Equality for Women Helps Reduce World Hunger

Cesar Chelala

Giving women the same tools and resources as men, such as financial support, education and access to markets, could reduce the number of hungry people worldwide by up to 150 million. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and other humanitarian agencies estimate that 925 million people across the world are undernourished. Of this number, 906 million live in developing countries. Particularly in these countries, the greatest burden of economic crises falls on those less able to sustain it, women and children.

Women make up 43 percent on average of the agricultural labor force in developing countries, and they tend to be kept in low-paying jobs and have, for the most part, seasonal or part-time work. Plots managed by women tend to be lower, on average, than those managed by men, and they have less access to tools and technology compared to male farmers.

Women have the traditional role of both producers and carers for children, old people, the sick, the handicapped and all those who cannot care for themselves. In Africa, women work an average of 50 percent longer each day than men. I remember visiting the countryside in Equatorial Guinea where I saw what is called casa de la palabra (house of the word), where men gather in the afternoon after work and spend several hours chatting or trying to solve problems in the village or community while their wives continue to work at home or in the fields. A similar situation exists in other African countries.

There is still little recognition of the critical role that women can play in increasing agricultural and business productivity. Although some commercial banks are lending more to women entrepreneurs to develop new agricultural services and products, some interventions such as land tenure rights and access to markets continue to keep women out of the picture. In Cameroon, for example, women hold less than 10 percent of land certificates, even though they do a significant part of the agricultural work.

According to the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) improving women farmers’ access to adequate resources, technologies, markets and property rights can help them increase agricultural productivity and improve household nutrition.

This is relevant since many people still go hungry every day, and this has an impact on their nutritional status. According to the Global Food and Farming Futures, the existing food system is failing half of the people in the world today. It estimates that one billion people lack crucial vitamins and minerals in their diet.

In China, several micronutrient deficiencies, such as iron, iodine, vitamin A and folate are still frequent in the Chinese population, particularly in rural areas. It has been estimated that five percent of Chinese children are anemic, and also five percent of children have goiter, a consequence of iodine deficiency.

There is now a momentum for women’s entrepreneurship in China, which now has over 29 million female entrepreneurs, almost 25 percent of the national total. Many of them are engaged in high tech industries and construction, and are a motor behind the upgrading of traditional industries and the use of new technologies.

According to the 2010 Global Hunger Index, which analyzes prevalence of hunger in developing countries, China ranks ninth in a survey of 84 countries. This correlates with the country having a “moderate” national hunger problem. Neighboring India ranks 67th; this corresponds to an “extremely alarming” hunger situation.

To aid eliminate hunger, women should have easier access to better seeds, fertilizers and time-saving technologies, as well as better credit, and more land and job opportunities. In Kenya, it has been shown that women with the same levels of education, information, experience and farm resources as men increased their farming yields by 22 percent.

Improved women’s education is part of the process for achieving women’s equality. It has been repeatedly proven that educating girls boosts countries’ prosperity and overall women’s well being. In addition, better educated women are more productive, and raise healthier and better educated children. Women probably are the world’s most underutilized resource. Giving them equal rights as men will significantly help in ending world hunger.

Why Threats Between EU and Turkey Ring Hollow

Patrick Cockburn

The decibel level of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s denunciations are invariably so high that it is impossible to know how seriously to take them. He has threatened to let loose a wave of three million Syrian and Iraqi refugees who would then try to make their way from Turkey to Europe at a time when anti-immigrant feeling is helping fuel the rise of the populist far right.

Erdogan’s threat came after the European Parliament passed a non-binding resolution to freeze talks on Turkey joining the EU as a protest against Ankara’s mass arrest of dissenters in the wake of the failed military coup on 15 July. The purge is extending way beyond those connected to the coup and liberals and Kurds are being detained and the few remaining independent parts of the media are being closed down or brought under control.

The EU correctly talks about “a disproportionate response to the coup” while Erdogan complains that the initial EU condemnation was so tardy and conditional as to suggest that the EU states would have preferred him to be overthrown.

The Turkish leader now says that he may tear up the agreement signed in March to keep potential migrants inside Turkey in return for accelerated talks on Turkey’s EU membership, visa-free travel for Turks coming to Europe and financial aid. “We are the ones who feed 3 million to 3.5 million refugees in this country,” said Erdogan. “You have betrayed your promises. If you go any further those border gates will be opened.”

There is no doubt Erdogan could try to do this, though the threat would have been more potent when it was easier for migrants to move north through the Balkans to central Europe. Border restrictions and fences now make this much more difficult. But the threat of more migrants still has a significant political impact just ahead of the presidential election in Austria in which far-right candidate Norbert Hofer is leading the polls. The success in the US presidential election of Donald Trump’s brand of populist nationalism with a racist cutting edge underlines the extent to which the immigrant wave is resetting the political agenda.

That said, there is an element of shadow boxing in the latest EU-Turkey row. It probably was not a good idea to link the refugee crisis with progress on Turkey’s faltering decades-old bid to join the EU because it wrapped two insoluble problems into one. It raised hopes in Turkey that were never going to be fulfilled and inevitably brought disappointment. On the other hand, it is not in the interests of the EU or Turkey to escalate their dispute beyond a certain level, even though relations are becoming more antagonistic. Both need each other.

All sides are paying a price for letting the wars in Syria and Iraq go on for so long and doing so little to bring them to an end. The EU and Turkey both made critical mistakes, which could have been avoided, and neither have come up with realistic policies. Turkey was for long the sanctuary and transit point for the extreme Islamist armed opposition flooding into Syria. Erdogan and his government were convinced that President Bashar al-Assad’s government was always on the verge of being overthrown though the evidence was much against this.

After 2011 the leaders of the main EU states – notably Britain and France – have had a Syrian policy based on wishful thinking and a belief that their vital interests were not affected by the conflict. They wanted to keep in with their traditional arms-buying allies in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. It was only as Syrian immigrants poured into Europe in 2015 and Isis launched a series of devastating terrorist attacks in France and Belgium that the results of their folly became apparent. Real progress in ending the immigrant crisis means ending the war in Syria.

