Macron warns of “fracturing” of NATO alliance on state visit to Washington

Alex Lantier

French President Emmanuel Macron’s three-day visit to Washington revealed the bitter economic and geopolitical rivalries tearing apart the NATO alliance as it wages war on Russia in Ukraine.

On Wednesday, Macron publicly attacked the $430 billion Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) passed by the US Congress this year. Some $370 billion of IRA funding will subsidize production in the United States or North America—but not in Europe—of advanced green technologies, as corporations worldwide retool to shift to electric cars, make more advanced electronics, and cut greenhouse gas emissions amid the climate crisis. Macron warned that such protectionist US policies, which threaten to exclude European products from US markets, could “fracture” the NATO alliance.

French President Emmanuel Macron speaks as he is welcomed to the U.S. Capitol by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., during his state visit to Washington, Thursday, Dec. 1, 2022 [AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite]

Thursday, however, Macron held a friendly press conference with Biden in which he called on the United States and France to fight as “brothers in arms” in Ukraine. Maintaining total silence on the impact of the war, which threatens to provoke a catastrophic energy crisis in Europe this winter, Macron then signed a bellicose Joint Statement aligning France with Biden’s aggressive policies against Russia and China.

Macron’s performance must be taken as a warning on the mortal political and economic crisis of world capitalism. Deeply-rooted economic conflicts that twice in the 20th century exploded into world wars between the United States and Germany, conflicts aggravated today by climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic, are erupting to the surface of political life. Moreover, the NATO powers are finding no way to paper over their differences beyond escalating military threats against major nuclear-armed powers.

Arriving in Washington, Macron made clear that his visit is part of a struggle between American and European capitalists over control of global markets. Criticizing the IRA at a lunch Wednesday at the US Congress on climate and biodiversity issues, he said: “This is super-aggressive for our companies.”

Macron added, “I don’t want to become a market for American products, because I have the exact same products as you. I have a middle class that needs to work, and people who need to find work. And the consequence of the IRA is that you may solve your problems, but you are going to make mine worse. I am sorry to be so blunt.”

Speaking later on Wednesday at the French embassy in Washington, Macron again raised the IRA and said: “The choices made … are choices that will fracture the West.”

Macron stated that the mounting US war threats against China, notably over Taiwan, are also aimed at European interests. He said, “We should not fool ourselves, there is a risk here: the United States is looking after first of all the United States—which is normal, we do the same for ourselves—and then to its rivalry with China. And in this, in some sense, Europe and thus France are treated as a variable it can use to adjust its policies.”

Despite mounting conflicts between Berlin and Paris, Macron was also speaking for powerful factions of the ruling class in Germany, the European Union’s (EU) hegemonic power. The German news magazine Der Spiegel aired some of these issues in an article titled, “Why there is a threat of a trade war between the United States and the European Union.”

Der Spiegel noted that the IRA continues former US President Donald Trump’s threats of massive US tariffs against German cars. The IRA, it wrote, “stipulates that [subsidized] products must be of North American origin, suspiciously recalling the ‘America First’ strategy. European politicians are looking across the Atlantic with horror. … Even the Chancellor is angry. During his last trip to Asia, Olaf Scholz constantly called for ‘more free trade’ and ‘great progress’ on globalization. Neither the content nor the timing of the US initiative correspond to his remarks.”

Noting the likelihood of flight of auto, battery and high-tech production facilities from Europe to America, Der Spiegel wrote: “Europe is in systemic competition not only with China but also to some extent with America, says Joe Kaeser, the longstanding boss of Siemens … Given how the US government is encouraging investment in America via the Inflation Reduction Act, [Kaeser added,] it is unsurprising that there is ‘flight of capital and production facilities out of Europe and into the dollar.’”

The flight of production facilities out of Europe is accelerated by the mounting energy crisis caused by the US-led war on Russia in Ukraine. Washington demanded that the EU cut off Russian natural gas imports, and Biden invited Scholz to Washington, warning him that the US government would know how to “bring an end” to EU imports of Russian gas via the Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea. In September, the two Nord Stream pipelines suddenly blew up in massive explosions whose authors remain unidentified, but the event proved very lucrative for US imperialism.

Energy costs in Europe have surged, as US companies demanded ruinous prices for US liquefied natural gas (LNG) exported to Europe to replace Russian gas. This summer, US LNG exports had risen 15-fold over their levels a year earlier, and they surged again after the Nord Stream bombing.

The NATO war in Ukraine not only threatens to bankrupt European firms with energy-intensive operations, however. In line with the global rise in prices for food, energy and other vital products, it is setting into motion a new, catastrophic social crisis for the working class in Europe.

As Macron arrived in Washington, Le Monde reported on orders his government is sending police authorities across France to prepare for unprecedented electricity cutoffs. The plan calls for rolling blackouts hitting 6 million people at a time (9 percent of the French population), mainly from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Subways and trams would shut down, and schools—without heating or light—would close. Cell phone coverage and the functioning of emergency call numbers for fire, police and medical services could also break down.

Le Monde added that the Macron government is also preparing for a “blackout scenario” of a longer collapse of the electricity grid, “but without believing in it,” the newspaper claimed.

Under these conditions, Macron’s pledging that the French people will serve as Biden’s “brothers in arms” in wars around the planet is politically criminal. Macron no doubt hopes European financial aristocrats will thus get a share of the spoils from NATO’s plundering of Russia, China, and the world. The criminality of this calculation is compounded by Macron’s blatant disregard for its impact on the health and livelihood of working and toiling people in France and across Europe.

