About the Award: This seventh edition of Pitch AgriHack is a pitching contest aimed exclusively at African businesses bringing technological innovation to the agriculture sector. Generation Africa, a thematic platform of the AGRF will host the competition.
The open competition portion of Pitch AgriHack 2021 will support companies that are driving innovation in agriculture across three categories-Early-stage, Mature/Growth-stage, and Women-led, with prizes totaling US$45,000. A fourth invite-only category known as the AYuTe Africa Challenge, sponsored by Heifer International, will award up to $1.5 million in grants to scalable ventures that are already generating measurable impact for Africa’s smallholder farmers.
Type: Entrepreneurship
Eligibility: The competition will identify and amplify efforts by young innovators to build resilience beyond COVID-19 through digital agriculture products and services. These innovations should be scalable and generate measurable impact in Africa’s food systems.
Selection: The open competition portion of Pitch AgriHack 2021 will support companies that are driving innovation in agriculture across three categories-Early-stage, Mature/Growth-stage, and Women-led, with prizes totalling US$45,000. A fourth invite-only category known as the AYuTe Africa Challenge, sponsored by Heifer International, will award up to $1.5 million in grants to scalable ventures that are already generating measurable impact for Africa’s smallholder farmers.
Number of Awards: Not specified
Value of Award: Winners will receive funding and continued support to scale up their innovations to transform the agriculture sector.
After a war has ended, historians, elected officials, and faith leaders, no less than the people involved, often raise doubts over whether the outcomes were worth the many horrific costs.
But mourning diminishes over time and life for the survivors goes on.
Such a recovery from destruction is no longer assured or even likely in the age of nuclear weapons. World leaders, however, continue to play the game of war in ways that risk the war that could end life on earth.
Recent US actions in Asia are bringing us closer to such a war. The US has long held agreements with many countries, including South Korea, permitting launch facilities for nuclear missiles. Now the US is engaging in a program of assisting Japan in the development of missiles capable of launching nuclear warheads.
The Japanese constitution bans the development and deployment of such weapons. But escalation of threats by US and Chinese officials may threaten this longstanding policy.
This potential for Japan to launch weapons of mass destruction comes at a time of increasing presence of US warships in the South China Sea. China was cruelly devastated by Japan in WW II, something effectively forgotten in the US but not in China. Indeed, a Chinese Communist Party video, still not confirmed as Chinese policy, threatens repeated nuclear attack on Japan in response to anticipated military provocations.
This would amount to a departure from China’s long-term policy of “no first use” (of nuclear weapons). Incredibly, the US has not yet committed itself to a “no first use” policy and has expanded its own nuclear weapons development programs. The recognition of potential danger from such development was clearly visible in the multi-lateral agreement preventing such activity in Iran. The US withdrew its treaty obligations under the Trump administration and has still not been able to revive the agreement.
History in the atomic era contains several examples in which deficiencies in communication during periods of hostility and threats almost led us inadvertently into the launch of a nuclear war.
The atomic scientists who monitor the level of risk have moved the nuclear doomsday clock closer to midnight. Massive expenditures for nuclear weapons development have produced tactical weapons more likely to be used and high yield weapons with destructive capacity far exceeding those used to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
These weapons continue to provoke adversaries, making us less secure. US military policy, resulting in 800 military bases in 80 countries, has not brought us security.
We live in a world in which the other greatest threats to life come from global warming and pandemic illness. To combat these threats international cooperation is needed.
We have developed a framework for such cooperation through the World Health Organization and other agencies of the UN. They have not been perfect but strengthening international collaboration in defeating pandemics and in radically reducing climate chaos may prove to be an insurance policy against falling into a nuclear war. When the reach of weaponry is global the reach of our relationships must be too.
This is far better than relying upon military powers to demonize competitors and continuing to see threats and force as a way that supposedly sane leaders can vie for competitive advantage. Building back better should mean the goods of life, not the instruments of death.
An appropriate agenda would start with rejecting first use of nuclear weapons, ending the budget for nuclear weapons, ending the idea that wars are ever moral alternatives to peaceful conflict resolution and demanding that our government rise to a level of mature diplomacy with all nations.
Negotiations toward zero nuclear weapons should be underway already, something that inspection technology makes practical and doable. We should lead and should incentivize all nuclear powers to join. This is literally a mortal threat to humankind.
Well-meaning military strategists are mired in a very dangerous game. They must be reminded that destroying our planet in a nuclear war would be a betrayal of everything we hold dear.
America has long been a nation at war – war against foreigner nations and peoples and war among its own people. While the wars against those foreign may have been bloodier in terms of lives lost, the wars at home have been the most vengeful.
Since the nation was first settled, generations of Americas have inflicted untold horrors against other Americans – be they Native people; African slaves and Black citizens; immigrants speaking a “foreign” language, non-Christians or from a different nationality or ethnic group; and, of course, those embracing different cultural values.
For all the rants by conservative pundits and politicians about “critical race theory,” media blowhards seem to know little of the nation’s long history in vengeful culture wars. Long forgotten, the New World was besieged by numerous sex scandals during the first seventy-five years of Puritan settlement. For New Englanders and other British colonists up and down the Atlantic Coast, these scandals set the boundaries of acceptable sexual practice. They mostly involved premarital sex (fornication), extramarital sex (adultery), sodomy (homosexuality) and interracial sex. Two offenses were most upsetting: bestiality involving young men and sexual witchcraft among older women. And many people, especially women, were arrested, tried and executed.
