US election: Vietnamese-Americans prefer Trump to Biden — and the president has fans in Vietnam too

Vietnamese-Americans are more likely than other Asian voters to pick Trump, a new survey has found

Trump is also popular in Vietnam, where social media fan pages dedicated to him boast tens of thousands of followers

EVEN AS TRUMP ENDS TEMPORARY VISAS FOR BOAT PEOPLE FROM THE EIGHTIES

Sen Nguyen Published: 3 Oct, 2020


US President Donald Trump during his February 2019 visit to Hanoi, Vietnam. Photo: Reuters
President Donald TRUMP may have stirred up culture wars that target a range of minority groups in the United States, but Vietnamese-Americans are more likely than other Asian-Americans to vote for him in the November election.

A survey – the results of which were released last month – of nearly 1,600 Asian-Americans by the advocacy groups APIAVote, AAPI Data and Asian Americans Advancing Justice, found that 48 per cent of Vietnamese-Americans favoured Trump, versus 36 per cent who supported Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.

Other Asian-American voters – including those of Chinese, Indian, Korean, Japanese and Filipino descent – preferred Biden to Trump by a margin of 54 per cent to 30 per cent.

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The results echo those of a similar poll in 2018 by APIAVote and AAPI Data in which Vietnamese-Americans were the only Asian-American group with a majority who approved of Trump’s job performance, at 64 per cent.

Pham Do Chi, one of the founding members of the US-based advocacy group Vietnamese Americans for Trump as President Again, or TAPA, whose members include refugees and veterans of the former South Vietnam military, told This Week in Asia there were clear reasons he preferred Trump.

“Asian-American lives have improved significantly under the Trump presidency, with a very strong economy and nearly full employment before the pandemic,” he said.


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Chi, 71, who has a doctorate in economics and was a former economist at the International Monetary Fund, said he thought Trump had the ability to lift the country out of its current recession, and also liked his tough stance on “illegal immigration” and China.

In comparison, Chi said he thought a Biden administration would increase taxes, “notably on the corporate sector, [which] will prolong this recession much further into 2021 and beyond”.

In a letter addressed to Trump in July, TAPA expressed its “100 per cent support” for the current president and his “Make America Great Again” campaign. The letter also spelled out the group’s gratitude to the US for welcoming Vietnamese refugees, and outlined its deep objections towards communism and Marxism “because it impoverished our country and killed our innocent people”.

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The historical relationship between Vietnam and the US is primarily characterised by the legacy of the Vietnam war, which ended in 1975. That year also marked the beginning of a mass emigration of over 2 million Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian refugees from their home countries. More than 880,000 of the 1.6 million Vietnamese who fled were resettled in the US.


VIRAL IN VIETNAM

In Vietnam, where online fan pages supporting domestic politicians are not common or viral, Trump fan pages boast tens of thousands of followers on Facebook – the most popular social media network in the Southeast Asian country, with over 60 million users.

While it is not clear where the page administrators are based, the phone numbers shown in the “About” section of some pages are all local numbers, and the language used in the posts is Vietnamese, although videos posted on the pages are sometimes in English.

Trump and Biden face off in their first presidential debate on September 30. Photo: Xinhua

On one page with more than 86,000 likes and nearly 290,000 followers, the moderators post various multimedia content, including Trump-focused activities such as his raucous rallies and latest policy moves, as well as strident criticisms of Biden.

A post that has garnered thousands of likes shows an image of Trump and first lady Melania Trump, with the caption: “He has lost friends, but he still has millions of Americans and citizens around the world supporting and staying by his side.”

Trump fandom is also present offline. Luong Minh Trung, 52, stands out at a traditional market in Ho Chi Minh City frequented by those of Khmer origin who now live in Vietnam. His scooter-parking business was named after Trump – making it easy to find because of its unique name, he said. “I only found out about Trump when he became president. He works hard and he cares about his citizens,” Trung said about why he supported Trump, adding that he followed news about the US president via online media.

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Many of his countrymen seem to feel the same way, going by a 2017 study conducted by the Pew Research Center, where respondents from most of the 37 countries included in the poll said Trump was not well qualified to be president – with the exception of Vietnamese respondents.

On Wednesday, after a chaotic first debate between Trump and Biden, a Facebook post by a state television channel on the contest between both men generated more than 1,500 likes and hundreds of comments. One Vietnamese netizen with the username Cuong Van commented: “I hope Mr Trump gets elected to destroy China because China is imperious towards other countries but no president has protested against [China] like Mr Trump [does].”

In Vietnam, Trump fan pages on Facebook boast tens of thousands of followers. Photo: Reuters

Thinh Nguyen, a 62-year-old who came to the United States as a refugee before becoming a citizen, and who now runs a tech company in Ho Chi Minh City, said the Vietnamese penchant for leaning Republican – and hence, for supporting Trump – sprang from many Vietnamese-Americans’ belief that “South Vietnam was lost because of the Democrats”. He said in their minds, it was the Democrats and anti-war leaders in the US during that time who brought down President Richard M. Nixon and forced the Americans out of the war, ultimately leading to the fall of Saigon.

Thinh showed off a button reading, “Vietnamese for Reagan-Bush 84” that he keeps in his home to commemorate how he used to rally support among other Vietnamese-Americans for the two Republicans when they ran for office.

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Thinh said he respected Vietnamese-Americans’ choice to be Republicans, even though he now calls himself a former member of the party after he gradually moved to the left of the political spectrum when he left New Orleans and moved to California in the 1980s.

“You have to be able to see when something is wrong morally and politically,” he said. “If you choose Trump, you are willing to accept corruption and destroy democracy and human rights, something that we have been building for a long time in the US.”

Janelle Wong, a senior researcher for AAPI Data and a core faculty member of the University of Maryland’s Asian-American Studies Programme, said Vietnamese-Americans had an affinity for the Republican Party because it had traditionally been associated with strong anti-communist positions.

