US Republicans push ahead with attacks on voting rights

Jacob Crosse

In the latest assault on the democratic rights of millions of people, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a Trump acolyte, signed Senate Bill 90 into law Thursday after it passed the Republican-dominated Florida legislature earlier this week. The anti-democratic measure is one of hundreds that have been advanced by Republican-led state legislatures across the country following former President Donald Trump’s attempted coup on January 6.

Ron Desantis speaking at the 2018 Student Action Summit hosted by Turning Point USA at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Florida [Credit: Gage Skidmore]

While the specifics in each bill vary, the overall purpose of the bills is to eviscerate the democratic and voting rights of the working class while bolstering Trump’s baseless claim that the 2020 election was “stolen.” This has not prevented a majority of the Republican Party in both Washington D.C. and state governments—with the exception of arch-conservative Liz Cheney—from embracing and propagating Trump’s “Big Lie” of a stolen election.

Testifying to the fascistic character of the bill and the Republican Party as a whole, DeSantis staged a “live-signing” of the bill exclusively on Fox News, in an attempt to enhance his standing with its far-right audience, which includes among its incessant viewers, Trump himself. According to a CNN report, local media outlets were told they were not allowed to go inside to witness the signing of the bill because it was a Fox News “exclusive.”

The Florida bill adds several unnecessary burdens onto the voting process, such as limiting the use of drop boxes and barring volunteers from returning completed ballots on behalf of voters, while also requiring voters who wish to vote by mail to re-register for every election cycle.

According to data from Target Smart, over 9 million Floridians returned an early in-person or mail-in ballot in the 2020 election, up 41 percent from 2016. In Florida, 45 percent of requested mail-in ballots went to Democrats, while 31 percent went to Republicans. However, the number of returned ballots by percentage was nearly identical, with 39 percent of Democrats and 38 percent of Republicans returning their ballots.

DeSantis himself acknowledged in a Fox News interview last week that Florida’s election was “fair and transparent” (because Trump won the state). Despite this, in a statement announcing the signing of the SB 90, the governor claimed the bill would allow Florida to “remain a leader in ballot integrity.” Wilton Simpson, president of the Florida Senate, in the same statement said the new restrictive measures would prevent a “backslide” and that “Florida was a model for the nation in November.”

Unable to make a broader appeal to the working class in defense of democratic rights, the Democratic Party has attacked the measure and similar ones in Texas and Georgia in purely racialist terms, while appealing to major corporations and the increasingly right-wing courts for redress. After DeSantis signed the bill, a coalition of Democratic Party-aligned organizations filed lawsuits challenging the anti-democratic provisions within the bill.

Democratic State Senator Shervin Jones called the bill “Jim Crow 2.0,” while at the same time admitting it will “make it harder for voters from low-income rural white communities, to the elderly, to communities of color to have their voices heard.”

Patricia Brigham, president of the League of Women Voters of Florida, said the legislation “has a deliberate and disproportionate impact on elderly voters, voters with disabilities, students and communities of color. It’s a despicable attempt by a one party-ruled legislature to choose who can vote in our state and who cannot. It’s undemocratic, unconstitutional, and un-American.”

The League joined the Black Voters Matter Fund, the Florida Alliance for Retired Americans and others in a joint lawsuit on Thursday against the bill. A separate federal lawsuit was filed in Tallahassee by the NAACP and Common Cause, which claimed that the law targets people who are black, Latino or disabled.

Mirroring Florida, in an early Friday morning vote after only nine hours of debate, the Republican-controlled Texas state House passed a less restrictive version of Senate Bill 7, which included several amendments from Democratic legislators. Because the House version differs significantly from the more restrictive version that had previously been passed in the Texas Senate, it will go to a conference committee of the two houses, whose members, behind closed doors, could strip out the amendments and reintroduce the more restrictive elements of the bill.

These restrictive measures are in direct response to the mass participation of voters in populous urban Democratic counties like Harris County, home of Houston. Restrictions included in the previously passed Senate bill include limiting the hours of early voting, banning drive-thru voting, reducing the number of polling places and restricting election officials from mailing out ballots to voters who did not previously request them.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott hailed the passage of the bill on Friday, writing on Twitter that limiting the access and ability to vote for millions of people would ensure “trust & confidence in the outcome of our elections.” Abbott’s alleged zeal for ensuring “trust & confidence” in elections is rife with hypocrisy, seeing as how Texas was the first state to back Trump’s spurious claims of fraud and led the attempt to overturn the election by supporting Trump’s lawsuit which would have suppressed the votes of nearly 20 million people.

Last December prior to the official meeting of the members of the Electoral College, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn the electoral results of four “battleground” states that Biden had won over Trump: Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Paxton’s lawsuit was supported by Trump and 18 other Republican-led state governments. The suit alleged that the shift to mail-in balloting across the country in light of the unchecked spread of the coronavirus, which has killed over 900,000 in the US, was unconstitutional.

While the Supreme Court rejected the suit, more than half of the Republican members of Congress and nearly every Republican state government embraced the lie that Biden was elected through fraud and that Trump was the legitimate president.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, as of March 24, 361 bills with restrictive provisions have been introduced by Republican legislators in 47 states. This confirms that even though Trump lost the 2020 election, the growth of the far right within the Republican Party, and the turn to dictatorial forms of rule by significant sections of the ruling class has not lessened, and in fact, is only accelerating.

In the eyes of the Republican Party, it is not simply that the election was “stolen,” but that too many people participated, including immigrants, college students and minorities. This was acknowledged by deputy White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Friday who commented on the Florida bill saying, “The only reason to change the rules right now is if you don’t like who voted.”

Despite representatives from the White House openly acknowledging the blatantly undemocratic character of the proposed legislation, Biden and the rest of the Democratic Party continue to appeal to Republicans to work with them to pass a bipartisan class agenda of “herd immunity” at home and imperialist war abroad.

