3 Oct 2017

New Zealand First to dictate make-up of next government

John Braddock 

Following the inconclusive result in New Zealand’s September 23 election the major parties, National and Labour, have each begun vying to form a coalition government with the right-wing, anti-Asian New Zealand (NZ) First Party.
According to provisional results, National, which has held office since 2008, remains the largest party with 46 percent of the vote (58 seats). Labour is on 35.8 percent (45 seats), and its close ally the Greens has 5.9 percent (7 seats), a combined total of 52 seats. NZ First is the third-largest party with 7.5 percent (9 seats).
On current figures, a Labour-Green-NZ First government would command a majority of just 61 to 59, while National-NZ First together have 67. This situation could change by one or two seats after an estimated 384,000 special votes, 15 percent of the total, are counted on October 7.
With a government not likely to be formed until mid-October, there is an atmosphere of crisis. The NZ dollar dropped to 72.54 US cents on September 26, down from 73.39 cents the previous week. One currency trader told the New Zealand Herald that the situation was “very much like a hung parliament.”
NZ First leader Winston Peters held a press conference on September 27, declaring that he will not make any decision until after special votes are counted. He bluntly rejected incumbent Prime Minister Bill English’s claim that National’s lead over Labour gave him the “moral mandate” to form the next government.
On election night, Green Party co-leader James Shaw declared that Labour, NZ First and the Greens had acted together “in opposition” and collectively represented the “mood for change.” Speaking on breakfast television, Labour leader Jacinda Ardern said that New Zealanders had “voted against the status quo” and she would seek to form a “stable coalition” with NZ First.
Following Ardern’s elevation to the Labour leadership on August 1, the party was rescued from near electoral collapse, polling at just 23 percent, to reach 36 percent in the election. The swing represented a shift to Labour among young voters and sections of oppressed Maori in particular. However, it was a pale reflection of the mood of disaffection and opposition in the working class. The official turnout of 78.8 percent was just above the 2014 figure of 77.9 percent, when more than a million people either abstained or did not register.
In another variant, on TVNZ’s “Q & A” program on Sunday, former National Party prime minister Jim Bolger advocated a National-Greens coalition instead. He said National “wanted to talk to the Green Party,” and the Greens had a “responsibility” to talk to National if the party was “serious about a clean, green New Zealand.”
Any government that includes NZ First will be one of militarism, anti-immigrant chauvinism, economic protectionism and deepening attacks on so-called Chinese “interference” in business and politics. NZ First’s election policies included sharp reductions to immigration and demands for jobs for “New Zealanders first,” a massive increase in police numbers, the formation of a specialised flying squad “to target criminality and gangs,” and large increases in military spending.
NZ First’s program is similar to parties such as the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and France’s National Front, which have been instrumental, under conditions of deepening social crisis and widespread popular alienation, in shifting official politics sharply to the right.
Last year Peters backed the reactionary Brexit campaign, telling the British to be “bold and courageous” and ditch the European Union in favour of the Commonwealth. In February, he defended US President Trump’s looming onslaught on immigrants, telling Newstalk ZB that Trump was ensuring the “security of the country” and was “on the right track.”
Following a terror attack in London in June, Peters delivered an anti-Muslim rant in parliament, insinuating that Muslim communities were harbouring terrorists. He declared that family and friends “choosing silence” to protect “these monsters” may be the “the culture of Damascus” and “acceptable in Tripoli,” but “not in New Zealand.”
Peters began his political career as a National Party MP in 1978. After being sacked for repeated criticism of the leadership, he set up NZ First in 1993 on an explicitly anti-immigrant, anti-Asian platform. At the same time he fraudulently posed as a critic of National and Labour’s “neo-liberal” policies, such as privatisation, and as a defender of elderly retirees.
NZ First held the balance of power after the 1996 election and, defying expectations, formed a coalition with National. Peters secured the positions of deputy prime minister and treasurer, responsible for enforcing National’s vicious attacks on the working class and welfare beneficiaries.
Labour won the 1999 election in a landslide, but by 2005 it was increasingly unpopular and turned to NZ First to prop up the government. Peters became minister of foreign affairs and helped to cement Labour’s foreign policy rapprochement with Washington, following New Zealand’s involvement in the invasions and neo-colonial occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Since the 2008 financial crisis, NZ First has adopted an even more right-wing, populist pose. NZ First joined national-protectionist protests against the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which was championed by National, while stepping up its xenophobic outbursts against Asian immigration.
NZ First has set the standard for Labour, Greens, the Maori nationalist Mana Party, the trade unions and pseudo-left groups in attacking Chinese “influence” as the major threat to New Zealand’s “sovereignty.” The purpose of this campaign has been to shift Wellington into even closer alignment with the US, under conditions in which Washington has been preparing a war with China, and is threatening to “totally destroy” North Korea.
The National Party has sought to strengthen military-intelligence ties with the US while maintaining strong economic relations with China. As a result it will have difficulty reaching a deal with NZ First. National opposes NZ First’s policy to slash immigration to just 10,000 per year, down from 72,000. Business leaders have declared that strong GDP growth and sectors of the economy such as agriculture and construction require high levels of immigration.
Peters last week repeated his call for an inquiry into National Party MP Jian Yang’s purported links to “Chinese military intelligence.” Reports just before the election that Yang had taught at a People’s Liberation Army languages school more than 20 years ago are being used to whip up an anti-China witch-hunt. A report by a New Zealand academic based at the Wilson Center in Washington, a think tank largely funded by the US government, accused National of being “soft on China” and implied that many of its leading figures had been “bought off” through business contacts with Chinese firms.
While such an inquiry would be difficult for National to agree to, Labour has already backed the proposal. Ardern has indicated that a Labour-led government would empower the intelligence agencies to conduct an investigation into purported Chinese “agents on influence” in politics and business, a pretext for a shift towards a more overt alliance with Washington.
NZ First has no significant popular support. Its 7.5 percent of the vote is one percent less than it received in 2014. Under conditions of deep popular alienation from the established set-up, the party is in a position to play a major role in the next government only because it has been fraudulently depicted by a layer of pro-Labour commentators, the Greens, trade unions, and pseudo-left groups, as “progressive,” and “left wing.”
Anti-TPP activist and academic Jane Kelsey—a favourite of the pseudo-left groups—praised Peters on Radio NZ, saying he would contribute to “openness in discussing how we should address trade and investment policies.” Her praise is for the NZ First’s championing of protectionist, trade war measures that will do nothing to defend jobs and conditions of the working class.
On the Daily Blog, Unite Union leader Mike Treen emphasised that on nearly “every significant economic and social policy” NZ First differs little from Labour. He cited pledges to raise the minimum wage, expand public transport, improve student allowances and access to tertiary education and to keep the pension age at 65.
Such promises whether by NZ First or Labour are as worthless as Trump’s phony posturing to defend the interests the American working class. At the start of the election campaign Labour and the Greens committed to “budget responsibility rules,” including a strict spending limit and paying down debt, which means deepening National’s austerity measures.
Whatever the makeup of the next government, it will be a class war administration at home and abroad. The conception of “progressive,” as advanced by Labour and NZ First’s apologists, is in fact a reactionary turn to national protectionism, scapegoating immigrants for low wages, unemployment and destruction of social services, and above all, support for US preparations for war against North Korea and China.