“I don‘t believe that Vietnamese are particularly enamoured of Trump, rather a large proportion will vote for the Republican candidate as a result of partisan loyalties, regardless of who that candidate might be,” she said via email.

Wong said that while Vietnamese-Americans might lean Republican overall, they aligned with Democrats when it came to certain policies, as they were generally strong supporters of climate change policies, universal health care and other social safety net programmes.

GENERATION GAP

Among Vietnamese-Americans, like many different groups in the US, younger generations differ substantially from their seniors in views on key social and political issues.

Late last month, Houston-based Apple Broadcasting Television 55.4 channel posted a video on its Facebook page featuring middle-aged looking women and men singing mostly in Vietnamese and some English about their support for Trump.

The first line of their song was “Let us remember in November to vote for President Trump, the person deserving of our vote”. The post garnered thousands of likes and shares.

Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, a professor and historian at Columbia University who specialises in the Vietnam war and US-Southeast Asian relations, said there was “no monolithic Vietnamese-American vote”, as their motivation depended on many factors, including age, socioeconomic status, gender and educational background.

“Without looking at polls and census data, my guess is that the younger generation of Vietnamese-Americans are to the left of the political spectrum [compared with] their parents and grandparents.”

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Diep The Lan, 36, is the son of Vietnamese refugees and a member of the San Jose City Council in California. He said he would vote for Biden because of the former vice-president’s experience in domestic and foreign policy, and his empathy.

Lan, a former Republican who became a Democrat last year, said his father, who fled the former South Vietnam after the war, was a Trump supporter “because he believes a Trump presidency will be beneficial to the pro-democracy movement in Vietnam more than a Biden presidency”.

“Arguably, the vote will be symbolic at best, because California is solidly in favour of Mr Biden, even if the Vietnamese refugee community is not,” he said.

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Colette Brannan, a law student at Yale University who has a Vietnamese-American mother and a white American father, said she chose not to discuss politics with her extended family – some of whom are Trump supporters – to avoid conflicts.

The 24-year-old said she was disheartened to see many older Vietnamese-Americans support Trump, but she was inspired by activist artists at the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network and by Viet Thanh Nguyen, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author who has publicly criticised Trump and Vietnamese-Americans who support him.
“
Trump‘s election in 2016 was actually one of the main reasons I decided to become more politically involved and to go to law school,” she said. “And it made me realise I should try and use my own abilities to make the world a better place, because if we do not do it, no one will.” ■




Sen Nguyen is a journalist based in Vietnam specialising in development, human rights, and the environment. Her broadcast commentary has appeared on ITV News podcast and Al Jazeera's The Stream.

Are Singaporean workers really losing jobs to Indian expats due to Ceca free-trade deal?
IMPERIALISM THE HIGHEST FORM OF CAPITALISM

As Singapore stares into its Covid-fuelled deepest recession, job anxiety is fuelling a sudden new wave of resentment over a deal dating back to 2005

Read social media and it seems the immigration floodgates have opened, but the figures tell a different story. Experts say jobs are being created, not lost

Kok Xinghui and Dewey Sim in Singapore
Published: 8:00am, 12 Sep, 2020

Office workers in Singapore. Photo: Reuters

As Singapore’s economy slows amid the coronavirus pandemic and job losses mount, people’s anxieties over their livelihoods have found a convenient target: a free-trade agreement Singapore signed with India in 2005. On social media, the Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement (Ceca) is being blamed for willy-nilly letting Indian nationals into Singapore to steal jobs from locals – no matter how many times the government says it is not true.

On a Facebook post of a news article explaining that Ceca did not give Indians automatic access to citizenship, permanent residency or employment, Stephanie Low commented: “Our jobs are taken by Ceca! Wait till the ministers’ jobs are also taken by them, then they will know!”

Others, like Emran Rahman, disparagingly referred to Indians as Ceca, saying: “Everywhere CECA! Even housing estates have them around!”

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On the public group SG Opposition, Michael da Silva said the government was letting professional Indians in to give them citizenship and eventually gain their vote for the ruling party.

These worries have become more pronounced as Singapore battles its worst recession and countries around the world continue struggling to contain the
Covid-19 pandemic.

Despite multiple clarifications from the authorities that Ceca does not give Indian jobseekers a free pass into Singapore, disgruntled citizens have latched onto two areas within the 16 chapters of the agreement that came into force in 2005. Their points of contention: intra-corporate transfers that let companies bring India-based staff into Singapore for a maximum term of eight years without having to first advertise the jobs to locals, and a list of 127 professions covered by the deal that range from database administrator, to accountants to financial analysts to medical specialists.

People cross a street in the shopping district of Orchard Road, Singapore. Photo: Reuters

Victor Tan, for example, who requested a pseudonym fearing a backlash that could hurt his career, insisted that job woes were caused by Ceca’s “free flow” of Indian nationals coming to Singapore.

He said his 14 years in the relocation industry – helping expatriates move in and out of Singapore – let him see that since 2016, the proportion of nationalities had shifted from being mostly Australian and British, to Indian.

To Tan, the free-trade agreement was “lopsided”. “We don’t see any of our Singapore locals going over to India to hold high positions. Instead, a lot of them are coming here, holding high positions,” he said. “When I was job searching, I didn’t see any opportunities in India for Singaporeans to go over.”

His sweeping views of the free-trade agreement are not based on truth. But they do reflect sentiments on social media.

This “obsession”, said Nanyang Technological University sociologist Laavanya Kathiravelu, should be seen within the context of rising economic uncertainty, with Singapore’s economy
expected to shrink by up to 7 per cent this year, even with a financial stimulus of about S$93 billion (US$68 billion).

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Kathiravelu said: “With the local and global economies experiencing sluggish growth, and many Singaporeans losing their jobs or having to go on reduced pay, the seeming preference for hiring foreigners becomes a higher-stakes issue. It’s being conceived as a zero-sum game, where a job given to a foreigner means one less job for a Singaporean.”

