CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M

Gautam Adani: Billionaire Indian tycoon facing US bribery charges

AFP
November 21, 2024

Gautam Adani has been charged by US prosecutors with paying more than $250 million in bribes to Indian officials for lucrative solar energy supply contracts - Copyright AFP Sam PANTHAKY

Billionaire Indian industrialist Gautam Adani, whose business empire has been rocked by US bribery charges against him, is one of the corporate world’s great survivors.

The tycoon — a close ally of Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi — oversees a vast conglomerate encompassing coal, airports, cement and media operations.

The US court charges that he paid hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes sent his companies’ shares plunging. But Adani has seen off big threats before.

On New Year’s Day in 1998, Adani and an associate were reportedly kidnapped by gunmen demanding a $1.5 million ransom, before being later released at an unknown location.

A decade later, he was dining at Mumbai’s Taj Mahal Palace hotel when it was besieged by militants, who killed 160 people in one of India’s worst terror attacks.

Trapped with hundreds of others, Adani reportedly hid in the basement all night before he was rescued by security personnel early the next morning.

“I saw death at a distance of just 15 feet,” he said of the experience after his private aircraft landed in his hometown Ahmedabad later that day.

Adani, 62, differs from his peers among India’s mega-rich, many of whom are known for throwing lavish birthday and wedding celebrations that are later splashed across newspaper gossip pages.

A self-described introvert, he keeps a low profile and rarely speaks to the media, often sending lieutenants to front corporate events.

“I’m not a social person that wants to go to parties,” he told the Financial Times in a 2013 interview.

– ‘Stop Adani’ –


Gautam Adani, whose empire has been rocked by panic-selling and allegations of fraud, is one of the business world’s great survivors – Copyright AFP INDRANIL MUKHERJEE

Adani was born in Ahmedabad, Gujarat state, to a middle-class family but dropped out of school at 16 and moved to financial capital Mumbai to find work in the lucrative gems trade.

After a short stint in his brother’s plastics business, he launched the flagship family conglomerate that bears his name in 1988 by branching out into the export trade.

His big break came seven years later with a contract to build and operate a commercial shipping port in Gujarat.

It grew to become India’s largest at a time when most ports were government-owned — the legacy of a sclerotic economic planning system that impeded growth for decades and was in the process of being dismantled.

Adani in 2009 expanded into coal, a lucrative sector for a country still almost totally dependent on fossil fuels to meet its energy needs, but a decision that brought greater international scrutiny as he rose rapidly up India’s rich list.

His purchase the following year of an untapped coal basin sparked years of “Stop Adani” protests in Australia after dismay at the project’s monumental environmental impact.

Similar controversies plagued his coal projects in central India, where forests home to tribal communities were cut down for mining operations.

– ‘Extraordinary growth’ –

Adani is considered to be close to Prime Minister Modi, a fellow Gujarat native, and offered the leader the use of a private company jet during the 2014 election campaign that swept him to power.

The tycoon has invested in the government’s strategic priorities, in recent years inaugurating a green energy business with ambitious targets.

In 2022, he completed a hostile takeover of broadcaster NDTV, a television news service considered one of the few media outlets willing to outwardly criticise Modi.

Adani batted away press freedom fears, but told the Financial Times that journalists should have the “courage” to say “when the government is doing the right thing every day”.

Last year a bombshell report from US investment firm Hindenburg Research claimed the conglomerate had engaged in a “brazen stock manipulation and accounting fraud scheme over the course of decades”.

Hindenburg said a pattern of “government leniency towards the group” stretching back decades had left investors, journalists, citizens and politicians unwilling to challenge its conduct “for fear of reprisal”.

Adani Group denied wrongdoing and characterised the report as a “calculated attack on India” but lost $150 billion in market capitalisation in the weeks after the report’s release.

Its founder saw his own net worth plunge by $60 billion over the same period, and he is now ranked by Forbes as the 25th-richest person globally.

US prosecutors on Wednesday charged the tycoon and two other board members with paying hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes and hiding the payments from investors.

The indictment accuses Adani Group’s leadership of bribing Indian government officials to secure lucrative government contracts.

The conglomerate and its founder have yet to respond to the charges.

How Indian billionaire Gautam Adani’s alleged bribery scheme took off and unraveled

Indian billionaire Gautam Adani speaks during an inauguration ceremony after the Adani Group completed the purchase of Haifa Port in Israel on Jan. 31, 2023.(REUTERS/File Photo)

https://arab.news/pjuk8
Updated 50 sec ago
Reuters
November 22, 20240

Gautam Adani allegedly tried to bribe local officials in India to persuade them to buy electricity produced by his renewable energy company Adani Green Energy
The allegations caught the attention of US watchdog agencies as Adani’s companies were raising funds from US-based investors in several transactions starting in 2021


NEW YORK: In June of 2020, a renewable energy company owned by Indian billionaire Gautam Adani won what it called the single largest solar development bid ever awarded: an agreement to supply 8 gigawatts of electricity to a state-owned power company.

But there was a problem. Local power companies did not want to pay the prices the state company was offering, jeopardizing the deal, according to US authorities. To save the deal, Adani allegedly decided to bribe local officials to persuade them to buy the electricity.

That allegation is at the heart of US criminal and civil charges unsealed on Wednesday against Adani, who is not currently in US custody and is believed to be in India. His company, Adani Group, said the charges were “baseless” and that it would seek “all possible legal recourse.”

The alleged hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes promised to local Indian officials caught the attention of the US Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission as Adani’s companies were raising funds from US-based investors in several transactions starting in 2021.

This account of how the alleged scheme unfolded is drawn from federal prosecutors’ 54-page criminal indictment of Adani and seven of his associates and two parallel civil SEC complaints, which extensively cite electronic messages between the scheme’s alleged participants.

In early 2020, the Solar Energy Corporation of India awarded Adani Green Energy and another company, Azure Power Global, contracts for a 12-gigawatt solar energy project, expected to yield billions of dollars in revenue for both companies, according to the indictment.

