British Columbia Liberals impose anti-Chinese property transfer tax

Dylan Lubao

In a rare summer session of the provincial legislature, British Columbia’s Liberal government adopted legislation earlier this month imposing a 15 percent property transfer tax on Metro Vancouver area homes purchased by those without Canadian citizenship or permanent residency status. This xenophobic tax follows an extended right-wing campaign by the political establishment and the corporate media to scapegoat foreign buyers for the region's soaring house prices, with an emphasis on buyers from China.

The Liberals announced the tax in late July and justified it on the basis of real estate purchase data collected over a period of just one-and-a-half months, from June to mid-July of this year. According to the Liberals, this data supposedly uncovered the central role foreign buyers are playing in driving up home prices in the B.C. lower mainland. The average price of a single-family detached home in the region now exceeds $1.5 million.

Rich foreign investors have played a part in this process, but the scale of their involvement has been inflated so as to channel anger over the lack of affordable housing into a right-wing, xenophobic campaign. The political establishment has united behind false claims that the more than 30 percent increase in property prices over the past year in Metro Vancouver is chiefly the responsibility of Chinese investors. The vast amounts of speculation undertaken by Canadian banks and the financial elite in real estate, which also finds expression in a 15 percent increase in property prices in Toronto over the past year, has been systematically covered up.

In reality, the figures show that foreign buyers made up just 5.08 percent of home buyers across the province, and represented only 6.5 percent of total investment in the Metro Vancouver housing market. In some areas, such as Vancouver City proper and nearby Surrey, the proportion of foreign buyers was even lower, at 4 and 3 percent, respectively.

The big-business Liberals acknowledged in a November 2015 document that “foreign investment in residential real estate may not be sufficient to impact the Metro Vancouver housing market, except for a small segment of luxury homes.” This conclusion was abandoned just months later, despite its validation by the June-July purchase data.

The blaming of Chinese investors for the housing crisis is a deliberate attempt to obscure the real cause of the unaffordability of housing for working people: the capitalist profit system.

The Metro Vancouver region is the most expensive place to live in Canada. It is, moreover, rapidly overtaking other high-priced housing markets like New York, San Francisco and London as the most expensive place to live on Earth. In June, the average cost of a single-family home had jumped 39 percent from the year before, to $1.6 million.

The sheer unaffordability of residential real estate in Vancouver is underscored further by the fact that half of the population rents. Yet, with vacancy rates at 0.8 percent as of last year, rents have skyrocketed to just under $2,000 a month for a two-bedroom apartment. The median income for renters in the city is less than $41,000 per year, meaning that many people pay more than half of their take-home wages just to stay housed.

With a median family income of $76,040 in 2014, Metro Vancouver incomes rank in the bottom quarter of Canada’s major metropolitan areas. For families who manage to secure a “starter” condominium unit, upgrading to a slightly more spacious town home would cost an additional $147,000 and this is projected to skyrocket to $341,000 by 2026. Moving from a town home to a single-family detached would cost a family an additional $880,000.

An important factor driving up the surging price of real estate in B.C. and other lucrative housing markets worldwide is a crooked sales technique known as “shadow flipping”, which is practiced by a significant number of realtors. This involves a realtor working with a buyer to purchase and re-sell a property, sometimes multiple times, before the deal is closed between the original seller and a final buyer. This nets both the initial buyer and the middleman realtor tens of thousands of dollars in untaxed profit, because tax is only paid at the end of sale.

The practice is widespread, with the self-regulated Real Estate Council of B.C. largely turning a blind eye and imposing only token fines on the few who do get caught.

For decades, all levels of government have been slashing support for social housing. In a phony attempt to dress up the new transfer tax as of benefit to working people, the Liberals have said its proceeds will be invested in a new Housing Priority Initiatives Fund. But it concedes that it has no idea how much money the tax will generate, nor has it provided any details whatsoever as to how the fund will be used.

The lack of affordable housing in Metro Vancouver is only the sharpest expression of a much wider phenomenon affecting workers across Canada and beyond. A recent report by the Parliamentary Budget Officer showed that Canadians have the highest household debt levels among G-7 countries. By the third quarter of 2015, household debt had reached 171 percent of disposable income, as working people scramble to cope with rising housing prices and decades of stagnant and falling incomes.

Even representatives of the financial elite, like Bank of Canada Governor Stephen Polloz, have acknowledged that such levels of debt are unsustainable and have issued warnings that they could trigger a financial crisis as the housing bubble in the US did in 2007-08.

The political establishment is seeking to channel the considerable social anger generated by the housing crisis in a reactionary direction.

Anti-Chinese and anti-Asian xenophobia has been a tool employed for over a century by the ruling class in western Canada to divide the working class. The new property tax on foreign buyers recalls the racist Chinese Head Tax enacted by the Canadian government in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to prevent Chinese labourers who had worked on the Canadian Pacific Railway from bringing their wives and other relatives to come to Canada.

The corporate media has played a central role in promoting the anti-Chinese hysteria, publishing incendiary headlines. The Globe and Mail, the traditional mouthpiece of the Canadian ruling class, justified this noxious narrative with an article titled “Meet the wealthy immigrants at the centre of Vancouver's housing debate.” A column in Bloomberg warned of “The Canadian Housing Boom Fueled by China's Billionaires.”

The Globe has been no less aggressive in its denunciation of Beijing over the South China Sea dispute, with an editorial describing it as a “rogue state” following the politically-motivated ruling of the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague that China had no valid territorial claims in the region.

B.C.'s trade union-backed New Democratic Party (NDP) has played a particularly odious role. Last month when the Liberals released preliminary figures illustrating the relatively minor influence of foreign buyers on the provincial housing market, NDP leader John Horgan made baseless accusations that the numbers were too low and that the province was suffering from an invasion of foreign investors “coming in based on greed rather than a desire to live and work in British Columbia.”

Such economic nationalism and anti-immigrant chauvinism is the stock-in-trade of the NDP. They vigorously promote, in tandem with their union allies, the slogan of “Canadian jobs for Canadians.” In 2012, the NDP-allied British Columbia Federation of Labour demanded that Chinese workers who had come to Canada to work at a mine owned by H.D. Mining International be sent home for costing Canadians jobs. In reality, the corporatist perspective of the trade unions—their slavish subordination of workers’ interests to capitalist profit—has led them to collude in the destruction of countless numbers of jobs and the imposition of wage cuts and other concessions.

The anti-Chinese campaign plays directly into the hands of the Canadian ruling class, which fully supports the Obama administration's “Pivot to Asia,” a strategy to economically and militarily encircle China and compel it to submit to Washington's demands. Ottawa has shown its full support for this agenda by backing the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal which excludes Beijing, and by lining up with the US and Japan over the territorial disputes in the South China Sea.