It is not the first time there has been unhappiness over Ceca. Ceca grabbed headlines last year when a man was captured shouting at his
condominium’s security guard and netizens immediately assumed he was an Indian expatriate – in fact, he was born in India but now has Singapore citizenship. Vitriol against Indian nationals since then has grown among opposition voices who use Ceca as an anti-immigration scapegoat and call for it to be abolished.


Political analyst Woo Jun Jie said the debate over foreign labour was long-standing but he sensed a shift in the conversation from when the issue became a political hot potato before the 2011 general election. In the years before that vote the population had grown from 4 million in 2000 to 5 million in 2010, but during the same time frame the number of permanent residents and foreigners almost doubled (from 287,000 PRs and 754,000 foreigners in 2000 to 541,000 PRs and 1,305,000 foreigners in 2010).

A vegetable stall in the Little India district of Singapore. Photo: EPA

While the discussion back then focused on the strain the growing pool of foreigners was placing on public infrastructure, this time the debate revolved around issues of inequality and access.

“Specifically, the public discontent now seems to be centred around job availability and pay levels, particularly for local PMETs [professionals, managers, executives and technicians],” he said.

Consequently, when Singapore’s 14th parliament opened last month, much of the debate was on how best to strike a balance between saving jobs for Singaporeans and not cutting out the foreigners needed to beef up Singapore’s small workforce of just 2.33 million and burnish its reputation as a global city.

Those from the ruling People’s Action Party and the opposition gave many suggestions, from enacting anti-discrimination legislation to naming and shaming companies that favoured foreigners to setting a quota for employment passes, while the authorities took the chance to share statistics.

Intra-corporate transferees, for example, account for less than five per cent of all who hold employment passes (a work pass for higher-skilled workers that carries a minimum salary requirement of S$3,900 or about US$2,850). That worked out to about 9,500 workers, and Indian nationals were but “a small segment” of those, said the ministry of trade and industry.

Still, those like Tan remain unhappy and unelected politician Lim Tean continues to fiercely campaign for Ceca to be abolished.


IS CECA REALLY THAT DIFFERENT?


While public displeasure has zeroed in on Ceca, the free-trade agreement – which has helped trade between Singapore and India grow by S$7.6 billion since 2005 – is not much different from the 24 others that Singapore has signed when it comes to the movement of workers.

In an interview with This Week in Asia, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Trade and Industry said most free-trade agreements had commitments on the movement of workers, including on intra-corporate transferees. 

Only the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) did not include intra-corporate transferees.

“The purpose behind that is to facilitate companies when they invest overseas. When you invest overseas, you will want to bring some of your own employees to start off the investment,” said the spokesperson.

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Minister of Trade and Industry Chan Chun Sing had told local media that Singapore’s Ceca commitments were not unique, and that most of the 164 World Trade Organisation members also had commitments on the entry of intra-corporate transferees under the General Agreement on Trade in Services. He said Singapore companies also made use of the intra-corporate transferees provision to take their employees along when starting out overseas.

Singapore’s Minister of Trade and Industry Chan Chun Sing. Photo: Facebook


Contrary to what Victor Tan and Lim Tean believe, agreements like Ceca benefit Singapore just as they benefit India, the government has maintained. Ceca allows Singapore banks DBS and UOB to set up shop in India, meaning Singapore companies can easily access these banks’ financial services when doing business in India. And there are many doing business in India. Chan said that by 2018, more than 650 Singapore companies had invested in the country.

What is unique about Ceca compared to other free-trade agreements is the annex of 127 professions. But while the list spells out what qualifies as a “profession”, it does not mean that those professionals get free entry into Singapore, or that they are prioritised over others.


“All foreign professionals – including Indian nationals – who wish to come to Singapore must meet work-pass qualifying criteria, including relevant education and professional qualifications, before they are allowed to work in Singapore,” said the Ministry of Trade and Industry spokesperson.


The inclusion of the list, the spokesperson said, was “a negotiated outcome” between Singapore and India.

There have also been many accusations that the finance industry is predominantly filled with Indian nationals. A Facebook user, for example, shared a photo of DBS chief executive Piyush Gupta, a naturalised Singaporean, with Indian staff behind him. The user asked viewers to “find a Singaporean or Chinese” in the photo. Prime Minister
Lee Hsien Loong rebuked the social media user, saying the photo was taken in India where DBS had opened a new office.

Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong. File photo

“The person who put up the post surely knew this, yet he irresponsibly misused the [photo] to insinuate that DBS in Singapore was not being fair to Singaporeans,” said Lee in a speech in parliament.

While Leader of the Opposition Pritam Singh’s request in parliament for data on the breakdown of new jobs that went to citizens, foreigners and permanent residents earlier this year was met with wariness, the discontent over claims of foreigners dominating Singapore’s financial services sector seemed to prompt the government to release more data.


Transport Minister Ong Ye Kung, who sits on the board of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, told parliament that financial services employed 171,000 workers and seven in 10 were Singaporean. Just 16 per cent were foreigners while 14 per cent were permanent residents.

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The percentages shift for senior roles, where 44 per cent are Singaporeans, 20 per cent are permanent residents and 36 per cent are foreigners. The foreigners in senior roles, however, are not made up of one nationality.


Ong said: “They come from over 50 countries, the largest group comes from Europe, with other significant nationalities from across Asia and North America.”

Banks in Singapore also shared their employment data with This Week in Asia. Citi Singapore said Singaporeans and permanent residents (PRs) made up around 80 per cent of its total direct hires in the city state, while this number was 95 per cent at its consumer banking department.

Jacinta Low, the head of human resources planning at OCBC Bank, said more than 90 per cent of the bank’s 7,000-strong workforce in Singapore were citizens or PRs. Citizens also account for 82 per cent of the bank’s senior leaders.

For the London-headquartered Standard Chartered bank, 83 per cent of its Singapore workforce were citizens or PRs, as were 90 per cent of its management team, while DBS Bank said over 90 per cent of its 12,000-strong Singapore workforce were Singaporeans and PRs. All 16 members of its top leadership team were Singaporeans.

