Ecuador’s government declares state of war with support of Washington

Andrea Lobo

Only six weeks after his inauguration, Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa has suspended democratic rights and ordered tanks and thousands of troops to carry out military operations across the country. 

Heavily armed soldiers roam the streets of Cotopaxi Province in central Ecuador, Tuesday January 9 [Photo: Ejército Ecuatoriano]

On Monday, following a handful of prison riots and the jailbreak of drug lord Adolfo Macías, alias “Fito,” Noboa ordered a state of exception nationally for 60 days. The measure suspends freedom of assembly, speech and movement, imposes a nighttime curfew enforced through arrests, and “provides political and legal support” for the military to act with impunity.

In response to a manhunt with thousands of soldiers and police, on Tuesday gangs launched at least 30 attacks in nine different cities, targeting markets, malls, hospitals, university campuses, police stations, and briefly taking a television news set hostage on live air. 

Videos on social media have shown scenes of chaos, with crowds of students and citizens running from attacks.

The government announced that the attacks and clashes on Tuesday left 13 dead, including three police officers, with prison guards and police taken hostage. 

Noboa then escalated the conflict, declaring war on 22 gangs. “I have ordered the Armed Forces to execute military operations to neutralize these groups,” he stated. 

The events on Monday were preceded by Noboa’s moves to implement a security plan involving the deployment of the military against gangs, building several new maximum-security jails and placing gang leaders on “prison boats.” 

Five days earlier, Noboa proposed a referendum asking Ecuadorians to allow the Armed Forces to intervene in internal security and enjoy immunity for any crimes committed, but the ruling class decided to simply dispense with such “democratic” fig leaves. 

The official narrative, as presented in a press conference Tuesday night by Adm. Jaime Vela, head of the General Command, is that the plan was working, which led to “unprecedented” gang reprisals. Standing next to ministers and masked soldiers, Vela said: “The future of our nation is at stake.”

Following this speech, speaking for the Biden administration, US Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs, Brian Nichols tweeted: “We are ready to provide assistance to the Ecuadorian government and will remain in close contact with President Daniel Noboa’s team regarding our support.” 

The reality is that the Ecuadorian military already acts in close coordination with the Pentagon. In October, Biden and ex-president Guillermo Lasso had already agreed to US military deployments on Ecuadorian soil. Then, last month, the White House announced an aid package of $200 million for arming the Ecuadorian military.

The “Pink Tide” governments of Lula da Silva in Brazil, Gustavo Petro in Colombia, Gabriel Boric in Chile and Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela joined Washington in expressing their support for Noboa’s declaration of war. 

Within Ecuador, the entire political establishment has fallen in line. On Tuesday, all parties in Congress announced an agreement granting the military and police a legal amnesty or pardons for any crimes they commit. 

Former President Rafael Correa, who leads from exile the largest party in Congress, Citizen’s Revolution, tweeted: “Full support, Mr. President. Organized crime has declared war on the state and the state must emerge triumphant. It is time for national unity.” His party had already formed a legislative coalition to give Noboa a parliamentary majority. 

All fronts led by the Stalinist Communist Party, including Popular Unity, the United Federation of Workers (FUT) and the Revolutionary Youth (JRE) have called for “unity” in supporting the military operations, with criticisms confined to its inefficiency. 

For its part, the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities (CONAIE) representing the indigenous bourgeoisie said: “We call for national unity to join efforts among all sectors of society.” 

In its latest statement after the election of Noboa, the Revolutionary Movement of Workers (MRT) of the Pabloite United Secretariat had praised the CONAIE and FUT for their “radical opposition to the new government” and called for their “remaking the unity of the popular camp.” 

By calling for national unity behind the US-trained and bloodstained Ecuadorian military, all of these organizations have become entirely exposed as right-wing agencies of the bourgeoisie and imperialism. 

Washington is again attempting to harness drug cartel violence to justify a “wars on drugs.” Plan Colombia and Plan Merida in Mexico show that this can only result in hundreds of thousands of deaths without making a dent in drug trafficking, which is ultimately anchored in the armed forces, government officials and financial elites.

Before that, 20th-century Ecuador and Latin America were marked by US-backed military dictatorships used to suppress opposition from below, which in several cases were directly backed by the Stalinists. 

As recently as June 2022 and October 2019, Ecuador witnessed the same scenes of troops marching and tanks rolling into cities, enforcing curfews, and carrying out unrestricted raids and checkpoints. But on those occasions soldiers killed and mutilated dozens of workers, peasants and youth at mass protests against social inequality, inflation, unemployment and the collapse of public education and healthcare. In both cases, the media and authorities criminalized protesters as “narco-terrorists.”

Today, US imperialism is escalating its efforts to use its military power to counteract the decline of its economic position in Latin America and globally, as reflected in its proxy war against Russia in Ukraine and its support for the Israeli genocide in Gaza, which itself is part of an unraveling conflict across the Middle East.

The Pentagon is openly stating its goal of recolonizing Latin America. During a December 2 US Senate hearing titled “Overlooking Monroe? Protecting our hemisphere and homeland?” several military and political leaders invoked the need to enforce the 1823 Monroe Doctrine opposing influence of any other powers in the Americas. 