It was a major step forward for Adani Green Energy, run by Adani’s nephew, Sagar Adani. Up until that point, the company had only earned roughly $50 million in its history and had yet to turn a profit, according to the SEC complaint.

The logo of the Adani Group is seen on the facade of its Corporate House on the outskirts of Ahmedabad, India, on November 21, 2024. (REUTERS)

But the initiative soon hit roadblocks. Local state electricity distributors were reluctant to commit to buying the new solar power, expecting prices to fall in the future, according to an April 7, 2021 report by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a think tank.

Sagar Adani and the Azure CEO at the time discussed the delays and hinted at bribes on the encrypted messaging application WhatsApp, according to the SEC.

When the Azure CEO wrote on Nov. 24, 2020, that the local power companies “are being motivated,” Sagar Adani allegedly replied, “Yup ... but the optics are very difficult to cover. In February 2021, Sagar Adani allegedly wrote to the CEO, “Just so you know, we have doubled the incentives to push for these acceptances.”

The SEC did not name the Azure CEO as a defendant, but Azure’s securities filings show the CEO at the time was Ranjit Gupta.

Gupta was charged by the Justice Department with conspiracy to violate an anti-bribery law. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Azure said on Thursday it was cooperating with the US investigations, and that the individuals involved with the accusations had left the company more than a year ago.

‘Sudden good fortune’

In August of 2021, Gautam Adani had the first of several meetings with an official in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, to whom he allegedly ultimately promised $228 million in bribes in exchange for agreeing to have the state buy the power, according to the Justice Department’s indictment.

By December, Andhra Pradesh had agreed to buy the power, and other states with smaller contracts soon followed. Other states’ officials were promised bribes as well, US authorities said.

During a Dec. 6, 2021 meeting at a coffee shop, Azure executives allegedly discussed “rumors that the Adanis had somehow facilitated signing” of the deals, according to the SEC.

Gautam Adani said on Dec. 14, 2021, the company was on track “to become the world’s largest renewables player by 2030.”

“The sudden good fortune for Azure and Adani Green prompted speculation in the marketplace about the contract awards,” the SEC wrote in its complaint.

Letter from the SEC

Before long, the SEC began to probe. The agency sent a “general inquiry” letter to Azure — which at the time traded on the New York Stock Exchange — on March 17, 2022, asking about its recent contracts and if foreign officials had sought anything of value, according to the Justice Department indictment.
According to the Department of Justice, Gautam Adani told representatives of Azure during a meeting in his Ahmedabad, India office the next month that he expected to be reimbursed more than $80 million for the bribes he had paid officials that ultimately benefited Azure’s contracts.

Some Azure representatives and a leading investor in the company decided to pay Adani back by allowing his company to take over a potentially profitable project. The representatives and investor allegedly agreed to tell Azure’s board of directors that Adani had requested bribe money, but hid their role in the scheme, prosecutors said.

All the while, Adani’s companies were raising billions of dollars in loans and bonds through international banks, including from US investors. In four separate fundraising transactions between 2021 and 2024, the companies sent investors documents indicating that they had not paid bribes — statements prosecutors say are false and constitute fraud.

FBI search

During a visit to the United States on March 17, 2023, FBI agents seized Sagar Adani’s electronic devices. The agents handed him a search warrant from a judge indicating that the US government was investigating potential violations of fraud statutes and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

According to prosecutors, Gautam Adani emailed himself photographs of each page of the search warrant on March 18, 2023.

His companies nonetheless went through with a $1.36 billion syndicated loan agreement on Dec. 5, 2023, and another sale of secured notes in March 2024, and once again furnished investors with misleading information about their anti-bribery practices, according to prosecutors.

On Oct. 24, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn secured a secret grand jury indictment against Gautam Adani, Sagar Adani, Gupta, and five others allegedly involved in the scheme.
The indictment was unsealed on Nov. 20, prompting a $27 billion plunge in Adani Group companies’ market value. Adani Green Energy promptly canceled a scheduled $600 million bond sale.

UK sanctions Angola’s Isabel dos Santos in graft crackdown


By AFP
November 21, 2024

Isabel Dos Santos is one of three people dubbed 'infamous kleptocrats' by the UK government - Copyright AFP/File Patrick T. Fallon

The UK government on Thursday announced sanctions on Angola’s Isabel dos Santos, the billionaire businesswoman and daughter of the country’s former president, as part of a new anti-corruption drive.

It also sanctioned Dmytro Firtash, a Ukrainian tycoon with links to the Kremlin, and Aivars Lembergs, one of Latvia’s richest people, who is accused of abusing his political position to commit bribery and money laundering, the foreign ministry said.

They are all subject to travel bans and asset freezes, it added in a statement, calling them “three infamous kleptocrats” and accusing them of “stealing their countries’ wealth for personal gain”.

Dos Santos, the ministry said, had “systematically abused her positions at state-run companies to embezzle at least £350 million ($443 million), depriving Angola of resources and funding for much-needed development”.

Considered Africa’s richest woman, she is currently wanted by Angolan authorities investigating alleged illegalities in the management of national oil company Sonangol between 2016 and 2017.

Her father, Jose Eduardo dos Santos, who died in 2022, ruled energy-rich Angola for 38 years until 2017.

She was sanctioned by the United States in 2021 for “involvement in significant corruption” and is barred from entering the United States.

Responding to the UK decision Thursday, dos Santos said that it was “incorrect and unjustified” and that she “intends to appeal”.

“I hope that the United Kingdom will give me the opportunity to present my evidence and prove these lies fabricated against me by the Angolan regime,” she said in a statement released in Portuguese.

“No court has found me guilty of corruption or bribery,” she added. “We are facing another step in Angola’s politically motivated campaign of persecution against me and my family.”

– ‘Ill-gotten gains’ –

Firtash is a one-time ally of ousted pro-Russian Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych.

He is currently in Austria fighting extradition to the United States, where he is wanted on bribery and racketeering charges.

In June 2021, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a decree imposing sanctions on Firtash, including the freezing of his assets and withdrawal of licences from his companies, after accusing him of selling titanium products to Russian military companies.

