Toxic Silence: Public Officials, Monsanto and the Media

Colin Todhunter

Are you being lied to or misled? Environmentalist Dr Rosemary Mason certainly thinks so and has provided much supporting evidence. She has been campaigning against the agrochemical industry for many years (all her work can be accessed here) and has borne witness to the destruction of her own nature reserve in South Wales, which she argues is due to the widespread spraying of glyphosate in the area.

In 2016, she wrote an open letter to journalists at The Guardian newspaper in the UK outlining how the media is failing the public by not properly reporting on the regulatory delinquency relating to the harmful chemicals being applied to crops (read it here). Her assertion was that not only humans and the environment are silently being poisoned by thousands of untested and unmonitored chemicals, but that the UK media are silent about the agrochemical industry’s role in this.

She has now sent a new ‘open letter’ to some major newspapers with a six-page document attached: ‘The British Government and Monsanto should stand accused of crimes against humanity’.

It has been sent to the editors-in-chief of The Times, The Sunday Times, The Telegraph, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, the London Evening Standard and The Independent as well as the director general of the BBC and its senior executives. Channel 4 News (UK) reporters have also been sent the document, including senior presenter Jon Snow, and a number of prominent UK government agencies and ministers.

The document discusses the lawsuits that have recently been brought against agrochemical and seed giant Monsanto, issues surrounding the renewal of the licence for glyphosate (key ingredient in Monsanto’s multi-billion-dollar, money-spinning herbicide Roundup) in the EU, rising rates of illness and disease (linked to glyphosate and other agrochemicals), the increasing use of pesticides and the lack of adequate testing and epidemiological studies pertaining to the cocktail of chemicals sprayed on crops.

Mason feels the media should be holding officials and the industry to account. Instead, there seems to be an agenda to confuse the public or to push the issue to one side. For instance, she has in the past argued that too many journalists are reinforcing the pesticides industry’s assertion that cancers are caused by alcohol use and that the catalogue of diseases now affecting modern society comes down to individual choice and lifestyle decisions. The media constantly link alcohol consumption with various cancers and this ‘fact’ is endlessly reinforced until people believe it to be true.

This, Mason argues, neatly diverts attention from the strong links between the increasing amounts of chemicals used in food and agriculture and serious diseases, including cancers.

In her various documents, Mason has over the years highlighted how international and national health and food safety agencies have dismissed key studies and findings in their assessments of the herbicide glyphosate, and she has provided much evidence that the chemical industry has created a toxic (political and natural) environment which affects us all. She argues that these agencies are guilty of regulatory delinquency due to conflicts of interest and have effectively been co-opted, enabling companies to dodge effective regulation.

Mason has gone to great lengths to show how a combination of propaganda disseminated by industry front groups and conflicts of interest allow dangerous chemicals into the food chain and serve to keep the public in the dark about what is taking place and the impacts on their health.

Aside from the subversion of democratic procedures, the result is rivers, streams and oceans polluted with agrochemical run-offs, spiralling rates of illness among the public and the destruction of wildlife and biodiversity.

By writing to major news outlets, Mason is pressing for at least one to take up this issue and finally begin holding public officials and agrochemical companies to account. To its credit, the French newspaper Le Monde has on occasion been unafraid to report on the activities of this industry.

Regardless of industry propaganda, it is not that we need the model of agriculture that these companies profit from. The increasingly globalized industrial food regime that transnational agribusiness is integral to is not feeding the world. It is, moreover, responsible for some of the planet’s most pressing political, social and environmental crises.

There are credible alternatives that actually can feed the world equitably (see ‘United Nations: Agroecology, not Pesticides, is the Future for Food‘).

So, isn’t it about time integrity and public health took precedence over profit and vested interest?

The UN special rapporteur on the right to food Hilal Elver says:

“The power of the corporations over governments and over the scientific community is extremely important. If you want to deal with pesticides, you have to deal with the companies.”

When speaking truth to power, however, perhaps for many well-paid media personnel with careers to protect it is easier to stay silent.

Kosovo at Delicate Crossroads Between East and West

Peter Koenig

The people of Kosovo were and still are cheering for joy. The European Commission (EC) recently decided that Kosovars won’t need visas any more to visit EU countries. Up to now, getting such visas was a horrendously complicated and bureaucratic procedure, especially hurtful, since Kosovo, with a population of about 1.8 million Kosovars living in Kosovo, has a diaspora estimated at 800,000 to a million, most of them in western Europe. For Kosovars, with close-knit families, 90+ percent Albanian Muslims, being able to visit their relatives and friends is a priority. So, this sudden EU opening up, was a great “gift” and a tremendous relief. – But, at what price? What happened? Why did it happen this turnabout by the treacherous EU?

Let’s go back to a bit of history.

Kosovo, a strategic pivot in the center of the Balkans; a landlocked country surrounded by Montenegro, Albania, Serbia and Macedonia. Kosovo, carved out from Serbia during or after the Clinton Administration invoked war – the infamous 69 days of bombing Serbian troops in Kosovo, following a ten-year period of systematic US-NATO- European vassals’ destruction of Yugoslavia, arguably the most prosperous country in Europe at the time.

You may want to recall, the dismemberment of Yugoslavia, started with the “Ten Days War” on Slovenia in 1991, followed by the Croatian War (1991-95); then the Bosnia War (1992-95); and the Kosovo War (1998-99), culminating with the Clinton induced 69-day NATO bombing of Kosovo, under the leadership of Wesley Clark, head of NATO in Europe. The latter under the pretext of freeing the Kosovo Albanians from Serbian Milosevic’s atrocities.

Of course, how Milosevic was used by the West to literally slaughter his neighbors, so far hardly anybody has dared to analyze and write about. He was on trial by the UN International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague. He was actually awaiting a court decision on his request to subpoena former President Clinton, as a witness, when he was suddenly found dead in his cell on 11 March 2006. The Dutch court coroner immediately certified that Milosevic died a natural death. Strangely, his death came less than a week after the star witness in his trial, former Croatian Serb leader, Milan Babic, was found dead in the same prison. Babic’s testimony in 2002 described a behind the scene political and military command structure headed by Milosevic. Babic served a 13-year prison sentence. His sudden death was said to be a suicide.

Too many Serbs die suddenly in The Hague to be called ‘coincidences’. In October 2015, Dusan Dunjic, a forensic pathologist, was found dead in his hotel room, just hours before he was due to testify as a key defense witness in the trial of the Bosnian Serb and genocidal general Ratko Mladic, who was on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity during the 1992-95 Bosnian war.Dutch police said, “we have no reason to suspect that a crime had been committed”.They gave no further detail. Case closed.

