5 Jun 2018

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Solve Global Challenges for Entrepreneurs 2018

Application Deadline: 1st July 2018

Eligible Countries: All

To Be Taken At (Country): New York (during UN General Assembly week, September 2018)

About the Award: The 2018 challenges include the following below. Each proposal must include a technology element. 

Global Challenges:
  1. Work for the Future: How can those most affected by the technology-driven transformations of work create productive and prosperous livelihoods for themselves?
  2. Frontline of Health: How can communities invest in frontline health workers and services to improve their access to effective and affordable care?
  3. Teachers and Educators: How can teachers and educators provide accessible, personalized, and creative learning experiences for all?
  4. Coastal Communities: How can coastal communities mitigate and adapt to climate change while developing and prospering?
About the Award: Solve at MIT is an flagship annual event held on the MIT campus in Cambridge, MA, bringing together over 300 leaders from the tech industry, business, philanthropy, government, and civil society. Solvers and their solutions will be featured on stage, in online and written materials, and through dedicated challenge workshops. Solve staff will continue supporting Solvers to match-make partnerships with our community members who will help make Solvers’ solutions a reality.
Anyone the world-over can participate in a Solve challenge and submit a solution. Whether you’ve just started building your solution and your team, you’re running a pilot, or you’re ready to scale, Solve is looking for innovators and entrepreneurs with the best solutions to these global challenges.
Solvers then gain access to Solve’s community. The Solve staff helps match-make between Solvers and leaders from the tech industry, business, philanthropy, government, and civil society who are seeking partnerships and opportunities to implement innovative, scalable ideas. Partnerships between Solvers and members will be announced at the flagship event Solve at MIT.

Type: Entrepreneurship

Eligibility: 
  • Optimistic solutions. Innovative solutions. Human-centered solutions. Tech solutions. Solutions that need partnerships across industry.
  • From research, to pilot, to growth, Solve accepts solutions at all stages of development. If you’re researching, Solve can help you develop a partnership to pilot. If you’re already piloting, Solve can help you grow. And if you’re already growing, Solve can help you scale.
  • The most important thing is that your solution will solve the challenge posed.
  • At MIT, every solution must include technology — whether new or existing — as a key component.
Selection Process and Criteria: In the first round, Solve staff will perform an initial screening of all applications for completeness, for coherency, and for whether the solution appropriately addresses the challenge. Then Solve judges will score the screened applications to determine finalists. Here are the criteria the judges will use to score the applications on the website:
  • Alignment: Does the solution address the challenge that has been set forth?
  • Scalability: Can the solution be grown and scaled to affect the lives of more people?
  • Potential for Impact: Does the planned implementation of the solution have the potential to impact lives, and does the theory behind how it will work make logical sense? Does the team have a robust plan for monitoring and evaluating the effectiveness of the solution?
  • Novelty: Is this a new technology, new application of an existing technology, or new process for solving the challenge?
  • Feasibility: Is it feasible to implement the solution, and does the team have a plan for the solution to sustain itself financially?
In the second round, each finalist will pitch before the challenge judges and a live audience. The judges will determine which solutions are the most promising. These new “Solvers” will receive support and partnership from the Solve community.

Number of Awards: Not specified

Value of Award: All solutions selected in Solve’s four current Global Challenges will receive a $10,000 grant funded by Solve. Solver teams will be selected by a panel of cross-sector judges at Solve Challenge Finals during UN General Assembly week in New York City on September 23, 2018. The deadline to apply is July 1, 2018.

Duration of Program: 
August, 2018 – Finalists announced
September, 2018 – Finalists pitch in New York during the U.N. General Assembly week


How to Apply: Select a challenge and submit a proposal to the challenge. Each proposal must include a technology element. The finalists in each challenge will be invited to present their ideas at an event in New York (simultaneous with the UN General Assembly, September 2018), after which the selected winners will be offered partnership opportunities.
It is important to go through the application information in Program Webpage (See link below) before applying.