Four centuries later, Donald Trump was elected president and, four years later, was defeated in a reelection effort. He is a man at the nexus of two contesting forces that define postmodern American life – hedonism and hypocrisy. Over the course of his adult life he morphed, like a recovering alcoholic, from an up-market hipster to a repentant moralist.
Trump embodies a profound contradiction: he seems to love money as much as sex, both assertions of primitive masculine potency His adult-life trajectory symbolizes the arch of the culture wars, especially the evolving sexual politics over the last half-century. Now, at 75-yrs, Trump’s sexuality has morphed into an aggressive campaign of political vengeance – one joined by desperate Republicans.
The current round of the culture wars began a half-century ago, a social and political reaction to the tumultuous 1960s, a decade that threatened the powers that be. The threat was expressed in the combined insurgency of the civil-right movement, anti-Vietnam War protests, the counterculture of sex, drugs & rock-&-roll, and the emerging feminist and gay-rights movements.
The culture wars were promoted by Phyllis Schlafly’s successful campaign to block the adoption of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Schlafly, a devoutly Catholic and rightwing activist, was a militant anticommunist long affiliated with the John Birch Society. Often unappreciated, her “STOP-ERA” campaign became more than a single-issue “war,” more than an effort to block a proposed constitutional amendment. It set the agenda for an awakened conservativism, the remaking of the Republican Party and social struggle for decades to come.
In the decades between Jimmy Carter’s election (1974) and the end of Barack Obama’s presidency (2017), including the presidents Bush I and II as well as Clinton, only Ronald Reagan aggressively played on culture-war themes to mobilize his predominantly white Christian base. Trump’s election brought to a head the deep social, political and moralistic tensions that had gotten worse over the preceding decades. The American Dream ended for most Americans with the end of the great Depression and WW-II recovery, and a deeply-felt sense of despair and resentment spread throughout the country.
Trump and his administration aggressively pursued the Christian moralistic culture wars. Example of their campaign are the following:
+ Trump backed overturning Roe v. Wade and limiting a woman’s right to an abortion. Before the Susan B. Anthony Listannual “Campaign for Life,” he asserted, “We’re also seeking passage of the 20-week abortion bill, which would end painful, late-term abortions nationwide.”
+ Trump backed “religious freedom” laws that legalizes discrimination of LGBTQ people based on (i) marriage as a union between one man and one woman, (ii) that sexual relations can take place only within such a marriage and (iii) that gender is an immutable biological characteristic.
+ The Dept. of Health and Human Services (HHS) backed antiabortion “crisis pregnancy centers” (CPC).
+ HHS sought to restrict protections afforded transgender people under federal civil rights law.
+ Vice Pres. Mike Pence supported conversion therapy and backed the Republican Party’s 2016 anti-LGBTQ platform that promoted it.
+ Trump sought to suppress commercial sex work with the FOSTA-SESTA — aka “Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act” and “Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act.”
The religious right’s support for Trump 2016 victory reinvigorated the culture wars and archconservatives of every stripe, including white nationalists. They were willing to forego their moral beliefs regarding Trump’s misogynist behavior and questionable business practices for political power. His election culminated in Trump’s appointment of three conservatives to the Supreme Court – Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barret.
In the wake of the 2020 elections, with Trump’s defeat and the Democrats securing control over both Houses of Congress, Republicans have grown ever-more desperate. Driven by Christian fundamentalists and race nationalist, a mean-spirited sense of vengeance seems to now direct current Republic programs, especially at the state level. “Republicans’ frustration with an inability to move policy at a federal level trickles down to more actions in the states,” said Alex Conant, a Republican strategist. “I think a lot of these state legislatures are responding to the demands of their conservative base, which sees the culture wars headed in the wrong direction nationally.”
Among the efforts now being promoted:
Anti-abortion – the Guttmacher Institute reports that as of June 14th, “there have been 561 abortion restrictions, including 165 abortion bans, introduced across 47 states (all counts current as of June 7, 2021). “A whopping 83 of those restrictions have been enacted across 16 states, including 10 bans.”
Anti-LGBTQ – the Human Rights Campaign reports that as of May 7th, 17 anti-LGBTQ bill were enacted into law; in addition, 11 anti-LGBTQ bills were on governors’ desks awaiting signature or veto; and several more were continuing to move through state legislatures across the country.
Anti-immigrant – the Catholic Legal Immigration Network reports that between January and October 2020, 494 pieces of legislation were introduced in 46 states and the District of Columbia; “close to 65 bills and resolutions have been adopted or signed by the governors.” A total of 222 proposed bills had died by July 31, 2020.
Online censorship – in the wake Trump’s being blocked from Twitter, the AP reports that “GOP politicians in roughly two dozen states have introduced bills that would allow civil lawsuits against platforms for what they all ‘censorship’ of posts.
Gun ownership – As of July 2021, five states—Iowa, Montana, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah—have passed permitless-carry laws, bringing the total number of states with such laws to 21.
The most telling expression of Republican culture wars’ desperation is the current assault on voting, the anchor of America’s claim to be a “democracy.”
Since Trump propagated his “big lie” — that his 2020 electoral victory was stolen – and the January 6th attack on Congress, a growing number of states have passed voter restriction laws. The Brennan Center reports that
between January 1 and May 14, 2021, at least 14 states enacted 22 new laws that restrict access to the vote.
The demographic clock is ticking against the Republicans – and they know it! They know that the racial/ethnic composition of the country changing and that by 2050, the U.S. will be a “majority-minority” country, with white non-Hispanics making up less than half of the total population. Equally foreboding, the U.S. is becoming an ever-increasing urban nation with about 83 percent of the population living in cities. Rural America is losing it population to more attractive urban centers (and the ever-growing suburbs), whether these be giant sprawls like New York, San Francisco Miami, Houston and Minneapolis or the dozen or more smaller urban pockets spread throughout the country.
