Ninety-Nine magazine - June 2022 (issue 23)

Challenging the power of the

Issue 23 - June 2022

Make polluters pay Why the fossil fuel industry must foot the bill

Also in this issue The burning case for climate reparations A crack in the door of monopoly capitalism Zambia’s debt crisis

ISSUE 23: June 2022 03 Campaign news 06 Global news 08 Climate reparations 10 The global IP regime 13 Global Justice Now supporters 14 Marcos returns to the Philippines 16 COP26 in pictures 18 How corporate courts can be beaten 19 Reviews

Ninety-Nine is published three times a year by Global Justice Now Global Justice Now campaigns for a world where resources are controlled by the many, not the few.

We champion social movements and propose democratic alternatives to the rule of the 1%. Our activists and groups in towns and cities around the UK work in solidarity with those at the sharp end of poverty and injustice.

Ninety-Nine magazine, Global Justice Now 66 Offley Road, London SW9 0LS 020 7820 4900 • offleyroad@globaljustice.org.uk • globaljustice.org.uk Editor: Jonathan Stevenson Graphic Design: Matt Bonner www.revoltdesign.org Cover: A protest at Uniper’s power station in Enfield, north London as part of our day of action against corporate courts in May. Photo: Léo Bodelle.

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Polluters must pay, not be paid, for the climate crisis Daniel Willis Campaigns and policy manager Given the repeated warnings from UN scientists over the global impacts of climate change, it’s unconscionable that the fossil fuel industry is using corporate courts to try and block climate action, threatening governments with demands for pay-outs that could run into the billions. But we are making a difference. Our excellent day of action on corporate courts and climate in May was part of a month of mobilisation across Europe, and the media is increasingly exposing the danger these legal claims pose.

Hopefully the bell is beginning to toll for the Energy Charter Treaty, the most climate-wrecking corporate court deal of all.

Instead of being paid off for lost profits, the fossil fuel industry must pay for continuing to pollute in the face of decades of scientific knowledge.

As Harpreet Kaur Paul and Tatiana Garavito write on pages 8-9, justice requires that corporations and rich governments make reparations – not just financial transfers, but an acknowledgment of the damage done, deep structural changes to the global economy, and more.

Yet the fossil fuel industry and rich governments are using the invasion of Ukraine to argue that more oil and gas extraction is needed to provide energy security. This is cynical, short-term profiteering that won’t solve the cost of living crisis, and will have a far worse impact on climate change (see pages 6-7). Renewables are the cheaper, sustainable Using the invasion solution that need to be of Ukraine to argue funded now.

But taking on the fossil fuel for more North industry is a major undertaking Sea oil and gas is that involves big questions like corporate power and historic cynical, short-term responsibility. As Nick Shaxson profiteering. explains on pages 10-12, we have the resources to make change happen, but our economic system is built to facilitate the transfer of wealth from public to private hands. Instead of encouraging polluting investments with tax breaks, we need to tax the polluters. Instead of supporting an intellectual property system built to protect profits, we need to support the global transfer of technology that will help everyone tackle the climate emergency (not to mention the next stages of the pandemic).

The struggle to slow down climate change, remake our world and repair the damage done is a long one. But there are years where things happen quickly. Let’s make this one of those.

CAMPAIGN NEWS

© Jess Hurd

Rich countries hold out on vaccine access as pharma profits rise Even after an estimated 20 million excess deaths around the world during the pandemic, a handful of rich countries have continued their grim mission to block the suspension of intellectual property on Covid-19 vaccines and treatments (the ‘TRIPS waiver’), with the UK at the forefront.

In March, after the world marked two years since the WHO declared a global pandemic, Global Justice Now’s ‘Decolonise Vaccines’ speaker tour came to eight UK towns and cities. It was brilliant to see so many supporters, old and new, in attendance. South African human rights lawyer Fatima Hassan joined us for the first leg, then Kenyan health activist Maurine Murenga, galvanising us with stories of their campaigns that confronted political and corporate interests head on.

Just a couple of days after our speaker tour started, a leaked text on the TRIPS waiver emerged from the World Trade Organization, with some reporting a compromise between South Africa, India, the US and the EU. But it soon became clear that rich nations had conceded very little. To help create the space for India and South Africa to resist the ‘deal’, the global People’s Vaccine Alliance sprang into action. In the UK, we worked with partners to coordinate a letter from MPs and Lords condemning the text, and held a roundtable in parliament where Fatima Hassan let rip on its many flaws. As Ninety-Nine goes to press, we await news of the latest WTO talks.

In April, Pfizer and Moderna both announced enormous 2021 profits, with Pfizer doubling its annual revenue

from the previous year. We joined global protests on the day that both held their AGM. It followed positive news in February, when the WHO’s mRNA vaccine hub in South Africa announced that it has successfully reverse engineered the Moderna vaccine, and hopes to begin production later in the year. The WHO later announced 13 partner countries to share the findings with, increasing the prospect that low- and middleincome countries will be able to rely on making their own vaccines, rather than being beholden to big pharma companies, in the near future.