Visit the Program Webpage for Details

Award Providers: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

The Empire Strikes Back: Leaving Indian Farmers in the Dirt

Colin Todhunter

By 2050, if current policies continue, India could have numerous mega-cities with up to 30-40 million inhabitants and just two to three hundred million people (perhaps 15-20% of the population) left in an emptied-out countryside. Given current trends in the job market, it could mean tens of millions of city-based rural migrants without much work: victims of the ill thought out policies we currently see being pushed through.
In the book ‘The Invention of Capitalism’, Michael Perelmen lays bare the iron fist which whipped the English peasantry into a workforce willing to accept factory wage labour. English peasants didn’t want to give up their rural communal lifestyle, leave their land and go work for below-subsistence wages in dangerous factories being set up by a new class of industrial capitalists. A series of laws and measures served to force peasants off the land and deprive them of their productive means.
In India, what we are currently witnessing is a headlong rush to facilitate (foreign) capital and the running down of the existing system of agriculture. While India’s farmers suffer as the sector is deliberately being made financially non-viable for them, we see state-of-the-art airports, IT parks and highways being built to allow the corporate world to spread its tentacles everywhere to the point that every aspect of culture, infrastructure and economic activity is commodified for corporate profit.
GDP growth – the holy grail of ‘development’ which stems from an outmoded thinking and has done so much damage to the environment – has been fuelled on the back of cheap food and the subsequent impoverishment of farmers. The gap between their income and the rest of the population, including public sector workers, has widened enormously to the point where rural India consumes less calories than it did 40 years ago. Meanwhile, corporations receive massive handouts and interest-free loans but have failed to spur job creation; yet any proposed financial injections (or loan waivers) for agriculture (which would pale into insignificance compared to corporate subsidies/written off loans) are depicted as a drain on the economy.
Let them eat dirt
Although farmers continue to produce bumper harvests, they are being put out of business by underinvestment, the lack of a secure income and support prices, exposure to artificially cheap imports, neoliberal reforms, profiteering companies which supply seeds and proprietary inputs and the overall impacts of the corporate-backed Indo-US Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture.
For all the talk of ‘helping’ farmers, the plan is to displace the existing system of livelihood-sustaining smallholder agriculture with one dominated from seed to plate by transnational agribusiness and retail concerns. To facilitate this, independent cultivators are being bankrupted, land is to be amalgamated to facilitate large-scale industrial cultivation and those farmers that are left will be absorbed into corporate supply chains and squeezed as they work on contracts, the terms of which will be dictated by large agribusiness and chain retailers.
Some like to call this adopting a market-based approach: a system in the ‘market-driven’ US that receives a taxpayer five-year farm bill subsidy of around $500 billion.
This clearly a con-trick and not the way forward:
“If government can be convinced or forced by the power of the global grassroots to reduce and eventually cut off these $500 billion in annual subsidies to industrial agriculture and Big Food, and instead encourage and reward family farmers and ranchers who improve soil health, biodiversity, animal health and food quality, we can simultaneously reduce global poverty, improve public health, and restore climate stability.” Ronnie Cummins, director of the Organic Consumers Association
Well over 300,000 Indian farmers have taken their lives since 1997 and millions more are experiencing economic distress. Over 6,000 are leaving the sector each day. And yet the corporate-controlled type of agriculture being imposed and/or envisaged only leads to degraded soil, less diverse and nutrient-deficient diets, polluted water, water shortages and poor health.
Although various high-level reports (as I outlined previously) have concluded that policies need to support more resilient, diverse, sustainable (smallholder) agroecological methods of farming and develop decentralised, locally-based food economies, the trend continues to move in the opposite direction towards industrial-scale agriculture and centralised chains for the benefit of Monsanto, Cargill, Bayer and other transnational players.
The plan is to shift hundreds of millions from the countryside and into the cities to serve as a cheap army of labour for offshored foreign companies, mirroring what China has become: a US colonial outpost for manufacturing that has boosted corporate profits at the expense of US jobs. In India, rural migrants are to become the new ‘serfs’ of the informal services and construction sectors or to be trained for low-level industrial jobs.
Even here, however, India might have missed the boat as jobless ‘growth’ seems to be on the horizon and the effects of automation and artificial intelligence are eradicating the need for human labour across many sectors.
If we look at the various western powers, to whom many of India’s top politicians look to for inspiration, their paths to economic prosperity occurred on the back of colonialism and imperialist intent. Do India’s politicians think this mindset has disappeared? The same mentality now lurks behind the neoliberal globalisation agenda hidden behind terms and policies like ‘foreign direct investment’, ‘ease of doing business’, making India ‘business friendly’ or ‘enabling the business of agriculture’.
Behind the World Bank/corporate-inspired rhetoric that is driving the overhaul of Indian agriculture is a brand of corporate imperialism which is turning out to be no less brutal for Indian farmers than early industrial capitalism was in England for its peasantry. The East India company might have gone, but today the bidding of elite interests (private capital) is being carried out by compliant politicians, the World Bank, the WTO and lop-sided, egregious back-room trade deals.
And all for a future of what – vast swathes of chemically-drenched monocrop fields containing genetically modified plants or soils rapidly turning into a chemical cocktail of proprietary biocides, dirt and dust?
Thanks to the model of agriculture being supported and advocated, India will edge nearer to having more drought vulnerable regions, even more degraded soils (which a is already a major problem) as well as spiralling rates of illness throughout the population due to bad diets, denutrified food, agrochemical poisoning and processed food laced with toxic ingredients.
