Thousands march to mark anniversary of Ben Ali’s overthrow in Tunisia

Alex Lantier & Kumaran Ira 

On Sunday, thousands marched in Tunis to mark the anniversary of the toppling of President Zine El Abedine Ben Ali on January 14, 2011. That event began the so-called “Arab spring,” as only 11 days later a revolutionary movement of the working class erupted in Egypt and toppled another imperialist-backed dictator, Hosni Mubarak. Seven years later, the Arab bourgeoisie has proven incapable of resolving any of the issues that drove workers to rise up in Tunisia and in Egypt.

The Middle Eastern bourgeoisie and its imperialist backers are still consumed by fear of social revolution. Yesterday’s march came after worker protests in Iran and a week of insurrectionary clashes of working-class youth with police, beginning in the old mining belt of southern Tunisia, where the 2011 uprising began.

The new wave of protests was prompted by anger over mass unemployment, corruption and the 2018 finance law. The Tunisian regime responded by sending in the army and jailing 800 people in an effort to crush the movement and ensure that yesterday’s anniversary not lead to a new insurrection.

The official march took place under conditions of a police lockdown. It included the pro-government General Union of Tunisian Labor (UGTT) trade union, a key ally of the ruling Nidaa Tounes party, the new name of Ben Ali’s Constitutional Democratic Rally (RCD). Only a few thousand people attended the march—far fewer than the numbers of youth who have clashed with police in southern Tunisia and in Tunis since the beginning of the year.

Nonetheless, as France24 reported, even “the high security of an event heavily monitored by police could not hide the rising social anger in Tunisia since the beginning of the year.” The report continued: “Seven years after the departure of Ben Ali, who now lives in Saudi Arabia, many Tunisians say they have won liberties but lost living standards. Among the marchers, more radical slogans rapidly emerged: ‘Government, resign,’ ‘The people want to bury the finance law,’ and ‘The country is rising up while the government celebrates the revolution…’”

The revolutionary uprising in Tunisia in 2011 vindicated the Trotskyist revolutionary perspective advanced by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI). Followed quickly by the even larger uprising in Egypt, it made clear that the Stalinist bureaucracy’s restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union had not ended the era of world socialist revolution inaugurated by the October 1917 revolution. Through an international wave of strikes and insurrectionary struggles, the working class showed that it remains the main revolutionary force in capitalist society.

The 2011 struggle in Tunisia began amid outrage over unemployment and official corruption when Mohamed Bouazizi, a graduate forced to work as a vegetable vendor, burned himself to death after an official confiscated his vegetable cart. The movement was fueled by the emergence of WikiLeaks and its publication of leaked State Department dispatches, including on Tunisia. These showed that US diplomats who in public praised Ben Ali privately dismissed his regime as totally corrupt.

Despite relentless and predictable efforts by Nidaa Tounes and its supporters to present the revolution as a dead end, based on their own record of economic stagnation and repression since 2011, there is rising opposition. Even in the media, the question is being raised of whether a new 2011 could take place. Mohamed Ali, a worker at a tire factory that was privatized for a token price, told reporters at the Tunis protest yesterday: “My problem is not the revolution, it is the government.”

Feres, a high school student in the working class Ettadhamen district of Tunis known as the “heart of the revolution,” described his anger over trying to speak to President Beji Caid Essebsi, a longtime member of Ben Ali’s party, when Essebsi visited Ettadhamen. He said, “We tried to talk to him and the policemen insulted us. Tunisia is our country, but this is not our government. We lie here in poverty and they despise us.”

What is being prepared, in Tunisia and internationally, is a new upsurge of the working class directed against not an individual dictator like Ben Ali or Mubarak, but the capitalist system as a whole. As the International Crisis Group’s Michaël Ayari told Middle East Eye, “The popular proverb saying ‘Ben Ali left but the forty thieves stayed’ is true… If before, the mafia was clearly identified in people’s minds with the Trabelsi clan [i.e., Ben Ali’s family], now it is the state in its entirety that is considered a criminal entity.”

The political crisis in Tunisia raises with particular sharpness the fundamental problem facing the working class internationally: the building of a revolutionary leadership. The seven years since the 2011 uprising have conclusively demonstrated the bankruptcy of not only the ruling class, but also the organizations that dominated what passed for the “left” in Tunisia. They are on the other side of the barricades from the working class.

Promoting a national perspective, rooted in affluent sections of the middle class and Tunisia’s pro-government trade union bureaucracy, they blocked any attempt by the workers to seize power in 2011. They tied workers to the perspective of waiting for deals negotiated between the Tunisian state, the international banks and the imperialist powers as they waged war in Libya, Syria and Mali. They adapted to the return to power in 2014 of Ben Ali’s cronies in Nidaa Tounes, which since 2015 has ruled in coalition with the Islamist Nahda party.

In short, they drove the working class and the revolution into a dead end. Now, amid a new upsurge, they do not want a revolution and the taking of power by the working class. They want, at most, to tinker with the existing regime’s policies.

Addressing the official march in Tunis, Hamma Hammami, the leader of the petty-bourgeois Popular Front coalition, said: “We will keep putting pressure on the government until it revises the new finance law that makes the poor poorer and the rich richer.”

As for the UGTT, which denounced workers fighting Essebsi’s police as “dubious” and “raiders of state property,” it made very clear yesterday to Le Monde, the most prominent press organ of France, the former colonial power in Tunisia, that it supports Essebsi’s budget talks with the International Monetary Fund. Le Monde rejoiced that the Tunisian government “has been able to rely until now on the support of the UGTT, with which it has established a fruitful working relationship.”

This “fruitful working relationship” has consisted of talks carried out behind closed doors with the personnel of the international banks and the old Ben Ali regime.

An unidentified UGTT official told Le Monde that Tunisian Prime Minister Youssef Chahed “has enjoyed our tacit support.” He continued, “Chahed’s opponents are trying to destabilize the government. But we are very attached to the current political stability.”

The UGTT official cited to Le Monde the lowering of the number of strikes before the latest outbreak of struggles in Tunisia as proof of the UGTT’s good will, i.e., the union’s resolve to strangle working-class opposition to the Essebsi regime.

Le Monde wrote that the UGTT might call some strikes, but only to keep working-class opposition from escaping its control: “The UGTT will probably take up arms in the coming days on the social front, but only so as to better oversee it. As often in the history of contemporary Tunisia, the UGTT’s zigzags can prove to be decisive ...”