According to some legal experts, the Liberals' new tax violates the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which guarantees certain civil rights to citizens and non-citizens alike. However, repealing the tax would not solve the fundamental question of affordable housing for workers and youth, who have been priced out of the market.

The reality of the housing crisis in B.C. is one of social polarization. Workers and youth are forced to surrender an ever greater portion of their earnings for ever-smaller residences, or seek more affordable housing dozens and even hundreds of kilometres away from their jobs. Many others cram themselves and their families into substandard housing, or, as many post-secondary students do, couch-surf in their friends' homes or sneak around campus looking for places to sleep. The most marginalized of society are forced to sleep rough and expose themselves to all the attendant dangers.

At the other pole, the wealthiest strata of society enjoy unlimited freedom to live and work anywhere in the region, treating it as their own personal playground. The richest tenth of the population monopolize over half of the province's wealth, including real estate, hoarding it and lording it over the vast majority of the population.

Mounting calls for Australian universities to slash enrolments

Oscar Grenfell

Over the past weeks, there have been repeated calls, including from the Liberal-National government, for a new overhaul of tertiary education in Australia, including a dramatic reduction in the number of university enrolments. The campaign is a continuation of the bipartisan assault on higher education carried out by successive governments, Coalition and Labor, and is aimed at entrenching universities as elite institutions responsive to the needs of the market and accessible to only a wealthy few.

Earlier this month, Education Minister Simon Birmingham spelt out the federal government’s agenda at the “Australian Davos Connection Education Summit.” The forum, “brings together leaders from business [and] government” to discuss public policy.

In his speech, Birmingham flagged financial measures to cut student numbers. He said the government would, “look at how the financial incentives the government has in place actually drive behaviour by the universities in their decision in how many people to enrol in different disciplines.”

Birmingham also indicated steps to direct resources to areas that would have a direct benefit to business. “We need to find a method that drives an outcome which is frankly more attuned with what the employment market demands,” he declared. The minister contemptuously told students to consider the prospects of finding work in a particular field before beginning their studies.

The speech followed a string of commentaries in the financial press complaining about the high numbers of students enrolled in courses such as law and teaching, compared to fields such as IT, which are central to the “innovation economy” being touted by the government.

An Australian editorial last week, for instance, declared that the government “would do students, universities and the national interest a major service by reforming a system in which too many students with low tertiary entrance scores, who may not finish their degrees, are being drawn to courses with poor job prospects.” The newspaper repeated its call for the government to “direct resources to increasing places in fields with the most pressing skills shortages.”

The editorial made clear that any conception of education as a social right aimed at the all-rounded cultural and intellectual development of individuals is a thing of the past as far as the corporate elite is concerned.

The heads of various university institutions have voiced similar conclusions. On August 17, Vicki Thomson, head of the Group of Eight wealthiest “sandstone universities,” called for an end to uncapped student enrolments. She called for a “new model,” to ensure “access and equity for all who are eligible to the program most suited for them but not at the expense of quality.”

In an earlier speech, Thomson said: “Why are we all so reticent about stating the obvious—that university isn’t for everyone. It was never intended for everyone.”

In 2012, the previous Labor government uncapped the number of places universities could offer to students, while making their funding dependent on how many they enrolled. The move was aimed at opening higher education up to the demands of the market and driving ever-greater competition between universities for enrolments, particularly in the most lucrative business-related degrees.

At the same time, the Labor government, under both Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, slashed a total of $6.6 billion from higher education and research between 2011 and 2013. This only intensified the fight between universities to attract both domestic students and full fee-paying international students, while cutting costs, thus driving up class sizes and reliance on lower-wage casual staff.

Both the Coalition and Labor opposition are committed to further cuts. The government is seeking to slash $3.2 billion from the sector. Birmingham earlier this month likened universities to “five-year-olds pleading for more chocolate who don’t appear to realise that budgets may have reached their limits already.”

The government has also advanced plans for higher student fees for “flagship courses.” In 2014, the government sought to deregulate all fees, which could have seen the average three-year bachelor’s degree priced at $100,000. That plan stalled in the Senate. The latest proposal to partially deregulate fees is aimed at developing a two-tier system, with the most sought-after degrees accessible only to the wealthiest students.

For its part, during the campaign for the July 2 federal election, Labor announced at least $320 million in university funding cuts. Labor’s measures included lowering the repayment threshold for student fees and loans, so that students would be forced to pay back their debts when they begin earning $50,000, rather than the current $54,000. Labor also called for the abolition of concessional fees for students in numbers of fields, including early childhood education.

Already, there is a stepped-up assault on the jobs and conditions of staff and academics at universities. Last December, the University of Sydney (USYD) adopted plans to slash undergraduate degrees from 122 to just 20, and to amalgamate 16 faculties and schools into six faculties and three schools. The restructure is based on a model previously implemented at the University of Melbourne, including the destruction of hundreds of jobs. USYD’s move includes the relocation of its visual design school, the Sydney College of the Arts, and the axing of 50 of its staff, or some 60 percent of the workforce.

Flinders University in Adelaide is similarly planning to merge its 14 schools and four faculties into six colleges, sparking fears of jobs cuts. Adelaide University is planning a restructure, while the University of Western Australia began the destruction of 300 jobs in June.

In addition, as a result of Labor’s restructuring of university funding, rates of casualisation across the sector have soared. Casual and sessional academics, most of whom earn less than $500 per week while teaching, now do half the teaching and research in Australian universities.

The National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU), which covers most academics and university staff, has played the central role in enforcing the ongoing restructure of universities. The union has done everything it can to politically subordinate the widespread hostility among staff and students to the process to its chief architect, the Labor Party, as well as the Greens, who kept the last minority Labor government in office. At the same time, the NTEU has worked hand-in-hand with university authorities to force through redundancies, faculty mergers and other pro-business moves.

Appalling conditions in Greek refugee camps

Katerina Selin

The mainstream media has gone silent on refugees in Greece. But the suffering of these people, who fled war and poverty, continues without interruption. At present, more than 57,000 people sit in makeshift tent camps and shelters.

“The majority of these people have been living for months in unbearable and increasingly desperate conditions,” warns the human rights organization Amnesty International in a statement on the situation in Greece. “They receive only limited support from volunteers, activists and NGOs. They are forced to linger in these unspeakable conditions with insufficient information and uncertainty about their futures.”

After the closure of escape routes over the Balkans, thousands of people endured weeks at the muddy camp in the village of Idomeni on the border with Macedonia. After the camp was broken up in May, the people there were divided up among several reception centers. The government of the pseudo-left party Syriza (Coalition of the Radical Left) had promised the desperate refugees humane living conditions.