US pushes for closer Sri Lankan involvement into war drive against China

Nanda Wickremasinghe

While rapidly strengthening its military ties with Sri Lanka, the Trump administration is voicing concerns over Colombo’s “unsustainable debts” with China. These views were outlined last month by Alice Wells, the US acting assistant secretary for South and Central Asia, in a report to the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
Entitled, “Maintaining US Influence in South Asia: the FY 2018 budget,” the report deals with Washington’s foreign assistance to South Asian countries including India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Maldives, over the next financial year.
Wells told the House Foreign Affairs committee that Sri Lanka’s “historic” elections in January 2015 had “ushered in a path to reform and reconciliation” She also noted, however, that Washington would “continue its oversight of implementation” of steps outlined in the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) resolution passed in October 2015.
The “historic” election referred to by Wells is the US-backed, regime-change operation that ousted former President Mahinda Rajapakse and replaced him with Maithripala Sirisena. The US opposed Rajapakse’s close relations with China and demanded that Colombo fall into line with Washington’s military preparations against Beijing.
The US supported Rajapakse’s war against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). However, after the LTTE’s defeat in 2009, Washington sponsored resolutions in the UNHCR calling for an international war crimes investigation into the decades-long conflict. This had nothing to do with exposing Sri Lankan war crimes but was to pressure Rajapakse to end Colombo’s close ties with China.
The UNHCR resolutions were dropped soon after the pro-US Sirisena government came to power and replaced with a new diluted proposal that allowed Colombo to establish a “domestic mechanism” to investigate human rights violations.
Wells told the House Committee on Foreign Affairs that the new Sri Lankan government was committed to a “reform agenda,” but significantly added, that it had a “growing interest in expanding engagement with the US, including in military-to-military relations.”
US assistance to Sri Lanka, however, will only be $3.4 million for the 2018 financial year, 92 percent less than in 2017. Although Wells did not explain why this cut had occurred, it appears that Washington is concerned about the Sri Lankan government’s recent investment deals with China.
The Indian-based Economic Times reported that Wells told the hearing that “China is providing non-concessional loans that promote unsustainable debt burdens, which I think are increasingly now of concern to the Sri Lankan people in the government.”
Wells also declared that the US is “using its tools to reinforce a message of reform, and to bring Sri Lanka into a space where they too will institutionalize the principles of the Indo-Pacific—freedom of navigation, transparency, non-militarization humanitarian assistance and disaster relief at its core.”
These statements are significant. Washington’s concerns are not Sri Lankan “unsustainable debt burden,” humanitarian relief or disaster relief but its ongoing economic relations with Beijing and the requirement that it fall into line with US strategy. “Freedom of navigation” is the catch phrase used by Washington to justify its provocative challenges to Chinese territorial claims in the South China Sea.
Soon after Sirisena came to power, Colombo halted some investment projects with China, such as the $1.4 billion Colombo Port City Project and South Asia’s tallest building, the Lotus Tower. But facing a foreign loan default, the cash-strapped government, turned to Beijing to negotiate an easing of the debt burden.
The government eventually signed an agreement with China Merchant Holdings Company to sell a 70 percent of share in the Hambantota Port for $1.2 billion, hoping to offset part of its loan repayments. It has also given a green light for the resumption of other Chinese-financed projects.
Wells remarks are a thinly-veiled warning to Colombo that it must strictly follow Washington’s line. This is the only meaning of her declaration that Sri Lanka must “institutionalize the principles of the Indo-Pacific.”
Washington’s methods to “reinforce a message of reform” will no doubt include behind-the-scenes threats to ramp up the UNHRC war crimes allegations against Colombo if it continues to move closer to Beijing.
The Indian Express has reported that the US Senate Appropriations Committee opposed the 92 percent cut in aid to Sri Lanka and last month tabled a separate bill calling for $43 million in 2018. The committee declared that Sri Lanka should be assisted because of its strategic location and the impact of the decades-long war on the country. The Pentagon is nevertheless strengthening its military ties with Sri Lanka.
Addressing the Indian Ocean Conference in Colombo at the end of August, Wells announced the first ever US-Sri Lanka joint naval exercise, Cooperation Afloat Readiness and Training or CARAT 2017, which will occur this month at Trincomalee. The exercise will be conducted by the US Seventh Fleet, which is at the centre of Washington’s war plans against China, and follows the Malabar naval exercise held in July, which involved India, US and Japan.
US war ships have been making frequent visits to Colombo since 2015 and the US Marine Corps are training Sri Lankan marines and navy soldiers, including on the Guam naval base in the western Pacific.
India, Washington’s main strategic and military ally in South Asia, has voiced concern over Colombo’s recent Hambantota Port deal and loan agreements with China. This was reflected in an August 13 article by Indian analyst Swaran Singh in the Daily Mirror.
Entitled, “Why India is worried about China consolidating in Sri Lanka?” Singh described the loans from Beijing to Colombo as a “debt trap” that would force India to “shore up its defence mechanism” with Sri Lanka.
India is currently bolstering defence ties with Sri Lanka. The Indian and Sri Lankan navies have resumed their annual SLINEX exercises. This year’s event was held at the Viskhapatnam naval base and in the Bay of Bengal from September 4–14. Joint exercises involving US, Indian and Sri Lankan naval personnel were also held last month at the Welisara navy camp, near Colombo.
Behind the backs of workers and the poor, the Sri Lankan government is tying the country to the US-led war drive against China that will have catastrophic consequences for the working class in South Asia and the world.