At the event, the Southern Command chief Gen. Laura J. Richardson, pointed to the “infinite and strategic natural resources” in the region and said “it is time to act now” against growing Chinese economic influence. 

However, as demonstrated by mass social protests in recent years that in Ecuador and other countries blocked oil fields and mines, it is the revolutionary threat of the historically combative working class across Latin America that constitutes the main obstacle to, and cause for fear by, US imperialism and its local client elites. This is taking place amid a crisis of bourgeois rule across the region, where all sections of the political establishment have been fatally discredited.

On December 6, Fitch Ratings, the Wall Street agency, issued a special report on Chile, Peru, Colombia and Ecuador, warning about a new “political and social upheaval,” pointing to the 2019 protests, “growing disillusionment with political leaders” and “growing calls for social expenditures amid a major economic slowdown after a short-lived post-pandemic rebound.” What has rebounded are COVID-19 cases amid the ongoing pandemic.

After Rafael Correa came to power in 2007, the boom in oil and mineral prices driven by Chinese growth allowed the increase of both social spending and corporate profits. He convened a Constituent Assembly and adopted the Chavista slogan of “21st Century Socialism” to exploit this brief economic surge in a bid to refashion the crisis-ridden capitalist state. 

Once oil prices fell in 2014, Correa and his hand-picked successor Lenín Moreno moved to impose brutal social austerity and sanction IMF loans. Moreno handed WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the British police and reached a “cooperation agreement” with the Pentagon in 2019.

Last October, Noboa pulled off an upset victory in snap elections triggered by the political downfall of the right-wing administration of Guillermo Lasso, who had dissolved Congress and his government by invoking a “mutual death” clause.

The local oligarchy and imperialism concluded that Lasso could not meet their pro-investor agenda because of his unpopularity. Instead, the ruling class opted for a clean break and the installation of a militarized police state aimed above all against working class opposition. 

Noboa, the 36-year-old scion of one of Ecuador’s wealthiest families, has rammed through corporate tax cuts and announced a plan to cut public spending by $1 billion and request a new loan from the IMF. “We wish to reset the economy,” he said in an interview last week. 

The sharp increase in cartel violence and homicides in Ecuador in recent years has historical and international roots. They cannot be solved through national social reforms—which the ruling class rejects outright—and much less by means of war and a capitalist dictatorship.

Commercial real estate plunges posing major problems for banks

Nick Beams

The indications by the US Federal Reserve that it is moving towards interest rate cuts may have boosted Wall Street, at least temporarily. However, they have done nothing to alleviate the mounting crisis for banks arising from debts in the commercial property market which have to be refinanced in the coming period.

Commercial Real Estate sale sign sits on a lot in Wheeling, Ill., Tuesday, Nov. 7, 2023 [AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh]

The Fed move led to a 1 percentage point drop in the interest rate or yield on the benchmark 10-year US Treasury bond. Despite some liquidity being provided to banks in the short-term, it will not halt what has been described as the “slow-burn of the US commercial property slump.”

While it may have eased tensions for now, the Fed move has been described as “too little and too late and temporary, to prevent rising bankruptcies.”

The worsening situation was laid out in a report published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) in December, which has been the subject of a number of articles in the financial media. Authored by four economists, it was entitled “Monetary Tightening, Commercial Real Estate Distress, and US Bank Fragility.”

Writing in the London-based Telegraph, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard cited remarks by Columbia University professor, Tomasz Piskorski, one of the authors of the NBER paper.

“It’s not a liquidity problem; it’s a solvency problem,” he said. “Temporary measures have calmed the market, but half of all US banks are running short of deposits with assets worth less than their liabilities, and we are talking about $9 trillion.

“They are bleeding capital and could not survive if something triggers a sudden loss of confidence. It is a very fragile situation and the Federal Reserve is watching it closely.”

Not all banks are immediately affected. The looming crisis is concentrated in smaller and regional banks which are often heavily invested in local commercial property. But the experience of the past year shows that problems that arise in less significant areas of the banking system can rapidly spread.

One need only recall the crisis of March last year when Silicon Valley Bank and two others went under because of a run by depositors. Financial authorities had to intervene to guarantee all uninsured depositors lest the crisis spread throughout the system.

The situation in the commercial property sector and its implications for banks is potentially even more serious. The March crisis was sparked by the fact that due to a rise in interest rates, the market value of the Treasury bonds, which they bought as a safe haven for their cash, had fallen giving rise to significant book losses.

In commercial real estate the problem is refinancing debt at a much higher interest rate. Some $5 trillion taken out in loans in the period when interest rates were at historic lows will come due in a series of tranches.

Evans-Pritchard cited comments by Scott Rechler, chairman of the Long Island developer RXR and a member of board of the New York Fed.

He said lenders were only now beginning to mark down loans. “As an industry, we in the first innings of what’s going to be a long game,” Rechler said, noting he had defaulted on a $240 million loan for a 31-storey Broadway office tower and handed the keys to a syndicate of banks.

“You can’t raise rates this quickly and not expect a financial shock. We’re already working on transactions at 50 percent on the dollar; the equity is wiped out and half of the loan is wiped out.”

