simply eliminating the cap on income subject to the FICA tax (currently only the first $118,500 of income is taxes, rising to 127,200 next year), so that all income is taxed, and benefits could even be expanded by adding a small transaction tax of a fraction of a percent on all short-term stock trading (a measure that would not impact long term investors or retirement funds).

It is a critical time for this organizing to begin because the attack on Social Security promises to be rapid and brutal. On the upside, rallying and organizing around a defense of this program can be the core of a new progressive movement that can address all the key issues facing us in the year and presidential term ahead. Just as an example, it would be difficult to rescue, and impossible to expand Social Security benefits if Trump and Congress go ahead with announced plans to expand spending on the military instead of cutting military spending.

New Zealand: Report reveals rampant exploitation of migrant workers

Sam Price

A report published on December 14 examines the rampant exploitation of migrant workers and international students in New Zealand. Worker Exploitation in New Zealand: A Troubling Landscape by Dr Christina Stringer, a lecturer at the University of Auckland Business School, is based on 105 interviews with workers from many industries, including construction, dairy, fishing, horticulture, viticulture, hospitality, education and sex work.

The report was commissioned by a coalition of NGOs, including ECPAT Child Alert, Hagar New Zealand, Stand Against Slavery, and The Préscha Initiative, in response to numerous media reports of exploitation and abuse of immigrant workers.

The interviews shed light on appalling conditions faced by these highly vulnerable people, who are bearing the brunt of the assault by the government and the ruling elite on conditions and wages.

One interviewee recalled working 12 hours daily, seven days a week for six months, for only $5 an hour. The hourly minimum wage is $15.25. Others said they were denied payment for months, or had excessive wages deducted for food, accommodation and transport. Requests for holiday pay, which workers are entitled to under the law, were met with responses such as: “I will give you holiday pay but you will lose your job.”

Workers also spoke of being charged excessive recruitment fees, being denied an employment contract, having their documents confiscated, as well as verbal, physical and sexual abuse.

One interviewee feared pressing charges with New Zealand police because he was continuously told by his employer, “You don’t know my powers.” Another was threatened by a contractor that if he spoke out “nobody’s gonna find your dead body in New Zealand.”

The report cites a 2012 story about a liquor store owner who withheld payment to 12 new immigrant workers, paid as little $4 an hour, and an alleged death threat. It also refers to a US report from the same year which named New Zealand as a major “source country” for sex-trafficking of underage boys and girls.

Because many migrants have no official employment contract, New Zealand authorities often refuse to help them. One interviewee explained: “I went to IRD [the Inland Revenue Department], I went to Labour Department, I went to Immigration, everywhere, to complain against these guys… but no one is doing anything.”

Speaking in parliament, Workplace Relations Minister Michael Woodhouse attempted to dismiss the testimony in Dr Stringer’s report as isolated incidents. He declared that “the vast majority of employers in New Zealand are law-abiding and treat their employees fairly.”

Yet cases of migrant exploitation continue to surface regularly. In August a number of men working at the Taste of Egypt eatery in Richmond were paid just $400 for up to 77 hours a week. In another recent case, a Lewis Pass motor inn was ordered to pay $19,000 to a worker who was paid below minimum wage and denied holiday pay for 5 months.

In October the managers of the Masala Indian restaurant chain in Auckland were convicted for paying their employees $3 an hour for working up to 66 hours a week. On December 14, labour contractor Binde Enterprises was ordered to pay $430,000 to 75 staff who were underpaid and denied holiday pay.

The publication of the University of Auckland report coincided with the sentencing of Faroz Ali, the first person convicted in New Zealand for human trafficking. Ali promised 15 Fijians $900 a week for picking fruit; instead they received little or no pay and were subjected to inhumane conditions.

One woman received only $25 after working three weeks on an orchard. Another was forced to sleep on the basement floor of her employer’s house with three others and no bedding provided. A 21-year-old man worked 12-hour shifts from 5 a.m., every day for three weeks and also slept on the floor. Ali’s victims were all made to pay $4,000 in administrative fees, leaving most of them financially worse off than when they left Fiji.

The opposition Labour Party has feigned concern for migrant workers and hypocritically attacked the National Party government. In fact both parties have repeatedly attacked migrants’ wages and conditions.

On December 2, Newshub reported that four Indonesian welders employed at the Napier Pine sawmill were being paid only $3 an hour and sometimes worked from 8 a.m. to 3 a.m. the next morning. An Immigration New Zealand official stated that these extremely low wages were legal because the men worked for “an offshore employer... so we can’t dictate the employment conditions or the wages that they’re earning.” Tens of thousands of people have been employed under these “specific purpose work visas” under successive Labour and National governments.

In 2007 Labour launched the Recognised Seasonal Employer Scheme to bring in low-paid workers from Pacific Island states to fill labour gaps in New Zealand’s $7 billion horticulture and viticulture industries. These workers are frequently forced to live in overcrowded accommodation and are contractually restricted to work for one company or face deportation.

In 2008 journalist Michael Field began investigations into horrific conditions suffered by foreign fishing crews in New Zealand waters. He and other researchers found routine underpayment of wages, shifts up to 20 hours, beatings and sexual abuse, and cases of workers being fed rotten meat. All of this occurred under National and Labour governments.

Labour’s main response to Dr Stringer’s report was to echo the anti-Asian, right-wing populist New Zealand First Party’s call to slash immigrant numbers. Labour MP Jacinda Arden wrote in a Fairfax Media column on December 18 that bringing in migrant workers was “creating a vulnerable work force where wages will continue to be compressed.”

The editor of the trade union-funded Daily Blog, Martyn Bradbury, responded to the report with an anti-immigrant rant. On December 18, he demanded “that we urgently shut down immigration and student visa scams until our infrastructure can be built up to cope with the landslide of desperate people trying to get into our country.”