In Florida, Democratic Representative and former Republican Governor Charlie Crist, who announced this week he would be running against DeSantis for governor, stated that the bill highlighted the differences between the two. He noted that DeSantis “locks out the public and caters to Fox News,” in contrast to Crist, who claimed that as governor he “invited everyone in—Democrats, Republicans and Independents.”

Biden’s continued calls to protect and sustain the Republican Party only demonstrates that the fight for democratic rights cannot be left in the hands of the feckless Democrats, who have done everything in their power to suppress and cover for their “Republican colleagues” even as they seek to eliminate the most basic democratic rights—including the right to vote of Democratic voters.

The Democratic Party’s real attitude toward democratic rights was most clearly shown in its actions against left-wing opponents throughout the 2020 election campaign, as Democratic-controlled state governments did everything in their power to block the efforts of the Socialist Equality Party to place its candidates on the ballot, depriving the voters of a socialist candidate. The same treatment was handed out to Green candidates in several states.

Fed report warns of “vulnerabilities” in US financial system

Nick Beams

The semi-annual Financial Stability Report, issued by the US Federal Reserve on Thursday, has warned that the rising debt of hedge funds, much of which is not recorded by regulatory authorities, poses growing risks for the stability of the financial system.

The Federal Reserve in Washington [Credit: AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File]

Key aspects of the report were highlighted in an introductory statement by Fed governor Lael Brainard, who chairs the Fed’s committee on financial stability. She noted that “vulnerabilities associated with elevated risk appetite are rising.”

The report said markets for short-term funding were now functioning normally, following the collapse of March 2020 and the turbulence of late February this year. However, “structural vulnerabilities at some nonbank financial institutions (NBFIs) could amplify shocks to the financial system in times of stress.”

In her statement, Brainard said valuations across a range of assets had continued to rise from their elevated levels of last year, with equity prices setting new highs. Relative to expected future earnings they were “near the top of their historical distribution.”

The appetite for risk had increased as the “meme stock” episode had demonstrated. This refers to the elevation of the share price earlier this year of the video games retailer GameStop, because of its promotion on Reddit and other social media platforms. This was despite the company’s business model experiencing significant difficulties.

Brainard said corporate bond markets were also seeing “elevated risk appetite” with the difference between the interest rates on lower quality speculative-grade bonds and that of Treasury bonds among the lowest ever seen.

“This combination of stretched valuations with very high levels of corporate indebtedness bear watching because of the potential to amplify the effects of a repricing event,” she said. In other words, a rapid downturn in one area of the market would be rapidly transmitted through the financial system.

Brainard pointed to the failure in March of the family-owned hedge fund Archegos Capital, leveraged by banks to the tune of $50 billion, and the associated losses suffered by those banks. It highlights, she said, “the potential for nonbank financial institutions such as hedge funds and other leveraged investors to generate large losses in the financial system.”

The Archegos event illustrated “the limited visibility into hedge fund exposures and serves as a reminder that available measures of hedge fund leverage may not be capturing important risks.”

Reading between the lines, the meaning of this statement is that the Fed is concerned that there are more Archegos Capitals out there, but it has no real idea of where they are or the level of bank exposure to them.

Brainard noted that the “potential for material distress at hedge funds to affect broader financial conditions underscores the importance of more granular, high-frequency disclosures.”

The report pointed to numbers of areas of potential instability and how it could be transmitted.

“Bank lending to NBFIs represents a potential channel for transmission of stress from one part of the financial system to another. Committed amounts of credit from large banks to NBFIs, which consist mostly of revolving credit lines and include undrawn amounts, increased in the latter part of last year and reached a record $1.6 trillion by year-end.”

Under the heading “Funding Risk,” the report said that in 2020 the amount of liabilities “potentially vulnerable to runs, including those of nonbanks, is estimated to have increased by 13.6 percent to $17.7 trillion,” an amount equivalent to about 85 percent of GDP.

It said “structural vulnerabilities” remain at NBFIs, including at money mutual funds and “regulatory agencies are exploring options for reforms that will address those vulnerabilities.”

The admission that nothing is in place at present underscores one of the key features of the financial system. Every time the Fed or other regulatory bodies attempt to put a check on, or even exercise oversight over, some of the more speculative operations, market operators devise new ways to get around them.

In setting out the near-term risks to the financial system, the report said that if the pandemic persisted longer than anticipated, especially in the event that new variants of the virus emerged, then it could derail the recovery in the US economy.

“If those developments occurred, a number of vulnerabilities… could interact with the negative shock to the economy and pose additional risk to the US financial system.”

While leverage was low at banks and broker dealers, “the leverage of some NBFIs, such as life insurance companies and some hedge funds is high, exposing them to sharp drops in assets prices and funding risks.”

It noted that, because European banks play an important role in the global financial system and have “notable financial and economic linkages” with the US, financial stress in Europe resulting from a continuation of the pandemic could also have a negative effect.

Likewise, if emerging market economies face a rise in interest rates not accompanied by an improvement in the global economic outlook, this could impact on US financial firms that have strong links with these countries and their companies.

Commenting on the Fed report, George Selgin, a senior fellow at the free-market Cato Institute, pointed to some of the inherent conflicts arising from the Fed’s policies as it continues to pump money into the financial system.

“The real story here is the tension—if not the glaring contradiction—of the Fed’s pursuit of quantitative easing (QE), the aim of which is to lower long-term rates and encourage reach for yield, and their concern that people are indeed reaching for yield,” he told Bloomberg.

The tension arises from the fact that while the stated intention of the ultra-low interest rate regime is to promote greater risk-taking through investment in the real economy—the financing of productive activity, real investment in plant, equipment and technology—the vast bulk of the money is being used to fund speculation in increasingly risky financial assets.

Selgin called for the Fed to “taper its QE activities to counter this risk-taking as the recovery continues.”

However, the financial system has become so dependent on the continued inflow of essentially free money that any move in this direction could ignite a major crisis.

Fiji government scrambles to contain COVID-19 outbreak

John Braddock

The government of the Pacific island nation of Fiji this week imposed a three-day lockdown in response to a sudden outbreak of COVID-19 cases, linked to the B16-17 variant from India. The move was announced only 30 minutes before it was enforced.

