Peru’s president facing mounting crisis after six months in office

Cesar Uco

After six months in office, Peruvian President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski (PPK) is facing a mounting threat to his ability to govern after failing to fulfill his promises regarding the slow economy, government corruption, street violence and a political stalemate with rival Keiko Fujimori’s Fuerza Popular, which controls Congress.

Peruanos por el Kambio (PpK) came in second in the first presidential vote, narrowly beating bourgeois pseudo-left candidate Veronika Mendoza of Frente Amplio, FA, guaranteeing a second round opposite Fujimori of Fuerza Popular (FP).

With the elimination of Veronika Mendoza, who won in the most impoverished departments located in the Andean southern region, the choice in June’s second round was between two right-wing pro-Wall Street candidates.

Both PPK and Keiko Fujimori are part of the right-wing wave that has supplanted a series of center-left bourgeois governments in Latin America. Kuczynski’s predecessor, Ollanta Humala, begun as a Chavista and ended up as a faithful defender of foreign capital, particularly the transnational mining corporations. He left office facing popular rejection from virtually all sectors of Peruvian society.

PPK’s professional life has been a mixture of government posts—minister of energy and mines under President Fernando Belaunde in the early 1980s, minister of economy and finance, and then prime minister to President Alejandro Toledo (2001-2006)—and a lucrative career as a veteran Wall Street investment banker, specializing in private equity funds.

Keiko Fujimori is the eldest daughter of former President Alberto Fujimori, who in 1993 executed a coup d’état, closing Congress and writing a right-wing Constitution—still in place—that put an end to labor stability and placed virtually all of the country’s resources on the auction block for foreign and national investors.

The right-wing fujimoristas are hated by a large section of the Peruvian population that remembers the corruption, assassinations and dictatorial rule imposed by Keiko’s father in the 1990s. After fleeing to Japan in 2000, Alberto Fujimori was eventually extradited and sentenced in 2009 to 15 years in prison for having ordered the Grupo Colina death squad to carry out massacres in Barrios Altos (1991), a poor working class neighborhood, and of teachers and students at La Cantuta (1992).

The pseudo-left candidate Veronika Mendoza called on her constituency to vote for the Wall Street banker as the “lesser of two evils,” in this way helping PPK defeat Keiko Fujimori in the second round by just over 41,000 votes, the narrowest margin of victory in Peru’s history.

PPK began his mandate arrogantly promising that, with his experience as a Wall Street banker and with his small team of technocrats, he could singlehandedly solve Peru’s social and economic problems.

Bloomberg Businessweek wrote last October: “Mr. Kuczynski has persuaded the opposition-controlled Parliament to back his economic platform, travelled to China to drum up interest in a US$70 billion portfolio of infrastructure projects, and pulled off Peru’s biggest-ever sale of local currency bonds in the global market.”

In the 2016 APEC Forum (Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation) annual conference last November, he played host to more than a dozen heads of state, including those of the US, Russia, China, Japan, Australia and Canada, along with most Latin American presidents.

But as soon as the APEC Forum closed, the long-awaited confrontation between his administration and the fujimorista -controlled congress and began to take shape.

In spite his early successes that were praised by the financial media, PPK inherited a country with a declining economy, due in large part to the diminishing growth of China and global capitalism, which has driven down commodity prices.

Peru had won a reputation for being one of the fastest growing economies in the world. In 2010 alone GDP grew 8.3 percent, according to the World Bank, while the US and the European Union were still suffering from the near meltdown of the world credit system, following Wall Street’s collapse in September 2008.

For the last five years. Peru’s economy has been slowing down. By 2014, growth had fallen to 2.4 percent. In 2015, GDP growth was 3.3 percent, less than the 3.6 percent inflation. The World

Bank forecasts GDP growth of 3.5 percent for 2017 and 3.2 percent for 2018.

An impasse between the executive branch and Fuerza Popular (FP) emerged as a result of the FP-led Congress impeaching Jaime Saavedra, minister of education, after finding him guilty of embezzlement. Days before, a Sunday news program established that the minister’s trusted personnel had embezzled part of the budget of 150 million soles (US$45 million) intended for the purchase of computers and other equipment.

The resignation wounded the executive and PPK. It created confusion, paralysis and loss of the initial confidence within the country’s ruling sectors in the president’s ability to govern relying on his team of technocrats.

Two weeks before Christmas, the archbishop of Lima, Juan Luis Cipriani, a despised arch-reactionary, summoned PPK and Keiko Fujimori to meet at his house. After a one hour meeting, the president declared: “I do not doubt that we can work together to promote a Peru that reaches 2021 with prosperity and modernity,” while Fujimori called PPK “president” for the first time.

Speaking to the press, Prime Minister Fernando Zavala said, “PPK will meet with the leaders of the Aprista party and César Acuña, leader of Alliance for Progress. Also, he will set a date for meeting with Frente Amplio (FA) and Acción Popular (AP).”

The accusation of embezzlement against the former minister of education was not an isolated event. Since the beginning, corruption has been a constant in PPK’s presidency.

The most notorious case involved a former adviser on health issues, Carlos Moreno, who faces seven accusations of corruption. The TV news program Cuarto Poder revealed corruption in other branches of government, including Regional Affairs, and Prevention and Control of Social Conflicts. By October, PPK’s popularity rating had dropped 8 percent.

At present, there are new accusations involving the “Lava Jato” (carwash) mega-corruption scandal surrounding Brazil’s state-run oil giant Petrobras, which fatally undermined the Workers Party and set the stage for President Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment.

The business daily Gestion reported: “Via a report addressed to the US justice system, the Brazilian company Odebrecht said it paid US$29 million in bribes ‘under the table’ in three presidential terms [Toledo, Garcia and Humala] from 2005 to 2014.”