Monsanto-Bayer, Cargill and other transnational corporations will decide on what is to be eaten and how it is to be produced and processed. A corporate takeover spearheaded by companies whose character is clear for all to see:
“The Indo-US Knowledge Initiative in Agriculture with agribusinesses like Monsanto, WalMart, Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill and ITC in its Board made efforts to turn the direction of agricultural research and policy in such a manner as to cater their demands for profit maximisation. Companies like Monsanto during the Vietnam War produced tonnes and tonnes of ‘Agent Orange’ unmindful of its consequences for Vietnamese people as it raked in super profits and that character remains.” – Communist Party of India (Marxist)
Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership
The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) could accelerate this process. A trade deal now being negotiated by 16 countries across Asia-Pacific, the RCEP would cover half the world’s population, including 420 million small family farms that produce 80% of the region’s food.
RCEP is expected to create powerful rights an lucrative business opportunities for food and agriculture corporations under the guise of boosting trade and investment. It could allow foreign corporations to buy up land, thereby driving up land prices, fuelling speculation and pushing small farmers out. If RCEP is adopted, it could intensify the great land grab that has been taking place in India. It could also lead to further corporate control over seeds.
The dairy trade could be opened up to unfair competition from subsidised imports under RCEP. According to RS Sodhi, managing director of the country’s largest milk cooperative, Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation, the type of deals being pushed under the banner of ‘free trade’ will rob the vibrant domestic dairy industry and the millions of farmers that are connected to it from access to a growing market in India.
India’s dairy sector is mostly self-sufficient and employs about 100 million people, the majority of whom are women. The sector is a lifeline for small and marginal farmers, landless poor and a significant source of income for millions of families. Up until now they have been the backbone of India’s dairy sector. New Zealand’s dairy giant Fonterra (the world’s biggest dairy exporter) is looking to RCEP as a way in to India’s massive dairy market. RCEP would give the company important leverage to open up India’s protected market. Many fear that Indian dairy farmers will either have to work for Fonterra or go out of business.
In effect, RCEP would dovetail with existing trends that are facilitating the growth of chemical-intensive farming and corporate-controlled supply chains, whereby farmers can easily become enslaved or small farmers simply get by-passed by powerful corporations demanding industrial-scale production.
RCEP also demands the liberalisation of the retail sector and is attempting to facilitate the entry of foreign agroprocessing and retail giants, which could threaten the livelihoods of small retailers and street vendors. The entry of retail giants would be bad for farmers because they may eventually monopolise the whole food chain from procurement to distribution. In effect, farmers will be at the mercy of such large companies as they will have the power to set prices and will not be interested in buying small quantities from small producers.
Corporate concentration will deprive hundreds of millions of their livelihoods. RCEP is a recipe for undermining biodiverse food production, food sovereignty and food security for the mass of the population. It will also massive job losses in a country like India, which has no capacity for absorbing such losses into its workforce.
Current policies seek to tie agriculture to an environmentally destructive, moribund system of capitalism. RCEP would represent a further shift away from real, practical solutions to India’s agrarian crisis based on sustainable agriculture and which place the small farmer at the centre of the development paradigm. Once you begin to consolidate land, displace the small-scale farm and amalgamate land into larger parcels for industrial-scale agriculture, you implement a more inefficient model of agriculture and undermine food security.
In a future India, people might eventually ask, why did India let this happen when far-sighted and sustained policy initiatives based on self-sufficiency, food sovereignty, smallholder-based regenerative agriculture and agroecology could have been implemented?
They might also ask why was the countryside emptied out and more effort not put into developing rural infrastructure and investing in village-based industries and smallholder farmers?
And not least of all, they might ask why did policy makers buy into neoliberal dogma, the only role of which is to seek to justify a corporate takeover?
Ultimately, it is a case of asking does India want – does any country want – industrial-scale agriculture and all it entails: denutrified food, increasingly monolithic diets, the massive use of agrochemicals, food contaminated by hormones, steroids, antibiotics and a range of chemical additives, spiralling rates of ill health, degraded soil, contaminated and depleted water supplies and a cartel of seed, chemical and food processing companies that seek to secure control over the global food production and supply chain to provide people with low-grade but highly profitable food products.
Solutions to India’s agrarian crisis (and indeed the worlds) are available, not least the scaling up of agroecological approaches which would be a lynchpin of rural development. However, in India (as elsewhere) successive administrations have bowed to and continue to acquiesce to grip of global capitalism and have demonstrated an unflinching allegiance to corporate power. It is unlikely that either the Congress or BJP, wedded as they are to neoliberalism, will ever undertake initiatives for seriously developing agroecological alternatives:
“But even if for argument’s sake… the present governance structure were to embrace agroecological alternatives, the problem of extreme inequality that results from the structural logic of capitalism… would require mitigation. Without tempering the ravages of the market, hunger will continue, as will the disempowerment of small producers. Indeed, an agroecological alternative would simply be co-opted by capitalist relations of production and distribution, with community-based initiatives becoming mere decentralised production points within a supply-chain logic that centralises power and profits in the hands of seed corporations.” – Milind Wani.