“(Firtash) extracted hundreds of millions of pounds from Ukraine through corruption and his control of gas distribution and has hidden tens of millions of pounds of ill-gotten gains in the UK property market alone,” the UK government statement added.

Sanctions would also be imposed on his wife, Lada Firtash, and UK-based Denis Gorbunenko, a UK-based financial “fixer”.

Lembergs, a former mayor, is accused of bribery and money laundering. His daughter, Liga Lemberga, is also sanctioned.

In 2021, a Riga court found him guilty of 19 charges including extorting bribes, forging documents, money laundering and improper use of office.

The measures are the latest under 2021 anti-corruption sanctions legislation brought in by the previous Conservative administration.

“These unscrupulous individuals selfishly deprive their fellow citizens of much-needed funding for education, healthcare and infrastructure — for their own enrichment,” said Foreign Secretary David Lammy, a member of the UK’s new Labour government elected in July.

 ”I committed to taking on kleptocrats and the dirty money that empowers them when I became Foreign Secretary… The tide is turning. The golden age of money laundering is over,” he said.

The Conservative government of Boris Johnson announced the first sanctions under its new global anti-corruption regime in 2021.

Britain had previously followed the European Union’s sanctions regime but since leaving the bloc in January 2020 struck out alone with its own policy.

The global anti-corruption sanctions were designed to prevent Britain from being a haven for illicit funds and money laundering.

Suriname’s Debt Crisis Shows Us How Global Capitalism Works

With rich Amazon forests and fewer than a million people, Suriname is one of the few countries that absorbs more carbon than it produces. But the former Dutch colony is now being forced to implement destructive austerity by global financial interests.

By Sharda Ganga, Jerome Phelps 

November 18, 2024

Source: Jacobin


A meeting of civil society group, Projekta Suriname. Image Credit: Projekta Suriname



Suriname is a former Dutch colony in South America, best known for the pristine Amazon forests that cover 93 percent of the country and make it one of only three countries that absorb more carbon emissions than they produce. It has recently become more interesting to the rest of the world for two main reasons: the fact that it is experiencing one of the world’s worst debt crises, and the discovery of offshore oil and gas in immense quantities.

The people of Suriname find themselves living in a dual reality. In the present, there is a brutal austerity program imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), wreaking the usual havoc on people’s lives. At the same time, politicians assure them that the country has a bright future ahead in which abundant oil revenues will solve all problems and benefit everyone.

Suriname is an important case study in the way financialized neocolonialism works in the twenty-first century. A feminist perspective on debt can supply us with invaluable tools for thinking about the destructive impact of debt and finding ways to combat it.
Debt and Neocolonialism

Suriname’s fertile land and navigable rivers have for centuries been profitable for powerful foreigners. Dutch settlers took over coffee, sugar, and cotton plantations from the British in 1667 and established what was arguably the most brutal slave economy in the region. However, the Dutch colonizers did not stray very far into the forested interior, where indigenous people and Maroon communities of people who escaped slavery defended their autonomy.

Yet even before the country gained its independence from the Netherlands, US commercial interests were transforming the landscape. Vast tracts of forest were flooded, forcing the Maroon Saamaka community from its lands in order to build the Afobaka Dam, which would generate hydroelectric power for the bauxite factory of the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa).

When Suriname was no longer sufficiently profitable to Alcoa, the company packed up and left, having managed to sell the dam back to Suriname. Thanks to unfair deals that doubled electricity prices and left Suriname exposed to swings in commodity markets, the country even owed Alcoa more than $100 million for electricity that was produced using its own natural resources.

This debt reached crisis proportions in the 2010s with the spending spree of the Dési Bouterse administration. Private lenders and international financial institutions queued up to make loans, often at high interest, amid the deep crash of global commodity prices. Although Bouterse is currently on the run from a twenty-year sentence for murdering political opponents, the Surinamese people still remain liable for the debts and at the mercy of anyone willing to lend money.

Having said no to the conditions set by the IMF in 2018, the government was forced to borrow from a variety of capital market instruments and multilateral creditors such as the Inter-American Development Bank and the Chinese state, again at high interest rates. After the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Suriname defaulted in November 2020.

States are not able to declare bankruptcy in the way that individuals or companies can. Suriname is considered too wealthy to access the Common Framework, the limited and inadequate process for debt relief and restructuring set up by the G20 in the wake of the pandemic. The result, for Suriname and countries across the Global South, is that precious resources needed for health and education drain away to pay the interest on loans.

When countries default, they have to negotiate with their creditors to reduce their debts. Private creditors receive 46 percent of external debt payments from the Global South and own 38 percent of Suriname’s debts. These actors are not used to taking losses when their risky loans go wrong. Private creditors held out in debt-restructuring negotiations with Suriname for an amazingly sweet deal that amounted to canceling just 2 percent of the debt owed. When interest is taken into account, Debt Justice estimates that bondholders will make profits of 80 percent.

Even worse, the bondholders have laid claim to Suriname’s future oil revenues through a value-recovery instrument. If all goes according to plan, this will line their pockets with a staggering windfall of 30 percent of future oil revenues, up to a total of £689 million. Meanwhile, Suriname will continue to spend 27 percent of its government revenues on external debt payments over the next five years.

In order to safeguard this windfall, the agreement with the bondholders is dependent on Suriname changing the legislation of its sovereign wealth fund by December 2024. Fifty years after Suriname’s official independence from the Netherlands, foreign bodies are once again dictating how Suriname uses its resources and what legislation it should pass. This is the new form of colonialism, using debt to gain access to resources.
Debt-Fueled Austerity

The result, for the people of Suriname, is austerity. The IMF demanded savage cuts, based on a flawed methodology that prioritizes capital flows over human rights and the sustainability of life.

These cuts have had a deep impact on people’s lives, plunging the country into political, economic, and social chaos, with strikes and uprisings. Health care has collapsed, medicines are scarce, and operating rooms are empty for lack of materials and qualified personnel. Essential workers such as teachers and health care workers have left the country in droves, poached by institutions in the Netherlands, the former colonizer.