“In December, the Attorney General’s Office,” continued Gestion, “opened a preliminary investigation into the relationship of former President Alejandro Toledo and PPK because it could have benefitted Odebrecht’s infrastructure contracts to build national highways.

“The Brazilian company has a significant presence in Peru, where public works contracts valued at more than US$10 billion have been given out.”

Gestion reported last week that the Peruvian president “rejected many requests to remove Odebrecht from Peru and noted that some of its managers are guilty, but not the company itself.”

PPK denied claims that he accepted the $20 million in bribes from Odebrecht that were awarded to an unidentified official for a public work contract in 2005, when PPK was minister of economy and finance under President Alejandro Toledo.

Peru’s largest construction company, Graña y Montero (GyM), was a partner of Odebrecht in a US$400 million contract to build the Lima Metro Line 1. Odebrecht acknowledged having paid US$1.4 million to a high-ranking government official for that project.

GyM said it never knew anything about the Odebrecht bribe.

As political crisis engulfs the PPK government, class conflict in Peru continues to escalate. Much of the recent social unrest has been generated by the development of large-scale mining projects by foreign companies in impoverished regions of the countries. The situation is aggravated by the high level of police brutality and corruption of regional presidents, mine and peasant leaders, who have more than once been taped soliciting millions of dollars in bribes.

Last July, the daily Correo and America Economia reported: “The southern part of the country, especially in Apurímac and Cusco, is the most conflictive, with 32 percent of all social conflicts in the country. Additionally, 72 percent of Peru’s conflicts are active while 28 percent are latent.”

This is the region that in 2011, Ollanta Humala, then espousing a vague left nationalist and populist program, won by more than 80 percent of the vote, and Veronika Mendoza won by more than 50 to 60 percent in 2016.

PPK and his technocrats are particularly ill equipped to deal with the immensity of the social conflicts in the interior of Peru, where the president’s party has no presence at all. It is this growth in the class struggle that that has forced PPK to seek alliances with the right-wing Fuerza Popular, on the one side, and the bourgeois pseudo-left Frente Amplio, on the other.

Cuba turns to austerity and foreign investment to counter economic contraction

Alexander Fangmann 

At a session of Cuba’s National Assembly held last week, Cuban President Raúl Castro and Economy Minister Ricardo Cabrisas disclosed that the country’s economy contracted nearly 1 percent in the past year. This is the first time a recession has officially occurred since 1993, following the dissolution of the USSR and the collapse of the economic relationships that had subsidized the Cuban economy for several decades. Remarks by Castro and Cabrisas made clear that the Cuban government aims to accelerate its program of laying off public sector workers and throwing them to the growing private sector while inviting foreign investors to take advantage of Cuba’s low-wage labor force.

The main reason for the contraction is the continued low price of commodities, particularly oil, nickel and sugar, resulting from the ongoing global economic crisis. This has manifested in Cuba as a massive drop in economic support by Venezuela, as that country’s economy reels from the impact of low oil prices that supply nearly all of its export earnings and a substantial portion of its state revenue.

In particular, Venezuela has not been renewing contracts for medical services provided by Cuban doctors and other professionals—Cuba’s main source of export earnings—and has even reportedly fallen behind on payments. In addition, estimates are that shipments of Venezuelan oil to Cuba have dropped from 90,000 barrels per day (bpd) to 40,000 bpd toward the end of the year.

The drop in oil supplies has led to cutbacks in public lighting and bus service and the imposition of large decreases in fuel usage by state workers, including through reductions in working hours, and may also lead to the closure of a refinery in Cienfuegos resulting in the loss of hundreds of jobs. The reduction in oil shipments has also led to a further fall in hard currency income, and thus imports, as Cuba was reselling a portion of its subsidized oil for desperately needed dollars.

The Cuban government’s strategy to deal with the collapse in support by Venezuela is to turn to austerity and an expansion of market relations, particularly through foreign investment. Aside from cutbacks in energy consumption and imports, including of food, austerity is also being pursued under the guise of “efficiency” and the cutting of “dispensable” expenses. More and more workers are being shed from the public sector and turned into cuentapropistas, or “self-employed” workers. The number of cuentapropistas has skyrocketed since they were legalized in 2010, and now amount to some 550,000, or around 10 percent of the labor force.

All told, roughly one-third of Cuba’s labor force is now involved to some degree in private sector employment, with 50,000 or so employed in joint ventures with foreign investors. One theme repeated by Castro during his speech at the National Assembly was that Cuba needs to get over its “obsolete mentality, full of prejudices” against foreign capital and investment and eliminate the “excessive delays in the negotiating process” that have hampered growth in this area. Just recently Haier, a Chinese company, announced it would open a factory in Cuba to manufacturer low-cost tablet and laptop computers.

Castro’s speech further indicated that the country has been delaying payments to suppliers while it works on renegotiating its external debt, having restructured around $50 billion in the past few years. Even so, Cabrisas stated that Cuba would look to sell bonds in the coming year to help overcome a deficit in the just-approved budget that he said amounted to 12 percent of GDP. If increased revenue targets from exports and tourism are not reached, social spending will likely be slashed to make up the rest of the budgetary shortfall.

The Cuban government is also looking to increase its own domestic oil production capabilities in the future, and has been working closely with Australian and Russian companies to expand existing operations. It is also exploring the possibility of expanding drilling operations in the Gulf of Mexico, thought to potentially harbor the equivalent of billions of barrels of oil, and has hired a Chinese firm to conduct a seismic exploration of the area.

The situation in Cuba would be much worse were it not for a large increase in the number of tourists, especially Americans who are now more easily able to travel to the island following the normalization of relations and relaxation of travel restrictions. A report by the Ministry of Tourism indicated 4 million tourists visited Cuba in 2016, a 13 percent increase over the previous year, with 137,000 Americans visiting in the first half of the year alone. The increase in tourists has, however, also reportedly exacerbated shortages of food stemming from reduced imports.