Winning The Malaria War Without Vaccines

Thomas C. Mountain

For over 10 years now Eritrea, a small country in East Africa, has been winning the Malaria War without vaccines, though much work remains to be done. Since 2005 I have been monitoring the reduction in Malaria mortality here in Eritrea and have seen a consistant reduction of between 70-80%, something almost unknown in Africa and the rest of the 3rd world for such an extended period.

Eritrea’s victories in the Malaria War have been done via old fashioned barefoot doctors distributing and maintaining insecticide treated mosquito nets through out the malaria belt in Eritrea.

Many countries have handed out millions of insecticide treated mosquito nets donated by the likes of the World Bank (51% owned by the USA) only to see the insecticide wear off in 3 months and the nets loose more than half their effectiveness. If you have ever slept under mosquito nets for very long you will find that sooner or later you end up with a hole in the net or touching the net while sleeping. It only takes a couple of minutes for that nasty critter Aegypti species to
smell you out, work its way through the hole or bite you right through the net and voila, you got malaria. Only treated nets prevent this with the insecticide keeping the mosquitos from getting near the net..

So you have to re-treat your mosquito nets every three months to keep winning the malaria war, something Eritrea has been fighting to do for over a decade now. Here in Eritrea if the people in the malaria belt don’t bring their nets in for treatment every three months the barefoot doctors go to them and make sure it gets done. This commitment to basic public health is a hallmark of a socialist country and Eritrea, like Cuba, is at the forefront in doing so despite limited resources.

The other major advance Eritrea has led Africa in is the development of a community network of clinics that can diagnose and provide the right medicine for the type of malaria afflicting the patient.

There is presently a network of clinics such that most of the people in the malaria belt can reach one within 3 hours by foot.

It isn’t complicated and doesn’t take an expensive vaccine or continously less effective prophylactics with nasty side effects, just old fashioned public health, like in barefoot doctors winning the malaria war in Eritrea. It is long past time that the bureaucrats with their fat salaries sitting behind desks at the World Health Organization offices in Geneva, Switzerland started to recognize this. To win the Malaria War, Instead of pushing expensive vaccines, they should be pushing barefoot doctors, a program proven to work for over a decade now here in Eritrea.

Rio de Janeiro faces violent demonstrations amid state of financial emergency

Gabriel Lemos

On November 22, Rio de Janeiro public sector workers held their third demonstration since Governor Luiz Carlos Pezão (PMDB—Brazilian Democratic Movement Party) announced a series of austerity measures in response to the state’s deepening economic crisis.

Among the measures, which were unveiled at the beginning of the month, are an increase in pension contributions from 11 percent to 14 percent, a wage freeze until 2020, the scrapping of social programs, such as a minimum income for poor families, food kitchens and rent assistance for the homeless, and an increase in bus fares and electricity rates.

These measures were aggravated by the state government’s decision to pay the October wages of 38 percent of public servants over seven installments ending on December 5. Pezão’s government has been delaying the wages of public servants since last year, when the economic crisis in Rio de Janeiro and Brazil as a whole intensified.

The austerity package is being discussed in the state’s Legislative Assembly, and the government expects a vote on it by the beginning of December. The Unified Movement of State Public Servants, which represents education, health, culture and security employees, has promised a general strike to prevent the Assembly’s approval of these measures.

The first two demonstrations were marked by violence. The first one, on November 8, with 10,000 public security employees—police, firefighters and prison guards—ended with the invasion of the Legislative Assembly by hundreds of demonstrators. The invasion was led by armed police officers, who occupied the Legislative Assembly for three hours shouting slogans against the governor and the Assembly’s president.

At the same time, they chanted slogans in support of the ultra-rightist federal deputy Jair Bolsonaro (PSC—Christian Social Party), a defender of Brazil’s former US-backed dictatorship and advocate of military rule.

One day after the invasion of the assembly, Governor Pezão abandoned one of the most controversial measures in the proposed austerity package, extracting a temporary 30 percent contribution from retired public employees to their pensions.

The second demonstration, on November 16, saw the participation of the security employees as well as thousands of teachers, health care workers and cultural employees. Even with the Legislative Assembly surrounded by two fences and guarded by both military police shock troops and the national security force, a group of demonstrators overturned the barriers and almost got inside.

The military police reacted violently with volleys of tear gas, rubber bullets and water cannon, turning the area surrounding the Assembly into a battlefield. Two police officers protecting the building deserted their posts and were arrested.

Early that day, the public security workers held a rally in front of the Legislative Assembly with banners and a sound truck calling for the military to intervene. One police officer attending the demonstration said to the UOL website that “everyone here is in favor of a military intervention.”

With the arrival of the education employees at the demonstration carrying banners of their unions and various left parties, the security employees took down teachers’ banners and a conflict ensued. A security employee speaking on a sound truck asked for the teachers to “put the flags down, this is not a political movement. We have no party. We are public servants claiming our rights,” reported the UOL website.

The participation of the security employees, alongside public workers historically aligned with the left, such as teachers and health employees, in demonstrations against wage delays and the governor’s austerity package has sparked a heated discussion within Brazil’s pseudo-left layers on the class character of the police. The Morenoite tendencies—PSTU, MAIS and MES/PSOL—have a long record of defending police strikes, and all hailed the desertion of the two policemen as a “victory for the working class.” Henrique Carnary, of the PSTU split-off MAIS, proclaimed that “the police are temporary allies” in the struggle against the austerity measures.

Such a statement not only leaves aside the irreconcilable class interests dividing the police, the first line in the defense of capitalist property, and the working class, but also ignores the brutal police violence in Rio de Janeiro.

The police in Rio de Janeiro have the most lethal record of any police force in Brazil, the country with the highest number of police killings in the world. In 2015, there were 3,345 police killings nationwide, a 51 percent increase since 2013. By comparison, in the US last year there were 1,146 people killed by the police, and in Germany, 10.