Watch the speaker tour at: globaljustice.org.uk/decolonisevaccines As Pfizer held its AGM online in April, we went to the company's UK headquarters to demand an end to pandemic profiteering.

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© Jess Hurd

Corporate courts kept out of UK-Canada trade deal We had some good news in March in our campaign on corporate courts and climate. Last year, thousands of Global Justice Now supporters took action to call for corporate courts to be dropped from the UK-Canada trade deal. When the government finally published its plans, buried in the trade jargon was a single sentence that says corporate courts will not be there. This is an amazing turnaround from a year ago and it shows what we can achieve when we come together to take action.

The latest IPCC report from UN

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climate experts confirms why this matters for the climate. It warns of “regulatory chill” and highlights how fossil fuel corporations are using these secret tribunals to “block” the phase out of fossil fuels. The report highlights the Energy Charter Treaty, a giant corporate court deal between 49 countries that many of the fossil fuel companies are using.

Several governments have expressed reservations about the treaty, but reform talks are stalled and there is the possibility of the EU withdrawing.

Our day of action on 21 May focused

on corporate courts and the ECT. Up and down the country, groups took action, from demonstrations outside specialist law firms, to a protest at a power station owned by Uniper which is suing the Dutch government over phasing out coal power. It was part of a month of action around Europe calling on governments to scrap the treaty, ahead of a crunch decision point in June.

Find out more at: globaljustice.org.uk/ect Above: We joined a protest at the AngloAmerican AGM in April over its Cerrejón corporate court case against Colombia.

CAMPAIGN NEWS

Zambia: Cancel the debt Zambia is one of a number of countries in the global south facing an economic crisis following the pandemic. Negotiations are underway over how to restructure the country’s debt, roughly half of which is owed to private banks and financial corporations in the UK. Global Justice Now has been campaigning in solidarity with Zambian civil society to demand that the banks cancel the debt (see page 18).

Blackrock, the world’s biggest asset manager which controls roughly $10 trillion in wealth, stands to make 110% profit from Zambian debt if it is paid off in full. Thousands of Global Justice Now supporters have written to Blackrock CEO Larry Fink to demand debt cancellation, and we helped organise a day of action against Blackrock in London and Edinburgh in April.

Together we have also made a campaign video highlighting how Zambia’s debt crisis is leading to austerity and holding back climate action.

Get involved at: globaljustice.org.uk/debt

© Ca llu m Be

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Above: Campaigners outside Blackrock in Edinburgh.

UK aid set to be further hijacked In April, we handed in a petition with over 25,000 signatures calling on the government to stop using aid to support the private sector and British businesses, and instead focus on tackling inequality and climate change. Foreign secretary Liz Truss’s new international development strategy will result in even more development funding being spent promoting British companies around the world.

In response to the strategy, we published research into the government’s Prosperity Fund showing why this approach to aid spending doesn’t reduce poverty and often results in aid being spent on useless or even damaging projects, such as healthcare privatisation and corporate trade conferences.

This highlights why any progressive government cannot simply return the aid budget to 0.7%, but will also have to radically rethink how UK aid can be a force for good in the world.

Read the report: globaljustice.org.uk/prosperity-fund The campaign was launched with a guerrilla Left: Finance campaigner Daniel projection in Canary Wharf in March.

Willis hands in the petition.

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GLOBAL NEWS MOVEMENT NEWS

Russian fossil fuel imports blocked amid global anti-war effort

© DPA picture alliance/Alamy Stock PhotoShutterstock

Activists block a rail track leading to the Russian-owned oil refinery of PCK-Raffinerie GmbH in eastern Germany.

Global Justice Now joined hundreds of organisations around the world in March calling for governments to urgently stop buying Russian oil and gas following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Dock workers and environmentalists blocked tankers carrying Russian imports into the UK, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands and the US. The G7 committed to

phasing out Russian oil in May, but so far European countries have failed to agree a ban.

The UK is less dependent on Russian imports than other European countries like Germany, but this has not stopped the fossil fuel industry opportunistically arguing for more domestic North Sea oil and gas extraction in response to the crisis.

In fact, renewable energy remains the cheapest and quickest way to replace fossil fuel imports and bring down bills.

Meanwhile, more than 13,000 people were arrested in the first two weeks after the invasion following anti-war protests across Russia.

Ongoing protests have remained small owing to heavy repression.

Investors desert East African Crude Oil Pipeline More than 20 financial institutions have said no to investing in a controversial $3.5 billion oil pipeline, which French oil giant Total and the China National Offshore Oil Company plan to build connecting oil fields in Uganda with the Tanzanian coast.

The pipeline would transport oil generating over 34 million tons of carbon emissions each year, threatens 6 Ninety-Nine 2022

to displace thousands of families and farmers and poses water risks including to the Lake Victoria basin. In May, Deutsche Bank became the latest bank to turn down the project, following an international campaign backed by an alliance of more than 200 African and international organisations.

