Indian chemical factory explosion and fire kill 18

Yuan Darwin

As many as 18 people have died from a June 7 fire at an SVS Aqua Technologies chemical plant located in the Pirangut industrial zone, some 40 kilometres from Pune, the second largest city in the western Indian state of Maharashtra. The plant produces chlorine dioxide for water purification.

“The fire broke out during plastic packing,” said Devendra Potphode, the chief fire officer for the Pune Metropolitan Region Development Authority Fire Services. “Smoke was so much that female workers could not find an escape. We have recovered 17 bodies—15 women and 2 men.” The fire was punctuated by two powerful explosions. It took several hours for the bodies of the victims, all charred beyond recognition, to be located and sent to Sassoon General Hospital for identification and post-mortems.

The fire at a factory at Ghotawade Phata in Pune on June 7, 2021. (Photo: NDTV)

Under conditions of mounting anger among the plant’s workers and the families of the dead, the local police filed a FIR (First Investigation Report) against the CEO of the company on June 7 and arrested its owner Nikunj Shah the following day on charges of culpable homicide. Preliminary investigations have pointed to criminal negligence on the part of management, with flammable materials stored without following prescribed safety norms.

The Maharashtra state government—which is a three-party coalition led by the fascistic Shiv Sena and that includes the Congress Party and a regional off-shoot from it, the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP)—has announced an ex gratia payment of 500,000 rupees ($US 6,828) to the families of each of the deceased. In announcing the payment, the state’s Deputy Chief Minister, Ajit Pawar of the NCP, said an expert committee has been designated to ascertain the cause of the fire and assign any responsibility for it.

India’s far-right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led central government has announced 200,000 rupees compensation for the kin of each of the deceased and 50,000 rupees for the injured. “Pained by the loss of lives due to a fire at a factory in Pune, Maharashtra. Condolences to the bereaved families,” tweeted Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

These are crocodile tears. The tragic loss of life and terrible injuries among the SVS Aqua Technologies workers are a direct result of the callous indifference of company management and both state and central governments to worker safety.

Modi’s government, in which the Shiv Sena served as a junior partner until November 2019, has relentlessly attacked workers’ rights, including by further weakening India’s notoriously lax environmental and occupational health and safety laws.

The loss of life from the Pune factory fire comes on top of the deaths of thousands on a daily basis due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which, fueled by the highly contagious and more lethal Delta variant, continues to rage across India.

Although the authorities are now reporting less than 100,000 new infections per day, India is still recording nearly 4,000 deaths daily, even according to the official figures, which are almost universally acknowledged to be a vast undercount. Maharashtra reported a seven-day average of over 11,000 new COVID-19 cases per day last week with a 1.7 percent case fatality rate.

Modi’s real concern is that the factory fire disaster will undermine his government’s demand that workers return to their jobs amid a still raging pandemic, risking their lives and those of their loved ones.

Even when India was averaging more than 400,000 new cases daily in the second week of May, the Hindu supremacist BJP government was adamant that it would fulfill Modi’s April 20 vow to “save India from lockdown,” not the pandemic. Citing the recent fall in cases, Modi, for several weeks now, has been urging those state governments that did enact partial lockdown measures, while leaving most industrial production to continue operating at full tilt, to quickly remove them.

The Pune factory explosion and fire is just one of many thousands of examples of major capitalist corporations sacrificing workers’ lives and forcing them to use hazardous materials and dilapidated machinery with little to no safety equipment or training, so as to maintain production and maximize profits.

Last year, as India reopened from the Modi government’s ruinous, ill-prepared COVID-19 lockdown, there was a series of major industrial accidents, due to companies’ failure to carry out proper inspection and maintenance before resuming or accelerating the pace of their operations. These include: a toxic gas leak at an LG Polymers plant in Andhra Pradesh on May 7, 2020, which killed 11 and made more than 1000 sick; a June 3 boiler explosion at Yashashvi Raasayan Private Limited’s Dahej, Gujarat facility that killed at least eight people and injured some 40; and boiler explosions at Neyveli Lignite Corporation’s thermal power plant in Tamil Nadu on May 7, and again on July 1, that killed at least 20 workers.

According to Labour and Employment Ministry data, 3,562 workers died in factory accidents in India between 2014 and 2016, and more than 51,000 were injured during the same period—an average of three deaths and 47 injuries every single day. A 2017 study by the British Safety Council painted a far bleaker picture, reporting that 48,000 workers die of occupational accidents in India every year.

Successive Indian governments have worked to transform the country into a cheap labor haven for giant multinational corporations and international investors, who have systematically neglected workers’ health and safety while reaping billions in profits.

Although central and state government authorities have worked with employers to cover up the number of COVID-19 workplace infections and deaths during India’s devastating second wave of the pandemic, reports suggest that the deaths number in the thousands, if not tens of thousands.

Late last month, major automakers in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, including Ford India, Hyundai, and Renault-Nissan, were forced to idle their operations in the face of protests and strikes by workers outraged over the lack of protection from COVID-19.