Disorderly Bangladesh: Is Anarchy Lurking Behind Extrajudicial Killings?

Taj Hashmi

Extrajudicial killings of dissidents and outlaws by states is as old as civilization. The recent world history is replete with such killings. As Hitler had his Waffen-SS and Gestapo, so had Mussolini his Blackshirts to do the job. In the recent past, the last Shah of Iran had his Savak, and the Pakistani occupation Army in Bangladesh had its al-Badr, al-Shams, and Razakars to abduct, torture, and kill their respective opponents. Various countries in the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia – Indonesia and Cambodia in the recent past, and the Philippines under Marcos and the incumbent President Duterte – have had their death-squads, some state-sponsored, and some totally under non-state actors.
The main premise of this article goes beyond explaining the evil of state-sponsored extrajudicial killings in Bangladesh. This piece is about pointing out the inherent dangers lurking behind the so-called “effective” and “desirable” state-sponsored extrajudicial killing of people, including hardcore criminals. The whole thing invariably backfires, and the states that promote and nurture this barbaric method for the sake of restoring law and order become more disorderly than before; and even turn into failing states. Examples abound! Thanks to their nurturing state-sponsored terror, multiple countries have remained dysfunctional for decades. Extrajudicial killing by law-enforcers in the long-run turns members of the killing squads into the Frankenstein’s Monsters of the state, that promoted and nurtured them.
There is nothing new about state-sponsored death-squads in Bangladesh, especially since the Khaleda Zia Government formally introduced the dreaded Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) in 2004, presumably to kill hardcore criminals; in violation of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Bangladesh Constitution. Since then, Bangladesh governments – elected and unelected ones – have never “looked back”! Although it is difficult to ascertain how many Bangladeshis – political activists, criminals, and innocent victims of personal vendetta – got killed in “crossfire” since the emergence of the RAB, one may estimate multiple thousands of people fell victims to extrajudicial, known and unknown killings. We must not impute the killings exclusively to RAB and police, but also to extortionists, drug dealers, and criminals having links with law-enforcers, local criminal gangs, and politicians (sometimes difficult to distinguish), international Mafia, and Islamist terrorist groups.
There is a slight difference between state-sponsored killing in Bangladesh and elsewhere. While the Filipino President Duterte, for example, publicly mentions his employing death-squads to kill drug-dealers – he even brags about his own role in killing drug-dealers by throwing them off flying helicopters – the Bangladesh Government has never confessed law-enforcers have ever done any extrajudicial killing since the inception of the RAB, and ever before. It has invented a laughable expression called “crossfire” or “gunfight”, as its fig leaf to hide its crime against humanity. It is similar to Indian government’s use of “encounter”, to narrate the unbelievable stories about law-enforcers’ armed encounters with criminals, which invariably result only in the deaths of criminals, not any law-enforcer. In short, “crossfire” has become a cruel joke in Bangladesh. So much so, that people and media use the expression in parentheses.
Then again, this does not mean that the so-called “crossfire” was always unpopular among large sections of the population when it was first introduced, with much fanfare in 2004. A large number of Bangladeshis – surprisingly many educated ones – welcomed the killing of hardcore criminals and extortionists like Kala Jahangir and Murgi Milon. So far so good! However, people’s acceptance of “crossfire” as legitimate means of eliminating hardcore criminals also indicates their lack of faith in politicians, judiciary, police, and bureaucracy. Unfortunately, the dire consequences of extrajudicial killings hardly ever dawn on the supporters of “crossfire”, until their own people fall victims to such killings.
The brouhaha following the latest killing of Akramul Haque, a local ruling party activist at Teknaf in Cox’s Bazar District, by RAB on 27thMay, is noteworthy. The widow of the victim publicized the audio tape of her telephone conversation with her late husband moments before his killing (recorded by a device on her phone) [“Murder it was”, Daily Star, June 1, 2018]. I cite another example of coldblooded murder of an alleged drug dealer by police just to underscore one thing: the ongoing “anti-drug operation” is a fabrication, nothing more than red herrings to divert people’s attention from multiple real issues, socio-economic and political. According to a media report, the police killed the wrong person, while the actual criminal had been in prison on multiple charges, including drug trafficking and murder [“Cops took my husband from home the day before”, Daily Star, June 3, 2018]. International media and human rights activists also consider the whole operation and extrajudicial killings unwarranted and politically motivated.
Interestingly, only after a ruling party activist got killed in “crossfire”, party leaders, including the Home Minister, and Awami League General Secretary, have started registering their concern at the methods of the killing process. However, they did not question the legitimacy of extrajudicial killing. The Home Minister said a magistrate would investigate the killing to take necessary action against the killers, and the General Secretary felt “one or two mistakes might take place in big operations like the anti-drug drive”. Meanwhile, in two weeks since the Government started its war against drug-lords and peddlers on 15thMay,the RAB, police, and presumably their civilian associates have killed 130 people in the most controversial and unacceptable manner.
By 2ndJune, the RAB and police have arrested more than 15,000 people in their so-called anti-drug operation. While very well-known, politically influential drug lords have remained unscathed, or have managed to flee the country, ordinary people are being “crossfired” in the most unacceptable manner. It is noteworthy that some leading media outlets and the Transparency International of Bangladesh (TIB) have demanded judicial probe into the killings, and some lawmakers have also asked for caution in drives against drug-dealers in the country [New Age, June 1 & 2, 2018]. Meanwhile, cross sections of Bangladeshis, including human rights activists, pro-Government intellectuals, and ruling party leaders have started questioning the methods of such killings. Some of them have even questioned the legitimacy of extrajudicial killing. However, too little, too late!
There are several examples of law-enforcers’ and soldiers’ turning into indiscriminate killers in Bangladesh. Two heads of state, multiple politicians, thousands of civilians, hundreds of military officers and troops have already fell victims to organized or disorganized death squads since Liberation. Fifty-seven army officers, including a major-general, got killed at the hands of their own troops (of the now defunct Bangladesh Rifles or BDR) on 25th/26thFebruary of 2009 alone.
In the backdrop of the almost uninterrupted process of extrajudicial killings in Bangladesh since 2004, I am afraid, the promoters and mentors of these killing squads are simply playing with fire. They do not know where they are pushing the country into! If the ongoing extrajudicial killing process of actual drug dealers, suspects, and totally innocent people goes on for an indefinite period, the country would definitely head toward disaster, possibly toward a long-drawn period of anarchy. Since the absence of law amounts to anarchy, the expression “extrajudicial killing” is self-explanatory indeed!
As terror begets terror, so individuals and groups in the fringe also make a foray out of ideological or purely criminal motivations. The upshot is the emergence of multiple autonomous and unrestrained non-state terror outfits or death-squads from among the disgruntled people to fight each other and extort and kill civilians. In the long-run, they even pose an existential threat to the state itself. Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, and Syria fall in this category of states. Bangladesh has lessons to learn from the examples of countries that became dysfunctional due to extrajudicial killings by law-enforcers, which eventually led to the mushroom growth of privately run death-squads.
It is sad but true, sections of the state-sponsored killing squads in Bangladesh have already gone out of control and working as mercenaries of various underground groups linked with international terrorist groups, drug Mafia, and criminal networks. International and social media networks, from time to time, provide documentary evidences of non-state killer gangs killing of unarmed civilians in Bangladesh with active support from RAB troops and officers. On several occasions RAB officers are directly involved in killing and extortion of civilians. The infamous Seven Murder Case at Narayanganj was one of them. In 2014, twenty-seven RAB troops, including three officers, were involved in the abduction and killing at Narayanganj [“Narayanganj seven-murder verdict due Jan 16” Dhaka Tribune, 30 November 2016].
The binary between state- and non-state actors in selective and indiscriminate killing is intricate. State-sponsored ones have the potential to become non-state death-squads or terrorist-insurgent outfits, which often vie for controlling or even capturing state machinery. The Afghan Taliban is a glaring example in this regard. Both state- and non-state death-squads or terror outfits have three-pronged agendas a) to intimidate their rivals (state machinery and people at large); b) to overpower them or neutralize them; and c) to extort and plunder from public and private sectors. Both of these killing squads could either be ideology-driven or extortion and plunder are their main motivations. While the state-actors are under the control of civil and military authorities of the state, non-state actors are autonomous and unrestrained, hence more dangerous and least predictable. Last but not least, as mentioned above, state-sponsored terror and extrajudicial killings lead to non-state death-squads, who often collaborate with local and international crime syndicates, drug Mafia, and terrorist networks.