The reality is something else entirely. The conditions in the camps are appalling. In several regions, refugees repeatedly protest against the abuses in their shelters and demand the most basic standards of humane accommodations.

In the Vial internment center on the north Aegean island of Chios, one of the so-called “hot spots,” more than 1,300 refugees live crammed together in shelters made from shipping containers. Surrounding the camp is a towering barbed wire fence that lends the hot spot the “appearance of a concentration camp,” as the daily Greek newspaper To Vima writes. In the first 25 days, the refugees lived as prisoners. After that, they were able to leave the camp only by special permission.

The refugees are supposed to be registered in the camp and given the opportunity to apply for asylum. Most have requested asylum. So far, 960 interviews, primarily with Syrians, have been conducted. But even though their country has for years been plunged into a bloody civil war, 69 percent of asylum applications by Syrian refugees are rejected, as the asylum official from Vial, Nikos Papamanolis, explained to To Vima.

Since the agreement with Turkey in March, asylum procedures have been reworked in Greece. First, authorities examine whether Turkey is a safe third-party state for petitioners. Only if that is excluded can the asylum application be considered further.

Many refugees are refused asylum because they are alleged to be safe if returned to Turkey and can be sent back to that country. Once there, however, they can expect more war and poverty than ever before. They are even threatened with deportation back to their countries of origin.

Since the establishment of detention facilities on Chios, protest actions by refugees have been a regular occurrence along with violent conflicts with the police and military who operate the camp. Since the end of July, the situation has only worsened.

In a video posted online earlier this month, refugees told aid workers and activists about conditions in the camp. They are often given bad food, consisting of nothing more than rice and beans, and sometimes contaminated with insects. When they throw it away, the military authorities serve the same rations to them again. During a protest, the police treated them with the utmost severity. The same day, no food was provided to them and for the next three days they received only bread and water.

Many children living in Vial are malnourished. Only rarely do they get meat, eggs or fruit. No new clothing or shoes have been provided. One woman reports that the military authorities respond with contempt to any complaint from the refugees. They are told they should go back to their own countries if they don’t like the food.

Faced with this situation, some refugees have tried to cook for themselves. Sneaking through holes in the fence, they go into the surrounding villages and get their own food. Because most of them have no money to shop at the market, they have resorted to breaking into the homes and gardens of local residents. The items stolen shed light on their desperate situation: fruit, vegetables, chickens or drinks from the kiosk.

The dealings with the people in the Vial camp have provoked regular conflicts with residents. The fascist organization Golden Dawn has exploited the volatile atmosphere for their xenophobic propaganda among the Greek islanders.

Altogether, there are now more than 10,000 refugees in the hot spots on the Aegean islands, though officially there is only room enough for 7,450 people.

On the mainland, the situation facing refugees is also unbearable. Refugees in the Ritsona camp in the Evia region have addressed a letter “to the Greek government, the political parties, the international community and Greek society,” in which they describe their living conditions.

“We are Syrians and Iraqis who have escaped injustice and are now held captive in squalor. We live in tents under the hot sun and in hellish temperatures, while in previous months we spent the nights in bitter cold.” The provisions from the military are inadequate and do not meet the needs of children, pregnant women and the elderly in particular.

“No one is in a position to tell us what the future holds. Such waiting produces an enormously stressful situation and puts a strain on our mental health. We literally live in isolation in the middle of a forest in appalling conditions that lead to infections and illnesses, because we are exposed to insects and animals.”

Twenty cases of hepatitis have recently been reported. The hygienic conditions—no warm water, few and poorly functioning toilets, infrequent waste disposal and insufficient health care—are intolerable. There are too few doctors and at night there are none at all to care for newborns, pregnant woman and the elderly. The refugees ended their letter with a series of demands for humane accommodations and provisions.

Refugees have also demonstrated in the Kilkis region in northern Greece. In the reception centre Nea Kavala, women and children organized a protest march on August 3. At least eight refugee children have contracted hepatitis A thanks to the inhumane conditions there.

Further north, on the border with Macedonia, near the former Idomeni camp, more and more refugees attempt to travel illegally. According to the daily paper Kathimerini, the police locate around 60 people hiding in the woods every day and bring them by bus to one of 20 military camps in central Macedonia where 20,000 refugees are already being held. The people often huddle together for days in the bushes and fields near the border and drink water from the pipes of the irrigation systems.

The conditions in the camps around Thessaloniki are no better. There is only cold water and scarce food rations. Children grow up in an environment increasingly characterized by sickness, drugs and violence.

In recent days, the media and representatives of the government have voiced their fears that the refugee agreement between Greece and Turkey could fail and the number of refugees coming over the Aegean into the European Union could again grow. Following the implementation of the agreement, which provides for the deportation of refugees back to Turkey, between 50 and 150 people a day have made the treacherous journey across the sea to Greece.

In the middle of August, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras interrupted his vacation to hold discussions on refugee policy with his cabinet. The Syriza government is doing everything it can to maintain the cruel deal with Turkey and has announced it will evenly distribute the refugees imprisoned in Greece throughout the country. In accordance with this, 2,000 people are to be resettled in Crete. The Minister for Civil Protection has been instructed to increase police surveillance on the island.

The Syriza government, like its European partners in Brussels and Berlin, treats refugees as a mass that can be moved from place to place at will. They are dealt with like criminals in prison camps, for whom basic democratic rights do not apply.

Over 1,800 extra-judicial killings under new Philippine government

Joseph Santolan

Ronald de la Rosa, chief of the Philippine National Police (PNP) testified Monday before a Senate investigation into the extra-judicial killings since President Rodrigo Duterte took office on June 1. He said the official police count of those who were killed by either police or vigilantes for the first six weeks of the Duterte administration was 1,789.

De la Rosa told the Senate that from June 1 to July 15, 712 people had been killed by the police as part of Duterte’s “war on drugs.” Vigilantes, he stated, had killed 1,067 in the same time frame.

These official figures are at least twice the tally estimated by the press prior to de la Rosa’s testimony. They reveal that Duterte, who has repeatedly endorsed the state and vigilante killings of alleged criminals, has launched a crusade of mass murder.

This slaughter has received the support and funding of Washington. Secretary of State John Kerry visiting Duterte in Manila on July 30, pledged $32 million earmarked specifically to fund Duterte’s anti-drug crusade.

Washington is not pleased, however, with Duterte’s failure to aggressively assert the country’s territorial claims in the South China Sea following the ruling against China by the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) in The Hague. Where his predecessor, Benigno Aquino, actively spearheaded the US drive against China in the region, Duterte has pursued bilateral negotiations and trade talks with Beijing.