US states press reopening amid mounting dangers from COVID variants

Patrick Martin

The COVID-19 pandemic has killed more than 600,000 people in the United States, according to the semi-official tabulation by Johns Hopkins University. But while more people have been killed in the US by coronavirus than in any other country, American state governments are moving pell mell to drop all public health protection against the deadly virus, while the Biden administration points to a July 4 reopening of the entire country.

Medical staff wearing protective equipment attend to patients affected by the COVID-19, at the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) of the Machakos County Level-5 hospital in Machakos, Kenya, Thursday June 17, 2021. Africa, whose 1.3 billion people account for 18% of the global population, has received only 2% of all vaccine doses administered globally. (AP Photo/Brian Inganga).

Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer announced Thursday that all the state’s restrictions on social distancing, indoor gatherings and mask-wearing will be lifted next Tuesday, ending 15 months of state-mandated public health requirements.

All capacity limits will be removed for bars, restaurants, arenas, churches and other indoor venues, and the state’s mask mandate will end 10 days earlier than the previous goal of July 1. Limits on entry into most health care and juvenile facilities will end, remaining only for visits to prison inmates and individuals living in long-term care facilities.

Whitmer crassly acknowledged that her administration was now focused on boosting corporate and business profits, declaring, “Our top priority going forward is utilizing the federal relief funding in a smart, sustainable way as we put Michigan back to work and jump-start our economy.”

State health officials justified the lifting of restrictions based on the level of vaccination and the return of warmer weather as summer approaches. About 50 percent of the adult population of the state is fully vaccinated, while 61 percent has received at least one shot.

Whitmer had said in April that she would lift restrictions only when 70 percent of the population had received at least one shot. That promise has been unceremoniously discarded in a capitulation to right-wing opposition, which reached the point that ultra-right gunmen linked to the Republican Party were arrested last year in the midst of a plot to kidnap and murder the Democratic governor for her actions in enforcing a limited lockdown.

The figures on vaccination mask significant regional disparities. Better-off suburban areas are more vaccinated than impoverished cities like Detroit and Flint and far more heavily vaccinated than the predominately rural northern half of the state, where economic dislocation and the domination of fundamentalist religion and the Republican Party play a pernicious role.

The same disparities exist on a national scale. The vaccination rate in the Northeast and West Coast states is over 70 percent, while in many of the poorer states of the South and Mountain West the vaccination rate is as low as 35 percent. Midwest industrialized states like Michigan fall somewhere in between.

Some inner-city areas in the Northeast have low adult vaccination rates: only 38 percent of adults in the Bronx and 41 percent in Brooklyn, two of the boroughs that comprise New York City, have been fully vaccinated.

From May to June, the vaccination rate has slowed sharply in the United States, down at least two-thirds from the April peak, according to a survey by the Washington Post. In 12 states, mainly in the South and Mountain West, daily vaccination rates have fallen below 15 shots per 10,000 residents. In Alabama last week, it was only four per 10,000.

The Post study found that until about 10 days ago, the rate of vaccination was not highly correlated with the rate of new infections, but this has begun to change. Counties with low vaccination rates (fewer than 20 percent vaccinated) have seen rising rates of infection. Counties with higher vaccination rates (at least 40 percent) have seen rates of infection declining.

Under these conditions, with as many as 100 million US adults not vaccinated, as well as nearly all children, there is a vast pool of vulnerable people unprotected from the new variants of coronavirus now spreading rapidly throughout the world.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) declared this week that the Delta variant, first observed in India, is now a “variant of concern,” making it a serious threat to those who are not vaccinated. The CDC estimated that the Delta variant accounts for as many as 10 percent of all new COVID-19 infections in the US, up from 2.7 percent two weeks ago, and as many as 20 percent in the Western states.

The Delta variant is far more infectious than the Alpha or UK variant, which became dominant worldwide during the winter and was in turn far more infectious than the original, or “wild,” form of coronavirus that emerged in China in December 2019.

In an interview with National Public Radio Thursday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said, “If you are not vaccinated, you are at risk of getting infected with the virus that now spreads more rapidly and gives more serious disease.”

Fauci pointed to the mounting crisis in Britain, even though a higher proportion of the population is vaccinated than in the US, because the Delta variant has swept rapidly through the large remainder of the population that is still unvaccinated. He warned that US states with a much lower vaccination rate than Britain’s could be in great danger.

Similarly, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy told CNN, “I’m worried about those who are unvaccinated,” because the Delta variant “is rapidly increasing here in the United States.”

Epidemiologists not constrained by working for the Biden administration have been sharper in their warnings against complacency. Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, pointed to the danger of regional variations in the US.

“The variants continue to spin out of infections around the world and have gotten more complicated and more dangerous,” he said. “We have a mistaken belief [the pandemic] is over here, but there are over 100 counties where less than 20 percent of the people have one dose of vaccine,” Osterholm continued. He added, “The challenge is what is the next variant going to look like.”