Despite Castro’s claims that with these measures Cuba is “not going, and will not go, toward capitalism,” the ruling strata around the Cuban Communist Party hope to use the expansion of foreign investment to move Cuba towards a system more like China’s, in which their rule and privileges are secured while they offer up the impoverished Cuban working class to be exploited mercilessly by US and global capital.

US police killed more than 1,150 in 2016

Gabriel Black 

At least 1,152 people were killed by police in the United States in 2016 according to the tracking site killedbypolice.net. While the total number of killings documented is slightly down from 2015’s total of 1,208, police continued to kill at the rate of three people every day.

The number of people killed by police every year in the United States far dwarfs those killed by police in every other major advanced capitalist country. In 2015, for example, US cops killed 100 times more people than German police, despite the US having only about four times Germany’s population. Meanwhile in the UK only 14 people were killed by police in 2014.

Paul Hirschfield, a sociologist at Rutgers University, found that the US police shot and killed at a ratio of 3.42 people per million inhabitants per year. In contrast, Denmark had a ratio of 0.187; France, 0.17; Sweden, 0.133; Portugal, 0.125; Germany, 0.09; Norway, 0.06; Netherlands, 0.06; Finland, 0.034; and England and Wales, 0.016.

The overwhelming and often deadly violence meted out by American police is, among other things, an expression of the brutal and tense state of class relations in the US. Large sections of the working class live in or near poverty with basic needs like clean water, nutritious food, a job, healthcare, a good place to live and an education beyond reach.

The state, in turn, has responded with brute force, cutting access to basic social services and spending billions of dollars upgrading and militarizing the nation’s police force. This has included the mobilization of the National Guard and the imposition of states of emergencies to quell protests against police violence in recent years.

The United States is a country where fraud, bribery, deception and outright theft, all on a massive scale, are standard business practices for the major banks and corporations. Meanwhile the working class is held to an entirely different standard, in which execution without trial by a police officer is an increasingly common punishment for the smallest of misdemeanors.

The end of the year is an opportunity to assess this mass loss of life and clarify the political issues at stake in this state sanctioned murder.

According to the Washington Post, which runs its own database on the amount of people shot and killed by police (not just killed), 24 percent of the victims of police shootings and killings were black in 2016. That is 232 people out of 957 total shot and killed. In 2016 African Americans were shot at a rate double their percentage share of the total population.

While the media discussion around police killings and the protests by the Black Lives Matter organization has focused on the disproportionate rate at which blacks are killed by police, the largest share, 48 percent, are white.

As the World Socialist Web Site has emphasized, “Blacks are killed by police at a much higher rate than their proportion in the population, an indication that racism plays a significant role, but the number of white victims demonstrates that class, not race, is the more fundamental issue.”

The exclusive focus on race by the pseudo left and the Democratic Party establishment conceals the most fundamental issue, that of class.

While the Post does not track the class of those killed going through each killing, though, case-by-case, one would be hard pressed to find people from the upper classes, let alone better off sections of workers and professionals, regardless of the color of their skin. Those who are killed are often from the lowest sections of the working class, and often its most vulnerable layers: the unemployed, the mentally ill, those living in the poorest neighborhoods, both rural and urban, and the homeless.

For example, of the 957 killed, 240 had clear discernible signs of mental illness—that is, 25 percent of the victims.

Of the victims, 441 were not armed with a gun, 46 percent of those killed. One-hundred seventy people were armed with a knife. And, 44 had a toy weapon of some kind. Forty-seven were neither armed nor driving a car in a way the police deemed dangerous.

Sixty-five were driving cars, causing the police to categorize the vehicle as a weapon. However, in many instances there is no evidence to show that a vehicle acted as a weapon. For example, Christian Redwine, a 17-year-old white male, was shot after a car-chase in which Redwine crashed. He was unarmed and was suspected of stealing the vehicle.

Another notable fact is that 329 of the victims were fleeing, about 34 percent of the victims.

These cumulative statistics show the willingness of police to quickly kill people who pose little to no threat to them.

Police killings should be considered in the broader context of punishment for the most vulnerable and impoverished. In the United States, over 2 million people are in federal or state prisons. Furthermore, 4.75 million are on probation or parole. This means that about 7 million people, 3 percent of the adult population, have been or are in prison.

As in the case of police killings, many of these people have been locked up for shoplifting, grand theft auto and robbery. Many others are incarcerated for drug possession and use.

While millions of destitute and hopeless people in the US are brutally punished for relatively minor infractions, the real criminals, those in the Bush and Obama administrations responsible for wars of aggression that have cost the lives of hundreds of thousands in the Middle East, as well as the bankers who crashed the economy in 2008, have reaped the benefits of their much more serious crimes.

No amount of police training, community engagement or racial bias classes will end police killings. The deaths are borne out of much more fundamental political and economic realities than what this or that police officer feels and thinks. In 2017, amidst a worsening political and economic crisis, the state will be even more ready to kill, harass and imprison the poorest section of the population.

The class struggle in the US in 2017

Jerry White

The year 2017 promises to be one of increasing class struggle in the United States and around the world. In every country, the ruling elites and their political servants want to make the working class pay for the global economic crisis and the costs of war.

In the US, the working class will confront a government unlike any other in American history, which will continue and intensify a decades-long social counterrevolution overseen by the Democrats and Republicans. The incoming Trump administration is manned by billionaires, generals and arch reactionaries. It is a government of, by and for the oligarchy, committed to destroying every remaining gain won by workers over the past century.

Trump wants to “Make America Great Again” by eliminating any restrictions on corporate profit, from minimum wage laws and occupational safety, health and environmental protections, to bedrock social programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Workers will fight against these attacks, and any illusions sections of workers may have had in Trump are already being rapidly dispelled.