This demographic change is being led by younger American looking for better jobs but better, more interesting lives. And this change was reflected in the 2020 election “Basically 40 percent of the electorate are essentially Gen Z and millennials and some young Xers in there,” said John Della Volpe, director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics who helped the Biden campaign survey younger voters. “They are replacing the Silent Generation and the Baby Boomers. For every one of those who are exiting the electorate, they are being replaced by someone more progressive.”
This is the great fear that is whispering into the ears of Trump Republicans – their historic days are coming to an end and they know it. And to hold on to power, they will reply upon increasing vengeance against all those who threaten them.
In late 2020 the British noticed that coronavirus cases were spiraling upward in the region of Kent. The culprit turned out to be a variant of the COVID-19 virus identified in September, Mutations in the genetic make-up, the RNA, lead to variants. They are still COVID-19 viruses, but they can behave differently. The variant first identified in Kent, UK (scientific name B.1.1.7, WHO name Alpha) is more infectious than the original strain which emerged from Wuhan, China.
The number of other people that each infected person infects is called the basic reproduction number, or R0 (“R naught”), in epidemiological parlance. It’s a measure of the biological characteristics of an infectious agent, but it can be affected by social and environmental conditions and human behavior (e.g. crowding vs. social distancing, ventilation, facemasks). The R0 of seasonal influenza is 1.3. The R0 of measles is around 15. As it emerged in Wuhan, the R0 of the original COVID-19 strain was 2.4—2.6. The R0 of the Alpha variant is 4 to 5.
The Beta variant (scientific name B.1.351) arose in South Africa in October 2020. It was found that the AstraZeneca vaccine was ineffective against the Beta strain – leading to a pause in its use there in February 2021. (The AstraZeneca vaccine may make a comeback in South Africa, since it is effective against the Delta strain, which is poised to become dominant there.)
The Gamma variant (scientific name P.1) arose in Brazil in December 2020. Manaus, in the Amazon, had had a severe epidemic of COVID-19 during 2020, such that it was estimated that 50% of its residents had been infected by October 2020. In December, Manaus experienced a second wave, more severe than the first, during which the Gamma strain was detected. Of note, Gamma caused infections in individuals who had been previously infected – demonstrating that an infection with one strain of COVID-19 might not lead to immunity against a different strain.
The Delta variant (scientific name B.1.617.2) was responsible for the April-June 2021 second wave in India. At its peak, India was recording nearly 400,000 cases and over 4000 deaths per day, believed to be a severe undercount. The true cases may have been over a million per day, and true deaths may have been 10 to 15,000 per day. Between January and June 2021, 3 to 4.7 million excess deaths occurred in India. The Delta variant has a R0 of 5 to 8. Each case of Delta leads to 5 to 8 more cases. An infected individual is likely to infect everybody else in the household. This gives it an evolutionary advantage over even the Alpha variant. The WHO declared Delta a “variant of concern” on May 10. By mid-July Delta was the dominant variant in the U.S.
A study involving 4272 cases of Delta from Public Health England (published July 21 in the New England Journal of Medicine) concluded that two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was 88% effective and that two doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine was 67% effective in preventing symptomatic COVID-19. (One dose of Pfizer was only 35.6% effective against Delta.) In contrast, according to Israeli data from mid-June to mid-July 2021, the Pfizer vaccine was only 39% effective in preventing COVID-19 infection, but this data has not been published in the peer-reviewed literature. Of note, however, vaccination was 91.4% effective in preventing severe COVID-19. On July 22, Los Angeles County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer announced that 20% of the COVID-19 cases in LA County over the past month were breakthrough infections in individuals who had been fully vaccinated.
Parts of the world that have vaccinated their populations with the Sinopharm and Sinovac vaccines from China are experiencing outbreaks. Indonesia, which is currently experiencing a major Delta wave, has relied on vaccines from China.
While the currently available mRNA vaccines (Pfizer and Moderna) are not quite as effective against Delta as it was against the original COVID-19 virus, they nevertheless prevent hospitalization and death. Currently, in the U.S., 97% of those hospitalized with coronavirus and 99.5% of those dying from coronavirus are unvaccinated. Clearly, we must continue to promote vaccination.
Delta has put “herd immunity” nearly out of reach, however. The percentage of the population that needs to be immune [whether from vaccine immunity or from infection with the original virus (I hesitate to say “wild type”) or a prior variant] to achieve herd immunity is derived from R0. From the estimate that the original COVID-19 strain had an R0=2.5, the
which is close to (though a little less than) 70%. This is the basis for government officials telling us that we need to vaccinate 70% of the population. Since the R0 of Delta is estimated to be from 5 to 8, using R0=6,
The next variant of concern (or the one after, or the one after that . . . twenty letters left to go in the Greek alphabet) may not only be as contagious as Delta. It may also more easily escape vaccine immunity (like Beta with AstraZeneca) or natural immunity (like Gamma). It is entirely plausible that vaccines will need to be reformulated to match future variants.
As difficult as it may be to achieve, we must continue to try to achieve herd immunity. In the U.S., FDA approval will allow employers and schools to mandate vaccines. During the current Delta wave, because of breakthrough infections, even the vaccinated should maintain social distancing and wear masks indoors. With businesses pressuring government officials not to impose lockdowns, it will be up to the informed to take measures on their own.