Such comments reflect hopes in ruling circles that Essebsi’s crackdown and promises Saturday to boost social spending will be enough to end last week’s protests. Social Affairs Minister Mohamed Trabelsi announced a hike to the welfare budget of 100 millions dinars ($40.2 million), with aid to poor families rising from 150 dinars (50 euros) to 180-210 dinars (60-70 euros) per month. With the monthly minimum wage of 326 dinars (111 euros) covering just two weeks’ shopping for a family of four, however, the proposed 30-to-60-dinar increase is a pittance that will solve nothing.

As all the other avenues are exhausted, the working class, in Tunisia and internationally, is being left with no choice other than to build a revolutionary leadership and mount a direct struggle for power.

Court suspends Christmas pardon as Brazil’s jail population reaches world’s third highest

Miguel Andrade

A report issued by Brazil’s Justice Ministry on December 8 reveals that the country’s prison population more than doubled between 2005 and June of 2016, reaching a total of more than 720,000. This figure places Brazil in the infamous position of the world’s third largest incarcerator, despite its having only the fifth largest population. Shockingly, of those imprisoned, 40 percent are being held without any conviction whatsoever.

The country’s prison population in absolute numbers is smaller only than that of the United States, with 2.2 million prisoners, and China—with seven times Brazil’s population—with 1.6 million prisoners. The incarceration rate is also the third highest, at 343 prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants, also behind the US (at 666) and Russia (455). At the same time, the report also reveals that Brazil has the world’s third largest rate of overcrowding, with prisons jammed to 197 percent overcapacity, trailing behind only the fascistic Duterte regime in the Philippines (316 percent) and neighboring Peru (230 percent).

Significantly, the last three years alone have seen 100,000 people thrown into the dungeons created by Brazil’s system of social apartheid.

The unbearable situation created by these conditions exploded once again with a New Year’s Eve prison rebellion in the western state of Goiás that ended with nine dead, including two by decapitation. This has become a veritable holiday tradition, after multiple New Year’s revolts in 2017 and 2014 ended in dozens of deaths and decapitations.

Parallel to prison massacres, Brazilian federal troops have occupied the capitals of four states—Rio Grande do Norte, Sergipe, Rio Grande do Sul and Rio de Janeiro. Their actions, which have included house-to-house searches, are conducted outside of civilian control and are answerable only to military tribunals. In each case, governors have issued Public Emergency decrees giving the federal troops impunity, while withholding the wages of civil servants and state police, prompting them to stay in their quarters.

The return of state Military Police to the streets after deals have been reached with the state governments has not resulted in any of these cases in a withdrawal of federal troops. On the contrary, a decree issued on December 29 by President Michel Temer provides for their deployment at least until July, at which point Rio de Janeiro and Rio Grande do Sul will have completed a year under federal military intervention.

Against this backdrop of prison mayhem and military repression, the most significant political event has been the suspension by the Supreme Court of Temer’s presidential Christmas Pardon, under the pretext that it would facilitate the evasion of justice by businessmen and politicians convicted by the ever-widening Lava-Jato investigation into a bribes-and-kickbacks scheme in major infrastructure projects.

After the decree was unveiled on December 22, the charge was led by federal prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol, a self-absorbed anti-corruption “crusader”, who stated that the pardon—which would reduce sentences by up to 80 percent—would undercut his team’s ability to blackmail the accused into turning state informants.

Dallagnol boasts of being heir to the “Clean Hands” Italian anti-corruption operations, never bothering to consider that the key political result of that operation was the entry into government of the fascistic Northern League.

Dallagnol was followed by the Temer-appointed Attorney-general Raquel Dodge, who asked Supreme Court President Carmen Lúcia Rocha to suspend the decree on the grounds that “the President has no unhindered power to extend pardons, otherwise he would take over the power of courts and liquidate sentences ... extinguishing the pillars of the Brazilian Constitutional Republic”. Temer’s decree would also “send a message against the Constitution” in a time of “rejection of systemic corruption”. Rocha accepted the argument, adding her own opinion that “a pardon cannot be a prize to the criminal nor implicate tolerance for crime”.

The right-wing language employed to suspend the decree until February, at the end of the Supreme Court recess, does not take into consideration, remarkably, that the measure has been applied by a plurality of Brazilian presidents stretching back to the 1950s, and had become increasingly embracing since the end of the military dictatorship in 1985. The application of the presidential pardon must be reviewed in every case by local courts, which may rule that individual prisoners are not eligible for a pardon.

In defending the measure, the government has claimed that Justice Ministry data shows that, on top of the 40 percent of prisoners who were not convicted, a staggering 80,000—or 20 percent of those have been convicted—are in jail for simple theft, and would be eligible for pardon after court review, which is restricted to non-violent, non-threatening crimes and requires good behavior and collaboration with authorities. Significantly, presidential pardons in Brazil cannot be applied in any circumstance to so-called heinous crimes, which according to Brazilian law encompass drug trafficking, which accounts for 36 percent of convictions.

A February 2017 report by O Globo newspaper, in the aftermath of the January 2017 prison massacres, has found that the so-called “Drugs Law” signed by former Workers Party (PT) president Lula da Silva in 2006 has made the percentage of prisoners incarcerated for drug-related offenses soar from 8.7 percent in 2006 to the cited 36 percent.

Even so, since 1997 presidential decrees have become ever more encompassing, with maximum sentencing for eligibility increasing from six to 12 years and the minimum time served falling from from one-third to one-fourth of the original sentence. The pardon has also been extended to include the elderly and mothers with small children.

The attacks on the 2017 pardon by Dallagnol and Dodge, backed by the press and the majority of pundits, take issue with its exclusion of a maximum penalty limit to become eligible for sentence review, and the reduction of minimum time served to one-fifth of the original sentence, as well as the possibility of pardon of fines together with prison sentences and the “non-exclusion” of crimes of corruption—which, not being classified as heinous crimes, were never before excluded from the annual decrees. Temer ignored the recommendation to exclude corruption from the pardon by the technical body charged with drafting the decree, the National Crime and Prison Council (CNPCP).

In fact, the president and the majority of the council had resigned on January 25, 2017 in protest over Temer naming of the far-right lawyer Alexandre de Moraes as Justice Minister and his declaration that fighting crime required “less studies and more guns.” As a result, the CNPCP took a sharp turn to the right.