Standard Chartered’s Singapore office. Photo: Reuters

Academics say the government’s concern that data could be twisted and misinterpreted is not entirely unfounded but sociologist Kathiravelu pointed out that fine-grained data could also help combat speculation based on anecdotes. This could be in the form of a breakdown of non-Singaporeans in specific sectors such as IT or banking, and a further breakdown by income and job title, when there was a perception that there was an over-representation of foreigners.

But opposition politician Lim Tean said the government could opt to cherry-pick data it released and this would not help give Singaporeans the full story. “I am very sceptical of the figures that the government is producing, I make no bones about that,” he said.


QUOTAS, PENALTIES, REGULATIONS

Singapore’s freshly minted parliamentarians raised several suggestions to stem anxieties at last month’s week-long parliamentary session.

Particularly, labour member of parliament (MP) Patrick Tay from the ruling People’s Action Party suggested that Singapore should consider raising the minimum-salary criteria for foreign workers in the IT and professional services sector, referring to how there are generally more firms from the two sectors on the hiring discrimination watch list.

His comments followed the authorities’ recent move to raise the minimum qualifying salary for new Employment Pass holders from S$3,900 to S$4,500. Those in financial services would need to have a minimum salary of S$5,000. The salary floors are also pegged to years of experience, so candidates in their 40s would have to earn around double the minimum qualifying salary. This was largely backed by economists and academics as a step in the right direction to restrict the number of foreign hires.


Tay, who is also the assistant secretary general of the National Trades Union Congress, said harsher penalties could be meted out to firms with discriminatory hiring practices, suggesting the authorities disallow these companies from winning public-sector contracts.

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The manpower ministry could also name and shame firms that repeatedly undermined the government’s efforts to protect its Singaporean workforce, he said, while more legal power could be given to the agency in charge of addressing workplace discrimination and harassment known as the Tripartite Alliance for Fair and Progressive Employment Practices.

Tay also said the authorities could impose a two-tiered quota – one for higher-skilled professionals with higher salaries, and another for mid-skilled executives. This way, companies would still be able to hire foreign talents with specialised skill sets to drive technology-based initiatives, he said.

Singh the opposition leader also called for the government to consider enacting anti-discrimination laws to punish errant companies that discriminated against Singaporean workers.

Singapore’s Manpower Minister Josephine Teo. Photo: AFP

But Manpower Minister Josephine Teo defended the city state’s current laws, saying that punishments, including the curtailment of work-pass privileges, would put pressure on firms.

“Not so many businesses are able to operate with a 100 per cent local employment workforce so this kind of a penalty is much more painful than if we were to, say, introduce a fine,” she said in parliament.

With Singapore seen as a potential beneficiary from businesses seeking to relocate or shift operations amid geopolitical uncertainties, Trade and Industry Minister Chan Chun Sing, at a business forum on Tuesday, said the city state would continue to be open to “top international talent”. But this would be done in a “calibrated manner” to enable businesses to plan for the future and for Singaporeans to learn from them.

“Our foreign worker policies will shift increasingly towards quality rather than quantity,” added Chan.

EASY TARGETS

Meanwhile, the fallout from the polarised debate over Ceca is complex. Indian nationals in the city state feel that they are being unfairly targeted while ethnic Indians – who form 7 per cent of the 3.5-million-citizen population – have expressed frustration at an ethnic group being the focus of racist vitriol, even as they have reservations about new migrants and professionals from India who are perceived to be more class conscious.

IN THE GHETTO
Kathiravelu, the sociologist from Nanyang Technological University, suggested that Indian professional migrants were highly visible because they lived in “residential enclaves” and gravitated towards specific sectors such as IT and banking. 

Even as early as a decade ago, English-language broadsheet The Straits Times reported that Indian families occupied 250 out of the 502 units at The Waterside, an upmarket condominium located in eastern Singapore. Lim, who heads opposition party Peoples Voice, also noted this trend, saying that many residential developments in the East Coast neighbourhood were populated by Indian nationals.

Joggers run near the Merlion Park in Singapore. Photo: Reuters

He said he felt “disturbed” when he visited Changi Business Park, where many financial institutions, including DBS Bank, Citi Group, UBS, Credit Suisse, JP Morgan and Standard Chartered Bank, park their back-end operations and call centres.

“I went there quite a number of times, and I was one of the first to say that when you go there, it feels that you are in a totally different country,” Lim told This Week in Asia. Some Singaporeans have coined the term Chennai Business Park when referring to the industrial area due to the large crowds of Indian nationals working there.

This visibility, said Kathiravelu, made Indians the targets of xenophobia as they were seen as dominating specific industries and not integrating into the social life of the country.
They were also seen as competing with Singaporeans for resources in a way that white or European expatriates were not, she added. “This is perhaps an expression of structural
racism and a colonial hangover where there is still a perception that white expats may be better qualified and suitable for jobs than their Indian or Asian counterparts.”

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Still, Lim stressed he was not “against Indians” or xenophobic but felt that Singaporeans should question why many Indian workers were taking up jobs he believed could be done by locals.

While the nativism that Singapore is grappling with is not unique – opportunistic politicians the world over have flogged such sentiments as countries turn inward – the rise of these feelings is a headache for a city state that relies on an open economy to survive.

Alex Capri, a visiting senior fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Business School, felt this was more of a political issue than an economic one. “This sort of thing plays well in the media. But if looked at objectively, there’s an overall net benefit for Singapore as the multinational enterprises as a whole contribute to Singapore’s economy and create local jobs,” said Capri.

He added that if there were increased regulations to FTAs including Ceca, the city state’s reputation as an open and free hub could be compromised.

Kathiravelu said in times of recession, exclusionary sentiments like xenophobia had been known to rise. “People look for easy targets to blame rather than understanding structural issues for change,” she said.