As Kerry’s visit to Manila demonstrates, Washington has no qualms about funding Duterte’s death squads, provided he toes its line. The recent flurry of negative international press about police and vigilante killings in the Philippines, headed up by the New York Times, is an implicit threat from Washington: Duterte will serve the US imperialist war drive against China, or the US will exploit “human rights” as a weapon against him.

On average, 40 people a day are being killed. Extrapolating on this basis, more than 2,000 would have been murdered by police and vigilantes under the Duterte administration by the time de la Rosa testified before the Senate.

The victims of the state murder campaign are the impoverished and oppressed. They are killed in the working class districts of Tondo and Quiapo. Their corpses, wrapped in duct tape and cellophane and shot through the back of the head, are abandoned in the narrow alleyways of shantytowns. Others, having been picked up without warrant, were executed while handcuffed in police custody.

The victims who have been identified in the press have been either unemployed or informally employed in occupations like pedicab driver or market vendor. Duterte is overseeing the systematic murder of the most oppressed layers of the Philippine population.

On August 18, United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on summary executions, Agnes Callamard, called on the Philippines authorities “to adopt with immediate effect the necessary measures to protect all persons from targeted killings and extrajudicial executions.” She said Duterte’s calls for killing criminal suspects “amount to incitement to violence and killing, a crime under international law.”

Duterte staged a two-hour press conference at two in the morning from his home in Davao in the southern Philippines in which he launched a profanity-laden tirade against the UN. He called Callamard “a sh*t” and threatened to pull the Philippines out of the international body. He said his role model was the vigilante played by Charles Bronson in the movie Death Wish.

Duterte postured as an opponent of imperialist interference, denouncing the hypocrisy of the UN voicing concern over death squads in the Philippines while allowing the “big powers” to bomb Syria and US police to murder “black people.”

Duterte is no opponent of imperialism, but is attempting with populist rhetoric to secure support for his administration. He has announced his full support for the basing of US military forces in the country, and has repeatedly proposed to alter the country’s constitution to allow increased access for foreign investors.

The next morning, Secretary of Foreign Affairs Perfecto Yasay held a press conference for damage control. No, he stated, the Philippines would not be pulling out of the UN. The president, he stated, had been “tired and hungry” the night before. “We must give him leeway. He is also human.”

However, Yasay said UN rapporteurs were not welcome to come to the country to investigate, because “they had already jumped to conclusions.”

A ubiquitous claim in the international media is that Duterte’s murderous campaign enjoys mass support. The New York Times, for example, wrote on August 19 that “his drug war has proved wildly popular in a country plagued by crime.” This is a baseless slander against the majority of the Filipino people.

Only two pieces of evidence have been supplied to substantiate this claim. First, Duterte is stated to have “received overwhelming support” in the election, winning “by a landslide.” This is a lie. He received 38 percent of the vote, a mere plurality of those who actually went to the polls. Second, Duterte received a very high trust rating in a survey conducted in mid-June, that is to say before he ever took office.

The ruling class, on the other hand, has demonstrated that it supports the use of death squads and police killing. Virtually the entire political establishment has lined up behind the Duterte administration.

The Senate, under the joint leadership of the committee on Human Rights and Justice under Sen. Leila de Lima and the committee on Public Order and Dangerous Drugs under Sen. Panfilo Lacson, launched an investigation of the extrajudicial killings. PNP Chief de la Rosa testified before this committee regarding the number of people killed.

Lacson was one the chief torturers of the Marcos dictatorship in the Military Intelligence and Security Group before rising in the ranks of the PNP to become its head under the Estrada government. Lacson publicly stated that the investigation must not interfere with the “momentum” of the police war on drugs.

De Lima was head of the Justice Department under President Aquino. She was responsible for prosecuting corruption cases against various figures with economic ties to China as part the Aquino administration’s integration in the US “pivot to Asia.” De Lima was responsible for securing the imprisonment of former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo as part of this campaign. Arroyo has now been rehabilitated under the Duterte government and is serving as a key ally in the legislature.

To the extent that there has been any political opposition to the extra-judicial killings it has been articulated by de Lima. At the opening of the Senate investigation she stated that Duterte “could face charges before the International Criminal Court.”

Duterte responded by denouncing de Lima as an “immoral, adulterous woman,” who had a long-standing affair with her driver. He claimed that her driver also served as her bagman to collect payoffs from various drug-lords.

There had been a proposal in the House of Representatives to carry out a parallel investigation into the police and vigilante killings, but this was immediately rejected and the lower body of the legislature voted instead to conduct an investigation of de Lima and her driver.

As the staggering figures of police and vigilante murders emerged on Monday, the Maoist Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) was preparing to hold the first round of formal peace negotiations with the government in Oslo. The talks are slated to run from August 22 to 26.

Joma Sison, the head of the party, hailed Duterte as a man who uses “street language and methods of the mass movement.” He declared that the CPP was “ever willing to cooperate with the Duterte government in pursuing the just cause of national and social liberation against foreign and feudal domination.”

The CPP is hostile to the working class and serves the interests of sections of the Filipino bourgeoisie. As Duterte, with funding from Washington, is carrying out a campaign of mass murder against the working class and the poor in the Philippines, the CPP is preparing to end its armed struggle and fully support his regime.

Divisions rise inside EU at summit between Germany, France and Italy

Alex Lantier

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President François Hollande and Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi met yesterday for a summit off the Italian island of Ventotene.

This was a reprise of the June 27 crisis summit that brought Merkel, Hollande and Renzi together in Berlin shortly after Britain voted to leave the European Union (EU). After the Berlin summit, where they called for broad new economic “reforms” attacking the working class and a united EU military policy, they were determined to show unity and halt further disintegration of the EU. They assembled again yesterday to prepare next month’s EU summit in Bratislava.

“Many thought that after Brexit, Europe was over,” Renzi declared as he opened the summit’s joint press conference, on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier Garibaldi. “But it is not, and we want to write a new page in the future.”

In fact, even before Britain invokes Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty to begin formally negotiating the terms of its exit from the EU, the EU is on the verge of a new explosion. At Ventotene, the three largest euro zone economies faced a broad range of urgent crises: the rapidly escalating war in Syria and the Middle East, the immigrant crisis and terror attacks in Europe, and the rising danger of a historic European banking collapse centered in Italy. However, they failed to unite around any common proposals, save more attacks on the working class and migrants’ democratic rights.

“Much symbolism but nothing concrete,” the Swiss Neue Zürcher Zeitung concluded about the summit. It mocked the three countries’ “empty declarations of solidarity and fulsome praise of the European project” and wrote: “Their ideas broadly clash, so everything stayed at the level of generous promises.”

Renzi, who is fighting to avert a run on Italy’s banks and to keep office amid the deepening slump of the Italian economy, pledged: “We will also talk about economic issues. We want strong measures, quality investments accompanied by structural reforms, investing in Manufacturing 4.0 and renewable energy. We have to focus on the youth.”