At the same time, Rio de Janeiro is one of the most unequal states in Brazil, which is the 14th most unequal country in the world. In recent years, the southeast region of Brazil, which includes Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, the most industrial region of the country, was the only one that saw an increase in inequality. It is also a region that has suffered more than 30 years of deindustrialization, in which the state of Rio de Janeiro is no exception.

Since the 1980s, Rio de Janeiro has been the state with the lowest growth rate in Brazil. What growth there was came mainly from royalties from the exploration of oil and gas by Brazil’s state-run energy giant Petrobras and others major oil companies, an industrial activity that grew 54 percent between 1985 and 2006, leaving the state’s economy largely dependent upon this sector. During this same period, the manufacturing industry in Rio de Janeiro declined by 39 percent.

With the fall in oil and gas prices, the state’s economic situation has gone from a surplus of 1.5 billion reais (US$440 million) in 2013 to an estimated deficit of 19 billion reais (US$5.6 billion) this year, turning it into the country’s most indebted state. In April, Rio de Janeiro’s public deficit was the equivalent of 201 percent of its GDP.

After the royalties from the gas and oil exploration, the second source of state revenue for Rio de Janeiro comes from state tax on the circulation of goods and services, which dropped 12 percent from 2014 to 2015, and 17 percent since last year. This drop was caused not only by the economic recession, but also by tax exemptions for large companies. From 2008 to 2013, these exemptions rose to 139 billion reais (US$40.7 billion), a figure that would pay the wages and pensions of 468,621 Rio de Janeiro public servants for more than five years.

Besides oil, construction, auto and beverage companies, the exemptions included H. Stern, Latin America’s leading jeweler. All these exemptions were made as part of a deeply corrupt system, which led last week to the jailing of former Rio de Janeiro governor Sérgio Cabral (PMDB). Governor from 2007 to 2014, Cabral is charged in connection with the Operation Car Wash (Operação Lava-Jato) investigation with a massive kickback scheme involving contracts between the state-run energy giant Petrobras, the state government and private construction companies.

Last June, a month before the Olympic games, Rio de Janeiro became the first state to declare a public financial emergency. On November 22, the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul followed suit, enabling it to delay debt payments and receive federal financial loans. After Rio de Janeiro and Rio Grande do Sul, 13 others Brazilian states may decree states of emergency over the coming weeks due to Brazil’s continuing economic crisis, the country’s deepest in a century.

The government of President Michel Temer (PMDB) is using the need of the states for federal loans to push through fiscal adjustments. Among the measures being demanded are increases in pension contributions and the imposition of limits on any increases in state social spending to the level of the previous year’s inflation for the next 10 years. President Temer has proposed a similar limit in federal social spending after last September’s impeachment of Dilma Rousseff (Workers Party—PT), but for a period of 20 years. The federal Senate is expected to vote on this cap in the coming weeks.

The situation facing public sector workers in Rio de Janeiro is similar to that confronting another 1.5 million public workers in 11 other states. The measures being presented by the state governments are only preparatory for broader counter-reforms that President Temer intends to present next year, including labor and pension reforms.

At the same time, the response of Rio de Janeiro public workers, and the police repression they have suffered in recent weeks, is an indication of tumultuous struggles that the Brazilian working class as a whole will face in the next period.

Canada’s Liberal government boosts employer assault on pensions

Roger Jordan

Canada’s Liberal government is proposing changes to regulations governing pension plans that will boost and accelerate the ruling-class drive to shred workers’ pensions.

Bill C-27, which was tabled in parliament last month, eliminates legal prohibitions on employers retroactively reducing “already accrued” or earned pension benefits.

It is also designed to facilitate employers’ efforts to eliminate defined-benefit pension plans, which guarantee workers a modest income on retirement, and replace them with so-called target benefit plans (TBPs).

Under TBPs, workers’ pensions are not “defined,” i.e., guaranteed at a set rate, but merely “targets,” and employers are not responsible for meeting projected pension-plan deficits. Should there be any shortfall between a plan’s “targeted” pension benefits and its financial resources, the “risk is shared.” Put simply, retirees’ benefits can be slashed and/or workers’ pension contributions hiked.

The Liberals’ Bill C-27 is patterned on a failed Harper Conservative government initiative.

In accordance with Canada’s constitution, the Liberal legislation will only directly impact companies and workers in sectors of the economy governed by federal labour law. These include banks, railways, airlines, telecommunication companies, and Crown Corporations like Canada Post and CBC. But its ultimate impact will be far wider, as federal labour standards have long served as an informal benchmark for governments across the country.

Bill C-27 is so egregious an attack on worker rights that the trade unions, which played a pivotal role in bringing Justin Trudeau and his Liberals to power and routinely boast about the extent of their collaboration with the government, have felt compelled to denounce it as a “betrayal.”

The legislation outlines rules for federally-regulated employers to establish TBPs. While it does not give an employer the unilateral right to transform an existing defined-benefit plan into a TBP, it does allow such a change if employees give their “informed consent.” Employers—no doubt pleading “competitive pressures” and financial difficulties and working in close collaboration with the union bureaucrats—will now seize on this legal device to bully workers into giving “consent,” that is into giving up hard-earned pension rights.

Management of the TBPs will be in the hands of employer-dominated boards, empowered to change benefit rates, i.e., slash pensions, so as to ensure the financial “sustainability” of the plan.

Bill C-27 marks a new stage in the big business assault on workers’ pensions. Since the 2008 global economic crisis, governments and corporations across Canada have moved aggressively to slash pensions, in many cases replacing defined-benefit schemes with defined-contribution plans, in which workers’ retirement income is totally at the mercy of the vagaries of the financial markets. In December 2014, the Quebec Liberal government pushed through legislation slashing municipal workers’ pensions, while dramatically hiking their pension contributions.

On November 16, nearly a month after the Liberals tabled their pension bill, the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) sent a letter to Finance Minister Bill Morneau denouncing Bill C-27 as “an unconscionable betrayal” of workers’ pension rights and complaining that the government had not consulted with the unions in preparing it. The legislation, wrote CLC President Hassan Yussuff, “invites” federal private sector employers and Crown Corporations to shift the burden of pension-plan financial risk onto “workers and retirees” and “will have negative implications for private and public-sector DB (defined benefit) plans in every jurisdiction in Canada.”