This is just to make the point that the murderous and atrocious Balkan wars were western instigated from the very preparation – including through decades long Fifth Column type – infiltration in Yugoslavia’s institutions.

Today, Kosovo lacks recognition from sufficient countries to be considered a “real country”. Kosovo is not member of the UN, because she has only been recognized by 114 of the current 193 UN members. It needs two thirds of UN members recognition to apply for UN membership. Kosovo is, of course, not a member of the EU either, only 23 of the 28 EU countries recognize her as a country. The reasons for it are multiple and complex. But Kosovo, with a surface of 10,900 km2, and less than 2 million inhabitants, prides herself with having already two military bases, one US – a huge one, and a “subordinate” NATO base – what else.

Like all the Balkans, Kosovo wants to get into the EU as fast as possible. But, they are far from even getting onto the “accession” path – which is like the runway to fly into the EU. When you get to accession status, you have pretty much fulfilled all or most of the EU conditions and are now accepted to negotiate. And ‘accession’ is a privilege that, aside from some rather ridiculous EU conditions, depends pretty much on Washington’s use for a country, once it has become part of the overall EU vassalage. Kosovo is no priority. The US military is already there and NATO has a base – so what more is needed for right now? The EU today in many countries is considered identical with NATO.

Kosovo is hungry though, to get into the EU, so hungry, it can be easily blackmailed – and bribed – into accepting almost anything, in order to gain kudos with Brussels. The best blackmail object is visas, or the waiver of visas, particularly to western Europe, where most of the Kosovar diaspora lives – an estimated 800,000 to one million people.

Montenegro, an EU candidate on fast track, NATO member since 2017, is building or expanding a NATO base right at the border to Kosovo. In fact, it requires Kosovo to give up some 8,200 ha of her land to Montenegro, the new ‘demarcation line’ (see map – red areas are Kosovo concessions to Montenegro). According to “Prishtina Insight”, the Kosovo Parliament ratified a few weeks ago the “land concession”, also called the “Demarcation Deal with Montenegro” with 80 votes against 11 opposition. And this amidst several teargas canister explosion episodes initiated by the opposition in Parliament.

Source: Prishtina Insight News

This was the deal: Kosovo give up a stretch of 8,200 ha of your land to Montenegro and you will get visa-free entry to all of Europe. Blackmail  only the west in its greed and hegemonic drive is capable of exercising over countries. Identifying their weak spots – in the case of Kosovo, the desire to get easy access to their relatives and friends living in Europe, and then hitting them with an “offer” they can’t refuse.

In fact, going by the strict rules of the EU, which can only slightly be bent to accelerate access, lest more ‘honest’ EU members might protest, none of the Balkan countries are complying with the EU access regulation – most of them are far from doing so, for multiple reasons, i.e. drug dealing, high crimes in human and organ trafficking, as well as more down-to-earth environmental conditions.

However, the EU and Washington are pushing for the pretty arbitrary target of 2025, simply because they are afraid that the Balkans may drift eastwards into the realm of Russia and on a larger scale, China. –Most educated Kosovars are much more “awake” than the average European. While intellectually they may know that east is where the future lays, their trauma of being persecuted and killed by the Serbs under Milosevic, is still strong and they are leaning towards the west. Ideally, though, what they want is full independence, being able to choose their allies that best suit them, as every sovereign nation should be able to do. Not having to confront the dilemma, ‘you are either our friend or our enemy’ – which is how the west attempts to buy the Balkans’ politicians.

The western push to prepare and forge these former Yugoslav republics into EU-NATO vassals is enormous. Every military base the Balkans allow to be built in return for being integrated into Europe, is for the west a step closer to Moscow – an increased threat for the Kremlin, so the western empire believes. If these new Balkan nations play their cards right, they may have it both ways – becoming EU members, benefitting from EU subsidies and trade advantages, while leaning eastwards to Russia and China, and eventually the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the new Silk Road, China’s One Belt Initiative (OBI), the multi-trillion-dollar equivalent economic development plan, on course to span the world.

Trillion Dollar Companies: The Apple Empire and Concentrated Markets

Binoy Kampmark

It seems a distant reality, or nightmare now: a company that was near defunct in 1996, now finding itself at the imperial pinnacle of the corporate ladder.  Then, publications were mournful and reflective about the corporation that gave us the Apple Computer.  An icon had fallen into disrepair.  Then came the renovations, the Steve Jobs retooling and sexed-up products of convenience.

Apple’s valuation last Thursday came in at $1 trillion and may well make it the first trillion dollar company on the planet.  That its assets are worth more than a slew of countries is surely something to be questioned rather than cheered.  This un-elected entity, with employees versed in evading, as far as possible, the burdens of public accountability, poses a troubling minder about how concentrated financial power rarely squares with democratic governance.

Chalking up such a mark is only impressive for those keeping an eye on the trillion dollar line.  China’s state-owned PetroChina is another muscular contender for getting there first, while the Saudi Arabian energy company Aramco, which produces a far from negligible 10 percent of the world’s oil, could well scoot past Apple should it go public.

Cheering was exactly what was demanded by James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute, whose piece in The Week suggests that Apple reached that mark “the right way”.  The critics of such concentrated power, technology company or otherwise, were simply wrong.  “For them, superbig is automatically superbad.”

Praise for Apple, an abstract being, is warranted in the way that its ally, modern capitalism, should be. “The story of Apple is really the story of modern capitalism doing what it does best: turning imagination into reality.”  The author prefers to see Apple, and Amazon, as products of US genius in the capitalist context.

The New York Times is similarly impressed, linking individual gargantuan successes to the broader American effort in the economy.  A small gaggle of US companies commanding “a larger share of total corporate profits” than at any time since the 1970s, is not necessarily something to snort at. The nine-year bull market has, essentially, been powered by the four technology giants.  “Their successes are also propelling the broader economy, which is on track for its fastest growth rate in a decade.”

To its credit, the paper does pay lip service to concerns that such “superstar firms” are doing their bit to stifle wage growth, shrink an already struggling, barely breathing middle class, while jolting income inequality.

This is where the trouble lies: a seemingly blind understanding of capitalism’s inner quirks and unstable manifestations. The paradox behind the tech giant phenomenon does not lie in the wisdom that innovation comes from competition. The converse is claimed to be true: that concentration, oligopolistic power, and strings pulled by a few players is the way to keep innovation alive.  This was Microsoft’s vain argument during the 1990s, something that did not sit well with the antitrust denizens.