In an opinion piece in The Straits Times, editor-at-large Han Fook Kwang said Singaporeans’ angst with the immigration policy ultimately came down to insecurities about livelihoods, standards of living and retirement security.

“The more secure they feel, the more open they will be to foreigners. Obviously, no government can guarantee absolute security, but a country’s social safety net plays a major role in providing a minimum level of support,” said Han.

Political analyst Woo Jun Jie said the perception of unfair hiring – such as when 47 employers were placed on a watch list for discriminatory practices – must be dealt with.

Woo said it was good that the government raised the qualifying salaries for foreigners to work in Singapore, but it was “not possible to keep using these as tools to control the foreign worker population, or even to encourage fair employment practices”. Woo said tougher penalties were needed for employers who did not give fair consideration to Singaporean candidates so that companies were nudged towards “organically developing a stronger pro-Singaporean stance, without the need for frequent state interventions”.

“This more organic and ground-up approach may be able to help prevent the emergence of populist politics or racism,” he said. ■

GREEN CAPITALISM #ESG

Widodo’s jobs bill poses threat to forests, global investors warn Indonesia


In a letter, 35 investors said the legislation could hamper efforts to protect the country’s tropical forests

The government says the bill, passed by parliament on Monday, is needed to streamline regulations in Indonesia


Reuters Published: 5 Oct, 2020

A demonstrator sets up scarecrows for keeping social distancing during a protest outside the Indonesian parliament against the Omnibus bill in Jakarta last month. Photo: Reuters

Global investors managing US$4.1 trillion in assets have warned

Indonesia’s government that a contentious job creation bill passed by parliament on Monday could pose new risks to the country’s tropical forests.

In a letter, 35 investors expressed their concerns, including Aviva Investors, Legal & General Investment Management, the Church of England Pensions Board, Netherlands-based asset manager Robeco and Japan’s largest asset manager, Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Asset Management.

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“While we recognise the necessity for reform of business law in Indonesia we have concerns about the negative impact of certain environmental protection measures affected by the
Omnibus Bill on Job Creation,” Peter van der Werf, senior engagement specialist at Robeco, said in a statement.
With President
Joko Widodo’s coalition controlling 74 per cent of seats, parliament passed the bill that the government says is needed to improve the investment climate and streamline regulations in Southeast Asia’s biggest economy.

FASCISM

The new law would ensure the “state’s presence” in the relationship between employers and workers, Airlangga Hartarto, chief economics minister, told parliament on Monday.

 

A coalition of 15 activist groups, including trade unions, earlier condemned the bill and called on workers to join a planned national strike on October 6-8.

Yusri Yunus, a spokesman for Jakarta police, said that a permit for the protest had not been approved and due to the
Covid-19 situation “we advise all of them not to demonstrate”.

THE WORKERS FLAG IS DEEPEST RED FOR THE BLOOD WE HAVE SHED

Indonesians protest against the Omnibus bill in January. Photo: Joe Cochrane

While recent rallies against the bill have been relatively small, some vowed to press on with protests.

“We will continue to strike nationwide,” said Nining Elitos, chairwoman of the labour group KASBI.

Ahmad Jumali, chairman of the Tanggerang chapter of the Federation of Metal Workers (FSPMI), also said workers planned to shut down production to protest the law.

Workers opposing the bill argue that the legislation would be a “red carpet for investors, widening the power of the oligarchy” that will not only hurt labour protection but also taking land from farmers and indigenous communities.

The investors said they feared the legislation could hamper efforts to protect Indonesia’s forests, which would in turn undermine global action to tackle biodiversity loss and slow
climate change.

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“While the proposed regulatory changes aim to increase foreign investment, they risk contravening international best practice standards intended to prevent unintended harmful consequences from business activities that could deter investors from Indonesian markets,” said the letter, sent hours before the bill was passed.

With concerns over environmental breakdown rising up the investor agenda, some asset managers have begun to take a more public stance in urging governments in developing countries to protect the natural world.

In a similar intervention in July, 29 investors managing US$4.6 trillion wrote to Brazilian embassies to demand meetings to call on right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro’s government to stop soaring deforestation in the Amazon rainforest.

Cambodian soldiers stand at Ream Naval Base in Preah Sihanouk province in July 2019. Photo: EPA

Cambodia has demolished a US-built facility on the country’s largest naval base, according to images published by an American think tank on Friday, amid increasing concern in Washington about China’s access to military bases in the nation.

The Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) published images that it said showed that the Cambodian government last month demolished a building that the United States had built at Ream Naval Base.
Last year the Pentagon had asked Cambodia to explain why it
turned down an offer to repair the base, saying the decision had raised speculation of possible plans for hosting China’s military.

Cambodia has demolished a U.S.-built facility at the country’s Ream Naval Base, according to satellite imagery collected on October 1. The demolition seems to confirm that changes are underway at Ream and raises questions about rumored Chinese access:
https://t.co/C1w5qeqneU
pic.twitter.com/HU7E5K11kJ
— AMTI (@AsiaMTI)
October 2, 2020

The Pentagon on Friday said it was concerned about reports that the US-funded Cambodian Navy tactical headquarters facility had been demolished and had asked the Cambodian government for an explanation.

“We have concerns that razing the facility may be tied to Cambodia government plans for hosting People’s Republic of China (PRC) military assets and personnel at Ream Naval Base,” the Pentagon said in a statement.

The Cambodian embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Cambodian government has denied reports that China had reached a secret deal with Cambodia to let it place forces at the base, saying that hosting foreign forces would be against Cambodia’s constitution.

The base is southeast of the port city of Sihanoukville, centre of a Chinese-led casino boom and a Chinese-run Special Economic Zone.

Cambodia is one of China’s closest allies in Southeast Asia and has received billions of dollars of Chinese aid as well as political backing for authoritarian Prime Minister Hun Sen in the face of Western criticism.

Cambodia has been wary of superpower rivalry since being devastated by fighting between US and Chinese proxy forces in the 1970s that culminated in the Khmer Rouge genocide.