Such attacks on immigrants are designed to divert attention from the fact that the Labour Party and the trade union bureaucracy have no real differences with the government’s austerity measures, which have led to soaring social inequality and poverty. For more than a century these nationalist organisations have scapegoated foreigners, especially Chinese people, for the social crisis in order to divide the working class and prevent a unified struggle against the capitalist system, which is the real source of poverty and inequality.

Slavery and trafficking in Thai fishing industry

John Braddock

Slavery remains endemic throughout Thailand’s seafood industry, according to a Greenpeace report published on December 15. Turn the Tide, the 86-page report into illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, describes vessels travelling thousands of miles into remote waters to avoid legal regulations and surveillance. Thailand’s fishing industry is the fourth largest in the world, with a 42,000-strong fleet, and is a central part of the country’s GDP.

The 12-month investigation followed a 2015 Associated Press (AP) exposure of appalling abuses in the Thai industry. AP reported trawlers operating off the coasts of South East Asia with thousands of slaves, smuggled from Burma (Myanmar) or Thailand, brutalised and forced to work against their will. When not at sea, crews were kept in cages at ports on remote islands in Indonesia. Workers in onshore factories, including small children, were found doing 16-hour days peeling shrimp in ice buckets. According to the UN, 60 percent of Burmese migrants in Thailand’s seafood industry were victims of forced labour.

The new Greenpeace report provides detailed evidence that widespread structural abuses persist despite the Thai government’s insistence that new legal measures to police the sector are working. The EU warned Thailand last year to clean up its $US6.5 billion industry or face a ban on its exports. In response, the military regime implemented limited measures against trafficking and arrested more than 100 people, mostly low-level operators.

Trafficking, murder and corruption still pervade the industry. Investigations by the Environmental Justice Foundation have found that the policing of fishing boats was highly erratic, overfishing rampant, the use of cheap and forced labour undiminished, and that crew transfers occurred at sea to hide trafficking from authorities.

Greenpeace observed several official inspections and alleged that the Royal Thai Navy failed to adequately identify and protect victims. Crew members reported that they had not been paid for some years, did not possess correct work permits, and had paid extortionate recruitment fees. Yet authorities cleared the vessels to return to port. The tiny number of convictions linked to trafficking decreased from 206 in 2014 to 169 in 2015.

Greenpeace claims that much of the seafood caught by Thai vessels is unreported, unregulated and essentially illegal. Depleted seafood stocks in the Gulf of Thailand forced ships to move to waters off Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, frequently using fake permits and ghost fleets to avoid inspections. An Indonesian government policy to sink vessels caught fishing illegally in the country’s waters forced boats into less policed waters off Papua New Guinea, Greenpeace claims.

Greenpeace tracked Thailand’s overseas fishing vessels and found that, after restrictions were imposed by the governments of Indonesia and Papua New Guinea in August 2015, as many as 76 Thai-flagged vessels shifted operations to the Saya de Malha bank off the eastern coast of mainland Africa, more than 7,000 kilometres from their home ports. There, vessels are out of reach of authorities, operating outside the law.

Large refrigerated vessels known as “reefers” remain at sea for years at a time, trans-shipping their catches. Captains routinely abuse, beat and traffic fishermen. Survivors told Greenpeace that daily beatings were part of everyday life, and that many had given up hope of ever getting off the boats alive. Of 15 trafficked survivors interviewed, almost half experienced physical violence. One of the main reasons for beatings was illness, especially when there was insufficient food and exhausted crew members would try to rest.

According to a 2016 Thai government report, nearly half of the 1,000 fishermen on 50 vessels in the Saya de Malha bank were working in violation of immigration and labour laws. Greenpeace interviewed men who had been trafficked to the boats after being told they would be employed at an on-shore fish processing factory. Instead, they worked 20-hour days, seven days a week, and could only leave the vessels once they had paid back the 30,000 baht ($US834) for which the captains had bought them.

Some fishermen are at sea for as long as five years. Beriberi, a preventable disease caused by vitamin B1 deficiency and common in the nineteenth century, was responsible for the hospitalisation and death earlier this year of a number of Cambodian and Thai fishermen who had continuously manned a reefer for nine months.

The report concludes by calling for greater controls and enforcement. Its recommendations include “prioritising efforts to eliminate risky practices,” “improved” inspections and better “transparency” to “hold sub-standard operators to account.” It absurdly declares that ultimate responsibility “rests with the industry.” In reality, the conditions described in the report are the inevitable outcome of the existing political set-up and the capitalist profit system.

Turn the Tide reveals that the powerful companies which are implicated in the use of slavery and other illegal practices are intimately connected through ownership and family ties to “significant interests” throughout the seafood supply chain as well as to influential positions in Thai “industry and politics.”

The Thai military junta is a repressive, anti-working class regime tacitly supported by Washington. The ruling National Council for Peace and Order, which came to power in a military coup in May 2014 by removing the elected Pheu Thai Party government, has maintained conditions of martial law. Torture is regularly used by the police and military, public gatherings and protests are banned, the media has been censored and elections have repeatedly been postponed.

More fundamentally, the fishing industry is an example of the global nature of capitalist production. It operates across national borders in defiance of nationally-based regulations to deliver ever-greater profits by producing at the cheapest price.

Thai seafood exporters include global operators such as Kingfisher Holdings, owned by the world’s largest seafood conglomerate, Japan-based Mahura Nichiro Corporation. Kingfisher, one of the companies implicated in AP’s 2015 slavery investigation, produces squid, shrimp and mackerel products for export to restaurant chains, food service companies, wholesalers and retailers throughout the US, Europe and Australia.

Under conditions of the worsening global economic crisis, the brutal practices uncovered by Greenpeace are not the exception, but increasingly the norm.

Anger mounting among US autoworkers in wake of GM layoff announcement

Shannon Jones

Frustration and stress is mounting in General Motors plants in the wake of the mass layoff announcement last week by the largest US-based automaker.