Monarch Airlines collapse causes air travel chaos

Steve James

With little warning, and only a few media hints that the company was even in trouble, British-based Monarch Airlines lost its Air Travel Organisers’ Licence (ATOL) and ceased trading at 4 a.m. Monday morning when none of its flights were in the air.
The collapse pitched the travel plans of up to 860,000 people into disarray. Some 110,000 travellers, mostly holiday makers, face days of chaos and uncertainty over their return flights, while 300,000 future bookings, which will include many family holidays, have immediately been cancelled. As late as yesterday, Monarch was tweeting to its customers that flights were operating as scheduled.
Thousands of customers have taken to social media to complain of the impact of the collapse on their wedding plans, anniversaries, sporting engagements, work assignments and long anticipated holidays. Others, stranded in airports across Europe, report no communication from the company at all.
Monarch employs around 2,750 workers, mostly in the UK, at its Luton Airport headquarters and at London Gatwick, Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds Bradford airports. According to the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), which oversees and regulates civil aviation in the UK, Monarch is the biggest UK airline ever to cease trading. The failure testifies to the multiple and interacting forms of political and economic chaos impacting on the European airline industry.
Firstly, over the last few years, Monarch’s holiday traffic to Egypt, Turkey and Tunisia has collapsed because of a spate of terrorist attacks on tourist resorts. These attacks are directly rooted in the quarter century of colonial wars visited by the US and its European allies on multiple countries in North Africa and the Middle East.
Secondly, there is huge oversupply in the European air traffic market. Monarch directed much of its traffic to Spain and Portugal—routes where the largest operators have increased competition—resulting in cheaper fares. As a result, according to Monarch administrator KPMG, over the last year the airline transported 14 percent more passengers yet earned £100 million less in revenue.
The Monarch collapse is the third major European airline to go under this year. In April, the former Italian national airline, Alitalia, entered administration, three years after 49 percent of the company was sold to Saudi-based Etihad. The airline, which employs 12,000 workers, was also undermined by the refusal of leading Italian banks, UniCredit and Intesa Sanpaolo, to back the company after workers rejected pay cuts and job losses agreed by the trade unions.
For the moment, the Italian government has propped up Alitalia with a €600 million bridging loan that will allow it to operate as far as next year’s general election.
In August, Air Berlin, Germany’s second-biggest airline which employs 8,600 workers, filed for bankruptcy having lost €2 billion over six years in the face of growing competition from low cost carriers such as Ryanair and EasyJet. Air Berlin, also part owned by Etihad, has for the moment been kept afloat with a €150 million bailout by the German government—pending a sale of sections of the business to Lufthansa.
Then there is Brexit, which has also impacted Monarch with the fall in the value of the pound increasing the company’s fuel bill by some £50 million. Brexit has led to uncertainty over the terms on which British airlines will be able to operate to European Union (EU) countries.
Only last year, the company's majority owners, vulture fund Greybull Capital—a London-based investment house owned by precisely four individuals—pumped £165 million into Monarch, confident that a six-year business plan proposed by the company could satisfy Greybull’s investment requirements.
The collapse was not due to any lack of cooperation from the trade unions. In 2014, as part of Greybull’s investment, workers were forced by the Unite and BALPA unions to accept a 30 percent pay cut and 900 jobs losses t o prop up the airline.
What has changed in Monarch’s position since last year is not yet clear, but the manner of the collapse is a direct product of the British government’s refusal to bail out the company in the manner of its German and Italian counterparts. Chris Grayling, the Conservative government’s Transport Secretary claimed implausibly that the collapse only became apparent in the “last very few hours and day.”
Grayling nevertheless agreed—under conditions in which the Tory government are desperate to avoid acute embarrassment as they meet this week during their annual conference---that the CAA should put together the “biggest peacetime operation of its kind” to repatriate the 110,000 passengers stranded abroad.
The CAA intends to hire 30 jets, to create, according to CAA CEO Andrew Haines “what is effectively one of the UK’s largest airlines to manage this task.” Acknowledging that this will be chaotic, Haines accepted that the “scale and challenge of this operation means that some disruption is inevitable.”
Monarch has outstanding orders for as many as 45 Boeing 737 aircraft. Thirty were ordered in 2014, the first were due to be delivered next year in a €3.2 billion deal, while as late as June this year another 15 of the aircraft were ordered at a cost of a further €1.7 billion. At the time, Monarch CEO Andrew Swaffield described the expanded order as “illustration of confidence in Monarch’s future success.”
In these circumstances, the British government’s refusal to support Monarch sends a message to the US administration of Donald Trump and manufacturer Boeing over its imposition of 219 percent tariffs on Bombardier C Series aircraft. Wings for the Bombardier C type are manufactured in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The minority British government is currently entirely dependent on continued support from Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party. Only last week, British Defence Secretary Michael Fallon warned that the tariffs “could indeed jeopardise our future relationship with Boeing.”
While Monarch’s thousands of workers and hundreds of thousands of passengers face weeks and months of uncertainty over their jobs and disrupted travel plans, the company’s competitors are likely to immediately benefit from the crash. Share prices of rival airlines and tour operators immediately shot up.
EasyJet rose 4 percent to 1258p. EasyJet is one of five airlines coming to dominate an increasingly consolidated European market. The others are Ryanair, Lufthansa, International Airlines and Air France-KLM, while market analysts report midsized operators are under increasing pressure.
A spokesman for EasyJet chair Sir Stelios Hajo-Ioannou hailed the Monarch crash because “taking capacity out of the system will give operators greater freedom to set prices and increase shareholder value.” Credit Suisse described the mayhem as “helpful” to improving profit margins.
Ryanair is likely to benefit in another way. The Irish-based budget carrier has been in the grip of a major crisis over pilot rostering.
With typical contemptuous high handedness, the company has responded to staff shortages over the last weeks by cancelling 18,000 flights on 34 routes over the next six months. The move impacts nearly 400,000 passengers on top of 2,000 flights already cancelled. Ryanair only conceded that passengers had a legal right to be offered flights on other airlines when faced with CAA action. Ryanair is expected to poach many of Monarch’s 400 pilots. Its share price rebounded too.

