Facebook e Google, certo, ma il sistema di fatturazione elettronica realizzato dall'Agenzia delle Entrate è molto più pericoloso, e oltretutto non se ne può restare fuori. Nonostante i toni accomodanti del Ministro delle Finanze, il Garante dipinge un ritratto a tinte fosche e impone il divieto di fattura elettronica per certi tipi di prestazioni. E impone al Ministero cambiamenti pesantissimi entro Aprile.

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the second week of January, 2019.

Bash 5.0 released
January 07, 2019 (comments)

BUGS

It's too big and too slow.

Still. Hackernews can't decide if this shell cribs enough code from its competitors, does not crib enough code from its competitors, or should be entirely replaced by code from its competitors. Most of the comments are complaints about the ancient version of this software that ships on their fashion accessories, even though none of them have any concrete reason to care. The rest of the comments are people recommending bad code as a reference to learn how to create time-delayed problems for other people later on.

Sears has another chance to avoid closing down
January 08, 2019 (comments)
The petulant infant in charge of driving an American commercial institution directly into a volcano receives a six hundredth second chance. Hackernews argues extensively about whether a business with a hundred-year head start and an identical business model could possibly have stood a chance against the unavoidable ascendance of Amazon. Many other threads are devoted to pointing out that perhaps things would have gone differently, had it not been for the human barrelfish inexcusably allowed to participate in adult business transactions with actual money.

Penguin travels every year to visit man who rescued him (2016)
January 09, 2019 (comments)
A pensioner pretends to be able to tell birds apart. One Hackernews recounts being bullshitted by a teacher about whether penguins can fly... and comes out the other end blaming the penguins for the humiliation. A different pack of Hackernews argue over whether it is possible to domesticate animals, while the bulk of the comments -- almost a third -- wistfully speculate on whether it's possible for animals to experience human emotions. Most Hackernews express regret that they must kill and eat animals to survive, even though they're talking about a story involving an animal none of them have ever eaten. No technology is discussed.

How I Built a $5K a Month Side Project
January 10, 2019 (comments)
A grifter writes vague motivational blogspam about how to swim in money. The latest grift involves attempting to "help companies tell stories that inspire with new company," which is both a grammatical disaster and the most bullshit possible business* model. Hackernews enumerates all the ways they've tried to wring dollars from the unsuspecting, generally involving liberal application of webshit. One Hackernews realizes the grifter is in fact an e-mail spammer, but the rest of the Hackernews point out that at least it's quality spam. Another group of Hackernews debates whether money tastes better if you bleed on it first.

I Can No Longer Recommend Google Fi
January 11, 2019 (comments)
A dipshit discovers that Google does not waste time or money on customer service. Hackernews staffs the lectern in shifts, explaining why it just wouldn't make any sense for Google to give a shit about the people whose money and data they collect, and it's best to just lie back and think of Adsense.

GoDaddy injecting JavaScript into websites and how to stop it
January 12, 2019 (comments)
A webshit finally pays attention to the garbage faucet, and is outraged to discover a tracking script someone else dropped in the stream. Hackernews shares in the outrage, and bickers over which domain registrar they should use to host websites. The rest of the comments are Hackernews getting nerd-sniped into escalating the surveillance webshit arms race.

The Man in Seat Sixty-One
January 13, 2019 (comments)
A train enthusiast sells information about trains. Hackernews knows a lot about trains -- that is, any given Hackernews who has ridden a train is an expert on that particular train.

Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, and databases
January 14, 2019 (comments)
Some webshits make some webshit to centralize all your other webshit. Hackernews dives right in with third-party client software, since webshit is their native language. Later, it turns out the data-scraping webshit also, as it happens, collects as much possible data about every single move you make, to everyone's profound surprise. Other Hackernews pine for some kind of alien technology that would enable them to record and organize text. The problem remains unsolved.

Writing an OS in Rust: Introduction to Paging
January 14, 2019 (comments)
The Rust Evangelism Strike Force throws a fancy-dress party, where Rust dresses up as a programming language anyone wants to use for non-webshit tasks. Hackernews finds the material commendably approachable, which is a natural condition that arises from hypothetical programming. Sadly, while the article itself receives a frenzy of vote increases, the content is technical, so Hackernews observes the traditional ten-to-one vote to comment ratio. Most of the comments thirst for embedded systems development in Rust, which is of course a perfect fit for a language so elegant and lightweight that it must be implemented in six million lines of C++ grafted onto a multi-gigabyte compiler toolchain.