The only way forward against this policy is the building of an international movement among youth and workers, uniting strikes against inflation that are erupting in America, Europe and around the world against imperialist war and the capitalist system.

The Stalinist bureaucracy’s dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 not only paved the way for NATO to wage bloody wars in resource-rich countries from Iraq and Yugoslavia to Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. It threw Eurasia open to US and European corporations and vastly exacerbated the geopolitical rivalries of world capitalism. Washington uses these wars not only to plunder weaker and poorer countries, but also to put its European imperialist rivals on rations.

OECD forecasts worsening global economic outlook

Nick Beams

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a grouping of 33 major economies, has forecast a worsening outlook for the global economy in a report issued last month.

But despite slowing growth and cuts in real living standards, the organisation insists the tightening monetary policies of central banks, aimed at suppressing wage demands by dampening the economy, or even inducing a recession, must continue.

[Photo: OECD]

The focus of the report was on the energy crisis, which it blamed on Russian “aggression,” completely ignoring the fact that the Ukraine war is being driven by the US and its NATO allies as they seek to dismember Russia and accelerate war preparations against China.

In its editorial introducing the report, the OECD said inflation was on the rise because of the COVID-19 pandemic. It had much more prevalent following the Russian invasion, such that because of the surge in prices “real wages are falling in many countries, slashing purchasing power.”

It stated that “fighting inflation,” the code phrase used by all capitalist economic institutions for further cuts in real wages, “has to be our top priority right now.”

The OECD claimed the policy was enjoying “some progress” as there was an easing of price rises in the US, while insisting that “monetary policy should continue to tighten in the countries where inflation remains high and broad-based.”

Furthermore, it wants a two-pronged attack. It was essential that government fiscal policy worked “hand-in-hand with monetary policy.”

If fiscal policy added to inflationary pressures, the editorial said, it would lead to even higher interest rates.

Accordingly, that meant “policy support to shield families and firms from the energy shock should be targeted and temporary… without adding to inflationary pressures and increasing public debt burdens.”

But overall, nothing substantial should be done since “energy prices are likely to remain high and volatile for some time” and “untargeted measures to keep prices down will become increasingly unaffordable, and could discourage the needed energy savings.”

There is a clear parallel here with the response to COVID. While some limited mitigation measures were put in place, they were abandoned in the face of the “let it rip” agenda. On energy prices, the policy is the same—limited “targeted” measures to try to assuage popular anger while pursuing a “let it rip” policy on price hikes and the profit gouging by the major energy corporations and the commodity speculators.

In its analysis of the state of the global economy, the OECD report painted a picture of a steadily worsening situation.

The significant tightening of global financial conditions was “weighing on interest-sensitive spending and adding to the pressures faced by many emerging-market economies.”

While labour market conditions remained “generally tight”—a situation which the central banks want to change with the higher-interest regime—“wage increases have not kept up with price inflation, weakening real incomes despite the actions taken by governments to cushion the impact of higher food and energy prices on households and businesses.”

It said global GDP growth was projected to be 3.1 percent in 2022, around half the pace in 2021, and was expected to slow further to 2.2 percent next year.

Global growth, such as it is, was becoming “increasingly imbalanced with the major Asian emerging market economies accounting for close to three-quarters of global GDP growth in 2023, reflecting their projected steady expansion and sharp slowdowns in the United States and Europe.”

But uncertainty about even this outlook remained high because “the risks have become more skewed to the downside and more acute.” One of those risks is that higher interest rates “slow growth by more than projected, with policy decisions difficult to calibrate given high debt levels and strong cross-border trade and investment links that raise the spillovers from weaker demand in other countries.”

Summing up the outlook, the OCED said the world economy was facing “a period of weak growth and persistent inflation, with elevated downside risks. Tighter monetary policy and higher real interest rates, elevated energy prices, weak household income growth and declining confidence are all expected to take their toll of growth, especially in 2023.”

The best prospect it could offer was a “mild recovery,” projected to get underway in most countries in 2024.

Besides the worsening prospects for the real economy, there are major problems in the financial system.

The OECD warned that a “sharp increase in interest rates” could jeopardise the ability of households and companies to service their debts, “potentially leading to defaults and bankruptcies, and to corrections in house prices.”

It said stress tests put in place after the global financial crisis of 2008 had helped improve the resilience of the banking sector. “Nonetheless, many banks could still face substantial losses if a larger-than-expected downturn occurred, especially in emerging-market economies where banks are particularly sensitive to shocks and have lower capital ratios than in advanced countries.”

Major problems could also erupt in non-bank financial institutions, the size of which has rapidly expanded in the last decade-and-a-half, as a result of rising interest rates.

“Repricing of stretched asset valuations could lead to disorderly market corrections and investor outflows,” it stated. And for “institutions that are highly leveraged, or which are subject to severe liquidity mismatches, such as open-ended funds [those where investors can withdraw their funds on a daily basis], the impact could be particularly large.”

Commenting on the OECD report, Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf sought to place it in a wider context, invoking the definition of “polycrisis” advanced by economic historian Adam Tooze in which “economic and non-economic shocks” are entangled “all the way down.”

He referred to the shocks emanating from the pandemic, the energy shock resulting from war, itself a breakdown in relations among great powers, slow growth, rising inequality, over reliance on credit, the decade of ultra-low interest rates that have led to financial fragility worldwide and the added threat of climate change.

Economists, among others, Wolf wrote, had to cease being confined to “silos,” think “systematically” and recognise “how the economy is interconnected with other forces” and that “navigating today’s storms compels us to develop a wider understanding.”

