the real world
exposing how greed, corruption, injustice, and imperialism impacts the world
and exposes the leaders who benefit
JAN 7, 2021
*Boris Johnson referred to police watchdog over alleged relationship with American businesswoman The prime minister of Great Britain may be facing an investigation as impeachment grips America.
Man becomes great exactly in the degree in which he works for the welfare of his fellow-men
Mahatma Gandhi
articles
*University College London apologises for role in promoting eugenics
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Britain Prepares for Increased Isolation in Wake of Brexit Deal
(excerpt below)
*INTERNATIONAL LAWYERS DRAFTING PLAN TO HOLD GOVERNMENTS, CORPS ACCOUNTABLE FOR 'WIDESPREAD DESTRUCTION' OF ECOSYSTEMS(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Bolivians Return Evo Morales’s Party to Power One Year After a U.S.-Applauded Coup
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Revealed: chaining, beatings and torture inside Sudan's Islamic schools
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Geneva to introduce minimum wage of £3,500 a month
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Covid-19 tests that give results in minutes to be rolled out across world
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Stained relations? Israeli PM accused of taking dirty laundry on state trips
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Black Met inspector stopped by police while driving home from work
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Vitamin D helps us fight Covid-19, major study finds
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Germany is first major economy to phase out coal and nuclear
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Gender equality: Most people are biased against women, UN says
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*The super-rich: another 31,000 people join the ultra-wealthy elite
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*DELHI PROTESTS: DEATH TOLL CLIMBS AMID WORST RELIGIOUS VIOLENCE FOR DECADES
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*UK to close door to non-English speakers and unskilled workers
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*No 10 refuses to comment on PM's views of racial IQ
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Germany Sees Political Fallout From Chancellor Merkel’s Alliance With Far Right
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Vietnam accused of teaching young people that being gay is a ‘disease’
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Canada: thousands of travelers affected as Indigenous-led rail blockade continues
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Illegal Chinese Chef Charged for Caning Black Employee In Kenya
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Abbas blasts Trump’s ‘Swiss cheese’ plan for Palestine in UN speech
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Botswana Selling Licenses To Kill Elephants At $39,000 A Head
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Women Perform 12.5 Billion Hours of Unpaid Labor Every Day
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Here’s What Workers of the Global South Endure to Create Corporate Wealth
(ARTICLE BELOW)
funnies(at the end)
*World Highlights*
*
University College London apologises for role in promoting eugenics
Links to early eugenicists such as Francis Galton a source of ‘deep regret’ to institution
Richard Adams Education editor - THE GUARDIAN
Thu 7 Jan 2021 12.20 EST
University College London has expressed “deep regret” for its role in the propagation of eugenics, alongside a promise to improve conditions for disabled staff and students and a pledge to give “greater prominence” to teaching the malign legacy of the discredited movement.
The formal apology for legitimising eugenics – the advocacy of selective breeding of the population often to further racist or discriminatory aims – is UCL’s latest effort to address its links to early eugenicists such as Francis Galton, who funded a professorship in eugenics at the university.
“UCL acknowledges with deep regret that it played a fundamental role in the development, propagation and legitimisation of eugenics,” the university said as part of its apology.
“This dangerous ideology cemented the spurious idea that varieties of human life could be assigned different value. It provided justification for some of the most appalling crimes in human history: genocide, forced euthanasia, colonialism and other forms of mass murder and oppression based on racial and ableist hierarchy.
“The legacies and consequences of eugenics still cause direct harm through the racism, antisemitism, ableism and other harmful stereotyping that they feed. These continue to impact on people’s lives directly, driving discrimination and denying opportunity, access and representation.”
Prof Michael Arthur, UCL’s provost, said: “UCL considers its history of involvement in eugenics to be in direct contradiction to its founding values of equality, openness and humanity. As a community, we reject eugenics entirely and are taking a range of actions to acknowledge and address our historical links with the eugenics movement.
“These actions – including our public apology today – are important steps towards understanding and acknowledging inequality within our institution and acting to ensure that UCL becomes fully inclusive for all our staff and students.”
The apology is in part a response to an independent inquiry’s report into the history of eugenics at UCL completed last year, as well as recommendations by inquiry members who refused to endorse the report, in part because it overlooked eugenics conferences held on UCL’s premises until 2017.
In 2018 it emerged that a senior academic at the university had been secretly hosting a private conference on eugenics with speakers including white supremacists.
Joe Cain, a professor of history and biology at UCL who was one of the dissenters, said he was pleased with the apology and with the backing given to it by Arthur, whose term as provost ends next month.
“The apology is great and I’m delighted to see this happen before the provost leaves because I know how important it was to him,” Cain said.
Cain said his research into the history of eugenics at UCL found that figures such as Galton and Karl Pearson, its first professor of eugenics, were regarded as extreme even by their contemporaries, with Pearson criticised by peers for his “atrocious antisemitism”.
“This apology is good because it says plainly that we need to have better institutional systems to catch atrocious behaviour,” Cain said.
UCL last year renamed buildings and lecture theatres dedicated to Galton and Pearson, and Cain said that process needed to continue. Most recently, UCL has stripped the name of Ronald Fisher, who followed Pearson as professor of eugenics, from a research centre and renamed it the Centre for Computational Biology.
UCL said it would also invest in a comprehensive review and action plan to improve the access and experience of disabled students and staff, and improve access for students from disadvantaged backgrounds.
It also plans to give greater prominence to the history and legacy of eugenics in UCL’s teaching activities, including a specific module in the induction programme for new students.
The formal apology for legitimising eugenics – the advocacy of selective breeding of the population often to further racist or discriminatory aims – is UCL’s latest effort to address its links to early eugenicists such as Francis Galton, who funded a professorship in eugenics at the university.
“UCL acknowledges with deep regret that it played a fundamental role in the development, propagation and legitimisation of eugenics,” the university said as part of its apology.
“This dangerous ideology cemented the spurious idea that varieties of human life could be assigned different value. It provided justification for some of the most appalling crimes in human history: genocide, forced euthanasia, colonialism and other forms of mass murder and oppression based on racial and ableist hierarchy.
“The legacies and consequences of eugenics still cause direct harm through the racism, antisemitism, ableism and other harmful stereotyping that they feed. These continue to impact on people’s lives directly, driving discrimination and denying opportunity, access and representation.”
Prof Michael Arthur, UCL’s provost, said: “UCL considers its history of involvement in eugenics to be in direct contradiction to its founding values of equality, openness and humanity. As a community, we reject eugenics entirely and are taking a range of actions to acknowledge and address our historical links with the eugenics movement.
“These actions – including our public apology today – are important steps towards understanding and acknowledging inequality within our institution and acting to ensure that UCL becomes fully inclusive for all our staff and students.”
The apology is in part a response to an independent inquiry’s report into the history of eugenics at UCL completed last year, as well as recommendations by inquiry members who refused to endorse the report, in part because it overlooked eugenics conferences held on UCL’s premises until 2017.
In 2018 it emerged that a senior academic at the university had been secretly hosting a private conference on eugenics with speakers including white supremacists.
Joe Cain, a professor of history and biology at UCL who was one of the dissenters, said he was pleased with the apology and with the backing given to it by Arthur, whose term as provost ends next month.
“The apology is great and I’m delighted to see this happen before the provost leaves because I know how important it was to him,” Cain said.
Cain said his research into the history of eugenics at UCL found that figures such as Galton and Karl Pearson, its first professor of eugenics, were regarded as extreme even by their contemporaries, with Pearson criticised by peers for his “atrocious antisemitism”.
“This apology is good because it says plainly that we need to have better institutional systems to catch atrocious behaviour,” Cain said.
UCL last year renamed buildings and lecture theatres dedicated to Galton and Pearson, and Cain said that process needed to continue. Most recently, UCL has stripped the name of Ronald Fisher, who followed Pearson as professor of eugenics, from a research centre and renamed it the Centre for Computational Biology.
UCL said it would also invest in a comprehensive review and action plan to improve the access and experience of disabled students and staff, and improve access for students from disadvantaged backgrounds.
It also plans to give greater prominence to the history and legacy of eugenics in UCL’s teaching activities, including a specific module in the induction programme for new students.
Britain Prepares for Increased Isolation in Wake of Brexit Deal
BY Sasha Abramsky, Truthout
PUBLISHED December 30, 2020
...The new U.K.-EU relationship has been a long time in the making.
In 2016, when a small majority of British voters opted to take the U.K. out of the EU, Brexiteers promised a fast, clean severance of ties with the EU. However, those promises turned out to be a stunning example of wishful thinking. The Brexit vote unleashed nearly half a decade of political acrimony and increasingly bitter dealings with France, Germany and the other EU powerhouses. Now, however, four and a half years later, Brexit is finally a done deal. It wasn’t fast, and, in the final negotiations, nor was it really very clean.
Boris Johnson rose to power amid the wreckage of Brexit, biding his time as Prime Minister David Cameron was destroyed by the referendum result; and then, over three years, as Cameron’s successor, Theresa May, repeatedly failed to navigate parliamentary revolts against her various Brexit proposals.
Johnson was elected Conservative Party leader in July 2019, gambled that he could win a national election a few months later on a promise to finally deliver Brexit, and ended up comprehensively demolishing his Labour Party opponents — winning a parliamentary majority almost as large as that upon which Margaret Thatcher’s leadership rested in the mid-1980s.
On Christmas Eve, barely a week before Britain officially exits the EU, the two sides announced they had finalized a deal. Running thousands of pages in length, the agreement covers a huge range of issues — from fishing rights to tariffs, to how produce will cross the Southern Irish/Northern Irish border, to which passport lines travelers will have to wait in at ports of entry.
The headline from the deal is that there will be no tariffs on goods traded between the U.K. and its erstwhile EU partners. That’s a huge relief for U.K. industry, and for businesses that sell European imports in Britain. But, to get there, the U.K. had to agree that its producers would adhere to EU standards, meaning that by and large, European labor, workplace safety and environmental rules will still apply within U.K. industry. That’s good news for labor rights activists, since, historically, the U.K. has embraced an American-style low-wage, low-labor-rights model rather than the more worker-friendly mores of the EU. Conversely, it’s bad news for those Brexiteers who believed they could undercut the EU by luring companies with the promise of fewer worker protections.
The deal goes far beyond workplace laws and trade regulations, however, and it’s in the broader details that U.K. citizens will find their daily interactions with Europe and with Europeans most upended. It will, over the coming years, affect most every area of life in the U.K. For those who aren’t already residents of the respective countries, there will be strict time limits on how long Brits can reside in EU countries in any calendar year, and how long citizens of EU countries can live in the U.K.
There will be no continued U.K. participation in Erasmus, the continent-wide education-exchange program under which students can study in any European country’s universities. Hundreds of thousands of students each year take up these opportunities; now, these doors are being slammed shut.
Perhaps most jarringly, there will be no automatic right for British citizens to work on the continent, and for EU residents to work in the U.K. However, if a professional qualification is mutually recognized on both sides of the divide, there is still the possibility for employers to hire a Brit on the continent and vice versa. But to stay on the continent beyond 90 days in any 180-day period, a British citizen will now need to apply for a long-term visa and residency rights.
A vast range of professional jobs — from doctors to architects to vets — that used to have EU-wide credentialing will now no longer have automatic recognition. If a British doctor wants to work on the continent, he or she will have to petition the country they want to work in to recognize their qualifications.
There will be a replacement scheme put in place for the European-wide health care access that British travelers currently enjoy, meaning that U.K. citizens who travel to Europe post-Brexit should still have access to health care if they fall ill while overseas. That’s a small blessing. But the details of that scheme are still to be worked out, meaning that, come January 1, even setting aside the pandemic travel restrictions, Brits don’t have a guaranteed health care system in place for their continental travels.
Britain will still remain in a number of important scientific collaborative ventures with the EU, but that cooperation sunsets after seven years, and what comes after is still to be determined.
U.K. banks will be limited in what services they can offer customers on the continent, a serious hit for one of Britain’s biggest and most important industries.
It is a bad deal — again and again, what used to be automatic and simple is now complex and bureaucratic; but it will almost certainly be passed by Parliament when members of Parliament debate its terms early in the new year for the simple reason that it is still far better than crashing out of Europe with no deal at all.
Brits have, as a culmination of a nearly five-year fit of national orneriness, finally traded away the right to live and work and study in 27 other countries in exchange for a series of platitudes about “reclaiming sovereignty” and “controlling our destiny” and protecting from greedy continental fishermen a fishing catch that makes up a smaller percentage of the national economy than does the single department store of Harrods.
Brexit didn’t make sense in 2016. It was, however, peddled and re-peddled in the years since as opening up the prospect of a series of glittering go-it-alone trade deals with countries and economic blocs around the world. Brexiteers argued that a weakened EU would be forced, somehow, to bow to Britain’s will in terms of the shape of any deal. They also took heart from the Trump administration’s enthusiastic embrace of Brexit and the promise of a comprehensive free-trade deal quickly negotiated and implemented with the United States.
Now, however, the shabbiness of the Brexit promise is clear. True, there probably will be a trade deal with the U.S. at some point — but the incoming Biden team is hardly champing at the bit to negotiate a deal that rewards Johnson for delivering a separation from the EU that Obama’s administration argued against back in 2016, and that Biden himself remains deeply suspicious of. True, there is now a deal with the EU, but that deal is a far cry from the resurrection of British grandeur, trading dominance and unfettered independence promised by Brexit proponents back in 2016.