The fraternity of economists, rarely capable in agreeing on broader trends, has become abuzz with literature focused on one unsettling topic: the continuing, and accelerating concentration of US industry.  Gustavo Grullon, Yelena Larkin and Roni Michaely noted in April last year that government policies encouraging competition in industry had been “drastically reversed in the US” with a 75 percent increase in the Herfindahl-Hirschman index (HHI) measuring market concentration.  (Antitrust regulators beware.)  The authors observe how, “Lax enforcement of antitrust regulations and increasingly technological barriers to entry appear to be important factors behind this trend.”

Marketing professor from NYU, Scott Galloway, is one who has supped from the cup of the tech giants. He has written about their exploits (The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google), his addresses having become something of a viral phenomenon with analyses of the companies at the DLD Conference in Munich.  Initially seduced by the bling and the product, he enjoyed the magic mushroom inducements the tech giants supplied, relished in their success and stock options, extolled their alteration of human behaviour. “This started as a love affair.  I want to be clear.  I love these companies.”

This year, a change of heart took place.  Galloway, after spending “the majority of the last two years” of his life “really trying to understand them and the relationship with the ecosystem” is convinced that these behemoths must be broken up.  The big four, striving all powerful deities, sources of mass adoration, have become “our consumptive gods”.  “And as a result of their ability to tap into these very basic instincts, they’ve aggregated more market cap than the majority of nation’s GDP”.

Power and influence has shifted.  Political leaders have little of these relatively speaking, certainly over the behavioural consistency and content of subjects and citizens.  Someone like Mark Zuckerberg, distinctly outside a political process he can still control, does.  “He can turn off or on your mood. He can take any product up or down. He can pretty much kill any company in the tech space.”  And that’s just Facebook.

What Galloway points out with a forceful relevance is that liberties and freedoms are not the preserve of estranged markets and their bullish actors. Regulation and oversight are required.  A return to competition would only be possible through some form of intervention and coaxing, perhaps even economic violence.  The memory of the great financial crisis initially stimulated an appetite for regulation.  In recent years, such urgings have been satiated.  The tech giants, fully aware of this, continue to burgeon.

Road rage faces student spirit in Bangladesh

Farooque Chowdhury

Road rage in Bangladesh is not new. And not new is death due to road rage. The new phenomenon is the student spirit has stood against road rage. To the students, life matters.

A movement against road rage has recently been carried out by the students in Dhaka. They stood for life. And they stood against disregard to life.

It was anarchy in a part of roads. The students opposed that anarchy. It was dominance of lumpen culture and practice in a part of roads. The students opposed that part of the lumpen culture and practice. The students standing for life sent a powerful message to all concerned or to-be-concerned. They served society — a thankful job.

Total inconsideration to ordinary people is not new in profit-powered economy. There is no scope for the Bangladesh economy to go ‘awry’ of this path — ignore the interest of ordinary people.
Roads are one profit-friendly area in a profit-driven economy. The consequence: the people passing the paths — millions in number every day — pay price heavily. Profit-hungry roads turn cruel under the mastership of crudely-earned capital. All, an entire society — from tax payers to tax controllers, from petty traders to politicians, from day-labourer, private car driver and driver’s daughter of to film director, from pupil to policeman, from children to octogenarian — turn victims of this arrogance-filled neo-capital.

‘Lion’s share’ in the death-market on Bangladesh roads is of the ordinary people, and especially of the poor. A look into class composition of the deaths in road accidents shows the fact. Mostly, the dead in road accidents are low-earning members of society. The affected families are in the lower strata of society. Is it that the road deaths love the low-earning people?

And, strangely, it is the ordinary people who collectively pay the most part for the roads. It is the ordinary people who keep the wheels of profit running on the roads. It is the fact seen from any angle: whether from the angle of source of profit gathered from roads or from the angle of payments made by the public.

It is a strange ratio: death market on roads and payment for roads! The ordinary people are the biggest payers in terms of life and in terms of money. Or, they make payment with their money and they are paid back by their lives taken away. It seems the more the ordinary people pay with money the more they are paid back with death!

The stories of road deaths or deaths under wheels, in any way one likes to name the deaths, are known to all. Media reports are evidences. It has many descriptions: high speed, reckless driving, mechanical failure, damaged road, broken bridge railings, rules ignored, overburdened either with passengers or with goods, fatigued driver, inefficiency, lack of training, and a few more including role of organisations claiming to be unions. A deeper look will find wrong design, lax in enforcement, and super-greed — scoop most possible money within shortest possible time. A further look will find management problem. A further look will find disregard life.

Problem is not with the transport labour. Nor is the problem the owner. The same labour will behave in a different way, in a responsible way, in a considerate way in a different circumstance, in a different atmosphere. Labour is not anti-people. Nor it is killer-friendly. Labour has no contradiction with the student community, not with citizens. There is no reason to consider labour anti-student, anti-public. A labour-student contradiction only serves that part of capital, which is in an anarchic spree.

The same owner will behave in a different way in another situation. Owners go for money all over the world. But that does not mean that they are motivated to kill.

It is a circumstance — amalgamation of many factors — that creates a situation with particular tilt. A circumstance grows in strength and overwhelms all around. Road rage, to put it in a simple way, has, thus, grown brutal, taking lives, many lives, lives of ordinary people. It has taken an anarchic appearance.

Road rage is spread over, broadly, all around the country. A classification of the spread out problem will find — village paths tax lives least; lazy roads are lazy in driving death; the more the speed the more the death, the more the power the more the disregard. And, it is the poorer the weaker.
It is a mismatched reality with all disproportions: the poor, the powerful, the speedier, the disregard, the rules, the slack.

These are known to all. These are old observations. These are tiring narrations. These are clichés.
The anarchic situation does not help politicians. Neither does it help production. Ultimately, its the people that suffer, it is production that gets hampered. And, politicians face awkward situation with possibility of deterioration, a serious deterioration, which opens path to further play by others.
The new development is the student spirit — standing for life, defending life. It is anchored in the history of student activism in Bangladesh. The history begins from the days of colonised Bangladesh: Students riding revolutionary road to overthrow colonial rulers. The days under the Pakistan rule blazed with student activism. The independent Bangladesh also found that the student community is not short of activism and martyrs.

All these student activism conveyed messages. The messages were noticed by a group while ignored by another. Lost was the ignorant group.

Student organisations were the organisers in all student activism during the Pakistan period. The school students’ movement opposing a book — Pakistan, Desh O Krishti – in the post-1969 uprising days also had indirect or distant presence of student organisations.