But such understanding will never be found in any of the institutions of capitalist society, much less a solution advanced to resolve “polycrisis”—or breakdown as it might be more accurately described. This is because it is rooted in the profit system to which they are dedicated to defending and maintaining at all costs.

And so, in the end, as the OECD report makes clear, the only “solution” they advance is deeper attacks on the working class.

Australia: Labor’s new anti-strike industrial relations bill approved by parliament

Martin Scott

The Labor government’s “Secure Jobs, Better Pay” bill will become law, after receiving the approval of the House of Representatives this morning. The legislation was passed by the Senate Thursday night, after Minister for Workplace Relations Tony Burke won the support of independent Australian Capital Territory Senator David Pocock in negotiations over the weekend.

Tony Burke holding a newly-printed copy of the “Secure Jobs, Better Pay” bill [Photo: Tony Burke]

The new laws will grant the pro-business Fair Work Commission (FWC) increased powers to shut down industrial disputes, ban strikes and impose the wage- and condition-slashing demands of big business on workers through arbitration.

The bill is also aimed at expanding the reach of the trade unions, upon which Labor is depending to suppress opposition to its agenda of cuts to wages and social spending. The laws are intended to help the unions reverse a profound decline in membership, which plummeted from 45.6 percent of workers in 1986 to just 14.3 percent in 2020. Just 5 percent of workers aged 15‒19 and 6 percent of those aged 20‒24 are union members.

Pocock called for minor changes to the legislation, exempting small businesses with 15‒20 employees from multi-employer bargaining, as well as the establishment of a committee to review welfare payments prior to annual budget announcements.

These concessions, along with hundreds of other amendments made to the initial 250-page bill since it was introduced on October 27, are an indication of the determination of Burke and the Labor government to put this legislation in place before the end of the year. This is also reflected in the fact that three additional sitting days were added to the parliamentary calendar to ensure there would be time to pass the bill.

This urgency stems from Labor’s recognition that class tensions are already mounting, as workers confront skyrocketing prices and interest rates. More than 128,000 working days were lost to strikes in the June quarter, more than four times the average over the past ten years.

These strikes involved almost 74,000 workers, the most since December 2005. The majority of these workers are nurses, teachers and public sector workers. They have been forced onto the frontline of the COVID-19 pandemic and languish under the lowest wages in the country. It is of considerable significance that these workers are also the most highly unionised workers. Union coverage, in other words, decreases wages, it does not increase them.

Under these conditions, the government is concerned that the measures previously relied upon to suppress workers’ struggles are no longer sufficient and must be strengthened.

The Fair Work Act (FWA), introduced by the previous Labor government in 2009, already grants the FWC sweeping powers to deny workers the right to take industrial action.

Two weeks ago, the FWC ordered a six-month suspension of all industrial action over an almost four-year enterprise bargaining dispute at tugboat operator Svitzer. The company, which has an effective monopoly over towage at Australia’s ports, threatened to indefinitely lock out its workforce in response to limited stoppages and work bans by workers. They were protesting a company offer of a provocatively tiny 1.5 percent wage rise, following a 4-year wage freeze.

Openly acknowledging that this was a premeditated and conscious manoeuvre engineered to prevent workers from striking, the FWC delivered the company what it sought—a free hand to proceed with business as usual, while workers were stripped of any right to oppose Svitzer’s vicious attacks on their pay and conditions.

Under the existing laws, the industrial court and the federal government are empowered to shut down industrial action on the basis that it might possibly cause harm to the economy. Whether this action was initiated by workers or the employer, and whether there was any intention of it going ahead, the outcome will always be that workers are stripped of their basic rights, while no restrictions are placed on the operations of the company.

Labor’s new legislation will allow the FWC to intervene in this manner in any dispute it declares “intractable,” even if there is no possibility of broader economic damage. With no legal right to strike, workers will then have their wages and conditions decided in backroom negotiations between management and union bureaucrats, or directly imposed by the FWC.

But the bill contains additional provisions designed to prevent disputes even reaching that stage. Under the new legislation, union-management conciliation conferences will be required before a strike vote is held, creating the conditions for sell-out deals to be struck before workers are able to disrupt profits for even a minute.

The union bureaucracies not only support and enforce these anti-strike laws—the maritime unions hailed the Svitzer ruling as a “victory”—they were instrumental in drafting both the 2009 legislation and the new amendments. The Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) is a vocal supporter of the bill, and enlisted its members into a campaign on social media and in public meetings to lobby Pocock for his vote.

The legislation will also introduce substantial changes to the Better Off Overall Test (BOOT) for enterprise agreements, which already does nothing to prevent employers from slashing wages and conditions. The test merely requires that workers will not be worse off than if they were employed under an industrial award setting out the bare minimum wages and conditions permissible in a sector.

Under the new legislation, the FWC will be able to approve agreements that could leave workers earning less than the award if their circumstances change after the agreement is approved. While workers will be able to ask the FWC to reapply the BOOT, this will require that they monitor every roster change and calculate the implications. The revised BOOT could also be used to employ new workers under substantially reduced conditions than existing staff.

The most discussed feature of the new industrial relations legislation is the expansion of multi-employer bargaining. While limited provisions for enterprise agreements covering workers at multiple companies already exist, they have almost never been used. The proposed legislation provides for three types of multi-employer bargaining, all of which will require workers to be union members.