Subsequently, the CLC vowed that if the government doesn’t back down it will “mobilize” its members against the bill.

No one should be fooled by this bluster. Yussuff and his fellow union bureaucrats are loyal allies of the Trudeau government, having worked tirelessly during the decade of Conservative rule to promote the lie that the Liberals—Canadian big business’ traditional party of government—are a “progressive” force. While they may bleat about their opposition to Bill C-27, they will do their utmost to confine workers’ opposition to it to impotent protests.

It would have been impossible for the Liberals to have moved forward with their anti-worker pension bill had the unions not demonstrated time and again their loyalty to this right-wing, big business government, and, just in the past few months, sabotaged major worker struggles in which pensions were a critical issue.

Just days prior to the Liberals’ tabling Bill C-27, Unifor, the country’s largest private sector union, rammed through a rotten concessions contract at Fiat-Chrysler, which among other things eliminated the last vestiges of a defined-benefit pension plan for new hires. This followed the pattern settlement that Unifor had imposed in the face of widespread opposition at General Motors and would subsequently impose at Ford.

In 2015, Unifor President Jerry Dias had admitted that allowing the automakers to establish wholly defined-contribution pension plans would be a major concession that would open the floodgates for an assault on defined-benefit pensions across the country. Yet this fall, he claimed that to give way on this issue was no big deal, while threatening autoworkers with job losses and plant shutdowns if they rebelled against Unifor’s Detroit Three pattern settlement and praising Trudeau and his Liberals for their purported concern for autoworkers’ livelihoods.

The corporate media hailed Dias and Unifor for agreeing to the gutting of pensions, with the conservative National Post writing gleefully that it was a “watershed moment” that should open the way for a cross-Canada attack on pensions in both the private and public sectors.

An equally reactionary role was played by the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) and its leader Mike Palecek, a former member of the pseudo-left Fightback group. Despite an overwhelming vote in favour of strike action by 50,000 postal workers in answer to Canada Post’s demands for a major assault on pension provisions, wages and working conditions, CUPW refused to call a strike and dragged out negotiations with management for months. Ultimately, in late August, the union agreed to a short-term, interim agreement that it concedes has in no way removed the threat of sweeping concessions and job losses.

CUPW justified its refusal to mount any job action by saying that nothing should be done to “disrupt” the Liberals’ task force on the post office, which it claimed would listen to workers’ concerns. Predictably, the task force concluded by issuing a report that endorsed virtually all of management’s demands, including sweeping attacks on jobs and the need for pension cuts.

Now the Liberals have moved to further strengthen Canada Post’s hand with their Bill C-27.

This record demonstrates that a mass struggle involving tens of thousands of workers could have developed over recent months in opposition to the attacks on wages and working conditions, including pensions, by the right-wing Liberal government and major corporations. That this did not take place is due to the rotten role played by the nationalist and pro-capitalist trade unions, whose suppression of the class struggle has facilitated the launching of the Liberals’ offensive on pensions, as well as its recently announced privatization drive.

Contrary to the CLC’s claim, the attack on pensions has not emerged like a bolt from the blue. It has long been in the making and the trade unions have been involved from the outset.

The TBP model was pioneered in New Brunswick by the province’s then Progressive Conservative government in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis. With the connivance of the province’s major unions, the Tories imposed drastic pension premium increases and benefit cuts on healthcare and other public sector workers.

In their book The Third Rail, Jim Leech of the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and Jacquie McNish of the Globe and Mail paint a devastating picture of the unions’ utter subservience to the demands of New Brunswick’s big business government. The unions, including CUPE, the nation’s largest, held lengthy consultations with a task force set up by the Tory government, enabling Premier David Alward to announce in 2012 that most of the province’s public sector workers had been transferred to TBP plans.

Leech and McNish write glowingly of the scene in the provincial legislature following Alward’s speech, which union leaders had been invited to attend: “After the premier gave a speech explaining the significance of the new shared-risk pension plan, which would also be applied that day to MLA [Member of the Legislative Assembly] pensions, Alward asked his guests to stand as he thanked them for their co-operation. As they rose, the two-story chamber was soon filled with thunderous applause. Every attending MLA from the … Liberal and Conservative Parties stood to give the unions and the labour lawyer a standing ovation.”

In 2014, the Harper Conservatives sought to take forward at the federal level what their colleagues in New Brunswick had begun, but retreated due to the depth of popular opposition. It required a newly-elected Liberal government with close ties to the union bureaucracy to move forward with the next stage in big business’ assault on workers’ right to a secure retirement.

At least five dead as extreme drought, wildfires ravage southeastern US

Zaida Green 

Dozens of wildfires have burnt more than 156,000 acres across the southeastern US since the beginning of November. The region is suffering a now five-month-long drought, the worst it has experienced since 2007. The states hit the hardest are Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Kentucky and Tennessee.

Thousands of people have been evacuated, over a thousand are sleeping in Red Cross shelters and tens of thousands of people remain in their homes without power.

At least five deaths have been caused by the fires, including the death of one on-duty firefighter in Kentucky. Four of the biggest active fires have burnt more than 10,000 acres.

One of the most devastated communities is the tourist town of Gatlinburg, Tennessee, where at least three people have been killed. Some 14,000 people were evacuated from the town alone, which has a permanent population of just over 4,000. Fire winds hit peak speeds of 80 miles per hour, and sustained at 30-40 miles per hour for over 10 hours on Sunday night.

“We were watching it, but we didn’t really know how bad it was until somebody said we had to leave,” Shari Deason, a Gatlinburg resident told the Knoxville News Sentinel. Deason, her boyfriend, Daniel and her 14-month old son, William, had moved to Tennessee from Mississippi and were living in a motel room. “I didn’t cry last night, and I didn’t cry this morning, but the more I see of all this, I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t know if we’ve got a room to go back to. I don’t know if we’ve got anything to go back to.”