Australia: Private health giant Healthscope axes 400 jobs

Margaret Rees 

Healthscope, which owns 45 hospitals in Australia and runs pathology operations in New Zealand, Malaysia and Singapore, suddenly last month announced the closure of two hospitals in the state of Victoria at the cost of more than 400 jobs.
The 107-bed Geelong Private Hospital, with 293 staff and the 60-bed Cotham Private Hospital in the Melbourne suburb of Kew with 124 staff, are to close in a month. Healthscope is engaged in asset stripping, as part of financial moves and counter moves on the stock market.
Healthscope claimed a review found its hospital portfolio in Victoria had “underperformed relative to the rest of the group.” It recorded a $68 million impairment regarding Frankston Private Hospital, also in Melbourne.
“We conducted an exhaustive evaluation of alternatives but unfortunately it is simply not viable to continue operations into the future,” chief executive Gordon Ballantyne stated.
Healthscope said it would contact patients currently at the hospitals or with future treatment planned, to try to ensure their care is not affected.
In reality, the company’s operations show little regard for clinical care. A Cotham Hospital nurse told World Socialist Web Site: “It’s a convenient hospital for local people and the elderly—it means they don’t have to go into the city. But millions need to be spent on the place. The lifts need totally replacing. Everything has been done on the cheap. They have only just put in a call bell system, even though it had been needed for years.”
With a state election due in November, the Victorian Labor government announced it would open 117 jobs in Barwon Health, Geelong’s public hospital system, to ameliorate the job losses at Geelong Private Hospital. One of the government’s concern is the political fallout in Geelong, a city hard hit by the closure of the Ford car plant and other job losses in recent years. It is also intent on preventing any fight erupting among workers against the closures.
To head off opposition, Health Minister Jill Hennessy said jobs would be available for Geelong Private Hospital workers, including in nursing, allied health, administration and patient services, as Barwon Health services were set to grow.
Hennessy met with the Geelong staff on May 25, telling them: “We believe we are going to be able to generate about 117 jobs at Barwon Health and make sure that we’re giving preference to those that are affected by the Healthscope decision.” She praised them as “supremely qualified and valuable professionals,” and claimed that the other job losses would be absorbed in the western suburbs of Melbourne.
The next day, state Premier Daniel Andrews announced a $10 million feasibility study for a women’s’ and children’s’ hospital, utilising the Geelong Private Hospital building. This is a blatant pre-election exercise, and commits the government to nothing.
While the closure announcement came as a shock to the hospital workers, the government would have known well in advance, as did the health trade unions.
Australian Nurses and Midwifery Federation (ANMF), which represents 3,000 Healthscope nurses, midwives and carers in Victoria, had warned in April that jobs would go at Healthscope hospitals. That was after an Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) radio report named four Healthscope hospitals in Melbourne as potential sites for redundancies.
The ANMF held separate members meetings at Cotham and Geelong hospitals on May 23, saying that about 200 nurses were affected by the announced closure. The meetings were held to “discuss members’ concerns, options and to ensure they receive all of their entitlements, including redundancy provisions.”
ANMF secretary Lisa Fitzpatrick said: “The closure of these health facilities and the loss of hundreds of jobs are incredibly distressing for our members and their families.”
However the union indicated no plans to hold a joint meeting of the affected staff at the two hospitals, or for a fight against the closures. Like the government, the union wants to block and wear down any resistance.
Similarly, Diane Asmar, secretary of the Health Services Union, covering the allied staff, said: “The sad thing is they neglected to realise the staff are their asset. The people who work hard and have dedicated so many years providing services for Healthscope.”
As Asmar’s choice of language reveals, the unions also regard the staff as a corporate asset, typifying the unions’ completely pro-business outlook.
Healthscope, Australia’s second biggest private hospital operator, with 18,000 employees, is divesting itself of the two hospitals in order to help secure a more favourable takeover bid.
Two conglomerates are vying to buy the company—Canadian giant Brookfield Asset Management, which made a $3.3 billion bid, and Australian private equity firm BGH Capital, which already has a 14 percent holding in Healthscope.
The latter firm includes Australian Super, a grouping of superannuation funds jointly run by union officials.
Health Minister Hennessy’s media statement on the closure of Geelong Private Hospital said: “It is closing its doors because it can no longer remain financially sustainable in a crowded market of three private hospitals.”
This is simply a rationalisation of the increasing privatisation of hospital care at the expense of the public hospital system, enforced by Labor and the unions.
The history of the two hospitals underlines this process. Cotham Private Hospital was built in 1970 by a consortium of doctors, with flats next door for doctors and the director of nursing. It has since been sold several times to corporate interests, with parts hived off as lucrative real estate. It has been whittled down deliberately in recent months to prepare for another sell off.
Geelong Private Hospital had its origins in the closure of the Baxter House maternity hospital, part of the public Geelong Hospital complex. Baxter House was closed in the late 1990s, along with 16 other public hospitals, as the then Liberal state government destroyed 13,500 health jobs.
The unions did nothing to oppose this offensive and Labor refused to reverse when it returned to government in Victoria. Geelong Private Hospital was set up using the empty Baxter House, on publicly-owned land.
Corporations such as Healthscope rake in hundreds of millions of dollars each year, profiting from people seeking adequate medical attention outside the badly underfunded public system. This year, the company’s projected hospital earnings were $340 to $350 million, marginally down from $359 million in 2017.
Despite protestations of concern for staff and patients by management, the government and the trade unions, it is the ruthless drive for profit on the money markets that dominates all their calculations.

Jordan’s prime minister resigns amid massive protests against IMF-dictated austerity