Professor Stijn Van Niewerburgh, a property and finance expert at Colombia University, has described the property market as a “train wreck in slow motion.” He recently published a paper which estimated that the “value destruction” of New York office buildings could exceed $650 billion.

The extent of the mounting problems is laid out in the NBER paper. It found that after the adoption of “hybrid working patterns”—the increase in working from home as a result of the pandemic—and higher interest rates, about 14 percent of all loans and 44 percent of office loans appeared to be in “negative equity.”

That is, current property values are less than the outstanding loan balances.

“Additionally,” it continued, “around one-third of all loans and the majority of office loans may encounter substantial cash flow problems and refinancing challenges, reflecting in part a more than doubling of the cost of debt following monetary tightening and substantial increase in credit spreads.”

The effect of the interest rate rises since March 2022 was outlined in the paper. It found that if CRE loan distress had manifested itself in early 2022 when interest rates were low, not a single bank would have failed even under the most pessimistic assumptions.

But because of the interest rate hikes since then and a more than $2 trillion decline in banks’ assets values, as many as 482 banks with aggregate assets of around $1.4 trillion would have the market value of their assets below their liabilities.

According to the research, distress in the CRE sector “could lead to the inclusion of dozens to over three hundred predominantly smaller regional banks within the cohort of institutions vulnerable to insolvency arising from … uninsured depositor runs.”

In other words, the crisis which erupted last March, leading to three of the four largest bank failures in US history, arose from conditions endemic in large parts of the banking system.

It noted that quite apart from spillover effects arising from the direct connections between banks, “the news about commercial real estate defaults and banking losses could be a trigger for a widespread run on the banking system by uninsured depositors, unravelling a fragile banking system,”

Moreover, the analysis suggested that “so long as interest rates remain elevated, the US banking system will face a prolonged period of insolvency risk.”

That conclusion has major implications as regards the very stability of American capitalism. A Fed interest rate of 5 percent or even more is not high by historical standards. But its maintenance today poses the risk of widespread insolvency.

That fact points not to a conjunctural downturn, which can somehow be alleviated, but to a deep-going historical crisis. The rise of American capitalism was powered by its industrial might.

That era has gone forever and today it is the centre of financial parasitism and speculation, financed by the inflow of ultra cheap money such that even the raising of interest rates to levels considered to be entirely “normal” in the past now threatens to bring down the financial system like a house of cards.

Australian COVID surge the worst in at least six months

Oscar Grenfell

As in many countries internationally, including the US and in Europe, Australia is in the midst of a substantial surge of COVID-19. Newer highly infectious variants of the coronavirus are spreading unchecked and the limited indices available point to a substantial increase of illness and hospitalisation.

The general global rise in transmission is likely compounded by the fallout from the Christmas/New Year holiday season, with the virus spreading in indoor and large outdoor gatherings. The past two years, the December/January period has witnessed substantial spikes of the virus, including the 2021–22 Omicron tsunami, when governments lifted successful public health measures and millions of people were infected.

To an extent greater than even last year, governments and health authorities are covering up the surge. It is occurring under conditions where daily reporting of infections, illnesses and deaths ended long ago, and the media references the pandemic in the past tense.

In a sign of the extent of the crisis, health officials have felt compelled to belatedly acknowledge what is underway.

Today, New South Wales Health issued its latest surveillance summary for the fortnight ending January 6. It stated: “COVID-19 activity remained at high levels across all indicators in the past fortnight. COVID-19 polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test positivity was 17.9 percent.” The positivity rate is higher than any time over the past year, though PCR testing is difficult to obtain, limiting what can be extrapolated from that metric.

The advisory added: “Indicators suggest COVID-19 activity in the past fortnight is higher than the 2023 winter peak, and across greater Sydney is approaching levels observed in December 2022.”

New South Wales COVID-19 hospital presentation and admission figures [Photo: NSW Health]

An accompanying graph tracking hospital presentations and admissions in New South Wales shows a dramatic rise in recent weeks. Presentations have been increasing since late November. But they surged from around 800 COVID-related hospital presentations per week in the first fortnight of December, to more than 1,400 at the end of the year.

For some weeks, hospital admissions had remained static, at around 200 per week, despite the trend of increasing presentations. Entirely unexplained, the discrepancy suggests people were being turned away from the overstretched public hospitals, which were maintaining some sort of quota on the number of patients each week.

Whatever the case, hospital admissions reached 400 per week by the end of the year, doubling in little over a fortnight.

Kerry Chant, NSW chief health officer, said today: “Currently, the Omicron variants EG.5 and JN.1 appear to be driving the majority of transmission in the community, with JN.1 increasing in prevalence, in line with what we have seen in other countries.” Authorities have described a “wave on a wave,” with JN.1 increasing transmission, which was already at high levels amid a surge of earlier Omicron variants over the past two months.

Chant continued: “No one wants to see high levels of transmission in the community, but we do know what works to limit transmission in these circumstances and I am calling on the community to do those simple things that will make a big difference.”

That is a cynical attempt to blame the population for the developing health crisis. The measures that “work,” including indoor mask mandates and density levels were overturned by all governments, well over a year ago. In NSW, a centralised directive requiring that masks be worn in patient-facing areas of public hospitals was abolished mid-last year, ending any pretence of limiting hospital-acquired infections and protecting the most vulnerable.