The “supported bargaining” stream is an overhaul of existing, but never used, “low-paid bargaining” provisions. This is intended to bring highly exploited layers of workers, such as those in aged-care, early childhood education and cleaning, under the controlling hand of the trade union bureaucracy.

This will also draw these workers, who are presently covered by minimum-wage industrial awards, into the enterprise bargaining system. For three decades this has served as the primary mechanism through which corporations, with the full cooperation of the unions, have forced workers to trade away conditions including penalty rates and overtime pay for minor increases in base wages.

The most controversial component of the bill is the “single-interest employer bargaining” stream, which could cover any business, as long as the operations of employers covered under a single agreement are ruled “reasonably comparable” by the FWC.

Major corporations and business lobbyists, under the phoney guise of protecting small business, have objected to this section of the bill. At the heart of this is a disagreement among sections of the corporate elite over whether the unions and enterprise bargaining are still the most effective means of driving down wages and increasing “productivity.”

A submission to the Senate committee by the Australian Resources and Energy Employer Association noted: “Less than half of resource sector workplaces are covered by an in- term enterprise agreement… Unions have attempted to organise those workplaces for many years.”

While industrial action will be possible under these two streams, workers will have to give employers five days’ notice, rather than the three required under single-employer enterprise agreements.

The third form of multi-employer bargaining is “cooperative workplace bargaining,” for which employers and unions must apply jointly. Workers in this stream will have no legal right to take industrial action.

The rationale behind multi-employer bargaining as a means of wage and class suppression is clearly expressed in a submission to a Senate committee report on the bill by Chris F Wright, a University of Sydney academic. Wright notes that in Denmark, where multi-employer bargaining is common, strikes are far less frequent. He writes: “Considering the relative sizes of their workforces, Australia lost about 10 times as many days to industrial action as Denmark in 2021.”

This is in line with statements made by ACTU secretary Sally McManus, who said in October that unions “don’t want to see more strikes,” and remarked approvingly that the bill “adds more red tape” to prevent workers taking industrial action.

Wages are also rising more slowly in Denmark than in Australia, according to Wright: “Over the past year average Denmark wages climbed 2.5% compared to a similarly- calculated 3% in Australia.” 

Far from Labor’s cynical claim of “getting wages moving,” the new legislation is aimed at suppressing wage growth and further eviscerating workers’ already limited rights. It is the latest chapter in escalating anti-strike laws implemented by successive Labor governments over the past four decades.

This began with the Accords implemented by the Hawke and Keating Labor governments between 1983 and 1996, with the full support of the unions. These brought harsh cuts to real wages and working conditions as well as the introduction of enterprise bargaining and the limitation of strikes to bargaining periods. The Accords also enshrined the relationship of the union bureaucracies with finance capital through the introduction of compulsory superannuation.

This was a critical turning point in the transformation of the unions and Labor from organisations that had previously sought limited gains for workers into agents of endless corporate cost-cutting and restructuring aimed at driving up profits of “Australian” businesses to make them “internationally competitive.”

The eager support of the union bureaucracies for the latest anti-strike bill should serve as a warning for the working class. It makes clear that these fetid organisations, just as they have been since the 1980s, are determined to continue and deepen their role as the enforcers of the government and the corporate elite, and the primary organs of class suppression.

The bulldozing of the industrial relations legislation through parliament, with the wholehearted support of the union apparatuses, will benefit only the profits of the major corporations. It highlights just what forces workers are pitted against. This is a conspiracy of the entire political establishment, the state apparatus in the form of the courts, the highly paid union apparatuses and the massive corporate conglomerates against workers in every section of industry and employment.

Chinese vice premier signals shift from Zero-COVID based on lie that Omicron is mild

Benjamin Mateus

In the most explicit official acknowledgment that China is lifting its “dynamic Zero-COVID” policy, during a symposium Wednesday at the National Health Commission (NHC), Chinese Vice Premier Sun Chunlan remarked, “The country is facing a new situation, and new tasks in epidemic prevention and control as the pathogenicity of the Omicron virus weakens, more people are vaccinated, and experience in containing the virus is accumulated.”

Sun, who has been overseeing pandemic efforts, added, “The Party central committee and the State Council have always put people’s health and safety first, and optimized and improved prevention and control measures according to the time and situation … taking small steps continuously.”

It is worth recalling that Sun, who had been present during the initial phase of the partial lockdowns in Shanghai last March, had insisted at the time on the continuation of the Zero-COVID policy even against Omicron. Absent in her statement on Wednesday was any reference to the dynamic application of Zero-COVID.

Instead, Sun said that “preventing the epidemic” would take place through vaccination, especially of the elderly, making medical resources available, and preparing therapeutics, all the while “stabilizing the economy.” Disturbingly, she also said that a critical component of the new approach to COVID will be “traditional Chinese medicine.”

The essence of all this is the turn from a comprehensive elimination strategy aimed at stopping viral transmission to a mitigationist strategy, which accepts an unspecified level of COVID-19. Every country or region that has shifted from elimination to mitigation, including New Zealand, Hong Kong, Vietnam and more countries, has seen rapid, massive surges of infections and deaths.

Residents walk past stores in the district of Haizhu in southern China's Guangzhou province, Thursday, Dec. 1, 2022. (AP Photo) [AP Photo/AP Photo]

According to Chinese health authorities, there were over 36,000 COVID-19 infections across mainland China on Wednesday which appears to have plateaued compared to recent days. However, in the capital city of Beijing, there was a record-setting 5,000-plus cases, while Guangzhou and Chongqing both continued to report over 6,000 cases.