Access to obstetric services in rural US communities continues to decline

Benjamin Mateus

According to a study published in September in the journal Health Affairs, nine percent of rural counties in the United States lost all access to hospital-based obstetric services from 2004-2014. As 45 percent of rural counties already lacked these services during the period in which the study was conducted, this means that more than half of rural counties have no access to this kind of medical care, despite being home to more than 28 million women of reproductive age.
This reduction in childbirth medical services has occurred parallel to an increase in US maternal mortality rates. Research published in 2016 in Obstetrics and Gynecology found that maternal mortality rates had increased from 18.8 per 100,000 live births in 2000 to 23.8 in 2014, a rise of 26.6 percent. By contrast, the World Health Organization reported in 2014 that 157 of 183 countries had seen a decrease in maternal mortality. The United States now ranks thirtieth among all OECD countries on this metric, ahead of only Mexico.
The decline in obstetric services has occurred over several decades. In 1985, 24 percent of non-metropolitan counties lacked hospital services while 50 percent of childbearing-aged women in these regions had access to obstetric services. By the early 2000s, more than 44 percent of these counties lacked hospital services, and only 20 percent of women of childbearing age living in the most rural counties had access to obstetric services.
According to the Health Affairs study, of the more than 28 million women of reproductive age who live in these areas, nearly a half million give birth each year. These rural facilities also serve a higher proportion of low and moderate-income families. Medicaid finances approximately half of all births in the US, with a greater proportion, 59 percent, in rural areas.
Counties are categorized as metropolitan (an urban core of more than 50,000 residents), micropolitan (an urban core of 10 to 50,000 residents) and noncore (all other rural counties). There are 1,984 rural US counties comprising 646 micropolitan and 1,338 noncore areas. For the year 2004, the Health Affairsstudy identified 1,249 rural hospitals located in 1,086 rural counties, of which 158 counties had multiple hospitals. Glaringly, 898 rural counties (45 percent) did not have hospitals.
According to the Office of Management and Budget, rural (micropolitan and noncore) areas account for 72 percent of the nation’s land area and are home to 46.2 million people, which is 15 percent of the total population. The median age of the rural population is 51, making these counties older by comparison to urban counties, whose median age is 45. Rural communities have higher poverty rates, and significant health disparities exist when compared to urban centers.
During the 2004-2014 period, 179 counties (9 percent) experienced the loss of all in-county hospitals providing hospital obstetric services. This affected 600,000 women of reproductive age, bringing the total number of women without access to these services from 1.8 million in 2004 to 2.4 million in 2014, an increase of 25 percent.
Noncore counties were more likely to not have obstetric services (58.6 percent) compared to micropolitan counties (17.6 percent), and were more likely to lose these services during the study period (n=150, 11.2 percent) in comparison to micropolitan counties (n=29, 4.5 percent). A full 59 percent of the most isolated noncore counties, those not adjacent to an urban area, had no obstetric services in 2004, a figure which increased to 69 percent in 2014.
While the study notes that almost all counties with full closures were adjacent to at least one county with continual services, the impact of these closures on maternal and neonatal outcomes is not addressed.
Childbirth-related hospitalizations totaled $27.6 billion in hospital costs in 2009, with 45 percent of these costs billed to Medicaid and 47 percent to private insurers. Medicaid pays hospitals about 50 percent less than private insurers for the same services, further straining hospital finances and contributing to closures in rural areas with higher proportions of Medicaid births.
Over the last decade, the US has seen severe maternal morbidity and postpartum hospitalization increase by 75 percent and 114 percent, respectively. The rates of blood transfusion, acute renal failure, shock and respiratory distress, as well as heart failure during deliveries, have doubled, while overall mortality has increased considerably. Currently, maternal mortality in large metropolitan areas is approximately 18.2 per 100,000 live births, while in rural areas it is as high as 29.4.
According to the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, women in rural areas of the United States have lower prenatal care initiation in the first trimester. Many cite distance as a major factor. Less than half of pregnant women in rural areas live within 30 minutes of a facility that offers obstetric services. They also experience higher rates of hospitalization due to pregnancy complications. Infant mortality rates in 1,041 (51 percent) rural counties exceeded the US rate. Some 128 rural counties had infant mortality rates that were twice the national rate.
Adding to these problems are the decreasing numbers of physicians practicing in rural settings. In 2008, only 6.4 percent of obstetricians practiced in rural settings, and in 2010, 49 percent of counties, home to 10.1 million women, lacked an obstetrician. However, according to the American Association of Medical Colleges, AAMC, demand for residency graduates is projected to account for only two percent of the projected demand.
The AAMC projects that by 2025 there will be a shortage of approximately 46,000 to 90,000 physicians. The shortfall for primary care physicians will be between 12,500 and 31,000, with shortages expected to persist under every scenario health care policymakers currently envision. With physician training taking a decade to complete, the shortfall is essentially already in effect and will become more apparent with each year.
Since the financial crisis of 2007-2008, critical access hospitals and other rural hospitals that have subsequently closed their doors have been closed primarily for financial reasons, and not due to declining demand for their services. The financial pressures show no sign of abating, leaving rural communities in continued distress.
Giving birth remains the most common reason for hospitalization, accounting for 10 percent of all hospital stays—nearly four times higher than the next leading causes for admission, such as pneumonia, septicemia or congestive heart failure.
With the already inadequate health care system under constant bipartisan attack by the American ruling class, the only way to address the shortage of health services in rural counties is through the fight for socialism, which alone can guarantee the resources necessary to address these needs and ensure everyone the right to the highest quality health care.