Dr. Peter Hotez, co-director of the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children’s Hospital, expressed concern about the impact of the Delta variant in his region of the country. “I’m really holding my breath about the South and what happens over the summer,” Hotez warned in an interview with CNBC. “Here in the South, particularly in Louisiana, Mississippi, we’re seeing really low vaccination rates. And less than 10 percent of adolescents are vaccinated in many of these southern states, so we have a real vulnerability here.”

Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist and senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists, also warned that states with low vaccination rates could be at risk given the rapid spread of the variant. “If the UK is where we should draw our lessons, I think the US is in for a surge in the lower vaccinated states.”

Military show trial of Suu Kyi begins in Myanmar

Mike Head

Myanmar’s ousted leader Aung San Suu Kyi was placed on trial behind closed doors this week, on the first of a series of bogus charges evidently designed by the military junta to shore up its power and claim international legitimacy for its dictatorship.

The military’s February 1 coup prevented elected legislators from Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) from taking office, following what was officially confirmed as a landslide election victory last year.

Myanmar’s leader Aung San Suu Kyi addresses judges of the International Court of Justice for the second day of three days of hearings in The Hague, Netherlands, Wednesday, Dec. 11, 2019. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong)

The army justified its coup by alleging that Suu Kyi’s government failed to properly investigate accusations of voting irregularities. Since then it has claimed to have found evidence of fraud, but that assertion has been rejected so far by various international agencies.

The trial is being conducted amid ongoing repression, against widespread popular opposition. United Nations deputy spokesman Farhan Haq this week said a UN team on the ground estimated that at least 861 women, children and men had been killed since February 1, with thousands more injured. About 4,800 people are in detention, including politicians, teachers, health care workers, civil servants, journalists and ordinary citizens.

Suu Kyi’s lawyers said she had been charged with illegally importing walkie-talkies for her bodyguards’ use, unlicensed use of the radios, and spreading information that could cause public alarm or unrest. There were also two counts of violating the Natural Disaster Management Law for allegedly breaking pandemic restrictions during the 2020 election campaign.

Two more serious charges against Suu Kyi are being handled separately. One is for breaching the British colonial-era Official Secrets Act, which carries a maximum 14-year prison term, and another for bribery, which has a potential penalty of 15 years’ imprisonment and a fine.

The proceedings are an obvious travesty. Although Suu Kyi faced her first charge just days after the coup, she was not allowed her first face-to-face meeting with her lawyers until May 24, when she made her initial appearance in court for a pre-trial hearing. She had only another brief meeting with them before the trial started on Monday.

Representatives of the ousted government, which was a partnership between the NLD and the military, are agitating for intervention by the imperialist powers. Myanmar’s ambassador to the UN, who has continued to be recognised by that body, despite being fired after the coup, has called for “effective collective measures” against the junta, ahead of expected UN Security Council talks on the crisis.

These appeals underscore the fact that the orientation of the NLD and its alternative “national unity government” in exile, is not to the youth and workers, who have conducted widespread strikes against the junta, but to the same world powers that backed the previous power-sharing arrangement between the NLD and the generals.

To overthrow the junta requires the mobilisation of the millions of workers, as well as the rural masses, to fight, not just for essential democratic rights, but for improved social conditions, which were under assault by the NLD-military regime.

As happened internationally, the COVID-19 pandemic intensified the attacks of government and big business on workers’ jobs and conditions. Suu Kyi’s government provided virtually no cash support to those hardest hit.

According to one survey conducted last October, the proportion of the population living in poverty (making less than $US1.90 a day) had risen from 16 percent to 63 percent over the previous eight months.

With the military takeover, the UN Development Program now expects half of Myanmar’s population of 55 million to fall into poverty over the coming six months, and the World Food Program worries that 3.5 million more people will face hunger.

Essential medicines and treatments are reported to be in extremely short supply, and during 2021, 950,000 infants will not receive the vaccines they need for diseases such as tuberculosis and polio.

Since the pandemic erupted, industries on which working-class households rely, such as tourism, have collapsed, as have remittances by migrant workers overseas, which totaled about $2.4 billion in 2019. The garment industry, which employed over a million people, many of them young women, has been devastated as orders from Europe have dried up.

Within days of the coup, hundreds of thousands of people poured onto the streets, demanding an end to military rule. A civil disobedience movement emerged, with medics leaving government hospitals, and quickly spread across the public sector. On February 22, a general strike shut down businesses, including banks.

The army cracked down ruthlessly. During the last week of February, elite infantry divisions, including units responsible for the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya ethnic minority, began moving into cities, firing on people in residential neighborhoods, breaking down doors and hauling people away

Nevertheless, protests persisted. Young men and women erected makeshift barricades and wielded shields to defend themselves. On March 14 alone, dozens were killed in Yangon’s industrial suburb of Hlaingthaya. On March 27, over 100 died as the army opened fire on crowds across Myanmar.

Amid the resistance, some protesters raised signs calling for “R2P,” referring to “responsibility to protect.” This is a doctrine developed to justify imperialist intervention, supposedly to defend people from crimes against humanity. Hopes of such action have since faded.