These austerity policies have had a particularly harsh impact on Surinamese women and LGBTQ people, who must pick up the burden of care as the state withdraws. Such feminized care work, disavowed and unpaid, has always been an essential precondition for capitalist profits, even though it is ignored in economic models or deemed “unproductive” in contrast with “productive” paid labor. Debt crises bring this to the fore, as carers have to find money to pay for privatized health services, the skyrocketing prices of essentials, or taxis for children to attend school after school buses and wider networks of public transport have been cut.

Susan Doorson of Women’s Way Foundation highlights the situation of LGBTQ women who face the prospect of going into debt to pay for mental and sexual health services: “How many people in Suriname die because they don’t have access to services? They have to think, am I going to feed the family today or am I going to get this checked out?”

Historic neglect of rural indigenous areas means that health care services are concentrated in the capital, Paramaribo, which is a fifteen-hour boat journey from some communities. According to Audrey Christiaan, ambassador of indigenous cultural group Juku Jume Maro, indigenous communities that “don’t have the luxury of public transport” because of spending cuts and lose access to vital services. In the event of a medical emergency, they face the dramatic expense of hiring a plane to bring people for treatment, which in some cases can be too late.

Austerity forces carers to work longer hours, in more precarious conditions, for lower salaries. Women are disproportionately employed in the public services that face redundancies due to IMF demands to balance the books. The informal sector jobs in which women and LGBTQ people often work also shrink as people cut back on discretionary spending. Inflation in Suriname has meant an 11 percent reduction in purchasing power over the space of a year.

As a result, carers are less able than ever to bear the sudden costs that fall upon them and have to go into debt themselves, as the cycle of debt moves from the state to the household level. At the same time, they have less and less time and resources to provide the unpaid care that service cuts increasingly load onto them, and that society depends on.

A Global Phenomenon

This scenario is not confined to countries like Suriname. We have also seen it play out for communities in the Global North, especially since the 2008 crash, as the governments of rich countries inflict austerity policies with similar narratives to justify them. The crisis of care is now a global phenomenon. As Nancy Fraser has argued, by pushing the unpaid carers on which it depends to the edge of survival while destroying the natural environment it pillages for free resources, global financial capitalism is increasingly cannibalizing the conditions of its own profiteering.

Debt-driven austerity is destabilizing countries across the world. In Suriname, unprecedented protests filled the main square of Paramaribo. But they had limited impact: the Surinamese government has little power in an unfair global system, and it has continued to implement the diktats of creditors and the IMF, despite their deep domestic unpopularity.

As Lucí Cavallero and Verónica Gago have explained, drawing on the experiences of the Ni Una Menos feminist movement in Argentina, debt-driven exploitation enforces obedience at the same time as it generates profits. In contrast to the expense of maintaining a colonial army, debt generates profits even as it controls and coerces.

The same tool that drains resources from communities simultaneously works to make that process of extraction invisible, individual, and shameful, in stark contrast to the collective exploitation of workers on the factory floor. Whereas unionized workers have strength in numbers for their collective struggle against identifiable exploitative employers, the individual stands alone with their debts before the invisible ranks of banks and creditors, while society tells them that it is their own fault.

States also stand alone against their creditors and the IMF, fearing the judgments of credit-rating agencies and stigmatized by a moralizing narrative that debts are the result of irresponsible borrowing, wastefulness, and corruption. When Burkina Faso’s president Thomas Sankara attempted to organize African states to stand in solidarity against neocolonial debt, he was swiftly deposed in a coup and murdered, allegedly with the support of the French state.

A Feminist Issue

We need a feminist perspective to understand and resist the new wave of debt-based expropriation. Feminism has always worked to make the private sphere politically visible and to build forms of collective solidarity against individualized stigma and exploitation. Financialized capitalism is enveloped in mystification: its workings seem opaque even to specialists, and incomprehensible to the people at the sharp end. Movements like Ni Una Menos have focused on demystifying this process, taking debt “out of the closet” and “challenging its power to shame,” in Cavallero and Gago’s powerful words.

We need an internationalist feminism of the 99 percent that can make connections between the impact of the debt and care crises on communities, women, and LGBTQ people in the Global South and North alike. The overlapping crises we face — debt, climate, and care — can only be addressed through international coordination by governments held accountable to and by their people.

Protests against austerity and irresponsible borrowing in the Global South must be combined with demands for solidarity and justice in the Global North. Examples include new laws in the UK and New York that would prevent private creditors from using the courts to demand payment in full from countries in default.

2025 will be a jubilee year, part of a long tradition of periodic debt amnesties that led to large-scale debt cancelation following the global Jubilee 2000 campaign. Twenty-five years on, we need internationalist feminist solidarity to drive the wave of civil society mobilizations that are demanding debt cancellation and a just international debt system.


Sharda Ganga  is the director of Projekta Suriname, a civil society organization focusing on the interlinkage between human rights, democracy, and governance, with a specific focus on women's rights and gender equality. She is also a playwright and newspaper columnist.

Woman-owned cafe in Indonesia’s Sharia stronghold shakes stigma


By AFP
November 17, 2024

Morning Mama owner Qurrata Ayuni (R) says her Banda Aceh cafe is the only one run by a woman in the capital of Indonesia's most conservative province 

- Copyright AFP Zikri Maulana

Jack MOORE

In what claims to be the only woman-run cafe in the capital of Indonesia’s most conservative province, owner Qurrata Ayuni says she and her baristas provide an alternative to rowdy, smoke-filled male haunts.

The 28-year-old opened Morning Mama last year to create a space that caters to women in Banda Aceh, known as the city of 1,001 coffee shops.

“I thought why not open a place that is comfortable for women?” she said.

While the province has long been known as the site of the world’s deadliest tsunami and a decades-long separatist insurgency, Aceh’s draw for visitors is often the coffee.

The traditional “sanger” latte, mixed with condensed milk, is a popular staple.