Despite these high figures, Beijing, Chengdu, Chongqing and Guangzhou have lifted their limited lockdown measures and allowed the resumption of businesses at shopping malls, including indoor dining services. Some cities now allow close contacts to quarantine at home and forgo testing for some groups. These shifts only cloud the scope of the surge in new cases where the epidemiological portrait had previously been sharp and exact.

In response to Sun’s comments, Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, warned, “In the absence of a road map for an orderly transition, her remarks might trigger unintended responses at the local level that make a rapid, nationwide surge of cases more likely.”

Even The Atlantic, a leading purveyor of pandemic misinformation, soberly acknowledged the potential for immense public health casualties in China if measures are loosened quickly and the virus is allowed to exploit the immunologically naive population during the cold winter months, when nearly everyone is sheltered indoors. The article noted that “a massive wave of new Omicron infections could overwhelm critical-care units and leave 1.55 million people dead.”

The claim that Omicron is “milder” and, therefore, pandemic measures may be loosened entirely is a relative matter compared to the Alpha and Delta phases of the pandemic. But it is a dangerous proposition in the face of an immune-evading and highly contagious pathogen that remains quite lethal and continues to kill more people globally than tuberculosis.

Since the first Omicron wave ended in late February, the US has tallied another 120,000 COVID-19 deaths in the last nine months, a figure far higher than the deadliest flu season in the previous two decades. By late February, population seroprevalence from prior SARS-CoV-2 infection had reached nearly 60 percent and large percentages of the population had been vaccinated and boosted with mRNA vaccines.

For Sun Chunlan to suggest that Omicron’s pathogenicity is much lower is a ruse that the Chinese working class must not accept. A population entirely naive to infections and an elderly population that has barely been boosted makes for a dangerous public health threat, especially for workers who will be crammed into factories to ensure Apple iPhones and other commodities are made available for purchase in time for the holiday shopping season.

The change in tone by Sun and the CCP, increasingly acknowledging the end of Zero-COVID, is also their response to the series of protests across China which took place over the weekend. These protests were centered among affluent middle class layers demanding an end to lockdowns and mass testing, which they perceive as impediments to their lifestyles.

The torrent of propaganda unleashed by the Western media in response to these protests has attempted to lump them together with far different protests staged by migrant workers in Guangzhou this week and Foxconn workers in Zhengzhou last week against unsafe conditions.

The recent protests among migrant workers in Guangzhou took place after garment factory workers exposed or infected with COVID-19 were removed from their apartments and placed in quarantine hospitals. Motivated by cost-cutting efforts justified by the “Twenty Articles” released November 11, which initiated the lifting of Zero-COVID, the local government kicked the workers out of the hospitals based on the new diminished time frames.

These migrant workers were then sent back to their remote villages and older cities, where strict anti-COVID measures remain, but were not granted travel passes out of fear of spreading infections to their communities.

These workers are thus waiting in limbo, unable to return home and banned from the factories, while having to take refuge under bridges because they lack the necessary travel passes. Many do not wish to go “home,” concerned about bringing the infection back to their families and elders but are being provided with no shelter to safely quarantine.

In their angry demonstrations, the occasional use of the slogan, “No lockdowns!” does not have the same meaning as the “freedom” slogans of the middle class students. Indeed, these demonstrations by workers will be the primary targets for repression by the CCP as the social crisis deepens in China with the lifting of Zero-COVID.

Global Health Corps Paid Fellowship 2023/2024

Application Deadline: 11th January 2023

Eligible Countries: GHC welcomes young professionals from Burundi, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe to apply for paid 13 month fellowships with health organizations in Malawi, Rwanda, Uganda, and Zambia. 

To be taken at (country): Health organizations in Malawi, Rwanda, Uganda, and Zambia. 

About the Award: Global Health Corps is building the next generation of diverse health leaders. We offer a range of paid fellowship positions with health organizations in Malawi, Rwanda, Uganda and Zambia and the opportunity to develop as a transformative leader in the health equity movement. Everyone has a role to play in the health equity movement.

Type: Fellowship

Eligibility: Global Health Corps Fellowship is looking for a global and diverse group of passionate and talented emerging leaders who:

• Are willing to push themselves outside their comfort zones, to embrace failure, and to approach a personally transformative year – with many challenges in the day-to-day – with integrity, humility, and self-reflection.
• Are ready to strengthen and use their voice — the most powerful tool for change that you have — in order to engage others, create space for critical conversation, and effect meaningful social change in global health.
• Are excited by a design-thinking approach to building a better world, creatively embracing wicked problems and ready to embrace failure as learning.
• Are committed to bringing your best and doing the work in the day-to-day, showing up as a critical part of the global health equity movement.
• Are passionate about social justice in global health and about finding and building their voices to effect health impact.
• Are committed to inclusivity and collaboration across sectors, cultures, and borders of all kinds, while investing in and supporting others.

Selection Criteria: By the start of the fellowship,  fellows must:

• Be 30 years or younger.
• Hold a bachelor’s or undergraduate university degree.
• Be proficient in English.

Number of Awardees: Not specified

Value of Global Health Corps Paid Fellowship: Yearlong paid placements within partner organizations in Malawi, Rwanda, Uganda and Zambia to address real-time capacity gaps and strengthen health systems.