The movement, generally identified as desh o krishti andolin (movement), was significant as it was opposing the ideology the state was formally trying to impose on young learners. The Pakistan state had to retreat. The book, prescribed for the secondary level, was withdrawn. A few months later, the Bengalis stood for their liberation through an armed struggle, which was widely joined in by students from middle and lower strata of society.

The Bangladesh students gained trust and love of the Bengali people through their years of activism since 1948. The activism centred, basically and broadly, on people’s interests. A part of this love and trust gathered rust resulting from a number of mal-activism or counter-activism — a loss for people’s interest, but a gain for anti-people camp.

The anti-road rage movement bared parts of a reality encompassing the state and people. There was the question of responsiveness of the students and the state machine and attitude of the people. The students’ response was instant. Parts of the state responded very quickly; and the response was positive. Hostility to each other was absent as the state machine was not standing opposed to the protesting students, unusual signals from both sides, which need to be deciphered.
A major question remains to be solved: the role of student organisations. The question carries within it a few more questions, answer to which will reflect the state of the overall and of different parts of student activism. Any observer will look into the outburst: its speed and extent, and the element powering it. Student organisations can take responsibility to stop all possibilities of deteriorating to anarchy. These organisations can stop play by provocateurs with some other agenda.

Anarchy will harm all — the people, production, political atmosphere and politicians. The move for safe roads will get harmed with anarchy. And the student spirit vibrant on Dhaka roads will lose face if anarchy sets in. The honour the protesting students from schools and colleges are gaining will get lost if anarchy steps in. So, that should not be allowed.

The Lasting Condition: Drought in Australia

Binoy Kampmark

Humans are a funny species.  They create settlements along fault lines that, on moving, can create catastrophe, killing thousands.  They construct homes facing rivers that will, at some point, break their banks, carrying of their precious property.  Importantly, they return in the aftermath.  Existence continues.

The same follows certain settlements of parts of the planet where hostile, environmental conditions discourage rather than endorse a certain form of living.  Changes in weather have been vicious catalysts for the collapse of civilisations; extreme climactic variations prevent and retard stable and sustainable agriculture.

“The flourishing of human civilisation from about 10,000 years ago, and in particular from 7,000 years ago,” notes earth and paleo-climate scientist Andrew Glikson, “critically depended on stabilisation of climate conditions”.  This had its due results: planting and harvesting of seed; cultivation of crops; the growth of villages and towns.

Australia, the second driest continent on the planet, has never been exempt from such patterns of disruption, and those stubborn, pluckily foolish farmers who persist in the notion that they can make a living in parts of it risk going the same way.

Australia’s agrarian purveyors have certainly been persistent, hopeful as pilgrims in search of holy land.  Disasters have not discouraged.  A sense of a certain attendant fatalism can be found in the scribbles of Nancy Fotheringham Cato’s “Mallee Farmer”:

You cleared the mallee and the sand blew over

Fence and road to the slow green river;

You prayed for rain but the sky breathed dust

Of long dead farmers and soil’s red rust.

You ploughed up the paddocks with a stump jump plough

But the gates were open and the drought walked through. 

The Settlement Drought (1790-1793) threatened but did not overwhelm early European settlers. The Goyder Line Drought (1861-5) savaged but did not kill farming in parts of South Australia.  The recent Millennium drought (1997-2009) was spectacularly ruinous, but Australian agriculture moaned and stuttered along.

Farming in Australia remains precarious, an occupation of permanent contingency.  Droughts ravage, kill and annihilate.  Crops and livestock perish with gruesome ease.  But the Australian farmer, rather than being portrayed as a dinosaur awaiting extinction, is seen as resilient, durable and innovative.  Yet each drought brings a certain narrative.

One aspect of that narrative is the sense of singularity.  Droughts are often seen as unprecedented.  This alleviates the need to consider stark realities and inefficiencies that characterise the problem of farming in naturally dry environs with inappropriate crops or livestock, to up stakes, as it were, and finally admit to the brutalities.  Such determination often flies in the face of the work conducted by climate science researchers, who tend to occupy a certain high terrain of gloom.  Recent publications float the suggestion that the droughts this year may be some of the worst in 800 years.

The response from the prime minister has been an urging against the predations of nature: to fortify “resilience” in light of more unpredictable rainfall.  The fear from such figures as former Nationals leader John Anderson is that matters of climate change will be co-opted in an act of politicisation.  This would suggest inevitability, doom and acceptance.

Climate change watchers Andrew King, Anna Ukkola and Ben Henley do not shed much light on these matters, logically pointing out that drought, being a “complex beast” can be “measured in a variety of ways.  Some aspects of drought are linked to climate change; others are not.”  The entire field of drought studies reads like a sophisticated, taxonomical manual of expertise and foreboding, noting variations in their spatial effects, duration, seasonality and intensity.

Such studies are intriguing, and tend to ignore the withering human consequences that invariably follow.  Figures like Edwina Robertson of Trangie, west of Dubbo supply the viewer with a pathos and desperation, her tears the only moisture in an arid setting.  The Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, was there to capitalise.  “It’s worse,” he was told, “than anything you are seeing in the media, it’s far worse.”

Drought brings with it a whole platoon of agents and variables.  Cash relief payments are provided through the Farm Household Allowance (additional payments of up to $12,000 have been promised); mental health services are boosted (the Rural Financial Counsellors feature in this scheme).  Australian farmers are being encouraged to come forth with their anxieties and strains.

These are salutary reminders that some parts of Australian farming can only be kept on life support for so long.  As Richard Eckard, director of the Primary Industries Climate Challenges Centre at the University of Melbourne explained in 2015, the limits to adaptation are unavoidable.  The odds for the more fortunate wheat farmer in a hotter, drier climate will be better than those cultivating chickpeas, walnuts and peaches.  No matter, argues Eckard; Australia’s farming adaptation technologies will ensure that the country never has a food security problem.  “We’re heading for quality, rather than quantity.”

Perversely, as the federal government and a host or bodies tend to the drought, and as is in the manner of the Australian environment, northern stretches of the country have been and are being drenched.  More flooding and cyclones are being promised in the future.  Australia, that most untamed environmental miracle of all; but Australia’s agrarian inhabitants, permanently subject to trials they are often poorly prepared for, buttressed by an obstinate faith that sustains them.

Assam’s National Register of Citizens: A Fact Based Analysis

Walter Fernandes

The draft has some flaws, but talk of bloodbath, deportation does not measure up to the facts of the exercise.