Aceh’s strong connection to coffee started hundreds of years ago with Dutch colonial rulers. Now, its farmers cultivate world-renowned beans in lush highlands.

Aceh still catches attention for its ultraconservative values, including by-laws that require Muslim women to wear hijabs.

While women are not banned from working in the only region in Muslim-majority Indonesia to impose Islamic law, running a coffee shop is seen as a man’s job.

“It’s extremely difficult for women in Aceh to pursue education or a career, facing not only legal restrictions but also social bullying,” said Andreas Harsono of Human Rights Watch.

Despite widespread criticism, public whipping remains a common punishment for a range of offences in the province, including gambling, alcohol consumption and relations outside marriage.

Independent career paths are mostly viewed as out of reach for Aceh’s young women, but Qurrata was undeterred.



– ‘Time for change’ –



Qurrata, who owns her cafe without a business partner, saw a demand for a space for women to work or meet friends.

She and her team of baristas pour fresh coffee to mostly hijab-wearing customers, with children’s books and menstruation pads on sale nearby.

“There’s no cigarette smoke, it’s not noisy, it’s really cosy,” she said, adding that some men also have coffees at her shop.

“It’s a statement that women can own businesses, make decisions and lead,” she said.

“Now is the time for change.”

The entrepreneur says women are stepping up, pointing to at least 1,000 applying for a barista job.

“I want to offer them the chance to change the course of their lives,” she said.

Caca, a 23-year-old barista, said it was a “really cool job” rare in Aceh.

The cafe’s regulars hail Morning Mama as a spot where women can be themselves.

“I feel more connection if I ask something with a woman barista,” said 21-year-old student Meulu Alina. “I don’t feel any nervousness. It’s more like talking with your sister.”



– Helping others –



Before starting her business, Qurrata overcame the loss of her parents at the age of eight in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which killed more than 200,000 people.

Her village near Banda Aceh was completely destroyed, but she survived and was raised by her aunt and uncle.

Qurrata said she wants to channel her grief into helping other women.

“It’s a platform to help others find their own resilience, much like I did,” she said.

Photography jobs allowed her to build savings and confidence, taking a leap into business after her uncle encouraged her and helped financially.

Other women were still “afraid to start”, she said, for fear men will say bad things.

“People here tend to believe that women should stay at home,” she said.

But “the older generation understands that times have changed.”

Owner of Aceh’s popular Solong coffee shop, Haji Nawawi, said he would not employ women but locals had accepted them making coffee elsewhere, calling it “normal” as values “from outside” Aceh had entered the province.

Qurrata employs five women alongside two men.

Revenue fluctuates, but Qurrata says her ultimate aim is to inspire other women.

“Women are capable of so much more than we’re often given credit for. We can be leaders, creators, and innovators,” she said.

“So don’t just sit back. Don’t be afraid.”

Vote For The Candidates Endorsed By The Peoples’ Socialist Caucus of The Republican Party

By Phil Wilson

November 15, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.




The Democrats and those who inhabit the DNC orbit have been in a rush to skip all five stages of grief.

My Email inbox has more pieces titled, “resist,” “fight back,” “organize” than at any time since Tim Berners-Lee invented the Internet. Those five stages of grief, elucidated by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. The patient has died. We peeled off the oozing bandages on November 5th and we all witnessed the worms, maggots and gangrene. We stared at the shriveled carcass and breathed in the odor of death. And yet I am asked to donate to the DNC, not for a coffin, but for the naked principle of Three Stooges style absurdity – James Carville wants money that I don’t have to fund something that doesn’t exist.

Do these DNC functionaries really have the temerity to beg me for cash – after I have drained my life savings for Bob Casey, Colin Allred, and Jon Tester? What did those donations get me? That’s obviously a rhetorical question – but to be transparent, I didn’t give a dime to any of these people running on the “Titanic Ticket.” But some of you did. The “Iceberg Collision Party” – the one owned by big tech, big pharma, big bombs, and Wall Street – died like a beached jelly fish due, perhaps, to my unwillingness to part with the price of a Cumberland Farms cup of coffee in a plastic cup. Nancy Pelosi emailed me again – “with your donation we can go back into the past and time-travel our way to defeat Trump last week.”

I wasted roughly six months of my sad, elderly life clicking the delete button on every Email from the DNC, the Congressional Black Caucus, and a million surrogate entities that shilled for the Biden/Harris/Walz/Weimar ticket.

The emails I get (by the thousands) proposing that we build a better, more progressive Democratic Party should not be seen as merely the garden-variety denial of Kubler-Ross – rather, we should see such expansiveness as the mirror reflection of MAGA. Both capitalist parties have become psychotic, with members drifting into a perpetually hallucinating state of paranoid fantasy. “Stop the steal” or resurrect the Democratic Party – both of these unhinged notions beg for a national shot of Thorazine.

The Democratic Party is dead – as in decomposing flesh and rigor mortis. Hold a stethoscope to the blue heart. You will hear a living Elvis singing “Jailhouse Rock” before you detect a Democratic Party pulse. If you laid the Five Hundred Meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (the world’s largest radio telescope) on the chest of that decomposing donkey, the silence would make a Buster Keaton Film seem like a primal scream. One can easily argue that the Democratic Party died decades ago, and only a collective and uniquely American variety of mass psychosis has held reality at bay.

The first act of the aspiring progressive movement has to be a funeral. The Democratic Party needs to be put in a cheap pinewood coffin (after driving a wooden stake through its heart as an act of caution), and then interred. Perhaps Liz Cheney, Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi can be made to deliver the eulogies. Once that coffin is lowered deep in a suitable crevice (I am fond of the San Andreas Fault) then those of us concerned about corporate crimes, environmental collapse and human rights need to get the fuck out of the earth quake zone, fast! But where do we go?

Is there a home somewhere for people who want to transform the fetid wasteland that is the USA into something at least marginally better? Any Marxist will tell you that you go to the working class, the proletariat, the people who work three jobs to pay rent and get no vacation or sick time, and pay through the nose for private medical insurance with more holes than swiss cheese. Those working people – the ones who we haven’t seen in the Democratic base since Ronald Reagan went brain-dead and the gods of capital resurrected him as Bill Clinton – hold the key to a renewed left wing. There is no other way.