• In addition to on-the-job training, we engage fellows in a comprehensive leadership training curriculum to build effective, empathetic, and innovative leaders of tomorrow.
• Fellow receive additional logistical and financial support during the year, including:
  • Monthly living and utilities stipend
  • Housing
  • Health insurance
  • Professional development grant of $600 and completion award of $1500
  • Travel coverage to and from placement site, all trainings, and retreats

Duration of Fellowship: 1 year

How to Apply for Global Health Corps Paid Fellowship:

• Applications for our 2023-2024 Africa fellowship class are now open until January 11, 2023. For more information, read on and check out our Africa Fellowship FAQs page and Find a fellowship role

• It is important to go through the Application Requirements before applying.

Visit Fellowship Webpage for details

In the Netherlands, a Discriminatory Algorithm has Impoverished Thousands of Families

Alexia Eychenne

Photograph Source: F.Eveleens – CC BY 3.0

Aided by an algorithm, the Dutch tax office has plunged into distress tens of thousands of families – in particular, foreign-born mothers, in wrongfully demanding from them staggering sums. The state is proving incapable of setting things right.

Rotterdam. Each day, Sabrina Sliep picks up her telephone to listen to the same despairing stories. There are families evicted from their residence, today camping with relatives or friends, mothers who work two jobs to keep their heads above water, parents who struggle with depression. Personal trajectories broken one day by a letter from the tax office and which remain fractured. “Some need counselling for what action to take, others just cry and want to be listened to”, sighs the nurse, emotional, in a café on Rotterdam’s periphery.

Sabrina Sliep provides a basic service for ‘Lotgenotencontact’ [‘fellow sufferers’ contact], a crisis hot line established in March 2022 for and by the victims of the ‘Toeslagenaffaire’ [the ‘family allocations’ affair]. Like them, the forty-something year old is facing demands from the tax office and the office responsible for the payment and control of social benefits for a reimbursement of a colossal ‘overpayment’ of the order of €70,000.

Like others, she has had no right to any recourse, and no explanation. Given that she lives alone with her two children, she has put her life in suspension to clear a debt while having no idea of its origins. Since 2012, 25,000 to 35,000 families could have been victims of this affair, product of a succession of failures of the state: presumption of guilt towards honest households, blind confidence in a xenophobic algorithm, intransigence of an administration deaf to warning signals and distress.

At Eindhoven, in the South-East of the Netherlands, in a workers’ quarter characterised by cookie cutter dwellings, Leigh-Anne Jansen recounts how she had received the first letter from the tax office in 2014. The young woman, today 32, was then in training and her husband, of Turkish origin, worked at the factory. The couple received assistance in financing child-minding for their 3 year old daughter. Around 583,000 households receive this allocation to cover a part of the costs of childcare of parents working or in training. The sum can cover the bulk of the bill of a creche or employment of a nanny but it fluctuates according to numerous parameters. Hence there is a more elevated risk of payment errors than for other forms of benefits.

In the Netherlands, the government has acquired a contempt for welfare measures. After the 1980s, the struggle against welfare fraud became a political hobby horse. In 2010 and 2012, the agreements between the coalition of the current Prime Minister, Mark Rutte (from the centre right party VVD [People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy]), promised to further enhance surveillance while slashing, in the name of efficiency, the staff of the dedicated services.

Beginning 2013, to augment the controls at least cost, an algorithm attributes to each beneficiary a risk score, from 0 to 1, according to the supposed probability that the claim should be incorrect or fraudulent. It functions as a ‘black box’; even the agents responsible for the dossiers after reporting don’t understand the criteria.

The consequences multiply

In 2014, Leigh-Anne Jansen and her husband are summoned to prove that their allocation has been used to pay for childcare. They furnish the particulars. “But the tax office just demands more documents, without specifying what document they want”, Jansen notes.

Then the allocation itself stops and a formal demand arrives to reimburse “€7,000, then €9,000, €5,000 …”, linked to the years of benefits that the couple is supposed to have received erroneously. Her requests for explanations stay dead letter. Leigh-Anne Jansen has no alternative but to pay up. “I have no more assistance, nothing to pay the nanny. I have stopped my studies to stay in the house and my husband flogs himself to work longer hours. We have borrowed money from friends to head off the bailiff and have moved house so many times in panic that we are broke.”

Everywhere in the Netherlands, parents describe the same Kafkaesque spiral. At the beginning of the 2010s, the lawyer Jaap Spigt is approached by 60 clients of a nursery school in Capelle aan den IJssel, a commune to the East of Rotterdam. One family has totted up €70,000 of debt, another more than €130,000 …

Rather than receive the benefit in their own account and then pay the creche, the families had accepted the demand of the creche’s director that the allocation be paid directly to the establishment. They discover much later that the employee responsible had overstated the hours to inflate its reimbursements from the state. This was a scam practised by other organisations at the time.

But in the eyes of the tax office, little import that the families have been unaware of the deception and had pulled no profit from it. “I have even asked them: ‘At least give them a delay to be able to pay, or let them reimburse more reasonable sums’, but they don’t want to hear”, remembers the lawyer Jaap Spigt. In nearly forty years of career, the criminal lawyer notes that he has never been so taken aback by a dossier. “Like in a game of dominoes, the families have suffered one catastrophe after another which finds their origins in the Toeslagenaffaire.”

One time accused of fraud, the parents are no longer able to seek any benefits for childcare. Those who have not the means to finance a place in a creche or hire a nanny abandon their employment or their training. More often than not, these are the mothers. At Capelle aan den IJssel, the municipality has released funds to avoid evictions of the most indebted renters. But elsewhere in the country, the cases pile up.