The current Delta wave will also pass. Many will die, but because many of the elderly and infirm have been vaccinated, not as many as in the dark days of January. Since the beginning of COVID-19, the epidemic curves of the U.S. and the U.K. have been shaped similarly. Of course, the U.S. has five times the population of the U.K. (331.4 million vs 68.2 million), so its absolute numbers of cases has generally been approximately five times that of the U.K. – except since late June, when Delta, which hit the U.K. earlier, gave the U.K. an absolute number of daily cases higher than that of the U.S. During the Delta wave, the daily cases in the U.K. approached those of its worst days in early January. The U.K.’s Delta wave appears to have peaked, however. The U.S.’s Delta wave is still in its exponential climb.
Regardless of what the future may bring, the task at hand is to deliver life-saving vaccines to the world. To stave off more India-like disasters around the world, we must support an accelerating, global Covid immunization campaign. The Biden Administration’s decision to support the suspension of intellectual property rights for vaccine manufacturing was a step in the right direction. On June 9, the US announced that it will purchase and donate 500 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine. This is clearly inadequate when fewer than 5 doses per 100 people have been administered in Africa (total population 1.34 billion). U.S. taxpayers subsidized the development of the mRNA vaccines. It is a travesty that Pharma profits so handsomely from public investment. Life-saving vaccines are public goods that belong to the people.
The COVID-19 pandemic is surging throughout South Asia, home to a quarter of the world’s population, with more than 34 million cases and nearly 480,000 deaths reported so far. The real figures are doubtless several times of these numbers, which are notoriously under-counted. The main responsibility lies with capitalist governments, who keep the economy open to guarantee big business profits, despite warnings from medical experts and epidemiologists.
People queue up for COVID-19 vaccine in Mumbai, India, Thursday, April 8, 2021. (AP Photo/Rafiq Maqbool)
Despite the spread of the pandemic fueled by the more dangerous Delta variant, governments are abandoning measures to control the virus, including lockdowns, mass testing, or contact tracing. Even under limited so-called lockdowns, non-essential businesses are allowed to carry on daily work, with factories open, forcing workers to go to work under unsafe conditions, leading to further spread of the virus. With underfunded public hospitals overflowing with COVID-19 patients and lacking oxygen and other crucial supplies, the death toll may rise by millions more.
While the official figures show more than 422,000 lives have been lost to COVID-19 in India, the actual figures are likely ten times higher, between three to five million, according to a study by the US-based Center for Global Development. The public health system is so run-down that most Indians rely on the private hospitals and have to pay about 63 percent of their medical expenses from their personal income. Without health insurance, a mountain of medicals bills is drowning ordinary Indians in debt.
On top of this, the pandemic has pushed 230 million people into poverty. Ordinary people are now starting to sell their gold jewelry after failing to find another job or to start a small business. This is especially the case in rural India. The Indian middle class has shrunk by 32 million in 2020, and inequality is soaring. Even before the pandemic, in 2019, the top one percent of India controlled 21.7 percent of the national income, while the bottom 50 percent had 13 percent. The pandemic has further intensified these obscene levels of social inequality.
A new wave of the pandemic is underway. A recent Massachusetts Institute of Technology study predicted that by the end of 2021, India will be the worst-affected nation with 287,000 new cases per day. With the public health care system already strained and almost non-existent in rural areas predicted to be badly hit by the pandemic, a catastrophe is looming.
Pakistan also faces another wave of death, as it passed the one million COVID-19 cases mark last Friday. Already, 23,087 deaths had been officially recorded by Tuesday, the second-highest in the Indian sub-continent. Hospitals are at capacity or turning patients away as COVID-19 infections surge in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city and its industrial and financial center. The Centre for Chemical and Biological Sciences at the University of Karachi found that the Delta variant is dominant in Karachi, accounting for as many as 92.2 percent of infections.
The health crisis in Karachi shows what could rapidly engulf other Pakistani cities if the virus is allowed to spread unchecked. Even Pakistan’s strained urban health care systems are absent in suburbs and rural areas. Amid the global crisis in vaccine production and distribution, only two per cent of the 216 million Pakistan population have been vaccinated.
The disaster in Pakistan is due both to the criminal negligence and indifference of the major imperialist powers who have controlled vaccine production, and the contempt for workers and toilers of the Pakistani regime in Islamabad. Prime Minister Imran Khan has refused to allocate funds and resources crucial to effectively controlling and suppressing the virus. Instead, his government has limited itself to calls to wear masks, and other limited measures.
Even official figures show that Bangladesh’s situation is very severe. It recorded a record toll of coronavirus, with 15,192 infections and 247 deaths on Monday morning. On Sunday, at least 228 deaths were reported. The total number of cases now stands at over 1.2 million and deaths over 20,000. If the pandemic maintains its current pace, there will soon be no space left in hospitals for patients, the Dhaka government warned on Sunday.
Bangladesh’s health care system is already overwhelmed and facing a shortage of key supplies, such as medical oxygen, Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), and ICU beds. Oxygen demand is about to exceed national oxygen production capability, and hospitals are struggling to treat the unprecedented surge of patients. Vaccination is very slow: Al Jazeera noted on July 27 that only 2.6 percent of Bangladesh’s 165 million population had been vaccinated with both doses.
The pandemic has intensified the already appalling social crisis in the country. Over the last year, a further 20 million were added to the 40 million people who lived below the poverty line before the pandemic hit Bangladesh. An alarming rise of dengue fever has also been reported.
In Nepal, more than 688,000 are infected with COVID-19, and the death toll has reached 10,000, according to official figures. About four percent of the country’s 28 million population has been fully vaccinated so far; only 2.61 million Nepalis had received their first doses by July 8.