While hardly reported by the mass media, 2017 opens with a series of strike threats and labor contract expirations in the US. These include:

•  145,000 workers at the largest US railroads who have been working without a new contract for a year. The workers are opposing sweeping health care cuts, cuts to vacation time and unsafe working hours. They could face a strikebreaking intervention by Trump.
  
•  More than 30,000 transit workers in New York City who are holding a mass meeting this weekend and have a January 15 contract expiration date with no agreement in sight. Another 460 bus drivers and mechanics for the regional transportation system in Dayton, Ohio have voted to strike on January 9 over health care and work conditions. In addition, 10,000 Chicago Transit Authority workers face a contract fight this year.
  
•  4,000 General Electric Appliance workers in Louisville, Kentucky, who rejected a wage-cutting deal recommended by the local and national leadership of the International Union of Electrical-Communications Workers of America in November. The same month, 1,200 airline mechanics at UPS’s super-hub in Louisville overwhelmingly voted to strike against health care cuts.
  
• 38,000 Illinois state workers who are in a contract impasse with Republican Governor Bruce Rauner’s demands for sharp hikes in health care costs and changes to overtime rules.
  
• 700 workers at Momentive Performance Materials in Waterford, New York, north of Albany, and Willoughby, Ohio (near Cleveland) who have been on strike for three months. It was recently revealed that a key advisor to president-elect Donald Trump, Blackstone Group founder and CEO Stephen Schwarzman, owns a stake in Momentive.

The assault on health care, pensions and wages was at the center of Obama’s economic policies. This will only be intensified under Trump. Some 120,000 retired coal miners and their dependents face the cut off of health and retirement benefits, some as early as April, because of the near-bankruptcy of the United Mine Workers funds.

Thousands of General Motors workers are facing the elimination of their jobs over the next few months, as the giant automaker, working with the UAW, seeks to slash jobs as car sales slow. Trump has appointed GM CEO Mary Barra to his corporate competitiveness board.

With great fanfare on Tuesday, Ford and the UAW announced that the company was canceling plans to build a new $1.6 billion plant in Mexico and would invest instead in expanding a plant in suburban Detroit. Ford CEO Mark Fields said the decision was made because, “One of the factors we’re looking at is a more positive US manufacturing business environment under President-elect Trump and some of the pro-growth policies he said he’s going to pursue. And so this is a vote of confidence.”

Indeed, the Ford executives and wealthy investors will certainly reap the benefits of tax cuts, deregulation and other anti-working class policies the Trump administration will pursue, while the UAW bureaucrats are more than willing to offer their services.

The growth of class conflict poses basic political questions for every section of the working class.

First, the struggles of workers must not be subordinated to the pro-capitalist trade unions, which in the United States and around the world function as instruments of corporate management and the state, not as workers organizations.

The past two years have already seen a significant increase in the efforts of workers to resist decades of declining real wages. In every case, they came into conflict with or were smothered by the pro-corporate, anti-working class trade unions, which worked closely with the Obama administration.

In late 2015, autoworkers rebelled against sellout contracts pushed by the United Auto Workers, which were only rammed through with a combination of lies, threats and fraud. Last year began with a series of wildcat sickouts by teachers in Detroit. The action of teachers was in defiance of the Detroit Federation of Teachers and its parent organization, the American Federation of Teachers, which shut them down and facilitated the passage of laws that deepened the attack on public education.

These actions were followed by the strike by 39,000 telecom workers at Verizon, a strike by 5,000 Minnesota hospital workers and a walkout by Philadelphia transit workers. All were isolated by the unions, which pushed through contracts that attacked jobs and living standards.

Workers must build new organizations of struggle, democratically controlled by the rank-and-file, and based on the methods of the class struggle. Every division used to weaken the working class must be overcome and a common struggle waged to defend the social rights of all workers.

Second, a real struggle to defend jobs and living standards must reject the economic nationalism that has long been promoted by the unions to subordinate workers to the profit interests of their “own” corporate bosses.

The growth of the class struggle must and will take on an increasingly international form. Over the past year, major strikes and demonstrations broke out throughout Europe, including in France against reactionary labor “reforms,” and in Portugal and Greece in opposition to austerity measures dictated by the banks. India saw one of the largest one-day strikes in human history against the right-wing agenda of Narenda Modi, while in China the number of strikes and protests in the first half of 2016 was up 20 percent from the year before.

Strikes by teachers, oil workers and other sections of workers in defiance of state violence also took place in Mexico, Venezuela and Brazil. In Canada, the year ended with 9,300 teachers in Nova Scotia, Canada walking out over wage freezes and to demand increased educational funding.

Finally, the defense of the basic rights of workers is fundamentally a political struggle. In the incoming Trump administration, the reality of the state as an instrument of class rule is exposed in naked form. Yet anyone under the illusion that a Clinton administration would pursue a pro-worker policy need only look at the record of the past eight years and the response of the Democratic Party to the election of Trump. Rather than criticizing Trump for his right-wing agenda, the Democrats have denounced him for not being aggressive enough against Russia while pledging to work with him on imposing his policy of economic nationalism.

The political radicalization of American workers and youth in 2015 was expressed in support during the Democratic Party primaries for Bernie Sanders, who presented himself as a socialist and opponent of social inequality. Sanders’ carried out his assigned task of channeling this opposition behind the candidate of the status quo, Hillary Clinton. However, millions of people backed Sanders not because of his political treachery, but because they are seeking some way of opposing an economic system dominated by the corporate and financial aristocracy.

The essential question confronting workers in 2017 is the development of a socialist leadership for the momentous battles ahead. The Socialist Equality Party is fighting to unite every section of the working class and every struggle, for jobs, decent living standards, against police violence, war and the attack on democratic rights, into a single political movement to fight for socialism.