The final draft of the National Register of Citizens for Assam, published on July 30, is a good document with some shortcomings. But the real problem is the fear-mongering by many Indian media outlets outside the North East. Some TV channels have even claimed that there will be a bloodbath in Assam because lakhs of its residents have been left out of the NRC, an exercise aimed at listing the registered Indian citizens in the state and identifying undocumented migrants.

This fear-mongering, which began before the draft was published, spread to some foreign countries too. A European human rights group asked me whether seven million Muslims would be excluded from the NRC, jailed, and eventually sent to Bangladesh. I told them that based on my examination and calculations of Census data, the number of Bengali speakers and their children (who some have clubbed under the umbrella term “Bangladeshi migrants”) cannot exceed 40 lakh. But some leaders speak of almost every Muslim as an “illegal” Bangladeshi, leading to the high numbers being banded about.

The question of undocumented migrants was where the NRC was born. In response to constant agitations by students’ unions over fears that the so-called illegal immigrants would outnumber the indigenous people of Assam, the Supreme Court in 2014 ordered that the NRC, first prepared in 1951 but riddled with problems, be updated by January 2016. The first list was out on December 30, 2017 and the final draft was released last week. Of the approximately 3.29 crore applicants, 40 lakh people have been excluded from the list and will now have to submit fresh documents to prove citizenship.

The media ignored the fact that it is the final draft, not the NRC itself. To find place in the NRC, every resident had to apply and prove that the names of their ancestors were found in the 1951 document, or, in other words, prove that their grandparents lived in Assam. This even though the cut-off date for citizenship in Assam has been affixed at March 25, 1971, in keeping with the Assam Accord.

The problem is that India does not have compulsory birth, marriage and death registration and many citizens, being illiterate, are unable to produce any record. Some others are too poor to argue their case and do not have enough legal assistance to prove their citizenship.

That has serious implications for a large number of Muslim and even some Bengali-speaking Hindu residents. The 40,07,707 people who have been left out of the NRC include former President Fakruddin Ali Ahmed’s brother’s family, which claims to have lost its documents in the floods in 2000, Azmal Haque, who retired from the Indian army after serving for 30 years, an MLA of the Assam government and the wife of another legislator, both Hindu. Thus, there are many anomalies that can lead to much injustice.

So the next question is: What happens to people excluded from the NRC? The Supreme Court has said that no coercive action is to be taken on them because this is only a draft. Action has to wait till the final list comes out, due on December 31. Thus, fear-mongering and talk of bloodshed are not justified, but are problematic and dangerous. Equally dangerous are statements of some leaders of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party that they completed the NRC while the Congress, which began the exercise in 2005, did not do so because they wanted to protect “illegal Bangladeshis”.

Fact check

I do not want to get into the Bharatiya Janata Party-Congress dynamic and instead focus on facts.

First, the NRC is not the initiative of any political party but the result of a Supreme Court order, in response to a clutch of petitions and in the wake of many years of student agitations against what they considered an influx of foreigners into the state.

Secondly, a myth is being created that “illegal immigration” began after India’s Partition and is a Pakistani conspiracy to destabilise the North East. In reality, immigration from Bangladesh was a response to the 1891 British policy that encouraged peasants from East Bengal (most of which now falls under Bangladesh) to migrate to Western Assam to grow more food to offset a famine, caused by land takeover by British for tea gardens, by cultivating what they called wastelands

These territories were in fact the lands shared by the Bodo and Rabha tribes inhabiting the region, and were their source of livelihood. Hence, from the outset, the conflict has been around land. Secondly, 90% of the East Bengal peasants were Muslims and that was the proportion among the immigrants too. This added a communal dimension to the land issue. Their number kept growing because they were landless labourers coming in search of fertile land. But in the 1930s, in the context of the debate on the Partition, some leaders of the freedom movement feared that Assam was becoming a Muslim majority province. So they encouraged Hindu peasants from Bihar to migrate to Assam. It added to the communal dimension.

Immigration has continued after Partition from Bihar, Nepal and Bangladesh. Today, Hindu Nepali and North Indian immigrants comprise around 60% of migrants and Bengali speakers are around 40%. Even today, the people of Assam are concerned mainly about their land and identity. But the focus of Centre’s leaders is on those they brand as illegal Muslim immigrants and term a threat to national security. One has said that all of them should be deported. The same government has, based on the electoral promise of the present prime minister, introduced an amendment to the Citizenship Act making it easy for minorities (read Hindus) ostensibly fleeing persecution in Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan to become citizens of India. The people of Assam oppose this amendment because they fear that the Assamese speakers, who are only around 60% of its population, will be reduced to a minority mainly because more and more land hungry Hindus may migrate to Assam, declare themselves victims of persecution and become citizens.

Land issue

But some political leaders are using the NRC as a tool to talk about expelling “illegal Muslims migrants” to Bangladesh, though many of them may be Indian nationals who cannot prove their citizenship. Bangladesh will not accept them and they have nowhere else to go. Migration from Bangladesh, with a population density of more than 1,200 per sq km, to Assam, with a density of less than 500 per sq km, can even be a mode of demographic balance. Moreover, around 20% of Bangladesh is expected to submerged by climate change within the next two decades. Where will its people go?

Detention camps can be a temporary solution. A long-term plan is required. Ways have to be found of accommodating them, perhaps with a work permit without voting rights. After all, a major attraction for the Bihari as well as Bangladeshi migrants to Assam is unskilled work. More importantly, the defective land laws that make encroachment easy have to be changed. Many migrants get pattas (ownership documents) for their encroached land by bribing government officials. One can also ask whether such large scale cross-border migration can be possible without bribing the border guards. It means that corruption has to be tackled. The economy has to be developed in order to provide a livelihood to everyone and that can satisfy the Supreme Court definition of Article 21 on right to life as everyone’s right to a life with dignity. Bloodshed and fear-mongering are not the answer.

Bangladesh need to unlock the unbalanced environment to tackle climate change!

Rajon Md. Shahabuddin

Can you imagine ever?  When we need water we just switch on water pump and get water but that will not be the case in less than a decade. According to the United Nation, 1.8 billion people will face acute water scarcity by 2025.“Green” is a buzz word these days and the Green movement is very much prominent throughout the world. In United nation Climate summit 2014, emphasize were given on how to tackle global climate change.

Let us have a look at why it is so important to Go Green? Going green actually reduce carbon footprint and helping the environment. Green buildings are designed in such a way to reduce overall impact on environment and human health by reducing trash, pollution and degradation of environment. Efficiently using energy, water and other resources is at the core of Green building.