Renzi’s proposals were stillborn, however. In the run-up to the summit, Merkel downplayed Renzi’s calls for looser rules on state budget deficits, and Hollande’s calls for the EU to back the formation of a €315 billion investment firm. Such policies—which would lessen the pressure for social cuts by somewhat slowing the unfolding Italian fiscal crisis, and fund limited economic projects for Germany’s European competitors—face significant opposition in Berlin.

While Merkel stated in her remarks that the EU’s “stability pact gives many opportunities for flexibility” on budgetary issues, it is clear that Italy’s over €300 billion in bad debts cannot be painlessly absorbed by another EU bank bailout. Italy’s economy has ground to a halt, stagnating in the second trimester of 2016. As tax returns collapse, Italy faces a new state budget crisis that threatens to trigger a bank run.

Berlin is opposed, however, to yet another attempt to paper over all these crises with massive “quantitative easing,” that is, by printing euros at the European Central Bank.

New EU rules require depositors and creditors to contribute to paying the costs of a bank failure. As a result, many Italian savers who put their savings in smaller banks that went bust have already been ruined. With major Italian banks like UniCredit and Monti dei Paschi di Siena now in turn facing life-threatening financial crises, the conflicts inside the euro zone over how to handle the winding down of bad debts in Italy is set to take on explosive forms—possibly leading to a decision by the Italian government to leave the EU and the euro currency.

It is unclear what such a decision would mean for France, which has hundreds of billions of euros invested in Italy, and whether Paris could itself under these conditions remain in the euro.

“As we trend into the second half of the year, the situation in Italy, and its spill-over for the rest of Europe, will continue to be one of the biggest macro-political risks we are concerned about,” Federico Santi, a London-based analyst at Eurasia Group, told Market Watch.

The crisis has the potential to trigger yet another exit from the EU. Renzi’s popularity has been undermined by his austerity measures, and he also faces a political challenge from the anti-euro and anti-EU Five-Star Movement (M5S), which has called for a referendum on exit from the euro. Particularly if Renzi’s proposed November referendum modifying the powers of the Italian Senate fails, and if he steps down as he has pledged to do, the result could be the coming to power of another anti-EU government in Italy.

Merkel, Hollande and Renzi tried to cover over the financial conflicts emerging from the crisis of European capitalism by aggressive, reactionary calls for a build-up of European military and intelligence agencies, as well as crackdowns on refugees and immigrants.

“Europe needs to better ensure its own defense, and must also be practical. We need to better protect European borders and share more intelligence information. We also want more coordination, more facilities, and more resources in the defense sector,” Hollande said. He also gave the thanks of the EU to the crew of the Garibaldi, the flagship of Operation Sofia—the navy patrols that force African migrant ships fleeing across the Mediterranean towards Europe to return to Africa.

Mentioning the escalating war in Syria and the refugee crisis, Merkel said, “We should do more for the internal and external security” of the EU. She also praised EU collaboration with other countries to block refugees from traveling to Europe: “We will discuss migrants and control of the coastlines, but we need collaboration from neighboring countries. Collaboration with Turkey is a good thing; otherwise we cannot win the fight against people traffickers. But we also need help from the migrants’ countries of origin.”

In this context, the decision of Merkel, Hollande and Renzi to visit the grave on Ventotene of Altiero Spinelli only further highlighted the EU’s historic bankruptcy. While in prison during World War II on the orders of Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, Spinelli helped draft the so-called Ventotene Manifesto—a founding document of the movement to build the EU—calling for a federal Europe without national states.

Spinelli’s manifesto is a generally counterrevolutionary document, reflecting his membership in the Stalinist Italian Communist Party (PCI) in the 1920s and 1930s, and the PCI’s opposition to socialist revolution and the political independence of the working class. Insisting that capitalist businessmen play a lead role in the reconstruction of postwar Europe, the manifesto attacks “workers, trained on the issue of class, who therefore cannot see anything but their own demands.”

Spinelli later worked with the PCI during its “Euro-communist” turn of the 1970s, which prepared the PCI’s support for the Kremlin’s restoration of capitalism in the USSR and the PCI majority’s subsequent transformation into Renzi’s pro-austerity Democratic Party (PD).

What the entire period of nearly 75 years since the drafting of the document has shown, in fact, is the deeply rooted inability of European capitalism to overcome the national divisions in Europe, as this crisis-ridden summit made clear.

US-South Korean war games inflame Asian tensions

Peter Symonds

The annual joint US-South Korean military exercises known as Ulchi Freedom Guardian (UFG) began yesterday amid rising tensions in Asia fuelled by the American military build-up throughout the region. While nominally aimed against North Korea, the war games consolidate Washington’s military alliance with Seoul as it makes preparations for conflict with China.

The military drills involve around 25,000 US military personnel, of which 2,500 will come from outside South Korea, operating alongside 75,000 South Korean troops. The US has 28,500 troops stationed permanently in South Korea and is currently restructuring its bases in the country as part of its broader reorganisation of American military forces in the Asia Pacific.

North Korea has responded with militarist threats to launch nuclear strikes on South Korea and the United States “if they show the slightest sign of aggression.” Such reckless and inflammatory threats, which have nothing to do with defending the North Korean people, play directly into Washington’s hands by providing a pretext for its own military expansion and provocations in the region.

The US-led UN Command Military Armistice Commission declared it had notified the North Korean army that the UFG exercises were “non-provocative.” This attempt to portray the joint war games as defensive and benign is false. Over the past five years in particular, the Obama administration has repeatedly exploited exercises with South Korea to make a menacing show of force in North East Asia.

Last November, the US and South Korea formally adopted a new military strategy—Operational Plans 5015 (OPLAN 5015)—that is explicitly offensive in character. In a conflict with North Korea, US and South Korean forces would make pre-emptive strikes on key targets, including nuclear facilities, and carry out “decapitation” raids to assassinate high-level officials, among them North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

OPLAN 5015 provides the framework not only for the UFG war games, but also the Soaring Eagle exercises currently being carried out by the South Korean Air Force, involving some 60 military aircraft and 530 troops. According to the Korea Times, the air force is practising to “pre-emptively remove the North’s ballistic missile threats by proactively blocking the missiles and their supply route.”

The Korea Times also noted that South Korean officials “are paying keen attention to the possibility that Pyongyang would carry out military provocations” during or after the UFG exercises. In reality, the huge exercises, which are premised on war with North Korea, have always heightened tensions on the Korean Peninsula. During last year’s drill, the US exploited the situation to station nuclear-capable B-2 stealth bombers at its bases on Guam in the western Pacific.