The no-win nature of the situation that Britain finds itself in was well summed up by Michael Heseltine, a grandee of the Conservative Party who has spent the past five years fighting against Brexit. “The deal is,” Heseltine told his colleagues earlier this week, “a terrible one.” But rather than voting against it in the House of Lords when it comes up for debate, he will, he declared sadly, abstain, since even a lousy deal is, at the end of the day, better than no deal at all.
In 2016, when a small majority of British voters opted to take the U.K. out of the EU, Brexiteers promised a fast, clean severance of ties with the EU. However, those promises turned out to be a stunning example of wishful thinking. The Brexit vote unleashed nearly half a decade of political acrimony and increasingly bitter dealings with France, Germany and the other EU powerhouses. Now, however, four and a half years later, Brexit is finally a done deal. It wasn’t fast, and, in the final negotiations, nor was it really very clean.
Boris Johnson rose to power amid the wreckage of Brexit, biding his time as Prime Minister David Cameron was destroyed by the referendum result; and then, over three years, as Cameron’s successor, Theresa May, repeatedly failed to navigate parliamentary revolts against her various Brexit proposals.
Johnson was elected Conservative Party leader in July 2019, gambled that he could win a national election a few months later on a promise to finally deliver Brexit, and ended up comprehensively demolishing his Labour Party opponents — winning a parliamentary majority almost as large as that upon which Margaret Thatcher’s leadership rested in the mid-1980s.
On Christmas Eve, barely a week before Britain officially exits the EU, the two sides announced they had finalized a deal. Running thousands of pages in length, the agreement covers a huge range of issues — from fishing rights to tariffs, to how produce will cross the Southern Irish/Northern Irish border, to which passport lines travelers will have to wait in at ports of entry.
The headline from the deal is that there will be no tariffs on goods traded between the U.K. and its erstwhile EU partners. That’s a huge relief for U.K. industry, and for businesses that sell European imports in Britain. But, to get there, the U.K. had to agree that its producers would adhere to EU standards, meaning that by and large, European labor, workplace safety and environmental rules will still apply within U.K. industry. That’s good news for labor rights activists, since, historically, the U.K. has embraced an American-style low-wage, low-labor-rights model rather than the more worker-friendly mores of the EU. Conversely, it’s bad news for those Brexiteers who believed they could undercut the EU by luring companies with the promise of fewer worker protections.
The deal goes far beyond workplace laws and trade regulations, however, and it’s in the broader details that U.K. citizens will find their daily interactions with Europe and with Europeans most upended. It will, over the coming years, affect most every area of life in the U.K. For those who aren’t already residents of the respective countries, there will be strict time limits on how long Brits can reside in EU countries in any calendar year, and how long citizens of EU countries can live in the U.K.
There will be no continued U.K. participation in Erasmus, the continent-wide education-exchange program under which students can study in any European country’s universities. Hundreds of thousands of students each year take up these opportunities; now, these doors are being slammed shut.
Perhaps most jarringly, there will be no automatic right for British citizens to work on the continent, and for EU residents to work in the U.K. However, if a professional qualification is mutually recognized on both sides of the divide, there is still the possibility for employers to hire a Brit on the continent and vice versa. But to stay on the continent beyond 90 days in any 180-day period, a British citizen will now need to apply for a long-term visa and residency rights.
A vast range of professional jobs — from doctors to architects to vets — that used to have EU-wide credentialing will now no longer have automatic recognition. If a British doctor wants to work on the continent, he or she will have to petition the country they want to work in to recognize their qualifications.
There will be a replacement scheme put in place for the European-wide health care access that British travelers currently enjoy, meaning that U.K. citizens who travel to Europe post-Brexit should still have access to health care if they fall ill while overseas. That’s a small blessing. But the details of that scheme are still to be worked out, meaning that, come January 1, even setting aside the pandemic travel restrictions, Brits don’t have a guaranteed health care system in place for their continental travels.
Britain will still remain in a number of important scientific collaborative ventures with the EU, but that cooperation sunsets after seven years, and what comes after is still to be determined.
U.K. banks will be limited in what services they can offer customers on the continent, a serious hit for one of Britain’s biggest and most important industries.
It is a bad deal — again and again, what used to be automatic and simple is now complex and bureaucratic; but it will almost certainly be passed by Parliament when members of Parliament debate its terms early in the new year for the simple reason that it is still far better than crashing out of Europe with no deal at all.
Brits have, as a culmination of a nearly five-year fit of national orneriness, finally traded away the right to live and work and study in 27 other countries in exchange for a series of platitudes about “reclaiming sovereignty” and “controlling our destiny” and protecting from greedy continental fishermen a fishing catch that makes up a smaller percentage of the national economy than does the single department store of Harrods.
Brexit didn’t make sense in 2016. It was, however, peddled and re-peddled in the years since as opening up the prospect of a series of glittering go-it-alone trade deals with countries and economic blocs around the world. Brexiteers argued that a weakened EU would be forced, somehow, to bow to Britain’s will in terms of the shape of any deal. They also took heart from the Trump administration’s enthusiastic embrace of Brexit and the promise of a comprehensive free-trade deal quickly negotiated and implemented with the United States.
Now, however, the shabbiness of the Brexit promise is clear. True, there probably will be a trade deal with the U.S. at some point — but the incoming Biden team is hardly champing at the bit to negotiate a deal that rewards Johnson for delivering a separation from the EU that Obama’s administration argued against back in 2016, and that Biden himself remains deeply suspicious of. True, there is now a deal with the EU, but that deal is a far cry from the resurrection of British grandeur, trading dominance and unfettered independence promised by Brexit proponents back in 2016.
The no-win nature of the situation that Britain finds itself in was well summed up by Michael Heseltine, a grandee of the Conservative Party who has spent the past five years fighting against Brexit. “The deal is,” Heseltine told his colleagues earlier this week, “a terrible one.” But rather than voting against it in the House of Lords when it comes up for debate, he will, he declared sadly, abstain, since even a lousy deal is, at the end of the day, better than no deal at all.
International lawyers drafting plan to hold governments, corps accountable for 'widespread destruction' of ecosystems
Kenny Stancil and Common Dreams alternet
November 30, 2020
An expert panel of top international and environmental lawyers have begun working this month on a legal definition of "ecocide" with the goal of making mass ecological damage an enforceable international crime on par with war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.
Assembled by the Stop Ecocide Foundation at the request of several Swedish parliamentarians, the initiative to criminalize the destruction of ecosystems at the global level has already garnered support from European countries as well as small island nations highly vulnerable to rising sea levels.
The drafting panel is co-chaired by Philippe Sands QC, a professor at University College London, and Justice Florence Mumba, a former judge at the International Criminal Court (ICC).
The November 20 launch date of the project coincided with the 75th anniversary of the beginning of the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders, where the terms "crimes against humanity" and "genocide" were coined.
"The time is right," Sands said recently at an event commemorating the Nuremberg trials, "to harness the power of international criminal law to protect our global environment."
"Seventy five years ago, 'crimes against humanity' and 'genocide' were spoken for the first time, in Nuremberg's Courtroom 600," Sands added, "and my hope is that this group will be able to draw on experience since that day to forge a definition that is practical, effective, and sustainable, and that might attract support to allow an amendment to the ICC Statute to be made."
Charles Jalloh, a professor at Florida International University and member of the United Nations International Law Commission who is on the panel drafting a legally robust definition of ecocide, said that "states should use all tools at their disposal, including their criminal law power at the national and international levels, to protect our shared global environment and to bring the most responsible perpetrators to justice."
The Stop Ecocide Foundation noted that the concept of criminalizing ecocide "has been steadily gaining traction in recent months since small island states Vanuatu and the Maldives called for 'serious consideration' of it at the ICC's annual assembly" in December 2019. According to the group, French President Emmanuel Macron "has actively promised to champion the idea," and the Belgian government has also "pledged diplomatic action to support it."
As The Guardian reported Monday, the ICC "has previously promised to prioritize crimes that result in the 'destruction of the environment,' 'exploitation of natural resources,' and the 'illegal dispossession' of land."
"An ICC policy paper in 2016 said it was not formally extending its jurisdiction but would assess existing offenses, such as crimes against humanity, in a broader context," The Guardian continued. Yet "there have been no formal investigations or charges of this type so far."
Panel member Pablo Fajardo, the Goldman prize-winning Ecuadorian lawyer who challenged Chevron for polluting the Amazon rainforest, said that this "great legal vaccum that exists globally" results in "crimes... committed against nature, against life... go[ing] unpunished," even though "these crimes take their toll on humanity."
"We see... systemic, widespread, and deliberate destruction of the environment without any obvious consequences," said panelist Christina Voigt, a professor at the University of Oslo and expert in climate change law. A newly defined crime of ecocide, she added, "could not only bring those responsible to justice, but also more importantly prevent further destruction."
As The Guardian pointed out, "one challenge for the drafting panel would be to define at what point an ecocide offense would come into force. Chopping down a single tree on a village green would not be sufficient."
Jojo Mehta, chair of the Stop Ecocide Foundation, told The Guardian that "it would have to involve mass, systematic, or widespread destruction" of the world's ecosystems.
"We are probably talking about Amazon deforestation on a huge scale, deep sea bottom trawling, or oil spills," she said. "We want to place it at the same level as atrocities investigated by the ICC."
Mehta explained that "in most cases ecocide is likely to be a corporate crime."
"Criminalizing something at the ICC means that nations that have ratified it have to incorporate it into their own national legislation," she added. "That means there would be lots of options for prosecuting [offending corporations] around the world."
Preparatory work is now underway, and the panel plans to deliver a draft of a legally enforceable definition of ecocide in early 2021.
Assembled by the Stop Ecocide Foundation at the request of several Swedish parliamentarians, the initiative to criminalize the destruction of ecosystems at the global level has already garnered support from European countries as well as small island nations highly vulnerable to rising sea levels.
The drafting panel is co-chaired by Philippe Sands QC, a professor at University College London, and Justice Florence Mumba, a former judge at the International Criminal Court (ICC).
The November 20 launch date of the project coincided with the 75th anniversary of the beginning of the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders, where the terms "crimes against humanity" and "genocide" were coined.
"The time is right," Sands said recently at an event commemorating the Nuremberg trials, "to harness the power of international criminal law to protect our global environment."
"Seventy five years ago, 'crimes against humanity' and 'genocide' were spoken for the first time, in Nuremberg's Courtroom 600," Sands added, "and my hope is that this group will be able to draw on experience since that day to forge a definition that is practical, effective, and sustainable, and that might attract support to allow an amendment to the ICC Statute to be made."
Charles Jalloh, a professor at Florida International University and member of the United Nations International Law Commission who is on the panel drafting a legally robust definition of ecocide, said that "states should use all tools at their disposal, including their criminal law power at the national and international levels, to protect our shared global environment and to bring the most responsible perpetrators to justice."
The Stop Ecocide Foundation noted that the concept of criminalizing ecocide "has been steadily gaining traction in recent months since small island states Vanuatu and the Maldives called for 'serious consideration' of it at the ICC's annual assembly" in December 2019. According to the group, French President Emmanuel Macron "has actively promised to champion the idea," and the Belgian government has also "pledged diplomatic action to support it."
As The Guardian reported Monday, the ICC "has previously promised to prioritize crimes that result in the 'destruction of the environment,' 'exploitation of natural resources,' and the 'illegal dispossession' of land."
"An ICC policy paper in 2016 said it was not formally extending its jurisdiction but would assess existing offenses, such as crimes against humanity, in a broader context," The Guardian continued. Yet "there have been no formal investigations or charges of this type so far."
Panel member Pablo Fajardo, the Goldman prize-winning Ecuadorian lawyer who challenged Chevron for polluting the Amazon rainforest, said that this "great legal vaccum that exists globally" results in "crimes... committed against nature, against life... go[ing] unpunished," even though "these crimes take their toll on humanity."
"We see... systemic, widespread, and deliberate destruction of the environment without any obvious consequences," said panelist Christina Voigt, a professor at the University of Oslo and expert in climate change law. A newly defined crime of ecocide, she added, "could not only bring those responsible to justice, but also more importantly prevent further destruction."
As The Guardian pointed out, "one challenge for the drafting panel would be to define at what point an ecocide offense would come into force. Chopping down a single tree on a village green would not be sufficient."
Jojo Mehta, chair of the Stop Ecocide Foundation, told The Guardian that "it would have to involve mass, systematic, or widespread destruction" of the world's ecosystems.
"We are probably talking about Amazon deforestation on a huge scale, deep sea bottom trawling, or oil spills," she said. "We want to place it at the same level as atrocities investigated by the ICC."
Mehta explained that "in most cases ecocide is likely to be a corporate crime."
"Criminalizing something at the ICC means that nations that have ratified it have to incorporate it into their own national legislation," she added. "That means there would be lots of options for prosecuting [offending corporations] around the world."
Preparatory work is now underway, and the panel plans to deliver a draft of a legally enforceable definition of ecocide in early 2021.
Bolivians Return Evo Morales’s Party to Power One Year After a U.S.-Applauded Coup
Right-wing forces cheered by the U.S. tried to destroy one of Latin America’s most
vibrant democracies. Voters just restored it.