The former CNPCP President Alamiro Velludo came forward on December 29 to declare to Folha de S. Paulo “there is a punishing climate stoked by Lava-Jato, and those who came out against the decree are the repressive organs, which I find dangerous.”

Nonetheless, a report by a Folha de S. Paulo columnist from December 29 and another by the specialized Law website ConsultorJurídico arrive at the same conclusion: of the 50 politicians and businessmen convicted by Lava-Jato, only 33 are currently serving sentences and only one has served the one-fifth of sentence minimum necessary to be eligible for a pardon.

The support of Supreme Court’s president Carmen Rocha and the press for the self-serving narrative of Lava-Jato prosecutor Dallagnol signal the advanced state of decay of democratic forms of rule in Brazil, where the supposed fight against corruption is being employed ever more openly to justify increasing the powers of the state and attacking fundamental rights.

This turn to the right is being carried out with the full complicity of Brazil’s pseudo-left. In Congress, the first questioning of the decree came from the Socialism and Freedom Party (PSOL), a “broad party” that includes in its ranks both Morenoite and Pabloite tendencies.

PSOL’s senior representative in the Lower House, Chico Alencar from Rio de Janeiro, announced on December 27 a draft law to limit the powers of the president to issue pardons. At the same time the Morenoite Spanish-language website La Izquierda Diario reported in true yellow press fashion: “Christmas Gift: Temer issues pardon that benefits those convicted of corruption.”

As for the fate of the hundreds of thousands of workers and youth facing horrifying abuse and violence inside Brazil’s vast prison system, this is a matter of complete indifference for these so-called “lefts,” whose politics reflect the interests of more privileged layers of the Brazilian upper middle class.

Members and supporters of 20 groups banned from entering Israel

Jean Shaoul

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s ban on the members of 20 organisations from entering the country because of their support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign is the latest escalation in Israel’s offensive against the Palestinians.

The ban prevents many of those who support the establishment of a Palestinian state from entering Israel, East Jerusalem—which Israel annexed illegally after the 1967 war, and the Occupied Territories. Its aim is to deepen the isolation of the Palestinians and quash both international and domestic opposition. The move is a violation of free speech, above all the right to criticise government policies and human rights violations and to advocate non-violent actions to address human rights abuses, as well as the right of free movement and travel.

The 20 organisations include the Palestine-based BDS National Committee, the UK-based Friends of al-Aqsa group, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Palestine solidarity and BDS activist organisations across Europe, in South America, South Africa and the United States, the anti-poverty NGO War on Want, the US-based Jewish Voice for Peace group, the American Quaker organisation, the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1947 for helping victims of the Nazis, American Muslims for Palestine, and Code Pink.

Minister of Strategic Affairs Gilad Erdan announced the list, saying that “boycott organisations need to know that the state of Israel will act against them and not allow [them] to enter its territory to harm its citizens.”

“We have shifted from defence to offence. No country would have allowed critics to harm the country by entering it,” he added.

BDS was founded in 2005 following a boycott of Israeli academic and cultural institutions, academic boycotts initiated in Britain, and after a call by 170 Palestinian NGOs for boycott, divestments and sanctions as a form of non-violent pressure on Israel. Run by the Palestinian BDS National Committee, it seeks an end to Israel’s occupation, settlements in Palestinian land and the Golan Heights and the blockade of Gaza, full equality for Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel and acknowledgement of the right of return of Palestinian refugees.

Although the BDS movement has had little effect on Israel’s economic relations, with its main impact being in the field of academic boycotts and the cancellation of some entertainers’ visits, it has provoked a furious response from Israel.

In July 2011, the Knesset made it a civil offence to publicly call for a boycott of economic, cultural or academic links with the State of Israel. It enables anyone calling for a boycott to be sued and forced to pay compensation.

In 2015, Netanyahu appointed Gilad Erdan to head the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, set up in 2006 at the request of then deputy prime minister and now Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman, to coordinate security and plans against “strategic threats” posed to Israel, including from Iran. Erdan’s brief was extended to include attempts to “delegitimise” Israel, including the BDS movement, previously the remit of the Foreign Affairs ministry.

Israel’s Intelligence and Atomic Energy Minister Yisrael Katz called at the Yediot Aharonot conference in Jerusalem in March 2016 for Israel to use “targeted civil eliminations” against leaders of the BDS movement such as Omar Barghouti.

Since then the Israeli authorities have imposed a travel ban on Barghouti and his residency status in Israel is under threat.

Ha’aretz reported that the Ministry of Strategic Affairs was going to set up a “dirty tricks” unit to establish, hire or tempt not-for-profit groups not associated with Israel to spread “negative information about BDS supporters” with an annual budget of at least $25 million. Just last week, a further $75 million was added.

Israel has put pressure on its allies to criminalise the BDS movement, quash free speech and counter support for the Palestinians and opposition to Israel’s inhuman and illegal policies on university campuses in the West.

Ha’aretz has reported seeing government contracts worth at least $1 million with law firms in Europe and the United States to oppose the movement, but details were redacted on national-security grounds.

In the US, 23 states have criminalised boycotts, including California and New York. There is a bill pending in Congress, the Israel Anti-Boycott Act, proposing large fines and long prison sentences for companies and their personnel if they impose a boycott on Israel or its settlements. US billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who finances a pro-Netanyahu daily free sheet in Israel, is underwriting a variety of initiatives to fight the BDS movement, including on college campuses.

France’s highest court of appeal has equated a boycott against Israel with “inciting hate or discrimination.” In Britain, the government sought to ban local authorities from divesting their pension plans to participate in the movement, a move later ruled as unlawful by the High Court in London.

In March 2017, the Knesset amended the Entry into Israel Law, banning entry of anyone who made a “public call for boycotting Israel” or the Israeli settlements.

The move was opposed by Jewish groups around the world including the Jewish Voice for Peace, and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in the US, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Jewish Leadership Council and Union of Jewish Students in the UK, which criticised the move, calling it “anti-democratic”, “indiscriminate” and “deeply problematic.” These organisations are very aware of the degree to which Israel’s brutal actions against the Palestinians is jeopardising Jewish support for the Zionist state.