Because they receive the benefits the most consequential, the most precarious households – single mothers for example – have been confronted with quantitatively the most significant reimbursements. To settle their debt, the administration has engaged in aggressive recovery tactics: it cuts their other subsidies (rental assistance, family allowances …) and deducts directly from their bank accounts this that it judges its due. “Between 2014 and 2019, the tax office has left me only €800 per month to live”, notes Sabrina Sliep. “I have dropped my plan to retrain. I have had to entrust my children to my ex-partner to keep working and to not go down completely.”

In the centre of Rotterdam, Estephanie Zut, of Dominican origin, also single mother, seller of hair products, claims to have suffered the same fate: “I’ve had to throw other activities to one side, to work seven days on seven to survive. It was crazy, but I believed myself alone and I was ashamed”.

“Over the years, we have notified all the relevant authorities, but everywhere, the doors close on us”, sighs Willeke Ravenna, the ex-manager of the creche at Capelle aan den IJssel. Ms Ravenna (who was unaware of the scam perpetrated by her establishment’s administration) observes, helpless, some families topple over into poverty, some parents “broken from head to toe”, some couples split up.

The lawyer Eva Gonzalez Perez moves heaven and earth. Chance has it that her husband should be running a creche in which 157 clients find themselves accused of fraud. In taking their files before the courts, helped by a source from inside the tax office, this legal expert of Eindhoven has accumulated proof of dysfunctionality. She recounts: “I discover the existence of lists of fraudsters, but the tax office refuses to explain why such people are listed there. I also have proof that the taxation staff receive instructions to not furnish to justice all the documents in their possession.

In 2017, seized by Eva Gonzalez Perez, the Dutch Ombudsman looks into the first group of families and concludes that the taxation authorities have not proved the existence of fraud. This which has not prevented them from taking action “in presupposing that fraud was involved”, without consideration for the distress provoked by such “disproportionate” sanctions. The Ombudsman demands apologies, and compensation. They will take more than three years to arrive, in spite of other warnings and several overwhelming articles in the press.

It takes a Parliamentary inquiry to transform the story into an affair of state. In December 2020, outraged Deputies accuse the tax office, but also the justice system, which has dismissed the families’ pleas and the legislator – to have “violated the fundamental principles of the state of law”. The parliamentarians denounce an “injustice without precedent” and the doctrine of “all or nothing” which allowed the authorities to sanction the least error as if indicating malintent.

They reproach the authorities for their headlong rush to garner more money and to justify the integrity of the controls, all in seeking to mask to the end the ensuing fiasco. “If they had put an end to the system in 2017 instead of concentrating on covering their errors, we would not have had a scandal of such scale”, regrets Renske Leijten, a Deputy of the Socialist Party and spokesperson for the victims in Parliament, accompanied by his counterpart Pieter Omtzigt (Independent). Leijten notes: “Their denial has driven the families into anguish and poverty”.

A ‘xenophobic machine’

In total, between 2012 and 2019, 25,000 to 35,000 persons have been accused of fraud – wrongly in 94 % of the cases. Among them, a great majority of foreign-born or bi-nationals, select targets of the controls, as the government has belatedly admitted. Nationality counts as a risk factor for the algorithm blindly followed by the taxation agents. But its functioning as a ‘black box’ and its ‘auto-learning’ character which allows the algorithm itself to identify criteria associated with the risk of fraud, have concealed the discrimination, as has denounced Amnesty International in a report on this textbook case of a ‘xenophobic machine’.

Besides, in case of an inquest into a fraud attributed to a beneficiary of foreign origin, the tax office is able to target controls on beneficiaries of the same nationality. The Autoriteit persoonsgevens [the Dutch Commission overseeing personal data protection] has sanctioned this procedure as “illegal and discriminatory”.

In February 2022, the victims have received a letter from the Prime Minister who soberly admits: “Our modus operandi in the past has been prejudicial towards you. You have not committed fraud. We offer you our sincere apologies”. Sabrina Slieps retorts: “I care little for their apologies. I have not seen my children grow up, I have not been able to change professions and to decide how to live my life. All that has affected my mental health and will never be recoverable”.

The victims have begun to receive a lump sum indemnity of €30,000 which, for many, won’t even cover the ‘overpayments’ demanded. Without speaking of the intangible suffering. “I have messed up many things with my youngest daughter because I could only work, work, to avoid destitution”, witnesses Estephanie Zut. “This history has destroyed thousands of lives and of dreams.”

An assistance service has been established to attempt to find some personalised solutions. But numerous families denounce the too complex procedures, which serve only to revive their traumas. Estephanie Zut, irritated, notes: “These last months, I have still threatened to have my lawyer intervene to get a response to my demand for support. Many parents have no longer the energy to keep fighting”.

The Netherlands has not finished with the ‘Toeslagenaffaire’. The psychological and social consequences for the children, for example, involving more than 10,000 victims in turn, is yet to be the subject of inquiries. The Parliamentary Opposition denounces a fake soul searching of the government which has admittedly resigned after this scandal, in January 2021 … only better to return a year later. The Deputy Renske Leijten concludes that “Nobody has shouldered responsibility for this affair. The culture at the head of the administration has not changed, neither the contempt with respect to welfare recipient, nor the lack of transparence”.

As for the algorithms which are claimed to automate fraud detection, they multiply in Europe, including in France, with the same opacity and the same potential for excess. On 5 October [2022], the Dutch Deputy in the European Parliament Samira Rafaela (of the Renew centre-right grouping) has warned the member states in the Strasbourg Parliament in calling to prevent the utilisation of criteria involving ethnic discrimination. Otherwise “this Dutch scandal will not be the only one in Europe”.