While limited and inadequate, the measure was the strictest since COVID-19 hit the country in March last year. The main island of Viti Levu and other parts of the country went into lockdown, with people ordered indoors from May 1 to May 3. No businesses were allowed to operate for a 56-hour period and contact tracing was carried out around the capital Suva and neighbouring towns. Authorities banned inter-island travel and Fiji Airways suspended all international and domestic passenger flights.

[Credit: FBC News Fiji @FBC_News, Twitter]

The three-day lockdown came after the Health Ministry declared the total number of active cases had risen sharply with 29 transmitted locally. The numbers are continuing to escalate. As of May 6, Fiji has had 125 cases of COVID-19, 50 active cases, and three deaths since its first case in March last year. Testing, however, is low. Just 55,000 tests have been conducted nationwide since testing began in 2020.

Two doctors at Lautoka Hospital are among the newest cases. On Wednesday the hospital was cordoned off and closed after a 53-year-old surgical patent was found to be a “late stage” carrier of the virus and died. More than 400 patients, doctors, nurses, and other staff have been sequestered and effectively quarantined until it is determined who else may have had contact with the patient.

Health Secretary James Fong warned that events in India showed the threat posed by the strain could not be underestimated. “We cannot let that nightmare happen in Fiji,” he said in a televised address. “We still have time to stop it happening but a single misstep will bring about the same COVID tsunami that our friends in India, Brazil, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States are enduring.”

The extremely infectious Indian strain has quickly spread. The cluster emerged after a soldier contracted the virus at a quarantine facility and transmitted it to his wife, who then exposed up to 500 people at a funeral. Fong said soldiers who had returned from overseas deployments had broken quarantine rules by mixing with each other when they should have been in isolation.

In another case, a returning Fiji citizen had tested negative but was recalled to quarantine following fears he may have contracted it from the soldiers. In the meantime, he had travelled extensively through Suva.

In an unrelated case, a 52-year-old woman from Nausori who tested positive may have exposed 887 garment factory workers to the virus. Contact tracing focused on two factories, Lyndhurst where the woman worked, and the Mark One Apparel factory. Workers at the two facilities share the same company transportation.

In yet another case, specimens have been sent to Melbourne to determine the origin of a cluster in the Ra province, which has not been linked to the B16-17 cluster.

Authorities have warned that the country’s vaccination program will depend entirely on the availability of vaccines. Just 20,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine arrived in the country last week, for a population of 903,000. The initial rollout is targeting people with disabilities and co-morbidities such as diabetes, hypertension, heart conditions, asthma, HIV, cancer, as well as essential workers.

The emergence of the Indian variant in the southwest Pacific further demonstrates how vulnerable the world remains to the pandemic, as new infectious strains ravage entire countries, and spread across even the most isolated and impoverished parts of the globe.

The Fiji outbreak follows that in nearby Papua New Guinea (PNG), where caseloads started surging exponentially two months ago. COVID-19 is now rife in the PNG capital, Port Moresby, and has spread to every province in the country. The health system has been close to complete breakdown since March. With over 11,000 cases and 115 deaths, the situation remains dire.

For most of the past year, the scattered Pacific island states had, to a greater or lesser extent, walled themselves off from the outside world. With strict border controls many, such as Samoa, the Cook Islands and others, remained either COVID-19 free or sustained relatively low numbers. Fiji was one of the more successful in initially containing community transmission.

A notable exception was the US territory of Guam, the site of a major American military base, which is one of the worst hit parts of the US and the Pacific. Guam’s total confirmed cases is around 7,000, with 113 deaths, for a population of around 165,000. Also hard hit was French Polynesia. Since the resumption of quarantine-free travel to Tahiti last July in a bid to open the beleaguered tourism industry, 18,000 people have caught the virus and 141 died.

The latest outbreaks highlight the dangers of resuming international travel. Australia and New Zealand have established a “travel bubble” to allow quarantine free travel between the two countries, even as recent cases in Brisbane and Perth prompted temporary shutdowns of both cities. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has announced a similar quarantine free travel arrangement with the Cook Islands beginning on May 17.

The Fiji government of Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama has been agitating since last year for Pacific tourism to be reopened. In 2020 more than 70 yachts used a special provision allowing “VIP tourists” to enter Fiji as part of plans to kick start tourism.

Tourism contributes nearly 40 percent of Fiji’s gross domestic product—about $FJ2 billion ($US980 million)—and directly or indirectly employs over 150,000 people. In 2019, Fiji had more tourists coming into the country (894,000) than residents (roughly 880,000). The bulk were from Australia and New Zealand which like many countries have now banned international travel. Tens of thousands of workers in the industry lost their jobs last year.

In March, the Bainimarama government said it had proven Fiji was a safe destination for travelers, with no community cases for more than 320 days. Fiji urged Australia and New Zealand to join its so-called “Bula Bubble” scheme. The New Zealand Fiji Business Council also declared a quarantine-free travel bubble between the countries was “long overdue.” All arrivals into Fiji have now been banned since April 22.

New study doubles global COVID-19 death toll

Bryan Dyne

The number of global COVID-19 deaths is twice as high as officially reported—6.93 million globally, 905,000 in the United States alone—according to a new study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME).

These new figures were reported Thursday in an analysis of “excess mortality” by the IHME. Importantly, the study includes only under-reported deaths from COVID-19, and excludes deaths from other causes related to the pandemic—including delayed medical care and “deaths of despair” such as suicides or overdoses, related to the social crisis triggered by the pandemic.

A family member mourns next to the bodies of COVID-19 victims at a crematorium near Pashupatinath temple in Kathmandu, Nepal, Friday, May 7, 2021 [Credit: AP Photo/Niranjan Shrestha]

The research presents a disastrous picture of the toll of the pandemic and is an indictment of the capitalist order that has allowed death on this scale to occur. If, in the words of the British medical journal BMJ, nearly 3.3 million deaths are “social murder,” what does the doubling of this death toll signify?