Some youth have since joined armed separatist groups, based on ethnic minorities in border areas, but these are outgunned by the military. Numbering perhaps 75,000 fighters in total, they face a military with over 300,000 personnel, equipped combat aircraft, drones and rocket artillery.

The fight for democratic rights, moreover, is bound up with far broader political issues, including overturning the divisive nation-state framework imposed over the region by British colonialism and maintained by the local ruling classes, which are utterly subservient to the global capitalist powers.

In 1937, ten years before Pakistan was split from India along religious lines, the British partitioned Burma from India on the basis of perceived racial differences. After being granted formal independence in 1948, the Burmese elite retained a communalist policy, denying basic rights to those designated as “aliens,” such as the near million Rohingya, driven into neighbouring Bangladesh.

Mired in this Burmese Buddhist nationalism, Suu Kyi and the NLD defended the military’s atrocities committed against the Muslim Rohingya.

The military had freed Suu Kyi in 2010, after 15 previous years of detention, and staged elections under a constitution that ensured its continued grip on the key levers of power. The Obama administration and its allies oversaw this anti-democratic arrangement, seeking to coax the generals away from links to Beijing, as part of US imperialism’s offensive against China.

As this history demonstrates, the working class can place no faith in Suu Kyi to defend democratic rights. No less than the generals, the NLD leaders fear a working-class uprising that could threaten capitalist rule. They represent sections of the capitalist class in Myanmar, whose profit-making interests have been flattened by the military, which controls substantial sections of the economy, including mining operations.

Myanmar is the world’s third-largest source of strategic mined rare earths. This not only provides the regime with revenue but heightens Myanmar’s strategic value for the US and its allies in their conflict with China, which borders Myanmar to the north and east. Any imperialist intervention will seek to pursue that confrontation, not defend the masses of Myanmar.

Sri Lankan government lifts fuel price, deepening social assault on workers and the poor

Saman Gunadasa

The Sri Lankan government announced a sharp increase in the price of fuel on Saturday, imposing further burdens on workers and the poor who already face declining living conditions worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic.

A litre of petrol now costs 157 rupees ($US0.79), a rise of 14.5 percent, with diesel and kerosene hiked to 111 and 77 rupees, increases of 6 and 10 percent respectively. The government is currently discussing lifting the price of gas by 25 percent.

Fishermen protest at Ambalangoda on 15 June over fuel price increases (Source: Facebook)

Bakers, bus owners, three-wheeler operators and distributors of food items have threatened to increase their charges, with bakery goods to go up by 5 rupees and transport by 15 percent. On Tuesday, the privately-owned Prima Company lifted the price of flour by 3.50 rupees a kilo.

Saturday’s increases are on top of already skyrocketing food prices. According to Central Bank data, the official food inflation rate hit almost 10 percent in the month of May.

The price of rice, Sri Lanka’s staple food, has climbed by 27–46 percent over the past twelve months to May, with other essential foods, such as dhal and coconut oil, going up by 36 and 30 percent in the same period.

Sri Lankan workers and the rural masses, already struggling to survive on meagre incomes, are adopting various coping mechanisms including smaller meal sizes, skipping meals, eating less preferred foods or borrowing, pawning, and selling assets.

In 2013, the Colombo Consumer Price index was at 100 points. In 2017 it reached 119, followed by 129.5 in 2019 and 135.4 last year.

In January 2020, the public sector real wage rate index was 95 points, but by December it had fallen to 92. It was 100 in 2016. Similarly, the private sector real wage index dropped from 97 to 89 between January and December last year.

On Tuesday, fishermen who have been heavily-impacted by the latest price increases, held a torch light protest in the southern town of Ambalangoda.

Workers who have spoken to the World Socialist Web Site this week voiced the rising popular anger over rapidly worsening social conditions.

Manickam, a plantation worker from Glenugie Estate in Up-Cot, said: “We’ve already been affected by the high price of goods and so the fuel price increase will make life intolerable. Our current wage is not enough even for food so we’re unable to give our children three meals a day. Workers are earning less than what the government and unions claim, they lie when they say we get 1,000 rupees [less than $5] a day.”

A three-wheeler taxi operator explained that he and his family were struggling to survive on his daily income. “We had to pawn the jewellery to buy food for my family and our two kids. I’ve searched for labouring work but have not been able to find any,” he said.

Iroshan, a fishmonger from Hikkaduwa, a southern coastal town, said: “I don’t know how I’m going to survive with this fuel increase. Fishing boats have stopped going to sea because they cannot cover their costs with the fuel price rises. Fishermen in Negombo and Chilaw [on the west coast] are preparing protests and we are planning to join them.”

Chaminda, a fisherman from Marawila in Chilaw, explained: “I use petrol for my small boat but with this new price my day’s fuel costs go up by 1,000 rupees to 6,500. There’s no guaranteed price scheme for fish and so if our catch increases, the market price comes down. We cannot afford to bear this price increase.”