On December 19, GM said it would eliminate one full shift, almost 1,300 jobs, at its Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly Plant in March. In addition it said it would idle five plants for one to three weeks in January, impacting some 10,000 workers.

In November, GM reported plans to eliminate shifts at its Lordstown, Ohio plant and Lansing Grand River plant in Michigan, impacting some 2,000 workers. In reporting the cuts GM cited excess inventories and slower sales. The layoffs, however, are coming at a time when many plants are imposing forced overtime.

The United Auto Workers has given its support to the job cuts, taking the position that the mass layoffs are a business necessity. In a statement issued in the wake of the job cut announcement UAW Local 22 at the Detroit-Hamtramck plant justified the cuts on the grounds of “cost efficiency.”

Hardest hit by the layoffs will be young workers, many of who are on long-term temporary assignment and do not qualify to be placed at other GM facilities. Many are also being deprived of supplemental unemployment benefits, which pay a portion of the difference between their state jobless benefits and their regular wages. Most of the workers facing layoff were hired in April of 2016. That means the layoffs were timed so that these workers will have less than the one-year seniority required to receive supplemental unemployment pay and other benefits.

A young GM worker at the GM Detroit-Hamtramck plant, who wished to remain anonymous, told the World Socialist Web Site she had previously worked for a GM subcontractor, but could not carry that seniority with her. “It sucks. They said they would see if they will transfer us to either Lake Orion or Romulus, but it is not a promise.”

Andrew, another young GM Detroit-Hamtramck second shift worker who faces layoff, said, “A guy who works near me quit a job at FedEx in Cleveland because he thought working at GM would be a more secure job.

“Out of the 1,300 that are being laid off, only about 300 are permanent employees. The rest are temporary and that means they can’t move to another plant. You are out of a job, and we don’t get sub pay.

“What is also upsetting is the uncertainty. I could be out of a job for a year. Do I start looking for a new job or hope to go back to work at GM?”

He continued, “The health insurance part is major. I am only getting one extra month of health insurance. My wife went off her health insurance plan at the job she was working so she could be covered under my plan at GM, which was better. But now she can’t get back on her old plan until November. Meanwhile, she has major medical expenses.”

Under terms of the UAW-GM sellout national agreement signed in 2015, the number of temporary workers that can be hired by management was doubled. This has created a super-exploited, “third tier’ of workers who can essentially be hired and fired at will by the company.

A veteran worker at the GM Delta Township plant near Lansing told the WSWS, “The majority of those being laid off are temporary workers. The shift they are eliminating at the Grand River plant are new hires. They will be coming over here to Delta and they will displace the temporary workers.

“We have temporary workers who work very hard. A lot of them quit other jobs to come work for GM where they thought they could get a foot in the door. They have made purchases and they have bills. In fact we just brought in another 100 temps the week before Thanksgiving.

“We call them ‘perma-temps.’ You can have them in there for years. It is not right. The decision should be made to hire them full time after 90 days.”

Workers pointed to the contradiction of GM insisting that it must slash jobs and production even as it has forced workers to labor extra hours and on weekends in order to build up inventory.

The Delta Township worker commented, “People are working two to three Saturdays in a row and they are laying people off. People are overworked. It is not right. It has got to stop.”

A worker from Ford's assembly plant in Wayne, Michigan said her factory had been impacted by layoffs. “I think it’s horrible what they’re doing. We have no rights. We were laid off for a week before Christmas from December 12 through the 19, and we will be off in February for another one or two weeks. They say it’s due to a slump in sales, yet they’ll work us 10 to 12 hours a day to boost production just so they can lay us off."

Workers also focused on the role of the UAW in facilitating the attack on jobs. Andrew, the Detroit-Hamtramck GM worker, said, “The UAW comes around once in a while. They claim they did not know in advance about the layoffs, but I find that hard to believe.”

The former GM subcontract worker said, “When they made the announcement there was not one UAW person on the stage to answer questions. Their position is basically you are out the door, ‘goodbye.’”

The Delta Township worker noted the fact that the UAW was one of the largest holders of GM stock. “They signed off on the decision to move small car production to Mexico, even though it would hurt jobs.

“The UAW has allowed GM to amend a lot of the old contracts in order to help the company make money. What the union isn’t saying is that it is in the interest of the union itself so that it doesn’t drive their stock down.

“A couple of years ago the union decided to raise union dues, saying there would be a big strike and they needed money for the strike fund. The strike never happened, but they did not lower the dues. Instead they gave themselves raises.”

Berlin’s “red-red-green” state government sets up refugee ghettos made from shipping containers

Franci Vier

On December 13, the red-red-green (SPD-Left Party-Green Party) state administration in Berlin decided to swiftly move refugees from mass lodgings into so-called “temp-homes.” The refugees are to be housed in container settlements that were ordered by the previous Social Democrat-Christian Democrat administration, and which are partly completed.

More than 20,000 refugees are still living in inhuman conditions in airport hangars, gymnasiums and trade fair halls in Berlin. Residents at one such camp recently went on a hunger strike to draw attention to the intolerable conditions.

Refugee shelter in a hangar at Tempelhof airport

The Left Party, whose state ministers are responsible for Housing and Construction and for Labour, Integration and Social Affairs in the new government, now praise the temporary container settlements as the solution to the housing crisis facing refugees. Last Tuesday’s decision by the Berlin state administration was a “signal for a real change in policy,” said Katina Schubert, the refugee policy spokeswoman for the Left Party.

The special building programme adopted in autumn 2015 planned originally for thirty container villages, but the figure was since reduced to eighteen. Designed to be habitable for a maximum of three years, they have mostly been built on the outskirts of Berlin, far away from the inner city districts with their infrastructure, subway system and educational institutions.