Gatlinburg’s median household income is $32,500, which is $5,000 less than what it was in 2000. The high cost of land coupled with the low-wage jobs in the tourist industry had already left the future uncertain for the town’s residents before the wildfires. A number of the town’s tourist destinations, including Westgate Resorts and Black Bear Falls cabins, have been destroyed by fire. Firefighter Bobby Balding described both sides of Gatlinburg’s downtown as an “apocalypse.”

Fire departments throughout the region, insufficiently equipped and understaffed, are struggling to combat the blazes. “Most of these fire departments are volunteer,” Tennessee Fire Deputy Chief Randall Lockhart told WRCB-TV. “They have a regular job, then they go out and help fight this fire the rest of the night.”

Firefighters from as far as Alaska and Puerto Rico have been deployed to the region to assist in containment efforts. In Dade County, Georgia, at least 27 prison inmates have been deployed to clear combustible materials around evacuated residences. The governors of South Carolina and Tennessee have declared a state of emergency and mobilized the National Guard to assist in debris-clearing and dousing efforts.

FEMA has authorized federal funds to later reimburse 75 percent of firefighting and evacuation costs in Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Kentucky.

Fire investigators throughout the region believe that most of the fires have been caused by human activity, through either careless behavior or arson. However, the extreme weather conditions in the region are what have made them so severe.

According to the US Drought Monitor, the southeastern US has suffered moderate drought conditions since May and severe drought conditions since June, with decreased rainfall and increased transfers of water from the land surface to the atmosphere. Conditions have intensified—since the beginning of November, most of the region has suffered extreme to exceptional drought.

Exacerbating the drought is the La Niña phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation cycle, which produces drier, warmer winters in the southern US.

This year has been one of the driest in several North Carolina counties in 105 years, according to state records. The Tennessee Valley Authority has had to throttle hydroelectric power generation to conserve water. Autumn and winter crops are failing to germinate, creating a higher risk of erosion and flash flooding when the region does see precipitation.

Cattle producers have been forced to feed their livestock hay due to a dearth of pasture, or sell off the animals prematurely.

The head of forecast operations at the National Climate Prediction Center, Matthew Rosencrans, observed that the current drought was not as severe as the two-year drought in 2007, but warned, “Droughts like to beget droughts; once you are in one it is very hard to get out of one.” At one point in the 2007 drought, the city of Atlanta had less than 90 days of water supplies left. The National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center forecasts high odds of below-normal precipitation in the Southeast for the next three months.

A report published earlier this year by the US Environmental Protection Agency pointed to the impact of climate change on conditions in the region. It noted that since 1970 average annual temperatures in the region have increased by about two degrees Fahrenheit.

Amazon worker attempts suicide at Seattle headquarters

Jerry White

A distraught employee leaped off the rooftop of Amazon’s Seattle, Washington headquarters in a suicide attempt Monday morning. The unidentified worker was hospitalized in critical condition after miraculously surviving the 12-story fall from the Apollo building, one of several structures at the South Lake Union campus where 20,000 employees of the online retail giant work.

Before trying to take his life, the worker sent an email seen by hundreds of co-workers and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos criticizing the way the company handled his request to transfer to a different department, according to a person familiar with the situation who spoke to Bloomberg News .

The worker had recently put in the request but was placed on a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP), a status that means likely termination in three months or less for not meeting work quotas and other company demands. In the email, the worker “hinted that he might harm himself,” the person who asked not to be identified told Bloomberg.

Amazon officials would not reveal the content of the email and issued a cursory statement to the media, saying, “Our thoughts are with our colleague as he continues to recover. He’s receiving some of the best care possible and we will be there to support him throughout the recovery process.”

While many details are still unknown and conditions are relatively different, the tragedy cannot but remind one of the suicides of Chinese workers facing unbearable conditions at electronics manufacturing firm Foxconn. After an international furor following 14 deaths in 2010, the maker of Apple and Samsung phones installed netting and forced workers to sign pledges that they would not kill themselves.

Monday’s event in Seattle sheds light on the realities of the “new economy” in the United States and the working conditions at Amazon, which employs 268,000 full- and part-time employees worldwide and plans to hire another 120,000 temporary workers in the US for the holiday season.

“The suicide attempt is terrible,” Michael Subit, an attorney in Seattle who has handled unfair termination cases brought by Amazon workers, told the World Socialist Web Site. “Certainly being put in the Performance Improvement Plan frequently leads to termination in a couple of months. Sometimes a worker succeeds, but more often than not they are let go.

“I am not a medical doctor, but for someone who has legally represented workers for 25 years I know that work is so fundamental to how workers define themselves. The prospect of losing their livelihoods also means the prospect of losing themselves, and it could trigger serious emotional responses from workplace violence to attempted suicide.”

In 2015, Amazon reached $100 billion in revenue for the first time, and it currently has a market capitalization of nearly $300 billion. Company CEO Jeff Bezos has a net worth of $66 billion and is number two on the Fortune 400 list for America’s richest people. He added $20 billion to his net worth over the 12 months through September 2016.

Bezos has championed the use of technology and data collection not only for determining the buying habits of consumers but also for imposing a relentless drive to sweat more output from warehouse workers, delivery drivers and office workers.

Conditions inside of Amazon’s giant “fulfillment centers” are notorious, with “pickers” expected to pull 100 items or more per hour and walk more than 12 miles over the course of a shift to fill orders. The handheld scanners workers use to locate items in the warehouses allow managers to track precisely how long it takes to fill an order, with those failing to “make rate” subject to losing their jobs. In 2011 it was revealed that workers at an eastern Pennsylvania center were working in 100-degree heat, with ambulances waiting outside to take away those collapsing from exhaustion.

In August 2015, the New York Times did an exposé of conditions facing developers, engineers, finance specialists and other office workers who regularly labor 80-85 hours a week and face cutthroat competition to retain their jobs and positions. In its offices, “Amazon uses a self-reinforcing set of management, data and psychological tools to spur its tens of thousands of white-collar employees to do more and more.”