Infection numbers have been unreliable and understated since the testing system was deliberately overwhelmed by the 2021–22 Omicron surge. Now, they are completely meaningless. NSW case numbers remain almost static, with only a limited increase registered despite the spike in hospitalisations.

The surveillance report’s reference to the 2023 winter peak underscores how much COVID is circulating. Already, the infection numbers were a gross underestimate, but even still, in June last year official case numbers for NSW approached 15,000 per week. In December 2022, also referenced in the report, weekly case numbers exceeded 40,000. Those infection levels were associated with a major increase in deaths, with more than 100 recorded in two weeks of January 2023, compared with low double-digits prior to the surge.

That is a warning that the mass transmission now underway will lead to a further spike in mortality.

The surge is not limited to NSW. In neighbouring Victoria, the second-largest state, COVID hospitalisations reached 377 on January 5. That compared with 266 on December 15 and is the highest level since June last year.

In Queensland, 322 were hospitalised in mid-December. The current number is not known. That compares with 68 hospitalisations in the beginning of October.

This is an indictment of governments, Labor at the federal level and in every state, except Tasmania, and the health authorities, who actively encouraged the spread of the virus over the holiday period.

Paul Kelly, the national chief medical officer, infamously described Omicron as a “Christmas present” in December 2021, because it provided a pretext for ending health restrictions to ensure maximum business and profit-making activities.

Last month, Kelly declared: “If you’re feeling vulnerable yourself for whatever reason, from a health perspective, then feel free to wear a mask. That’s people’s choice that they can do that to protect themselves.” One would have no idea that he was referencing a virus that has officially killed almost 24,000 Australians, more than 20,000 of those fatalities over the past two years.

Kelly obscenely suggested that people visiting relatives in aged care facilities could “consider” wearing a mask, emphasising that it was not mandatory. As of January 4, there were active outbreaks at 413 such facilities across the country. Throughout the pandemic, they have been transformed into killing fields, with more than 6,100 confirmed fatalities.

In comments last October, NSW Chief Health Officer Chant went even further, repudiating the most basic principles of medical ethics and scientific method. Chant discouraged young people who were ill from finding out what virus they were afflicted with. She contemptuously instructed them to remain at home and tough it out, in the manner of a hotel doorman, shooing the hoi polloi away.

Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) data, released last month, showed that for the first eight months of 2023, deaths were estimated at 6.1 percent above expected levels. That equates to thousands of lives lost that should not have been. The ABS described COVID as a “key contributor” to the ongoing excess mortality.

The ABS report pointed to the class character of the toll, overwhelmingly afflicting the poor and vulnerable. It stated: “In 2021, the number of people who died due to COVID-19 was 6 times higher for in those in quintile 1 (most disadvantaged) than those in quintile 5 (least disadvantaged). This ratio declined to 2.8 times higher in 2022, and has fallen further to 2.4 times higher in 2023.” Whatever the causes of that narrowing, a major social discrepancy remains.

The situation will only worsen. Governments are continuing to roll back the last vestiges of a public health response, with federal Labor last month shutting down the National Coronavirus Helpline, which had been fielding roughly 130 calls a day from people seeking assistance.

Vaccination, falsely presented as a silver bullet justifying the end of all other essential restrictions, has now also been dropped. An article posted on the Conversation website in late November noted that only 38 percent of people deemed to be at high risk due to their age or underlying health conditions had received a COVID vaccination over the previous six months.

Ongoing COVID-19 surge heralds another winter of death

Bryan Dyne

Registered nurse Erin Beauchemin monitors an Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO) machine connected to a patient in the COVID-19 Intensive Care Unit at Harborview Medical Center Friday in Seattle [AP Photo/Elaine Thompson]

Another winter of death is now unfolding in the United States and across the Northern Hemisphere as the JN.1 variant of the coronavirus continues to surge globally. Wastewater data from the United States released Tuesday indicate that upwards of 2 million people are now being infected with COVID-19 each day, amid the second-highest wave of mass infection since the pandemic began, eclipsed only by the initial wave of the Omicron variant during the winter of 2021-22.

There are now reports on social media of hospitals being slammed with COVID patients across the US, Canada and Europe. At a growing number of hospitals, waiting rooms are overflowing, emergency rooms and ICUs are at or near capacity, and ambulances are turned away or forced to wait for hours to drop off their patients.

According to official figures, COVID-19 hospitalizations in Charlotte, North Carolina, are now at their highest levels of the entire pandemic. In Toronto, Dr. Michael Howlett, President of the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians, told City News, “I’ve worked in emergency departments since 1987, and it’s by far the worst it’s ever been. It’s not even close.” He added, “We’ve got people dying in waiting rooms because we don’t have a place to put them. People being resuscitated on an ambulance stretcher or a floor.”

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Dr. Joseph Khabbaza, a pulmonary and critical care specialist at the Cleveland Clinic, told TODAY, “The current strain right now seems to be packing a meaner punch than the prior strains. Some features of the current circulating strain probably (make it) a little bit more virulent and pathogenic, making people sicker than prior (variants).”