And where will you find working people in vast numbers? Uh, that may seem like a trick question, but it really isn’t. The working class is being held in custody by the Republican Party. Why are they there? you ask. Because they have been offered something to distract themselves from the empty, meaningless, tedious anomie of US life – racism, cruelty and political theatrics. Working people would rather have affordable housing, free dental care, job security, a reduced work week, sick leave, child care, a living wage and paid vacation – but no one is offering them that. When one party offers racism and the other offers nothing at all it is an easy choice. Something is always better than nothing.

And another thing that is absolutely critical – Trump told the truth on the most important issue there is – he correctly opined that life in the US sucks. He may have put that truth in fascist terms, blaming suffering on dark skinned foreigners and trans people, but the Democrats never acknowledge the basic truth. Life in the US, for many working people, teeters on the edge of a self-inflicted gunshot to the skull. On the deepest level, Trump is more honest than most all Democrats.

Some of us think of racism as a terminal, irredeemable affliction. I have an anecdote to address that idea:

In the early nineties, I worked in a group home for teens in Hayward, California. One day I did an intake on a kid I will call Tom. Tom, a white kid, began by telling me his most essential value: “I am hecka racial and if you make me live with a bunch of n*s, I am going to run away.”

Well, Tom was true to his word – he ran away that night, but he didn’t run alone. He ran off with Tony, one of our most defiant residents. The Police found Tom and Tony walking together in downtown Hayward a few days later, and brought them back. We had provided a description – a small, skinny blond kid with a tattoo of a snake winding around his wrist and a heavy set Black teen with low slung pants hanging below his boxers in the style of that era. Tom informed me brashly that he and Tony were “brothers” and that, therefore, he was no longer ‘racial.’ Tom said that Tony had told him just how badly “this place” sucked, and that he and Tony would run again. Both wound up in different programs, and I hadn’t really even thought about them until now. The point is childishly obvious. Racism, for most bigots, hangs by an ephemeral thread.

Let me restate my points thus far:

1) Racism is a place holder for the things working people really want – to be given human rights – housing, nutritious food, medical care, decent wages, security and free time.

2) The Democratic Party of college educated, comfortable suburbanites is as dead as any skunk crossing I – 95 in rush hour.

3) If progressives want to have a meaningful voice they have to migrate to the place inhabited by the working class and join forces with poor and working people.

4) The working class – much of it – can be found at the so called GOP.

5) The GOP/fascist party is an echo chamber with no access to nuance, or basic reality

Therefore????

It may seem counterintuitive to suggest that fighting fascism is contingent on a massive influx of progressive voices joining the GOP. After all, the GOP, like the Democratic Party, is owned, shaped and exploited by corporate power. If progressives gained no traction in the Democratic Party, why would they be heard in the Republican/fascist Party?

That question has no good answer – we are tossing a hail Mary – but the Republican Party has just undergone a hostile takeover from without. The neocons gave way to the fascist zombies. The idea that the “establishment” is dirty, vile and profane has been stolen from the left. We have, in some vague form, a rhetorical precedent to exploit. This was never the case inside the dead and departed Democratic Party. The Republican/fascists have torn the wrapper off of America’s secret. Those in power are indeed scoundrels and murderers, but not for allowing a few victimized asylum seekers to sneak in, but for pouring a fortune into weapons, fossil fuels and political lobbying. In the process, the elites have robbed working people to the point of suicidal despair.

Allow me to provide a caveat to my argument that racists – in droves – are eagerly waiting to be humanized, before we go further. The US is a racist nation with more racist politicians dog whistling for white votes than fish in the ocean (these days), but institutional racism and human hearts are not inevitably in sync. The racism that thrives in the human heart needs to be watered by bigoted, fear mongering media like FOX and Newsmax. These propaganda juggernauts have become the driving force of Republican fascism, and they have the ear of the working class. You might argue that the left needs its own counterattacking media sphere, but corporate money will always prevent rational ideas from being platformed on anything larger than “The Young Turks.”.

I am arguing that the most crucial task of a progressive coalition – as we reach the juncture where fascism, the climate apocalypse and nuclear war merge into a sort of narrative certainty – is to go into the mosh pit of fascism and speak to “Zombies” as if they were human beings.

Now it is time to disrupt the Republican echo chamber. Trump and his billionaire pals talk a populist anti-corporate line – Trump accused Hillary Clinton (rightly so) of being a Wall Street stooge, and the Republican choir nodded along. So let us expand the choir – imagine the Republican ranks swollen with me and you. Envision union members, communists, social democrats, Bernie Sanders, Ralph Nader, Chris Hedges and tens of millions more of us all suddenly becoming registered Republicans. We need people – passionate Republicans, of course – who can elaborate in detail about what it means to be anti-corporate, anti-establishment and opposed to the deep state. Who is putting flesh on the bones of the concept of “the deep state?” Who tells the zombified masses being held hostage in the MAGA Empire that Exxon, Tesla, Amazon, The Heritage Foundation, The New York Times, Facebook, RTX Corporation, FOX News and CNN all sit at the table of the deep state?

Imagine MAGA candidates running in Republican primaries against candidates vowing to fight for a $25 dollar minimum wage. These same anti-MAGA radical Republicans will promise a Draconian reduction in military spending, and the end to corporate campaign lobbying and spending – and how about a fierce vow to pass anti-trust legislation, and universal healthcare. We have always had a one party system – the Dog-on-a-Leash Corporate Party – but now we can have an eclectic party that questions political obedience. We will have a one party system with the complex discourse forbidden in our alleged (now rotten) two party system to date. After all, what the fuck is Trump but a symbol of disobedience – even if Trump’s disobedience is empty and merely a ruse to hide his slavish corporate fidelity.