They are usually situated next to or in industrial areas, as well as close to major roads and not infrequently by train tracks. At the end of 2014, a special derogation in planning law was introduced allowing accommodation for refugees to be built in places that are not suitable for residential purposes.

As with the current mass accommodation, external operators will be contracted to organize and manage the container villages. They will receive a guaranteed daily rate per refugee for three years, providing them with lucrative business. As a result, it is not surprising that there was a veritable scramble when the European-wide tender was opened for each location. The approximately 30 to 50 companies who applied to operate a container village noticed they offered “quite some economic potential,” the spokesman for the Berlin State Office for Refugees (LAF) Sascha Langenberg was quoted recently in the online edition of Die Welt.

According to the state administration, around 280 to 500 people will be housed in each facility, with up to 1,000 at a double-sized location. The units consist of three containers, each of approximately 13 square metres, making a total of just 39 square metres. This is meant to house four to eight people—depending on whether the state administration defines them as “emergency shelter” with high permitted occupancy rates or “community accommodation” with a lower occupancy level.

The interior of the accommodation is Spartan, to say the least. The windows are located on the narrow sides. With a container length of about six metres, the rear portion of the space is difficult to ventilate and receives little daylight.

Temp-homes in Berlin Altglienicke (Photo: Ronald Seiffert, www.altglienicke24.de)

The shelters are situated in remote wastelands—without any landscaping or trees. Each site will be fenced off, with an entrance gate with entry control and security personnel. Supply buildings, children’s playrooms, computer rooms and the like are also situated within this perimeter fence.

In this way, the temp-home settlements take on the character of a ghetto. Cut off from the neighbourhood, the containers—seen all over the world on building sites or cargo depots—repurposed for “residential” use, clearly send out the message: Whoever lives here is a refugee, only temporarily tolerated in Germany; these are people of second or third class.

The plans to house refugees in subhuman conditions are not seen as merely a short-term, temporary solution. This reality is reflected in the so-called “modular accommodation for refugees (MUF),” facilities to be built in the coming year and which the new red-red-green state administration wants to construct.

Unlike the containers, the MUF facilities are designed to be habitable for up to one hundred years. Using a precast concrete construction, similar to previous prefabricated buildings, large, five-story homes are to be constructed to house refugees.

But these shelters will face even greater problems with lighting and ventilation. Apart from the communal sanitary facilities, many kitchens and living areas remain without daylight. People would continue to live in narrow confinement and have little privacy. Two people are to occupy a 16-square-metre room, while 15 people share two showers.

The architecture magazine Bauwelt describes these buildings as being part of a fundamental shift from “housing to shelter.” The “modular shelters” are only “convertible into individual apartments at extraordinary expense,” it says.

This demonstrates the long-term strategy of the Berlin state administration, which is only planning for a minority of refugees to be provided with homes and integration. The percentage of asylum seekers who manage to get a private apartment stood at 58 percent in 2013.

At the same time, the minimum social standards that shaped housing in the post-war period, and which emulated the programme of social housing in the 1920s under the slogan “light, air, sun,” are being undermined. The first to suffer are refugee families, but ultimately this will also apply to other working-class residents who can no longer afford Berlin’s soaring rents, and who will be forced into ever more miserable living quarters.

By opting for temp-homes and the continued construction of the MUFs, the red-red-green state administration has made clear that it will continue the right-wing refugee policy of its Social Democrat-Christian Democrat predecessor. Just one week after taking office, it has abandoned its promise to provide refugees with decentralized accommodation in individual apartments. While the coalition agreement said that a red-red-green administration would “accommodate refugees quickly in homes,” there is no longer any talk of this.

Under the new government, the Left Party’s Katrin Lompscher will serve as state minister for construction. She served as state health minister in the earlier SPD-Left Party administration of Klaus Wowereit, which was responsible for the mass privatization of social housing that contributed to the present housing shortage.

Now the self-created housing shortage is being used as justification to force refugee families into container villages and push them into ghetto-like settlements in the long term.

Berlin terror attack suspect was well known to German intelligence agencies

Johannes Stern

One and a half weeks after the devastating attack on a Christmas market in Berlin, more information has emerged regarding the close links between German security authorities and the alleged perpetrator. Press reports allege that Anis Amri, who was shot while on the run in Italy, carried out the attack literally under the noses of the secret services. He was intensively monitored and officially classified as unusually dangerous just a few days before he drove a truck into a market on December 19.

According to the latest report by Hans Leyendecker and Georg Mascolo in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, on 14 December, five days before the attack, security authorities issued “the latest version of a personal profile containing everything they knew about Amri.” The document describes “a man whose résumé is very similar to that of former assassins in the service of the terrorist group Islamic State,” according to the two investigatory journalists, who have close links to sources in secret service circles.

According to Leyendecker and Mascolo, the secret services knew virtually all there was to know. The profile describes “the career of a petty criminal who was already in prison in Italy as a youth, and committed a theft in a German asylum shelter. It contains language skills: German, Arabic, Italian, Spanish and French…. It contains the eight identities that Amri used. There are constantly changing domiciles and places of residence. There are several pictures of him.”

The journalists note that Amri may have shared many of these factors with other potential offenders under the surveillance of the intelligence services, but in his case, “the evidence is even more concrete.” For instance, the state police agency in Duisburg described Amri as “a Salafist and radical fundamentalist.” The police department in Dortmund assessed him to be a sympathizer of the Islamic State.

The authorities were also aware that “Amri has searched the Internet for instructions on the construction of pipe bombs [and] had shown interest in the chemical processes that can be used to produce explosives.” There was allegedly at least one Chat in February this year in which Amri “presumably offered himself as a suicide bomber…most likely in conversation with an Islamic State member.”

Amri was not only on the radar of the local security authorities in Berlin and North Rhine-Westphalia. He was also repeatedly “on the watch list of the Joint federal and state Counter-Terrorism Center (GTAZ) in Berlin.” Leyendecker and Mascolo report that the “profile of 14 December” was drawn up by the GTAZ. The report notes that Amri showed “experience with police” and a level of “conspiratorial behavior, which is unusual even among Islamists.”