Jean Shaoul

Jordan’s Prime Minister Hani Mulki resigned yesterday following days of anti-government protests in Amman and other major cities. The protests were against a new law lowering the income tax threshold, a hike in the sales tax, and increases in the cost of fuel, electricity and water.
King Abdullah, the country’s real ruler, cancelled his planned overseas trip and appointed education minister Omar al-Razzaz, a former World Bank economist, in Mulki’s place. The king’s move follows the failure of his announcement last Friday suspending price increases until the end of the year—at a cost of $22.5 million—to assuage popular anger.
On Saturday, he called on parliament to lead a “comprehensive and reasonable national dialogue” on the new tax law, saying, “It would not be fair that the citizen alone bears the burden of financial reforms.”
Petra, one of Jordan’s news agencies, reported that legislators were set to ask Abdullah’s permission to hold an exceptional session to withdraw the changes.
Last Wednesday, 33 unions called a general strike of health care and public-sector workers—Abdullah’s key and very narrow social base—along with small towns, villages and tribal areas where the clans and indigenous minority East Bankers live. This was to protest legislative proposals aimed at increasing the proportion of income tax payers from 4.5 percent to 10 percent. The average wage, such as a teacher’s salary, is around $350 a month, or less than $5,000 a year.
This will hit families hard, because Jordan is a low-wage economy, where the median age is 22 years and it is the norm for young people to live at home with their parents until they can afford to marry. Many work at two or three jobs, if they can find them in a country with an official unemployment rate of 18 percent, a gross underestimate.
Corporation tax will rise from 35 to 40 percent. Manufacturers of food and other basic products will see their income tax rise from 24 percent to 30 percent. The new law will also criminalise tax violations, making them subject to prison terms and heavy fines.
This comes in the wake of January’s budget extending sales tax to a further 165 items, including basic products; increasing the price of fuel, electricity and water; raising tobacco tax; and increasing the cost of public transport by 9 percent.
The price of fuel has risen five times since January, while electricity bills, already phenomenally high, have risen 55 percent since February.
The removal of flour subsidies means that the price of a kilo of white bread has doubled from $0.22 to $0.45, while the price of smaller flat bread has increased by more than 67 percent.
Amman, where one-third of Jordanians live, is one of the most expensive capitals in the Arab world. Such is the hardship that there has reportedly been a 20 percent slump in sales during Ramadan, a period of peak retail demand.
These measures were the latest in a series of economic reforms following a $723 million three-year loan from the International Monetary Fund in 2016, aimed at reducing Jordan’s $40 billion public debt from about 94 percent of GDP to 77 percent by 2021.
Tens of thousands demonstrated across the country on Thursday and Friday. On Friday evening, protesters gathered outside Mulki’s office calling for the fall of the government. On Saturday, despite Abdullah’s announcement suspending price increases for fuel, electricity and water, some 200,000 took to the streets of Jordan’s towns and cities.
Social network sites were full of slogans such as “don’t touch my salary,” “a government of thieves” and “don’t steal our rights.” Strikers chanted, “We are here until we bring the downfall of the bill ... This government is shameful” and “Our demands are legitimate. No, no to corruption.”
Three thousand demonstrators protested outside Mulki’s office on Saturday shouting, “Mulki should leave.”
Protests are ongoing, with a one-day general strike called for Wednesday.
The king is putting pressure on the US and his traditional supporters in the Gulf, whose funding has dried up over the last two years, to come up with the cash to prop up his tottering regime. Carved out of part of the Palestine governorate of Greater Syria, part of the former Ottoman Empire, by Britain in the aftermath of World War I, Transjordan was never a viable state. After World War II, and particularly after 1957, Washington replaced London as Jordan’s underwriter in return for its services in policing US interests in the region, suppressing the Palestinians over whom King Hussein (Abdullah’s father) ruled in both Jordan and, until 1967, East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Latterly, Jordan has provided a key staging post for US-backed operations against the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad.
It has become a holding pen for the region’s refugees—Palestinian, Iraqi and Syrian—created through wars in the geostrategic interests of the imperialist powers and their regional clients. As a result, Jordan’s population has soared from 5.5 million in 2003 to 9.9 million this year.
The Trump administration’s decision to cut its funding by £300 million to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, has been catastrophic. With 2 million Palestinian refugees in massive refugee camps and in cities, their needs have now to be met from Jordan’s declining resources.
Jordan also has around 650,000 UN-registered Syrian refugees, of whom some 100,000 live in camps. Most live in the towns and cities, alongside nearly a million more unregistered refugees who seek work where they can. According to Jordanian officials, the government has spent $10 billion on the refugees, with little support from either its wealthy Arab neighbours or the major powers.
Around half of the Syrian refugees are children who should be attending school. To cope, many schools are operating a two-shift system, in the morning and afternoon.
The US signed an aid package for Jordan earlier this year for $1.275 billion a year beginning in the fiscal year 2018 and ending in 2022—a $275 million annual increase over the previous three years, but this only accounts for 10 percent of Jordan’s budget.
By far the major source of income is the Gulf. But the $3.6 billion from the Gulf Cooperation Council states came to an end 18 months ago, a major cause of the current economic crisis. The increasingly close alliance being forged between the US, Saudi Arabia and Israel against Iran has left Jordan out in the cold. At the same time, President Trump’s decision to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem has undercut Amman’s role in Jerusalem, where Abdullah has guardianship of the al-Aqsa mosque compound, and inflamed tensions in the country, more than half of whose population is of Palestinian origin.
His visit to Riyadh in December to discuss the US embassy decision was fraught with tensions, leading to the Saudi authorities detaining a Jordanian-Palestinian businessman, Sabih al Masri, who heads the Arab Bank, Jordan’s leading financial firm. Relations soured further after Abdullah attended an Organisation of Islamic Cooperation meeting where the Jerusalem embassy issue was discussed, prompting Saudi Arabia to withhold a further $250 million in promised aid. Abdullah compounded his crime by shaking hands with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani during the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation summit in Istanbul two weeks ago.
In January, Abdullah reorganised the army, “retiring” three close relatives, including his brothers, from senior positions, amid rumours of a Saudi plot to unseat Abdullah— like the attempt to fashion a more pliant government in Lebanon via Saad Hariri’s forced resignation.
This is prompting speculation that to secure the kingdom’s survival Jordan may normalise relations with Syria, entertain closer relations with Tehran, ally itself with Qatar against Saudi Arabia’s embargo, refuse to accept Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and secure new patrons, such as Turkey.