The current war games are particularly reckless because of growing signs of instability in Pyongyang. Seoul last week reported the defection of a high-level North Korean official—the number two in its embassy in London. Washington has deliberately sought to destabilise the North Korean regime by strangling its economy through punitive sanctions and isolating the country diplomatically.

The US is boosting its defence ties with South Korea as part of its “pivot to Asia” and war drive against China. Earlier this month the Obama administration approved the sale of military GPS systems to South Korea to improve the capability of its Korea GPS Guided Bomb. On August 14, the Yonhap news agency cited a top official in Seoul saying that South Korea would expand its ballistic missile arsenal to be able to destroy all North Korean military installations simultaneously.

The most significant move, however, was the announcement last month that the US will station its Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) system in South Korea as part of its anti-ballistic missile network in the western Pacific. THAAD, which can intercept and destroy ballistic missiles, is not aimed primarily against Pyongyang, but against Beijing. It is part of US preparations for nuclear war with China, which has objected to the THAAD deployment.

Relations between Seoul and Beijing have soured as South Korea has been increasingly integrated into US war plans. Chinese authorities joined their North Korean counterparts in condemning the US-South Korean war games. The state-owned Xinhua news agency criticised US “muscle-flexing,” warning it would “lead to a vicious circle of violence for violence” that could provoke fighting.

Last week, the Chinese military held its own exercises in the Sea of Japan involving a simulated bomber attack on a naval task force. The potential for a mistake or minor incident provoking a broader conflict was also highlighted last week when three Chinese military aircraft flew briefly into an area covered by overlapping Chinese and South Korean air defence identification zones. The South Korean air force scrambled fighter jets to escort the “intruders” out of the area.

Beijing is concerned that South Korea is not only strengthening military ties with the US but also with Japan. Until recently, Seoul resisted US pressure to coordinate more closely with Japan, given Tokyo’s brutal colonial record on the Korean Peninsula before 1945. The US is keen to integrate both its North Asian allies into military plans, pressing in the first instance for closer intelligence sharing, which is necessary to integrate US anti-ballistic missile systems in Japan and South Korea.

Under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, encouraged by the US, Japan has moved to remilitarise and take a more aggressive stance against China, not only over the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu islets in the East China Sea but throughout the region. The Japan Times revealed over the weekend that China had warned Japan not to send its military forces to join provocative “freedom of navigation” operations challenging Chinese territorial claims in another flashpoint—the South China Sea. Such an action by Japan would constitute a “red line”—in other words, could lead to Chinese retaliation.

Five years after President Barack Obama announced the “pivot to Asia,” Washington’s reckless actions have led to a dangerous heightening of geo-political tensions throughout the Asia Pacific. The worsening of the longstanding confrontation on the Korean Peninsula is just one of the potential triggers for a war involving nuclear-armed powers that could rapidly engulf the region and the world.

Rotterdam School of Management (RSM) MBA Scholarships for International Students 2016/2017 – Netherlands

Application Deadline: four application rounds: 4 April 2016, 18 July 2016, 12 September 2016 and 14 November 2016.

Offered annually? Not specified

Eligible Countries: International students

To be taken at (country): Rotterdam School of Management at Erasmus University, Netherlands

Brief description: Rotterdam School of Management at Erasmus University is offering scholarships for international students to study for full-time MBA Programme 2016/2017.

Eligible Field of Study: Business Administration

About Scholarship

Over the past 40 years, Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University has firmly established its reputation as one of Europe’s leading business schools. RSM offers numerous scholarships to support candidates that have been accepted onto the Full-time MBA programme in meeting their tuition expenses. Applicants from outside the home country will often need to meet specific English language/other language requirements in order to be able to study there.

Scholarship Offered Since: not specified

Scholarship Type: full-time MBA Programme

Eligibility Criteria

• The Scholarship is merit-based and thus the RSM MBA Awards Committee will select the candidate based on your MBA application. For example, essays, CV, GMAT, business case (if applicable), admissions interview.
• Scholarship is available to any MBA candidate who has submitted his/her online MBA application to the International Full-time MBA Programme commencing in January 2017 by one of the MBA interview.
• Award is open to high potential candidates who are in need of financial aid to enable them to pursue their MBA degree at RSM.
• Furthermore, the Awards Committee will look at profile or aspects thereof such as nationality, cultural background, gender, experience, upbringing, sustainability etc.

Number of Scholarships: not specified

Value of Scholarship: Each RSM MBA Diversity scholarship will be awarded as a €10,000 tuition fee waiver. Dean’s Assistance awards are available with a value of up to 50% offered as a MBA tuition fee waiver.

Duration of Scholarship: for the period of study

Deadline: There are four applications round: 4 April 2016, 18 July 2016, 12 September 2016 and14 November 2016.

How to Apply

Submit his/her online MBA application to international full-time MBA programme commencing in January 2017 is by one of the MBA interview round deadlines as outlined above. Complete the RSM MBA Diversity Scholarship Application Agreement and email their signed applicant agreement to the RSM Financial Aid Office at finaid-at-rsm.nl by no later than the relevant MBA interview application as outlined above.

Visit Scholarship Webpage for details

Scholarship Provider: Rotterdam School of Management at Erasmus University, Netherlands

Important Notes: Note: Candidates may only submit one application to the MBA Diversity Scholarship.  If applicant not successful in their scholarship application, they are not eligible to apply to any further additional MBA Diversity Scholarship rounds.

Wolfson Foundation Fully-funded PhD Scholarships for International Students 2016/2017 – UK

Application Deadline: 1st September, 2016

Offered Auunally? Yes

Brief description: Doctoral (DPhil) research Scholarships in Humanities for students of all nationality to study in one of nine selected UK Universities including University College London, University of Cambridge, University of Edinburgh, University of Oxford, University of Sheffield, University of Southampton, University of Warwick, University of York, School of Oriental and African Studies.

Eligible Subject Areas: The Wolfson Postgraduate Scholarships will fund doctoral research in three disciplines that align closely with the Foundation’s interests: history, literature and languages.

About Scholarship

The Wolfson Postgraduate Scholarships in the Humanities programme awards funding to support doctoral studies at nine carefully selected universities. The initiative reflects our concerns about funding for the humanities and the potential impact of increased undergraduate student debt on postgraduate studies. Our aim is thus not only to support some of the most exciting students, but also to make a statement about the value of the humanities. We believe that high quality academic research in this field is of critical importance to British society. We hope that this programme might help to attract further funding to the sector.

Scholarship Offered Since: Not Specified

Selection Criteria

Wolfson Scholarships are awarded to outstanding students who demonstrate the potential to make an impact on these fields and to be future academic leaders. They are awarded solely on merit to students aspiring to an academic career.

Eligibility

Candidates should be applying to start a new doctoral course at one of the participating universities.