Glenn Greenwald - the intercept
October 19 2020,
IN NOVEMBER 2019, Bolivia’s three-term President Evo Morales was forced under threat of police and military violence to flee to Mexico, just weeks after he was declared the winner of the October presidential election that would have sent him to his fourth term. Installed in his place was an unelected right-wing coup regime, led by self-declared “interim President” Jeanine Áñez, who promptly presided over a military massacre that killed dozens of Morales’s Indigenous supporters and then granted immunity to all the soldiers involved. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at the time cheered the coup by citing subsequently debunked claims of election fraud by the Organization of American States, or OAS, and urging “a truly democratic process representative of the people’s will.”
But after the Áñez regime twice postponed scheduled elections this year, Bolivians went to the polls on Sunday. They delivered a resounding victory to presidential candidate Luis Arce, Morales’s former finance minister and the candidate from his Movement Toward Socialism, or MAS, Party. Although official results are still being counted, exit polls from reputable firms show Arce with a blowout victory — over 50 percent against a centrist former president and a far-right coup leader — and Áñez herself conceded that MAS has won: “We do not yet have an official count, but from the data we have, Mr. Arce and [MAS Vice Presidential candidate] Mr. Choquehuanca have won the election. I congratulate the winners and ask them to govern with Bolivia and democracy in mind.”
It is difficult to remember the last time a U.S.-approved military coup in Latin America failed so spectacularly. Even with the U.S.-dominated OAS’s instantly dubious claims of electoral fraud, nobody disputed that Morales received more votes in last October’s election than all other candidates (the only question raised by the OAS was whether his margin of victory was sufficient to win on the first round and avoid a run-off).
Despite Morales’s election win, the Bolivian police and then military made clear to Morales that neither he, his family, nor his closest allies would be safe unless he immediately left the country, as Morales detailed in an interview I conducted with him just weeks after he was driven into exile in Mexico City. In that interview, Morales blamed not only the U.S. for giving the green light to right-wing coup leaders but also attributed the coup to Western anger over his decision to sell some of the country’s valuable lithium supply to China rather than to the West.
After 12 years in office, Morales was not free of controversy or critics. As the first elected Indigenous leader of Bolivia, even some of his core supporters grew wary of what they regarded as his growing reliance on quasi-autocratic tactics in order to govern. Several of his most prominent supporters — both in Bolivia and in South America — were critical of his decision to secure judicial permission to seek a fourth term despite a constitutional term-limits provision of two terms. Even Morales’s long-time close Brazilian ally, former President Lula da Silva — who correctly predicted in a 2019 interview with me that “you can be certain that if Evo Morales runs for president, he’ll win in Bolivia” — nonetheless called Morales’s pursuit of a fourth term a “mistake.”
But none of those criticisms changed a central, unavoidable fact: More Bolivians voted for Morales to be their president in 2019 than any other candidate. And in a democracy, that is supposed to be decisive; for those purporting to believe in democracy, that should be the end of the matter. That is why Lula, in his Guardian interview shortly after the coup where he criticized Morales’s bid for a fourth term, nonetheless emphasized the far more important point: “what they did with him was a crime. It was a coup – this is terrible for Latin America.”
And whatever critiques one can legitimately voice about Morales — it is hard to imagine any leader ruling for more than a decade without alienating some supporters and making mistakes — there is no question that Morales’s presidency, by almost every metric, was a success. After decades of instability in the country, he ushered in a stable and thriving democracy, presided over economic growth that even western financial institutions praised, and worked to ensure a far more equitable distribution of those resources than ever before, particularly to the country’s long-oppressed Indigenous minority and its rural farmers. That success is what was destroyed, on purpose, when the Bolivian presidency was decided in 2019 not democratically but by force.
The West’s reaction to the 2019 Bolivian coup featured all of its classic propaganda tropes. Western officials, media outlets, and think tank writers invoked the standard Orwellian inversion of heralding a coup of any democratically elected leader they do not like as a “victory for democracy.” In this warped formula, it is not the U.S.-supported coup plotters but the overthrown democratically elected leader who is the “threat to democracy.”
Depicting U.S.-supported coups as democratic and democratically elected leaders disliked by the U.S. as “dictators” has been a staple of U.S. foreign policy propaganda for decades. That is the rubric under which the Obama administration and its Secretary of State John Kerry somehow celebrated one of the world’s worst despots, Egyptian Gen. Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, as “restoring democracy” following the brutal military coup he carried out.
But thanks to Sunday’s stunning rebuke in Bolivia, the standard tactics failed. Ever since Morales’s election victory almost exactly one year ago today, Bolivians never stopped marching, protesting, risking their liberty and their lives — even in the middle of a pandemic — to demand their rights of democracy and self-governance. Leading up to the election, the coup regime and right-wing factions in the military were menacingly vowing — in response to polls universally showing MAS likely to win — that they would do anything to prevent the return to power of Morales’s party.
At least as of now, though, it looks as though the margin of victory delivered to MAS by the Bolivian people was so stunning, so decisive, that there are few options left for the retrograde forces — in Bolivia, Washington, and Brussels — which tried to destroy the country’s democracy. Anyone who believes in the fundamentals of democracy, regardless of ideology, should be cheering the Bolivians who sacrificed so much to restore their right of self-rule and hoping that the stability and prosperity they enjoyed under Morales expands even further under his first democratically elected successor.
But after the Áñez regime twice postponed scheduled elections this year, Bolivians went to the polls on Sunday. They delivered a resounding victory to presidential candidate Luis Arce, Morales’s former finance minister and the candidate from his Movement Toward Socialism, or MAS, Party. Although official results are still being counted, exit polls from reputable firms show Arce with a blowout victory — over 50 percent against a centrist former president and a far-right coup leader — and Áñez herself conceded that MAS has won: “We do not yet have an official count, but from the data we have, Mr. Arce and [MAS Vice Presidential candidate] Mr. Choquehuanca have won the election. I congratulate the winners and ask them to govern with Bolivia and democracy in mind.”
It is difficult to remember the last time a U.S.-approved military coup in Latin America failed so spectacularly. Even with the U.S.-dominated OAS’s instantly dubious claims of electoral fraud, nobody disputed that Morales received more votes in last October’s election than all other candidates (the only question raised by the OAS was whether his margin of victory was sufficient to win on the first round and avoid a run-off).
Despite Morales’s election win, the Bolivian police and then military made clear to Morales that neither he, his family, nor his closest allies would be safe unless he immediately left the country, as Morales detailed in an interview I conducted with him just weeks after he was driven into exile in Mexico City. In that interview, Morales blamed not only the U.S. for giving the green light to right-wing coup leaders but also attributed the coup to Western anger over his decision to sell some of the country’s valuable lithium supply to China rather than to the West.
After 12 years in office, Morales was not free of controversy or critics. As the first elected Indigenous leader of Bolivia, even some of his core supporters grew wary of what they regarded as his growing reliance on quasi-autocratic tactics in order to govern. Several of his most prominent supporters — both in Bolivia and in South America — were critical of his decision to secure judicial permission to seek a fourth term despite a constitutional term-limits provision of two terms. Even Morales’s long-time close Brazilian ally, former President Lula da Silva — who correctly predicted in a 2019 interview with me that “you can be certain that if Evo Morales runs for president, he’ll win in Bolivia” — nonetheless called Morales’s pursuit of a fourth term a “mistake.”
But none of those criticisms changed a central, unavoidable fact: More Bolivians voted for Morales to be their president in 2019 than any other candidate. And in a democracy, that is supposed to be decisive; for those purporting to believe in democracy, that should be the end of the matter. That is why Lula, in his Guardian interview shortly after the coup where he criticized Morales’s bid for a fourth term, nonetheless emphasized the far more important point: “what they did with him was a crime. It was a coup – this is terrible for Latin America.”
And whatever critiques one can legitimately voice about Morales — it is hard to imagine any leader ruling for more than a decade without alienating some supporters and making mistakes — there is no question that Morales’s presidency, by almost every metric, was a success. After decades of instability in the country, he ushered in a stable and thriving democracy, presided over economic growth that even western financial institutions praised, and worked to ensure a far more equitable distribution of those resources than ever before, particularly to the country’s long-oppressed Indigenous minority and its rural farmers. That success is what was destroyed, on purpose, when the Bolivian presidency was decided in 2019 not democratically but by force.
The West’s reaction to the 2019 Bolivian coup featured all of its classic propaganda tropes. Western officials, media outlets, and think tank writers invoked the standard Orwellian inversion of heralding a coup of any democratically elected leader they do not like as a “victory for democracy.” In this warped formula, it is not the U.S.-supported coup plotters but the overthrown democratically elected leader who is the “threat to democracy.”
Depicting U.S.-supported coups as democratic and democratically elected leaders disliked by the U.S. as “dictators” has been a staple of U.S. foreign policy propaganda for decades. That is the rubric under which the Obama administration and its Secretary of State John Kerry somehow celebrated one of the world’s worst despots, Egyptian Gen. Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, as “restoring democracy” following the brutal military coup he carried out.
But thanks to Sunday’s stunning rebuke in Bolivia, the standard tactics failed. Ever since Morales’s election victory almost exactly one year ago today, Bolivians never stopped marching, protesting, risking their liberty and their lives — even in the middle of a pandemic — to demand their rights of democracy and self-governance. Leading up to the election, the coup regime and right-wing factions in the military were menacingly vowing — in response to polls universally showing MAS likely to win — that they would do anything to prevent the return to power of Morales’s party.
At least as of now, though, it looks as though the margin of victory delivered to MAS by the Bolivian people was so stunning, so decisive, that there are few options left for the retrograde forces — in Bolivia, Washington, and Brussels — which tried to destroy the country’s democracy. Anyone who believes in the fundamentals of democracy, regardless of ideology, should be cheering the Bolivians who sacrificed so much to restore their right of self-rule and hoping that the stability and prosperity they enjoyed under Morales expands even further under his first democratically elected successor.
BARBARISM IN THE NAME OF RELIGION!!!
Revealed: chaining, beatings and torture inside Sudan's Islamic schools
Two-year BBC News Arabic investigation uncovers horrific conditions, with boys as young as five facing violence and sexual abuse
Fateh Al-Rahman Al-Hamdani - THE GUARDIAN
Mon 19 Oct 2020 02.15 EDT
An April evening in the suburbs of Khartoum. After months of undercover work, I had learned to time my visits to khalwas, Sudan’s Islamic schools, to coincide with evening prayers. I entered while the sheikhs (teachers) and 50-odd boys dressed in their white djellabas were busy praying. As they knelt, I heard the clanking of chains on the boys’ shackled legs. I sat down behind them and started filming, secretly.
I began investigating after allegations emerged of abuse inside some of these schools: children kept in chains, beaten and sexually abused. Khalwas have existed in Sudan for centuries. There are more than 30,000 of them across the country where children are taught to memorise the Qur’an. They are run by sheikhs who usually provide food, drink and shelter, free of charge. As a result, poor families often send their children to khalwas instead of public schools.
I had been working as a journalist in Sudan for five years, but this was the first time an assignment really felt personal. I was taught at a khalwa: a place where I would try to get through each day without being beaten.
In 2018, I began what would become a two-year investigation with BBC News Arabic and take me to 23 khalwas across Sudan. Before proper undercover equipment from the BBC arrived, I taped my phone inside a notebook, to secretly film.
Despite having gone to a khalwa myself, I was shocked by what I found. I saw children – some as young as five – beaten and shackled like animals. One boy with deep, raw wounds around his ankles told me: “We can be in groups of six or seven all chained together, and they [the sheikhs] make us run around in circles. Whenever one of us falls over we have to get up again because they keep whipping us … They say that this is good for us.”
One of the worst experiences I had was in 2018 at Ahmed Hanafy, a well-respected khalwa in Darfur. In a study room, under a hot corrugated iron roof, a small boy was held down and whipped more than 30 times by a teacher. The only sound in the room was the lashing of the whip and the boy’s anguished cries. I wanted to grab the whip and hit the sheikh, but I knew I couldn’t. When I later contacted the school, the sheikh confirmed they do beat children but denied this incident ever took place.
Another disturbing case was that of two 14-year-old boys, Mohamed Nader and Ismail. When I visited them in hospital they were lying on their stomachs, unconscious, their backs stripped of flesh. They were beaten and tortured so badly they nearly died.
“They kept them in a room for five days without food or water,” Mohamed Nader’s father, Nader, told me.
“They rubbed tar all over their bodies. [Mohamed Nader] has been so badly beaten you can even see his spine.”
I had filmed inside the same khalwa where this had happened, al-Khulafaa al-Rashideen, run by a man called Sheikh Hussein. The conditions there were the worst I had seen. Most of the boys were shackled and teachers hovered over them with whips in case they made any mistakes. One student pointed out a room with barred windows, which he described as a prison. It was the room in which Ismail and Mohamed Nader had been kept.
I kept in regular contact with the boys. Several months after the attack, as we played on a PlayStation together, Mohamed Nader began to tell me what happened when he was caught trying to escape with Ismail.
“They tied me up and laid me on my stomach before whipping me”, he said. The beatings went on for days. “A lot of people came to beat us while the rest of the khalwa was asleep. After that, I don’t know what happened, I woke up in the hospital.”
The police charged two teachers with assault, who were later released on bail. The khalwa remained open.
As he stared at the screen, Mohamed Nader said: “There is rape in the khalwa. They would call you for it, in a macho way.” He said the smaller or weaker boys were abused by older students.