Death toll rises as volcanic eruption buries entire towns in Guatemala

Andrea Lobo

The National Coordinator for the Reduction of Disasters (CONRED) of Guatemala confirmed that at least 62 people have died after a volcanic eruption Sunday created pyroclastic flows that wiped out entire communities.
The preliminary numbers include 300 injured, 2 million affected, and 3,300 evacuated, with about 1,000 in shelters. There is still an unknown number of missing, and the death toll is expected to rise dramatically.
On Sunday, a survivor leaving the “furnace” told El Periodico, “there are way too many buried, a multitude of dead, countless people are dead.”
On Sunday night, at a press conference with ministers and CONRED, President Jimmy Morales declared shamelessly: “Our budget does not allow us to allocate a cent to this emergency. I’m ashamed to say this again, but the Budget Act does not allow us to count a single cent for emergencies.” The Finance Ministry announced it could scrape together about $25 million.
Located 20 miles northwest of the capital, Guatemala City, and 12 miles from Antigua, the Fuego volcano, one of the most active in Central America, had long given repeated and increasingly alarming warnings, according to residents, but no evacuation orders were made in time.
This neglect has produced yet another devastating social crime by the capitalist ruling class. It is similar to those that led to 5,000 deaths in Puerto Rico from Hurricane María, the 370 dead from last year’s earthquake in Central Mexico, the Grenfell fire in London, the poisoning of children and workers in Flint, Michigan and virtually all the devastating and unnecessary mass deaths from natural disasters and “accidents” under capitalism.
In contrast to the criminal indifference and neglect of the government and the ruling class, the immediate aftermath of Fuego’s first eruption saw the mobilization of the population across Guatemala at collection points to send food, diapers, clothes, blankets and other aid, while local inhabitants have prepared meals for rescue teams. There have been breathtaking scenes of bravery by ill-equipped rescuers, including fire fighters, paramedics, rank-and-file military and police who decided among themselves to penetrate deeply into unstable and buried areas amid scorching temperatures, with several being injured and at least one losing his life, but helping evacuate hundreds more as pyroclastic flows continued.
The US Geological Survey indicates that these flows, composed of molten rock, mud and other volcanic materials, move at speeds faster than 50 mph, compared to running-pace lava flows. Temperatures can reach 700 degrees Celsius (1,300 degrees Fahrenheit), leaving low probabilities of survival for anyone caught unawares in a region where most people have no vehicles and the roads are in poor condition.
Dr. Matthew Watson, a volcanologist at the University of Bristol, who has studied the Fuego volcano for 20 years, told the Independent: “This volcano is surrounded by real rural poverty, and evacuation is typically done on foot or in vehicles that take a long time to get anywhere.”
Older residents in Alotenango accompanying the families of victims said to journalists that they had never witnessed a disaster of such magnitude, recalling that about 40 years ago an eruption also wiped out crops and towns, but the population was able to escape in time.
The first eruption happened at 11:00 a.m., a second one occurred at 4:00 p.m. and a third one at 8:00 a.m. on Monday. Almost immediately after the state’s volcanological institute, INSIVUMEH, had announced that the second eruption had ended, the third one began, forcing rescuers, journalists and more inhabitants to evacuate in panic. Rescuers and local reporters broke into tears after finding the charred bodies of entire families burned alive.
In the Chimaltenango Department to the north, at least six communities are still entirely cut off due to avalanches and a river that has overflowed its banks.
The column of ashes ascending from Fuego on Sunday reached about 8,000 feet above the peak of the volcano, which is 12,000 feet above sea level. Ash spread across the area, coating the capital, Guatemala City, Escuintla and Quetzaltenango, and reaching most of the country’s territory. The Aurora International airport in Guatemala City was forced to suspend operations. Adding to the anxiety, at 9:00 a.m. on Monday, a 5.2 magnitude tremor hit the Pacific coast, rocking the entire region around the volcano.
Several smaller but significant eruptions occurred last year, with the government’s CONRED limiting their warnings for tourists not to camp in the plateau area and for the leaders of communities to stay in contact with emergency agencies.
The INSIVUMEH had reported “strong explosions” in August and November 2017 that sent ashes to nearby towns, while eruptions had been getting stronger. On February 1 of this year, the largest explosion in six years led to the evacuation of 2,880 inhabitants, given lava and pyroclastic flows down the Seca, Cenizas, Las Lajas and Honda ravines, the same ones carrying the deadly flows on Sunday and Monday. The Las Lajas and Honda ravines are directed toward the east and southeast, where most residents were left trapped in the towns of San Miguel Los Lotes, El Rodeo and Escuintla.
As recently as May 5, more than 300 people were evacuated due to a smaller eruption. The Smithsonian Institution’s Global Volcanism Program also reports large and recent explosions with pyroclastic flows down the same known ravines on May 17, April 14-17, April 7-10, February 27-28 and February 7-13.
In 2012, about 10,000 people were evacuated due to heightened activity in the volcano. Even though, as Dr. Watson notes, the last eruption had “gone up an order of magnitude in terms of scale,” and in spite of the large tourist sector and productive agriculture in the area, there was no justification for thousands of residents in the most vulnerable areas downstream of the known pyroclastic channels to not have been resettled.
The areas vulnerable to lava and pyroclastic flows, avalanches and floods are well known from decades of documentation. With the presence of 32 active volcanoes in the country, Guatemala’s preparations for these disasters, especially close to the largest cities, should include emergency agencies constantly on alert and fully equipped. This is far from the case.
The disaster caused by the Fuego volcano eruption is an extension of the social catastrophe that characterizes Guatemalan society. It is the most unequal country, in terms of the Gini index, in the most unequal region of the world. The last figures available for 2014 from the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean show that the official poverty rate stands at 60 percent, including 71 percent of the mostly indigenous rural population, while 23.4 percent live under conditions of extreme poverty. All of these figures have increased sharply since the 2008 global capitalist financial meltdown.
Access to health care, pensions and a livable income is denied to the vast majority of the population. In 2017, 111 children under the age of five died from starvation in Guatemala, while 46.5 percent of all infants suffer from chronic malnutrition. Meanwhile, Guatemala is expected to pay $1.8 billion in interest payments to bondholders this year, while the ministry of defense is asking for a $531 million budget. According to Oxfam, more than 260 people have more than $30 million in assets, while the Central American Institute for Fiscal Studies (ICEFI) calculates that the top 1 percent in the country hoards 42 percent of the national income.
Such inequality and desperate economic conditions are the product of more than a century of super-exploitation and domination by US imperialism. While workers and peasants have held mass mobilizations against rampant corruption in recent years, including those that resulted in the resignation and jailing of president Otto Pérez Molina in 2014, these social conditions and the intensifying exploitation of the working class persist, alongside official corruption and austerity, as the entire Guatemalan ruling class continues enriching itself and its financiers on Wall Street and the City of London.
The social resources were available to prevent the deaths, destruction and suffering produced by the Fuego volcano’s eruption, and the resources exist to help the survivors get on their feet, to improve the social infrastructure across the country and to satisfy the urgent social needs of the entire population, including quality housing, food, education, and health care.
The only way for the working class and the exploited masses in Guatemala to secure their social rights is by undertaking a struggle against capitalism, in unity with workers throughout the hemisphere and internationally, to expropriate the enormous wealth amassed by the ruling elite and the transnational corporations.