Taiwan’s local elections a blow to ruling DPP and Washington

Ben McGrath

Taiwan’s local elections last Saturday resulted in a significant defeat for the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), with the opposition Kuomintang (KMT) securing a majority of the municipality, city, and county seats across the island.

Taiwan Kuomintang party Taipei city mayoral candidate Wayne Chiang celebrates his victory with supporters in Taipei, Taiwan, Saturday, Nov. 26, 2022. [AP Photo/Chiang Ying-ying]

The KMT took control of 13 out of 22 local government seats, including key cities like Taipei and Taoyuan. Notably, the KMT’s Chiang Wan-an, the great-grandson of dictator Chiang Kai-shek, defeated the DPP’s Chen Shih-chung for mayor of Taipei. Chen served as health minister for much of the COVID-19 pandemic. Chiang’s victory brings the KMT back to power in its traditional stronghold, currently held by Ko Wen-je of the minor Taiwan People’s Party (TPP).

The DPP lost two seats, reducing its total to five. Nominal independents took two others, while the TPP took Hsinchu City. A special election will be held December 18 for Chiayi City, which the KMT is also expected to win, bringing the party’s total to 14, the same number held before the election.

The results are less a sign of support for the KMT than an expression of dissatisfaction with the entire political establishment. Voter turnout was low compared to past local elections, with about 60 percent of people participating, compared to 66.11 percent in 2018. Both the DPP and KMT are deeply unpopular, with only 31 percent and 14 percent of people supporting the parties respectively.

The result has been received with apprehension in the US media, concerned over the impact on Washington’s confrontation with Beijing over Taiwan. The Biden administration following on from Trump has provocatively strengthened ties with Taiwan, thereby undermining the One China policy under which the US de-facto has recognized the island as part of China and Beijing as its legitimate government. In doing so, the US has encouraged the Taiwanese nationalist DPP to move towards independence—a step that Beijing has warned it will oppose with force.

In its efforts to goad China into a war over Taiwan, the US has relied on the support of Taiwan’s president Tsai Ing-wen and her DPP. Thus the election result comes as blow to the US, which routinely declares that Tsai and the DPP are the popular representatives of Taiwanese “democracy,” standing up to mainland China’s “aggression.”

Tsai herself attempted to make the local elections a referendum on her government’s handling of relations with Beijing. In a barely disguised challenge to the One China policy, she told a November 12 rally, “I want to tell everyone that the existence of Taiwan and Taiwanese people’s insistence on freedom and democracy are not a provocation to anyone.” She continued: “As president, my calling is to make every effort to let Taiwan still be the Taiwan of the Taiwanese people.”

While economic and social issues were major factors in the election, the result also reflects real fears about Taiwan being transformed into a US pawn for a war with China. Nina Chen, a 50-year-old Taipei resident who voted for Chiang Wan-an told the Wall Street Journal: “What I care [about] the most is peace across the strait because our lives and property are already threatened.”

After the election, President Tsai resigned as head of the DPP, a common and largely symbolic gesture to give the impression someone is “taking responsibility” for the party’s loss. Tsai remains president until the end of her second term in 2024.

The US media has attempted to downplay the significance of the vote, pointing out that the low polls for the KMT indicate that it was unlikely to oust the DPP in the 2024 presidential elections. The KMT established a US-backed dictatorship on Taiwan after being driven out of China in the 1949 Chinese revolution, but following the restoration of capitalism in China has sought closer economic ties with the mainland.

The Wall Street Journal attributed the results to poor weather, election burnout following recent referendums, and COVID restrictions. Its article quoted Wen-ti Sung, a political scientist in the Taiwan Studies Program at Australian National University, who claimed, “We cannot infer this to be a loss for DPP’s China policy platform.”

Certainly, other local issues played a significant role in the election. Taipei’s decision to allow COVID-19 to tear through the population had an impact. In the past week alone, there have been 102,576 new cases, placing Taiwan in the top ten in the world for cases per million people. It also currently has the second-highest deaths per million. Total overall cases stand at 8,313,366 with 14,334 deaths, most occurring since April.

National Taiwan University Professor Chan Chang-chuan, a public health expert, criticized Taipei’s handling of the pandemic in a Facebook post on Monday, writing, “A COVID case, no matter if it ends in recovery, hospitalization, or death, is a very unpleasant experience of illness that has the patient and the patient’s family living in continuous anxiety, fear, and inconvenience for over a month. It is therefore inevitable that the difficult COVID experience affects many people’s election behavior.”

Youth unemployment remains high, with 12.27 percent of 20 to 24-year-olds officially out of work. Wages have been stagnant for more than two decades, with a recent university graduate earning about $1,000 a month now compared to $975 in 2000. For those under 40, 65 percent are in debt.

At the same time, while consumer prices have risen a comparatively low 3.1 percent this year, they have spiked sharply for food and fuel, particularly over the spring and summer when food prices rose 7.4 percent in May. Food prices rose 5.17 percent in October.

The Taiwanese ruling class however has profited during the pandemic, with the economy growing 6.28 percent in 2021, its fastest rate since 2010. The economy grew 3.11 percent in 2020. These social conditions demonstrate the sharp class divide that exists in Taiwan.

Undoubtedly, the worsening social and economic conditions facing working people influenced the votes of many. However, voters in Taiwan have always been acutely conscious of the state of relations across the Taiwan Strait with China. The prospect of being plunged into a US proxy war against China—as has happened to the Ukrainian people—was weighing on their minds as they cast their ballot.