“As a continent, we should know better before submitting to corporate

colonialism and extractivism and fiercely refuse to succumb to the charm of the dying fossil fuel industry,” said Ugandan climate activists Hilda Nakabuye and Mulindwa Moses.

Activists blockaded the AGM of Total in Paris in May, leading to the meeting being cancelled.

GLOBAL MOVEMENT GLOBAL NEWS

NEWS SHORTS Global food sovereignty movement to converge The food sovereignty movement, founded over 25 years ago, is coming together for a new global process to renew itself. A series of discussions and consultations at local, national and regional levels are planned through 2022, ahead of a spring 2023 convergence in a global Nyéléni forum (named after a legendary woman farmer from Mali).

Asylum seekers stuck on Diego Garcia start hunger strike

Global Coastal Rebellion over climate threat to oceans In February, activists from 20 countries including Argentina, South Africa, Colombia, Germany, Spain and Peru mobilised for the Global Coastal Rebellion. The demonstrations sought to draw attention to the damaging impact that fossil fuel exploration and fracking by transnational companies, such as Shell, is having on the world’s oceans and biodiversity. Protesters called for corporations to face accountability for their actions and to stop polluting the

oceans.

Several actions also made reference to a recent oil spill from a refinery owned

by Spanish corporation Repsol on Peru’s Pacific Coast, which has caused untold damage to oceanic wildlife and fishing communities. Campaigners are calling for Repsol to clean up their mess and pay compensation to the communities affected. The organisers are hoping to hold similar demonstrations to coincide with the G7 meeting in Germany in June.

Liberian nurse ‘applauds’ big pharma at Davos

Dozens of Tamil asylum seekers launched a hunger strike in May after eight months stranded on a secretive UK-run military base in the Indian Ocean.

They were taken to Diego Garcia when their boat was intercepted

by UK forces. They are demanding to be allowed to claim asylum in a safe third country.

Caribbean movements call for reparations during Royal tour Prince William and Kate Middleton faced protests over slavery and colonialism during a visit to the Caribbean in March.

Advocates Network, a human rights coalition of Jamaican activists and equalities organisations, released a statement giving 60 reasons for an apology and compensation, in keeping with Jamaica’s upcoming 60th anniversary of independence.

© Leo Hyde Public Services International

George Poe Williams protests at Davos in the Swiss Alps.

A frontline nurse from Liberia launched a ‘round of applause’ for Big Pharma executives at the World Economic Forum in Davos in May. In a protest designed as a satirical reversal of the global applause for frontline workers, George Poe Williams sought to highlight the continuing failure to agree a patent waiver on Covid-19 vaccines and treatments at the World Trade Organization. While the CEOs of Pfizer, AstraZeneca and a wide array of billionaires met inside the WEF secure

area, Williams was stopped by police outside the perimeter shortly after beginning his protest.

“If I wanted to earn what Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla made last year, I would have to work every single day until 6100 AD,” he said. “But what makes me really furious is that Bourla and many of his billionaire buddies here at WEF are doing all they can to block our demands for a patent waiver – just so they can make even more money.”

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CLIMATE JUSTICE

The burning case for climate reparations Compensation for loss and damage is at the heart of global south demands for climate justice. But true repair demands more, write HARPREET KAUR PAUL and TATIANA GARAVITO.

© Vuk Valcic/SOPA Images/Shutterstock

In 2019, twin cyclones Kenneth and Idai devastated communities in Mozambique within the space of one month. Around 146,000 people were internally displaced, the cyclone and flooding ruined 1 million acres of crops, and caused damage to 100,000 homes.

Infrastructure to the tune of $1 billion was destroyed.

Already, 63% of Mozambiquans lived in extreme poverty. The country faces a debt

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crisis, exacerbated by secret loans made by international banks, including two in London. This poverty and indebtedness continues patterns of colonial exploitation by Portuguese and British interests. In the 20th century, British financiers backed the private companies leading Mozambique’s colonial administration, and forced communities into mines and plantations in neighbouring British colonies. This pattern continues today through debt, trade and investment agreements

Climate justice movements in the global north are increasingly putting reparations - long demanded by the global south - on their agenda.