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: US fears Beijing link to razing of facility

BACKGROUNDER 

When did coronavirus breach US president’s bubble? Inside a big Trump mystery

Trump interacted with dozens of aides and hundreds of supporters throughout a series of widely attended events over the past week

Now his team is trying to figure out how widely the virus may have spread in his orbit


POLITICO Published: 6:56am, 3 Oct, 2020


US President Donald Trump is seen in silhouette against a US flag as he speaks during a rally in Minnesota in September. Photo: AFP

The first sign of trouble sent a wave of worry through US President Donald Trump’s team travelling on Air Force One: a beloved top White House aide, Hope Hicks, had fallen ill during a campaign trip to Minnesota.

After a fundraiser early Wednesday evening, Hicks stayed aboard the presidential aircraft as other Trump aides watched the airport rally that evening from the sidelines. She later isolated herself on the plane for the return trip to Washington.

By Thursday morning, Hicks had tested positive for Covid-19 – triggering a frenzy throughout the White House to handle a bombshell that would upend the final month of the 2020 campaign and reshape the president’s posture toward a virus that had already killed more than 208,000 Americans on his watch.



US President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump test positive for Covid-19

As the White House and campaign scrambled to chart a new plan for October with a hospitalised president, Trump’s aides and medical team were launching their highest-profile contact tracing exercise yet: dissecting the movements and interactions of the president, dozens of aides and perhaps hundreds of supporters throughout a series of widely attended events, from a Supreme Court nominee unveiling last Saturday to the first presidential debate in Ohio on Tuesday to a fundraiser in New Jersey on Thursday, hours after the president already knew about the threat lurking within his team.

By Friday afternoon, it remained far from clear whether Hicks or Trump himself or someone else entirely was the source of bringing the virus into the White House bubble.

The result of the sprawling effort carries high stakes for the president in the final stretch of a turbulent year. A detailed contact tracing effort could uncover more positive tests across Trump world, putting more staffers in quarantine with just over four weeks left until Election Day.

Yet a failure to successfully recreate the steps of Trump and those in his orbit could allow a constant drip of Covid-19 news in the coming weeks that leaves the administration looking ill-prepared – especially after it faced criticism for a lacklustre effort to fund and encourage robust contact tracing systems across the nation.

“This whole situation is tragic in that this was all preventable,” said former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen. “What makes Trump reckless is that he has access to the greatest, unlimited medical attention. Proper testing could have avoided all of this for him and others. Trump is now Covid-positive because of ignorance and arrogance.”

Even on Friday, once the world knew about the positive tests for the president, first lady and Hicks, the White House was still struggling to appear like it took the threat of the virus seriously. White House chief of staff Mark Meadows briefed reporters maskless – though most of the White House had been instructed to work from home.


“Why the f*** isn’t Meadows wearing a mask to brief?” one White House official asked.


“It’s just dangerous for everyone,” another White House official said. “They put people’s lives in danger. They’re all trying to get on the same message. Some people are scared. Some people are pissed off because they were put into this position.”

Some aides were tracing their steps back to the events of the prior weekend, when Trump unveiled his Supreme Court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, in the White House Rose Garden. Some guests interacted at gatherings both inside and outside the White House before and after the event.

World leaders wish Trump and Melania speedy recovery from Covid-19

A Friday announcement by Senator Mike Lee of his positive diagnosis led some attendees to wonder whether they may have been exposed there. Hundreds of largely unmasked guests attended the event, some of them seen hugging after the announcement.

The University of Notre Dame president, who announced his positive diagnosis on Friday, said he had been tested before the Rose Garden event and “told that it was safe to remove our masks”. (Health officials say the virus could take up to 14 days to lead to a positive test.) Numerous officials who attended Saturday have since tested negative.

Following the Rose Garden ceremony on Saturday, several top aides and close advisers attended a small celebration in the Diplomatic Room of the White House alongside Barrett and her family to celebrate her nomination. Barrett had been diagnosed with Covid-19 over the summer but has since recovered, according to a person familiar with the situation.

On Sunday, the president held a news conference and a private candlelight reception with Gold Star families on the State Floor.


While Trump held other events Monday, including an announcement to repackage an earlier message about his coronavirus testing strategy, attention has focused squarely on a stretch from Tuesday’s presidential debate – which Hicks also attended – to Wednesday’s events in Minnesota to Trump’s Bedminster trip on Thursday.



Ahead of the debate on Tuesday in Cleveland, the president prepared at the White House with personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. Aides and family members then travelled with Trump to Ohio to square off with Biden.

Speaking on ABC Friday morning, Christie said no one wore masks while in the room with the president as he got ready for the debate. Christie also said he tested negative on Friday.

Notably missing in Tuesday’s debate hall was Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel, who tested positive for the virus on Wednesday after a family member also tested positive. (She had been at home in Michigan last Saturday, the RNC said. A day earlier, last Friday, McDaniel and Republican congresswoman Elise Stefanik of New York had visited the Trump 2020 headquarters. according to a campaign staff member.

Later Tuesday night on the debate stage, the president said wearing a mask is “OK,” arguing he wears one “when needed”. But then he went on to mock the former vice-president for excessive mask wearing.


“I don’t wear masks like him. Every time you see him he’s got a mask,” Trump said of Biden.

The same attitude was reflected by most members of Trump’s own family, who took off their masks after walking into the debate hall. The first lady did wear a mask during the debate.

Asked about the atmosphere of mask-wearing in the White House, one White House official said: “Some people wear them because they think it’s important. And I think some are probably embarrassed to wear them because there are some who think it’s dumb and they’re pretty loud about that.”


A person close to the White House added that staff have been trying to follow Trump’s lead and his profound scepticism about the importance of mask-wearing. “It had less to do with weakness and more to do with reflecting the president’s behaviour,” the person said. “The president’s behaviour has a large impact on the staff.”