US Congress fails to reauthorize insurance program covering 9 million children

Kate Randall

The US Congress missed a deadline to reauthorize the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) over the weekend. The failure to act threatens health insurance coverage for about 9 million children in lower-income families across the United States. Although the Senate released a five-year bill to reauthorize the program last week, a vote was not scheduled by the Republican Senate leadership.
States will begin to feel the effects of Congress’s inaction as soon as the end of this year. Previously, when some states closed CHIP enrollment for limited periods in response to budget shortfalls, studies show that eligible individuals were left without access to coverage, causing negative effects on family health and finances.
Funding for CHIP expired on September 30. Although funds did not immediately dry up on October 1, the program faces imminent shutdown in a number of states. Joan Alker, executive director of Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families, told reporters earlier this month, “This is ridiculous. It’s already too late. We have never had a situation like this before.”
CHIP was passed into law under the Clinton administration with bipartisan support, championed by then-first lady Hillary Clinton. The program provides low-cost health coverage to children in families that earn too much to qualify for Medicaid.
Although eligibility rules vary by state, in most states children age 18 and younger qualify for the program if their family’s income falls below 200 percent of the federal poverty line, or just under $50,000 for a family of four. Some states offer coverage to children in families earning up to 300 percent over the federal poverty line, and 20 states also offer coverage to pregnant women.
CHIP provides low-cost insurance for a large range of benefits, varying by state, including routine checkups, immunizations, mental health services, prescriptions, inpatient and outpatient hospital care, x-rays and lab services. An analysis from the American Academy of Pediatrics found that families are much more likely to attend to preventive and primary care after enrolling their children in the program.
Average costs to families run about $150 per child annually, compared to insurance premiums of more than $850 per year per child in employer-sponsored insurance, according to a report from the Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission released earlier this year.
About 9 million children are currently insured through CHIP. Since its enactment, the uninsured rate among children has fallen significantly, from 13.9 percent in 1997 to 4.5 percent in 2015, the Access Commission says. In 2016, more than 8.9 million children were enrolled, up from 8.44 million in 2015.
CHIP currently costs about $14 billion a year, with the federal government picking up about three-quarters of this cost. Some states provide CHIP as part of the expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), others operate a separate CHIP program, while some provide a combination of these approaches. Under expiration, states with CHIP-funded Medicaid expansion would be required to maintain this coverage, but with lowered federal funding. States with separate CHIP coverage would not be required to maintain it.
According to an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), 48 of 50 responding states, including the District of Columbia, assumed continued federal funding for CHIP in their fiscal year 2018 budgets. Thirty-four of 42 responding states also assumed they would receive the 23 percent match included as part of Obamacare. This means that the majority of states face a funding shortfall due to CHIP’s expiration.
Ten states—Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Mississippi, Oregon, Idaho, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, California and Hawaii—anticipate exhausting CHIP funding by the end of 2017. Most states must provide 30 days’ notice to enrollees that their coverage will be eliminated.
Previous state enrollment caps and freezes in CHIP benefits have had a disastrous effect on coverage and medical services. When North Carolina froze enrollment between January and October 2001, enrollment fell by nearly 30 percent, from about 72,000 to 51,300, according to KFF. Parents affected by the freeze said that almost all of their children experienced periods of being uninsured and reported difficulties obtaining prescriptions for them. They also reported obtaining care for their children required them to cut back on necessities, borrow money from family or friends, or accrue debt.
House Democratic Caucus Chairman Rep. Joe Crowley (New York), blamed Republicans for missing the CHIP reauthorization deadline. However, neither House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi nor Senate Minority leader Chuck Schumer has voiced loud protests over congressional inaction that threatens the health care of millions of US children.
The failure to reauthorize CHIP follows last week’s collapse of Senate Republicans’ latest Obamacare repeal effort, as Majority Leader Mitch McConnell pulled legislation sponsored by Sens. Lindsey Graham (South Carolina) and Bill Cassidy (Louisiana), when it became clear the measure did not have the votes to pass.
While committees in both the House and Senate said hours before Congress failed to reauthorize CHIP that they would take up the legislation for the children’s program again this week, such action is anything but assured. Joan Benso, president and CEO of advocacy group Pennsylvania Partnerships for Children, told the Morning Call, “If we get to November and it’s not done, then we’ll get pretty concerned.”
In the wake of the latest failure to repeal the ACA, a bipartisan effort to “fix” Obamacare by Sens. Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, and Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, is expected to continue. This effort is not aimed at extending coverage to the 28 million Americans who remain uninsured seven years after the passage of the ACA, but at “stabilizing” the insurance markets.
Such a bipartisan deal would retain the basic framework of Obamacare, which has broad support from the insurance companies and big business, bloating the profits of the insurers while at the same time increasing out-of-pocket health care costs for the vast majority of Americans.