Indeed, two recent studies indicate that JN.1 appears to more efficiently infect cells in the lower lung, a trait that existed in pre-Omicron strains which were considered more deadly. One study from researchers in Germany and France noted that BA.2.86, the variant nicknamed “Pirola” from which JN.1 evolved, “has regained a trait characteristic of early SARS-CoV-2 lineages: robust lung cell entry. The variant might constitute an elevated health threat as compared to previous Omicron sublineages.”

The toll on human life from the ongoing wave of mass infection is enormous. It is estimated that one-third of the American population, or over 100 million human beings, will contract COVID-19 during just the current wave. This will likely result in tens of thousands of deaths, many of which will not be properly logged due to the dismantling of COVID-19 testing and data reporting systems in the US. When The Economist last updated its tracker of excess deaths on November 18—before the JN.1 wave began—the cumulative death toll stood at 27.4 million and nearly 5,000 people continued to die each day worldwide.

The current wave will also induce further mass suffering from Long COVID, which has been well known since 2020 to cause a multitude of lingering and often debilitating effects. Just last week, a pre-print study was published in Nature Portfolio, showing that COVID-19 infection can cause brain damage akin to aging 20 years. The consequences are mental deficits that induce depression, reduced ability to handle intense emotions, lowered attention span, and impaired ability to retain information.

Other research indicates that the virus can attack the heart, the immune system, digestion and essentially every other critical bodily function. The initial symptoms of COVID-19 might resemble those of the flu, but the reality is that the virus can affect nearly every organ in the body and can do so for years after the initial infection. While vaccination slightly reduces the risks of Long COVID, the full impact of the virus will be felt for generations.

Some of the most prevalent symptoms of Long COVID

The latest winter wave of infections and hospitalizations takes place just eight months after the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Biden administration ended their COVID-19 public health emergency (PHE) declarations without any scientific justification. This initiated the wholesale scrapping of all official response to the pandemic, giving the virus free rein to infect the entire global population ad infinitum.

A virtual blackout of any mention of the coronavirus in the corporate media accompanied the swan song of official reporting. From then on, if illnesses at hospitals or among public figures were referenced at all, it was always with the euphemism “respiratory illness.” The words COVID, coronavirus and pandemic became all but blacklisted and the facts of the dangers of the disease have been actively suppressed.

Summarizing the cumulative results of this global assault on public health, the WSWS International Editorial Board wrote in its New Year 2024 statement:

All facts and data surrounding the present state of the pandemic are concealed from the global population, which has instead been subjected to unending lies, gaslighting and propaganda, now shrouded in a veil of silence. There is a systematic cover-up of the real gravity of the crisis, enforced by the government, the corporations, the media and the trade union bureaucracies. Official policy has devolved into simply ignoring, denying and falsifying the reality of the pandemic, no matter what the consequences, as millions are sickened and thousands die globally every day.

In response to the latest wastewater data, there have only been a handful of news articles, most of which sought to downplay the severity of the current wave and largely ignored the deepening crisis in hospitals.

The official blackout has given rise to an extraordinary contradiction in social life. The reality of mass infection means that everyone knows a friend, neighbor, family member or coworker who is currently or was recently sick, or even hospitalized or killed, by COVID-19. Yet the unrelenting pressure to dismiss the danger of the pandemic means that shopping centers, supermarkets, workplaces and even doctor’s offices and hospitals are full of people not taking the basic and simple precaution of masking to protect themselves. Every visit outside one’s home carries the risk of being infected, with unknown long-term consequences.

As the pandemic enters its fifth year, it is critical to draw the lessons of this world historical experience. The past four years have demonstrated unequivocally that capitalist governments are both unwilling and incapable of fighting this disease. Their primary concern has always been to ensure the accumulation of profits of corporations continue unabated, no matter the cost in human lives and health.

The real solution to the coronavirus is not to ignore it, but to develop a campaign of elimination and eradication of the virus worldwide. To do so requires the implementation of mask mandates, mass testing and contact tracing, as well as installing updated ventilation systems and the safe deployment of Far-UVC technology to halt the spread of the virus. The resources for this global public health program must be expropriated from the banks and financial institutions, who are themselves responsible for the mass suffering wrought by the pandemic.

Wells Mountain Education Scholarship Program 2024

Application Deadline: 1st March 2024

Offered annually? Yes

Eligible Countries; Developing Countries

Accepted Subject Areas? All fields are eligible although WMF intends to favor helping professions such as health care, social work, education, social justice, as well as, professions that help the economy and progress of the country such as computers, engineering, agriculture and business.

About the Wells Mountain Education Scholarship Program:

Wells Mountain Foundation offers undergraduate scholarships to students from developing countries to study in their home country or any other developing country. The foundation hopes that by providing the opportunity to further one’s education, the scholarship participants will not only be able to improve their future, but also that of their communities. The foundation believes in the power and importance of community service and, as a result, all scholarship participants are required to volunteer for a minimum of one month a year.