CLIMATE JUSTICE

Within the UN climate change transform the systems that oppress us negotiations, countries on the front in the first place. We must move away lines have been demanding equity from our current extractive economic for decades. They have fought for a model which exploits people and fair approach which would see those the natural world for profit; away countries that contributed most to from colonial borders and racist the climate crisis immigration policy; decarbonise away from the The average first, and provide theft of land from citizen of finance to indigenous people others. And more and subsistence Mozambique did recently, they farmers. We almost nothing to have fought envision a world in for measures to communities cause the climate which address ‘loss and have the agency damage’ from crisis, yet they are to define what those countries well-being means bearing the brunt in the global for them in line THE CASE FOR REPARATIONS north that are with our planet’s of the loss and However, in movements around the most responsible. available resources. damage. world there is a growing chorus of These promises Our struggles are demands for climate reparations. were hard won all connected, Reparations generally seek for but global north governments have and true repair can only be achieved those responsible for harms to repair thus far failed to deliver on them. when we build power together to fight them. Forms of reparation have It is estimated that loss and damage injustice. included apologies, compensation, (climate impacts we cannot adapt to) Various groups around the world commemorations, promises or in the global south will cost between are doing the work to make climate legislative changes to stop the harms, $290 and 580 billion annually by 2030. reparations a reality. In the UK, the and commitments as well as policies Yet there exists no earmarked funding Climate Reparations Bloc we co-led to ensure they are never repeated. to address it. At COP26 in Glasgow, from the Bank of England to Trafalgar Movements and communities have global south countries came with a Square during COP26 compiled a list called for reparations for those clear demand to establish a Glasgow of interim stop and start demands: affected by slavery, torture, genocide, Facility for Loss and Damage Finance. actions the government must take to apartheid, colonialism, war, and more. But the proposal was shot down by stop perpetrating harm, while starting Climate reparations acknowledges countries including the EU, the UK, to repair the existing harm they’ve that ways of trading, our relationships and the US. Instead, they agreed to caused. Many other movements are to one another and the natural a weak compromise – a ‘dialogue’ fighting for elements of repair that world, and our social relationships around loss and damage finance that go beyond compensation of people all changed irrevocably under will conclude in 2024. In the leadaffected, from migrant justice groups colonialism. These histories set us on a up to COP27, we must demand that resisting racist policies to movements trajectory that led to colonisers both countries pledge new and additional for agroecology and land access. being responsible for the devastation finance for loss and damage to the By building a powerful movement wrought by brutal colonial practices scale of hundreds of billions of dollars practising the values we wish to see, like slavery, and disproportionately annually. we can collectively define, build and for the greenhouse gas emissions create the future that climate justice driving unprecedented floods, storms, TRUE REPAIR demands. droughts, disease spread and more. At But loss and damage finance is only Harpreet Kaur Paul co-leads the Care & Repair work at Tipping Point UK. Tatiana Garavito is an its core, climate reparations is about a small part of the broader vision for organiser and facilitator on issues around race, coming together to imagine how to climate justice. Reparations can’t be migration and climate justice. They're grateful repair these injustices. limited to writing a cheque – we must for Sadie DeCoste's support in putting this article which allow corporations to extract wealth, expropriate resources and contaminate the environment, and through mining projects like the Mozambique Liquified Natural Gas project which recently received funding from the UK. The average citizen of Mozambique did almost nothing to cause the climate crisis, and yet they bear the brunt of the loss and damage caused by cyclones Kenneth and Idai.

Wealthy, colonial countries and fossil fuel corporations disproportionately contributed to this damage through their reckless climate inaction, but they refuse to pay for it.

together.

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TRADE

A crack in the door of monopoly capitalism For decades, intellectual property rules have been at the heart of a hidden private tax system that transfers wealth away from ordinary people. But now the global mood is changing, writes NICK SHAXSON. A few years ago, economists who followed these things noticed a weird thing happening in Ireland: a staggering 26% jump in the size of its economy in 2015, and a bunch of other indicators going haywire.

Nothing stranger than usual was happening on the streets of Dublin – so what the hell was going on?

After a bit of digging, the answer became clear. Ireland, a corporate tax haven, had changed its tax rules, encouraging Apple and a bunch of other multinationals to shift their corporate structures and bring a trove of ‘intellectual property’ such as patents, brands and trade secrets into their affiliates in Ireland. An estimated €250 billion worth of these ‘intangible assets’ had suddenly whooshed in, though it hardly touched the sides – except for perhaps helping a handful of Irish tax advisors to upgrade their Porsches. It made the Irish national statistics a laughing stock: the economist Paul Krugman dubbed this tax haven activity “Leprechaun Economics”.

We now live in a global economy which transfers resources on a vast scale from ordinary people to billionaires, from the productive economy to the financial sector, from the public to the private sectors, in ways that both redistribute wealth upwards and reduce prosperity. They can do this, in particular, by monopolising markets and dodging taxes. In reality, this is what the socalled ‘free’ market increasingly looks like – a system of offshore monopoly capitalism.

Intellectual property (IP) – essentially, the business of government-enforced

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monopolies over ideas and inventions – sits at the core of this system.

IP has become a lifeblood of our modern global economy, sewn into its fabric via a nest of legal rules and heavyweight political protection. These monopolies over patents, copyrights and trademarks constitute a hidden private tax system levied by private interests over wider populations.

There is a role to play for patents in a modern economy, but the system has been rigged by vested interests. In an earlier age, when government policies in many countries struck a better balance between private property rights and the interests of citizens, there was a surge of new wonder drugs under development. The rise of private power to exert choke holds over markets has dramatically tightened the innovation tap.