On Wednesday night, staffers started sensing that one of the closest people in Trump’s orbit was ill. The president travelled to Duluth, Minn. – for a fundraiser at a private home followed by a campaign rally – with a group of aides that included chief of staff Meadows and senior advisers Hicks, Stephen Miller and Derek Lyons.

Trump only spoke for about 45 minutes at the rally that night, an unusually short amount of time for the president’s freewheeling speeches.


When asked why the rally was brief, one aide scoffed and said it was still 47 minutes long. Still, reporters travelling with Trump that night were struck by the short length of his speech – often the president will speak without a prompter for over 90 minutes.

(From top) The US president’s family members Eric Trump, Ivanka Trump, US first lady Melania Trump, Tiffany Trump and Donald Trump Jr are seen ahead of the first presidential debate in Cleveland on Tuesday. Photo: AFP

On the flight back, Hicks displayed symptoms, according to a person familiar, and self-quarantined aboard Air Force One. She had travelled with the first family on Marine One earlier in the day. The next morning, a Covid-19 test came back positive.

News of Hicks’ diagnosis was closely held among a small group of aides at the White House. Press secretary Kayleigh McEnany held a briefing for reporters late Thursday morning at the White House, and has said she did not learn that Hicks tested positive for coronavirus until later that afternoon.


But soon after that news, the president was back aboard Marine One heading to another event. Some aides had been pulled from the trip as top White House officials grappled with the implications and sent some staffers home.

Only a handful of officials – including Tony Ornato, Brian Jack, John McEntee and Judd Deere – travelled with Trump to New Jersey, where the president gathered among dozens of donors outdoors at his Bedminster golf club.

That night, Trump said in a taped message to the Al Smith dinner that “the end of the pandemic is in sight”. THAT'S NOT TRUE AND IT'S NOT FUNNY


Hours later, as word of Hicks’ positive test results spread publicly, Trump went on Sean Hannity’s Fox News programme to discuss her situation and say he was awaiting his own test results.


“The first time I realised that something was up with him personally was the Hannity hit,” one White House official said. “He did sound a little different … He just sounded a little bit congested to me.”


Trump announced his own results in a tweet early Friday morning, just before 1am.


Anita Kumar and Gabby Orr contributed to this report. SCMP.COM 

This story is published in a content partnership with POLITICO. It was originally reported by Daniel Lippman, Nancy Cook and Meredith McGraw on 
politico.com on October 2, 2020

As atmospheric carbon rises, so do rivers, adding to flooding

by Kristin Strommer, University of Oregon

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

When it comes to climate change, relationships are everything. That's a key takeaway of a new UO study that examines the interaction between plants, atmospheric carbon dioxide and rising water levels in the Mississippi River.

Published recently in the Geological Society of America's journal GSA Today, the study compared historical atmospheric carbon data against observations of herbarium leaf specimens to quantify the relationship between rising carbon levels and increasingly catastrophic floods in the American Midwest.

Using data covering more than two centuries, researchers demonstrated that as carbon levels in the atmosphere have risen due to the burning of fossil fuels, the ability of plants to absorb water from the air has decreased. That means more rainfall makes its way into rivers and streams, adding to their potential for damaging floods.

Co-authored by UO Museum of Natural and Cultural History geologist Greg Retallack and earth sciences graduate student Gisele Conde, the study focused on Ginkgo biloba leaf specimens representing a time span of just over 260 years.

The team examined the leaves' stomata, tiny pores that deciduous plants use to take up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. In low-carbon environments, plants increase the density of stomata so they can take in enough carbon dioxide for photosynthesis, but they need relatively few stomata in carbon-rich environments.

"Variations in stomatal density, which we observed using microscopic imaging, reflect corresponding changes in atmospheric carbon over the 264-year span," said Retallack, director of the museum's Condon Fossil Collection and a professor of earth sciences.

Stomatal density also governs the degree of transpiration, the process by which plants absorb water and give off water vapor; the fewer the stomata, the lower the transpiration potential. In the leaf specimens under examination, the researchers observed an overall decline in stomatal density and transpiration potential over the 260-year timespan, with a 29 percent reduction from 1829 to 2015.

The authors note that the reduction has directly contributed to the devastating floods that increasingly plague the Midwest, since less transpiration means more water running off into streams and rivers, and in turn, greater flooding risk.

"The devastation of individual floods is still related to that year's weather, but the steady rise of carbon levels is driving the average level of the Mississippi River up by a stunning 2 centimeters per year," Retallack said.

The study also points to a need for revised planning efforts and insurance concepts in the region.

"Rising carbon levels aren't always considered in flood prediction and risk analyses," Retallack said. "We hope the study will help clarify the danger that climate change and attendant flooding pose to agricultural communities around the Mississippi River, and help inform new insurance and zoning policies there."


Explore further

The revolt of the plants: The arctic melts when plants stop breathing

More information: Gregory Retallack et al. Flooding Induced by Rising Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide, GSA Today (2020). DOI: 10.1130/GSATG427A.1

Provided by University of Oregon

Historic Amazon rainforest fires threaten climate and raise risk of new diseases

by Kerry William Bowman, The Conversation

The South American tapir is in steep decline due to habitat fragmentation from deforestation, agriculture and human habitation. Credit: Shutterstock

The fires in the Amazon region in 2019 were unprecedented in their destruction. Thousands of fires had burned more than 7,600 square kilometers by October that year. In 2020, things are no better and, in all likelihood, may be worse.


According to the Global Fire Emissions Database project run by NASA, fires in the Amazon in 2020 surpassed those of 2019. In fact, 2020's fires have been the worst since at least 2012, when the satellite was first operated. The number of fires burning the Brazilian Amazon increased 28 percent in July 2020 over the previous year, and the fires in the first week of September are double those in 2019, according to INPE, Brazil's national research space agency.

Despite the surge in fires, international attention has waned in 2020, likely due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet the degradation of the Amazon rainforest has profound consequences from climate change to global health.

Global climate implications

The Amazon rainforest covers approximately eight million square kilometers—an area larger than Australia—and is home to an astounding amount of biodiversity.