In the evolution of sustainable development, three mutually reinforced pillars have been the key- people, planet and profit. In the light of 2030 SDGs, 3P’s have been upgraded to 5P’s- People, Planet, Prosperity, Peace, and Partnership. All countries and stakeholders are to implement the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, with firm determination of taking necessary steps towards ensuring a steady, resilient, and sustainable development path.

In fact, it was a difficult challenge to bring the world to understand that human activity has a real impact on our environment. For many years, some scientists and leading people denied this fact. It’s true that climate has always changed through the billions of years of our planet’s life: 4000 years ago, the Saudi Kingdom was all green. And now it is a desert!

This is not the point. The point is that human activity has accelerated the pace of the change. Now this fact is admitted by all of us. But it took time to recognize and to address this issue.What we can say is that human activities generate so-called “anthropogenic” greenhouse gases, distinct from the greenhouse gases naturally present in the atmosphere. Those greenhouse gas emissions alter the atmosphere’s composition, causing the increased greenhouse effect that is leading to global warming.

If we notice under the current global emissions trends, the rise in average global temperatures should come to between 3.7°C and 4.8°C by 2100. To limit atmospheric concentrations by 2100 and achieve the goal of keeping global warming below 2°C, global greenhouse gas emissions need to be reduced by 40-70% by 2050 compared to 2010 levels, and to drop to levels close to zero CO2 emissions by 2100.

In this regard entrepreneur’s level are encouraged to invest in renewable energies – for example solar panels for their RMG factories, through the access given to funds with a very low interest, or through a contribution to the expenses by the state. Renewable energy reduces the consumption of electricity from National Grid which makes the environment healthier and sustainable. This is why our priorities should go for sustainable energy. If there’s one thing I hope we can all agree on, it is that clean, affordable energy is the key with which we can unlock a sustainable future.

Here as you know, Bangladesh is the first country of the world in terms of domestic solar solutions. It can be replaced by RMG industry.  Public and private national funds, as well as donor funds are mobilized in order to build solar power plants.

Surely banks have a key role to play, as they are responsible for funding this global move. Banks are also encouraged to move green by giving the priority to dematerialization in their relations with their customers and by funding projects to develop renewable energies at all levels. They have to encourage environmental friendly choices. Bangladesh Banks has already taken good initiatives for green financing.

English poet William Wordsworth rightly mentioned “Nature never did betray the heart that loved her” We have to love our nature if we want to be sustainable in business. Because Climate change and environment are such an important issues we can’t left it for our future generation. So true sustainability should come from heart not from head.

So now the matter is: how to alleviate this problem and tackle the climate change in order to live as part of our environment, rather than against our environment. In fact, we have no other choice, we must GO GREEN.

GM threatens of plant shutdowns and layoffs as car sales fall

Samuel Davidson

The United Auto Workers and General Motors are reportedly collaborating to close one or more of the company’s five remaining car assembly plants and throw thousands more workers onto the unemployment lines as car sales continue to fall.

Overall sales for the company were up, driven by sales of its line of SUVs and pickup trucks. However, passenger car sales continue to fall. In May, overall domestic car sales were down by over 11 percent.

Sales of General Motors’ popular Chevrolet Cruze fell by over 26 percent from 51,265 in the second quarter of 2017 compared to just 37,836 in the second quarter of this year.

The Cruze is manufactured at the company’s Lordstown, Ohio assembly plant, and is one of the plants that could possibly close according to press speculation. In June, the company eliminated its second shift at Lordstown, impacting 1,500 workers. Many of those workers had 20 years service with General Motors. In January, 2017 the company eliminated the third shift, laying off 1,500 workers at the time.

In the months before laying off the second shift at Lordstown, the United Auto Workers entered into an agreement with the company to hire temporary workers from a subsidiary of General Motors, GM Subsystems LLC, at wages starting as low as $9.00 an hour, to fill many jobs at the plant such as maintenance and forklift drivers.

Four other assembly plants could face possible shutdown according to press speculation including passenger car plants located in Kansas City, Kansas and Lake Orion, Detroit-Hamtramck, and Lansing, Michigan. Three out of the five car assembly plants are working just one shift. In all, the five plants are working at just 37 percent of capacity, meaning 1.3 million more cars could be made each year at the plants.

A veteran worker at the Lordstown plant spoke to the World Socialist WebSite Autoworker Newsletter about the threat to close more GM plants. “It will hit this area hard, in particular Youngstown. I am tired of GM bullying us around. I have seen this plant go from 15,000 workers down to 1,200.

Overall, General Motors’ sales were up 4.6 percent for the second quarter, driven by sales of SUVs and pickup trucks. But rather than shift production to its car plants, the company has been able to boast production at its SUV and truck plants with the assistance of the United Auto Workers enforcing overtime and increased and unsafe line speeds. Several of GM’s truck and SUV plants are working three shifts at 105 percent of capacity.

The worker added, “They are raising the line speed and making us work on Saturday all the while people are laid off. Then there was the memorandum of understanding signed by [UAW Vice President] Cindy Estrada bringing in GM Subsystems workers at lower pay.

“There is no more UAW. The contracts should all be null and void. They should pay us back for the cost of living raises they took away.”

General Motors continues to make billions in profits, including getting a massive windfall from the Trump corporate tax cuts. Last year the company made nearly $20 billion. In total the company has made over $142 billion since emerging from bankruptcy.

As part of the company’s bankruptcy reorganization, the United Auto Workers, under the direction of the Obama administration, pushed through massive concessions in wages and health care, and most notably installed a two-tier wage and benefit system in which new hires are only paid a fraction of what traditional workers earn.

With the help of the United Auto Workers, General Motors closed 14 plants and laid off over 20,000 workers. Nearly ten years since emerging from bankruptcy, a very substantial and ever growing percentage of GM workers are now at the lower pay and benefit scale.

While throwing thousands of workers onto the streets and cutting wages and benefits for the workers, the company again plans to give stockholders and executives massive profits. This year alone the company has earmarked over $6 billion for dividends and stock buybacks.

The UAW has been highly rewarded for its services. Since coming out of bankruptcy, the UAW has received hundreds of millions from General Motors in the form of payments for training centers, union-corporate committees and the like. In the case of Fiat Chrysler, not a small part of this money ended up in the pockets of individual UAW officials. According to recent reports, former UAW President Dennis Williams has been named as a party to the corrupt scheme to divert funds from training centers to the UAW. A charity run by UAW vice president Cindy Estrada, who signed the secret agreement with GM to bring in subcontract worker at the Lordstown and Lake Orion plants, is also under federal scrutiny as a possible conduit for stolen funds.