Applicants are only allowed to select a university in a developing country. Applications to study in UK, USA, Europe and Australia will not be accepted

Offered Since: 2005

Type: Undergraduate

Who is qualified to apply for Wells Mountain Education Scholarship Program? To be eligible to apply for this scholarship, applicant must be a student, male or female, from a country in the developing world, who:

• completed secondary education, with good to excellent grades
• will be studying in their country or another country in the developing world*
• plans to live and work in their own country after they graduate
• has volunteered before applying for this scholarship and/or is willing to volunteer while receiving the WMF scholarship
• may have some other funds available for their education, but will not be able to go to school without a scholarship

*Scholars planning to study in the United States, Canada, Australia, UK or Western Europe will not qualify for a WMI Scholarship

Number of Awards: 10 to 30 per year

What are the benefits? Maximum scholarship is $3,000 USD.

• tuition and fees
• books and materials
• room rent and meals

How to Apply for Wells Mountain Education Scholarship Program: 

• Applicants must submit two letters of recommendation written by someone who knows you, but is not a family member, who can tell why you deserve to receive a WMF scholarship. What qualities will make you an excellent student, a successful graduate and a responsible citizen who will give back to his or her country? These letters of recommendation may come from a teacher, a religious leader, volunteer supervisor, or an employer.

Visit Scholarship Webpage for details

UK Post Office scandal implicates all main political parties in injustice against hundreds of postmasters

Robert Stevens

The scandal over the terrible plight of hundreds of Post Office sub-postmasters wrongly accused of theft and false accounting, is rocking the ruling elite following last week’s broadcasting of a four-part ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office.

Between 1999 and 2015, the Post Office prosecuted 736 sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses—an average of one a week—for accounting errors actually caused by a faulty IT system named Horizon, provided to the Post Office by Fujitsu. This was despite sub-postmasters and mistresses complaining about bugs in the Horizon system after it reported shortfalls of many thousands of pounds.

Royal Mail van, outside the Axminster post office [Photo by Felix O / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0]

The legitimate concerns by postmasters, who had never had any such issues before Horizon was implemented, were ignored by the Post Office which prosecuted them instead. Many people lost their jobs, suffered unwarranted prison sentences, bankruptcy and divorces. At least four of the victims committed suicide.

With the first wrongful convictions in 1999, 60 victims have died before finding any justice. Only 93 of 900 convictions linked to the flawed IT system have been overturned and only 11 victims have been compensated in full.

To this day, no executives of the Post Office, Fujitsu, or any of the government ministers involved in running the Post Office have been punished.

The ITV drama, with renowned actor Toby Jones playing Alan Bates, tells the story of some of the victims of the Post Office—and successive Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrats governments—and the fightback campaign Bates led for over 20 years to get justice for postmasters and their families.

Bates, a former sub-postmaster, took over a shop with a post office counter in 1998. He first became aware of issues with Horizon by the end of 2000, when a shortage of £6,000 appeared on his books. This was rectified when he noticed multiple duplicated transactions in the system. However, in 2003 his Post Office contract was terminated when the company claimed £1,200 was unaccounted for. Bates and his partner Suzanne kept their shop but lost the Post Office counter and their investment of around £60,000. In 2009, Bates set up the Justice For Subpostmasters Alliance.

The first episode of the drama was watched by 9.2 million viewers, with the four episodes being the most watched programmes on any channel so far this year.  Feeling the heat building up, the Financial Times editorialised Monday on a “grave British miscarriage of justice… The most talked-about holiday TV viewing in Britain was not a Hollywood blockbuster or a Netflix fantasy drama. It was a dramatisation of the real-life scandal of hundreds of sub-postmasters wrongly accused by the Post Office of theft and false accounting that were in fact the result of a faulty computer system.”

The drama sparked over 1.2 million people signing an online petition, first set up in 2021, demanding that former Post Office boss Paula Vennells hand back her Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) award.

Vennells was awarded her CBE in the New Year honours list of 2019—fully 20 years after the scandal first broke—for “services to the Post Office”. Having been hired by then Tory Prime Minister David Cameron with a remit to eliminate the £3 million-a-week subsidy to the Post Office his government wanted to make, Vennells played a critical role in the persecution of postmasters in her role as Post Office CEO from 2012 to 2019. On Tuesday, Vennells announced she would hand back the CBE with immediate effect.

In December 2019, following a class action case, Bates & Ors v Post Office Ltd—fought for by the Justice For Subpostmasters Alliance—the High Court ruled that the Horizon system was faulty and 550 sub-postmasters were awarded over £58 million in compensation.

The ruling class gives up nothing easily and even the £58 million was held back. After costs only £11 million was paid out to the postmasters in the class action to compensate for false prosecutions. This equated to around just £20,000 each but many received only £8,000. In April 2021, the Court of Appeal quashed 39 convictions, a tiny fraction of the many hundreds more that remained unsafe. A BBC Panorama documentary aired in 2022, The Post Office Scandal, further exposed the outright criminality in the prosecution of postmasters.

With the scandal again in the spotlight, more than 100 people have come forward seeking legal advice. The Guardian reported that among these are expected to be postmasters who were involved in a Horizon pilot scheme rolled out in 1995 and 1996 to hundreds of branches in northeast England under a Labour government.

The Conservative government, which ignored the crisis for years before setting up a highly restricted ongoing public inquiry in 2020, has held high-level meetings in Downing Street in the last 48 hours, including receiving legal advice on how to quell a mounting crisis.