It helps balance the global carbon budget by absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and plays a key role in the global water cycle, stabilizing global climate and rainfall. A nine nation network of Indigenous territories and natural areas have protected a massive amount of biodiversity and primary forest.

Yet these lands are under siege. As of 2019, an estimated 17 percent of the Amazon's forest cover has been clear-cut or burned since the 1970s, when regular measurements began and the Amazon was closer to intact.


As the rainforest bleeds biomass through deforestation, it loses its ability to capture carbon from the atmosphere and releases carbon through combustion. If the annual fires burning the Amazon are not curtailed, one of the world's largest carbon sinks will progressively devolve into a carbon faucet, releasing more carbon dioxide than it sequesters.

While the global impacts are dire, the local impacts of these fires are also significant. Persistent poor air quality, which extends far into Brazil and other regions of South America, including in metropolitan centers like São Paulo, can lead to health problems.

As roads are built and forests are cleared for timber production and agriculture, a checkerboard of tropical forest edges is created. These destructive activities can lead to rapid extinctions and a severe loss of species richness anywhere that human encroachment occurs.

Many researchers predict that deforestation is propelling the Amazon towards a tipping point, beyond which it will gradually transform into a semi-arid savanna. If the deforestation of the rainforest continues past a threshold of 20-25 percent total deforestation, multiple positive feedback loops will spark the desertification of the Amazon Basin.

Global health implications

Zoonotic diseases, like SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, are on the rise. Understanding the root causes of these spillover events that move viruses from animals to humans gives us insight into how to prevent future zoonotic outbreaks. The degradation and fragmentation of tropical rainforests such as the Amazon may be a key factor in this process.

The checkerboard of forest edges increases the potential points of contact between humans and wildlife, which in turn increases the likelihood of viral transmission and the emergence of novel human diseases. Intact forests and high levels of biodiversity, on the other hand, can provide a "dilution effect" associated with a lower prevalence and spread of pathogens.

The present pandemic may well have had an environmental genesis. Maintaining the Amazon's current high level of biodiversity is vital, both for the health of the global ecosystem and because, otherwise, the Amazon could become a future hotspot of emerging diseases. When we protect the global ecosystem, we also protect ourselves from emerging zoonotic diseases.

Interventions are complex, but the protection of Indigenous territories, the restoration of already degraded lands and, most importantly, continued international awareness of political dynamics and consumer choices, all offer us ways to avert oncoming tragedy. If we do not take a longer view of this pandemic and look upstream for drivers and causes, pandemics will continue to emerge.


Explore further Fires 'poisoning air' in Amazon: study

Provided by The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Fires spike in Brazil's Amazon, scientists say

by Louis Genot

A member of an Indigenous group fights a forest fire in Brazil, which has seen an increase in wildfires over last year

The number of forest fires in Brazil's Amazon increased sharply in September, figures released Thursday show, fueling growing criticism of President Jair Bolsonaro's environmental policies.


The National Institute of Space Research (INPE) said satellite imagery showed an increase of 61 percent in the number of fires in September, compared to the same period last year.

Satellites used by the institute detected 32,017 outbreaks last month in the Amazon, compared to 19,925 in the same month in 2019.

In the first nine months of the year, the total number of fires increased by 14 percent over the same period in 2019, the INPE said.

Despite the data from INPE, a world-renowned public body, Bolsonaro has continued to denounce a campaign of "disinformation" about the Pantanal and the Amazon.

On Wednesday, Bolsonaro—an ally of US President Donald Trump—lashed out at US Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden for "disastrous and unnecessary" comments on destruction of the rainforest.

Biden said during the first presidential debate that if elected in November, he would raise $20 billion to help Brazil to "stop tearing down" the Amazon, threatening "significant economic consequences" if it did not.

Bolsonaro backlash

Smoke rises from an illegally lit fire in the Amazon rainforest south of Novo Progresso in Brazil's Para State, in August 2020

Later, in a video address to a UN biodiversity summit, Bolsonaro said Brazil was "firm in its commitment to sustainable development and preserving our environmental wealth."

He accused "certain non-governmental organizations" of perpetrating "environmental crimes" to stain the country's image.

Most of the Amazon fires consist of agricultural burning on illegally deforested areas, even though the government banned all burning for four months from July.

Further south, in the Pantanal—the world's largest wetlands—the number of fires have almost tripled to 8,106, making September 2020 the worst month since the INPE began compiling statistics on the fires in 1998.

"Brazil is in flames. From the Amazon to the Pantanal, the environmental heritage of all Brazilians is being reduced to ashes," Christiane Mazzetti of Greenpeace in a statement.

"The is a consequence of the policy of the Bolsonaro government, which despite the predictions of drought in the Pantanal, has not used the necessary means of fire protection," she said.


The situation in the Pantanal, straddling Brazil, Paraguay and Bolivia, has been exacerbated by the worst drought in half a century.

The fires have ravaged 23 percent of the Brazilian part of the Pantanal, acording to data collected by scientists at the Laboratory for the Application of Environmental Satellites (LASA).

An aerial view of a deforested area close to Sinop, in Brazil's Mato Grosso State in August 2020

Growing investor pressure

The wildfires that devastated the rainforest last year triggered an international outcry, forcing Bolsonaro onto the defensive. He ultimately deployed the army to the Amazon to fight the fires.

So far this year, despite an increase in fires, the deforestation rate is down by about five percent.

But Brazil is coming under increasing pressure from allies, trading partners, international investors and powerful voices in the business world over the scale of the deforestation.

In June, 29 global investment firms managing nearly $4 trillion in assets sent an open letter to Bolsonaro, urging him to change policies blamed for accelerating the destruction of the rainforest.

Environmental destruction by Brazilian agribusiness firms is also threatening a long-sought trade deal between the European Union and the Mercosur bloc, of which Brazil is a member.


Explore further Fires triple in Brazil's Pantanal wetlands in 2020