Germany’s Social Democrats prepare to suppress popular opposition

Marianne Arens & Peter Schwarz 

After its worst election defeat in the post-World War II period, Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) has wasted no time in repositioning itself. On election night, the SPD announced that it was not interested in the continuation of the grand coalition with the conservative Christian Democratic Union and would go into opposition. Three days later, the SPD parliamentary group elected former labour minister Andrea Nahles as its leader.
Nahles will thereby become the new guiding figure within the SPD. The parliamentary group leadership offers her more opportunities for political influence than the party leader, although there is much to suggest that she will also be the successor to Martin Schulz in the latter position. Schulz’s influence is rapidly diminishing after he headed up the SPD’s worst election result, with 20.5 percent of the vote, since 1945. The only reason he has not been immediately removed is that the party elected him unanimously as leader in March.
The SPD’s decisions to go into opposition and choose Nahles have a clear political content. The issue at stake is not a “process of renewal,” a “combative role in the opposition” or challenging the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), as Nahles and the SPD have publicly claimed. As the largest opposition party, the SPD will assume the task of suppressing popular opposition to militarism, the strengthening of the state apparatus and social cutbacks. In the process, the SPD is ever more openly adopting the AfD’s slogans.
Faced with mounting social and political opposition, the SPD is exiting government to cover for right-wing policies that the party has played a major role in developing since 1998, with a break of just four years, and which the incoming Christian Democratic/Free Democratic/Green Party “Jamaica” coalition will continue. The Social Democrats are basing themselves on tens of thousands of bureaucrats in the trade unions, the SPD and the state apparatus, where the SPD continues to enjoy substantial influence at the state level.
The 47-year-old Nahles is better equipped to play this role than almost anyone else. Unlike Martin Schulz, who spent the last 23 years of his political career in European politics, Nahles has at her disposal a close network of contacts both within and outside the SPD.
She is a member not only of the SPD, but also the IG Metall trade union, Attac and the central committee of the German Catholics. She was also for many years a member of the Denkfabrik (Think Tank), a group within the SPD that evaluates the prospects for closer collaboration between the SPD, the Left Party and the Greens. Angela Marquardt, Denkfabrik’s head of operations, is Nahles’ secretary in Berlin. Until 2002, Marquardt was a leading member of the Left Party’s predecessor, the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS).
As leader of the opposition, Nahles is striving to establish cooperation with the Left Party. “We now have before us four years in opposition and we have to reach an understanding in one way or another about our joint responsibility for our democracy. I am ready for that,” she said in an interview with Der Spiegelafter her election as parliamentary group leader.
In her various posts in the party and in government, Nahles has perfected the technique of combining demagogic phrases with right-wing policies. After joining the SPD at the age of 18, she led the Jusos, the SPD’s youth organisation, from 1995 to 1999. She was a protégé of then-SPD leader Oskar Lafontaine, who described her as a “gift from God.” Nahles was elected to the parliament (Bundestag) for the first time in 1998. In 2009, she became general secretary of the SPD, and in 2013 she became labour minister in Angela Merkel’s grand coalition government.
She collaborated closely with the trade unions in this role. She bears responsibility for the Contract Unity Law, which effectively created a monopoly for unions aligned with the German Trade Union Alliance (DGB) and prevented strikes by smaller, profession-based unions such as the pilots’ Cockpit, the doctors’ Marburger Bund and the Train Drivers Union.
In 2003, Nahles publicly criticised then-SPD Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s Agenda 2010, which earned her a reputation as a “left.” But she drew no practical political conclusions from this, other than the promotion of her own career. During her term as labour minister, Agenda 2010 took full effect: Germany became a low-wage country in which 40 percent of wage workers labour under precarious conditions.
Nahles’ own projects, the minimum wage, company pensions and the Contract Unity Law, were aimed at bolstering Agenda 2010. They were intended to dampen criticism without placing even the most minimal restrictions on the predatory profiteering of German corporations and banks. In addition, they sought to consolidate the unions’ influence in the economy.
The centerpiece of Nahles’ social policy is the minimum wage, which came into force on January 1, 2015. It currently stands at €8.84, so low that it is impossible to live on in any major city. And there are more holes in the minimum wage regulation than a Swiss cheese. The many exceptions target young people, seasonal workers and harvest helpers, the long-term unemployed, and others. Additional conditions have been added that further undermine the minimum wage.
It is a similar story with the company pension law, which mainly benefits the pension funds and insurance providers. Company pensions are financed through “deferred compensation,” i.e., contributions taken from the wages of employees. Companies are compensated with tax subsidies, and the state pension has been further reduced. In practice, this kind of company pension contributes to an increase in old age poverty. Since 2006, the number of people who have to work after reaching retirement age has doubled.
Nahles’ interview in the latest edition of Der Spiegel leaves no doubt that the SPD will continue these right-wing policies in opposition.
“We now have to take responsibility for our democracy in opposition,” Nahles told the magazine. The SPD does not interpret “responsibility for democracy” to mean defending democratic rights, which it has played a part in systematically undermining over recent years. Rather, it means strengthening the bourgeois state’s apparatus of repression. “It was right for us to demand 15,000 more police officers in our campaign,” Nahles stated in the interview.
She adopted the tone of the AfD on refugee policy and advocated the creation of a strong state. “We are not naive,” she said. “When a million people come here they are not all going to be nice. And anyone who doesn’t play by the rules must face tough consequences.”
Asked whether the state must be capable of closing its borders, Nahles answered, “Yes, because a state must be able to be strong. It is a force for regulation, organisation, opportunity-creation, but also punishment and restriction. If that is called into question, it won’t be good in the long term.”
Nahles insisted on the continuation of Schröder’s Agenda policies. In reply to Der Spiegel’s remark, “The Agenda 2010 was a mistake,” she said, “No, the Agenda was a necessary impulse for reform.” She rejected the policies of British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn with the remark, “Things work differently here. In Germany, we have a good tradition of a culture of consultation, for example between employers and trade unions.”
Above all, Nahles insisted that Germany has to stick to the foreign policy goals set by the grand coalition four years ago. Based on its dominant position in Europe, Germany should once again become a military power. To do this, she appealed for close cooperation with France.
Nahles said she is very grateful to French President Emmanuel Macron for “having presented this week his vision of Europe with a strong, constructive state, with a defence union, unified minimum wage, and a harmonised social state.” Macron’s “strong state” is seen in the permanent state of emergency he is maintaining in France. And Nahles’ talk of a “harmonised social state” can be seen in Macron’s right-wing labour market reforms, which have triggered stormy protests by French workers.
Nahles and the SPD are well aware of the widespread opposition among workers and young people to militarism, the strengthening of the state apparatus and social cuts—policies that all of the established parties in one form or another support. The AfD was able to direct this pent-up anger into right-wing channels with its demagogic slogans.
But there are millions who oppose the current political set-up just as much as they do the AfD and are searching for a progressive way out of the capitalist blind alley. The SPD considers its most important task to be maintaining control of and suppressing this opposition.