The position we newly radicalized “Republicans” take will have to be simple, direct and focused on working class aspirations. Do we define disobedience as being nothing more than being a greedy, crass asshole, or does disobedience mean civil disobedience, with the aim of arresting and jailing those who commit environmental crimes, and extort the working class?

I am Phil Wilson and I am running for a senate seat in Massachusetts on the “Republican” ticket with the following platform – a $35 dollar minimum wage, six weeks paid vacation, universal health care, a deal with China to import low cost EV’s to be offered to working families at reduced prices via subsidies. Who will pay for it? The savings from all the bombs, drones and planes that won’t be sent to Israel and Ukraine will be given to working people. Okay, I am not cut out for the senate, but someone else will do it and I’ll knock on doors. Picture every blue state without a single Democratic official, but with “red” replacements – in the rather forgotten shade of red that terrified Joe McCarthy 75 years ago.

The “Republican” candidate that I’ll be supporting will also be introducing the idea of replacing the senate altogether with a “citizen’s assembly.” This would put decision making in the hands of ordinary people like you and me. It ought to play well on the populist right who – now that everyone is a Republican – will be forced to confront life outside of the Trumpian vacuum.

If history is a guide, being anti-capitalist inside of a fascist party will be extremely dangerous. Ask Ernst Rohm what happened to the Nazis who wanted to carry out a socialist revolution. But Rohm’s SA had a confused identity, muddied with all the eugenic nonsense that percolated in every faction of the Nazi movement. As a professional thug specializing in street violence, Rohm had no useful role to play once the Nazis came to power. It may be a stretch to compare the Nazi SA to the US progressive movement, but history provides an imperfect roadmap for political strategy. The radical faction of the Republican Party will have to do what a limited thinker like Ernst Rohm could not do – engage the erstwhile fascist masses in a peaceful, civil dialogue about populism, capitalism and the power of the working class.


Phil Wilson also writes at Nobody’s Voice.

For more on this topic, consider Lonnie Ray Atkinson’s series, Don’t Think of a Republican: : How I Won A Republican Primary As A Lefty Progressive And You Can Too.


Phil Wilson  is a retired mental health worker and union member. His writing has been published in ZNetwork.org, Current Affairs, Counterpunch, Resilience, Mother Pelican, Common Dreams, The Hampshire Gazette, The Common Ground Review, The Future Fire and other publications. Phil's writings are posted regularly at Nobody's Voice https://philmeow.substack.com/

Don’t Follow Sanders Back into the Democratic Party

Sanders is a carnival barker at the graveyard of social movements. He’s spent years cheerleading for Biden — what good is his recent criticism?


Nathaniel Flakin and Otto Fors

November 15, 2024

LEFT VOICE

Photo: Jonathan Ernst

The day after Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders put out a withering statement placing the blame for that loss squarely on the Democratic Party:


It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them … While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change.

He asks if “the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party” will ever “understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing.” He wonders if they will take on the “increasingly powerful Oligarchy,” concluding “Probably not.” He finally announces that “very serious discussions” will take place, and ends with an open-ended: “Stay tuned.”

This is the Bernie Sanders people remember from his 2016 and 2020 primary campaigns, who mobilized millions of young people disaffected by the misery wrought by decades of neoliberalism. His language will resonate with the millions of people who did not vote for Harris, and the millions more who cast a ballot while holding their noses, because she ran a campaign in defense of the status quo.

Yet does Sanders think we can just forget the last four years, and everything he said until the day after the election?
Sanders: Biden and the Democrats’ Most Enthusiastic Cheerleader

Just a few months ago, after Biden’s catastrophic performance at the presidential debate, Sanders published a full-throated endorsement of Biden, calling him “the most effective president in the modern history of our country.” Sanders called on Democrats to “stop the bickering and nit-picking” and rally behind their candidate.

Was this just a momentary slip up in the final stretch of a campaign, when the Vermont senator was terrified by the prospect of a Trump presidency? Far from it: Sanders has been an integral part of the Biden administration, first as chair of the Senate Budget Committee, then as chair of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. Every time Biden and the Democrats threw workers and the oppressed under the bus, Sanders was there putting his leftist rubber stamp on Biden’s policies. He wrote no scathing rebukes when the Biden administration ran to Trump’s right on immigration, abandoned demands like a $15 minimum wage, ramped up fossil fuel production, and voted to break the railway strike. In fact, Sanders, with his reputation for saying it like it is, repeatedly lies about the president’s supposedly pro-labor record, claiming that “Biden wants to make it easier for workers to form unions.”

But that’s not all: Sanders, along with other progressive Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Ortez, was a Biden dead-ender, standing with him even as more and more Democrats called on him to step down. When Biden finally left the stage, Sanders praised him as “the most pro-working class president in modern American history.”

When Kamala Harris replaced Biden on the ticket, she cozied up to billionaires and made clear that she lacked even Biden’s purely rhetorical commitment to the labor movement. Yet Sanders remained a loyal cheerleader.

In a delusional search for votes from “moderate” Republicans, Harris began campaigning with the anti-Trump Republican Liz Cheney. Her father Dick Cheney was the principal architect of the Iraq War, a cynical intriguer whose company was raking in billions from forever wars that killed millions of people. The Cheneys might be the most bloodthirsty war hawks in the rogue’s gallery of U.S. imperialism. And Sanders? He stood with the war hawk — “I applaud the Cheneys for their courage in defending democracy,” allowing Donald Trump, a first-rate imperialist, to present himself as an anti-war candidate.
The Democrats Have Never Been on Our Side

The Intercept has claimed that “Bernie would have won,” given his “credibility” from “spending decades consistently fighting doggedly for the working class.” This is, unfortunately, pure amnesia, as Sanders spent the last four years defending an administration attacking the working class. And he has been plainly dishonest. Was Biden a champion of the working class, as Sanders claimed just half a year ago? Or did the Democrats abandon workers, as Sanders says now?