25 Chancellor’s Masters Scholarship at University of Sussex UK 2017/2018

Application Deadline: 1st May 2017 23:59:00 BST.

Eligible Countries:  International (Non-UK/EU)

To be taken at (country): University of Sussex UK

Eligible Field of Study: All full-time taught Masters degree courses at the University of Sussex are eligible (e.g. MA, MSc, LLM) excluding the following courses:

• Courses in the Institute of Development Studies, except the MA in Gender and Development and MSc Climate Change, Development and Policy
• MSc in Social Research Methods
• DPhil combined (1+3 degrees)
• International foundation years, postgraduate certificate, International Year One Diploma in Business and Management, and Pre-masters.
• Pre-Masters Degrees and Diplomas taught at partner colleges that are validated by Sussex
• Masters in Business Administration or Masters in Education
• LLM in Corruption, Law and Governance (delivered in Qatar)
• Courses within the Brighton and Sussex Medical School

Type: Taught full-time Masters

Eligibility

• Be assessed as liable to pay fees at the “overseas” (namely the non-EU) rate.
• Have sufficient funds to meet your tuition fees and living expenses, after taking account of the possible award of a Chancellor’s International Scholarship.
• Intend to remain on the programme for which the scholarship is offered.

Students who hold other University of Sussex scholarships, including the SYLFF Fellowship, will not be eligible for the Chancellor’s International Scholarship.

Selection Criteria Scholarships will be awarded on the basis of previous or current academic performance and future potential. The selectors will pay careful attention to the information you provide in the Scholarship application form.

Number of Scholarships: up to 25

Value of Scholarship: 50% off international student tuition fee

Duration of Scholarship: 1 year

How to Apply

• To apply for this scholarship you must first have submitted your application to study through the University of Sussex online postgraduate application system.
  
• When you have applied for your course, apply for the scholarship using the application form.
• Confirmation of submission will be sent automatically following your submission. If you do not receive this, please ensure that you check your junk/deletion folder for this notification as it may be sent directly to these folders depending on your email security settings.
• The closing date for applications to be received is 1 May 2017 23:59:00 BST. Applications received after 1 May 2017 will not be considered.

Visit Scholarship Webpage for details

Scholarship Provider: University of Sussex UK

Rolex Awards for Enterprise 2018 for Young Leaders. 100,000 Swiss Francs

Application Deadline: 30th June 2017.

Offered annually: Yes

Eligible Countries: Any nationality

About the Award: Since 1976, Rolex has honoured extraordinary individuals who possess the courage and conviction to take on major challenges. Each Rolex Award for Enterprise is given for a new or ongoing project anywhere in the world – one that deserves support for its capacity to improve lives, or protect the world’s natural and cultural heritage. These projects have touched all aspects of humanity by expanding knowledge or improving life on the planet.

Rolex Laureates are of all nationalities and backgrounds. They are united by a talent for independent thinking and the capacity to embrace projects that require creativity and determination in the face of considerable odds.

Focus Areas: They support pioneering work in the areas of the environment, applied science and technology, or exploration.

Eligibility Criteria: The Rolex Awards are open to anyone;

• over 18 years of age and under 30 years,
• of any nationality,
• whose ground-breaking project is helping to expand the knowledge of our world and improve the quality of life on the planet.

Selection Criteria: Projects are assessed on their originality, potential for impact, feasibility, and, above all, on the candidates own spirit of enterprise.

Prizes: The five winners will each receive 100,000 Swiss francs, double the amount of prize money previously offered to young Award winners. They will also benefit from worldwide publicity and receive a Rolex chronometer.

How to Participate: There is a two-phase application process: a pre-application, which can be submitted by any eligible candidate, followed by a full application to be submitted by some candidates, upon invitation only.

It is important to go through the program webpage for eligibility details before applying.

Visit program webpage for details to enter

Unilever Graduate Scholarship in the Sciences 2017/2018 – UK

Application Deadline: 19th May 2017.

Offered annually? Yes

Eligible Countries: All

To be taken at (country): St Cross College in Oxford University, UK

Field of Study: Science-related fields. Preference will be given to those studying for degrees in engineering or biochemistry

Type: DPhil (Doctor of Philosophy)

Eligibility: The Scholarship is tenable at St Cross College only

Value of Scholarship: £3050. Scholarship winners will be guaranteed to have a room in College accommodation (at the standard rent) for the first year of their course.

Duration of Scholarship: The Unilever Scholarship in the Sciences is tenable for three years coterminous with College fee liability

How to Apply: An application form can be downloaded from this site, or requested by email. Written requests should be sent to the Academic and Admissions Assistant, St Cross College, St Giles’, Oxford OX1 3LZ.

Visit Scholarship Webpage for details

Award Provider:  St Cross College, Oxford University.

God Hates Mexicans

Charles Pierson

People will believe anything if it flatters their vanity.  Think of the idea that Americans are God’s favorites and that the Almighty directs history for America’s benefit, even when that harms non-Americans, particularly non-Whites.

From the belief that divine providence guides America’s destiny came two more bad ideas.  American exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny were heroic-sounding euphemisms used to justify the trampling of Native Americans and Mexicans in the course of the US Empire’s mad dash across the continent.

Divine providence was such a transparently self-serving and chauvinist notion that we can be thankful that it has vanished from American thinking.  Except that it hasn’t.  Michael Medved, nationally syndicated conservative radio host, makes the case for heavenly intervention on behalf of the United States in his new book, The American Miracle:  Divine Providence in the Rise of the Republic.