Mohamed Nader and Ismail were not sexually assaulted, but several other people also told me that rape happened in the khalwa under the management of Sheikh Hussein.
When I returned to the khalwa to talk to him, Sheikh Hussein admitted that it was wrong to imprison children, but maintained that shackling was “packed with benefits” and that “most khalwas use chaining, not just me”. He told me he had stopped using chains and that “the prison” was now a storeroom. When I asked about allegations of sexual abuse he became angry, categorically denying these claims and accusing me of attacking the Qu’ran.
The sheikh died in a car accident earlier this year.
The new transitional government is now conducting a survey of all khalwas in Sudan. The minister of religious affairs, Nasreddine Mufreh, said they would be reformed. There should be “no beating, torture, violation of human rights or children’s rights whatsoever” inside khalwas.
When I told him about the abuse I had seen, he replied: “The old regime didn’t have laws regulating khalwas. I can’t solve a problem caused by 30 years of the old regime overnight.”
With the influence that sheikhs hold, it’s rare for families to seek justice. However, Mohamed Nader’s parents have decided to press charges. Although the public prosecutor’s office is obliged to look into all cases of violence against children, Mohamed Nader’s parents have had to hire a lawyer to fight their case.
On the way into court his mother, Fatima, said the 2018 revolution had made her more optimistic: “In the past, we had no rights but now it’s different. With the new government, we will get our rights, God willing.”
After several hours inside she emerged disappointed. One of the defendants had failed to turn up and the hearing was postponed. The teachers accused of beating the boys still haven’t entered a plea. The khalwa is now run by Sheikh Hussein’s brother who told me that under his management the beating of children would not be tolerated.
Mohamed Nader and Ismail are on a slow road to physical recovery. But thousands of other children across Sudan are still at risk.
I began investigating after allegations emerged of abuse inside some of these schools: children kept in chains, beaten and sexually abused. Khalwas have existed in Sudan for centuries. There are more than 30,000 of them across the country where children are taught to memorise the Qur’an. They are run by sheikhs who usually provide food, drink and shelter, free of charge. As a result, poor families often send their children to khalwas instead of public schools.
I had been working as a journalist in Sudan for five years, but this was the first time an assignment really felt personal. I was taught at a khalwa: a place where I would try to get through each day without being beaten.
In 2018, I began what would become a two-year investigation with BBC News Arabic and take me to 23 khalwas across Sudan. Before proper undercover equipment from the BBC arrived, I taped my phone inside a notebook, to secretly film.
Despite having gone to a khalwa myself, I was shocked by what I found. I saw children – some as young as five – beaten and shackled like animals. One boy with deep, raw wounds around his ankles told me: “We can be in groups of six or seven all chained together, and they [the sheikhs] make us run around in circles. Whenever one of us falls over we have to get up again because they keep whipping us … They say that this is good for us.”
One of the worst experiences I had was in 2018 at Ahmed Hanafy, a well-respected khalwa in Darfur. In a study room, under a hot corrugated iron roof, a small boy was held down and whipped more than 30 times by a teacher. The only sound in the room was the lashing of the whip and the boy’s anguished cries. I wanted to grab the whip and hit the sheikh, but I knew I couldn’t. When I later contacted the school, the sheikh confirmed they do beat children but denied this incident ever took place.
Another disturbing case was that of two 14-year-old boys, Mohamed Nader and Ismail. When I visited them in hospital they were lying on their stomachs, unconscious, their backs stripped of flesh. They were beaten and tortured so badly they nearly died.
“They kept them in a room for five days without food or water,” Mohamed Nader’s father, Nader, told me.
“They rubbed tar all over their bodies. [Mohamed Nader] has been so badly beaten you can even see his spine.”
I had filmed inside the same khalwa where this had happened, al-Khulafaa al-Rashideen, run by a man called Sheikh Hussein. The conditions there were the worst I had seen. Most of the boys were shackled and teachers hovered over them with whips in case they made any mistakes. One student pointed out a room with barred windows, which he described as a prison. It was the room in which Ismail and Mohamed Nader had been kept.
I kept in regular contact with the boys. Several months after the attack, as we played on a PlayStation together, Mohamed Nader began to tell me what happened when he was caught trying to escape with Ismail.
“They tied me up and laid me on my stomach before whipping me”, he said. The beatings went on for days. “A lot of people came to beat us while the rest of the khalwa was asleep. After that, I don’t know what happened, I woke up in the hospital.”
The police charged two teachers with assault, who were later released on bail. The khalwa remained open.
As he stared at the screen, Mohamed Nader said: “There is rape in the khalwa. They would call you for it, in a macho way.” He said the smaller or weaker boys were abused by older students.
Mohamed Nader and Ismail were not sexually assaulted, but several other people also told me that rape happened in the khalwa under the management of Sheikh Hussein.
When I returned to the khalwa to talk to him, Sheikh Hussein admitted that it was wrong to imprison children, but maintained that shackling was “packed with benefits” and that “most khalwas use chaining, not just me”. He told me he had stopped using chains and that “the prison” was now a storeroom. When I asked about allegations of sexual abuse he became angry, categorically denying these claims and accusing me of attacking the Qu’ran.
The sheikh died in a car accident earlier this year.
The new transitional government is now conducting a survey of all khalwas in Sudan. The minister of religious affairs, Nasreddine Mufreh, said they would be reformed. There should be “no beating, torture, violation of human rights or children’s rights whatsoever” inside khalwas.
When I told him about the abuse I had seen, he replied: “The old regime didn’t have laws regulating khalwas. I can’t solve a problem caused by 30 years of the old regime overnight.”
With the influence that sheikhs hold, it’s rare for families to seek justice. However, Mohamed Nader’s parents have decided to press charges. Although the public prosecutor’s office is obliged to look into all cases of violence against children, Mohamed Nader’s parents have had to hire a lawyer to fight their case.
On the way into court his mother, Fatima, said the 2018 revolution had made her more optimistic: “In the past, we had no rights but now it’s different. With the new government, we will get our rights, God willing.”
After several hours inside she emerged disappointed. One of the defendants had failed to turn up and the hearing was postponed. The teachers accused of beating the boys still haven’t entered a plea. The khalwa is now run by Sheikh Hussein’s brother who told me that under his management the beating of children would not be tolerated.
Mohamed Nader and Ismail are on a slow road to physical recovery. But thousands of other children across Sudan are still at risk.
3,500 Pound Sterling = 4,526.20 US Dollar!!!
Switzerland
Geneva to introduce minimum wage of £3,500 a month
Voters back measure amid reports of growing poverty linked to Covid-19 pandemic
Kim Willsher in Paris - the guardian
Wed 30 Sep 2020 08.55 EDT
Geneva is to introduce a minimum wage of almost £3,500 a month, reported to be the highest in the world, after locals approved the measure in a surprise vote result sparked by reports of growing coronavirus-linked poverty in the Swiss city.
The canton’s 500,000 voters passed the minimum wage proposed by local unions and leftwing parties, after twice rejecting it in 2011 and 2014.
The minimum hourly wage will be set at just under £19.50 an hour, more than twice the rate in neighbouring France, with a guaranteed minimum monthly salary of 4,086 Swiss francs (£3,457) based on a 41-hour working week, or 49,000 Swiss francs (£41,430) a year, in one of the world’s most expensive cities to live.
France 3 television reported that the measure came after the Swiss city, whose economy depends on tourist and business visitors, had been hit particularly hard by the Covid-19 epidemic with concern about growing queues of people outside food banks.
Michel Charrat, the president of the Groupement transfrontalier européen, an independent organisation that supports those living and working across the French-Swiss border, described the vote result as a “mark of solidarity” with the city’s poor.
“Covid has shown that a certain section of the Swiss population cannot live in Geneva … 4,000 (Swiss francs) is the minimum to not fall below the poverty line and find yourself in a very difficult situation,” Charrat said. He added the measure would benefit 30,000 low-paid workers, two-thirds of them women.
Before Sunday’s vote, Alexander Eniline of the Swiss Labour party (PST-POP) said: “The introduction of a minimum wage is a fundamental requirement of justice, and an essential measure against precariousness.”
He added that opposition claims that the minimum wage would destroy jobs and increase unemployment were “baseless”.
While the unions and leftwing politicians pointed out the high cost of living in Geneva, classed the third most expensive city in the world after Zurich and Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan, the 300,000 cross-border workers living in neighbouring France were reported to be the biggest winners.
Wages in Switzerland can be regulated, or not, by authorities in the country’s 26 cantons. Two other cantons, the Jura and Neuchâtel, have already introduced the same 20 Swiss franc (£18.51) hourly wage. The rest of the country has no such measure.
The UK’s national living wage, the minimum paid to workers over the age of 25, is £8.72. The minimum wage for those younger and apprentices ranges from £4.15-£8.20 an hour.
In France, the minimum wage is €10.15 (£9.28) an hour and €1,539,42 (£1,407.25) a month for a 35-hour working week.
According to Expatistan, which uses crowdfunded data to produce a cost of living index for world cities, Geneva is the world’s second most expensive city in which to live. London is listed ninth.
The minimum wage rise was approved by just over 58% of Geneva voters and the measure come into effect on 17 October. In a national vote, also on Sunday, the Swiss rejected a rightwing proposal to limit immigration from European Union member states.
The canton’s 500,000 voters passed the minimum wage proposed by local unions and leftwing parties, after twice rejecting it in 2011 and 2014.
The minimum hourly wage will be set at just under £19.50 an hour, more than twice the rate in neighbouring France, with a guaranteed minimum monthly salary of 4,086 Swiss francs (£3,457) based on a 41-hour working week, or 49,000 Swiss francs (£41,430) a year, in one of the world’s most expensive cities to live.
France 3 television reported that the measure came after the Swiss city, whose economy depends on tourist and business visitors, had been hit particularly hard by the Covid-19 epidemic with concern about growing queues of people outside food banks.
Michel Charrat, the president of the Groupement transfrontalier européen, an independent organisation that supports those living and working across the French-Swiss border, described the vote result as a “mark of solidarity” with the city’s poor.
“Covid has shown that a certain section of the Swiss population cannot live in Geneva … 4,000 (Swiss francs) is the minimum to not fall below the poverty line and find yourself in a very difficult situation,” Charrat said. He added the measure would benefit 30,000 low-paid workers, two-thirds of them women.
Before Sunday’s vote, Alexander Eniline of the Swiss Labour party (PST-POP) said: “The introduction of a minimum wage is a fundamental requirement of justice, and an essential measure against precariousness.”
He added that opposition claims that the minimum wage would destroy jobs and increase unemployment were “baseless”.
While the unions and leftwing politicians pointed out the high cost of living in Geneva, classed the third most expensive city in the world after Zurich and Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan, the 300,000 cross-border workers living in neighbouring France were reported to be the biggest winners.
Wages in Switzerland can be regulated, or not, by authorities in the country’s 26 cantons. Two other cantons, the Jura and Neuchâtel, have already introduced the same 20 Swiss franc (£18.51) hourly wage. The rest of the country has no such measure.
The UK’s national living wage, the minimum paid to workers over the age of 25, is £8.72. The minimum wage for those younger and apprentices ranges from £4.15-£8.20 an hour.
In France, the minimum wage is €10.15 (£9.28) an hour and €1,539,42 (£1,407.25) a month for a 35-hour working week.
According to Expatistan, which uses crowdfunded data to produce a cost of living index for world cities, Geneva is the world’s second most expensive city in which to live. London is listed ninth.
The minimum wage rise was approved by just over 58% of Geneva voters and the measure come into effect on 17 October. In a national vote, also on Sunday, the Swiss rejected a rightwing proposal to limit immigration from European Union member states.
Coronavirus outbreak
Covid-19 tests that give results in minutes to be rolled out across world
Global initiative will supply 120m rapid antigen tests to low- and middle-income countries
Sarah Boseley Health editor - the guardian
Mon 28 Sep 2020 11.49 EDT
Tests for Covid-19 that show on-the-spot results in 15 to 30 minutes are about to be rolled out across the world, potentially saving many thousands of lives and slowing the pandemic in both poor and rich countries.
In a triumph for a global initiative to get vital drugs and vaccines to fight the virus, 120m rapid antigen tests from two companies will be supplied to low- and middle-income countries for $5 (£3.90) each or even less.
The tests, which look like a pregnancy test, with two blue lines displayed for positive, are read by a health worker. One test has received emergency approval from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the other is expected to get it shortly.
The quick and easy but high-quality tests will allow mass screening of health workers, who are dying in disproportionate numbers in low income countries.
Wealthy countries that have signed up to the Access to Covid tools initiative (ACT accelerator), as the UK has, will also be able to order the tests. The initiative was launched in March by the WHO, the European commission, the Gates Foundation and the French government.
In return for a volume guarantee from the Gates Foundation, the companies are making 20% of their production available to low- and middle-income countries and 80% to the rest. Germany has already ordered 20m tests and France and Switzerland are following suit.
The UK government is keen to get rapid virus tests, which were central to the “moonshot” proposals leaked recently, but it is not clear if they intend to buy these tests. It has invested in British-made saliva tests as well as rapid antigen tests, both of which take about 90 minutes. Saliva tests are being trialled in Salford and Southampton, while DnaNudge, which uses a swab read by a Nudgebox, is in use in some NHS hospitals.