Please ensure you meet the requirements for entry to your course, including English language requirements.

The Scholarships are available in three disciplines that align closely with the Foundation’s interests: history, literature and languages. The Scholarships are available for doctoral research only and will be paid over three years. For full-time students, it is expected that students complete their doctorate in three years.

Number of  Scholarships: Twenty seven scholarships are funded each year at nine universities across the UK

Scholarship Benefits: The scholarships are worth some £27,000 each year (over three years), and cover fees, provide a maintenance stipend, and provide for some research and training costs.

Duration of Scholarship: Three (3) years

Eligible Countries: The scheme is open to all nationalities including African countries. Applicants should be intending to return to their country of ordinary residence following their studies.

To be taken at (country): The participating universities are selected using a formula based on their research record. Institutions currently involved in the programme are: University College London, University of Cambridge, University of Edinburgh, University of Oxford, University of Sheffield, University of Southampton, University of Warwick, University of York, School of Oriental and African Studies. Individuals should apply directly to the university and not to the Foundation.

How to Apply

Candidates should apply for graduate study to any of the participating institutions. The recipients are nominated by their host university, and enquiries should be directed to the relevant university in the first instance.

Visit scholarship webpage for details

Scholarship Provider: Wolfson Foundation UK: The Wolfson Foundation is a charity that awards grants to support and promote excellence in the fields of science and medicine, health, education, and the arts and humanities.

Arctic Death Rattle

Robert Hunziker

As of August 17th U.S. Naval Research Lab measurements of Arctic sea ice over a 30-day period “shows that the multi-year sea ice has now virtually disappeared,” Storms over Arctic Ocean, Arctic News, August 19, 2016. This means the Arctic has lost its infrastructure. It’s gone.

That means no more 20’-25’ multi-year thick ice, leaving two-dimensional “ice extent” with little thickness and no substantial mass, which charlatans use to prey upon the public’s climate science ignorance by crowing about how far and wide the “ice extent” is during freeze-over so that anthropogenic global warming is made to appear as a hoax. These keynote mountebanks at staged speaking events mislead the public about climate change. They’re found high and low.

In turn, the Arctic negatively affects the entire Northern Hemisphere (source: Jennifer Francis, Instit. of Marine and Coastal Sciences) by altering jet streams at 30,000-40,000 feet altitude, which turns normal weather patterns upside down, wreaking havoc throughout the hemisphere. But, much more significantly, loss of Arctic ice exposes the planet to risks of a crushing blow to the planetary ecosystem, without warning.

Going forward, Arctic ice will consist of young, thin, new yearly ice that easily fractures, turns to slush, turns darker, much more prone to absorbing sunlight, which, unfortunately, could bring on a worldwide catastrophe. Fasten your seat belts!

Ever since the last Ice Age, the Arctic has performed a huge favor by serving as a deep freeze over gigatons of frozen methane (CH4). That locked-in-ice methane, especially in shallow waters where it can make it to the surface in bubbles (already studied by teams of scientists), is a beastly monster beyond anything Hollywood has ever dreamed; it makes Godzilla look like a little whippersnapper.

Natalia Shakhova, head of the Russia-U.S. Methane Study at International Arctic Research Center, University of Alaska believes it is possible that a 50-gigaton (Gt) burp of methane erupts along the shallow waters (50-100 m) of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, thereby actuating a fierce self-reinforcing feedback process leading to runaway global warming (5Gt of CH4 is currently in the atmosphere). In turn, life on Earth hits a thud!

Still, it’s important to note that the “50-gigaton burp of methane” theory is extraordinarily controversial among climate scientists. Whereas, the startling loss of Arctic ice mass is irrefutable via actual measurement, and it is glaring evidence of global warming, as heat melts ice!

The Guardian’s ace environmental editor John Vidal recently published an article entitled Time to Listen to the Ice Scientists About the Arctic Death Spiral, The Guardian, August 18, 2016, wherein he states: “The Arctic’s ice is disappearing. We must reduce emissions fast, or the human catastrophe predicted by ocean scientist Peter Wadhams will become reality.”

Professor Peter Wadhams (University of Cambridge) has a new book due for release September 1st, 2016 A Farewell to Ice, A Report from the Arctic (Publ. Allen Lane). According to Vidal’s Guardian article, Wadhams’ book offers a new slant on the climate change controversy: “Because Peter Wadhams says what other scientists will not, he has been slandered, attacked and vilified by denialists and politicians who have advised caution or no-action.”

“He and other polar experts have moved from being field researchers to being climate change pioneers in the vanguard of the most rapid and drastic change that has taken place on the planet in many thousands of years. This is not just an interesting change happening in a remote part of the world, he says, but a catastrophe for mankind.”

All of which begs the question: Is runaway global warming a possibility within current lifetimes?

Yes, it is certainly possible if, as Dr. Wadhams suggest, an ice-free Arctic triggers rapid acceleration of climate change. Accordingly, Wadhams beckons people who study climate change to speak up, tell the truth, don’t hold back.

After all, it is already public knowledge that scientists have been tweaking their own work by downplaying the severity of climate change in order to preserve grants and avoid ridicule, and dodge rabble-rousing, extremist name labeling, which can freeze research funds and ruin careers.

Leading climate scientists are not willing to honestly expose their greatest fears, as discovered by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! whilst at COP21 in Paris this past December, interviewing one of the world’s leading climate scientists, Kevin Anderson (University of Manchester) of Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research/UK who said: “So far we simply have not been prepared to accept the revolutionary implications of our own findings, and even when we do we are reluctant to voice such thoughts openly… many are ultimately choosing to censor their own research.”

Forthwith, we know from one of the world’s leading authorities on climate change that climate scientists are censoring (downplaying) their own research, but why?

“What we are afraid of doing is putting forward analysis that questions the paradigm, the economic way that we run society today… We fine-tune our analysis so that it fits into the economic reality of our society, the current economic framing. Actually our science now asks fundamental questions about this idea of economic growth in the short term, but we’re very reluctant to say that. In fact, the funding bodies are reluctant to fund research that raises those questions,” Top Climate Expert: Crisis is Worse Than We Think & Scientists Are Self-Censoring to Downplay Risk, Democracy Now! Dec. 8, 2015.

Dr. Anderson’s last sentence is worth repeating because it goes to the heart of the debate about climate research bias: “In fact, the funding bodies are reluctant to fund research that raises those questions.” To that end, money dictates science. Hmm! Shouldn’t it be the other way around?

Along with Wadham’s unambiguous point-blank warning of serious trouble ahead, Anderson’s revelation is all the more reason to stop and think and act, each and every person, especially leaders because the accumulation of all wars, of all natural disasters, of all famine and heartache throughout all time pales in comparison to a blindside hit by out of control intense climate change, perhaps driven by runaway global warming.