“The company is running a continual performance improvement algorithm on its staff,” Amy Michaels, a former Kindle marketer, told the Times.

“Even many Amazonians who have worked on Wall Street and at start-ups say the workloads at the new South Lake Union campus can be extreme: marathon conference calls on Easter Sunday and Thanksgiving, criticism from bosses for spotty Internet access on vacation, and hours spent working at home most nights or weekends.”

Office workers are subjected to monthly “business reviews” where they are criticized for not meeting “team goals.” Workers are encouraged to use the “Anytime Feedback Tool” to inform on co-workers in comments only management reads. Because team members are ranked, and those at the bottom eliminated every year, “it is in everyone’s interest to outperform everyone else,” the Times reported.

Every year there is an Organizational Level Review where managers debate the rankings of their subordinates, assigning and reassigning names to boxes in a matrix projected on the wall also known as “stack ranking” or “rank and yank.” The newspaper noted, “As the hours pass, successive rounds of managers leave the room, knowing that those who remain will determine their fates.”

In addition to these annual cullings—referred to as “Purposeful Darwinism” by one former top Amazon human resource director—the company regularly threatens to terminate workers who take time off because of illness, pregnancy, caring for elderly parents or other pressing family needs.

“A woman who had breast cancer was told that she was put on a ‘performance improvement plan’—Amazon code for ‘you’re in danger of being fired’—because ‘difficulties’ in her ‘personal life’ had interfered with fulfilling her work goals,” the Times wrote. Another female worker who suffered a miscarriage was put on a PIP, telling the Times, “I had just experienced the most devastating event in my life” only to be told her performance would be monitored “to make sure my focus stayed on my job.”

Subit said he is now working on a class action case brought by Amazon delivery drivers against the company and its subsidiaries. “This is a significant issue regarding the ‘Gig Economy,’ because the company is avoiding classifying its drivers as employees. The complaint charges that Amazon.com and Amazon Logistics are misclassifying drivers as ‘independent contractors’ so they don’t have to pay minimum wages and overtime.”

These conditions are not limited to the US. According to a BBC report, Amazon drivers in the United Kingdom are forced to speed, and some had to urinate or defecate in their trucks, in order to meet the company’s demanding delivery schedules.

Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post, wields significant political power. Last May he was a guest at the White House, where he joined the Obamas in announcing Amazon’s plan to hire 25,000 veterans and military spouses. A vocal critic of Donald Trump, Bezos quickly congratulated the Republican after the election, tweeting, “I for one give him my most open mind and wish him great success in his service to the country.”

Last week, a US District judge in Cincinnati ordered a halt to a strike by pilots for Air Transport Services Groups, which hauls packages for Amazon.com. Two hundred and fifty pilots struck November 22 to protest manpower shortages.

Granting ABX Air’s request for a temporary restraining order during Amazon’s peak sales period—from Thanksgiving through so-called Cyber Monday—US District Judge Timothy Black declared, “The public expects that purchases and shipments will be delivered in a timely fashion. Absent an injunction, ABX, its customers and the public will suffer immediate, irreparable harm. Imagine Christmas without Amazon!”

Trump forms a Wall Street government to attack health care and workers’ rights

Patrick Martin

Major US newspapers reported Tuesday night that President-elect Donald Trump has selected Steven T. Mnuchin, a former Wall Street banker who served as Trump’s campaign finance chairman, to be the next secretary of the treasury, the most influential cabinet position in terms of economic policy and the jobs and living standards of working people. The appointment is to be formally unveiled on Wednesday.

This follows Trump’s appointment of Representative Tom Price of Georgia, a leading right-wing Republican and opponent of Medicare, to head the Department of Health and Human Services. This department oversees Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, which account for the vast bulk of domestic social spending by the federal government.

There were also press reports that the much-rumored nomination of billionaire speculator Wilbur Ross as secretary of commerce would be announced shortly, and that Elaine Chao, the wife of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and a cabinet member in the George W. Bush administration, would be named as secretary of transportation.

Trump has already named another billionaire, school privatization advocate Betsy DeVos, wife of Amway heir Dick DeVos, to be secretary of education.

With these appointments, the general outlines of the new administration’s domestic policies are clear. Far from Trump’s demagogic claims that he would “drain the swamp,” the corrupt nexus between Wall Street and Washington is tighter than ever.

In many ways, the Trump administration represents the fusion between the two, with prominent members of the financial aristocracy, including three of the 500 or so US billionaires—Trump, Ross and DeVos—taking leading positions in the nation’s capital.

Every non-billionaire cabinet appointment announced by Trump is a millionaire or multi-millionaire. These include Senator Jeff Sessions, Representative Tom Price, Elaine Chao and, of course, Mnuchin, a former partner at Goldman Sachs worth upwards of $50 million.

Mnuchin is not the first Goldman Sachs veteran—and campaign insider—that Trump has named to a top position. Stephen Bannon, the campaign CEO and former head of the ultra-right Breitbart News, may be said to represent the fascist wing of Wall Street, while Mnuchin represents its more conventional establishment wing.

In selecting a Goldman Sachs alumnus to head the Treasury, Trump is following the example of George W. Bush, who appointed Henry Paulson, and Bill Clinton, who appointed Robert Rubin. Mnuchin’s father and brother had long careers at the firm, but Mnuchin left soon after becoming a partner, first working for billionaire George Soros (a prominent Clinton backer in 2016), then going west to make millions as a Hollywood financier, backing some highly profitable action films, including the X-Men franchise, as well as Avatar, Gravity and the execrable American Sniper .

One of his more controversial financial operations on the West Coast involved the takeover of the failed California mortgage lender IndyMac in 2009. He headed a group that bought IndyMac from government receivers, renamed it OneWest, pushed ruthlessly to foreclose on borrowers, and so improved the balance sheet that he sold the company to CIT in 2014 for more than twice the purchase price. Fair housing groups filed discrimination charges against OneWest for refusing to lend or refinance in certain minority areas.