By any measure, this is the largest public health disaster ever in the United States. 905,000 deaths are greater than all the combat and non-combat deaths in the American Civil War, the nation’s bloodiest conflict. 905,000 deaths represent one in every 367 men, women, and children in the US. 905,000 deaths are more than double the combined combat casualties of all US wars fought since the Spanish-American War in 1898, including World War I, World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War.

Almost equally astounding is that the new estimates have gone essentially unreported in the media. The IHME has been used as the semi-official coronavirus case and death count prediction team for more than a year, referred to multiple times by the New York Times, Washington Post, and numerous others.

But no matter the efforts by the media to bury this report, such a colossal loss of life has the most far-reaching implications. It is a brutal indictment of the American ruling elite and the capitalist governments of the entire world.

Such mass death was not an accident, but the product of deliberate policy. The world’s ruling elite was well aware of the threat posed by the virus, but refused to raise the alarm. While Trump sought to “play down” the virus, despite being aware that “[t]his is deadly stuff,” congress and the media received numerous briefings and interviews about the scale of the looming disaster.

Yet no alarms were raised either by the White House or the media until March. Instead, plans were developed to protect the world’s markets, not human lives. In the United States and Europe, trillions of dollars and euros were pumped into financial markets, while virtually nothing was being devoted towards minimizing the impact of the pandemic, which at that point had already claimed tens of thousands of lives.

Instead of suppressing the pandemic, the ruling classes promoted the policy of “herd immunity”–the claim it would be better for society to just let the disease spread uncontrolled.

This policy was voiced publicly in Britain on March 14, when the government’s chief scientific advisor Sir Patrick Vallance stood next to Prime Minister Boris Johnson and declared that it “isn’t desirable” to “stop everyone getting” the coronavirus. This policy was made even more explicit over the summer, when Trump administration advisor Paul Elias Alexander said on July 4 that, “Infants, kids, teens, young people, young adults, middle aged with no conditions etc. have zero to little risk… so we use them to develop herd… we want them infected.”

The policy of herd immunity was further developed specifically in relationship to children in Sweden by state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell, who in an email also on March 14 stated that, “One point might speak for keeping schools open in order to reach herd immunity more quickly.”

Once the various bailouts were secured, there was a definite shift in the tone of world governments to immediately end lockdowns, particularly those of March and April 2020 that were triggered by numerous wildcat strikes against unsafe working conditions. Chief among the reopening calls were from the Trump administration, asserting that “the cure can’t be worse than the disease.”

Outcries from workers and medical experts against this homicidal policy were met with contempt. Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, declared on April 8, “It’s raining. We’re going to get wet. And some are going to drown in the rain.” German parliament president Wolfgang Schäuble said similarly on April 26, “But when I hear that everything must take second place to the protection of life, then I must say: that is not right in such an absolute sense.”

This outlook was epitomized by the recently reported outburst by Boris Johnson, which occurred on October 30 when he demanded, “No more f***ing lockdowns, let the bodies pile high in their thousands!”

More than a year later, the human tragedy caused by the “malign neglect” of the world’s governments toward the working class is clear in a figure that is worth repeating: an estimated 6.93 million men, women and children dead in little more than year to a deadly but preventable disease.

Now, under Joe Biden, schools are reopening across the country, threatening a major resurgence of the disease nationally. Biden himself declared on January 22, 2021, that, “There’s nothing we can do to change the trajectory of the pandemic in the next several months,” categorically ruling out lockdowns while sending students, teachers and staff back into disease-infested buildings. The result was a predictable rise in cases in Michigan, Florida, Pennsylvania, Illinois and elsewhere.

Now, mask mandates and social distancing measures are being wholly abandoned throughout the United States.

The dangers of such an outlook cannot be understated. Already, the pandemic has entered a new stage, of rampaging through the equatorial regions and global south. The disaster in India is the worst of numerous emerging surges of the pandemic, where the IHME estimates more than 654,000 dead, compared to the official count of 238,000, and predicts a further 1 million dead by September.

In a nationally televised address delivered on April 21, 2021, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi made clear that future lockdowns to prevent such a colossal scale of death are out of the question. He declared, “In today’s situation, we have to save the country from lockdown.” In other words, the economic interests of the financial oligarchy must be “saved” no matter how many lives are lost.

Such callous disregard for human life does not merely threaten every worker in India, it threatens the working class the world over. As has been shown by the emergence of new variants in the past six months, the coronavirus is extremely capable of mutating into new and more infectious forms, as demonstrated by the variants first detected in Brazil, Britain and India, which are suspected to be the drivers of the recent surges in cases and deaths in the respective countries.

Moreover, even if the virus is stopped in the United States, for example, the variants spreading in India or Brazil or elsewhere could absolutely wrap around and reinfect the US, including with mutations that allow the virus to evade immunity. By its very nature, a pandemic is a global phenomenon and can only be resolved with a genuinely international response.

Such a response, however, will not come from the existing ruling classes. Trump, Johnson, Bolsnaro, Macron, Modi, Biden and their ilk are all responsible for “social murder” on a scale not seen since the world wars and they will not change course. It will only be the working class itself, mobilized in a political struggle against the capitalist profit motive which all these figures defend, that will hold these criminals to account for the mass death and suffering they have inflicted on the world’s population.

International Women’s Forum (IWF) Fellows Program 2021

Application Deadline: 1st June 2021

About the Award: The program convenes approximately 35 Fellows from around the world for a total of 20 days,
comprised of three separate sessions. It is executed in partnership with INSEAD and Harvard Business School. The Fellows Program offers creative, multidisciplinary training aimed at developing leadership and strategic management capabilities.

Each year, IWF invests in making women stronger, smarter and more influential through its Fellows Program, a year-long, intensive leadership development experience. The Fellows Program was launched in 1994 with seed-funding from the U.S. Labor Department as a direct result of the Glass Ceiling Commission and annually convenes approximately 35 Fellows from around the world for a total of 20 days. Featuring academic partnerships with Harvard Business School and INSEAD, the program offers customized leadership training for high-achieving women leaders on their path to the C-suite. The approach is holistic and focused on the participant’s personal and professional development, career path, and trajectory, while embracing the value of an outside perspective.