But this is only a small part of the payout that the UAW has received from the auto companies. In addition to the training and joint committee funds, the UAW administers the multi-billion retiree health care benefit trust fund, which owns a considerable share of GM stock.

Once again, the UAW is playing its role by pushing through the current round of plant closures and layoffs. The UAW is seeking to divert the anger of workers against both General Motors and itself by placing the blame on autoworkers in Mexico and promoting chauvinism and nationalism.

In particular, the UAW is pointing to the fact that General Motors already produces some Cruzes in Mexico and announced in June that it plans to build some Blazers there as well.

Appealing to Trump to take action against Mexican autoworkers, UAW Local 1112 president David Green sent a letter to Trump last month.

“You campaigned on the promise to keep Americans working, yet on June 22, 2018, GM announced they would build the new Chevy Blazer in Mexico. Ironically this was also the very last day our second shift, another 1,200 workers, were laid off. The fact that many of our members here in Ohio voted for you, and for you to remain silent on this issue is disturbing.”

He concluded the letter with the advice: “If you sell it here, you need to build it here. This is how we can keep America working.”

Far from protecting jobs and living standards of autoworkers, the push by the Trump administration and supported by the UAW for tariffs and protectionism is aimed at lining workers in the United States against their class brothers in Mexico, Europe and Asia which will ultimately lead towards war.

In fact, autoworkers can only defend their jobs and living standard by uniting with workers internationally in a common struggle against the corporate giants and the governments that serve them. This means a break with the UAW and the building of rank-and-file factory committees to organize an independent fight against plant closures.

Zimbabwe: Violence follows disputed re-election of President Mnangagwa

Chris Marsden

Parliamentary and presidential elections hailed as the beginning of a new era for Zimbabwe have instead plunged the country into bitter factional struggle.

The declaration that President Emmerson Mnangagwa of the ruling ZANU-PF has been re-elected with a 50.8 percent majority has been rejected by his main opponent, Nelson Chamisa of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC)-led Alliance.

Turnout of registered voters was 84.8 percent, indicating the massive interest in securing political change after the end of Robert Mugabe’s 37 years as Zimbabwe’s leader but also the deep divisions between supporters of ZANU-PF and the MDC-Alliance.

Mnangawa’s majority narrowly tops the 50 percent needed to avoid a run-off. But Chamisa, who secured 44.3 percent of the vote according to the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC), told a press conference in the capital, Harare, Friday, “We won this election and we are ready to form the next government.”

He called the official results “fraudulent, illegal, illegitimate and characterised by serious credibility gaps” and “a coup against the people’s will.”

Chamisa, a church pastor, added that he would not attend Mnangagwa’s inauguration, was seeking support from South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa, and may be filing a court challenge. The press conference was invaded and delayed by riot police.

ZANU-PF had earlier convincingly won the parliamentary elections, taking two-thirds of the 210 contested seats. The ZEC reported ZANU-PF winning 144 seats compared to 61 for the MDC-Alliance.

There is nothing substantial to back up Chamisa’s claim of victory, especially given that ZANU-PF can capitalise on its control of the state and much of the media and is still able to mobilise its rural Shona majority base. But the official results nevertheless show the MDC winning the majority vote in many urban areas, including Harare. It also won the oppressed minority Ndebele tribal areas in Matebeleland North, including the city of Bulaweyo, and in the desperately poor Manicaland province to the east, where the minority Manyika ethnic group resides.

On Wednesday, before the delayed presidential result announcement, three people were killed by riot police and army personnel during a pro-MDC protest in Harare that turned violent, with three more dying in hospital. A curfew was mounted, with reports of the army instructing people to leave the town centre.

A raid on the MDC’s headquarters was staged the next day to seize documents seeking to prove Mnangagwa’s allegations that the violence was planned by the opposition parties and that protesters were armed. A search warrant, seen by the Associated Press, names Chamisa and others including former finance minister Tendai Biti in relation to the crimes of “possession of dangerous weapons” and inciting “public violence.”

On Saturday, 24 members of the MDC arrested during the raid on the party’s headquarters appeared in court, accused of fomenting and taking part in violent protests. The 16 men and eight women face charges of smashing windows at Zanu-PF’s offices, setting fire to vehicles and stone-throwing.

Amnesty International said more than 60 people had been “arbitrarily arrested” in a post-election clampdown in MDC strongholds in Harare and its outskirts. The MDC states that hundreds of its activists are in hiding, with many afraid to seek treatment for injuries. In Chitungwiza, the army reportedly sealed off the home of a close relative of Biti.

The potential for further conflict is clear, with both sides seeking the patronage of the imperialist powers, regional allies such as South Africa and the support of China.

Mnangagwa, who came to power in a coup against President Robert Mugabe last November, advances himself as the strongman required to restore the order necessary for resumed investment by the major corporations. He celebrated his victory Friday by stating that Zimbabwe was now “open for business… We want to leapfrog and catch up with other developing countries.”

Chamisa heads a party set up by a coalition of white farming interests and the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) bureaucracy. He took over leadership of the MDC from Morgan Tsvangirai after he died from colorectal cancer in February. The MDC’s history is one of promising to normalise relations with its imperialist sponsors, including during 2009’s National Unity Government with ZANU-PF. It now finds itself competing directly with the post-Mugabe ZANU-PF for the favours of the major powers.

This left the more than 5 million Zimbabweans who registered to take part in the poll a choice between two right-wing bourgeois factions.

It seems unlikely at this point that the MDC-Alliance will have any immediate success in swaying the imperialist powers away from their post-coup decision to back Mnangagwa.

A US statement urged Mnangagwa to show “magnanimity” but also counselled the opposition to show “graciousness in defeat.”

The African National Congress (ANC) government in South Africa has also welcomed Mnangagwa’s victory.

European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini’s office appealed “for calm and restraint on all sides and for protests to be conducted according to the law.”

The UK Minister for Africa, Harriett Baldwin, stated only that “There is much to be done to build confidence in Zimbabwe’s electoral process.”

A significant element in the calculations of the imperialist powers is to avoid buttressing Zimbabwe’s reliance on China, which has a decades-long relationship with Mnangagwa in his role as Mugabe’s enforcer. Beijing signed off on November’s coup when Mnangawa and a military delegation visited China shortly before it was staged. It has called the elections “orderly” and urged respect for the “choice made by the people of Zimbabwe.”