When Mnuchin agreed last summer to head Trump’s fund-raising operation, he was widely criticized in Hollywood and Wall Street circles, which largely backed Democrat Hillary Clinton. Mnuchin himself had donated mainly to Democratic candidates, but knew Trump from previous business dealings. As he told Bloomberg Businessweek at the time, “Nobody’s going to be, like, ‘Well, why did he do this?’ if I end up in the administration.”

It is a virtual certainty that a Mnuchin Treasury will scrap the pretense of regulating Wall Street that was mounted by the Obama administration and the Democrats through passage of the 2010 Dodd-Frank banking bill. The only institutional change accomplished by Dodd-Frank, and a minor one, the establishment of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is likely to be reversed.

While the Trump administration gives Wall Street free rein, it will deepen the attacks on health care for working people that have already reached a new level under the Obama administration. This is the significance of the nomination of Representative Price as secretary of health and human services.

As one headline put it, “Gutting Obamacare might be the least controversial part of Tom Price’s health care agenda.” A former orthopedic surgeon and six-term House member from the same wealthy Atlanta suburbs that elected Newt Gingrich, Price favors a completely market-based health care system, in which no one would be “entitled” to health care unless he or she had the money to pay for it, perhaps with the aid of a totally inadequate government voucher.

Like Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan, a close ally whom he succeeded as chairman of the House Budget Committee, Price seeks to take advantage of the unpopular and reactionary character of Obamacare to launch a frontal assault on all federal health care programs, particularly Medicare and Medicaid, which underwrite health care for 130 million people, including the elderly, the poor and those suffering from the worst illnesses.

Under a program that the Republican-controlled Congress would likely enact, Trump would sign into law, and Price would administer, Medicaid would be ended as a federal entitlement program and transformed into separate block grants for each of the 50 states, which would be entirely free to reduce benefits and standards. Medicare would become a voucher program, similar to the Health Savings Accounts offered by many employers, with the federal contribution to purchase private insurance limited to a maximum of $3,000, leaving the bulk of the cost of health care to fall on the elderly.

Planned Parenthood, women’s rights groups, and gay and lesbian groups all denounced the Price nomination as a signal of the reactionary direction of the Trump administration, warning that it proposed to go back decades, or even half a century, in terms of family planning, abortion rights and other social issues.

Price is an adamant opponent of abortion under all circumstances. He introduced legislation to defund Planned Parenthood programs and as well as a constitutional amendment to outlaw gay marriage. According to one report, he was so hostile to the idea that some women require financial assistance to pay for birth control that he challenged a reporter to “bring me one woman” who struggled to afford contraception.

He will be in charge of a department that sets policy on issues such as who can receive survivor’s benefits under Social Security, whether drugs like Plan B can be sold over the counter, and whether health insurance policies should cover birth control and abortion services.

These cabinet selections demonstrate the absurdity of all attempts by the Democrats to paint Trump in positive colors. This is to be a government of reaction all down the line, from extreme militarism in foreign policy to vicious attacks on jobs, living standards, social programs and democratic rights at home.

The two-faced character of the Democratic response to Trump was typified in comments by incoming Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer. He denounced the naming of Representative Price to run Health and Human Services, saying Price “has proven to be far out of the mainstream of what Americans want when it comes to Medicare, the Affordable Care Act and Planned Parenthood.” At the same time, he hailed the selection of Elaine Chao to run the Department of Transportation, praising her “long history of service to our country.”

Schumer added, “Senate Democrats have said that if President-elect Trump is serious about a major infrastructure bill, backed by real dollars and not just tax credits and without cutting other programs like health care and education, that we are ready to work with his administration.” Actually, the Democrats are ready to work with Trump under all circumstances, and if they cannot find anything “positive” to support, they will invent something.

How I Produce Fake News for Russia

David Swanson

Apparently I’ve written “fake news” on behalf of Russia without ever receiving a dime from Russia or realizing what I was doing. It took the intrepid reporting of the Washington Post to alert me to what I have been engaged in. My “fake news” has been published in at least 18 Russian propaganda outlets included on the Washington Post-endorsed Enemies List.

They are ahtribune.com, off-guardian.org, opednews.com, antiwar.com, beforeitsnews.com, blackagendareport.com, ronpaulinstitute.org, rt.com (that one is actually Russian), consortiumnews.com, countercurrents.org, counterpunch.org, globalresearch.ca, truth-out.org, truthdig.com, informationclearinghouse.info, washingtonsblog.com, mintpressnews.com, and nakedcapitalism.com.

Since everything I write is also at davidswanson.org it’s a safe bet that that’s a Russian propaganda site as well, even though I hadn’t realized it.

In all seriousness, there is very likely Russian propaganda to be found somewhere, since Russia tried to hire me a-year-and-a-half ago to produce it. I turned them down and blogged about their offer. Quite likely not everyone turns them down. But even voter fraud or intelligent Washington Post articles can be found eventually if you look hard enough.

I have also turned down all invitations to conferences in Russia, due to colleagues’ fears of false accusations that it turns out arrive anyway. I have also repeatedly gone on Russian media and denounced actions by the Russian government, due to the fact that that was what I thought of those actions.

And yet somehow I’ve produced a veritable flood of Russian propaganda, most of it not even mentioning Russia at all. I’ve given some thought to how this has happened. Here’s my best explanation:

I sit in front of my computer. I think about the world. I move my fingers in such a manner that words appear on the screen.

Does that help explain it?

Here, I’ll demonstrate:

It is my belief that the president of the United States is Barack Obama. If this is true, then blaming a pipeline in North Dakota on Donald Trump is a chronological error. Admitting that bizarre error doesn’t make Trump one iota less racist or sexist or authoritarian, since it’s a statement about a completely different topic.

It is my belief that any thaw in the new U.S.-Russian Cold War created by the Obama regime will be a good thing, above all because a nuclear holocaust would be horrible. Agreeing with this does not guarantee that Trump will bring it about. Nor does it suggest that Vladimir Putin is a saintly humanitarian. Nor does it constitute a claim that all U.S. presidents should be white males. This is because it is a comment about a completely different topic from those ones.