Israel had deported Isabel Phiri, a citizen of Malawi living in Switzerland and a senior official of the World Council of Churches, after landing at Ben-Gurion international airport in December 2016. According to the Interior Ministry's Population and Immigration Authority, she was the first tourist to be prohibited from entry “based on anti-Israel activity and promoting economic, cultural and academic boycotts against it.”

Israel has had a long history of excluding people because of their opposition to Israel’s suppression of the Palestinians. The first to be banned under the new legislation was Hugh Lanning, chairman of the UK-based Palestine Solidarity Campaign and a longstanding human rights campaigner and frequent visitor to Israel and Palestine. Israel also stopped five BDS supporters from boarding a flight from the US to Israel. Three of the five were Jewish Voice for Peace members, an organisation that promotes human rights for Palestinians, who were travelling to Israel as part of an interfaith delegation to meet religious leaders and human rights activists in Israel and Palestine.

The World Socialist Web Site has sharp political differences with the BDS campaign, which holds Israeli citizens responsible for the actions of the Israeli state. This is no more tenable than holding US or British citizens responsible for the criminal actions of their governments that rule on behalf of the corporate and financial elites. The BDS movement has served to politically confuse workers and students, and to reinforce divisions between Palestinians and the Jewish citizens of Israel and between artists and academics who are equally opposed to Israel’s brutal measures.

In Israel, the BDS movement has allowed the government to create a siege-like mentality and reinforce national chauvinism, while opening up its supporters abroad to charges of anti-Semitism.

Despite these political differences, the attack on the BDS movement must be strenuously opposed as an attempt to intimidate and criminalise all those who defend Palestinian rights. Israel’s reactionary campaign, including travel bans and attempts to curb free speech on campuses in Europe and the US, are a threat to basic democratic rights.

The BDS campaign seeks to apply pressure on the Israeli regime and its imperialist backers with the aim of establishing an unviable mini-state for Palestinians as part of a “two-state” solution. This is a bankrupt outlook that rejects the fight to unite Arab and Jewish workers against the Zionist occupation.

Instead of creating another mini-capitalist state in the region, the aim must be to forge a unified movement of Arab and Jewish workers seeking to end the division of the region into hostile nation states based on the brutal exploitation of its peoples and to build a United Socialist States of the Middle East.

Fraud of official inquiry into Grenfell fire exposed by forced withdrawal of project management adviser

Robert Stevens

KPMG, one of the world’s biggest business restructuring and advisory firms, was forced to step down this week as project management adviser to the Grenfell Tower fire inquiry.

That it was ever considered for the role says everything that needs saying about the political fraud being perpetrated by the Conservative government.

KPMG withdrew from an inquiry supposedly aimed at uncovering the truth about a fire in which at least 71 people died only after “core participants” complained of conflicts of interest that should have prevented it from ever being offered a £200,000 cheque for its services.

The main organisations to be questioned about their role in creating the conditions that led to the Grenfell inferno are the Conservative-run Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea council (RBKC), Rydon, who refurbished the Tower in 2015—encasing it in flammable cladding—and Celotex, which manufactured the insulation material used as part of the cladding.

Yet KPMG was appointed despite having raked in more than £5 million from previously auditing all three entities! It was paid just under £1 million in audit fees from RBKC over the past six years, £3.4 million by Rydon since 2007 and £1 million by Saint Gobain Construction Products UK—which owns Celotex—since 2011.

Over the past decade, Saint-Gobain—the French parent company of Saint Gobain Construction Products UK—paid KPMG a staggering £109.2 million in audit and other advisory fees.

A letter of protest to Prime Minister Theresa May was signed by 70 campaigners, academics and opposition MPs who described KPMG’s appointment as “insensitive,” “inappropriate” and “sickening.” But no explanation or apology was forthcoming from either May or the inquiry’s presiding judge, Sir Martin Moore-Bick—whose decades on the bench would require at least a passing acquaintance with what constitutes a conflict of interest.

Instead, an initial statement by the inquiry defended KPMG’s role as having the aim of facilitating “limited planning and programme management support during its start-up phase in order to help the inquiry make rapid progress in its work.”

KPMG was appointed to the inquiry last August when its terms were first being established. But this only became public knowledge when London’s Evening Standard disclosed it last week, citing work conducted by the research group Tussell. The Cabinet Office refused to say who had signed off on the appointment. However, an unnamed spokesperson admitted that this had been carried out without any consultation, telling the press, “Given the urgent need to obtain specialist support, a single tender procurement exercise was run, which is in-line with government procurement rules.”

Even after stepping down, KPMG stressed that while recognising the “strength of opinion about our role … undermining confidence in the inquiry,” it remained “confident that no conflicts exist between our role advising the inquiry and our work for other clients …”

Such claims were punctured by a former KPMG partner, Paul Moore, whose statements are a devastating indictment of the government and of Moore-Bick. He described KPMG’s appointment as “outrageous”: “It’s perfectly bloody obvious that KPMG shouldn’t have accepted that engagement. What they’ve done is a complete disgrace.”

The scandal over KPMG serves once again to dispel any illusions that the official Grenfell inquiry has anything to do with establishing the truth, ensuring that justice is served or holding the guilty to account. Its terms rule out a priori any evaluation of issues of a “social, economic and political nature.” Moreover, whereas Moore-Bick has no powers to prosecute anyone, he has absolute control even over what questions can be raised by legal representatives of survivors and other interested parties.

Such was the level of public scepticism over the inquiry that earlier in December, the UK’s watchdog on human rights, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), announced that it would launch its own investigation into why more than 70 people perished in homes “managed by the State.” The EHRC’s application to be a core participant in Moore-Bick’s inquiry was rejected.

Opposing the attempt by the government to be in sole charge of its proceedings and appointing its leading personnel, a petition by survivors and their families demanded Moore-Bick accept a representative panel and not be allowed to vet questions. The petition, which gathered over 26,000 signatures, requested that May use powers granted her under the “Inquiries Act 2005 to appoint additional panel members with decision-making power” to “avoid a collapse of confidence in the Inquiry’s ability to discover the truth.”

On December 22, just days before Christmas and with many Grenfell victims still living in hotel and other temporary accommodation, May rejected the petition, insisting to Moore-Bick that the Inquiry, as presently constructed, “has the necessary expertise to undertake its work.”

Everything is being done to ensure that the guilty in political and corporate circles evade justice.