AT THE HEART OF TAX INJUSTICE We’re often told that tax is bad: that the less tax we pay, the freer we are. This ideology has helped vested interests push official levels of corporate and personal income taxes down to very low levels. As the heiress Leona Helmsley once said, tax is for the little people. She was right. Worse, many of us pay large private taxes on top of our normal taxes, through the power that intellectual property gives to big business.

We pay four layers of these hidden private taxes for these knowledge monopolies, in fact.

First, nearly all the high-technology goods and services we consume were funded,

Right: The campaign to suspend patents on Covid-19 vaccines and treatments is putting new pressure on the global intellectual property regime.

TRADE junctions used to (and sometimes still to a large degree, by taxpayerdo) shake down hapless travellers funded public research, which and traders passing by. According citizens ultimately pay for. The private to an estimate by the US economist sector typically only invests after Dean Baker, Americans paid $315 the “entrepreneurial state”, as the billion more in 2018 economist Mariana for prescription Mazzucato puts Many of us pay drugs than they it, has made the would have in a bold, high-risk large private competitive market investments. To taxes on top of with the patent take a recent example, it’s our normal taxes, protections relaxed.

Add in software, estimated that through the power pesticides, medical $100 billion of equipment and public money that intellectual all the rest, and he has been pushed into the research property gives to estimates the cost at $1 trillion annually, and production big business. over $3,000 in of Covid-19 monopoly taxes for medicines. each American citizen, each year.

The second layer is what There is a fourth tax on top of this, Leprechaun Economics measures: which is the result of this monopolistic the way multinational firms can park their intellectual property in tax havens system reducing economic growth and stunting innovation and economic to escape paying their taxes – freedynamism. This happens through riding on the taxes that the rest of us, in countries rich and poor, then essentially must pay on their behalf.

The third tax is bigger. Companies routinely use these super-strength monopolising patents and trademarks to make us pay more as consumers, just as tollkeepers at key road

various economy-wide effects. For example, if monopolistic companies generally set their prices far above what an open market would warrant, people buy less, firms produce less, and they demand less labour. This not only pushes wages down – but it also shrinks the economy. Or when fierce patent rules shift money from poor people, who consume a high share of their income, to rich people, who consume a lower share, then consumption and economic activity shrinks. Or, most pertinent for climate change or Covid drugs, these restrictive systems smother innovation.

Monopolising patents are used routinely to block new technologies and potential rivals. Thickets of multiple, obscure, overlapping patents often surround profitable products, any one of which can trip up others trying to enter the market or build upon earlier technologies. A company can easily refuse to licence others who they fear might develop the understanding and know-how that goes along with producing something, and subsequently become rivals.

The spread of innovation is slowed, often very vividly between

© Aaron Chown/PA Images/Alamy Stock Photo

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TRADE

countries around the world to accept rules that allow multinationals to barricade their goods and services with ferocious legal fortresses, to exclude anyone else from using their inventions, for exceptionally long periods. But right now, things may be changing.

TRIPS received a shocking jolt last year when the US trade representative Katherine Tai announced in May that her administration would support a waiver of the IP protections for Covid vaccines. This followed similar ENSHRINED IN INTERNATIONAL LAW demands from a range of other The global system of intellectual countries, from scientists, from medical property, underpinned and enforced experts and from a wide spectrum by global trade rules, has at its heart of campaigners, for an exemption a system called TRIPS (Trade-Related from TRIPS. For decades, the United Aspects of Intellectual Property States had led a granite-like global Rights). It was one of the foundational resistance to any weakening of TRIPS, agreements in the newly formed World so experienced activists were stunned Trade Organization in 1995, turning

by Tai's words. As one of them, Cory the patchwork of intellectual property Doctorow, said: “I’ve been in global rules which existed up to that point into IP circles for nearly twenty years a single, binding piece of international now, and I’ve been in rooms with trade law. the US trade representative many TRIPS is a billionaire factory, a times. I have never seen a [US trade monopolists’ charter, which forces representative] – let alone the head of rich and poor countries – whether that shows up in access to vaccines and medicines or being stuck with old, off-patent climate technologies when we need the whole planet to be using cutting edge solutions as fast as possible.

In short, the first three private taxes redistribute the pie unfavourably; the fourth shrinks the pie. The rigged system stifles innovation, worsens inequality, threatens jobs, undermines democracy and harms the planet.

US Mission photo/Eric Bridiers (CC BY-ND

2.0)

US trade representative Katherine Tai made the shock announcement last year.

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the USTR – make a statement that was in the same galaxy as this one.”

Almost immediately a chorus of lobbyists for Big Pharma companies and for the broader global IP regime – boosters ranging from the software monopolist Bill Gates, via a multitude of commercial lobby groups, to the then German leader Angela Merkel – came out of the woodwork to attack the US’ heresy. Tai’s efforts to change the story hit heavy political waters, almost as soon as she uttered the words – and the stand-off has dragged on for more than a year.

Those who have been campaigning against the system for decades, who have never been able to get traction on this Teflon issue, may feel disheartened at the pushback. Yet now is not the time for despair, for at last we see a chance, an opening, for true change. This rigged system, which has literally killed millions of people and impoverished hundreds of millions of others, is now vulnerable.