Type: Fellowship

Eligibility: Each year, IWF selects a geographically, culturally, ethnically and professionally diverse group
of women. IWF seeks candidates that demonstrate the following:

• Considered change agents within their organization and community
• Possess the ambition to push to the highest levels of their career and the desire to lift as they rise with regard to legacy and mentoring
• Substantive professional/work experience and significant direct accomplishments
• Strength of character, motivation and commitment to goals
• Superior intellectual ability, as evidenced by academic history and distinctions, and recommendations
• Have the capacity to both contribute to and gain from the Fellows Program
• Intention to participate fully in all activities and training components associated with the Fellows Program, as well as a commitment to the Legacy Project

Eligible Countries: International

To be Taken at (Country): USA, France

Number of Awards: 35

Tuition: $30,000 USD

Value of Award: In addition to leadership training, Fellows are matched with an IWF member who serves as a
mentor during the program year. Through the mentoring experience, participants gather personal insights and advice from women at the top of their field. Fellows also take part in IWF’s annual World Leadership Conference, which brings together 850+ women executives from more than 40 nations

Duration of Award: Below is the planned module schedule:

• September 29-October 1, 2021: 2021-2022 Fellows Program Launch in Washington, DC.
• November 3-5, 2021: IWF Virtual World Leadership Conference.
• February 28 – March 3, 2022: INSEAD Executive Education Module in Fontainebleau, France.
• June 6-11, 2022: Harvard Business School Executive Education Module in Cambridge, MA.

How to Apply: Apply today

• It is important to go through all application requirements in the Award Webpage (see Link below) before applying.

Visit Award Webpage for Details

AGNES-BAYER Science Foundation Research Grant 2021

Application Deadline: 30th June, 2021 at 00.00 GMT. 

Type: Grant

Eligibility: The Grant is for Junior Researchers (PhD students) and aims to strengthen the scientific capacity of young scholars in Africa.

Eligible Countries: sub-Saharan African countries

Number of Awards: Not specified

Value of Award: Euros 7000

How to Apply: For more details please download the application documents and conditions

• Call for application
• Template of CV

• It is important to go through all application requirements in the Award Webpage (see Link below) before applying.

Visit Award Webpage for Details

Ten Things to Understand about Latin America

Laura Wells

The United States — the land and people — will be a lot better off when the idea of US supremacy is dropped. Toward that end, and toward the goal of a better world, here are ten things for the US to understand about Latin America.

1. Threat of a good example. That is the main reason countries get on the “bad lists” of the US, not oil since not all maligned countries even have oil. The reason is that the countries do not “have the interest of the United States at heart” as CIA director George Tenet said during the US-backed 2002 coup against Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez. The bad lists include Trump’s “Troika of Tyranny” — Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela — and the 30-plus countries around the globe suffering from the deadly effects of US sanctions. The US justifies sanctions by saying they are based on matters people care about deeply, such as human rights abuses and trafficking. Meanwhile, the United Nations charter clearly prohibits “unilateral coercive measures” taken by one country against another.

2. Sovereignty YES, Sanctions NO. Latin American countries are sovereign nations. They are not a “backyard” requiring US protection or interference. They have many leaders, in government and not in government, who are very intelligent with in-depth knowledge of history. They are not, as the US government and media call them, dictators, regimes, strong-men, or tyrants. To repeat, they are sovereign nations capable of choosing their own leaders. Certainly anyone familiar with US elections can believe it is possible to find better, more easily verified electoral systems outside the US, for example, Venezuela’s system, which is computerized and has paper ballots that allow for audits.

3. Constitutions get updated. Most Latin American countries are among the more than 90 countries in the world with proportional representation. PR is the key to having multiple parties, which allow voters to actually affect their governments because they can vote for the candidates most aligned with their values, not just against the worst candidates. It is said that it’s virtually impossible to eliminate from the US constitution even the based-on-slavery Electoral College, which installed two recent presidents who lost the popular vote, both Bush and Trump.

4. Term limits are not a solution. Term limits are not the great electoral reform many people believe them to be. Nicaragua and some other “bad list” Latin American governments have dispensed with them. When Venezuela held a vote to remove term limits, there were loud cries that “Hugo Chavez wants to be dictator for life!” but significantly, those accusers did not point out that Venezuela joined other nations without term limits, like the U.K., Germany, Italy, Japan, and most Scandinavian nations. When facing term limits, elected officials tend to be less focused on their current duties and more focused on positioning themselves and their campaign contributors for their next move. Terms limits came in after FDR and stopped voters from being able to re-elect presidents they still wanted. More effective electoral reforms are proportional representation, free and fair media coverage, and open debates.

5. Nicaragua’s healthcare system is free. A major hospital has a huge sign telling people, “All services are free. If anyone tries to present you with a bill, report it.” That certainly constitutes a “threat of a good example.” When a poor country like Nicaragua can provide healthcare to its residents, then there is no excuse for the US, the wealthiest nation the planet has ever known, to have the worst healthcare system — in terms of cost, access, and results — of the 30 wealthy, industrialized (OECD) countries. People question statistics with good reason, but it is clear Nicaragua, Cuba, and Venezuela have dealt with the COVID pandemic better than the US. The Nicaraguan government had plans in place as early as January 2020 to prevent the spread of COVID, but did not impose quarantines. Most Nicaraguans could not have worked from home on their computers. Quarantines would have been an economic death knell to the majority of the population that work in very small businesses including farms and the informal economy of open air stands selling everything from food to furniture.

6. Food sovereignty is key to Nicaragua’s resilience. Nicaragua produces about 90% of its food, primarily on the small farms of the campesinos. This represents a beneficial change from the mono-cropping agribusiness model that took over so much land in Latin America, and from the abandonment of farming that happened in oil-rich Venezuela in the 1900s. The ability of Nicaraguans to feed themselves locally helps them survive despite the pressures of US sanctions, the COVID pandemic, and yet another 2020 disaster: two hurricanes, category 4 Eta and then category 5 Iota, two weeks apart in November.