The pandemic has led to the collapse of Nepal’s economy, which relies heavily on remittances from migrant workers and tourism. On July 19, the Kathmandu Post wrote that the “central bank Governor Maha Prasad Adhikari warned that external sector stability remained precarious due to an exponential rise in the trade deficit coupled with the unavailability of means to curb it in the near future.”
In Sri Lanka, the official death toll is over 4,000 and COVID-19 cases have exceeded 300,000, though the real figures are no doubt much higher. President Gotabhaya Rajapakse’s government keeps lifting health restrictions, even as the Delta variant spreads in Sri Lanka. It is ignoring repeated warnings by the medical professionals that the country faces a “fourth wave” of the virus. Facing massive debts and a crisis of its foreign currency reserves, it is desperate to boost exports and has pressed industries to continue operations, putting profits before lives.
Not only South Asia, but the entire Asian region is severely hit by the pandemic. This region was home to the 51 percent of the world’s 688 million malnourished people last year. A report by the World Health Organization and UN agencies showed that the number of food-insecure Asians doubled to 265 million in 2020, mainly due to under-investment in social protections.
It noted that most the world’s 74.5 million stunted children under age five live in South Asia. Even before the pandemic, in 2019, nearly 350 million people in South Asia faced severe food insecurity.
Over recent days, southern Germany, Saxony and Berlin have seen further heavy rainfall and flooding. Heavy flooding was likewise reported in Belgium, the city of Dinant near Namur being particularly hard-hit.
Destroyed cars and piles of rubble at the entrance to Walporzheim (Credit: WSWS)
In the parts of Rhineland-Palatinate and North Rhine-Westphalia hardest hit by floods last week, denizens continue to wrestle with the great number of fatalities, injuries and the immense damage caused to homes, businesses, stores, restaurants, hotels, roads, bridges and the entire infrastructure system.
Over 131 people lost their lives in the Ahr Valley of Rhineland-Palatinate. The dead drowned in their houses and apartments or were swept away by the masses of water. The normally tranquil Ahr River became a raging torrent, in places rising eight meters (26 feet) within a few hours. More than 149 people are still missing.
In North Rhine-Westphalia, officials have confirmed 47 deaths from the storm. Here, too, houses, roads and basic infrastructure were destroyed. Belgium has suffered at least 36 fatalities.
Deutsche Bahn, the German railway company, estimates that the damage to tracks, stations and rolling stock in Rhineland-Palatinate and North Rhine-Westphalia total around 1.3 billion euro. By its figures, 600 kilometres of track, 50 bridges, dozens of stations and stops were affected.
Many areas hit by the floods still lack drinking water and electricity. Mobile phone networks remain widely disrupted. The damage to regional housing and infrastructure runs into the billions.
The emergency aid pledged so far by the federal and state governments, totaling 400 million euro, is but a drop in the bucket. This amounts to 1500 euro for a head of household and 500 euro for each additional family member, up to a maximum of 3500 euro.
Many of those affected doubt this aid will reach them promptly. Based on recent experience, notably the repercussions of the pandemic, residents fear that they will walk away entirely empty-handed left to figure out how to recover on their own.
Of the approximately 50,000 people living along the Ahr River, more than 40,000 have been impacted by the flood. Emergency shelters for the newly homeless are often in deplorable condition. Mutual help and solidarity among residents has been tremendous; help from the state, on the other hand, is all but naught, as people from Ahrweiler told a team of reporters from the World Socialist Web Site last Thursday.
As explained by the WSWS in previous articles and statements, the disaster is not the outcome of an unavoidable natural occurrence. That the flood killed so many people and caused such devastation is a direct result of criminal inaction by federal and state governments over many years.
By the time residents were swept away by the deadly torrents, the government and authorities had long been warned but remained inactive, refusing to initiate evacuations and other protective measures. They did not even inform the population about the approaching danger.
The British Sunday Times reported that the first signs of the impending catastrophe had been indicated by satellite nine days before the flood occurred. Then, four days before the flood disaster, the European Flood Warning System (Efas) directly warned the German government. Further warnings, a full 24 hours before the event, predicted with pin-point precision which districts would be worst affected.
In its current cover story, entitled “Schutzlos: Mehr als 170 Tote - Chronik einer vermeidbaren Katastrophe,” [“Defenceless: More than 170 dead—Chronical of an avoidable catastrophe”] the weekly news magazine Der Spiegel explores some aspects of the government’s failure to take adequate precautions and warn the population.
Regarding warnings issued by the German Weather Service, meteorologists and scientists about the severe storms and attendant danger, Der Spiegel concludes: “So it could have been anticipated. In fact, it must have been anticipated.”
The magazine describes how roads were not closed despite the approaching deluge, warning systems were either non-existent or did not work, authorities underestimated the danger and existing disaster control structures did not interact.
The Spiegel report quotes a number of local politicians, among them Hubertus Kunz, the mayor of the small town of Mayschoss on the Ahr, who says he could not have imagined the water rising so high. When suddenly “a level of more than five meters was predicted,” he said he thought, “they’re crazy, that can’t possibly be right.” At least one in four of the town’s residents lost their homes in the flood and at least five people died. “Knowing what we know today, we should have evacuated,” Kunz said.
Der Spiegel also quotes local residents. They confirm that the warnings came too late and that authorities dramatically underestimated the impending disaster. Achim Lorenz, from the district of Ahrweiler, reports that the water level was already over 5.70 meters in the evening, far above previous flood levels.
“All the alarm bells should have been ringing,” Lorenz said. But it was not until much later, around midnight, that the fire department issued its first warning by loudspeaker. They simply asked people not to go into cellars and to stay on the upper floors. On this basis, “really no one” believed “that a historic catastrophe was imminent.”