The Democratic Party has always been a party of the bourgeoisie, and Sanders has been part of it for almost 50 years, even while formally an independent. Despite his left-wing credentials, he has a long track record of supporting almost every U.S. imperialist intervention, while voting for trillions of dollars for weapons. Sanders is nothing but a social democratic fig leaf for a capitalist political machine. He is a carnival barker at the entrance to the graveyard of social movements.

You might also be interested in: Trump is President. Which Way Forward for the Labor Movement?

The tragedy of Sanders campaigns is that he indeed inspired millions of working-class and young people with progressive demands — and then led them into a party that could only betray them. We see Sanders channeling the movement for Palestine into working with the imperialist state as well. Across the country, leftists are rallying Democrats to support Sanders’s arms embargo measure — as if the institutions of the imperialist state could deliver an end to the genocide in Gaza. This is just a microcosm of Sanders’s role in the Democratic party, and how he works to keep outrage from developing into a serious challenge to the system.

Given the astounding failure of the Democratic Party (it’s actually kind of impressive that they managed to convince millions of workers that Donald Trump was less hostile to working people!), huge swaths of people realize we need a political alternative. Unfortunately, many will follow Sanders’s advice, and continue to try to change a party run by billionaires.

It’s not that Democrats lost their connection to working-class voters — the Democrats have never been on our side. Even in the supposed glory days of FDR, the Democratic Party was trying to save capitalism. Sanders, as a more or less official democrat, is part of the problem — even if he founded his own party, it would be a party loyal to U.S. imperialism. Workers in the United States need our own party — one completely independent of billionaires, war hawks, and all their political hacks.



Nathaniel Flakin

Nathaniel is a freelance journalist and historian from Berlin. He is on the editorial board of Left Voice and our German sister site Klasse Gegen Klasse. Nathaniel, also known by the nickname Wladek, has written a biography of Martin Monath, a Trotskyist resistance fighter in France during World War II, which has appeared in German, in English, and in French, and in Spanish. He has also written an anticapitalist guide book called Revolutionary Berlin. He is on the autism spectrum.

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Otto Fors

Otto is a college professor in the New York area.

The myth that carbon dioxide can save us is not just an Alberta thing

By

• Adrienne Tanner
•  
• 
  

• Opinion

November 11th 2024

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith speaks at a Carbon Capture Canada conference in Sept., 2024. Photo from Danielle Smith's official Facebook page

Only in Alberta. That was the refrain when my colleague Natasha Bulowski broke the story that Alberta’s ruling party was considering striking carbon dioxide from the list of planet-heating pollutants and instead, embracing the gas as a "foundational nutrient for all life on Earth.”

Those types of broad-brush remarks about our fellow Canadians are unfair, of course. There are a good many people in my home province who wouldn’t buy into this line of thought for a second. However, Alberta is the powerhouse producer of oil and gas in Canada, and politically deserves its bad rap for thwarting efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Its premier, Danielle Smith, is an unabashed fossil fuel booster, who lashes out at absolutely anything that would make life more difficult for corporations mining the oil sands and fracking for gas.

She throws around threats of lawsuits against federal climate policy like a major league pitcher. Days before her leadership review, Alberta filed suit against the federal carbon pricing system, on grounds it was being unfairly applied across the country — pointing to the tax carveout on home heating oil in the Atlantic provinces. 

This week, Smith threatened another court challenge, this one against the proposed federal oil and gas emissions cap, claiming it encroaches on provincial jurisdiction and threatens to lead the country “into economic and societal decline.”

And of course there are the roadblocks the Smith government has thrown up to thwart Alberta’s thriving renewable energy sector, designed to ensure fossil fuel companies maintain their edge. 

But even against this backdrop, the CO2 love-fest motion by the United Conservative Party (UCP) seemed beyond the pale. But lo and behold, it passed. An overwhelming majority of UCP members voted last weekend to ditch the province’s emissions reduction targets and recognize carbon dioxide as “a foundational nutrient for all life on earth.” 

That put Smith in a bit of a quandary. She couldn’t wholeheartedly promise to back the resolution; giving up on emissions reductions all together would rob the giant oilsands companies of huge amounts of money they want for their carbon capture projects and place them at a disadvantage internationally, where carbon intensity is starting to matter.

Smith tiptoed through that dilemma by saying she would honour the spirit but not the text of her party’s resolution and promised to continue support for the oil and gas industry’s commitment to reach net-zero by 2050. 

All of this made us at Canada’s National Observer wonder where the motion came from in the first place. To be sure, some carbon dioxide is a foundational part of life on our planet; plants need it to grow. All animals exhale it when they breathe. Of course, just like coffee that eventually gives you the shakes, there is a limit to how much carbon dioxide is good for the planet. 

Only in Alberta, you say? Not really. The CO2 as a life giving force myth has been around a long time. #emissions #CO2 #carbon #climate #abpoli

The Alberta motion ignores entirely the fact we are well past the threshold. Carbon dioxide, produced when humans burn fossil fuels, and other greenhouse gases like methane, act like a blanket that traps more and more of the heat around the planet. As the planet warms, more energy is added to the atmosphere, creating more violent storms, less predictable weather patterns, drying forests and rising sea levels. The hurricanes, floods and forest fires tell you all you need to know about how far past optimum levels we have already gone.

Turns out the disinformation spreaders, who designed the pro-CO2 slogans and urged us to forget the facts, were from a front group for a coalition of American coal producers. They first blasted out the argument in 1997 to prevent climate policies curtailing coal. It has been in circulation ever since, used as a rallying cry by fossil fuel boosters, climate deniers, online conspiracy theorists, and now, sadly, some Canadian political parties. The same myth was propagated by at least two Conservative Party of B.C. candidates during the recent provincial election.

It all goes to show how persistent disinformation in the service of the fossil fuel industry can be, and how eager those who stand to profit from the economic status quo are to continue its spread. In this case, it is the political parties lacking foresight who are to blame. 

So, no, it’s not only in Alberta. The UCP is just the latest one to jump on this bandwagon. 

 SEE LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for CCS

NATONAL OBSERVER

November 11th 2024

Adrienne Tanner

Editor-in-Chief

@AdrienneTanner