The Inquiry is not set to hand over even its interim findings, on how the fire started and spread, until the autumn. Almost seven months after the fire, it is still holding “procedural meetings,” with not a single person or representative of the organisations who bear major responsibility for the fire and its rapid spread summoned to the witness stand. The inquiry announced this week that the next procedural hearing, due to take place on January 30/31, would now be held at the end of February.

The Metropolitan Police inquiry into the Grenfell fire is part of the same state-orchestrated cover-up. No one has been questioned, let alone charged, in relation to the fire. And there is no likelihood of this happening in the foreseeable future, with Met Commissioner Cressida Dick telling the London Assembly in December that the forensic stage of the criminal investigation is unlikely to be completed until 2019 and that the full investigation could take years to complete.

The protest registered over KPMG’s role by Labour MPs such as Emma Dent Coad (Kensington) and David Lammy (Tottenham) has not led the party to withdraw its backing for May’s bogus inquiry or to make any criticism whatsoever of the Met’s investigation.

Walmart closes 63 Sam’s Club locations, lays off thousands of employees

Trévon Austin

Walmart, which owns Sam’s Club, is closing 63 Sam’s Club stores across the country, reducing the number of stores from 660 to 597. According to Business Insider, 12 of the units will be converted into eCommerce distribution centers. Some stores have already closed and others will be closed within the next few weeks.

Many employees were not informed that their store had closed before showing up to work Thursday morning. Employees arrived at their stores only to find the doors locked and a notice posted announcing the closing. According to Business Insider, police officers even turned away workers at some stores.

Sam’s Club CEO John Furner notified employees of the closures in a company-wide email sent Thursday.

“After a thorough review, it became clear we had built clubs in some locations that impacted other clubs, and where population had not grown as anticipated,” he said. “We will be closing some clubs, and we notified them today. We’ll convert some of them into eCommerce fulfillment centers—to better serve the growing number of members shopping with us online and continue scaling the SamsClub.com business.”

Some employees were told of the closings via notices that were sent through FedEx on Thursday.

“FedEx showed up at my door with a package from Sam’s Club and I was thinking that maybe it was my W-2,” Nic Townsend, an employee of a Sacramento, California Sam’s Club, told Business Insider. “It was a letter saying they are closing down. ... I’m unsure of what to do. I have a baby and a mentally sick mother. I’m lost. I’m heartbroken. I’m scared.”

A Walmart official has stated the closures will affect approximately 9,400 employees. Three of the locations being closed are in Puerto Rico, leaving hundreds without jobs in the wake of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Maria.

The closures were announced on the same day Walmart said its minimum wage for hourly employees would increase from $9 an hour to $11 an hour, following the passage of the Trump administration’s legislation slashing the corporate income tax. The company also promised its employees a one-time bonus of up to $1,000 based on tenure, and a number of benefits such as increases in paid maternal and parental leave.

The claim that Walmart deserves praise for the small bump in its starvation level wages is little more than depraved. The new pay scale leaves workers’ income far below the federal poverty level for a family of four, itself an absurdly low number.

Nevertheless, the media fueled excitement and praise for Walmart’s wage increases, portraying the move as a win for workers and a precursor to greater economic growth. Walmart’s decision was cynically credited to the Trump administration. “Trump’s Tax Bill Prompts Walmart To Raise Starting Wage, Give $1,000 Bonuses To Some Employees,” Newsweek declared in its headline. CNBC stated, “Walmart’s workers will soon reap the benefits of the recent tax law changes.”

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders celebrated the company decision, while Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka tweeted, “Thanks to the passage of historic tax cuts, American workers and their families are winning!” Trump shared a video of Fox Business discussing the wage increase and declared, “Great news, as a result of our TAX CUTS & JOBS ACT!”

Multiple companies have announced increases in wages or benefits to their employees since Congress passed the tax bill last month. The hike in wages is a ploy used to divert attention from the right-wing, anti-working class tax plan and “trickle down tax reform.”

The mass layoff of Sam’s Club employees exposes the ruthless character of corporate management and its utter disdain for the rights of workers. According to Fox Business, Walmart is also expected to cut 1,000 corporate jobs this year. Indeed, any additional costs incurred as a result of the pay increases being doled out by Walmart will likely be more than offset by the cost savings achieved through store closures and mass layoffs.

Walmart, the largest private employer in the world, with 2 million employees, received one of the largest tax breaks under the new Trump administration tax plan that cut the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. Despite the closure of stores across the country, Walmart shares have gained about 60 percent in the past two years.

By one estimate Walmart stands to benefit to the tune of $2.2 billion a year from the cut in the corporate income tax rate. Walmart said its planned wage increases would cost $700 million annually.

Aluminum giants lock out one thousand ABI workers in Quebec

Laurent Lafrance

Aluminerie de Bécancour Inc., a joint venture of two of the world’s largest aluminum producers, locked out 1,030 workers at its Bécancour, Quebec aluminum smelter early Thursday morning.

Management imposed the lockout shortly after the workers rejected, by a massive majority of more than 80 percent, what the company described as its “final offer”—a proposal for a concessions-laden contract.

The second largest aluminum smelter in North America, with an annual output of 450,000 metric tonnes, Aluminerie de Bécancour (ABI) is 75 percent owned by Alcoa and 25 percent owned by Rio Tinto Alcan.

Alcoa has said that the workers will remain locked out of the plant until further notice and that management will continue to operate one of the smelter’s three potlines.

Workers affiliated with United Steelworkers (USW) Local 9700 are currently picketing the ABI smelter, which is located about halfway between Montreal and Quebec City. According to a union official, about a hundred workers breached security Thursday morning, entered the plant and staged a brief sit-in inside the cafeteria. Management has hired private security guards to intimidate workers and prevent any disruption of production.

Negotiations started last September on an agreement to replace the five-year contract that was to expire November 22. On the day the contract expired, workers rejected ABI’s contract proposals and gave the union leadership a powerful 97 percent strike mandate. But the USW refused to launch strike action, insisting that a “negotiated settlement” was possible and signalled its readiness to accept concessions.

Talks broke off only in late December after ABI negotiators tabled their so-called final offer. After that offer was decisively rejected by the rank-and-file this week, the USW urged the company to resume negotiations. But instead it locked out the workers, in what the union termed a “bodyblow,” imposed “without warning in the middle of the night.”

The union has not publicly outlined ABI’s contract demands in full, but it has been revealed that management is seeking to force through sweeping pension cuts.