But the WHO-approved rapid antigen tests are faster and easier, as well as cheaper, and could be used for screening in schools, universities and workplaces. Countries that can afford it could screen more generally. While the tests will not pick up all cases, they could allow many infectious people to be identified before they have symptoms and go into quarantine.
One of the tests, from the South Korean company SD BioSensor, has just been given emergency approval by the WHO, while the other, from the US company Abbott, is expected to get it shortly for a test it manufactures in South Korea.
Catharina Boehme, CEO of the non-profit Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (Find), a key player in the initiative, said they had put in bulk orders for the tests quickly so that low- and middle-income countries would not lose out in the global scramble for rapid tests, as they did when the PCR tests came out. “We see the pressure of supply building rapidly. That’s why we need this volume guarantee. We needed to secure volumes for low- and middle-income countries, before all the other countries place their orders and the poor populations again lose out.
“For us the message is about unprecedented collaboration. We are really able to show what can be achieved when the world and leading global health partners come together with a shared priority.”
Also in the partnership that has secured the deal are the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, the Clinton Health Access Initiative, and Unitaid.
The companies claim their tests are about 97% accurate, but that is in optimal conditions. Find puts their sensitivity between 80% and 90% in real-world conditions. That would pick up most infections. There is relatively little testing in most low- and middle-income countries at present. While North America tests 395 people per 100,000 population daily and Europe tests 243, Africa tests fewer than 16 – and most of those are in Morocco, Kenya and Senegal.
There are rapid antigen tests available for sale online, but these are the first to meet the WHO’s specifications and some tests have fallen short. Spain had to send back two batches of rapid tests it bought from unlicensed companies in China in March, because they were said to be faulty.
The ACT accelerator initiative is also working on bulk-buying and distributing drugs to treat Covid-19 around the world – and will share its global portfolio of vaccines when one of them is proved to work.
In a triumph for a global initiative to get vital drugs and vaccines to fight the virus, 120m rapid antigen tests from two companies will be supplied to low- and middle-income countries for $5 (£3.90) each or even less.
The tests, which look like a pregnancy test, with two blue lines displayed for positive, are read by a health worker. One test has received emergency approval from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the other is expected to get it shortly.
The quick and easy but high-quality tests will allow mass screening of health workers, who are dying in disproportionate numbers in low income countries.
Wealthy countries that have signed up to the Access to Covid tools initiative (ACT accelerator), as the UK has, will also be able to order the tests. The initiative was launched in March by the WHO, the European commission, the Gates Foundation and the French government.
In return for a volume guarantee from the Gates Foundation, the companies are making 20% of their production available to low- and middle-income countries and 80% to the rest. Germany has already ordered 20m tests and France and Switzerland are following suit.
The UK government is keen to get rapid virus tests, which were central to the “moonshot” proposals leaked recently, but it is not clear if they intend to buy these tests. It has invested in British-made saliva tests as well as rapid antigen tests, both of which take about 90 minutes. Saliva tests are being trialled in Salford and Southampton, while DnaNudge, which uses a swab read by a Nudgebox, is in use in some NHS hospitals.
But the WHO-approved rapid antigen tests are faster and easier, as well as cheaper, and could be used for screening in schools, universities and workplaces. Countries that can afford it could screen more generally. While the tests will not pick up all cases, they could allow many infectious people to be identified before they have symptoms and go into quarantine.
One of the tests, from the South Korean company SD BioSensor, has just been given emergency approval by the WHO, while the other, from the US company Abbott, is expected to get it shortly for a test it manufactures in South Korea.
Catharina Boehme, CEO of the non-profit Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (Find), a key player in the initiative, said they had put in bulk orders for the tests quickly so that low- and middle-income countries would not lose out in the global scramble for rapid tests, as they did when the PCR tests came out. “We see the pressure of supply building rapidly. That’s why we need this volume guarantee. We needed to secure volumes for low- and middle-income countries, before all the other countries place their orders and the poor populations again lose out.
“For us the message is about unprecedented collaboration. We are really able to show what can be achieved when the world and leading global health partners come together with a shared priority.”
Also in the partnership that has secured the deal are the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, the Clinton Health Access Initiative, and Unitaid.
The companies claim their tests are about 97% accurate, but that is in optimal conditions. Find puts their sensitivity between 80% and 90% in real-world conditions. That would pick up most infections. There is relatively little testing in most low- and middle-income countries at present. While North America tests 395 people per 100,000 population daily and Europe tests 243, Africa tests fewer than 16 – and most of those are in Morocco, Kenya and Senegal.
There are rapid antigen tests available for sale online, but these are the first to meet the WHO’s specifications and some tests have fallen short. Spain had to send back two batches of rapid tests it bought from unlicensed companies in China in March, because they were said to be faulty.
The ACT accelerator initiative is also working on bulk-buying and distributing drugs to treat Covid-19 around the world – and will share its global portfolio of vaccines when one of them is proved to work.
real klassy!!!
Benjamin Netanyahu
Stained relations? Israeli PM accused of taking dirty laundry on state trips
Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife said to pack soiled clothes to be cleaned on foreign trips
Oliver Holmes - the guardian
Thu 24 Sep 2020 09.07 EDT
While black-tie banquets, lavish royal receptions and priceless gifts are the most obvious extravagances of international diplomacy, Israel’s leader and his wife have spotlighted a lesser-known perk of the state visit: free dry cleaning.
Benjamin and Sara Netanyahu have developed a reputation for lugging bags and suitcases of dirty clothes on foreign trips to be laundered at another country’s expense, a practice noticed by staff at the White House guesthouse, according to the Washington Post.
“The Netanyahus are the only ones who bring actual suitcases of dirty laundry for us to clean,” the paper quoted an unnamed US official as saying. “After multiple trips, it became clear this was intentional.”
The Israeli prime minister’s office has denied the allegation, but it is not the first time the 70-year-old leader has been accused of taking soiled clothes abroad for a rinse.
In 2018, leaked transcripts emerged containing allegations that Sara Netanyahu packed “four or five” suitcases worth of laundry for state trips. Two years previously, the prime minister successfully launched a legal bid to have his domestic laundry bills remain private.
The Israeli embassy in Washington said in a statement the allegations were “groundless and absurd”, and aimed at distracting from Netanyahu’s recent US visit, where he signed accords to normalise relations with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.
“On this visit, for example, there was no dry cleaning, only a couple of shirts were laundered for the public meeting, and the prime minister’s suit and Mrs Netanyahu’s dress were ironed also for the public meeting,” the embassy statement said. “Oh yes, a pair of pyjamas that the prime minister wore on the 12-hour flight from Israel to Washington was also laundered.”
In its report, the Washington Post said last week’s visit did not include multiple suitcases of laundry, but that “political and career officials spanning the Trump and Obama administrations” had confirmed several previous mass cleaning incidents.
The allegations have compounded domestic accusations that the Netanyahus have sought to exploit the benefits of high office, no matter how small.
Last year, Sara Netanyahu was convicted of illegally misusing tens of thousands of pounds of public funds on lavish meals, despite having an in-house cook provided by the state.
Meanwhile, the prime minister is on trial in three corruption cases, including charges he accepted expensive gifts including champagne, jewellery and cigars. Netanyahu denies all accusations.
Benjamin and Sara Netanyahu have developed a reputation for lugging bags and suitcases of dirty clothes on foreign trips to be laundered at another country’s expense, a practice noticed by staff at the White House guesthouse, according to the Washington Post.
“The Netanyahus are the only ones who bring actual suitcases of dirty laundry for us to clean,” the paper quoted an unnamed US official as saying. “After multiple trips, it became clear this was intentional.”
The Israeli prime minister’s office has denied the allegation, but it is not the first time the 70-year-old leader has been accused of taking soiled clothes abroad for a rinse.
In 2018, leaked transcripts emerged containing allegations that Sara Netanyahu packed “four or five” suitcases worth of laundry for state trips. Two years previously, the prime minister successfully launched a legal bid to have his domestic laundry bills remain private.
The Israeli embassy in Washington said in a statement the allegations were “groundless and absurd”, and aimed at distracting from Netanyahu’s recent US visit, where he signed accords to normalise relations with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.
“On this visit, for example, there was no dry cleaning, only a couple of shirts were laundered for the public meeting, and the prime minister’s suit and Mrs Netanyahu’s dress were ironed also for the public meeting,” the embassy statement said. “Oh yes, a pair of pyjamas that the prime minister wore on the 12-hour flight from Israel to Washington was also laundered.”
In its report, the Washington Post said last week’s visit did not include multiple suitcases of laundry, but that “political and career officials spanning the Trump and Obama administrations” had confirmed several previous mass cleaning incidents.
The allegations have compounded domestic accusations that the Netanyahus have sought to exploit the benefits of high office, no matter how small.
Last year, Sara Netanyahu was convicted of illegally misusing tens of thousands of pounds of public funds on lavish meals, despite having an in-house cook provided by the state.
Meanwhile, the prime minister is on trial in three corruption cases, including charges he accepted expensive gifts including champagne, jewellery and cigars. Netanyahu denies all accusations.
Vitamin D helps us fight Covid-19, major study finds
Israeli population-based study supports research showing that vitamin D supplements could help people avoid serious respiratory effects of Covid-19.
By ISRAEL21c Staff
JULY 27, 2020, 7:00 AM
A low level of vitamin D in blood plasma appears to be an independent risk factor for Covid-19 infection and hospitalization, say scientists from Israeli HMO Leumit Health Services and the Azrieli Faculty of Medicine of Bar-Ilan University.
The researchers came to their conclusion using real-world data and an Israeli cohort of 782 Covid-19 positive patients and 7,025 Covid-19 negative patients.
A low level of vitamin D in blood plasma appears to be an independent risk factor for Covid-19 infection and hospitalization, say scientists from Israeli HMO Leumit Health Services and the Azrieli Faculty of Medicine of Bar-Ilan University.
The researchers came to their conclusion using real-world data and an Israeli cohort of 782 Covid-19 positive patients and 7,025 Covid-19 negative patients.
“The main finding of our study was the significant association of low plasma vitamin D level with the likelihood of Covid-19 infection among patients who were tested for Covid-19, even after adjustment for age, gender, socio-economic status and chronic, mental and physical disorders,” said Dr. Eugene Merzon, head of Leumit’s Department of Managed Care.
“Furthermore, low vitamin D level was associated with the risk of hospitalization due to Covid-19 infection, although this association wasn’t significant after adjustment for other factors,” he added.
The scientists’ research follows a few worldwide studies that have shown the pronounced impact of vitamin D metabolites on the immune system response and on the development of Covid-19 infection by the novel SARS CoV-2 coronavirus.
“Our finding is in agreement with the results of previous studies in the field. Reduced risk of acute respiratory tract infection following vitamin D supplementation has been reported,” said Dr. Ilan Green, head of Leumit’s Research Institute.
As for the amount of vitamin D required, Merzon says it should be “personalized and take into account patients’ age, gender, race and ethnicity, nutritional status and health condition.”
Their report on the study was published in The FEBS Journal and is expected to make a wide impact because of the study’s size and population-based structure.
Fascinating findings
Dr. Milana Frenkel-Morgenstern, leader of the Azrieli Faculty of Medicine research group, added that the analysis showed people who were Covid-19 positive were older than non-infected people.
“Interestingly, the two-peak distributions for age groups were demonstrated to confer increased risk for Covid-19: around ages 25 and 50 years old,” she said.
“The first peak may be explained by high social gathering habits at the young age. The peak at age 50 years may be explained by continued social habits, in conjunction with various chronic diseases.”
Leumit Chief Medical Officer Dr. Shlomo Vinker said he was surprised to discover that “chronic medical conditions, like dementia, cardiovascular disease and chronic lung disease that were considered to be very risky in previous studies, were not found as increasing the rate of infection in our study.”
However, he added, “this finding is highly biased by the severe social contacts restrictions that were imposed on all the population during the Covid-19 outbreak. Therefore, we assume that following the Israeli Ministry of Health instructions, patients with chronic medical conditions significantly reduced their social contacts. This might indeed minimize the risk of Covid-19 infection in that group of patients.”
Now this joint Israeli research team is planning to evaluate factors associated with Covid-19 mortality in Israel.
“We are willing to find associations to the Covid-19 clinical outcomes — for example, pre-infection glycemic control of Covid-19 patients — to make the assessment of mortality risk due to Covid-19 infection in Israel,” said Merzon.
The researchers came to their conclusion using real-world data and an Israeli cohort of 782 Covid-19 positive patients and 7,025 Covid-19 negative patients.
A low level of vitamin D in blood plasma appears to be an independent risk factor for Covid-19 infection and hospitalization, say scientists from Israeli HMO Leumit Health Services and the Azrieli Faculty of Medicine of Bar-Ilan University.
The researchers came to their conclusion using real-world data and an Israeli cohort of 782 Covid-19 positive patients and 7,025 Covid-19 negative patients.
“The main finding of our study was the significant association of low plasma vitamin D level with the likelihood of Covid-19 infection among patients who were tested for Covid-19, even after adjustment for age, gender, socio-economic status and chronic, mental and physical disorders,” said Dr. Eugene Merzon, head of Leumit’s Department of Managed Care.
“Furthermore, low vitamin D level was associated with the risk of hospitalization due to Covid-19 infection, although this association wasn’t significant after adjustment for other factors,” he added.