7. Devastating hurricanes — climate crisis is real. Wawa Bar is a small community in Nicaragua that was hit by both hurricanes. It is in a semi-autonomous region on the Caribbean Coast that has afro-descendant and indigenous populations. The devastation was heart-breaking — huge trees that had survived decades of hurricanes were uprooted, 700 head of cattle were killed; crops were ruined, and the soil had become too salty from the flooding to replant — but not one person died, everyone was evacuated in time, and all community members are moving back. Food was provided and within weeks the Nicaraguan government restored electricity and sent roofing supplies so everyone again had a roof over their head. Among the first buildings the community restored was the school. The hurricanes had destroyed their textbooks, bilingual in both Spanish and the indigenous Miskito language, but education will continue for their children. How can the US continue illegal sanctions in the face of such devastation? Sanctions, in the process of trying to effect “regime change,” greatly hurt ordinary people. Sovereign nations have the right to choose their own presidents, governments and economic systems.

8. Nicaragua has the fifth highest gender equality in the world. It is not surprising the first four countries are Iceland, Norway, Finland, and Sweden, but how many people would guess Nicaragua to be fifth? The reason is that they have a mandate to have 50/50 in their legislatures, and if, for example, a president or mayor is male, then the vice-president or vice-mayor will be female. Or vice versa.

9. Daniel Ortega is in for the long haul. President of Nicaragua Daniel Ortega is a controversial figure particularly outside of Nicaragua, where media and official stories are not countered by people’s direct experience. Ortega was president in the 1980s when the Sandinista revolution ended the 45-year dictatorship of the Somoza family. The Sandinistas lost the 1990 elections, as the opposition promised peace from contra violence if elected. However, support for the Sandinistas remained strong in the popular neighborhoods and much of the countryside, so in 2006, Daniel Ortega was elected president again with 38% of the popular vote, re-elected in 2011 with 62% of the vote, in 2016 with 72.5% of the vote, and has the same level of popular support leading up to the elections in November 2021. Nicaraguans approve of their healthcare system, literacy programs, free higher education, expanded and improved roads and electricity — and they remember how those gains were reversed during the 1990s when the Sandinistas were out of power and services including water were privatized. The large rural population likes land reform, which enables them to work their own small farms. They have hope for a good life for their families. That is why Nicaraguans re-elect Daniel Ortega, and why Nicaraguans are not joining the caravans migrating to the US the way many other Central Americans are trying to do.

10. Power of a good example. It’s an American tradition to end with hope and this piece follows that tradition. There is hope for improvement in the US and the world, although it’s unclear whether the US will change significantly through a people’s revolution or a capitalist collapse. Even though, unfortunately, US media from FOX to PBS line up with the military-industrial-complex, people can still learn how the US affects the world, through compelling writings by authors such as Smedley D. Butler, Noam Chomsky, John Perkins, and Naomi Klein.

Life can certainly be better for people in the US, with better healthcare, housing, jobs, justice, education and environment, and less student debt, incarcerations, and wasteful military spending. What is needed is to raise expectations, increase pressure on politicians — including Biden/Harris, who have not shown signs that they will reduce Trump’s ramped-up sanctions — and find ways to stop believing the lies.

Castigating Its Competitors: Western Hypocrisy and China

Paul Cochrane

The West’s political and media assault on China increases week by week. Human rights has become the primary means of criticism and justification for sanctioning China over its actions in Hong Kong and treatment of the Uighers.

This info war is creating a divide – those pro-Western ‘values’ arguing China has to be brought to heel, and those that criticise Western hypocrisy for banging on about human rights abuses. If you fall in the latter camp, you are seen as an appeaser, a defender of China – and Russia – devoid of criticial reflection and guilty of ‘whataboutism’.

The situation is making discussion, and argument, difficult, to say the least.

It is not as if China is acting like a cuddly bear and being unfairly criticised (although the Uigher issue has been politicised and claims of genocide seem tenuous), but the media attacks are being rather blinkered, which is what gets the goat of many critics of Western policy and those seeking a more just world.

This was evident in a recent Financial Times opinion piece – Western companies in China succumb to Stockholm syndrome – in which Jamil Anderlini argued that Western executives are so fearful of antagonising Beijing that they’ve adopted a hostage mindset, aka Stockholm syndrome. “If you want to make money in modern China you have to toe the Communist Party’s line, engage in ostentatious displays of fealty and assist in its propaganda efforts,” he wrote.

This is true. Companies do make a Faustian pact to enter the Chinese market – the FT itself self-censors stories related to Taiwan, Xinjiang and Tibet on its Chinese language website. But one can say the same about Western companies and other autocratic regimes and markets, the Middle East and North Africa being a prime example.

The UK is the biggest foreign investor in Egypt, and the USA the largest military donor, yet there are few calls, if any, for imposing sanctions and for such transactions to halt despite the appalling human rights record, the near total erosion of press freedoms (I’ve been stopped for filming the Nile from a hotel balcony for ‘national security’ reasons; Egyptian academics refuse to give interviews as they are so fearful), mass surveillance of Egyptian citizens, and an ever tightening grip of the security state led by a former director of military intelligence, President Abdel Fattah Sisi.

Egypt is too strategically important, too close to the European Union (EU) and Israel, to antagonise, and Sisi knows it (he threatened the EU a few years ago, saying he could unleash Egypt’s then 80 million people – now over 100 million – to sail across the Mediterranean if he didn’t get support).

It is a similar story in the Gulf, with Western companies and governments over looking the usual suspects list of violations for lucrative deals, oil revenues, and massive arms contracts.

Anderlini writes of ‘Hong Kong-based international business executives’, several from ‘democratic societies’, saying they ‘viewed the free press as their greatest enemy’… as ‘pesky journalists dared to report on these developments, thereby convincing head office to stop investing in the city’.