Washington considers direct intervention in siege of Yemeni port city

Bill Van Auken

In what would constitute a major escalation of the US role in the near-genocidal war waged over the last three years by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) against Yemen, US officials were in discussions yesterday on the Pentagon taking a direct role in the siege of the country’s Red Sea port city of Hodeidah.
Saudi and UAE-led forces came within 10 km of Hodeidah on Monday, having pushed north up Yemen’s western coast with the aid of relentless air strikes against Houthi rebel forces, which control the city as well as the country’s northwestern provinces, including the capital of Sana’a, which is 230 miles to the north.
The Wall Street Journal Monday cited US officials reporting that “The Trump administration is weighing an appeal from the United Arab Emirates for direct US support to seize Yemen’s main port. ...”
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a strong proponent of global US military intervention, has asked American officials to come up with a “quick assessment” of the prospects for a direct US military role in the siege of Hodeidah.
The Journal report cited one official raising doubts that the US-backed forces “would be able to do it cleanly and avoid a catastrophic incident.” Another senior American official, however, told the Journal: “We have folks who are frustrated and ready to say: ‘Let’s do this. We’ve been flirting with this for a long time. Something needs to change the dynamic, and if we help the Emiratis do it better, this could be good.’ ”
A battle for control of Hodeidah poses a direct threat to the city’s civilian population of 400,000, with the potential of a Saudi blitzkrieg combined with a direct US intervention recreating the kind of mass slaughter unleashed by the Pentagon in Mosul, Iraq and Raqqa, Syria.
More broadly, such a siege threatens the lives of millions of Yemenis in the Houthi-controlled highlands, for whom Hodeidah is the sole aid lifeline in a country historically reliant on imports for 90 percent of its food.
Even before taking into account the catastrophic impact of closing down this port, the chief aid official at the United Nations, Mark Lowcock, warned last week that by the end of this year, another 10 million Yemenis will join the 8.4 million who are already on the brink of starvation in what the UN has called the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
Hundreds of foreign aid workers have reportedly evacuated the city, and it was reported on Monday that a UN aid vessel came under direct attack by Saudi warplanes. The city is already under bombardment from both the air and the sea.
“Thousands of civilians are fleeing from the outskirts of Hodeidah which is now a battle zone,” Jan Egeland, secretary-general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, told Reuters. “We cannot have war in Hodeidah, it would be like war in Rotterdam or Antwerp, these are comparable cities in Europe.” He added that such a war would mean “nothing coming through” in terms of food and other aid for the country’s starving population.
It was reported Monday that a UN mediator, Martin Griffiths, had arrived in Sana’a to present a proposal for a Houthi withdrawal from Hodeidah and the placing of the port under UN supervision. It was not clear, however, whether either the Houthi-led administration or the Saudi and UAE-led forces would adhere to such a settlement.
The Saudi-led “coalition” wants to secure its grip over Hodeidah in order to starve into submission the entire population in the areas under Houthi control.
Sharpening the tensions and creating the conditions for even greater slaughter, the Saudi and UAE monarchies are pursuing conflicting interests in their military interventions in Yemen, with Riyadh attempting to re-install the puppet government of Abd-Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, and the UAE supporting secessionists who are seeking to revive the former state of South Yemen.
Saudi Arabia launched the war in March 2015, carrying out relentless airstrikes ever since that have devastated civilian neighborhoods, vital infrastructure, factories and even farms. Mass civilian casualties have resulted from the bombing of funerals and weddings, with the death toll from these attacks now over 13,000, with many more dying from hunger and disease. More than 2,200 people have lost their lives to a cholera epidemic that has infected 1.1 million people, while the country has seen its first outbreak of diphtheria since 1982
From the beginning of the Saudi onslaught, the Obama administration provided indispensable US military support, selling Saudi Arabia and the UAE bombs (including outlawed cluster munitions) and warplanes used to strike Yemen, providing mid-air refueling to Saudi jets to assure continuous bombardment, and setting up a joint US-Saudi command to render logistical aid, including intelligence used in selecting targets. At the same time, US special forces units and armed drones have been deployed in Yemen for assassination missions against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
The Trump administration has escalated US involvement, with not only massive new arms sales to the Saudi monarchy, but also the deployment of US special operations troops to fight directly alongside Saudi forces. Revealed a month ago, this deployment was carried out behind the backs of the American people and without informing Congress, much less gaining its authorization. While explained as a mission to protect Saudi Arabia’s borders with Yemen, the purpose of the US troop deployment appears to be far broader.
Driving the US toward increasingly direct intervention in a war that has pitted the obscenely rich oil monarchies of the Persian Gulf against the poorest nation in the Arab world is the broader strategy elaborated by the Trump administration in preparation for a military confrontation with Iran.
The US and its allies have cast the war in Yemen as a so-called proxy conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia, with Washington making unsubstantiated allegations that Iran has supplied the Houthi rebels with arms. The reality is that both Washington and Riyadh see the domination of Yemen by any government that is not a US-Saudi puppet regime as an unacceptable threat.
The discussions in Washington on an escalation of direct US intervention in Yemen are unfolding in the context of the sharp ratcheting up of US sanctions and threats against Iran following President Trump’s unilateral May 8 withdrawal from the nuclear agreement reached in 2015 between Iran and the so-called P5+1—the US, UK, France, Germany, China and Russia.
A more direct US military intervention in Yemen may prove the stepping stone to a region-wide war aimed against Iran and at the securing of US imperialism’s unfettered control over the energy-rich and strategically vital Middle East.