Now the security authorities have begun a debate about “what went wrong” in the run-up to the attack. In essence, there are two interpretations. According to one reading, the attack in Berlin “simply could not have been prevented,” since there are “too many radical Islamists in Germany.” According to the second reading, as Leyendecker and Mascolo put it, “there was a clear mishap in the Amri case. A perpetrator, who had been talking about attacks for ten months, should not have gone dark.”

Both “readings,” repeated endlessly by political circles and the media, are aimed at obscuring the obvious and decisive question: how could someone “go dark” under the noses of the authorities, which were monitoring him so closely, and who was active in a milieu teeming with undercover agents with whom Amri maintained direct contact?

All of the facts known about Amri and the manner in which the attack is being politically exploited indicate that there are forces in sections of the security apparatus that were more closely informed of the attack plans, allowed the attack to go ahead or even provided indirect support for it in order to destabilize the Merkel government and effect a political lurch to the right in Germany.

Since the attack, right-wingers in the media and political establishment have been drumming ceaselessly for an expansion of police-state measures and have been denouncing the refugee policy of Angela Merkel. Despite the fact that the chancellor adopted right-wing anti-refugee measures at the last CDU party congress, she is under relentless attack, especially from one of her coalition partners, the Christian Social Union.

A few days before the traditional CSU meeting at the beginning of January, the Bavarian Minister of Finance, Markus Söder, declared the “uncontrolled opening of the borders” to be a serious mistake. Now “Germans [...] anticipate that their state is defenseless. Terrorists and criminals must know that they cannot expect the good life with us, they must be made aware that it does not pay to attack Germany.”

Söder demanded mass deportations next year. “We will have several hundred thousand people with a rejected asylum application in 2017 - so we need a deportation plan for the coming year to ensure that a large percentage of them can be returned,” he said. “This must be done quickly and consistently.”

A large share of political responsibility for the aggressive stance of the right wing rests with the SPD, the Left Party and the Greens. Their response to the rise of the far-right AfD and the right-wing elements in the CDU and CSU is to adopt the right-wing parties’ policies and wage their own campaign for police-state measures and tougher action against refugees.

On Tuesday, the chairman of the SPD in Schleswig-Holstein, Ralf Stegner, who is also deputy chairman of the German Bundestag, called for so-called “potential offenders” to be permanently detained in deportation prisons. “If their applications for asylum have already been rejected, they must be imprisoned.” In an interview with Die Welt, he attacked CDU Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière from the right, declaring that “the SPD provides many more police in federal and state governments and better equipment. Precisely in these areas the Interior Minister has put on the brakes.”

The same tone is to be heard from the Left Party and Greens. Green Party deputy faction leader Konstantin von Notz declared, “The CSU is trying once again to pull the wool over our eyes: for more than ten years it has been part of the federal government, but acts as if it has been in the opposition for years and therefore not responsible for internal security.” What is necessary is “more video surveillance for sensitive points.”

The chairman of the Left Party, Dietmar Bartsch, is campaigning for a strengthening of the security forces and police. He told the newspaper Deutschlandfunk, “We need police, of course,” adding, “this is not a new demand by the left for more policemen and good equipment, we have been demanding this for many years.”

Russia and Turkey broker ceasefire in Syria

Bill Van Auken

A ceasefire brokered by the governments of Russia and Turkey went into effect at the beginning of Friday, December 30, with the Syrian army announcing that it had “declared a comprehensive cessation of hostilities across all the territories of the Syrian Arab Republic.”

The ceasefire deal comes just one week after the Syrian army and allied militias restored government control over all of Aleppo, depriving militias led by the Syrian Al Qaeda affiliate, formerly known as the Al Nusra Front, of their last urban stronghold, the eastern sector of the city, which they had held since 2012.

The retaking of Aleppo was a strategic defeat for the United States and its regional allies, which orchestrated, armed and supported the Islamist militias that served as their proxy forces in a nearly six-year-old war aimed at regime change.

Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the agreement Thursday in a meeting with the Russian foreign and defense ministers. He said that three documents had been accepted by the government of President Bashar al-Assad and seven armed opposition groups. The first was an agreement to cease hostilities; the second to develop means of monitoring and enforcing the ceasefire; and the third to prepare for peace talks to be held in Kazakhstan early in the new year.

While the deal may lead to an end to hostilities in some areas of Syria, it hardly signals a full halt to the violence that has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands and driven some 11 million people, half the country’s population, from their homes.

Like earlier abortive ceasefire deals brokered between Washington and Moscow, the latest agreement excludes those organizations classified by the United Nations as “terrorist,” including the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and the Fateh al-Sham Front (formerly the Al Nusra Front, Syria’s Al Qaeda affiliate). These two groups have been the most active fighting forces in the war against the Assad government, with the latter having fought in close alliance with weaker so-called “moderate rebels” backed by the CIA, Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf oil monarchies.

This means that fighting will certainly continue in the areas controlled by ISIS, which are under siege by not only the Syrian government, but also US-backed Kurdish fighters as well as Turkey and militias that it is backing.

The Kurdish militia, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), is apparently not a party to the agreements. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu acknowledged Thursday that there was not an agreement on Ankara’s labeling of the YPG as a “terrorist” organization. He insisted, however, that the Kurdish group and its political arm, the Syrian-Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), would be excluded from the peace talks in Astana. Ankara considers the Syrian Kurdish groups to be an extension of Turkey’s Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, against which it has waged a protracted counterinsurgency campaign.

The status of the YPG is a subject of substantial friction between Washington and Ankara. The Pentagon has funneled arms and aid to the Syrian Kurdish militia and has deployed US special operations troops to support it, even as the Turkish government has vowed to carry out military action to prevent the YPG from consolidating control over a de facto Kurdish state on its border.