Medved argues that the rise of the US cannot be explained naturalistically; there must have been a divine guiding hand.  The American Miracle opens with the “extraordinary coincidence” of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both dying fifty years to the day from the signing of the Declaration of Independence.  Such a wildly improbable conjunction of events, writes Medved, could not have been mere coincidence.  In another early chapter, Medved describes how unusual weather conditions saved the Continental army following the disastrous Battle of Long Island.  A fierce storm on the night of August 29/30, 1776 kept British troop ships from reaching vulnerable American positions.  A dense fog, unprecedented during the Summer months, rose up towards morning and continued past daybreak, concealing the Americans and allowing them to make a strategic retreat from Long Island across the East River to Manhattan.  Incredibly, not one American life was lost during the retreat.

The Almighty also brought about the freeing of the slaves.  President Lincoln had determined not to issue an Emancipation Proclamation until there was a major Union victory; otherwise, Emancipation would be seen as an act of Northern desperation.  The Union victory at Antietam on 17 September 1862 gave Lincoln what he wanted.  That victory, Medved writes, came about through a literal miracle.  Confederate battle plans wrapped around three cigars were found by Union soldiers in a campground which Confederate troops had vacated the day before.  Possession of the Confederate plans ensured Union victory.  Five days later, on September 22, 1862, Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.

Medved finds in such wildly improbable occurrences “a pattern for which the influence of some higher power remains the most rational explanation.”

Baloney.  Strange concatenations of unlikely circumstances happen everywhere, not just to Americans.  People in every nation can point to “evidence” that God loves them best.  Were George Washington’s many escapes from death testament to divine protection, as Medved insists?  Fidel Castro survived dozens of assassination attempts by the CIA and lived to be 90.  Washington only lived to be 67.  Did God love Castro 34% more than George Washington?

Washington and Fidel may just have been lucky.  Still, if you want to believe that God kept Jefferson and Adams alive long enough so that they could expire on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, be my guest.  That belief is harmless.  And if you believe as does Medved that the attempt on the life of President Andrew Jackson failed because God kept the powder in the assassin’s gun from igniting, that belief is harmless too (although even the reviewer for the conservative Commentary magazine questioned why God would want to save the life of this slaughterer of thousands of Native Americans).

What should disturb us, however, is occasions when, to hear Medved tell it, God’s intervention on behalf of America harms non-Americans, particularly non-Whites.  On such occasions, ruling elites use divine providence to justify American imperialism and racism.

Consider Medved’s chapter on the Mexican War.  The Mexican War divided the US public between extremists who wanted to seize all of Mexico and moderates who just wanted half.  Moderation won out.  The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed by the US and Mexico on February 2, 1848, formally ended the war and ceded California and large chunks of what would become New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and Colorado to the United States for $15 million.

Unknown to both Mexico and the Administration of President James K. Polk, gold had been discovered nine days earlier on January 24 at Sutter’s Mill, California.  The deal would not have gone through had Mexico known what it was losing.  Medved says that the timing of the discovery was no accident.  Medved quotes a French prospector who said at the time: “It had been so ordered by Providence, that the gold might not be discovered until California should be in the hands of the Americans.”

What the hell had the Mexicans done to piss God off?  The US had been the aggressor in what Mexicans aptly call la intervención norteamericana.  The Mexican War was a blatant land grab which the US cloaked in the half-baked notion of Manifest Destiny.  In asking for a Declaration of War, President Polk told Congress that Mexico had “invaded” US territory.  Polk knew that was false.  Americans were the invaders.  Washington sent troops into Mexico pursuant to a bogus claim that the border of Texas (which had become a US state in 1845) extended as far south as the Rio Grande (p. 241).  Medved unquestioningly accepts Polk’s bogus claim as sincere.  The US House of Representatives did not.  In November 1848, the House voted to censure President Polk for starting an unnecessary war.

As for Manifest Destiny, Medved is fine with it.  Medved told a caller to his December 2 show that he was glad the US acquired California.  California, he said, had been going to waste under the Mexicans.  The Mexicans, and the Spanish before them, had done nothing to develop California.  Or to populate it.  Medved tells us that in 1848, a mere “7,500 people of European ancestry” (because Whites are the people who matter) lived in California. California must have seemed to Americans like a land without people for a people without (enough) land.

Today, the phrase “Manifest Destiny” has gone out of fashion, replaced by the secular doctrines of “humanitarian intervention” and the “right to protect” (with its hip abbreviation “R2P”).  Don’t be fooled.  These are simply this season’s imperialist styles.  The US still goes where it pleases and takes what it wants.

“U-S-A!  U-S-A!”

Why then does God “shed his grace” on America rather than let loose the thunderbolts we deserve?  It is not because Americans are better than other people, Medved assures us.  Medved explains that God blesses the US “not as reward for distinctively righteous behavior but as an exercise of his inscrutable will” (p. 21).  I’ll say it’s inscrutable.  In the case of the Mexican War, God’s will was downright perverse if we believe that God gave victory to the nation that started the war.

Medved insists that God’s grant of His favor imposes “obligations” on America towards the rest of the world.  Tell that to the Pentagon and State Department.  Medved is aware of the left’s criticism of US foreign policy, but rejects it.  Medved points out that America’s military interventions in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. (it is a lengthy “etc.”) added no territory to the US.  Yes, but what Medved does not consider is that it is less hassle for an imperial power to rule indirectly from outside than directly from inside.  Medved also declares that US military interventions have largely not benefited the US, but are carried out at great expense.  To US taxpayers, certainly, but the military-industrial complex does just fine.

I told a priest in my antiwar group about Medved’s book.  He replied by telling me about eisegesis.  Don’t confuse that with exegesis.  In exegesis, believers approach a biblical text with an open mind with the purpose of determining the text’s meaning.  Eisegesis, on the other hand, is imposing your own meaning on Scripture.  My friend said that it sounded like that is what Medved was doing.