Initially, ABI demanded that more recent hires be forced into a defined-contribution pension plan, creating a two-tier pension system. Under defined-contribution plans workers have no guaranteed minimum pension benefit on retirement and bear all of the financial risk on the investment of the monies set aside for their retirement.

Apparently, in its final offer, the company went even further, seeking to impose a new, entirely worker-funded pension plan “without any distinction according to seniority.”

ABI is also demanding concessions on seniority rights, particularly in respect to staffing. The joint venture currently employs about 400 younger or low-seniority workers. This includes students who are paid almost $10 per hour less than regular workers.

As the contract deadline approached, the company successfully petitioned the Tribunal administratif du travail (Quebec Labor Board) for an injunction ordering workers to “stop or refrain from slowing the plant’s activities.” That injunction was still in effect this week when management imposed its lockout.

Alcoa and Rio Tinto are both huge transnational corporations. They made vast profits from the resources boom of the first decade of this century, while using their global reach to drive down labour costs through a relentless push for speed-up, worker concessions, and tax breaks.

Now they are citing increased corporate competition to demand even bigger worker givebacks.

While ABI has not publicly threatened to close the smelter, which was opened in 1986, it has suggested that its future is at risk. Management urged workers to accept its “final offer” so as to “ensure the sustainability of the smelter in the future.”

The lockout will have a major impact on the local economy, as ABI is the largest private employer in the Mauricie and Centre-du-Québec regions, and its economic activity supports many jobs indirectly.

The USW has for decades pursued a corporatist, pro-company policy, accepting job cuts and concessions in the name of assuring employers’ “international competitiveness” and “saving” “Canadian,” “Quebec” and “American jobs.”

The union is now manoeuvring to shut down the ABI workers’ anti-concessions struggle. While deploring the lockout, USW Local 9700 President Clément Massé, declared, “Our position has not changed. Our door is always open to negotiate in good faith, to ensure the smooth running of this factory.”

The USW in Quebec is closely allied with the big business Parti Quebecois. In both Canada and the US the USW bureaucracy is closely collaborating with the Trudeau Liberal government and the Trump administration in the NAFTA “renegotiation,” hoping to use it to fashion protectionist steel and aluminum tariffs that target European, Chinese, and other overseas workers. In this the USW is continuing its long association with Trump’s billionaire Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who made a fortune, working with the USW apparatus to reorganize the steel industry at the expense of workers’ jobs, wages and pensions.

To successfully prosecute the struggle to defend their pensions, other social rights and jobs, the ABI workers need to take their struggle out of the hands of the USW and appeal to aluminum and other workers in Canada and internationally for a joint struggle against all concessions and job cuts.

Greek workers stop work in opposition to Syriza anti-strike and austerity measures

Robert Stevens

Thousands of Greek workers demonstrated and carried out strikes on Friday against further austerity measures being imposed by the Syriza government, along with severe restrictions on the right to take industrial action.

Between 10,000 and 20,000 workers protested in Athens at the culmination of a week of strikes and protests. Those on strike for 24 hours included Athens Metro workers, doctors and sailors.

The action shut down the entire Metro rail system, which brought gridlock to the streets of the capital. Ships were unable to sail, while state-run hospitals were forced to rely on reserve staff due to the walkout by doctors.

Among those striking were workers from the GSEE (General Confederation of Greek Workers) private-sector unions as well as from PAME (All Workers Militant Front), the union federation affiliated with the Stalinist Communist Party of Greece. Banners and placards carried by workers read: “Hands off strikes,” “Uprising!” and “No to modern slavery!”

Speaking to Reuters, retired ship officer George Papaspyropoulos said, “This essentially abolishes the right to strike... Such things happened only during the junta. This government is leftist in name only. In deeds it’s a junta.”

Nikos Papageorgiou, a 50-year-old hotel worker, told the news agency, “Blood was shed by generations that came before us to have the right to strike. Now a so-called left-wing government is trying to abolish it.”

Once again, riot police were mobilised by the Syriza government against workers. As the protesters made their way up the steps to the parliament building in the capital’s Syntagma Square, they were tear-gassed by heavily armed officers.

This week has seen protests by workers who forced their way into ministry buildings, including the Employment Ministry, where they confronted minister Efi Achtsioglou. Protests were also held outside the heavily guarded official residence of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras.

The anti-democratic measures are the latest to be drawn up by the European Union and the Syriza government to force the Greek population, already bled white by nearly a decade of savage austerity, to endure even greater “sacrifices” to pay off the country’s debt to the banks, which remains at around €300 billion.

The current €86 billion loan, which expires in August, is in return for an austerity programme Syriza is pledged to implement. Greece has received only €40.2 billion of this money. It will get a further tranche of about €4.5 billion only if the government imposes more cuts and privatisations.

Under a multi-purpose bill set to be passed Monday night by Syriza and its coalition partner, the far-right Independent Greeks, family benefits will be further slashed, a new process to speed up foreclosures on overdue loans will be implemented, and draconian measures to restrict strikes will be enacted.

The anti-strike law will overturn a law first enacted in 1982, in the aftermath of the fall of the fascist junta in 1974. It amends the earlier law to set a higher worker participation requirement for strike votes, to be decided at primary union assemblies. The threshold for a strike vote to be legal will be raised from one third to at least 50 percent of all paying union members, not simply those who take part in the vote.

Further strikes are scheduled for Monday by ADEDY (Supreme Administration of Greek Civil Servants Trade Unions) public-sector workers, timed to coincide with the parliamentary vote to be held late in the evening. Among those striking will be public transport and public hospital workers and air traffic controllers. The latter will hold a three-hour work stoppage between 12pm and 3pm that will affect 48 domestic and international routes on Aegean Air and Olympic Air.

Responding to Friday’s protest, government spokesman Dimitris Tzanakopoulos attempted to play down the significance of the latest measures, stating that they would not affect the operations of the highest levels of the bureaucracies of the main trade union federations, the GSEE and ADEDY. "This does not affect (umbrella) unions and it does not change the process followed to called strikes," he said.

Greek governments of all political stripes, from the social democratic PASOK, to the conservative New Democracy and now Syriza, have relied on the union federations to ensure the imposition of austerity over the last decade. They have called some 50 general strikes, for the most part one-day affairs, at regular intervals for the purpose of allowing workers to let off steam while they held talks with the government on implementing the cuts.