Politico reported that the government has had to put aside £1 billion to cover the expected compensation payments bill. On Monday, after Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was forced to declare that he intended to “get the money to people as quickly as possible,” Justice Secretary Alex Chalk met with Post Office Minister Kevin Hollinrake to find ways of speeding up compensation to victims of the scandal.

To keep a lid on a mushrooming social opposition, the government is considering the mass quashing, via parliamentary legislation, of all remaining 800 unsafe convictions that have not yet been overturned. Hollinrake told Parliament Monday, “The time for quibbling is over. It is a case now of action, action on this day, and delivering that by overturning convictions.”

Asked on Tuesday by Nadhim Zahawi, the former Tory cabinet minister if he would put forward a “simple bill” to quash the convictions, Chalk replied, “The suggestion he made is receiving active consideration.”

Central to this emergency face-saving operation by the Tories—who face a general election this year under conditions in which they are substantially behind in the polls to the opposition Labour Party—is identifying the necessary scapegoats.

All told, 11 government ministers from three Labour and Conservative-led governments oversaw the Post Office during the period in which postmasters were falsely prosecuted. In recent days pressure has mounted on Liberal Democrats leader Ed Davey, who served as Post Office minister for two years in the 2010-15 Conservative-Liberal coalition.

Bates wrote to Davey five times to demand action over the crisis, as part of correspondence with ministers over the span of three successive governments between 2010 and 2019. In May 2010, Davey refused to meet Bates declaring he did not believe it “would serve any purpose”. Several high profile prosecutions of postmasters had already taken place. On May 11, 2009, the same month that Bates contacted Davey, Computer Weekly magazine published the first major piece exposing the scandal. It revealed the plight of seven sub-postmasters, including Bates, and raised concerns about the suitability of the Horizon IT system.

Bates also wrote to another former Lib Dems leader, Jo Swinson, who served as Post Office minister in the coalition from September 2012-May 2015.

Fujitsu was handed hundreds of millions of pounds after winning the contract for a Post Office IT system. The latest incarnation of Horizon is still used by the Post Office today. As a “strategic supplier” to the government, Fujitsu has secured £3 billion in contracts since 2013, including 150 more in the few years since the Post Office finally stopped prosecuting its innocent staff. Leading Tory and Labour figures, led by Tory peer Lord Arbuthnot and Labour peer Baron Falconer demanded in a Sunday Times column, “The inquiry needs to examine in detail the role of Fujitsu, which provided and managed the faulty software. Was Fujitsu completely unaware of the devastating effect of its actions? Should it not contribute to the compensation claims of hundreds of sub-postmasters?”

Labour Shadow Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds said, “If it is found that Fujitsu knew the extent of what was occurring there will have to be consequences that match the scale of the injustice.”

This is meant to conceal the role played by governments that have overseen terrible injustices for the last 25 years. Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, who refused even to back calls for Vennells to hand back her gong, was Britain’s Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) at the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) from 2008 to 2013, before entering parliament. Starmer never lifted a finger to challenge any of the frame-ups of the postmasters, with at least 27 postmaster cases brought by the CPS when Starmer was DPP.

Horizon originated in a Tory government procurement process in 1994. It was announced by John Major’s government at the 1995 Conservative Party conference, with a stated goal not just to computerise the payment of benefits at post offices but of reducing welfare benefit “fraud” by £150 million per year.

Fujitsu and its Horizon system was chosen, with a major factor that in seven out of 11 categories Horizon was the cheapest option available. The £1.5 billion project was funded under the private finance initiative (PFI) set up by the Tories but carried out mainly by the 1997-2010 Blair/Brown Labour governments. The full rollout began in 1999 with deployment to over 13,000 offices in 2000 and 2001. Horizon would eventually cover 18,000 offices.

The faulty data was resulting in prosecutions almost immediately. In 2000, there were six shortfall convictions that relied on Horizon data, with another 41 sub-postmasters prosecuted in 2001, and 64 in 2002. By 2009, with Tony Blair out of office, and succeeded by Gordon Brown, prosecutions had risen to a staggering 525.

2024 begins with 600 UK communication workers at Communisis facing redundancy

Margot Miller

On December 28, 196 workers at printing and business services company Communisis at its base in Liverpool, UK received the gut-wrenching news that they were losing their jobs with immediate effect, victims of the growing use of digital technology in the communications industry under capitalism.

A total of 638 of the company’s employees at its Liverpool, Leeds and Cramlington (in Northumberland) sites will lose their jobs. The business, with its UK headquarters in Leeds employing 1,000 in the UK and 200 overseas, has gone into administration.

Sign outside UK unemployment office Job Centre [Photo by Andrew_Writer / CC BY 2.0]

According to financial advisory service Interpath, the Communisis Customer Experience, the side of the business dealing in printed communications on behalf of high street banks like Lloyds, was hit by declining demand and cost hikes in energy and paper. Figures for 2021 show a 20 percent fall in demand for paper bank statements, postal mail and cheque books.

Communisis had hoped to restructure and modernise, securing a deal with Indian outsource company Tech Mahindra in 2022, but it proved too costly.