The possibility that the ceasefire has been reached at the expense of the Kurdish factions appeared likely with the report by Turkey’s Dogan news agency that Russian warplanes had launched airstrikes for the first time against ISIS positions around the Syrian town of Al-Bab. Turkish forces have launched an offensive aimed at preventing the Kurdish militia from taking the town and thereby furthering their aim of linking up two separate Kurdish-held zones.

A rapprochement began earlier this year between Turkey and Russia. This followed a sharp deterioration of relations after Turkish warplanes shot down a Russian jet carrying out airstrikes on the Syrian-Turkish border in November 2015, raising the specter of war between the NATO member and Russia. Relations grew closer after an abortive military coup last July which Turkish officials blamed on Washington.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Thursday that seven separate “rebel” groups comprising 60,000 fighters had signed onto the ceasefire deal. Later in the day, however, one of these groups, Ahrar al-Sham, a hardline Islamist faction that had been closely aligned with Al Qaeda, denied it had accepted the agreement stating unspecified reservations.

The exclusion of the Syrian Al Qaeda affiliate from the ceasefire also raises serious questions as to its future. Strikes against it are likely to also affect so-called “moderates” who are allied with and fight closely alongside it. This was a continuous subject of conflict in previous ceasefire deals between Moscow and Washington. Russia demanded that the US carry through on its promise to separate its “moderates” from Al Nusra, while the State Department claimed this was nearly impossible because these US-backed factions had become “marbleized” with the Al Qaeda affiliate.

The Syrian government Thursday said that the truce agreement excluded ISIS, the Al Nusra Front and “groups linked to them.” It also stressed the obligation of groups that had signed the deal to separate themselves from these two Islamist factions.

Çavuşoğlu, meanwhile, said that his government would refuse to negotiate with representatives of Syria’s Assad government in any peace talks and that it had reached an agreement with Russia to “leave aside for now” the future of the Syrian president. Previously, Ankara has insisted that any settlement must include Assad’s removal from the Syrian presidency.

Syria’s Foreign Minister Walid al-Muallem, meanwhile, told the state news agency Sana that while Damascus accepted Moscow as a guarantor of the ceasefire, “We don’t trust the Turkish role,” because of Ankara’s backing for the Islamist militias.

A State Department official Thursday described the ceasefire as a “positive development,” but clearly the exclusion of Washington from the deal--Russia’s Foreign Minister Lavrov said that the incoming Trump administration could participate--reflects the failure of the US policy of regime change in Syria and a reversal in its drive for hegemony over the entire region.

The US ruling establishment will continue to be racked by recriminations over who lost Syria even after the change of administration, laying the foundations for a new upsurge of US militarism in the Middle East.

Obama escalates anti-Russian campaign with new sanctions and threats

Patrick Martin

In an executive order accompanied by a series of official statements, US President Barack Obama has sharply escalated the campaign against Russia, based on unsubstantiated claims of Russian government hacking of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Hillary Clinton campaign in the presidential election.

Obama has imposed sanctions on top Russian government officials, blacklisted several Russian IT companies and expelled 35 Russian diplomats stationed in the US, giving them only 72 hours to leave the country. Two Russian-owned facilities, in San Francisco and Maryland, are being shut down with less than 24 hours’ notice.

“These actions are not the sum total of our response to Russia’s aggressive activities,” Obama declared. “We will continue to take a variety of actions at a time and place of our choosing, some of which will not be publicized.” This indicates that secret retaliatory measures, possibly including cyber-warfare actions to disrupt Russia’s economy, finances or infrastructure, are being taken.

The text of the executive order, as posted on the White House web site, contains vague, sweeping language that has ominous implications for the democratic rights of the American people. Any political activist opposed to the official two-party system could face sanctions or even criminal charges for actions “with the purpose or effect of interfering with or undermining election processes or institutions.”

Is uncovering internal documents of the Democratic National Committee or the emails of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta “interfering with or undermining election processes or institutions”? Evidently so, since that is the principal crime alleged against the Russian government.

It is quite possible, however, that the documents were made public thanks to leaks by disgruntled DNC staff, perhaps angry about the content of the emails, which showed a deliberate effort by the DNC leadership to block the campaign of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and insure Clinton’s nomination. Would such leaks now be criminalized?

What about making those documents widely available, as the WikiLeaks organization did? What about publishing excerpts or the full texts of those documents, as virtually the entire American media did? Where do “interfering with or undermining” end and freedom of speech and freedom of the press begin? Obama’s executive order makes no distinction.

The corporate-controlled media, ever compliant with the dictates of the US military-intelligence apparatus, has made no challenge to the legality or constitutionality of Obama’s order. It has not criticized the refusal of the White House to provide a single fact to substantiate its claims of Russian hacking directed against the Democrats.

Obama’s executive order takes the form of an amendment to a previous executive order, issued in April 2015, in response to alleged North Korean hacking of Sony Corporation offices in Los Angeles, after the company made a film whose plot revolved around a CIA assassination attempt against North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

With little publicity, Obama declared a “national emergency with respect to significant malicious cyber-enabled activities” on April 1, 2015. Under the terms of Executive Order 13694, the secretary of the treasury, in consultation with the attorney general and the secretary of state, may designate for economic sanctions, including freezing of all property and bank accounts in the United States, any person they designate as a target.

Anyone “responsible for or complicit in, or... engaged in, directly or indirectly, cyber-enabled activities” directed or originating “from outside the United States,” whose purpose, in the judgment of these officials, would harm the US infrastructure, disrupt computer networks, cause misappropriation of funds or affect the US elections, is a potential target for US government retaliation.

Given that virtually all human interaction in economically developed countries is “cyber-enabled,” and that the World Wide Web is by definition a global entity “outside the United States,” this language is a mandate for the exercise of essentially unlimited, arbitrary power.