The likely upshot of out of control intense climate change, beyond catching humanity with its pants down, is rapid increase in sea level flooding coastal cities, embedded droughts diminishing or destroying agricultural production, severe storm activity, and horrific heat throughout the mid latitudes, resulting in panic, illness, and sudden death (happening now). The world turns chaotic. Life turns difficult. The American dream turns horribly sour within a generation.

But, the preponderance of published science on climate change leads to the conclusion that such an event is far off in time, decades or in some cases more than 100 years away, and in some cases nothing to worry about, which is the intermittent “gradualists” viewpoint.

Whereas sorrowfully, in point of fact, there is already evidence indicating that the worst-case scenario is in its early stages. Just read Wadhams’ book. The only question going forward is whether climate change rapidly accelerates as an out of control defiant monster or evolves little by little, in which case the gradualists will be correct, meaning future generations can fight the demons of ecosystem collapse.

In any case, anthropogenic (human influenced) climate change/global warming is openly and plainly a deadly serious dilemma that in some cases is severe, happening right under society’s collective nose, for instance, the loss of Arctic sea ice, or 95% of Greenland’s surface turning to slush for the first time in recorded scientific history (1-2 mile thick ice = 23’ sea rise), or Swiss Alps’ glaciers turning into Land O’ lakes, or the Everest base camp glacier turned to stone, or the permanent closing of the world’s highest ski resort Chacaltaya at 17,785 feet turned to rock, or Chinese drought destructiveness doubling over the decades, or Antarctica’s Totten Glacier 90×20 miles irreversibly cascading, or Antarctica’s Pine Island Glacier retreating at fastest rate of any ice mass on Earth, or North Carolina’s Outer Banks irreversibly losing isle land mass to the sea, and the list goes on, and on, and on.

Still, people in key American leadership positions, like Donald Trump, publicly state: “Global warming is a hoax.”

Labouring Hours: Sweden’s Six-Hour Working Day

Binoy Kampmark

“The establishment of a normal working-day is the result of struggle between capitalist and labour.”

Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Ch 10

Lengthy hours of work are never a good recipe for feeding the productivity machine.  In Calvinist notions of hard work, the harder such toil is engaged in, the greater the prospects of gain. Combined with industrial rapacity, this doctrine produced terrible results for the toilers of the Industrial Revolution.  Men, women and children were drawn into the machine and ruined to the sound of rising capital. What, however, of actual productivity?

Karl Marx, ever the historical digger, was onto the point in Chapter 10 of Das Kapital: lengthier working days do not a more productive worker make.  Taking aim at his ever familiar target of capital, “the labourer is nothing else, his whole life through, than labour-power, that therefore all his disposable time is by nature and law labour-time, to be devoted to the self-expansion of capital.”

Those things such as time spent for education and intellectual development; or social intercourse and “the free play of … bodily and mental activity, even the rest time on Sunday” would be mere “moonshine”.  Capital, having a “were-wolf hunger for surplus-labour” usurps “the time for growth, development, and healthy maintenance of the body.”

Sweden has been in the news of late for attempting to take the Marxist spirit to heart, with employers seeking to maximise the value of labour from the shorter work time offered.  The latest reduction will take the form of a six-hour working day, though trials were already taking place last year.

Some work places in Sweden will not find the moves particularly novel – the Toyota centres in Gothenburg have been engaging in the practice for 13 years. Staff have registered levels of high satisfaction, which has been rewarded with low turnover rates and, shockingly to those across the Atlantic, high profits.

Linus Feldt, CEO of the Stockholm-based app developer Filimundus, has had his reservations of the eight-hour day for years.  “To stay focused on a specific work task for eight hours is a huge challenge.”  His strategy entails using pauses, improving the work mix “to make the work day more endurable.”

Sweden’s more than mere flirtation with this idea has its roots in a broader historical debate.  The balance between work and leisure, along with the ever increasing rise of capital, has been the battle of industrialised societies, typified by the rise of organised labour.

Australasia, in its pugnacious infancy, tended to be strides ahead of the pack in accepting that more leisure, better working conditions, and importantly, less work hours, would be productive to company profit and physical health.  Chartist men such as James Stephens, a Welsh-born agitating mason derided by the Melbourne Daily Herald as a “stupid mischievous blockhead”, saw organised unionism as a weapon to blunt the broader ravages of unaccountable capital.

On April 21, 1856, stonemasons working on the site of the University of Melbourne made their point in marching on Parliament House, largely at Stephens insistence.  The result of their pluckiness?   The 48-hour week.

Some of their views were sensibly observant, and the working movement in the antipodes took heed of the stresses inflicted by the environment on the working body for lengthy periods of time.  As the Victorian Operative Mason’s Society Report (11 June, 1884) observed, “the period of labour under the relaxing influence of an Australian climate, cannot extend to the length of daily toil in the mother country [Britain], without sacrificing health, and shortening the duration of human life.”

In the manner that now sounds like textbook socialism, the mind of such working folk would also be deemed important.  This entailed, as the same report noted, “The self-cultivation… of the ‘adult man’.”  Give the worker time to read and study, “and to progress in knowledge and virtue.”

Airing and feeding the mind, while providing more leisure, would also have a lasting effect on family life and engender in a citizen the values of civic understanding. The “natural flow of the animal spirits” needed to be unleashed, and in so doing would come “self-respect, and respect for other, for law, order, and forms so essential to freedom, domestic virtues and good citizenship.”

Other states have made the shorter work week famous in the last few decades.  France’s 35-hour working week was introduced in 2000 by a socialist government as a threshold measure “above which overtime or rest days start to kick in.” With a certain bitter irony, it is the current socialist government that is having severe reservations about it.

The vigilantes of productivity always saw little merit in cutting back such hours.  The 35-hour week entailed higher labour costs while tying French hands in the global market place.  “Labour reforms” have been touted as necessary to unclog the disincentives.

As Prime Minister Manuel Valls explained in January, “Exemptions to the legal duration of working time at 35 hours are no longer a violation of the law.”  Economy minister Emmanuel Macron preferred to be even blunter, suggesting that legal requirements to pay overtime rates of at least 10 percent more than the standard rate should be abolished altogether.

Even in Sweden, there are those sceptics who insist that less work risks becoming a matter of idleness.  The mining town of Kiruna, for instance, saw a trial that ran for 16 years examining the shorter work day.  It was abandoned amidst political acrimony and a lack of reliable data.

For all that, it is still comforting to note that cultural changes in environment, given the appropriate nudge along, do help. While the six-hour day, like any such work programs, can become a caricature, they are very much part of a social welfare sentiment distinctly absent in US or Japanese workplaces.  The rationale is hard to fault: the happier the employee, the greater the productivity.