For Lorenz, like many others, it is clear that governments and authorities are responsible for the fatalities. “There was enough time to adequately warn and save people,” he said, venting his anger. If “those responsible had acted properly, probably not as many people would have died.”
The Spiegel authors expressed concern about the growing anger and opposition among the population. Something “has shifted in Germany,” they note. It is “the question of how safe people can still feel here. Whether citizens have the impression that the state protects them, whether they can rely on it when things get dangerous, life-threatening.”
During the pandemic it became clear that Germany “doesn’t function nearly as well as assumed.” The flood disaster now multiplies “this unease: it proves how ill-prepared this country is for extreme situations.”
Der Spiegel attributes the “problems” to “gaps, omissions and a tussle over competencies between the federal government, the states, and the municipalities,” as a result of which “expertise is not called upon.” This is nothing but diversion and an attempt to conceal the real causes. In both the flood and the pandemic, capitalism and its political representatives are responsible for the suffering and destruction.
In the pandemic, all governing parties deliberately allow the virus to spread and refuse to take the necessary measures to protect the population. Their main concern is to ensure the profits of the financial oligarchy, which enriched itself enormously over the last year. The consequence is over 91,000 deaths in Germany and more than four million, at least, worldwide.
The same inhuman indifference to the safety and lives of the population was again revealed in the flood disaster. Despite decades of warnings from scientists, nothing was done to address climate change. Disaster protection was bled dry, and investments urged by experts, such as a robust nationwide warning system, were ignored. Instead, billions were handed over to banks and corporations and flowed into military armament.
A report by the Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS), released this week, has pointed to the severe financial deprivation and social crisis that is being inflicted on working class households as the COVID-19 pandemic worsens in Australia.
The ACOSS report reveals that requests for food parcels, inquiries about financial assistance and online searches for emergency relief have soared since the beginning of the current outbreak of the Delta variant, centred in Sydney, Australia’s most populous city.
Unemployed workers outside an inner-western Sydney Centrelink office in March 2020 [Source: WSWS Media]
The corporate media has imposed a virtual blackout on the report, which shows that those most affected are people thrown out of work, especially casualised low-paid workers, the households trying to survive on sub-poverty level welfare payments and international workers and students, who have been denied all government income support.
Thus far, the Delta outbreak has risen to above 200 new infections daily in Sydney, with smaller numbers in other states, not the many thousands of cases in other countries. No less than elsewhere, however, governments are imposing on the working class the full burden of the disaster that they have created by refusing to take the necessary measures to protect the population from the pandemic.
For ten days, after infections were first recorded in Sydney on June 16, the New South Wales (NSW) government refused to impose any shut down measures, in line with the demands of the corporate elite for no restrictions that could affect profits, only expanding some mask mandates.
The subsequent “stay at home” orders exempted a wide range of non-essential retail, manufacturing and other business operations. As a result, the outbreak continued to spread across the Greater Sydney region and into the neighbouring states of Victoria and South Australia.
The ACOSS report shows that between the start of the partial Sydney lockdown on June 26, and July 14, online searches for emergency relief services rose by more than 800 percent through Ask Izzy. This is a mobile website that connects people in need with housing, a meal, health and wellbeing services, family violence support and counselling.
Searches for financial assistance on Ask Izzy doubled in Sydney during the same period. Foodbank, which provides food relief, was processing as many hampers a day as it did in a week, before the limited lockdown began—2,500 to 3,500 daily.
International students, many of whom normally work part-time but are excluded from government income support, had made 20,000 requests for food hampers since July 6.
The impact has gone beyond Sydney because infections have spread to other areas and because the economic slump in Sydney, a major industrial and logistics hub, affects the entire country. By July 19, Foodbank had a backlog of over 10,000 food relief requests across the state of New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory.
As at July 22, Foodbank reported that over 12,163 emergency relief hampers had been distributed to lockdown areas across Greater Sydney, the Blue Mountains, the NSW Central Coast and Wollongong, an increase of 160 percent compared to the previous level of need. Foodbank also reported an overall 37.5 percent increase in food parcel distribution.
Similar signs appeared in Victoria during a COVID-19 lockdown from May 27 to June 10. There was a 120 percent increase in searches for emergency relief, with almost one in four searches relating to food relief. Searches for financial assistance rose by 76 percent.
At the end of March, the federal Liberal-National Coalition government scrapped its JobKeeper wage subsidy scheme, which had earlier given employers up to $750 a week to pass onto their employees, and cut the JobSeeker dole payments back to the below-poverty level of $315 a week, or $44 a day.
Young people, including students who are living independently and entitled to government support, were cast back into an even worse situation. Youth and Austudy allowances are just $256 per week, or $36 a day.
These “social security” payments are not enough to live on. If a welfare recipient is living in a private rental residence, they may also get Rent Assistance of up to $70 per week. Yet median rent for a unit in Greater Sydney is $495 per week, leaving a huge gap.
The JobKeeper and JobSeeker cuts were a deliberate drive to coerce workers into low-paid work, thus intensifying the use of the pandemic to slash the wages and conditions of workers across the board. The government has since refused to reinstate even the small JobKeeper subsidies and JobSeeker supplements.
Yesterday, in an attempt to head off mounting discontent, Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced an increase in Covid Disaster Payments for laid-off workers from $600 to $750 per week, and for part-time workers from $375 to $450 per week. People on welfare who lost more than eight hours of employment per week can apply for payment top-ups of up to $200 a week.