The redundancies followed parent company OSG Holdings, based in the US, filing for bankruptcy. It “exited its UK business” in December. With a reported annual turnover of almost £256 million, Communisis was nevertheless hitting shareholders profits of OSG, according to Printweek.

Parts of the business, including delivery of services to the Lloyds Banking Group and the Brand Deployment wing, which provides marketing services for companies such as Proctor and Gamble and operates in 20 countries, were immediately bought up by rival Paragon Customer Communications. The remaining 581 employees are being transferred to Paragon.

Not only is half the workforce being made redundant, but it is unclear to what extent their pensions will be protected. In 2021, Communisis had a £20.8 million deficit in its pension fund accounts.

The workers cannot look to their union, Accord, to begin a fight back as it makes clear in a January 2 “Newsflash for Communisis members”. Accord first addresses employees who have not lost their jobs, stating, “We’d encourage questions relating to immediate changes such as pay dates to be directed to Paragon.”

As for members who have lost their jobs: “We’ll be taking legal advice on claims that may be possible as a result of the collapse and immediate redundancy. There’s some guidance on our website which may be helpful including CV writing and ways to find new work.”

Then the final insult: “…you may be able to use the services of either… the Print workers charity… [or for those employed by Lloyds before Communisis] the Bank workers charity”.

According to its website, Accord is a “grown-up union” with staff in the Lloyds Banking Group, TSB and subsidiary companies. It boasts that “by keeping the lines of communication open, even when we disagree or can’t get what we want, we can find a way to make the situation better.”

The job losses at Communisis are only the latest in a series of redundancies in the banking sector announced in the UK in December. Just before Christmas, almost 500 proposed job losses were announced at the Nationwide Building Society, as part of a major restructuring, affecting the chief operating office, retail operations, mortgages and financial wellbeing division.

Lloyds confirmed 2,800 jobs were threatened due to cost cutting which will affect middle management roles such as analysts and product managers.

Up to 2,000 jobs are at risk at Barclays in a £1 billion drive to cut costs and increase profits to shareholders. Jobs affected will be in Barclays Execution Services, which supports its retail and international operations.

The Metro Bank is in line to cut 20 percent of its workforce or 800 jobs to save £50 million a year. Shares fell by 67 percent last year. While bank lending is more lucrative with higher interest rates, borrowing is much riskier with the danger of defaults.

According to consumer group Which, 189 local bank branches will be cut in 2024 as customers switch to online banking. The Bank of Scotland, Halifax and Lloyds were expected to close 276 branches in total over 2023/24.

The UK’s largest recruitment agency, the Recruitment and Employment Confederation, warned the Bank of England ahead of its decision on December 13 whether to increase interest rates further, that the recruitment of permanent staff across different sectors had fallen by its second highest rate since the pandemic.

In response to the strike wave in 2022/23, only prevented from coalescing into a general strike by the betrayals of the trade unions, the Bank of England (BoE) followed the US and raised interest rates from a historic low to 5.25 percent to try and depress wage demands. Bank governor Andrew Bailey said rates would need to stay high to tackle inflation, though the rate remained the same.

Skills and productivity partner Claire Warnes at accountancy firm KMPG said “sustained economic slowdown” due to high interest rates among other factors was impacting the hiring of permanent staff, with London hit hardest, and driving forward redundancies.

Towards the end of the year, the number of those seeking jobs rose as major companies implemented layoffs. The unemployment rate in Britain reached 4.2 percent at the beginning of December, with 1.4 million seeking work, an increase of 13,000 from the previous quarter and 206,000 up from the previous year. The unemployment rate showed an increase of 77,000 from its level before the pandemic hit.

In the second quarter of 2023, the age-group with the highest rate of unemployment was the youngest, between 16 and 24.

PwC recently announced job cuts of between 500-600 due to falling demand for advisory services. PwC partners were awarded £906,000 in 2022.

Deloitte is planning to cull 800 jobs in the UK, while EY and KPMG are looking to hundreds of redundancies in their advisory and consulting departments.

Over the coming year, tech companies globally are expected to make layoffs, a trend begun last year. According to online publisher tech.co, most tech companies including Netflix, Microsoft, Twitter, Shopify, Tesla lost staff in 2023. Amazon and Salesforce have begun the new year with redundancies.

UK based British Telecom has declared it will cut its global workforce by 55,000 or more than 40 percent by 2030, a fifth of which will be replaced by AI.

The rise of social media and turn to online publishing is hitting print newspapers and its advertising revenue hard. Reach, the largest commercial news publisher both print and online in the UK and Ireland, plans to lay off 450 journalists. Reach plc has acquired more than 130 brands, like national dailies the Mirror, Express and Daily Star, as well as local brands such as MyLondon, the Manchester Evening News and BelfastLive.

The National Union of Journalists (NUJ), which accepted previous redundancies in the industry, appealed to the company for it to be party to implementing the job cuts. National organiser Laura Davison said, “Reach must act in the spirit of genuine and meaningful engagement, allowing for a flexible and transparent consultation process…”

The digital revolution and turn to online shopping have had a major impact on retailers, forcing the closure of long- established stores in the UK like Debenhams and more recently 400 Wilco stores.