For every cent Greece receives in loans from the EU, it must impose even greater attacks on working class living standards. On Friday, Kathemerini reported, “The Euro Working Group of euro zone finance ministry officials told Greek representative Giorgos Houliarakis on Thursday that the government has less than a week to finish off the prior actions required for the review to be completed in time for the January 22 Eurogroup meeting.”

The Euro Working Group members had received the “600 translated pages of the multi-bill currently being debated in the Greek Parliament, but had not had time to assess the contents” and determine whether its proposals went far enough.

Trump’s racist comments trigger international condemnation

James Cogan

The already battered international standing of the US government has been dealt a further blow by the revelation that President Trump labeled some of the most oppressed and impoverished nations as “shithole countries.” Disgust and anger over the openly racist comments the US president made at a meeting with congressional leaders on Thursday have only been intensified by Trump’s belated and obviously dishonest attempts to deny that he said what has been reported by multiple sources, including some who were at the meeting.

The remarks were made at a White House conference with Democratic and Republican lawmakers on immigration policy. In response to a discussion on “temporary protected status,” which allows people from countries ravaged by natural disasters or war, such as Haiti and El Salvador, to live and work in the US, Trump said: “What do we want Haitians here for? Why do we want all these people from Africa here? Why do we want all these people from shithole countries? We should have more people from places like Norway.”

Trump’s rant was leaked to the Washington Post and made public. International denunciations soon followed.

The United Nations human rights’ spokesperson, Rupert Colville, told a press conference: “There is no other word one can use but racist. You cannot dismiss entire countries and continents as ‘shitholes,’ whose entire populations are not white, are therefore not welcome.”

The government of Haiti, from which hundreds of thousands of people have migrated to the US to escape intractable poverty and political repression, issued a statement declaring that it “condemns in the strongest terms these abhorrent and obnoxious remarks.” The country’s ambassador to the US has demanded a public apology.

Other political leaders also felt obliged to issue statements. The president of El Salvador tweeted that Trump had “struck at the dignity of Salvadorians.” Last Monday, the Trump administration stripped over 250,000 people from El Salvador who have been living for decades in the US of their protected status, giving them 18 months to pack up and leave or be deported.

Vicente Fox, the former president of Mexico, tweeted to Trump: “Your mouth is the foulest shithole in the world.” During the 2016 election, Trump slandered millions of Mexican immigrants to the US, asserting: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”

The African National Congress government in South Africa labeled the remark as “extremely offensive.” The country’s media was full of denunciations and ridicule of Trump. One news outlet, the Daily Maverick, wrote that an event at the White House “is soon to include [Ku Klux Klan] hoods and tiki torches at this rate.”

The government of Botswana called the remarks “reprehensible and racist” and reportedly summoned the US ambassador to ascertain if the country was considered a “shithole” by Washington. Across Africa, Trump was condemned and the imperialist powers, including the United States, declared to be responsible for the continent’s legacy of poverty and backwardness.

Not surprisingly, there have been no strong statements of condemnation by European governments or by Japan or Australia. The policies of all the imperialist powers are discriminatory against people from the poorest regions of the world.

The European Union is seeking to seal its borders to block refugees from Africa and the Middle East, leading to thousands of people losing their lives attempting to cross the Mediterranean. Immigration to Japan is effectively impossible from most countries. Australia maintains a black list of dozens of states whose citizens are routinely denied even tourist visas. While they may not be officially labeled as “shithole countries,” that is how their populations are treated.

In much of the world, however, officials of the Trump administration have been left to desperately try and contain the diplomatic fallout. The State Department and embassies have issued reassurances that the United States values its relations with African and Central and South American countries.

The damage nevertheless extends internationally, as indicated by the announcement by the White House yesterday that Trump is canceling a February visit to the United Kingdom. There is no doubt he would have been met by even larger demonstrations than were expected due to the popular revulsion in Britain over his comments. In fact, wherever in the world Trump travels, the American ruling class faces the prospect of its head of state being greeted by mass opposition to his presence.

After less than one year in office, Trump is arguably more reviled than “weapons of mass destruction” fabricator and war criminal George W. Bush. The American president is viewed by billions of people as an unstable warmonger, racist and liar. In the American working class, one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse on the planet, growing opposition to Trump’s racist immigration policies and fascistic outlook is intersecting with mounting anger over falling living standards, failing infrastructure and police-state repression.

The reaction of the American political and media establishment to Trump’s remarks has had an air of despair. There is a degree of recognition in the capitalist class and its representatives that, with the Trump administration, the protracted loss of US authority and credibility, on both the world arena and at home, has reached a breaking point.

Summing up the sentiment in the corridors of power, Idaho Republican Mike Simpson told the Associated Press: “This a big deal. America’s influence and power in the world has really been about our ability to persuade because of our leadership, and he’s just destroying that.”

At the same time, the condemnations of Trump are laced with hypocrisy, especially on the part of the Democratic Party and its supporters. In the final analysis, Trump simply gave crude expression to how the Obama administration viewed and treated migrants from the nations that have been labeled as “shithole countries.”

Under Obama, at least 2.5 million people were deported—at least 1,000 per day—particularly from Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. If Hillary Clinton had been elected in 2016, the brutal persecution of so-called “illegal” immigrants would have continued unabated.

The aim of the recriminations against Trump in the American establishment is to try and present the current president as a mere aberration, a blemish on an otherwise healthy and democratic body politic. Every effort is being made to promote the conception that if a new figure was installed in the White House, things would return to “normal.”

Nothing could be further from the truth. Trump is the product of a decades-long process, characterised by a steep decline in the global economic position of American capitalism and the immense growth of class antagonisms and social inequality within the US.

The Cold War lies and propaganda that US imperialism stood for “liberty,” “democracy” and “human rights” have been thoroughly exposed over the past 25 years. Washington engages in intrigues or outright invasions of countries and inflicts death and destruction so American banks and corporations can plunder resources and dominate markets. Within the US, the living standards of the working class have been devastated to protect and increase the wealth of a tiny proportion of the population—the capitalist class and its upper-middle class periphery.

It is within the degenerated political environment produced by these processes that Trump was able—through demagogic appeals to the immense alienation of sections of the population, and the political vacuum left by the right-wing, anti-working class policies of the Democrats—to win the presidency. His administration has proceeded to pursue the interests of the capitalist oligarchy through massive corporate tax cuts at home and stepped-up militarist intrigues internationally.