EU hands Spain blank check for stepped-up police repression in Catalonia

Alex Lantier & Alejandro López

The day after images of the savage repression of the Catalan independence referendum by Spanish police shocked people around the world, Spain's Congress announced yesterday that it did not have time to invite Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy to discuss the Catalan issue until October 10.
With 16,000 Guardia Civil still in Catalonia, this was a declaration of confidence in Rajoy's crackdown. It is also a warning that, after Catalan officials claimed a victory in the referendum and announced plans to secede on Sunday night, Madrid is preparing new, even bloodier attacks.
On Sunday, the world received an unforgettable lesson on the anti-democratic methods of a major, supposedly “democratic” capitalist state in Western Europe. Faced with a Catalan independence referendum it opposed, Rajoy's minority Popular Party (PP) government sent in tens of thousands of police in a failed attempt to smash the referendum by terrorizing the population. Guardia Civil units broke into and smashed polling places including schools and sports arenas, stole ballot boxes and beat up peaceful, defenseless voters.
Horrific videos flooded the Internet—of an elderly woman speaking, covered in blood, after Guardia Civil picked her up and threw her face-first onto the pavement; of police beating Catalan firefighters; of Guardia Civil grabbing young women peacefully sitting on the ground in polling stations by their hair and throwing them down flights of stairs. One video in Girona showed a police unit surrounded by a large mass of voters that suddenly ceased beating them when the voters raised their hands and chanted, “Assassins, assassins.”
French Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire spoke for the entire European ruling class when he made clear that the bloody images of mass police repression in Catalonia did not trouble him.
“All these decisions are matters of Spanish sovereignty,” Le Maire told RTL radio. “What would we say if the Spanish government started giving opinions on the situation in France, on the ways we handle our issues of public order? All these decisions belong to the Spanish government, and they are its exclusive responsibility.”
The European Commission echoed Le Maire, handing Rajoy a blank check for new onslaughts against the Catalan population, signed by the entire European Union. In a statement published online yesterday placing its seal of approval on Madrid's repression, it declared: “We trust the leadership of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy to manage this difficult process in full respect of the Spanish Constitution and of the fundamental rights of citizens enshrined therein.”
Reaching new lows of hypocrisy even for the EU bureaucracy in Brussels, the Commission added, “Violence can never be an instrument in politics.”
With this support, the Spanish press is whipping up nationalist, law-and-order hysteria and promoting far-right protests of hundreds and in some cases several thousands of people being held across Spain. While the press invariably describes them euphemistically as protests “for the unity of Spain,” it also blandly reports that protesters are singing songs of the 1939-1978 Spanish fascist regime of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, such as the Hymn of the Legion or Cara al Sol.
In a noticeable echo of the Francoite regime's traditional denunciations of regional separatists and communists, the right-wing La Razón blamed Sunday's violence on the Catalan population. It declared, “Civil guards and police officers acted with their accustomed and proportionate professionalism to the violence exercised by the radicals.”
The daily El País, while long associated with the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE), took a line virtually indistinguishable from the nationalist right. It hailed police actions in Catalonia it said were “of course, taken within the framework of the law, as is correct in a state where the rule of law is in force.”
El País also denounced Catalan police for not attacking the population violently enough. It wrote that had they acted "as ordered, stopped the polling stations from being opened and seized the ballot papers, the Spanish National Police and the Civil Guard would not have had to do this job later; and we would have been spared many of yesterday’s deplorable scenes that were broadcast around the world.”
The Catalan independence referendum has exposed the enormous shift to the right taking place across Europe. After a quarter-century of escalating imperialist wars in Africa and the Middle East and EU austerity at home, since the Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union and particularly since the 2008 Wall Street crash, economic inequality and social tensions are reaching explosive levels. For several years since the 2008 crash, Spanish unemployment has hovered at or near 20 percent.
The political settlement orchestrated in the 1978 Transition in Spain from fascist rule to parliamentary democracy is disintegrating. The PSOE, the Spanish bourgeoisie's main party of government in the post-Franco period, has been discredited by decades of policies of austerity and war and fallen to barely 20 percent in the polls. Moreover, the truce between Madrid and regional ruling elites in Catalonia and the Basque country has now collapsed.
The ruthless crackdown in Catalonia is a warning to the European and international working class. While Franco has been dead for over 40 years, the class forces that sustained his regime are still in place, and the democratic forms of rule that existed over this period are rapidly eroding. Anytime the ruling class meets serious opposition, it resorts to dictatorial methods—unhesitatingly mobilizing police, military police and even the army as it suppresses opposition.
If Le Maire can effortlessly endorse Rajoy, it is because the entire European ruling elite is moving in the same direction. Indeed, shortly after Le Maire's comment, French President Emmanuel Macron, a close ally of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, drove this point home by placing a phone call to Rajoy to endorse his policies. Macron reportedly stressed that in Spain he “has only one partner, and that is Mr Rajoy.”
As Macron imposes his labor decrees shredding workers' basic legal rights despite mass opposition in the French working class, and Berlin prepares new social attacks to be carried out by whatever government emerges from the September 24 German elections, these remarks are a warning. The European ruling class as a whole is preparing for the type of repression now seen in Catalonia.
The critical question is the political mobilization of the entire Spanish and European working class in struggle against the rehabilitation of fascism and the turn to police-military rule. In particular, there must be determined opposition to any attempt by Madrid to crush the Catalan population and the Catalan nationalist parties' plans for secession through the mobilization of the army.
As the International Committee of the Fourth International explained in its statement, “Oppose the state crackdown on the Catalan independence referendum!,” this can be accomplished only by the revolutionary unification and mobilization of the working class across Europe in struggle against war and capitalism, and for socialism.
This underlines the essential bankruptcy of the Catalan nationalists' opposition to Madrid. Having led right-wing, pro-austerity administrations in Catalonia, they are both incapable of and hostile to making an appeal for support against Rajoy to the European working class.
The appeals of regional premier Carles Puigdemont and of the Podemos-backed mayor of Barcelona, Ada Colau, to the EU to adjudicate the crisis are impotent. They are being studiously ignored by the EU governments, which are preparing for their own confrontations with the working class and endorsing Rajoy's assault on Catalonia. Similarly, they are planning the one-day general strike being held today by Catalan nationalist parties, trade unions and business groups as a harmless, symbolic action that will do nothing against the threat of military rule.