While the executive order details a series of measures that US officials are empowered to impose on anyone they see fit to target, Obama provided no evidence of the Russian hacking which is the supposed cause of this “national emergency.”

Instead, he refers to the finding of the US intelligence agencies, issued October 7, declaring they were “confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations.”

Obama’s statement is an exercise in circumlocution, aimed at disguising the fact that he is demanding that the American people and the world accept the premise of his executive order—extensive Russian hacking of the Democratic Party—on faith. The charges made by the US intelligence agencies, known worldwide for their brazen lies, fabrications, provocations and attacks on democratic rights, are to be received as gospel truth.

Responding to demands that he provide actual evidence of the Russian hacking, Obama announced before he left Washington for his two-week holiday in Hawaii that the intelligence agencies would deliver a report to Congress and the public by the time he leaves office on January 20.

But the punishment for the alleged crime, imposing sanctions and expelling diplomats, is announced three weeks earlier.

If the US government were in possession of actual evidence of Russian hacking into the Democratic National Committee, it could present this to a grand jury, indict the perpetrators, and pursue them through Interpol and other global police agencies.

Nothing of the kind is being proposed. Instead, the presumption of Russian guilt is taken up by the entire corporate media in the United States to pummel public opinion with the necessity for unspecified retaliatory action against Moscow and prepare the political climate for direct military conflict with Russia, whether in the Middle East, Ukraine or Eastern Europe.

Congressional Democrats and Republicans immediately issued statements to that effect. Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, who will be the top Democrat in Washington after Obama leaves the White House, declared, “We need to punch back against Russia, and punch back hard.”

Along with Obama’s statements and modified executive order, the FBI and the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center released a joint document on Thursday that purported to give “technical details regarding the tools and infrastructure used by the Russian civilian and military intelligence service” to interfere in the election.

The 13-page report, given the title “Grizzly Steppe,” consists of unsupported allegations that two groups of hackers, allegedly with ties to the Russian government, penetrated the email server of the Democratic National Committee. There follows a general list of precautions to be taken by cyber-security managers at businesses and organizations that could be taken from any security bulletin board on the Internet. There are no names, no dates, no locations, no actual facts about the alleged hacking, still less any evidence connecting the hackers to the Russian government.

The Russian Foreign Ministry responded with a blunt dismissal of Obama’s claims. “Frankly speaking, we are tired of lies about Russian hackers that continue to be spread in the United States from the very top,” spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a statement. She called the accusations “a provocation directed by the White House” that contained “not a single piece of evidence.”

She noted that Obama had only three weeks left in the White House and appeared to be seeking to poison US-Russian relations to block any shift in policy by the incoming Trump administration. “History is unlikely to forgive its behavior according to the principle ‘after us the deluge,’” the Russian spokeswoman added.

Israel-Palestine and the “two-state solution”

Nick Beams

The speech by US Secretary of State John Kerry on Wednesday, reaffirming US support for a “two-state solution” to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, was more than a defence of a useful political fiction. It was a warning that abandonment of the policy will have explosive consequences for the United States in the entire Middle East region and, not least, for Israel itself.

The incoming US administration of Donald Trump, together with the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu, has denounced the Obama administration for not using its veto and instead abstaining in the vote on last week’s UN Security Council resolution criticising the expansion of Israeli settlements on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem. They have been joined by a large section of Congressional Democrats.

The US decision was not made out of concern for the future of the Palestinian people. As Kerry made clear in his speech, the US has always been Israel’s chief supporter. It was motivated by the necessity to maintain the “two-state solution” as part of “advancing United States interests in the region.”

Kerry was giving voice to concerns that under conditions where the position of the US has been significantly weakened—most notably by the debacle of its attempted regime-change operation in Syria—it will suffer further major setbacks if the “two-state solution” is officially abandoned.

The concern of Kerry and the Obama administration is that the chimera of peace with the Palestinians through the establishment of their own state must be maintained because it allows the US allies in the Arab bourgeois regimes to suppress social and political opposition, thereby enabling Washington to utilise those regimes to ensure its domination over the oil-rich Middle East.

Emphasising that his task was above all to “defend the United States”, Kerry said the alternative to a “two-state solution”, that is, complete Israeli colonial domination of the West Bank, was “fast becoming the reality on the ground”. He warned that if “we were to stand idly by knowing that in doing so we are allowing a dangerous dynamic to take hold, which promises greater conflict and instability to a region where we have vital interests, we would be derelict in our responsibilities.”

For its part, the Israeli government could have simply ignored the toothless UN resolution, which has no enforcement mechanisms and is broadly in line with similar resolutions going back decades on which the US had also abstained, as Kerry noted in his speech.

But it decided not to do so because of the shift in policy expected from the incoming Trump administration, which could abandon the two-state policy. Trump has indicated the direction of his administration with the appointment as ambassador to Israel of his personal bankruptcy lawyer, David Friedman.

Friedman is a long-time fundraiser for West Bank Jewish settlements who has supported moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem—an action that would be a de facto abandonment of the two-state policy.

Kerry warned that any such move would not only endanger the interests of the United States, but the state of Israel itself. He held out the prospect that Arab leaders were prepared to have a new relationship with Israel and that together with Tel Aviv had “common interests in countering Iran’s destabilizing activities”, but that prospects for such cooperation depended on “meaningful progress towards the two-state solution.”

However, the Israeli coalition government, Kerry said, is the “most right-wing in Israeli history with an agenda driven by the most extreme elements” and was “more committed to settlements than any in Israel’s history”, leading in the opposite direction.

The establishment of such a single state over all of “Greater Israel” would pose enormous problems for Israel itself, Kerry warned. If occupation were officially established as permanent, then the Palestinian Authority would simply dissolve, posing the question of how Israel would respond to widespread protests and civil unrest. There would be increasing violence and growing despair among the Palestinians that “would create very fertile ground for extremists.”