The scientists’ research follows a few worldwide studies that have shown the pronounced impact of vitamin D metabolites on the immune system response and on the development of Covid-19 infection by the novel SARS CoV-2 coronavirus.
“Our finding is in agreement with the results of previous studies in the field. Reduced risk of acute respiratory tract infection following vitamin D supplementation has been reported,” said Dr. Ilan Green, head of Leumit’s Research Institute.
As for the amount of vitamin D required, Merzon says it should be “personalized and take into account patients’ age, gender, race and ethnicity, nutritional status and health condition.”
Their report on the study was published in The FEBS Journal and is expected to make a wide impact because of the study’s size and population-based structure.
Fascinating findings
Dr. Milana Frenkel-Morgenstern, leader of the Azrieli Faculty of Medicine research group, added that the analysis showed people who were Covid-19 positive were older than non-infected people.
“Interestingly, the two-peak distributions for age groups were demonstrated to confer increased risk for Covid-19: around ages 25 and 50 years old,” she said.
“The first peak may be explained by high social gathering habits at the young age. The peak at age 50 years may be explained by continued social habits, in conjunction with various chronic diseases.”
Leumit Chief Medical Officer Dr. Shlomo Vinker said he was surprised to discover that “chronic medical conditions, like dementia, cardiovascular disease and chronic lung disease that were considered to be very risky in previous studies, were not found as increasing the rate of infection in our study.”
However, he added, “this finding is highly biased by the severe social contacts restrictions that were imposed on all the population during the Covid-19 outbreak. Therefore, we assume that following the Israeli Ministry of Health instructions, patients with chronic medical conditions significantly reduced their social contacts. This might indeed minimize the risk of Covid-19 infection in that group of patients.”
Now this joint Israeli research team is planning to evaluate factors associated with Covid-19 mortality in Israel.
“We are willing to find associations to the Covid-19 clinical outcomes — for example, pre-infection glycemic control of Covid-19 patients — to make the assessment of mortality risk due to Covid-19 infection in Israel,” said Merzon.
wow, a country with intelligent leaders!!!
Germany is first major economy to phase out coal and nuclear
By FRANK JORDANS - ap
7/3/2020
BERLIN (AP) — German lawmakers have finalized the country’s long-awaited phase-out of coal as an energy source, backing a plan that environmental groups say isn’t ambitious enough and free marketeers criticize as a waste of taxpayers’ money.
Bills approved by both houses of parliament Friday envision shutting down the last coal-fired power plant by 2038 and spending some 40 billion euros ($45 billion) to help affected regions cope with the transition.
The plan is part of Germany’s ‘energy transition’ - an effort to wean Europe’s biggest economy off planet-warming fossil fuels and generate all of the country’s considerable energy needs from renewable sources. Achieving that goal is made harder than in comparable countries such as France and Britain because of Germany’s existing commitment to also phase out nuclear power by the end of 2022.
“The days of coal are numbered in Germany,” Environment Minister Svenja Schulze said. “Germany is the first industrialized country that leaves behind both nuclear energy and coal.”
Greenpeace and other environmental groups have staged vocal protests against the plan, including by dropping a banner down the front of the Reichstag building Friday. They argue that the government’s road map won’t reduce Germany’s greenhouse gas emissions fast enough to meet the targets set out in the Paris climate accord.
“Germany, the country that burns the greatest amount of lignite coal worldwide, will burden the next generation with 18 more years of carbon dioxide,” Greenpeace Germany’s executive director Martin Kaiser told The Associated Press.
Kaiser, who was part of a government-appointed expert commission, accused Chancellor Angela Merkel of making a “historic mistake,” saying an end date for coal of 2030 would have sent a strong signal for European and global climate policy. Merkel has said she wants Europe to be the first continent to end its greenhouse gas emissions, by 2050.
Germany closed its last black coal mine in 2018, but it continues to import the fuel and extract its own reserves of lignite, a brownish coal that is abundant in the west and east of the country. Officials warn that the loss of mining jobs could hurt those economically fragile regions, though efforts are already under way to turn the vast lignite mines into nature reserves and lakeside resorts.
Schulze, the environment minister, said there would be regular government reviews to examine whether the end date for coal can be brought forward. She noted that by the end of 2022, eight of the country’s most polluting coal-fired plants will have already been closed.
Environmentalists have also criticized the large sums being offered to coal companies to shut down their plants, a complaint shared by libertarians such as Germany’s opposition Free Democratic Party.
Katja Suding, a leading FDP lawmaker, said the government should have opted to expand existing emissions trading systems that put a price on carbon, thereby encouraging operators to shut down unprofitable coal plants.
“You just have to make it so expensive that it’s not profitable anymore to turn coal into electricity,” she said.
This week, utility companies in Spain shut down seven of the country’s 15 coal-fired power plants, saying they couldn’t be operated at profit without government subsidies.
But the head of Germany’s main miners’ union, Michael Vassiliadis, welcomed the decision, calling it a “historic milestone.” He urged the government to focus next on an expansion of renewable energy generation and the use of hydrogen as a clean alternative for storing and transporting energy in the future.
Bills approved by both houses of parliament Friday envision shutting down the last coal-fired power plant by 2038 and spending some 40 billion euros ($45 billion) to help affected regions cope with the transition.
The plan is part of Germany’s ‘energy transition’ - an effort to wean Europe’s biggest economy off planet-warming fossil fuels and generate all of the country’s considerable energy needs from renewable sources. Achieving that goal is made harder than in comparable countries such as France and Britain because of Germany’s existing commitment to also phase out nuclear power by the end of 2022.
“The days of coal are numbered in Germany,” Environment Minister Svenja Schulze said. “Germany is the first industrialized country that leaves behind both nuclear energy and coal.”
Greenpeace and other environmental groups have staged vocal protests against the plan, including by dropping a banner down the front of the Reichstag building Friday. They argue that the government’s road map won’t reduce Germany’s greenhouse gas emissions fast enough to meet the targets set out in the Paris climate accord.
“Germany, the country that burns the greatest amount of lignite coal worldwide, will burden the next generation with 18 more years of carbon dioxide,” Greenpeace Germany’s executive director Martin Kaiser told The Associated Press.
Kaiser, who was part of a government-appointed expert commission, accused Chancellor Angela Merkel of making a “historic mistake,” saying an end date for coal of 2030 would have sent a strong signal for European and global climate policy. Merkel has said she wants Europe to be the first continent to end its greenhouse gas emissions, by 2050.
Germany closed its last black coal mine in 2018, but it continues to import the fuel and extract its own reserves of lignite, a brownish coal that is abundant in the west and east of the country. Officials warn that the loss of mining jobs could hurt those economically fragile regions, though efforts are already under way to turn the vast lignite mines into nature reserves and lakeside resorts.
Schulze, the environment minister, said there would be regular government reviews to examine whether the end date for coal can be brought forward. She noted that by the end of 2022, eight of the country’s most polluting coal-fired plants will have already been closed.
Environmentalists have also criticized the large sums being offered to coal companies to shut down their plants, a complaint shared by libertarians such as Germany’s opposition Free Democratic Party.
Katja Suding, a leading FDP lawmaker, said the government should have opted to expand existing emissions trading systems that put a price on carbon, thereby encouraging operators to shut down unprofitable coal plants.
“You just have to make it so expensive that it’s not profitable anymore to turn coal into electricity,” she said.
This week, utility companies in Spain shut down seven of the country’s 15 coal-fired power plants, saying they couldn’t be operated at profit without government subsidies.
But the head of Germany’s main miners’ union, Michael Vassiliadis, welcomed the decision, calling it a “historic milestone.” He urged the government to focus next on an expansion of renewable energy generation and the use of hydrogen as a clean alternative for storing and transporting energy in the future.
Gender equality: Most people are biased against women, UN says
A new study shows that almost 90% of people worldwide are biased against women and around half perceive men to make better leaders. And nearly 30% of people think it's justified for a husband to beat his wife.
dw.com
3/5/2020
Women around the world still suffer from widespread gender bias, according to a newly-published report by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
The study measures how people's social beliefs inhibit gender equality in areas including education, politics and the work force. It contains data from 75 countries, covering over 80% of the world's population.
Pedro Conceicao, director of the Human Development Report Office at UNDP, said that while progress has been made in giving women the same access to basic needs as men in education and health, gender gaps remain in areas "that challenge power relations and are most influential in actually achieving true equality."
The UNDP analysis found that despite decades-long efforts to close the gender divide, around half of the world's population feel that men make better political leaders, while over 40% think men make better business executives and have more right to a job when work availability is limited. Almost 30% of people think it's justified for a husband to beat his wife.
Women hold only 24% of parliamentary seats globally and they make up less than 6% of chief executives in S&P 500 companies, the study showed.
Countries with the highest numbers of people showing any kind of bias against gender equality are Jordan, Qatar, Nigeria, Pakistan and Zimbabwe. The countries with the lowest levels of gender bias are Andorra, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden.
The study measures how people's social beliefs inhibit gender equality in areas including education, politics and the work force. It contains data from 75 countries, covering over 80% of the world's population.
Pedro Conceicao, director of the Human Development Report Office at UNDP, said that while progress has been made in giving women the same access to basic needs as men in education and health, gender gaps remain in areas "that challenge power relations and are most influential in actually achieving true equality."
The UNDP analysis found that despite decades-long efforts to close the gender divide, around half of the world's population feel that men make better political leaders, while over 40% think men make better business executives and have more right to a job when work availability is limited. Almost 30% of people think it's justified for a husband to beat his wife.
Women hold only 24% of parliamentary seats globally and they make up less than 6% of chief executives in S&P 500 companies, the study showed.
Countries with the highest numbers of people showing any kind of bias against gender equality are Jordan, Qatar, Nigeria, Pakistan and Zimbabwe. The countries with the lowest levels of gender bias are Andorra, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden.
Women Perform 12.5 Billion Hours of Unpaid Labor Every Day
BY Michelle Chen, Truthout
PUBLISHED January 24, 2020
The global economy is polarized on multiple dimensions. Even as the gap widens between the extremely poor and ultra-rich, a chronic economic divide persists between men and women. Millions of people subsist on an income of a few dollars a day, and billions of women work for nothing at all.
Oxfam’s new report on global inequality — which was released to coincide with the gathering of the ultra-wealthy at the World Economic Forum January 21-24 in Davos, Switzerland — lays out devastating but familiar, statistics: The world has 2,153 billionaires who collectively possess more wealth than 4.6 billion people at the bottom of the income scale. More than half the world’s population is estimated to survive on less than $5.50 a day, while the rate of poverty reduction slowed by half since 2013.
The latest analysis highlights how poverty is both gendered and also socially entrenched. According to the report, men collectively own 50 percent more wealth than women do, and at the top of that wealth gap, “the richest 22 men in the world own more wealth than all the women in Africa.”
The gender wealth gap isn’t entirely surprising — sexism predates industrial capitalism, after all. But the systematic economic subjugation of women reflects how patriarchy and poverty are mutually reinforcing. Due to social as well as cultural pressure, women perform vast amounts of unpaid labor — about 12.5 billion hours every day.
Women’s unwaged labor — which occupies up to 14 hours a day in rural and low-income regions — involves domestic duties, primarily the “care work” of looking after children or elders, cooking, cleaning and mending. It could also involve procuring water or gathering firewood, or tending subsistence crops on a family farm — tasks that will become increasingly challenging as climate change and other environmental stresses intensify.
One woman in rural India, who said she worked around the clock and would be beaten by her husband if she slipped up, told Oxfam researchers, “I have no time, not even time to die for they will all curse…. Who will look after them and bring money to the family when I’m gone?”
If women like her were paid the real value of their economic contributions to their families, they would be owed at least $10.8 trillion (more than half of the U.S. annual gross domestic product) — the estimated collective value of women’s unpaid care work worldwide.
“The care economy is very neglected,” said Gawain Kripke, director of policy and research at Oxfam America. “Most of it is unpaid. And what we pay [for] is treated very poorly. And this provides a subsidy to the more formal economy. All this work that gets done, society and the economy wouldn’t function without this work…. Businesses rely on it, families rely on it, society as a whole relies on it. And yet we don’t recognize it, and don’t compensate it, and don’t support it.”
This is not an accidental oversight, but institutionalized oppression. “This is what patriarchy is,” he added. “It ignores and makes invisible women, and exalts and elevates rich men.”
In the United States, the care gap for children and the elderly falls disproportionately on women, whether they are caring for their own, or paid as hired care workers. In 2018, according to the Alzheimer’s Association, about 16.2 million people, the majority of them women, provided unpaid informal care for individuals with dementia, contributing about 18.5 billion hours of feeding, bathing, providing medication and other tasks. If the unpaid care work in the U.S. was provided through government services instead, taxpayers would have paid an estimated $234 billion. Meanwhile, professional home health care aides who care for seniors — aides who are also mostly women — typically earn poverty wages, and about half receive public benefits.
Child care faces a similar crisis: it’s both extremely expensive for families — well over $1,000 per month in many areas — and chronically underpaid for child care providers. Across the country, the Center for American Progress reports that roughly half of families with children under the age of six (about 6.3 million households) face difficulty finding suitable child care, often because of cost barriers or a lack of open slots. Roughly 4 in 10 mothers (and an even higher percentage of Black and Latinx women) are especially vulnerable because they are the primary or sole income-earners for their families. Women who could not find a decent child care program were generally less likely to be employed (fathers’ workforce participation, unsurprisingly, did not change according to child care availability), indicating that many women opt out of work rather than have their earnings eaten up by daycare fees.
Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR) Chief Operating Officer Cynthia Hess says that, since women tend to earn lower wages, “it often makes economic sense for the family for the woman to be the one to do that…. And without access to that affordable quality child care, a lot of working parents, particularly mothers, really don’t have a real choice about whether to participate in the paid labor force or not.”
According to Wendy Chun-Hoon, executive director of advocacy group Family Values @ Work, the marginalization of care work can drag down women’s lifetime economic prospects. “Devaluing women means care work is under-valued and unseen. That leads to lower pay and to job loss, which then cements women in jobs that pay less and have less opportunity for advancement, or boots women out of the workforce and labels them as ‘unreliable’ and ‘dependent’,” Chun-Hoon told Truthout via email.
Despite steady growth in women’s workforce participation over the past 50 years, the care gap between working men and women has barely budged. According to the Pew Research Center’s time-survey analysis from 1965 to 2011, “American mothers still spend about twice as much time with their children as fathers” — with women most recently clocking around 13.5 hours a week, compared to men’s 7.3 hours. According to a briefing paper co-authored by Oxfam America and IWPR, the care gap is wider among young people than older ones: Women aged 25 to 34 spend about twice as much time on unpaid household and care work (8 hours to 3.9 hours) than their male peers, compared to a gap of 5.6 hours per week versus 4.1 hours per week between women and men aged 45 to 54. The care gap is also wider between Black, Latinx and Asian men and women than between white ones.
The gender gap in wealth is undergirded by a gender gap in political power. The inequality report points out that fewer than one in four government ministers around the world is a woman, which might explain why the social welfare policies most crucial to women and families are often targeted by austerity measures. “Cutting these services is done as a budget savings,” Kripke said, “but they don’t see that the costs will be borne mainly by women, and many women will have to leave the paid workforce in order to pick up the care burdens.”
Although the intersection of gender and economic inequality is built into most modern social structures today, Oxfam and IWPR researchers note that both gender and economic justice can be tackled in tandem through the structural redistribution of wealth. For the U.S., gender-equality advocates recommend measures like paid family leave and paid sick days to allow working parents to meet their care needs without endangering their jobs. The gender wage gap, which hovers at roughly 19 percent between women’s and men’s weekly earnings, could be narrowed by boosting wages and working conditions and supporting collective bargaining. To help counter gender stereotypes, paid family leave policies should be structured to encourage men to use their leave time to spend more time caring for their kids.
In the U.S., child care has become a central issue for both liberal and conservative lawmakers. Democratic presidential contenders Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have advocated for universal early childhood education funded through a wealth tax. Warren has proposed making child care free for households earning less than double the federal poverty line and cap overall costs at 7 percent of income; Sanders has not released a detailed plan, but has called for universal preschool, in line with legislation he previously sponsored. Sanders also commented broadly on the Oxfam report, stating that the global wealth gap had pointed to the need to “develop an international movement that takes on the greed of the billionaire class.”
In response to the Oxfam report, Mary Ignatius, statewide organizer of the California-based advocacy group Parent Voices, stated, “Fully funding a robust and comprehensive child care system that meets the needs of today’s working women will dramatically and immediately close the income inequality crisis in this country and liberate women to take greater control of their lives.”
At the same time, a robust national family care program would engage women both as beneficiaries and workers. Although care jobs are hugely in demand, they remain notoriously low-paying and underregulated. A sustainable care infrastructure — expanding on the model family welfare policies of Scandinavian countries — would guarantee living wage jobs in gender-segregated sectors of the economy — particularly child care and home care jobs that relegate millions of women to the lowest wage tiers of the education and health care systems. An analysis by the University of California-Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Child Care Employment shows that aligning preschool teachers’ salaries with those of typical elementary and middle school teachers would more than double their pay, from $25,218 to $60,602 annually, which, multiplied by the early childhood education workforce nationwide, would boost their collective earnings by more than $80 billion. Similarly, the home health care workforce, with annual median wages stuck at just $13,000, would be massively boosted by raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour, which would in turn raise their income by roughly 50 percent, and generate an economic ripple effect that would average $2,000 per worker.
The Oxfam report estimates that taxing just an additional half of 1 percent of the wealth of the richest people in the U.S. would, over a decade, generate the funds “needed to create 117 million care jobs in education, health and elderly care and other sectors, and to close care deficits.” Those jobs could form the foundation of a comprehensive care-labor infrastructure, providing working parents with universal access to child, elder and disability care, as well as the flexibility to take time off from work to tend to an ailing parent or bond with a newborn, without risking their families’ economic security.
Global inequality, of course, is not just a gender issue. But the current inequities in wealth around the world could not exist if patriarchy were not subordinating half the population to a hierarchy within a hierarchy. And to end inequality, a political transformation that dismantles sexism as a tool of economic oppression is a critical step toward total social emancipation.
Oxfam’s new report on global inequality — which was released to coincide with the gathering of the ultra-wealthy at the World Economic Forum January 21-24 in Davos, Switzerland — lays out devastating but familiar, statistics: The world has 2,153 billionaires who collectively possess more wealth than 4.6 billion people at the bottom of the income scale. More than half the world’s population is estimated to survive on less than $5.50 a day, while the rate of poverty reduction slowed by half since 2013.
The latest analysis highlights how poverty is both gendered and also socially entrenched. According to the report, men collectively own 50 percent more wealth than women do, and at the top of that wealth gap, “the richest 22 men in the world own more wealth than all the women in Africa.”
The gender wealth gap isn’t entirely surprising — sexism predates industrial capitalism, after all. But the systematic economic subjugation of women reflects how patriarchy and poverty are mutually reinforcing. Due to social as well as cultural pressure, women perform vast amounts of unpaid labor — about 12.5 billion hours every day.
Women’s unwaged labor — which occupies up to 14 hours a day in rural and low-income regions — involves domestic duties, primarily the “care work” of looking after children or elders, cooking, cleaning and mending. It could also involve procuring water or gathering firewood, or tending subsistence crops on a family farm — tasks that will become increasingly challenging as climate change and other environmental stresses intensify.
One woman in rural India, who said she worked around the clock and would be beaten by her husband if she slipped up, told Oxfam researchers, “I have no time, not even time to die for they will all curse…. Who will look after them and bring money to the family when I’m gone?”
If women like her were paid the real value of their economic contributions to their families, they would be owed at least $10.8 trillion (more than half of the U.S. annual gross domestic product) — the estimated collective value of women’s unpaid care work worldwide.
“The care economy is very neglected,” said Gawain Kripke, director of policy and research at Oxfam America. “Most of it is unpaid. And what we pay [for] is treated very poorly. And this provides a subsidy to the more formal economy. All this work that gets done, society and the economy wouldn’t function without this work…. Businesses rely on it, families rely on it, society as a whole relies on it. And yet we don’t recognize it, and don’t compensate it, and don’t support it.”
This is not an accidental oversight, but institutionalized oppression. “This is what patriarchy is,” he added. “It ignores and makes invisible women, and exalts and elevates rich men.”
In the United States, the care gap for children and the elderly falls disproportionately on women, whether they are caring for their own, or paid as hired care workers. In 2018, according to the Alzheimer’s Association, about 16.2 million people, the majority of them women, provided unpaid informal care for individuals with dementia, contributing about 18.5 billion hours of feeding, bathing, providing medication and other tasks. If the unpaid care work in the U.S. was provided through government services instead, taxpayers would have paid an estimated $234 billion. Meanwhile, professional home health care aides who care for seniors — aides who are also mostly women — typically earn poverty wages, and about half receive public benefits.
Child care faces a similar crisis: it’s both extremely expensive for families — well over $1,000 per month in many areas — and chronically underpaid for child care providers. Across the country, the Center for American Progress reports that roughly half of families with children under the age of six (about 6.3 million households) face difficulty finding suitable child care, often because of cost barriers or a lack of open slots. Roughly 4 in 10 mothers (and an even higher percentage of Black and Latinx women) are especially vulnerable because they are the primary or sole income-earners for their families. Women who could not find a decent child care program were generally less likely to be employed (fathers’ workforce participation, unsurprisingly, did not change according to child care availability), indicating that many women opt out of work rather than have their earnings eaten up by daycare fees.
Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR) Chief Operating Officer Cynthia Hess says that, since women tend to earn lower wages, “it often makes economic sense for the family for the woman to be the one to do that…. And without access to that affordable quality child care, a lot of working parents, particularly mothers, really don’t have a real choice about whether to participate in the paid labor force or not.”
According to Wendy Chun-Hoon, executive director of advocacy group Family Values @ Work, the marginalization of care work can drag down women’s lifetime economic prospects. “Devaluing women means care work is under-valued and unseen. That leads to lower pay and to job loss, which then cements women in jobs that pay less and have less opportunity for advancement, or boots women out of the workforce and labels them as ‘unreliable’ and ‘dependent’,” Chun-Hoon told Truthout via email.
Despite steady growth in women’s workforce participation over the past 50 years, the care gap between working men and women has barely budged. According to the Pew Research Center’s time-survey analysis from 1965 to 2011, “American mothers still spend about twice as much time with their children as fathers” — with women most recently clocking around 13.5 hours a week, compared to men’s 7.3 hours. According to a briefing paper co-authored by Oxfam America and IWPR, the care gap is wider among young people than older ones: Women aged 25 to 34 spend about twice as much time on unpaid household and care work (8 hours to 3.9 hours) than their male peers, compared to a gap of 5.6 hours per week versus 4.1 hours per week between women and men aged 45 to 54. The care gap is also wider between Black, Latinx and Asian men and women than between white ones.
The gender gap in wealth is undergirded by a gender gap in political power. The inequality report points out that fewer than one in four government ministers around the world is a woman, which might explain why the social welfare policies most crucial to women and families are often targeted by austerity measures. “Cutting these services is done as a budget savings,” Kripke said, “but they don’t see that the costs will be borne mainly by women, and many women will have to leave the paid workforce in order to pick up the care burdens.”
Although the intersection of gender and economic inequality is built into most modern social structures today, Oxfam and IWPR researchers note that both gender and economic justice can be tackled in tandem through the structural redistribution of wealth. For the U.S., gender-equality advocates recommend measures like paid family leave and paid sick days to allow working parents to meet their care needs without endangering their jobs. The gender wage gap, which hovers at roughly 19 percent between women’s and men’s weekly earnings, could be narrowed by boosting wages and working conditions and supporting collective bargaining. To help counter gender stereotypes, paid family leave policies should be structured to encourage men to use their leave time to spend more time caring for their kids.
In the U.S., child care has become a central issue for both liberal and conservative lawmakers. Democratic presidential contenders Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have advocated for universal early childhood education funded through a wealth tax. Warren has proposed making child care free for households earning less than double the federal poverty line and cap overall costs at 7 percent of income; Sanders has not released a detailed plan, but has called for universal preschool, in line with legislation he previously sponsored. Sanders also commented broadly on the Oxfam report, stating that the global wealth gap had pointed to the need to “develop an international movement that takes on the greed of the billionaire class.”
In response to the Oxfam report, Mary Ignatius, statewide organizer of the California-based advocacy group Parent Voices, stated, “Fully funding a robust and comprehensive child care system that meets the needs of today’s working women will dramatically and immediately close the income inequality crisis in this country and liberate women to take greater control of their lives.”
At the same time, a robust national family care program would engage women both as beneficiaries and workers. Although care jobs are hugely in demand, they remain notoriously low-paying and underregulated. A sustainable care infrastructure — expanding on the model family welfare policies of Scandinavian countries — would guarantee living wage jobs in gender-segregated sectors of the economy — particularly child care and home care jobs that relegate millions of women to the lowest wage tiers of the education and health care systems. An analysis by the University of California-Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Child Care Employment shows that aligning preschool teachers’ salaries with those of typical elementary and middle school teachers would more than double their pay, from $25,218 to $60,602 annually, which, multiplied by the early childhood education workforce nationwide, would boost their collective earnings by more than $80 billion. Similarly, the home health care workforce, with annual median wages stuck at just $13,000, would be massively boosted by raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour, which would in turn raise their income by roughly 50 percent, and generate an economic ripple effect that would average $2,000 per worker.
The Oxfam report estimates that taxing just an additional half of 1 percent of the wealth of the richest people in the U.S. would, over a decade, generate the funds “needed to create 117 million care jobs in education, health and elderly care and other sectors, and to close care deficits.” Those jobs could form the foundation of a comprehensive care-labor infrastructure, providing working parents with universal access to child, elder and disability care, as well as the flexibility to take time off from work to tend to an ailing parent or bond with a newborn, without risking their families’ economic security.
Global inequality, of course, is not just a gender issue. But the current inequities in wealth around the world could not exist if patriarchy were not subordinating half the population to a hierarchy within a hierarchy. And to end inequality, a political transformation that dismantles sexism as a tool of economic oppression is a critical step toward total social emancipation.
review
Here’s What Workers of the Global South Endure to Create Corporate Wealth
BY Eve Ottenberg, Truthout
PUBLISHED January 5, 2020
In recent decades, as U.S. corporations shipped millions of jobs overseas to save money on wages, GM, H&M, Apple and dozens of other companies established elaborate supply chains in Asia, Mexico and Latin America, where workers earn pennies per hour. These chains are geographically expansive networks organized by foreign companies to produce semi-finished goods in different places before final assembly for huge global corporations.