Medved sees himself in The American Miracle as telling history’s greatest success story.  It has not been a success story for non-Whites.  It still isn’t.  The US robbed Mexicans of half of their country in the 1840s.  Medved’s subtext, whether he intends this or not, is that God hates Mexicans.  Why else would He hand half of Mexico—including California’s gold—to the American aggressors?  It seems like many Americans hate Mexicans, too.  We have just been through a Presidential election where 62,979,636 voters cast their ballots for a candidate who promises mass deportations.  That’s 46.1% of all votes cast.  (To his credit, Michael Medved rejects Donald Trump’s plans for mass deportations.)

God must hate Native Americans, too.  Western expansion drove Native Americans from their homes, and to this day, Whites continue to displace Native Americans.  Running an oil pipeline through a mostly White city like Bismarck, ND is unthinkable.  But Whites don’t have a problem with the Dakota Access Pipeline fouling Native American water and destroying Native sacred grounds at Standing Rock.  (Medved has referred to the water protectors on air as “morons.”)

My purpose has not been to attack religion.  My purpose has been to attack the misuse of religion in the service of imperialism.  It is a misuse of religion to suggest that God blesses one people by bringing calamity down on another.  It is a misuse of religion to suggest that God favors the strong over the weak, Americans over non-Americans, Whites over non-Whites.  I prefer to think that God blesses the downtrodden, the victims of injustice, not the conqueror.  I do not know how many Americans share Medved’s views.  Let’s hope it is not many.  That would be a blessing.

1,000 former GM Opel workers facing joblessness in Germany

Dietmar Henning

Two years ago, GM-Opel closed its plant in Bochum, eliminating around 3,300 jobs. Some 2,600 workers were moved into a so-called “transfer company” with the agreement of the IG Metall union, the works council and the management. Now, around 1,000 Opel workers face what they feared all along: they will lose all employment by the beginning of the year.

About 750 Opel workers left the transfer company at the end of 2015. As a rule, these older workers, born before 1962 (“near pension age” workers) are registered unemployed so as to bridge their time until they can take early retirement. However, each year they draw early retirement benefits they are hit with a statutory pension reduction of 3.6 percent.

According to the TÜV Nord Transfer Company, in the last year, only 750 workers could be placed in a new job. Another 150 signed work contracts for 2017. None of these figures have been confirmed, however.

The “future earnings for the majority of the transferred employees lie below what they currently receive from the transfer company”, acknowledges TÜV Nord Transfer on its web site.

Over the last few years at Opel Bochum, IG Metall and the works council agreed to pay cuts of about 20 percent, supposedly to “secure the location” for continued production. During the first year of the transfer company, workers were paid 80 percent of their last net salary and in the second year this was reduced to 75 percent. Yet this is still more than former Opel workers can expect to be paid in the future!

No wonder “many [have] hesitated to take the decision to leave the transfer company”, as its managing director Hermann Oecking said.

Oecking sought to justify the poor employment outcomes by saying more than 300 Bochum Opel workers have limited health and 1,800 were over 50 years old. But that was all known in advance.

The real issue is that there are hardly any decent-paying jobs for skilled workers in the de-industrialized Ruhr area. Opel was not the only industrial company that has shed jobs. At its highpoint in the 1980s Opel employed about 20,000 workers in Bochum. In addition to the Opel job cuts, tens of thousands of other positions have been eliminated by Nokia, Thyssen, Outokumpu, Johnson Controls and other companies.

The new jobs that have been created are almost exclusively in the low-wage sector. The official unemployment rate currently stands at 10.6 percent. Of the more than 18,500 unemployed in Bochum, almost one in five is over 55 years old and around 7,800 are considered long-term unemployed.

This means many former GM-Opel workers have been forced into precarious, low-paid and temporary jobs, mostly in logistics and as truck drivers, some in security companies. Only a few found work as electricians or mechanics.

The 1,000 Opel workers now being kicked out of the transfer company face the same conditions or worse, including reliance on welfare.

The chief beneficiary of this process has been the operator, the TÜV Nord Transfer GmbH, which has pocketed a good part of the 550 million euros that Opel provided for the “social contract agreement” from the Bochum closure of Bochum plant.

Around 150 workers will remain in the transfer company until June 2017, and around 100 “hardship cases” have the opportunity to stay in it for another year. IG Metall executives announced that the “conciliation committee” chaired by former President of the Bremen State Labour Court, Martin Bertzbach, has decided this designation will apply to those severely disabled, with at least a 70 percent disability, and for employees in the lower wage groups with a 50 percent disability.

The Opel works council members who negotiated all this have not shared the fate of the rank-and-file workers. They were all moved to the spare parts warehouse (Plant III), which was spun off a decade ago, initially to Caterpillar and then to Neovia, before being bought back by Opel again in early 2016, or more precisely by “Opel Group Warehousing GmbH”.

They are now complaining that Opel has not complied with the agreements of recent years. In early December, Opel Bochum works council chairman Murat Yaman, the successor to Rainer Einenkel, who has since retired, moaned that the 100 manufacturing jobs promised at the Bochum site had “still not been clearly defined and not implemented”. The agreed “transfer of vocational training to a sustainable training factory” was “far away”.

Opel has since devolved training to the “Career Workshop” of Deutsche Edelstahlwerke (DEW). The manager of this outsourced company is former DEW personnel director Burkhard Hartmann.

Meanwhile, the union-backed division of Opel workers continues. Since August, Opel has imposed short-time work hours at its plants in Rüsselsheim and Eisenach because of declining sales in the UK following the Brexit referendum. The end of this is not in sight, according to an Opel spokesman.

The 1,800 employees at the Eisenach factory were notified at a staff meeting on 16 December that instead of manufacturing the Adam and Corsa models, they will build the successor to the SUV Mokka X model in 2019. The Adam and Corsa will then be produced in Zaragoza, Spain.

The Eisenach works council chairman Bernd Delete claimed this decision was good for Eisenach, saying, “Now we can have a relaxed Christmas holiday”. Most workers regarded this announcement with caution, writes the Thüringer Allgemeine, citing an Opel worker saying, “Whether everything turns out this way, we will see—and much water will flow under the bridge by 2019.”