Policies on international trade or tax change only very slowly, but with immense momentum. Once a new direction is set, it is very hard to deflect.

Katherine Tai’s words are less important in themselves, than in the fact that they reflect a deep and enduring sea change in the global public mood, which has steadily in recent years been turning against the outdated old ideologies of low taxes, weak regulations, lax enforcement, and strong protections for IP monopolies.

There is an opening here, which we haven’t seen for a very long time. It is time to get our collective foot in this crack in the door, organise, and push hard.

Nick Shaxson is a journalist and author of The Finance Curse: How Global Finance is Making Us All Poorer. This is an extract from a longer article on the history of patent monopolies available at globaljustice.org.uk/long-read

Global Justice Now Supporters

Summer Events

Join others from around the UK and Europe as in-person events return!

9 July

Hope in the Dark – national gathering and AGM

As temperatures rise year on year, the whole world is becoming more vulnerable to climate chaos.

Yet the worst effects are mostly suffered by those communities who have contributed least to climate breakdown. To have any hope of adapting to a changing climate, while also preventing the crisis from getting even worse, we need a global just transition – but countries in the global south are hamstrung by a world economy that works in the interests of the rich.

17-21 August

Join Global Justice Now’s 2022 national gathering to discuss what a just global transition looks like, and how climate justice movements are taking a stand the world over. The event runs from 1pm-6pm on Saturday 9 July at the Owen Building, Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield S1 1WB, and is preceded by our AGM. Book your free place for both via globaljustice.org.uk/hope

European Summer University of Social Movements

Global Justice Now is taking part in a panEuropean political education and movement building event in Mönchengladbach (near Cologne) in Germany this August, along with many of our allies. It’s an activist event with simultaneous interpretation between English, German and French, and a huge range of sessions.

We’ll be strategising with European trade activists as well as hearing from speakers such as Luciana Ghiotto from the Latin America Platform Against Free Trade Deals. We’ll be joined by Maaza

Seyoum of the African Alliance, a leading figure in the global campaign for a People’s Vaccine.

And Shaista Aziz of Oxford Anti-Racist City will be speaking at a forum we’re organising on building movements that are actively anti-oppressive.

The last time an event like this happened, in Toulouse in 2017, a number of Global Justice Now members came along. Mönchengladbach is a direct train ride from Brussels, so it’s a feasible journey from the UK without flying. For more information go to globaljustice.org.uk/esu22

Global Justice Now bookshop All the books reviewed in Ninety-Now are now available to buy online via Global Justice Now's page on Bookshop.org. An alternative to billionaire-run online bookshops, a share of the cover price goes to Global Justice Now and a share goes into a fund to support local bookshops across the UK. See globaljustice.org.uk/books

PHILIPPINES

Another President Marcos – how?

DOROTHY GUERRERO on the shocking election victory of former dictator Ferdinand Marcos’s son in the Philippines. the Philippines has around 7,100 islands, Ferdinand Marcos Jr, popularly known running a national election campaign as Bongbong, will be sworn in as the Philippines’ 17th president on 30 June 2022. requires huge funds. The Marcos-Duterte ticket was a powerful combination, which How did the son and namesake of a man brought together political clans from known worldwide as a brutal dictator and both the north and southern part of the one of the world’s worst kleptocrats, who drove his country to economic bankruptcy, Philippines. The Marcos family is one of the most successful, going back over a century manage to win an electoral landslide 36 to Marcos Jr’s great grandfather in the years after his father was ousted? northern province of Ilocos.

Philippine democracy is in tatters after After Ferdinand Marcos Sr was ousted six years of Rodrigo Duterte’s government, following the mass notorious for brazen popular struggle of killings under its ‘war What has been 1986, his family exile on drugs’, muzzling proved to be shortthe media and lost, and with lived. New president disregarding the rule terrible effect, is the Corazon Aquino of law. With Duterte’s allowed the family’s daughter Sara elected collective social return to face various to the vice-presidency, court charges in 1991, it seems that the memory. after Marcos’s death in Philippines’ future is 1989. This was actually getting more and a precondition by the Swiss government in more similar to its dark past. exchange for cooperation with efforts to PATRONAGE POLITICS recover the Marcoses’ wealth. Since their The wide margin won by the Marcosreturn, the Marcos family have taken turns Duterte tandem proved that Philippine occupying various elected posts. elections are still dominated by the wellVOTE-BUYING AND OTHER entrenched machineries of political ELECTION PLAGUES dynasties which rely on patronage politics. These politically influential families Running against well-entrenched monopolise public offices from generation gatekeepers and well-oiled machinery is to generation, treating it almost as their an uphill battle. It is an ‘open secret’ that birthright. Local politicians depend on vote-buying is part of the electoral culture, them for largesse, which they in turn use and there were allegations of vote-buying to distribute favours to local residents. On in many areas in the presidential election, election days these translate into votes. which reportedly even boosted the local Political dynasties are power economy. gatekeepers. They have very close Closest rival candidate Leni Robredo, relationships with business tycoons who a human rights lawyer and current vicesupport their electoral campaigns. Given president (elected independently in 2016

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Right: A protest in Quezon City in February to mark the 36th anniversary of the People Power revolution, which toppled dictator Ferdinand Marcos in 1986.