The rupture between the Israeli government and the outgoing Obama administration is another expression of the breakdown of the post-war order of which the establishment of the state of Israel, backed by the United States, was an essential component.

Kerry’s speech constituted a warning that the breakdown of this order and the political relations that have been so vital to its maintenance—of which the “two-state solution” to the Israel-Palestinian conflict has been one—could have potentially catastrophic consequences.

But like every conflict and crisis, it serves a valuable educative role in burning away political fictions and laying bare the underlying and essential reality.

Two myths now stand exposed.

First, there is the claim that the establishment of the state of Israel could secure peace and security for the Jewish people after the horrors of the Holocaust. The expansionist and colonialist policy of Zionism has pitted the population of Israel against the other peoples of the region, constantly living under the danger of war, while the price of expansionism has been paid for through the creation of one of the most unequal societies in the world. The creation of the Zionist state has, as Leon Trotsky warned, proven to be a “bloody trap” for the Jewish people.

Second, the disintegration of the so-called “two-state solution” has revealed the utter bankruptcy of the claim that peace and security for the Palestinian masses and an end to their oppression by the Zionist state could be obtained through a series of deals and manoeuvres between imperialism and the bourgeois Arab regimes.

The exposure of these two fictions, however, points the way to the solution for the Jewish, Palestinian and working masses across the Middle East: the development of a unified struggle of the Arab and Jewish workers, not for the creation of unviable national bourgeois regimes, based on religious or ethnic divisions, but the establishment of a socialist federation of the Middle East as part of the fight for a socialist world order.

Government of Flanders Priority Country Scholarship Programme for African/International Students 2017/2018 – Belgium

Application Deadline: 31st March 2017

Offered annually? Yes

Eligible Countries: Brazil, Chile, Japan, Mexico, Morocco, Russia, South Africa, Turkey and the United States of America.

To be taken at (country): Various universities in Belgium

• KU Leuven / University of Leuven
• University of Antwerp
• Ghent University
• Hasselt University
• Vrije Universiteit Brussel

University colleges (Arts and Nautical Sciences)

• Antwerp Maritime Academy
• Artesis Plantijn University College Antwerp
• Artevelde University College Ghent
• Erasmus University College Brussels
• Howest, University College West Flanders
• Karel de Grote University College
• LUCA School of Arts
• Odisee University College
• PXL University College
• Thomas More University College
• UC Leuven-Limburg
• VIVES University College
• University College Ghent

Eligible Field of Study: The program holds for all study areas.

About the Award: The Priority Country Programme 2017-2018 is preferably for exchange projects, which will start from August 2017 and end before September 2018 to avoid duplication of implementation period of exchange projects selected by the Transition Fellowship Programme 2016-2017.

The selection for the Priority Country Programme is made only once a year. In this respect, those who are planning to exchange in the Spring Semester of 2018 (January-August 2018) shall apply for 2017-2018. It is estimated that 80 to 120 students can benefit from the program on a yearly basis.

Many forms of mobility are accepted under the Priority Country Programme: both short mobility of one, two or three months, or long mobility of one semester up to a period of maximum one year, both for study or internship:

• Brazil, Chile, Japan, Mexico, Morocco, Russia, South Africa, or the United States of America: fellowships for students in both directions, both short and long mobility.
• Turkey: fellowships for students in both directions, short mobility only: duration of mobility is restricted to one month for internship and two months for study.

Type: Masters

Eligibility: Due to the unique nature of this program, in order to be eligible, the exchange project needs to fulfill all five requirements below:

1. A higher education institution in Belgium/Flanders (home institution) and an educational institution in Brazil, Chile, Japan, Mexico, Morocco, Russia, South Africa, Turkey or the United States of America (host institution) have established an academic cooperation agreement or have the intention to set up a new cooperation agreement.
2. The Flemish higher education institution, as well as the partner from Brazil, Chile, Japan, Mexico, Morocco, Russia, South Africa, Turkey or the United States of America cannot ask tuition fees to the students for the exchanges.
3. The Flemish home institution has selected a Flemish student enrolled at the home institution to send to the host institution, and such selection has been accepted by the host institution. A Flemish student is defined as a student from any nationality, subscribed full-time in a Flemish Higher Education Institution.
4. In case of a duo-project, the same host institution has selected a student enrolled at the host institution to send to the Flemish home institution, and such selection has been accepted by the same Flemish home institution.
5. If the Flemish student has already started the exchange, or the international student has already stayed in Belgium/Flanders before the application period of the Priority Country Programme 2017-2018, the application is not accepted.

Value and Duration of Scholarship: The duration of the exchange can range from one month up to one year.

• For short exchanges, the fellowship amounts to €650,- per month for the Flemish and €800,- per month for the international student.
• The students receive a supplementary reimbursement for travel expenses, according to the following rules in the link below.

How to Apply: The application needs to be submitted through Mobility-Online Flanders: https://www.service4mobility.com/europe/LoginServlet

Documents to be uploaded: 1. Motivation letter of the applicant (maximum two A4 pages). 2. Applicant Learning or Training agreement. 3. Official Transcript of records. 4. Letter of recommendation from a professor or lecturer of your home institution. 5. Copy of Cooperation Agreement (or Memorandum of Understanding for cooperation) between paired institutions, by e-mail with scanned files OR declaration of intention to set up new cooperation agreement, signed by Head of Flemish higher education institution, signed by both parties. 6. Copy of international passport of (paired) applicants by e-mail with scanned files.

All documents are to be written in English, with exception of the official Transcript of records. If the Transcript of Records written in another language than Dutch, French or English, enclose a certified translation.

International students meet all academic entrance criteria, including relevant language req uirements, for entering the study programme in the Flemish host institution.

Visit Scholarship Webpage for details

Award Provider: Flemish Government