China has built a dominant position in overseas investment in key extraction industries and other areas of the economy that Mnangagwa has promised to defend. The August 3 Guardian noted how, “In recent years Mnangagwa had been seen as more business-friendly and pragmatic than many other senior figures in the ruling Zanu-PF party, attractive features to a Chinese government keen to protect investments ranging from mobile phone networks to hydropower and tobacco.”

That same day, the Economist asked, “Will the West overlook the ruling party’s political gamesmanship?”

Replying in the affirmative, it predicted that the UK and other major powers, “will utter bromides about the need for Zanu-PF and the MDC to come together. They will continue to list the ways in which the election was not fought on a level playing field. But ultimately they cannot stop Mr Mnangagwa. Nor do some countries want to. Britain has backed the president and his allies for almost three years. It is hardly going to stop.”

The question would ultimately be decided by “Whether Mr Mnangagwa and his military allies can in fact restore discipline to the economy, and give foreign investors certainty…”

Both sides in the factional struggle within the bourgeoisie are offering the banks and global corporations a chance to carve up Zimbabwe and its natural resources at the expense of the working class. This confirms the true character of a coup move against Mugabe.

Mnangawa and the military exploited popular hostility to Mugabe’s despotic rule to lend legitimacy to a regime-change operation whose real economic and political agenda can only end in yet deeper attacks on working people and the rural poor. It is necessary to restate the central appeal made by the World Socialist Web Site in the coup’s aftermath:

“The working class must maintain political independence from all representatives of the national bourgeoisie and the imperialist powers—including both factions of ZANU-PF, the rival MDCs, etc.—and the trade union federations that back them. The advanced workers and youth must begin building a Zimbabwean section of the International Committee of the Fourth International to fight for a socialist Zimbabwe and a United Socialist States of Africa, and to forge a unified movement for socialism with workers in the US, Britain and other imperialist states.”

Venezuelan President Maduro charges right-wing opposition backed by Colombia with supposed assassination attempt

Alexander Fangmann

Two explosions occurred at a military parade in Caracas on Saturday as Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro gave a speech commemorating the 81st anniversary of the creation of the Bolivarian National Guard. The explosions, which apparently injured seven soldiers and sent many others scattering for cover, left Maduro and other senior officials unharmed.

Regardless of the exact circumstances of the explosions, it is clear that Maduro and the Venezuelan government are using the incident as a pretext to clamp down on growing protests against the country’s deteriorating economic conditions.

Although the sequence of events is somewhat murky, the explosion evidently caught Maduro, his wife Cilia Flores and other officials by surprise. Video clips show Maduro looking toward the sky as he makes his speech. The feed then switches to a wider shot which shows soldiers scattering, after which the video source was cut off. Reports state that Maduro was then shielded by bodyguards before being quickly whisked away.

According to an article in El Pais, the army has confiscated other footage from the private television company covering the event. Venezuela’s National Union of Press Workers said that seven journalists covering the event were interrogated for hours after the incident, with some having their cameras taken from them.

The official government position, relayed by Jorge Rodriguez, the Venezuelan Communication, Culture and Tourism minister, is that the explosions were produced by drones loaded with explosives. Other reports claim that the explosion resulted from an exploding gas tank at a nearby apartment building, though those have been contradicted by others claiming to be eyewitnesses.

Already by Sunday, in a televised press conference, Maduro claimed that the Venezuelan government has taken some of the “material authors” of the attack into custody, along with evidence. Maduro claimed, “It was an attack to kill me, they tried to assassinate me.”

Maduro blamed the attack on the “ultra-right wing” in Venezuela, Colombia and Miami, and said, “I have no doubt that the name Juan Manuel Santos is behind this attack,” referring to Colombia’s president. He further said that preliminary investigations “indicate that various of those financing it live in the United States, in the state of Florida. I hope that President Donald Trump is ready to fight these terrorist groups.”

The Colombian government issued a denial of any involvement in the affair, saying, “The suggestion that the Colombian president is responsible for this supposed attack against the Venezuela president is absurd and lacking in all foundation,” while US National Security Advisor John Bolton claimed “there was no US involvement.”

On Saturday evening, a group calling itself the National Movement of Soldiers in T-shirts apparently claimed responsibility for the incident, referring to it as “Operation Phoenix,” through a statement passed to and read by Patricia Poleo, a US-based YouTube user with links to the right-wing Venezuelan opposition.

Whether that group had any involvement or not, the Venezuelan government is poised to initiate a further crackdown on political dissent as well as growing protests against Venezuela’s deteriorating economic conditions. Attorney General Tarek William Saab said, “There will be a ruthless punishment.” This threat was echoed by Maduro in his own speech calling for “maximum punishment” and “no forgiveness.”

Indeed, the incident occurs amid a growing upsurge of the class struggle that the right-wing Frente Amplio is struggling to contain. During the last week, health workers at the University Hospital of Caracas, electricity workers, telecommunication workers and teachers have continued strikes, while more and more neighborhoods have been putting up roadblocks and protesting at the state utility companies over the lack of running water. On August 2, Maduro met with representatives of peasants who had marched hundreds of miles to Caracas to air grievances regarding corruption of the ruling PSUV (United Socialist Party of Venezuela) and to “reverses” in land reform in the countryside.

The representatives of Frente Amplio’s right-wing parties could be seen addressing some of these crowds. For instance, Carlos Julio Rojas and other operatives of the right-wing Vente Venezuela of the US-funded politician María Corina Machado were calling this morning on protesters outside of the water company Hidrocapital in Caracas to “leave” and wait for future protests, appealing for “civic unity,” to which no one applauded.

For almost two weeks they have called for new committees and consultations “with all sectors” about organizing a mass strike. The desperation was clear in a press conference Thursday by the regional Frente Amplio in Zulia, which described the situation as “unsustainable.” In announcing their preparations for a strike, their spokesperson said: “Everyday, the Conflict Laboratory reports one more strike, one more walkout, people have had it... Venezuela is a country in emergency. It’s sinking.”

According to the Venezuelan Observatory of Social Conflict, there were 9,787 protests in 2017. While the protests organized by Venezuela’s bourgeois political right have largely dissipated, 2018 numbers are set to exceed that amount. There have been over 5,300 so far this year. Of these, 80 percent are estimated to involve demands of the working class to social rights such as food, water and a living wage.

In the face of this increasing unrest and deterioration in the economy, the Maduro government has placed its confidence in the Venezuelan military to handle the situation. In May, it allocated a 2,400 percent pay increase to the armed forces, in contrast to the 103 percent granted to civilian workers.