In Sri Lanka there are around 5,000 multi-day fishing vessels. They generally spend several days at sea with each vessel usually consuming between 10,000 and 15,000 litres of diesel. Some 30,000 fishermen and their families depend on the industry. Tens of thousands of small-boat fishermen, who mostly use kerosene, are being also hard hit by the increases.

Desperate to divert rising anger over the new fuel price, Sagara Kariyawasam, general secretary of the ruling Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna called on Energy Minister Udaya Gammanpila to take responsibility for the hikes and resign. Gammanpila is leader of the Pivithuru Hela Urumaya, which is also part of the government’s ruling alliance.

President Gotabhaya Rajapakse declared, however, the price increases were decided by a cost-of-living committee that he chaired. The hikes, he said, were the result of global crude oil prices, the scarcity of foreign exchange and losses of the state-owned Ceylon Petroleum Corporation. He then absurdly claimed that it was connected to his “Climate Resilient Green Economy” policy to reduce fuel consumption.

“The government has taken steps to implement a number of proposals to change the pattern of consumption based on imported fuels,” Rajapakse said. It was, he added, “one key factor in a common strategy that strengthens the local economy” and “safeguard[s] the health and welfare of the people.”

When Rajapakse speaks about strengthening the “economy,” he is not referring to the living conditions of Sri Lankan workers and the poor, but to big business profits. His insistence that there be a “change in the pattern of consumption based on imported fuel” is, however, not limited to that commodity but extends to the importation of many essentials that have been stopped or had levies imposed.

State Minister Ajit Nivard Cabraal admitted that the fuel price increases would drive up the cost of living but said that “the government can no longer continue without revising prices.”

The international consequences of the coronavirus pandemic have been catastrophic for the cash-strapped government and the national economy. Last year, the Sri Lankan economy contracted by 3.6 percent with declining exports, tourism and remittance payments.

This week, Fitch Rating revealed that the government will have to pay a staggering $US29 billion on loans between now and 2026. Having concluded a financial swapping agreement with Bangladesh for $200 million earlier this month, the Central Bank is now attempting to organise a $400 million swap with India in order to avoid foreign debt default.

While the Rajapakse government is determined to place this financial burden on the masses by pushing up fuel costs and the price of essentials, it demands export sector employees, particularly in the garment industry, keep working despite the ongoing surge of COVID-19 infections.

At the same time, the labour ministry last month announced that employers can postpone their payments of workers’ pension funds for another six months and said they should direct their employees to keep working despite COVID-19 travel restrictions. The trade unions have endorsed these directives and continue to hold discussions with the government on how to keep industry operating.

Big businesses in Sri Lanka, with the blessing of the government and the unions, have reaped record profits during the pandemic. The Hayleys conglomerate generated 242 billion rupees in revenue last year and a 14 billion-rupee net profit, the highest in the company’s 143 years’ of existence. LOLC, a major finance company, made a 53 billion rupees after tax profit, the highest ever recorded by any Sri Lankan company, while Hemas reported a 3.3 billion rupees net profit.

While the corporate elite is accumulating record fortunes, recent months have seen a wave of strikes and protests by key sections of the working class, including among state sector, plantation, garment, railway and port and port staff.

Nervous about these growing struggles, which are part of a rising movement of the international working class, President Rajapakse used the draconian essential services act on May 27 and June 2 to ban state sector strikes and industrial action. Last Friday, more than 50,000 health workers defied these authoritarian measures, holding a five-hour walkout over jobs and demands for improved COVID-19 safety measures.

The government’s fuel price hike and other attacks on the masses are further deepening class tensions and creating the conditions in Sri Lanka for a social explosion.

French Institutes for Advanced Study (FIAS) Fellowship Programme 2022/2023

Application Deadline: 6th July, 2021 – 6:00 PM CET (Paris Time).

Eligible Field(s): The call is open to all disciplines in the SSH and all research fields. Research projects from other sciences that propose a transversal dialogue with SSH are also eligible.  Some of the IAS have scientific priorities they will focus on more specifically.

Type: Fellowship

Eligibility:

• FIAS awards fellowships to outstanding researchers of all career levels, from postdoctoral researchers to senior scientists. The minimum requirement is a PhD + 2 years of research experience at the time of the application. Exception will be made for scholars with a Master + 6 years of full-time research experience after the degree (PhD training will not be considered in the calculation of experience).
• Researchers from all countries are eligible to the FIAS Fellowship Programme but they have to have spent no more than 12 months in France during the three years prior to the application deadline.

Eligible Countries: All

To be Taken at (Country): France

Number of Awards: For the 2022-2023 academic year, FIAS offers 28 fellowship positions: 17 in Paris, 4 in Marseille, 3 in Montpellier and 4 in Nantes.

Value of Award: The FIAS fellows will benefit from the support and conducive scientific environment offered by the IAS, in an interdisciplinary cohort of fellows and in close relation to the local research potential. The fellows will be free to organize their work and conduct research as they wish.

CONDITIONS

All IAS have agreed on common standards, including the provision of a living allowance (min. net 2,700€ per month), social security coverage, accommodation, a research budget, plus coverage of travel expenses.