Trump is the noxious expression of the decline and decay of American capitalism and its ruling class. The presence at the pinnacle of state power of an outright racist, who gives open and crude expression to the reactionary content of US foreign and domestic policy, undermines the ability of American imperialism to cloak its aggression and plunder around the world in the mantle of “democracy” and “human rights.”

Anti-immigrant xenophobia, racism and nationalism are the inevitable corollary to militarism and deepening attacks on the working class. In every country, it is how the capitalist class is seeking to divide and disorientate the masses and defend its ownership and control over society’s wealth and productive capacity.

The response of the working class to racism and chauvinism must therefore be developed in complete opposition to the capitalist system and all its political parties and defenders. In the United States and around the world, it must be answered with the fight for the international unity of the working class in the common struggle for world socialism.

Facebook announces major plan to censor news content

Andre Damon

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Friday that the world’s largest social network is initiating major changes aimed at deprioritizing news and political content on individual users’ news feeds in favor of “personal moments.” The change is the most significant effort to date to censor online information.

Facebook is currently a major source of news for hundreds of millions of people throughout the world. The number of global Facebook users has increased from 100 million in 2008 to more than 2 billion. According to a Pew Research poll last November, 45 percent of Americans use Facebook for news content, more than any other social media platform. It has become a significant mechanism for the organization of protests and the spread of information outside of the control of the major media conglomerates. It is this that Facebook, working closely with the major capitalist states, wants to end.

In his post announcing the decision, Zuckerberg said that the company is “making a major change to how we build Facebook … from focusing on helping you find relevant content to helping you have more meaningful social interactions.”

The manifesto is filled with the type of Orwellian language characteristic of an authoritarian regime. The changes are motivated, Zuckerberg explains, by “a responsibility to make sure our services aren’t just fun to use, but also good for people’s well-being.” By demoting news content and emphasizing posts from friends and family, Facebook will ensure that its users “feel more connected and less lonely,” and the overall effect will be “good for our well-being.”

In other words, Facebook knows what is good for you, and it is not news and information about the state of the world. Such “public content” will be increasingly removed from Facebook news feeds, while those news posts that are shown “will be held to the same standard—it should encourage meaningful interactions between people.”

In the dictatorship envisioned by Orwell in his book 1984, Big Brother and his apologists in the media use “Newspeak” to paper over the perpetual state of war and dictatorship by turning things into their opposite: war is peace. In Zuckerberg’s “funspeak,” the suppression of peoples’ ability to transmit information is described as an effort to “bring us closer together with the people that matter to us.” Censorship in the guise of a Hallmark greeting card.

Zuckerberg states, moreover, that Facebook “started making changes in this direction last year,” that is, that censorship has already begun. The World Socialist Web Site has observed that over the past six months, content posted on Facebook, particularly videos, have a significantly lower reach than in the past, while readers have reported having their own posts of WSWS articles flagged as “spam.”

The political motivation for the decision—a 180-degree shift from the company’s content strategy—is underscored by the fact that it will likely have a significant negative impact on Facebook’s bottom line. In his post, Zuckerberg acknowledged that he expects “the time people spend on Facebook and some measures of engagement will go down.” This, combined with an anticipated drop in advertising revenue from content publishers, caused Facebook stock to fall 9 percent on Friday.

But more important issues are at stake. Facebook’s action exemplifies the embrace by the major technology companies of corporate-state censorship. From companies whose stated aim is to propagate, share and disseminate information, they have become instruments of suppression and control.

One year ago, Zuckerberg would have taken his statement, included in his post yesterday, that “video and other public content have exploded on Facebook in the past couple of years” as a point of pride. Now, he treats it as dangerous.

This shift is the outcome of a campaign led by the Democratic Party and US intelligence agencies. In coordination with media outlets including the New York Times and Washington Post, they have developed a neo-McCarthyite argument that Russian influence in US politics, primarily through the mechanism of social media, has corrupted “American democracy” and is “sowing divisions” within the country—an argument taken up by Germany, France and other states.

In a series of hearings at the end of last year, US lawmakers made clear that they expected Facebook, Twitter and Google to implement a sweeping crackdown on political speech. Just this past week, Democrats in the US Senate released a major report on alleged Russian intervention in US and European politics that concludes that “social media platforms are a key conduit of disinformation campaigns that undermine democracies.”

The real concern of the ruling class is not Russian “meddling,” but the growth of social and political opposition, in the United States and internationally. As the Trump administration pursues its reactionary, militarist and antidemocratic agenda—including the abolition of net neutrality—the Democrats are terrified that unending war and unsustainable levels of social inequality will produce a social explosion.

Five months ago, the World Socialist Web Site warned that Google was seeking to censor leftwing, antiwar, and progressive web sites as part of a broad turn toward censorship by the major technology companies. The assault on democratic rights and free speech has far progressed in just half a year. The ruling class is taking rapid actions in anticipation of a major war and the explosion of social unrest this year.

Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST) Training for Tech Entrepreneurs in Africa 2018

Application Deadline: February 2018

To be taken at (country): Ghana.

About the Award: The programme aims to provide its trainees with hands-on software development training, an opportunity to start and grow their own business with access to global markets, as well as mentoring from executives from global software companies and the opportunity to solve real-world business problems.

This campaign falls in line with MEST’s plan to create a pan-African network which will pool the collective talents of entrepreneurs and techies alike. The campaign will also seek to increase the number of entrepreneurs by empowering young Africans while increasing investment eligibility throughout Africa.

Type: Entrepreneurship, Training

Eligibility: To be eligible for the programme, applicants need to meet the following requirements:

• Have a strong passion that drives you to want to succeed
• Have several years of experience as an entrepreneur or corporate work experience
• Be able to commit a full year in Accra for the MEST programme which begins in August 2018.

Value of Training: 

• This cohort of MEST trainees will also be eligible to receive seed funding of US$50 000 up to US$100 000.
• The entrepreneurs-in-training (EITs) accepted into the programme will receive a number of benefits. Namely, they’ll receive housing accommodation for a year in Ghana, three meals a day as well as a small monthly stipend.

Duration of Training: I year

How to Apply: Anyone who would be willing to apply can do so here.

Visit Training Webpage for details

Award Provider: MEST