All these amounts still fall far below what is needed to live in Sydney. The state Coalition government in NSW has placed a ban on evictions for now, but there is no rent relief, so many tenants confront soaring rental debts that they cannot pay off.
A related ACOSS survey produced some accounts from people affected by the crisis. Their responses gave a picture of the escalating financial and social stress.
One respondent said: “Every fortnight I have to decide whether to use the $40 I have left after rent and bills to buy my prescription medication or food. My landlord hasn’t raised my rent since the start of the pandemic, but that’s not fair on him and his family. Even with that kindness, I still lose 85 percent of my JobSeeker allowance in rent. How is that sustainable?!”
A student who lost hospitality work because of the pandemic, wrote: “After $280 rent I have about $40 a week to survive. This barely covers the cost of groceries. On top of that I have medical bills, phone bills, utility bills, car payments and so on. I also resume uni classes soon and will need textbooks, stationary supplies etc., and the costs of transport/parking. This is simply impossible on Youth Allowance alone.”
An ACOSS analysis of Department of Social Security figures also shows that the western and southwestern local government areas in Sydney with the strictest lockdown requirements, such as Fairfield, Liverpool and Canterbury-Bankstown, cover federal electorates with the highest numbers of people on welfare payments and low incomes in NSW.
In these suburbs, which have the highest levels of infection because they are home to the greatest numbers of frontline workers, only workers whose positions are deemed “critical” are permitted to leave their districts in order to work. These restrictions are being enforced by a heavy police presence, unlike more affluent eastern areas of the city, where the outbreak began.
People in these working-class areas are being doubly targeted. Not only are they being impoverished but they are also being subjected to police-state conditions, designed to intimidate them under conditions of rising social and political disaffection.
Sri Lankan Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse told a meeting with teacher union officials on Tuesday that the government was not in a financial position to address their wage demands. Over 200,000 public school teachers have been holding a national “online learning” strike since July 12 to win higher salaries.
Teachers are also demanding withdrawal of the Kotelawala National Defence University Act (KNDUA), which will be debated in parliament next month. If the Act is passed, the military-controlled university will be able to establish more private fee-paying courses. The Act is part of the government’s moves towards the privatisation of education and the militarisation of society.
Joint teachers protest outside Colombo Secretariat July 23 [WSWS Media]
The teachers’ wage demands were rejected on Monday at the weekly meeting of cabinet of ministers, which is chaired by President Gotabhaya Rajapakse, citing Sri Lanka’s economic crisis. The economy has been heavily impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse was appointed to head a sub-committee and directed to meet with teacher union officials on Tuesday. Those attending included leaders of the Ceylon Teachers Union (CTU), the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna-controlled Ceylon Teachers Service Union (CTSU), the pseudo-left Frontline Socialist Party affiliated United Teachers Service Union, and officials from other educators’ unions.
According to media reports, Mahinda Rajapakse claimed that the government knew that the wage issue “needs to be resolved.” However, he then said that “under the present global situation and the country’s financial predicament, the government was not in a position to rectify the salary issue at this moment.”
The prime minister cynically “assured” the assembled union bureaucrats that the matter would be discussed with the salaries commission and a decision taken soon.
An official statement from the Prime Minister’s Office indicates that the teachers’ union leadership fully endorsed the government’s position. They urged the prime minister to take “a policy decision” to reduce salary anomalies, adding that they had “a clear understanding that an immediate increment for the salaries is not possible due to the current economic crisis in the country.”
In other words, the unions have betrayed the teachers’ salary demands once again, and are now working to shut down all industrial action on the basis of another empty promise from the government to “reduce the salary anomalies” at some unspecified future date.
The teachers’ unions first called for wage increases 24 years ago, in 1997, and have systematically betrayed every struggle by teachers since then on the basis of bogus government promises.
Addressing a media conference on Tuesday, teacher union officials, who are nervous about the rising anger of their members, did not reveal that they had accepted the government’s dictates.
Attempting to put on a brave face, CTSU secretary Mahinda Jayasinghe simply told the media that talks with government had failed. Fearing that any attempt to immediately shut down the strike could see the unions lose control, Jayasinghe said the strike would continue.
Social unrest and working-class anger are rising across the country in response to the efforts of the Rajapakse government and big business to offload the burden of the economic crisis on to the working masses.
Yesterday, university teachers held a one-day strike against the KNDUA. On the same day, hundreds of nurses from several hospitals participated in a lunch-hour protest called by the Government Nursing Officers Union over worsening conditions in the health system.
Last month, the nurses’ unions betrayed national strike action by 25,000 nurses over 14 demands, including professional and risk allowances, staff grade positions with a legitimate promotion system and the easing of unbearable workloads, after agreeing to similar empty promises from the government.
Starting on July 26, teachers stepped up their industrial action, by withdrawing from practical examination-related duties for GCE Ordinary Levels, Sri Lanka’s major exams for Grade 11 students. They have also placed bans on preparing student applications for Advanced Level Examinations.
The mainstream media has unleashed a vicious campaign against the striking teachers. An editorial in the Island newspaper yesterday stated that “government teachers deserve a better deal” but added, “the question is whether this is the right time for salary increases in the public sector. The economy is also on oxygen support.”
Parroting the government’s line, the editorial declared the “pay hike would mean tax increases and the aggravation of the woes of the public struggling to keep the wolf from the door.” It then praised the Rajapakse administration, stating that “it is heartening that the government has paid off a one-billion-dollar bond debt” before deadline and is helping to “boost investor confidence.”
Government, big business and their media are united in their efforts to ensure that profits come before human lives. The struggles of teachers, health workers and other public sector workers further reveals that the unions are aiding and abetting the ruling elite’s efforts to impose the burden of the worsening economic crisis on the working class and the poor.