Duration of Award: 10 months

How to Apply: Applications are submitted online via www.fias-fp.eu where you will find detailed information regarding the content of the application, eligibility criteria and selection procedure.

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

Visit Award Webpage for Details

Huawei HMS App Innovation Global Contest 2021

Application Deadline: 20th August 2021

About the Award: The Huawei HMS App Innovation Global Contest aims to inspire talented developers across the globe to create seamless, smart, and innovative digital experiences, and explore the future of digital intelligence. By highlighting pioneering HMS open capabilities, the competition gives app developers the tools to build tomorrow’s all-connected world.

Type: Contest

Eligibility:

• The Huawei HMS App Innovation Global Contest is open to developers from all over the world. Participation is as simple as signing up with your HUAWEI ID.
• Individuals aged 17 and under are not eligible to enter the contest.
• Employees of Huawei and its affiliates, and their immediate relatives, are not eligible to enter the contest.
• You can participate in the contest on your own, or as part of a team. All members of the team must belong to the same contest region.

Rules for setting up a team

• (1) Each contestant is only eligible to join a single team.
• (2) Each team can have no more than 3 members.
• (3) Each team should have a team leader who is responsible for team management, such as inviting or deleting members and submitting works.
• (4) A team member can apply to join or leave a team.
• (5) The score for a contest submission belongs to the team. If a team member leaves the team, all existing scores will continue to belong to the team, rather than the departing member.

You will be disqualified in the event of the following:

• (1) You plagiarise the work of others;
• (2) Third-party code plug-ins used in your works are not authorised, and/or are the source of a legal dispute; or
• (3) Your works violate any relevant terms, service agreements, or rules applicable to HUAWEI DEVELOPER services, including but not limited to the HUAWEI Developer Service Agreement, Agreement on Use of Huawei APIs, and AppGallery Review Guidelines.

Eligible Countries: Global

Number of Awards: See below

Value of Award: US$1,000,000 Total Bonus

Huawei has set aside US$1 million from its Shining Star Program as prize money for the contest.

US$200,000 will be allocated for the top 20 apps in each region. The awards are as follows:

• US$15,000x 5 Best App
• US$15,000x 3 Best Game
• US$15,000x 3 Best Social Impact App
• US$5,000x 1 Tech Women’s Award
• US$5,000x 2 Best HMS Core Innovation Award
• US$5,000x 1 All-Scenario Coverage Award
• US$5,000x 3 Excellent Student Award
• US$3,000x 5 Honorable Mention

How to Apply: Apply below

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

Visit Award Webpage for Details

Amazon, Microsoft and other companies promise to “diversify corporate boards” and embrace black capitalism

Angelo Perera

Major corporations based in Washington state have joined a new effort to triple the ratio of black executives on executive boards by 2028. Embracing the right-wing principles of black capitalism, corporate leaders argue that diversifying the upper echelons of American society will advance the fight against racism and police violence.

Promotional still from the Black Boardroom Initiative

According to a Seattle Times article, “New program to diversify corporate boards gets backing by Seattle-area companies,” the Seattle-based law firm Perkins Coie initiated the “Black Boardroom Initiative” on June 2, hoping to make the corporate boardrooms “a little less white.” The campaign has attracted the support of Amazon, Microsoft, Starbucks, F5, Zillow and a handful of other businesses.

The initiative was developed in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin last May, which sparked mass demonstrations among millions of workers and youth throughout the world. James Williams, managing director of Perkins Coie is quoted in the article as being “galvanized” to “get this off the ground,” in the wake of Floyd’s murder.

Last year’s eruption of protests against police brutality, social inequality and the capitalist response to the pandemic certainly shocked the ruling class, which was fearful of the potential for mass anger to escape the control of the two-party political establishment. In that context, various corporations, including Amazon and Microsoft, issued statements of support for police reform and the end to “systemic racism,” donated to Black Lives Matter and affiliated organizations, and stated their commitment to “diversity and inclusion” in their own ranks.

The real content of their “solution” to unending police terror is revealed in efforts like the Black Boardroom Initiative: Adding a handful of minorities to their ranks and continuing to bask in record wealth accumulated from the exploitation of the rest of society. None of the executives clamoring for boardroom inclusion has explained how having more black directors in a corporation will compel the cops to kill less.

The Black Boardroom Initiative reflects the class character of identity politics, which is aimed at obscuring the basic class divide in society while elevating a small layer of privileged upper-middle class minorities into the top 1 percent of society. This program is even more revealing in the context of the pandemic, when the wealth of the world’s billionaires increased by $3.4 trillion while the vast majority of the planet faced mass death, unemployment and poverty.

Since Nixon’s passage of affirmative action executive orders in 1969, the ruling class has sought to elevate a layer of upper-middle-class African Americans that would be loyal to the status quo.

In 1960, around the time E. Franklin Frazier wrote his pioneering work, The Black Bourgeoisie, there were an estimated 25 black millionaires in the US. That number has grown 60,000 times. Today there are an estimated 1.5 million black millionaires and seven black billionaires in the United States.