I’ve encountered a similar attitude, this ‘Stockholm syndrome’ of buying into the business-first narrative, in Westerners in the Gulf. In Dubai during the first year of the so-called Arab Spring, in 2011, and following Saudi Arabia’s brutal crackdown on demonstrators at Manama’s Pearl Roundabout (which has been erased from the face of Bahrain’s earth, in case anyone might remember), I was covering an IT expo. Interviewing a British CEO, I asked how the Arab Spring had impacted business. He said Riyadh had done a ‘good job in bringing back stability’, and growth was back to normal. Human rights violations, freedom of expression and so on were clearly not as important as profit.

It is not a surprise, it is a capitalist mindset, but it is indicative of a wider trend. I noticed the same among many Western expats in the Gulf, especially Dubai. After a year or two there, they would take offence at any criticism of the Emirates, and even defended the leadership.

Many times I heard Western businessmen gush about the ‘vision’ of ‘His Highness’ or ‘His Excellency’. They weren’t very different from government employees in the Gulf, Jordan, Egypt or Syria I had interviewed, but the difference is that Westerners could be critical, whereas these government employees of autocratic states could not – they could not leave without repercussions unlike the craven Westerner.

Criticism of the Gulf has increased in recent years, particularly of Saudi Arabia following the brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi and the Yemen war, but business is still ongoing. Arms deals in particular.

And here we see real Stockholm syndrome. One of the biggest cases of corruption in the arms trade was the Al-Yamamah oil-for-arms deal agreed by Saudi Arabia and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, which netted the British arms giant $55 bn in revenues from 1985 to 2006.

In 2006, a media investigation alleged that BAE paid over GBP1 billion to Saudi Arabian facilitator Prince Bandar to secure the Yamamah arms deal. The case went to the UK’s Serious Fraud Office. It was then squashed by then Prime Minister Tony Blair, under pressure from the Saudis, but also the British monarchy, to maintain relations.

Over in South America, the Stockholm syndrome of siding with strong men and political meddling is apparent. The West went along with the coup in Bolivia in 2019, and Canadian mining companies in the 2012 coup in Paraguay. In the lead up to the 2018 Brazilian elections, a Dutch journalist friend living in Sao Paulo told me that the Dutch men he played football with, who worked for the Big Four accountancy firms, all backed Jair Bolsonaro as he was ‘good for business’. The destruction of the Amazon and labour rights be damned.

There are innumerable examples of businesses and governments looking the other way to get into markets. That is capitalism, and that is the real Stockholm syndrome at play here, of people hostage to an imperialist system they believe is better than any alternative, and use mental gymnastics to go along with. This includes racism and Otherness – how else to explain EU companies banned from selling toxic  pesticides containing glyphosates to spray on crops within the EU yet can export to third countries?

What is ultimately missing in the Western media’s critiques of China and elsewhere is objectivity. The raping of the planet, the massive inequality and so on, is being carried out by all sides – China, Russia, the EU, and the US. The human rights and the war of words is used selectively when politically expedient to do so.

Everyone should be held to high standards, to uphold the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Calling out the transgressions of another without looking at yourself is hypocrisy. And the West doesn’t have a leg to stand on, it hasn’t for years. Not after up to 2 million were killed in the War on Terror and the destruction of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen… Not after Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, extraordinary renditions, the mass surveillance revelations of Edward Snowden, or the unjust incarceration of Julian Assange.

The US and EU can resort to sanctions that have more impact due to greater economic strength than China’s or Russia’s to rein in bad behaviour. Yet these are unilateral, or multilateral in the weakest sense, rather than being globally backed. As Jeffrey Sachs noted, the UN should be used to investigate the situation in Xinjiang – let’s have the accusation of genocide from the UN itself, rather than the US and EU.

Yet the West, especially the US, doesn’t want to use an organisation it was central to creating as it is fearful of the majority, the General Assembly, as it can’t whip everyone into line anymore. It is why there is no possible change in the structure of the Security Council – all the world’s top financial powers and arms dealers, Russia and China included – to be more universalist.

If the West practiced what it preached, it would have a higher moral ground to castigate its competitors, especially as the West established the so-called ‘rules based system’ and enacts globally reaching laws. But it doesn’t. Until it does – and that will require revolutionary change – accusations of human rights abuses will ring hollow, and only those with Stockholm syndrome, taken hostage in believing in the sanctity of the neoliberal, imperialist Eurocentric order, will keep believing otherwise.

The Global Spread of Fascism is as Real as the Spread of COVID-19

Walden Bello

The global spread of fascism is real, as real as the spread of COVID-19, and you better believe it.

For purposes of academic analysis, it might be legitimate to distinguish between a “fascist-leaning” movement and a truly fascist one, or a far-right regime and fascist regime, or an authoritarian populist and a fascist. But I am a former member of the Philippine parliament and a street activist. While I have great respect for academics, those of us who operate in the realm of practical politics cannot afford to act as academics.

For me a movement or person must be regarded as fascist when they fuse the following five features: 1) they show a disdain or hatred for democratic principles and procedures; 2) they tolerate or promote violence; 3) they have a heated mass base that supports their anti-democratic thinking and behavior; 4) they scapegoat and support the persecution of certain social groups; and 5) they are led by a charismatic individual who exhibits and normalizes all of the above.

Belittling the Threat

When Mussolini and Hitler were still upstarts fighting to barge into the political mainstream in Italy and Germany, politicians of the left, center, and traditional right dismissed them as oddities who would either disappear or be absorbed into the parliamentary democratic system.

When Donald Trump got elected president of the United States in November 2016, opinion makers — with the exception of a handful, like the progressive filmmaker Michael Moore — were taken by surprise. But most predicted that the office would transform the unpredictable star of reality television into a proper president, one respectful of the customs and traditions of the world’s oldest democracy.

In the Philippines, after warning before our own 2016 elections that Rodrigo Duterte would be “another Marcos,” I wrote two months into Rodrigo Duterte’s presidency that he was a “fascist original.” I was criticized by many opinion-makers, academics, and even progressives for using the “f” word.