It is my belief that dozens of things went wrong with the recent U.S. election, none of which eliminate any of the others. Here is a partial list.

The Democratic Party stacked the primary against its politically and morally superior candidate — in ways that we always knew, ways that we know now, and in other ways that many of us suspect.

The propaganda-free U.S. Corporate Media of Freedom stacked the Republican primary against anyone other than Donald Trump by giving Trump billions of dollars worth of free air time.

The Republican governments of several swing states stripped 7 million disproportionately racial minority voters from the voting rolls.

Donald Trump encouraged voter intimidation.

States provided too few voting machines in racial minority precincts.

Prisoners and felons were stripped of their voting rights.

Residents of U.S. territories were not allowed to vote.

The popular vote winner was denied the win.

Congress was determined largely by gerrymandering.

Winner-take-all systems without ranked-choice voting blocked options.

Votes were counted on unverifiable machines that produced the usual suspicious red shift away from exit-poll results.

The media and the presidential debates “commission” shut out candidates, views, and useful questions.

There was no serious reporting on what the candidates would do if elected about climate change, military spending, wars, or poverty.

Serious scandals were passed over in favor of obsessing with lesser scandals.

Among serious scandals that were passed over I would include near the top of the list: Hillary Clinton took money into her family foundation from foreign governments and weapons makers, and then supported weapons sales from those companies to those governments, resulting in massive death and destruction.

Among serious scandals that were passed over I would also include near the top of the list: Donald Trump encouraged racism, bigotry, hatred, and violence, and threatened to “kill families” in wars aimed at “stealing oil.”

Among the lesser scandals that ate up air time, I would put near the bottom: Without any proof, Trump was accused of being an agent of Russia, and Russia was accused of interfering in the election.

Tokenism was, once again, promoted as meaningful.

I believe that every population that has U.S. troops on or within its borders should have a vote in the U.S. presidential election. When Russians or anyone else in the world are pleased by the outcome, I take that to be a good thing. My taking that to be a good thing does not erase any negative aspects of that outcome, because one thing is not identical to lots of other things.

Why did people vote for Trump? For the most part they did not. He got fewer votes than Hillary Clinton, who herself got fewer votes than either of the two candidates in recent U.S. presidential elections. But some voted for Trump for the same reason they backed Bernie Sanders: they wanted to reject the establishment, no matter what form that rejection took. Some voted for him because they bought into his racism, bigotry, and scapegoating. Some simply couldn’t stomach any more Clintons. Some wouldn’t vote for a woman. Some mistakenly believed that Trump would help them. But these groups overlap, as do these reasons.

Why is it acceptable in the United States to make fun of poor white people, to mock their speech and their dentistry, to condemn them in ways that are simply forbidden with other groups? Why is there no Trailer Park Studies Department? Why does the very idea sound ludicrous, while ethnic studies departments of all non-white varieties are very serious institutions? One justification for this is that poor rural white people are racist, and that it is perfectly fine to be cruel to racists. That is simply false and horribly misguided; it is not simply fine to be cruel to anyone. And that fact does not mean that racism and sexism are acceptable, because that would be a completely different claim.

A vicious cycle can be produced in which people who perceive anti-racist and anti-sexist campaigns as directed against them consequently embrace their racism more strongly, resulting in more opposition to their racism and to them. This can be compounded by the usual delusions to the effect that government assistance hurts people, while tax cuts for billionaires help people. This can be reinforced by systems of government assistance that do not benefit everyone, as would a basic income, or single-payer healthcare, or free college, or free job training, or guaranteed vacation, or sustainable infrastructure, instead of systems designed merely to aid and stigmatize the very poorest.

Recognizing the blind spots of identity politics or the madness of the new McCarthyism do not mean that election results are always all to be blamed on liberals, since that conclusion would require erasing numerous other problems listed above.

Imagining that elections carry as much or more importance than building a nonviolent movement for revolutionary change is a deep mistake made by most people on earth, including in Russia.

‘The Coral Was Cooked’: 2016 Deadliest Year On Record For Great Barrier Reef

 Nika Knight

The Great Barrier Reef suffered through the worst coral die-off in recorded history this year, scientists found, with unusually warm ocean water and record-setting bleaching events killing a stunning 90 percent of all coral in the worst-hit area.

Those were the conclusions of a study published Monday by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies.

“One of the worst-hit areas is around Lizard Island in Far North Queensland, where around 90 percent of the coral has died,” reports the BBC. “Dr. Andrew Hoey, whose team charted the area, said the impact was far worse than feared after an initial survey in April.”

“It’s devastating to get in the water somewhere you’ve been coming for almost 20 years, and it’s just knocked it on its head,” Hoey told the BBC. “There’s very little coral cover left there. It was dominated by the acropora—the branching corals—but we lost most of them.”

The BBC reports on what caused the mass coral death:

In February, March and April, sea surface temperatures across the Great Barrier Reef were the hottest on record, at least 1ºC higher than the monthly average.

“Some of the initial mortality was down to heat stress,” said study leader Professor Terry Hughes.

“The coral was cooked.”

Far more has been lost through gradual starvation, after the coral expelled the colourful algae zooxanthella, which turns sunlight into food.

This is what leads to the white, skeletal appearance of the coral, which is left without its main source of energy.

The study also found that the coral which survived the bleaching have now come under greater threat from predators such as snails and crown of thorns starfish.

However, researchers also discovered that corals in the southern areas of the Great Barrier Reef fared better, with the central region of the reef showing only six percent of corals dying off.

“The good news is the southern two-thirds of the Reef has escaped with minor damage. On average, six percent of bleached corals died in the central region in 2016, and only one percent in the south. The corals have now regained their vibrant color, and these reefs are in good condition,” said Professor Andrew Baird of the ARC Centre, who took part in the research.

For the dead coral in the Great Barrier Reef’s northern region, though, recovery seems a dubious prospect, as climate change appears to only be accelerating.

“The trajectory is not good,” Dr. Anne Hogget, a scientist who works at a research station on Lizard Island, told the BBC. “We keep pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and this happened absolutely because of that.”