The concentration of wealth among African Americans is extreme. According to a Pew Research Study, 35 percent of black households have negative or no net worth. Another 15 percent have less than $6,000 in total household worth.

Virtually every major corporation, financial investment firm and state agency has adopted the program of diversifying the upper strata of their organizations. Last December, NASDAQ filed a yet-to-be-approved proposal with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, which would require all companies listed on the exchange to publicly disclose consistent, transparent diversity statistics about their boards of directors. When the companies are unable to have at least two “diverse” directors, they are compelled to explain why. A director is considered “diverse” if they self-identify as female, an underrepresented minority, or LGBTQ.

As outlined in its “2021 Stewardship Expectations” published in December 2020, BlackRock, the world’s largest investment manager, will be voting down directors of companies in their $8.67 trillion portfolio if they do not improve diversity in the workplace, including the board.

Wikipedia lists BlackRock as the largest investor in weapons manufacturers through its iShares U.S. Aerospace and Defense ETF. State Street Global Advisors, another investment firm holding $3 trillion in assets, followed suit in January, putting pressure on the S&P 500 and FTSE 100 that it has voting power over.

While the super-rich have engaged in their “diversity” campaign in the wake of Floyd’s tragic death, American cops have been busy killing workers and the poor, of all races, at about the same rate as before. Statista’s report on police brutality published on June 1 notes that “the trend of fatal police shootings in the United States seems to only be increasing, with a total 371 civilians having been shot, 71 of whom were Black, in the first five months of 2021.”

It is significant that the Black Boardroom Initiative is piloted in Seattle, a city that has witnessed a drastic economic and social polarization fueled by the expansion of the technology industry, led foremost by Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google.

The population has grown by 18.7 percent since 2010, making it the fastest-growing city in the nation. While the median income increased from $60,200 in 2010 to $102,500 in 2019, driven by the growth of millionaire and billionaire executives in the tech, medical and business sectors, working class households have struggled to afford housing and pay the bills. The bottom quarter of Seattle families earn under $50,000, which is a poverty income in one of the most expensive cities in the United States.

As a result of rising inequality, housing costs and gentrification, homelessness has worsened. According to a report released by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Washington state experienced a 6.2 percent increase in homelessness between 201 and 2020, during which time 30 out of every 10,000 people in the state were homeless. During the same time period, homelessness grew by 2 percent nationwide.

Police violence continues and intensifies, because its real source is ever-rising social inequality, requiring ever more brutal forms of police terror on behalf of the corporate oligarchy.

Today, economic polarization is greater within the black population than in the US population as a whole, and the conditions of African American workers are worse than they were a half century ago.

The “inclusiveness” of people of color into the ranks of the ruling class indicates the selfish profit interests of this social layer. Their diversity initiatives will do nothing to address the plight of millions of workers in the United States, least of all black workers, who face among the highest rates of poverty, hunger and housing insecurity.

The ending of police violence, racism and poor social conditions demands not the redistribution of wealth and privileges in the richest strata of society under capitalism, but rather the elimination of social inequality under socialism.

German Green Party election conference endorses the use of armed combat drones

Johannes Stern

Were any proof needed that a federal government including or lead by the Greens would exacerbate the militarist policies of the present grand coalition of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats, the recent Green Party conference supplied it.

Green party co-leaders Annalena Baerbock and Robert Habeck (AP Photo/Michael Sohn, pool)

At the end of their gathering, the former pacifists decided to include a passage in their election manifesto that would, in principle, allow the procurement of armed drones for the Bundeswehr (Armed Forces). By a narrow majority of four votes, the federal delegates’ conference approved a corresponding motion by former Federal Environment Minister Jürgen Trittin.

The motion justifies the planned procurement of combat drones on the grounds that, “these systems can better protect soldiers in certain situations.” This is nothing but propaganda. Everyone knows that combat drones, like no other weapon, are brutal tools of murder that are linked to the imperialist powers’ illegal interventions in Central Asia, North Africa and the Middle East.

According to the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the US military alone carried out 14,040 drone strikes between January 2004 and February 2020, killing between 8,885 and 16,901 people. Among the victims are many civilians (910 to 2,200) and children (283 to 454), participants of birthday parties, weddings and other family celebrations repeatedly targeted for attack.

The Greens are aware that their decision paves the way for regular use of this murderous means of warfare by the German military. “Armed drones are primarily used in anti-terrorist missions and often for killings that violate international law. The availability of armed drones threatens to change military deployment scenarios,” read a counter-motion that was rejected by delegates.

The conference decision to leave criticism of NATO’s two percent target in the manifesto also has nothing to do with pacifism. “We’re talking about an extra 15 to 20 billion euros a year,” said National Executive Secretary Michael Kellner. “Let’s reject the arbitrary two percent target and at the same time make an offer on how Germany can play a stronger role in the world.”