How wrong the pundits were in dismissing these personalities as flukes, as they were when it came to others, like Victor Orban in Hungary, Narendra Modi in India, and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil.

Academics are scornful of what they put down as “loaded terms,” but the consequences of underestimating the threat posed to democracy by fascists are not academic. It would be superfluous to be reminded now of Trump’s almost successful effort to prevent a peaceful transfer of power in the United States by systematically spreading the lie that he lost the elections and instigating a violent insurrection.

But for those who have not followed the career of other persons of interest as closely, let me acquaint you with the highlights of their respective reigns: Five years and over 20,000 extra-judicial executions later, the “f” word is one of the milder terms used for Rodrigo Duterte, with many preferring “mass murderer” or “serial killer.” Modi has made the secular and diverse India of Gandhi and Nehru a thing of the past with his Hindu nationalist project. And Orban and his Fidesz Party have almost completed their neutering of democracy in Hungary.

Democracies in Peril

The United States, India, Brazil, and the Philippines were four of the seven biggest democracies in the world just nine years ago. Today, three of them are led by fascists who are determined to complete their transformation into non-liberal democratic systems. The other barely survived a fascist’s determined effort to hold on to power.

With 11 million more Americans voting for Trump in 2020 than in 2016, 70 percent of the Republican Party believing against all evidence that he won the election, white supremacy emerging as the guiding ideology of the Republican Party, and a coalition of angry extremists open to violent means of seizing power emerging as the party’s driving force, who can deny that American democracy is in intensive care, despite the passage of the presidency to Joe Biden?

I would like to stress three things at this juncture.

First, the features of fascism come together in unique ways. If we are waiting for the ideal-type fascist to make his appearance, meaning a spitting image of Adolf, then we will be waiting forever.

Second, the key features of fascism do not become prominent all at once. They may, in fact, be institutionalized only late in the day, such as Mussolini’s eliminationist policy towards Jews, which he only made law in 1938, 16 years after he came to power.

Trump’s true willingness to openly overthrow the cornerstone of democracy — the peaceful succession of power via majority decision of the electorate — was not on full display until he lost the November 2020 elections. Modi and the BJP’s incendiary views of Muslims were dismissed by many as simply rhetorical excesses until the BJP came to power in 2014. Then began the lynching of Muslims falsely accused of being cattle traders, followed by mob attacks on Muslim ghettos, and the legalization of the social subordination of Muslims.

The third point is that the closer fascists come to power, the more some of them feel they must put on a pretense of respecting democratic processes and values to lull the electorate into believing they’re really not as bad as the liberal and progressive press make them out to be and evince horror at being branded as fascists.

Leaders of the Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) in Germany have been trying hard to cultivate the image of responsible politicians who can be trusted to behave in a coalition with the Christian Democratic Party, the country’s main traditional conservative party. Fortunately, just when they think they’ve succeeded, someone from their ranks lets the cat out of the bag — like Christian Lueth, formerly the press spokesperson of AfD, who recently slipped and publicly assured a right wing blogger on the question of migrants, “We can always shoot them later, that’s not an issue. Or gas them, as you wish. It doesn’t matter to me.”

How can one deny that there is a fascist resurgence if one were to do even just a brief survey of today’s Western and Central Europe, which birthed fascism in the first half of the 20th century and has again become its fertile soil in the second decade of the 21st century?

From having no radical right-wing regime in the 2000s, except occasionally and briefly as junior partners in unstable governing coalitions as in Austria, the region now has two solidly in power — one in Hungary, the Orban government, and one in Poland, the Peace and Justice Party. The region has four more countries where a party of the far right is the main opposition party. And it has seven where the far right has become a major presence both in parliament and in the streets.

Seeding the Ground for Political Success

It would be myopic to judge fascism’s resurgence only in terms of its political success. The spread of fascist ideas is much faster than the pace of its electoral successes and, indeed, seeds the ground for its eventual political success. Racism, white supremacy, promotion of violence, conspiracy theories — such as Muslims seducing Hindu girls “in love jihads” to change the demographic balance in India — all spread fast online, become normalized in the echo chambers of the internet, and eventually are legitimized.

Especially alarming for people in the West who think liberal democratic beliefs are too solidly entrenched in their polities to be eroded should be the fact that holocaust denial is now more widespread in Europe than three decades ago, and that in the United States, surveys suggest broad ignorance about the Holocaust among millennial and Gen-Z respondents . These inroads in eroding the collective memory of 20th century fascism’s most diabolical crime must surely count as one of 21st century fascism’s biggest successes.

If you think I am exaggerating, listen to the German authorities, who report that anti-Semitic incidents in Germany in 2020 rose to 2,275, the highest since they started collecting data on politically motivated criminality in 2001. Listen to Charlotte Knobloch, former head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, who tells us, “Anti-Semitism has become socially acceptable again.” Talk to the German domestic intelligence agency BfV, which has made the unprecedented request to the judiciary to place the AfD, Germany’s biggest opposition party, a hotbed of both Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, under scrutiny as a suspected fascist organization.

Why Fascists Target Migrants First

Especially targeted by fascists today are non-white migrants. Now, just because an individual is anti-migrant does not mean he or she is a committed fascist. The problem is anti-migrant attitudes today are bound up with support for repressive moves against them, like drastically limiting asylum to political refugees, deporting large numbers of them as “criminals” or “national security risks,” physically breaking up their communities under the pretext of “assimilation,” and denying them fundamental human rights, like the right of parents and children to stay together, which the Trump administration violated in the case of Central American and Mexican migrants.

The most vulnerable groups, like migrants, are the first targets of fascists, but you can be sure they won’t stop with them. As Pastor Niemoller’s celebrated poem reminds us, you only think you’re safe until they come for you and “there won’t be anyone left to speak” for you.

The beast is struggling against its chains in Germany. It has bared its fangs in Washington, D.C. It has shed blood in the Philippines and India. Let us not repeat the mistake of the democracies of the early 20th century of hesitating to call that beast by its name.