Nearly two decades ago, the Central Intelligence Agency began its sadistic program of torture and abuse, and the Department of Defense created a prison at Guantanamo to evade U.S. law. We are still learning about the horrors of the Global War on Terror. On July 16, military prosecutors finally asked to erase information obtained through torture and abuse. Several days later, the Biden administration transferred its first detainee out of Gitmo, repatriating a Moroccan man who had been cleared for release five years ago. These two items provide an opportunity to document the inadequacy and the errors of the mainstream media’s coverage of CIA’s unconscionable crimes.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken audaciously claimed that it is difficult to transfer detainees until the United States receives assurances that the “rights of these people will be protected in that country.” In other words, the senior diplomat of the country that tortured and abused hundreds of captives; violated various Geneva Conventions by kidnapping individuals and turning them over to countries such as Syria and Pakistan that conduct torture and abuse; created secret prisons throughout East Europe and Southeast Asia; and used Guantanamo to circumvent U.S. laws is now concerned about the health and safety of these abused individuals.
Over the years, false statements from government officials have been treated as facts by the mainstream media. Perhaps Blinken is unaware that many U.S. captives who were turned over to third countries were actually released by those countries for lack of sufficient evidence of culpability. Blinken should familiarize himself with the Inspector General report on Khalid al-Masri, who was a victim of an erroneous rendition. If it hadn’t been for al-Masri’s German citizenship and the intervention of National Security Adviser Condi Rice, then CIA director George Tenet may never have sanctioned the release of al-Masri who was being held in Afghanistan.
In 2004, the CIA’s Inspector General completed a study of the torture and abuse that was used in CIA’s secret prisons, but various CIA directors have argued against the findings of the report. Former CIA director General Michael Hayden lied about every aspect of the torture program in his briefings to Congress, including the genesis of the program; the number of detainees; the intelligence allegedly obtained from coercive tactics; and the illegal conduct of the interrogators. He asserted that “fewer than 100” detainees were moved through the CIA’s detention program, but that is an understatement.
Moreover, some individuals were moved or rendered from one country to another or to the U.S. military and therefore not counted as part of the CIA program. Hayden also stated publicly that “fewer than a third” of the detainees were subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques,” the Orwellian term for torture and abuse. Far more detainees were subjected to elements of the program, including sleeplessness, shackling, and constant light and noise. There were numerous examples of detainees who were rendered by mistake who were tortured. Of course, he was probably comfortable lying to members of the intelligence committee who had been briefed on the program several years earlier and did nothing to stop it.
The entire process was criminal, but the mainstream media failed to highlight what were essentially war crimes. The CIA had legal protection with memoranda from the White House and the Department of Justice, but media failed to note that the torture and abuse began before the memoranda were prepared and that the torture techniques exceeded what the DoJ considered legitimate. CIA officers served as accusers, investigators, renderers, interrogators, judges, juries, and jailers. There was no appeals process, and no oversight by CIA lawyers and managers. Some individuals were rendered on the basis of information from a single source to a single, unvetted asset. Too many innocent people were kept in custody long after there were reasons to do so. We will probably never know how many of these people ended up in Guantanamo.
The decline of congressional oversight of the intelligence community and the weakening of the role of the Inspectors General throughout the intelligence community have enabled the CIA to escape accountability for its role in conceptualizing and implementing an unconscionable program of torture and abuse. President Barack Obama had the best opportunity to address the issue of accountability, but he said that he would “look forward, not back” at the crimes of the Bush administration and its global war on terror. Senior CIA officials pressed the White House to place limits on the role of the CIA IGs, and Obama honored these demands.
CIA director Tenet who approved the torture program left government with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor that can be given to a civilian. Whenever Tenet was asked about CIA torture, his standard reply was “We don’t do it and I’m not going to talk about it.” Tenet’s immediate successors, Representative Porter Goss and General Hayden had no interest in accountability. Goss defended the “techniques” as “unique and innovative ways, all of which are legal and none of which are torture.” Hayden lobbied for a CIA exemption in any legislation to ban torture and abuse. (Tenet received his Presidential medal along with Paul Bremer, who probably did more to create chaos and havoc In Iraq than any American other than the war’s sponsors: President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld.)
The CIA committed serious crimes in the 1960s and 1970s during the Vietnam War, but at least the Church Committee in the Senate and the Pike Committee in the House exposed the assassination plots and the secret intrusions against U.S. citizens. Laws were written to stop the kinds of assassinations that had been approved by the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, and the Senate and House intelligence oversight committees were created, three decades after the creation of the CIA itself. It took an additional fifteen years and the crimes of Iran-Contra to create a statutory Inspector General at the CIA. The torturers should have been prosecuted, and the crime of torture and abuse should have led to stronger oversight of the CIA.
At its peak, Gitmo held more than 675 men. According to the New York Times, there are currently 39 men in the prison; only 11 have been charged with crimes. There have never been charges against the other 28 individuals, and a federal parole-like panel has approved transfer for ten of them, including a 73-year-old Pakistani with heart disease. President Obama failed in his efforts to close Guantanamo and transfer the detainees to a U.S. prison; the 2022 budget proposal of the Biden administration has restored the proposal to close Gitmo and transfer the detainees. (The Times’ Carol Rosenberg deserves kudos for her outstanding coverage of Guantanamo over a twenty-year period, filling in the vacuum created by the failure of congressional and governmental oversight to do so.)
The only accomplishment of the torture program was the degradation of the United States and the Central Intelligence Agency.