A few days later, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported that a new large SUV to hit the market in 2019 will be built at the GM-Opel plant in Rüsselsheim. Currently, 3,800 employees produce the Insignia model at the company's headquarters. Wolfgang Schäfer-Klug, chairman of Opel and the central works council, said jobs at both plants had been secured by those decisions.

Workers should not take anything IG Metall and works council representatives say for good coin. They are closely allied with the top management and helped to work out the cuts and closure plans before implementing them on behalf of the company. In doing this, they deceived and blackmailed the workforce. This can be clearly seen by the closure of Opel Bochum, the first, but not the last, auto plant in Germany to close since the end of World War II.

Holiday season highlights social desperation in New Zealand

John Braddock

The Christmas holiday season has served to highlight the dire social conditions faced by increasing numbers of New Zealanders. Social agencies and charities reported being “swamped” this year by a record demand for food parcels and other essential items.

At the Auckland City Mission, thousands queued over the two and a half weeks before Christmas for parcels of basic necessities including meat, cereals, canned food, yoghurt and occasional treats. The City Mission is a prominent voluntary welfare provider, and its services are often overstretched during the holiday period.

On Christmas Day, the Mission typically provides meals for 2,000 people, prepared and served by 600 volunteers, and distributes 8,000 presents to needy children. This year, an Auckland cafe also put on a free meal for another 160 people struggling to make ends meet, including several who travelled from the outer working class suburbs of Papatoetoe and Manurewa.

Mission spokeswoman Diane Robertson said there had been 3,000 food parcels handed out between December 7 and 18, more than ever before. They had expected that number across the entire month of December. Around 125 food parcels were distributed on the first day of the Christmas period, compared to 39 last year. Families were queuing nightly outside the mission’s Hobson Street premises from 1 a.m.

“The reason really is that more people are in need,” Robertson explained. “Realistically we know families are just struggling so much and every year it just gets harder.”

Recipients go through a rigorous process to get a food parcel and are first seen by onsite government Work and Income (WINZ) staff to check whether they are entitled to welfare payments. Christmas gifts for children are a one-off and recipients’ details are recorded.

The Mission depends on public donations. With more than 300 families queuing every day, a plea was issued for more donations to meet the demand, costed at more than $1 million. Fundraising manager Alexis Sawyers said there was less to go around this year because donations had been sluggish while first time visitors “in desperate need” had increased.

Chrissie McKee, a west Auckland grandmother on her first visit to the mission told Fairfax: “I knew there would be a queue but I didn’t think there would be people sleeping here since 1 a.m. This is where [former prime minister] John Key needs to be.”

McKee and her husband can no longer work for health reasons and are caring for their five-year-old grandson. “Really, we’ve got about $200 odd a week and we’re supposed to get by on that when we’re all in and out of hospital,” she said.

Former truck driver Gordon Brown lives in a $590 per week rental house in west Auckland, splitting costs with his wife, son, friend Philip Hardy and his wife, step-daughter and nephew. Brown, who has an inoperable heart condition, said: “Each week we do have to choose between paying power bills or the doctor’s fees.”

Hardy said there was only $36 from his benefit left to feed himself and his family, after rent.

The National Party-led government, which Key headed from 2008 until his resignation on December 5, has imposed harsh austerity measures. Tens of thousands have been pushed off benefits, forced into insecure work or left to fend for themselves. Thousands of jobs have been axed since the 2008 financial crisis, including mass layoffs in the public sector and state-owned companies.

Following decades of welfare cuts by successive National and Labour Party governments, child poverty has soared. WINZ has reduced its emergency food grants by 28 percent over the past six years. Spokesman for the Council of Christian Social Services, Trevor McGlinchey, declared in June that “a ‘new normal’ of desperation to find housing, food and sufficient income to survive has emerged for many families.”

Last May, reports of people in Auckland living in cars made international news reports. In response, Te Puea Marae (Maori meeting house) in south Auckland opened its doors to accommodate 56 families over the winter. Marae chairman Hurimoana Dennis said the “tidal wave” of desperate requests to house parents and children “just bowled us right over.” A crowdfunding web page dedicated to the initiative raised more than $90,000 in donations.

Housing costs are responsible for plunging more people into poverty. This is particularly acute in the country’s largest city, Auckland, where more than half the houses are now worth more than $1 million, according to the New Zealand Herald. Rents are setting record highs. Median rents across all Auckland property categories are $510 per week, having increased 21 percent over five years. Some 40 percent of the city’s population depends on rental accommodation.

While the country’s property bubble is a major source of profit for the ruling elite, it has imposed an immense burden of debt on working-class families. Three out of five homeowners have a mortgage, with a median value of $172,000. According to the Treasury, household debt has risen by 26.2 percent in five years to a total of $246 billion.

Nationwide, 42,000 people are homeless, equivalent to nearly one of every 100 people. The number of homeless people has increased by 19 percent since 2006.

The New Zealand Herald reported on December 22 that a group of Auckland families faced a bleak Christmas in cramped motel rooms at a cost to the Ministry of Social Development (MSD) of thousands of dollars each week. The tenants had been placed under the MSD’s emergency accommodation scheme while waiting for social housing.

Hazel Waipouri and her two granddaughters have been living in a single-bedroom unit at one motel for four months. “It’s terrible, traumatic, bad,” Waipouri said. “We’re stuffed in one room, we’re all getting sick.”

In the regional centre of Tauranga, people have resorted to sleeping in public toilets as the city’s homelessness worsens. A report in December by the Tauranga Homelessness Steering Group found a lack of affordable housing to be a growing problem for low-income people. It noted that emergency accommodation for women and children is deficient and mothers fear losing their children if they admit to having nowhere to live.