The social pathology of the Las Vegas Massacre

Patrick Martin

In yet another eruption of savage impersonal violence, at least 59 people were killed and 527 people wounded as an outdoor music festival on the Las Vegas Strip, attended by more than 20,000, was suddenly converted into a war zone.
The alleged gunman, Stephen Paddock, used multiple semi-automatic weapons that had been converted to fully automatic use, through an attachment known as a bump-stock device—available for a mere $40 per weapon—as he opened fire on the helpless crowd from his vantage point on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel and casino. He took his own life after the rampage.
Paddock could lay down a field of fire on a military scale, nearly 100 rounds per minute. He was found in possession of about 20 weapons, many of them high-powered semi-automatics, along with additional ammunition. The first minutes of gunfire triggered a smoke alarm that allowed police to locate Paddock far more quickly than through a search of the huge 3,300-room hotel, a fact that suggests that the toll of death and injury could have been much higher.
The gunman’s motives are unknown, and his identity sheds little light on what drove him on this murderous course. Paddock was 64 years old, shared a comfortable home with his female companion, and was, according to some reports, financially well-off. One of his brothers described Paddock as a real estate multi-millionaire. He had a pilot’s license and owned two small planes. He had no known associations with any political or religious group.
There is a family history of mental illness—Paddock’s father, Richard Hoskins Paddock, was a bank robber and diagnosed as a psychopath. He was on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted List for nearly a decade. But Stephen Paddock had no contact with his father after he was seven years old, and there are no reports that he exhibited mental illness or received any treatment for it.
As in virtually all such shootings, the gunman knew none of the wounded and killed. They did not exist for him as individuals. Paddock saw the concert-goers packed below him in a parking lot not as fellow human beings, but as objects to be destroyed. The victims were the random targets of the uncontrolled and impersonal hatred of a gunman indifferent to their fate and the lifelong suffering that awaits their surviving family and friends.
Clearly, this was not the act of a normal person. Some form of mental illness, even if not previously diagnosed, must be involved in Paddock’s crime. But there is certainly a socially induced element in this terrible event. The frequency of these occurrences cannot be explained in purely individual and personal terms. The Las Vegas massacre is a peculiarly American crime, arising out of the social pathology of a deeply troubled society.
What is the social context of this latest episode of domestic mass killing? The United States has been at war more or less continuously for the past 27 years. The US government has treated tens of millions of people in the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Africa as targets for extermination through bombs, bullets, and drone-fired missiles. These wars have penetrated deeply into American culture, celebrated endlessly in film, television, music and even sport.
Social relations within the United States, characterized by the growth of economic inequality on a scale that exceeds any previous era in American history, fuel a culture of indifference, and even outright contempt for human life.
One telling detail: on the day that the media was filled with reports about the worst mass shooting in American history, the stock market continued its relentless march upwards, with new records for the Dow-Jones Industrial Average and other indexes. Wall Street is celebrating in anticipation of the Trump administration pushing through the biggest tax cut for corporate America and the super-rich in history.
The damage inflicted on American society by constant war and deepening social inequality has found expression in an endless series of events like the mass shooting in Las Vegas. With only 5 percent of the world’s population, the US accounts for 30 percent of the mass shootings. And the scale of such horrors is increasing: the four worst mass shootings, in terms of casualty toll, and six of the seven worst, have taken place since 2007.
Corporate media pundits and government officials are incapable of more than perfunctory expressions of shock and dismay over such atrocities, which recur with appalling frequency in the United States. Even uttering such rote statements seems to be too much to ask of President Trump, whose remarks Monday morning were both banal and palpably insincere. How can anyone take seriously a foul-mouthed misogynist and pathological liar as he begins a sentence with the words, “Scripture teaches us”?
As for his moronic statement that the killings in Las Vegas were “pure evil,” such a characterization explains nothing. It doesn’t even explain Trump himself, who gave a speech two weeks ago at the United Nations where he threatened to use nuclear weapons to incinerate the 27 million inhabitants of North Korea. Yet CNN, ever the sycophant, described his televised remarks on Las Vegas as “pitch perfect.”
Trump is to visit Las Vegas Wednesday, one day after an equally stage-managed and bogus display of compassion set for Puerto Rico. There he will view the devastation inflicted by Hurricane Maria, while pursuing his Twitter feud with local government officials who have dared to criticize the poorly executed federal response to the catastrophe.
During the 16 years since the 9/11 attacks, during which the US government has been supposedly engaged in a “war on terror,” an average of one American per year has been killed by a foreign terrorist. During the same period, at least 10,000 Americans have been killed every year by other Americans. Mass shootings like Virginia Tech, Newtown, Orlando and now Las Vegas have killed six times as many Americans as all the terrorist attacks in that period.
Further investigation into the circumstances of the Las Vegas tragedy is vital. But one conclusion can surely be drawn: what happened late Sunday night outside the Mandalay Bay hotel was a manifestation of a deep sickness in American society.

2 Oct 2017

Google Andela Learning Community (ALC) 2.0 for Kenyan and Nigerian Students 2018

Application Deadline: 21st October 2017
Eligible Countries: Kenya, Nigeria
To Be Taken At (Country): Online
About the Award: Andela Learning Community (ALC) 2.0 powered by Google is a program that connects people who are interested in learning software development with beginner or intermediate courses in Android/web development or product design. Powered by Andela and Google, and featuring course curriculum from Udacity, it is designed to spark a generation of tech talent across Africa
ALC 2.0 is split into two ‘tracks’ based on level of experience.
  • The beginner track is for candidates with no prior programming experience. It starts from the absolute beginning and provides candidates the option to learn how to develop apps, build websites, and/or build technology products.
  • The intermediate track is for candidates who have 1-2 years prior programming experience on Android, web development, or product design.
Type: Training
Eligibility: 
  • Anyone in Kenya or Nigeria over the age of 13.
  • An ability to commit 10+ hours per week from mid-November to March 2018.
  • Have or have reliable access to a laptop.
  • Be located in Kenya or Nigeria.
  • Have a strong passion for technology
  • Prior programming experience is not required.
Number of Awards: Not specified
Duration of Program: The program begins mid-November and continues until March 2018.
How to Apply: Apply here
Award Providers: Google, Andela

TU Delft Fully-funded Excellence Scholarships for International Masters Students 2018/2019

Application Deadline: 1st December 2017
Offered Annually? Yes
Eligible Countries: International
To Be Taken At (Country): TU Delft, The Netherlands
About the Award: Justus & Louise Van Effen Excellence Scholarships are financed by the legacy of Justus and Louise van Effen. Mr. van Effen studied at TU Delft in the 1940’s and strongly believed technological developments will contribute to solving societal issues.
The Foundation Justus & Louise van Effen was established with the aim of stimulating excellent international MSc students and financially supporting them in their wish to study at TU Delft.
Type: Masters
Eligibility: Candidate must be an excellent international applicant admitted to one of TU Delft’s MSc programmes, with a cumulative grade point average (GPA) of 80 percent or higher of the scale maximum in their bachelor’s degree from an internationally renowned university.
Number of Awards: 3 per faculty
Value of Award:
  • Full fee waiver for a TUDelft MSc programme and living expenses
  • Membership to the Scholarship club giving access to personal development, workshops, seminars, etc..
Duration of Program: for 2 years.
How to Apply: 
  • To be considered for these scholarships, your complete application for an MSc programme must be uploaded before 1 December 2017.
  • In addition to all the regular documents for a MSc programme application, you must also upload a Scholarship Application Form(available per 1 October 2017) in which you make clear why you are applying for the scholarship. 
  • It is necessary to visit the official website (link found below) to access the application form and for detailed information on how to apply for this scholarship.
Award Providers:
  • Only students who have been granted a scholarship will be informed by TU Delft via email by begin-March 2018.
  • Please note that Non EU students must include their English test with their application. EU students can submit this in a later stage according to the Admission instructions.
  • Only students meeting this deadline who have been (conditionally) admitted to one of the MSc programmes of TU Delft could be considered for these scholarships.