PHILIPPINES

and not from Duterte’s party), lacked the financial resources to match the billions of campaign funds mobilised by the combined Marcos-Duterte machinery.

Thousands of Robredo supporters did house-to-house campaigns and used their own money to produce the campaign’s pink-themed wristbands and t-shirts and distribute food at rallies. Artists, bands and actors wrote songs, painted murals, performed and endorsed her campaign on social media. Hundreds of thousands joined her rallies in many key cities – the last one held in Manila had 700,000 attendees. Those rallies were the biggest in Philippine electoral history.

Robredo’s campaign in just six months generated a lot of inspiration and put up a very good fight but time was not on their side. The toughest battle was on social media, which was central to Marcos’s campaign.

He shunned TV debates and avoided questions

from media seen as unfriendly, while internet trolls spread lies about Robredo and distorted the history of the Marcos dictatorship and martial law. Such historical denialism will sadly continue.

Marcos’s popularity can also be attributed to the failure of the country’s education system to educate the population about the brutality of the martial law period.

The media and the church share this responsibility. What has been lost, and with terrible effect, is the collective social memory. There is also the bigger factor of the socio-economic conditions that make a large segment of the population vulnerable to historical distortion and denialism.

PART OF A WIDER GLOBAL PROBLEM The Marcoses’ restoration to power presents a crisis not just to Philippine democracy. The inclination towards authoritarianism and the rejection of liberal democracy, trolling and manipulation by the far-right media are globally shared problems.

Bongbong ran a Trumpian campaign.

It is expected that the already limited progress in holding the Marcoses to account for their various crimes and violations while they were out of power will grind to a halt now that the family are back in power.

What will now happen to an existing US verdict that holds Bongbong in contempt of court for failing to pay reparations to victims of his father's human rights violations?

More broadly, the Philippines is in a key geopolitical location. The question of how the Philippines relates to both China and the US in the coming years is key – and this election will have a big impact.

Dorothy Guerrero is head of policy at Global Justice Now. She was part of the people’s movement that overthrew Marcos in 1986.

© Basilio Sepe/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock

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IN PICTURES

A decade of resistance Migrant justice groups are marking ten years of resistance to the government’s hostile environment policies by vowing to continue the fight.

When Theresa May stood up in the House of Commons in April and criticised the government’s plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda on the grounds of “legality, practicality and efficacy”, it was a remarkable end to a spiral of anti-migrant hostility she had herself sparked as home secretary in 2012. Ever since she announced her intention “to create, here in Britain, a really hostile environment” for illegal immigrants, people across the country – from NHS workers to teachers, employers to bank workers – have been pressured into acting as border guards.

But from outrage at the Windrush scandal which followed, to successive legal challenges to the policy, which was found to be in breach of equalities law, as well as protests, campaigns and petitions, the hostile environment has been resisted every step of the way. A week of action in June, organised by the Solidarity Knows No Borders network, will continue the struggle.

For more info see: firmcharter.org.uk/week-of-action

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IN PICTURES

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1. Campaigners outside the Department for Education in 2017 call for a boycott of the school census used to build lists of foreign children attending schools in the UK. In June 2018 the government announced the data would no longer be sought. © Mark Kerrison/Alamy Live News

2. Londoner Marcia Fredericks outside the Home Office in April 2018. She was refused cancer treatment by the NHS due to a mix-up over her date of birth, even though she is a British citizen. © Andy Rain/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

3. Campaigners from Docs Not Cops protest outside St Thomas’s Hospital in 2017 against the government’s hostile environment measures requiring NHS trusts to demand patients’ immigration status before giving treatment. © Mark Kerrison/Alamy Live News

4. Protestors in Pollokshields, Glasgow, block an immigration enforcement van after an attempted raid was carried out in May 2021.

After a long stand-off, two men who had been detained were released. © Ewan Bootman/NurPhoto/Shutterstock

2022 Ninety-Nine 17

DEBT JUSTICE

Do Zambia’s lenders care about human life?

Zambia is spending half its budget on debt, as it deals with the impacts of the pandemic, writes ENGWASE MWALE. Debt has put a huge strain on Zambia’s national budget over the last decade, and Covid-19 has made the situation worse. The government is spending almost 50% of its budget on debt repayments, and as a result spending on critical social sectors has shrunk.

Zambia’s target is to spend 15% of the national budget on health, but since 2012 it has been around 8 to 9%. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, most of our facilities were quite short on important health accessories, equipment and also drugs. Like many African countries, Zambia has had challenges to access Covid vaccines – even today less than 30% of people are vaccinated.