Earlier, Annalena Baerbock, who was officially elected as the party’s candidate for chancellor at the conference with 98.5 percent of delegates’ votes, had attacked the infamous two percent target from the right. An abstract fixation on defence spending amounting to two percent of gross domestic product was not enough to ensure the necessary rearmament, she said. Perhaps, “more spending on our security” was needed, she declared in a joint TV discussion with the two other candidates for chancellor, Armin Laschet (CDU/CSU) and Olaf Scholz (SPD).

The Greens know what they are talking about. When they first participated in the federal government between 1998 and 2005, they helped organise Germany’s first combat operations since the Second World War, in Kosovo and Afghanistan, together with the SPD. Now they want to further intensify the war policy.

The election manifesto adopted by the Greens leaves no doubt about this. Although the grand coalition has massively rearmed in recent years, launched numerous interventions in Africa and the Middle East and increasingly openly harkened back to the disastrous traditions of German militarism from the last century, German foreign policy is still far too hesitant for the Greens.

“For years, however, Germany has at best moderated in Europe and the world, has often hesitated, has gone into hiding.” It was “time to pursue an active foreign policy again and to lead the way as a shaping force,” it says in Chapter 6 of their election manifesto on international politics. In the style of a lobby group for the arms industry, the Greens plead for massive rearmament of the Bundeswehr, NATO and the European Union. Here are some examples.

In the section “Modern Bundeswehr” it says: “The mission and tasks of the Bundeswehr must be oriented towards the real and strategically significant challenges for security and peacekeeping. We want to securely equip the Bundeswehr with personnel and materiel per its mission and tasks. It is unacceptable that soldiers go on missions with inadequate protective equipment.”

The EU must also “live up to its responsibility for its own security and defence.” To develop the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP), “enhanced cooperation between armed forces in the EU should be developed” and “military capabilities should be pooled and generally recognised capability gaps closed.” What was needed is “appropriate equipment, the expansion of EU units and a strengthening and consolidation of the joint EU command structure.”

Regarding NATO, the Greens call for a “strategic reorientation” so that “strategic interests can be jointly developed and cohesively and more convincingly represented based on European values such as multilateralism, democracy and the rule of law.” What this means is clear. The Greens are playing the leading role in Germany in the escalating war preparations of the imperialist powers against Russia and China.

The election manifesto contains numerous threats against these two nuclear powers. “The German and European economy” was “under great pressure” and had to “hold its own in global competition with authoritarian state capitalism and largely unregulated tech giants,” it says at one point.

The Nord Stream 2 pipeline project was “geostrategically harmful—especially for the situation of Ukraine,” and must “therefore be stopped.” At the same time, the sanctions “imposed on Russia because of the annexation of Crimea in violation of international law and the military action against Ukraine” must be maintained and “tightened if necessary.”

Again, the Greens do not shy away from military escalation. Before the party conference, co-chair Robert Habeck visited the war zones in eastern Ukraine and demanded that the right-wing, anti-Russian government in Kiev be supplied with German weapons and given greater military support.

The Greens played an active role in the Maidan coup in early 2014, supporting extreme right-wing forces in the name of democracy and human rights to bring a pro-Western regime to power in Kiev. Now, they are pushing the same strategy regarding Russia and Belarus.

On Russia, the Greens’ manifesto announces they would “support and intensify exchanges with the courageous civil society that stands up to the Kremlin’s increasingly harsh repression and fights for human rights, democracy and the rule of law.”

Significantly, Belarusian opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya appeared at the party conference on Sunday. She said that Germany must play a “key role” in resolving the political crisis in her country because Europe can “only be secure if Belarus is secure.” She explicitly thanked Habeck and Baerbock for their commitment to Eastern Europe and for “giving Belarus a voice in Germany.”

In domestic politics, too, the Greens are positioning themselves as ruthless representatives of the interests of German capitalism. In the speeches by Habeck and Baerbock, the dangers posed by the still rampant COVID-19 pandemic played almost no role. The same applies to the election manifesto. Over 137 pages there is not a single demand or concrete measure to fight the virus. Words like “lockdown,” “coronavirus protection measures” or “vaccination programme” do not appear.

This is not surprising. Wherever the Greens govern in the federal states, together with the CDU, FDP, SPD and Left Party, they put into practice the murderous “profits before lives” policy that has already led to almost 90,000 deaths in Germany alone. When reference is made to the coronavirus, it is only to argue that the German economy needs to be restructured and made fit for international competition. “After the coronavirus pandemic, our country needs a new economic awakening,” it says, for example, in the chapter titled “We promote entrepreneurship, competition and ideas.”

Against this background, the few social promises in the manifesto are not worth the paper they are written on. After the federal elections, the ruling class is preparing to recover from the working class the debt created as hundreds of billions were handed to big business and banks through the so-called coronavirus bailout packages.

Here, too, the Greens and the affluent upper middle-class layers they speak for are prepared to walk over corpses. For example, the party conference decided to leave the “debt brake” (a legal cap on public spending) in the manifesto. With this, the Greens explicitly back the most important instrument of the austerity policies of recent years. In 2003, when they were in a federal coalition government with the SPD, the Greens had helped initiate the “Hartz laws,” which have plunged millions of workers and their families into abject poverty.