Abuses abound. One typical example: An Indonesian factory that supplied the Japanese multinational behind the clothing brand Uniqlo abruptly closed, leaving workers with unpaid wages and unpaid severance. Intan Suwandi, the author of the recently published book Value Chains, told Truthout that there have been similar cases involving Nike, Adidas, H&M and Walmart in Cambodia and Honduras. A Chinese factory that supplied PUMA abused its workers and paid starvation wages, while workers in India’s home garment sector are as young as 10 years old, working for companies that supply the U.S. and European Union.
Suwandi also cites, in an email, a Chinese factory that produces computer products, such as keyboards and printer cases, for Hewlitt-Packard, Dell, Lenovo, Microsoft and IBM. The factory applied a “long list of draconian disciplinary measures, and fines were used to control every movement and almost every second of the workers’ lives.” She also mentions a Chinese factory that produces parts for Ford, where, among many violations, seriously injured workers were “fired after a year or two.”
And then there’s Foxconn, the Taiwanese company that assembles iPhones for Apple and products for Dell, Nokia, Hewlitt-Packard and Sony. It employs roughly 400,000 people at its Shenzhen factory, paying 83 cents an hour, under conditions so deplorable that in one six-month period in 2010, 13 workers jumped from the factory building, at least 10 to their deaths, while later, 150 threatened to kill themselves thus. Meanwhile, in 2012, a fire in a garment factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh, that supplied Walmart and Sears, killed 112 workers.
Value Chains argues that economic imperialism is alive and well and being practiced in the Global South by corporations from the North. Although in recent years some leftists have argued that with the hollowing out of the Global North’s manufacturing base, economic imperialism ended, Suwandi disputes this. Her book mentions the GM commodity chain, which, as former GM director of sustainability David Tulauskas told Suwandi, includes “20,000 suppliers that provide us parts that go onto our vehicles. We buy from them approximately 200,000 individual items, spending about $100 billion. We operate in 30 countries. We sell those products in 125 countries.” Those suppliers, Suwandi explains, are scattered in Brazil, China and Mexico. Wages are kept low through direct investments and “arm’s lengths contracts.”
Value Chains devotes many pages to these contracts, which are a form of subcontracting without equity involvement. In these contracts, multinationals outsource production to suppliers mostly in the global South through contract relationships. As a result, the complex network of labor-value chains conceals how profits are extracted from workers by making it almost impossible to trace profits back to those workers. This is largely due to the arm’s length contracts.
Suwandi cites John Smith’s Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century in order to demonstrate how much wealth transnational western corporations extract from workers in the Global South: “Apple subcontracts the production of the component parts of its iPhones to a number of countries, with Foxconn subcontracting the final assembly in China. Due … to low-end wages … Apple’s gross profit margin on its iPhone 4 in 2010 was found to be 59 percent of the final sales price.” For each iPhone 4, retailing at $549, Smith writes, only $10 went to labor costs in China.
Cheap labor in the Global South means that multinational capital only has to pay a few cents an hour for work which creates much more value than that, Suwandi explains. Corporations disguise this value capture by attributing it to marketing, distribution and design activities in the Global North. Of course, it helps that that’s where the products are sold, with high markups on production cost. This obfuscates GDP. Take Apple’s iPhones:
Only 1.8 percent goes to labor costs in China, only that amount is recorded in China’s GDP, while a large percentage is recorded in the GDP of the country where Apple is headquartered — the United States — even when none of the production processes happened here…. The country where the iPhone was produced receives in its GDP only a small proportion of the final sales price. Meanwhile the larger part shows up in the GDP of the country where it is consumed…. So that’s why the profits that multinationals get are very difficult to trace back to the workers in the Global South.
Suwandi emails that global labor value chains (or “global commodity chains,” “global value chains,” or “global supply chains”) link people, tools and activities to deliver goods and services to the market. Her book argues that multinational corporations headquartered in the Global North control these chains completely, in every detail, even though they don’t own them. She explains that each chain consists of various nodes (each node signifies a specific production process) with different businesses involved in these different production processes. Take a pair of Nike sneakers: Several nodes are involved where semi-finished parts of the final product are made in various factories located in different countries. The raw materials are also acquired from different countries. If final assembly occurs in a factory in Vietnam, the sneakers will be labeled “made in Vietnam.”
The top three countries participating in labor value chains are China, India and Indonesia, where, according to Value Chains, wages are low and productivity is high. These labor value chains “are imperialistic in their characteristics,” because “capital accumulation processes are inseparable from the unequal relations among nation states.” The global labor force is concentrated in the South: With 541 million industrial workers there in 2010, compared to 145 million in the North, the idea that the commodity chain system is imperialist in nature makes sense. Indeed, Value Chains argues that globalized production is a new form of economic imperialism that transfers wealth from South to North. This does not preclude, however, the creation of local billionaires in China and India, who reap immense profits from their own transnational corporations. And where does all that profit go? “Huge quantities of this loot,” Value Chains reports, “captured from peripheral economies in the global South end up in the ‘treasure islands’ of the Caribbean, where trillions of dollars of money capital are now deposited.”
All this pelf, of course, comes directly out of workers’ hides. The cheaper the wages of the workers in the Global South, the greater the gross profit margins. Moreover, Suwandi explains, “Multinationals exercise a high degree of control within these labor-value chains, even when they only engage in contractual relationships with their suppliers.”
Value Chains examines two Indonesian firms, pseudonymously labeled Java Film and Star Inc., which often have the same customers for the plastic wrappers they produce. These firms do not use sweatshops, partly because they do not identify as “labor intensive.” But that’s one of Suwandi’s points: Exploitation does not necessarily involve blatantly abusive practices. She observes that multinationals control their suppliers’ production to the smallest detail, determining their suppliers’ profit margins, by increasing exploitation of the suppliers’ workers, usually through increased productivity, but also sometimes by depriving workers of their rights, or through violence, abuse and law-breaking.
Making production more economical and increasing productivity involve two processes, according to Value Chains – “systemic rationalization and flexible production.” Suwandi explains that capital wants production to be flexible enough to accommodate market fluctuations, “without paying the price … this burden is in the end placed upon workers through enhancing exploitation.” Engaging in arm’s length contracts itself exemplifies both processes. Systemic rationalization, according to Value Chains, refers “to the technological and organizational changes by corporations that began in the 1970s … [with] its focus on the rise of decentralized production throughout the globe.” (The ‘70s was the decade when neoliberalism and the union busting it entailed really got going. It’s when corporations “modernized.”) Flexible production — according to Lean and Mean by Bennett Harrison, which Value Chains quotes — involves “lean production, downsizing, outsourcing and the growing importance of spatially extensive production networks governed by powerful core firms and their strategic allies.”
Abuses abound. One typical example: An Indonesian factory that supplied the Japanese multinational behind the clothing brand Uniqlo abruptly closed, leaving workers with unpaid wages and unpaid severance. Intan Suwandi, the author of the recently published book Value Chains, told Truthout that there have been similar cases involving Nike, Adidas, H&M and Walmart in Cambodia and Honduras. A Chinese factory that supplied PUMA abused its workers and paid starvation wages, while workers in India’s home garment sector are as young as 10 years old, working for companies that supply the U.S. and European Union.
Suwandi also cites, in an email, a Chinese factory that produces computer products, such as keyboards and printer cases, for Hewlitt-Packard, Dell, Lenovo, Microsoft and IBM. The factory applied a “long list of draconian disciplinary measures, and fines were used to control every movement and almost every second of the workers’ lives.” She also mentions a Chinese factory that produces parts for Ford, where, among many violations, seriously injured workers were “fired after a year or two.”
And then there’s Foxconn, the Taiwanese company that assembles iPhones for Apple and products for Dell, Nokia, Hewlitt-Packard and Sony. It employs roughly 400,000 people at its Shenzhen factory, paying 83 cents an hour, under conditions so deplorable that in one six-month period in 2010, 13 workers jumped from the factory building, at least 10 to their deaths, while later, 150 threatened to kill themselves thus. Meanwhile, in 2012, a fire in a garment factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh, that supplied Walmart and Sears, killed 112 workers.
Value Chains argues that economic imperialism is alive and well and being practiced in the Global South by corporations from the North. Although in recent years some leftists have argued that with the hollowing out of the Global North’s manufacturing base, economic imperialism ended, Suwandi disputes this. Her book mentions the GM commodity chain, which, as former GM director of sustainability David Tulauskas told Suwandi, includes “20,000 suppliers that provide us parts that go onto our vehicles. We buy from them approximately 200,000 individual items, spending about $100 billion. We operate in 30 countries. We sell those products in 125 countries.” Those suppliers, Suwandi explains, are scattered in Brazil, China and Mexico. Wages are kept low through direct investments and “arm’s lengths contracts.”
Value Chains devotes many pages to these contracts, which are a form of subcontracting without equity involvement. In these contracts, multinationals outsource production to suppliers mostly in the global South through contract relationships. As a result, the complex network of labor-value chains conceals how profits are extracted from workers by making it almost impossible to trace profits back to those workers. This is largely due to the arm’s length contracts.
Suwandi cites John Smith’s Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century in order to demonstrate how much wealth transnational western corporations extract from workers in the Global South: “Apple subcontracts the production of the component parts of its iPhones to a number of countries, with Foxconn subcontracting the final assembly in China. Due … to low-end wages … Apple’s gross profit margin on its iPhone 4 in 2010 was found to be 59 percent of the final sales price.” For each iPhone 4, retailing at $549, Smith writes, only $10 went to labor costs in China.
Cheap labor in the Global South means that multinational capital only has to pay a few cents an hour for work which creates much more value than that, Suwandi explains. Corporations disguise this value capture by attributing it to marketing, distribution and design activities in the Global North. Of course, it helps that that’s where the products are sold, with high markups on production cost. This obfuscates GDP. Take Apple’s iPhones:
Only 1.8 percent goes to labor costs in China, only that amount is recorded in China’s GDP, while a large percentage is recorded in the GDP of the country where Apple is headquartered — the United States — even when none of the production processes happened here…. The country where the iPhone was produced receives in its GDP only a small proportion of the final sales price. Meanwhile the larger part shows up in the GDP of the country where it is consumed…. So that’s why the profits that multinationals get are very difficult to trace back to the workers in the Global South.
Suwandi emails that global labor value chains (or “global commodity chains,” “global value chains,” or “global supply chains”) link people, tools and activities to deliver goods and services to the market. Her book argues that multinational corporations headquartered in the Global North control these chains completely, in every detail, even though they don’t own them. She explains that each chain consists of various nodes (each node signifies a specific production process) with different businesses involved in these different production processes. Take a pair of Nike sneakers: Several nodes are involved where semi-finished parts of the final product are made in various factories located in different countries. The raw materials are also acquired from different countries. If final assembly occurs in a factory in Vietnam, the sneakers will be labeled “made in Vietnam.”
The top three countries participating in labor value chains are China, India and Indonesia, where, according to Value Chains, wages are low and productivity is high. These labor value chains “are imperialistic in their characteristics,” because “capital accumulation processes are inseparable from the unequal relations among nation states.” The global labor force is concentrated in the South: With 541 million industrial workers there in 2010, compared to 145 million in the North, the idea that the commodity chain system is imperialist in nature makes sense. Indeed, Value Chains argues that globalized production is a new form of economic imperialism that transfers wealth from South to North. This does not preclude, however, the creation of local billionaires in China and India, who reap immense profits from their own transnational corporations. And where does all that profit go? “Huge quantities of this loot,” Value Chains reports, “captured from peripheral economies in the global South end up in the ‘treasure islands’ of the Caribbean, where trillions of dollars of money capital are now deposited.”
All this pelf, of course, comes directly out of workers’ hides. The cheaper the wages of the workers in the Global South, the greater the gross profit margins. Moreover, Suwandi explains, “Multinationals exercise a high degree of control within these labor-value chains, even when they only engage in contractual relationships with their suppliers.”
Value Chains examines two Indonesian firms, pseudonymously labeled Java Film and Star Inc., which often have the same customers for the plastic wrappers they produce. These firms do not use sweatshops, partly because they do not identify as “labor intensive.” But that’s one of Suwandi’s points: Exploitation does not necessarily involve blatantly abusive practices. She observes that multinationals control their suppliers’ production to the smallest detail, determining their suppliers’ profit margins, by increasing exploitation of the suppliers’ workers, usually through increased productivity, but also sometimes by depriving workers of their rights, or through violence, abuse and law-breaking.
Making production more economical and increasing productivity involve two processes, according to Value Chains – “systemic rationalization and flexible production.” Suwandi explains that capital wants production to be flexible enough to accommodate market fluctuations, “without paying the price … this burden is in the end placed upon workers through enhancing exploitation.” Engaging in arm’s length contracts itself exemplifies both processes. Systemic rationalization, according to Value Chains, refers “to the technological and organizational changes by corporations that began in the 1970s … [with] its focus on the rise of decentralized production throughout the globe.” (The ‘70s was the decade when neoliberalism and the union busting it entailed really got going. It’s when corporations “modernized.”) Flexible production — according to Lean and Mean by Bennett Harrison, which Value Chains quotes — involves “lean production, downsizing, outsourcing and the growing importance of spatially extensive production networks governed by powerful core firms and their strategic allies.”
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