When it comes to Zambia’s lenders, we feel let down by the fact that the debt situation went overboard and our lenders seemingly did

© Xinhua/Shutte rstock

Many rural education facilities still need to be improved, especially secondary schools. There is often not enough funding to ensure they are built and completed, sometimes several years down the line. Many learners are completing primary education but struggling to get to secondary education.

When Zambia’s previous government was procuring most of the loans, the funds were going largely to infrastructure like roads and bridges, without a corresponding investment into production and manufacturing to make sure that there was economic growth. Even as the debt was increasing, unemployment levels were going up. We saw quite a lot of youth and women getting into the informal sector, with no job security.

In the 2021 elections, the people of Zambia and the majority youth came out in numbers to vote for a change of government. People felt that by and large they had been left behind. I think people are quite hopeful that the New Dawn

18 Ninety-Nine 2022

government is providing a new direction.

not have the aspirations of ordinary citizens in mind. We had expected that those who were lending Zambia funds at very exorbitant interest rates would take a keen interest in some of the accountability issues being highlighted by the auditor-general’s reports. But they didn’t.

Today any lender that has regard for life would need to look at what is happening and ask ‘How can we help the people of Zambia to be able to regain their economic position as a country?’ It is on this basis that as the Civil Society Debt Alliance we are appealing to all those lenders that have a heart for Zambia to consider cancelling the debt – to provide an opportunity for Zambia to get back on its economic trajectory from a clean slate.

Engwase Mwale is a member of the Zambian Civil Society Debt Alliance. This article is based on a talk she gave to a webinar in April. Watch more at: globaljustice.org.uk/zambia-webinar

A market in Lusaka, capital of Zambia.

Fewer than three in ten Zambians have received a Covid-19 vaccine.

REVIEWS

Reviews VACCINE WARS: THE TRUTH ABOUT PFIZER

Dispatches Channel 4, December 2021

BUTLER TO THE WORLD:

HOW BRITAIN BECAME THE SERVANT OF TYCOONS, TAX DODGERS, KLEPTOCRATS AND CRIMINALS

Oliver Bullough Profile Books, 2022 The British government’s reluctant pivot to trash-talking (and eventually sanctioning) Russian oligarchs following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine must have caused sleepless nights in Whitehall. After all, as Oliver Bullough reveals in this finely-told account of how Britain stumbled into a new global role in the aftermath of the Suez crisis, impeccable manners in the face of financial skulduggery are fundamental to the business model.

His central metaphor, of the UK as a butler helping some of the world’s worst people get away with whatever they will pay to get away with, might initially feel too soft. But it captures the combination of consigliere and smooth talker that only the City of London can provide. In doing so it punctures the self-importance of ‘Global Britain’ – we now have the freedom to be even more subservient to the global superrich. Though, as Bullough stresses, we have long had the freedom to choose the opposite course.

Jonathan Stevenson

Pfizer's Covid-19 vaccine – actually developed by German start-up BioNTech – recently became the most profitable drug in history. Yet most of the world is still unable to access it. With a new generation of vaccines due at similar prices in the autumn, this is a great time to brush up on the reality of this biggest of big pharma giants, via Channel 4’s Dispatches investigation, available on catch-up and online.

It covers Pfizer’s exorbitant pricing of its vaccine for the NHS, its profiteering from the monopoly over the technology and the refusal to share its know-

how to available manufacturers in the global south. To top it all off, we see evidence of presentations given

by Pfizer-funded organisers to medical professionals in Canada implying the AstraZeneca jab could lead to cancer. Such outrageous claims helped fuel vaccine hesitancy, with deadly impacts across the world. By shining a light on Pfizer’s ‘war profiteering’, there is plenty here to motivate us to keep our fight going.

Alena Ivanova

DON’T LOOK UP Adam McKay, 2021 2hrs 21 mins While Don’t Look Up does a good job of ridiculing a media, political and capitalist elite which prioritises profit over life with literally world-ending consequences, I was left feeling that the metaphor of climate-crisis-ascomet is ultimately flawed.

By presenting the climate crisis as a force of nature, for which we’re all equally responsible, it suggests our salvation will be found in white Western technology that ultimately requires zero behaviour change. When Leonardo DiCaprio's character reflects, "we really did have everything”, he isn’t speaking for most people on the planet. The people of colour who have been ringing the alarm bell for

decades are conspicuously absent in this film, as are their modes of resistance to the climate crisis.

Ultimately, you can’t organise in the face of a comet. Luckily for us the climate crisis is not a comet, but a symptom of a toxic system: one that can be dismantled and rebuilt.

Daisy Pearson

Global Justice Now and Jubilee for Climate present

Hope

in the

dark

Climate breakdown, reparations and a just transition

Saturday 9 July 2022, 1–6pm • Owen Building, Sheffield Hallam University More info: globaljustice.org.uk/hope

Lumumba Di-Aping Former UN climate negotiator Esther Stanford-Xosei Reparations scholar-activist Nick Dearden Global Justice Now Nick Anim Jubilee for Climate Maggie Mason South Lakes Action on Climate Change