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* business here used in the most general form, to wit: accepting someone else's money.

di Riccardo Orioles e Giovanni Caruso

Bisogna aiutare l’Africa a casa sua, certamente. E bisogna fare antimafia, un sacco d’antimafia. Lo dice Corrado Labisi, Gran Maestro della “Serenissima loggia del Sud”, promotore di convegni in Africa nonché fondatore della gloriosa “associazione antimafia Livatino” (premi, convegni e trombonate varie). L’hanno arrestato a luglio per una serie di imbrogli fra cui, pare, traffici di diamanti in Africa (“Aiutiamo le nostre tasche a casa loro”).

E chi è il propagandista di Labisi, il “fratello” vicedirettore del suo giornale? L’onorevole (spera lui) Fabio Cantarella, nemico di africani e barboni (memorabile il suo blitz a san Berillo col vice-Salvini Stefano Candiani, quest’estate), siciliano per caso ma brianzolo onorario, arrapatissimo al pensiero delle prossime elezioni: assessore a Catania (a che? ai rifiuti) non gli basta più, e deve in ogni maniera farsi vedere, mettersi in mostra, far parlare di sé.

C’è una manifestazione antimafia: che migliore occasione? E subito si fionda in prima fila, appena dopo lo striscione. Ma purtroppo per lui, non è una delle manifestazioni “antimafia” del Gran Maestro, ma antimafia vera, i Siciliani giovani addirittura. Una signora lo riconosce e garbatamente gli chiede che faccia là. Lui dà in escandescenze. La gente comincia a voltarsi, don Ciotti lo guarda perplesso, qualche ragazzo comincia a fare “Razzista! Via di qua!”. Lui imbestialisce, si lancia, arrivano i poliziotti e, urlante e scalciante, se lo portano via.

L’antimafia va avanti col suo corteo, e il nostro giorno dopo il Cantarella rilascia dichiarazioni e interviste sui suoi diritti di cittadino, sui “comunisti” cattivi e sugli “antagonisti” feroci che violentano e mettono al rogo chiunque non la pensi come loro. Ma tutto quel che è successo è che per una volta è incappato nell’antimafia vera, quella che non imbroglia la gente e non permette ai “fratelli” dei truffatori di giocare col nome di Giuseppe Fava. A parte ciò, ciascuno – nelle manifestazioni dei Siciliani – la pensa come vuole: è 30 anni che qui si fanno cortei unitari con tutti, dal notaio liberale all’“autonomo” arrabbiato, a condizione che almeno quel giorno tutti rispettino tutti e non siano, ovviamente, “fratelli” di gente losca. (Quella stessa mattina, ad esempio, la “nemica” – politicamente – assessora Barbara Mirabella era stata a trovare i Siciliani al Giardino di Scidà, con molta correttezza e cortesia, ed era stata accolta con la cortesia e correttezza che meritava).

Poi la politica c’entra, come c’è sempre entrata a partire da Giuseppe Fava. Che non era l’intellettualino borghese che piacerebbe a tanti, ma un militante civile, senza partito, che si batteva senza riserve per le cause umane: non solo l’antimafia (I quattro cavalieri dell’apocalisse mafiosa) ma anche il pacifismo (Ti lascio in eredità i missili di Comiso) e i dolori degli emigranti (La passione di Michele).

* * *

I Siciliani di oggi, che non a caso si chiamano Siciliani giovani (e prima o poi qualcuno vorrà pur ringraziare, fra i grandi dell’antimafia, la generosità e l’impegno di questi ragazzi), continuano le idee e le battaglie di Giuseppe Fava, esattamente quelle, non una parola di meno, non una parola di più. Se Palma di Montechiaro, nel frattempo, si è spostata in Africa e se dalle valigie di cartone si è passati ai gommoni, e dai vecchi avvocati mafiosi ai nuovi allegri gerarchi padaneggianti, a noi non interessa: noi restiamo fedeli a Giuseppe Fava, e chi vuol dare una mano è benvenuto, e chi vuol far finta antimafia no. Di quest’ultima siamo i primi nemici e con essa, ci spiace, ma siamo del tutto intolleranti. Chiedetelo ad Antonello Montante, il capo di Confindustria finito in galera coi mafiosi: sono stati i Siciliani giovani a smascherarlo per primi, e figuratevi se abbiamo voglia di impietosirci di fronte a qualche “fratello” di loggia siculopadana.

Ci rivediamo l’anno prossimo, amiche e amici nostri, senza tante storie. Sempre a gennaio e sempre il cinque, sempre tutti diversi e tutti insieme, e sempre con la garanzia dei Siciliani, che qui antimafia fasulla non ce n’è e mai ce ne faremo entrare.

L'articolo Catania, l’assessore Cantarella contestato al corteo per Pippo Fava. Si è imbattuto nell’antimafia vera proviene da Il Fatto Quotidiano.

all'uscita dal periodo più buio dell'anno, due Piccole storie vere sulla reale portata delle tecnologie che ci circondano. Il 2019 sarà un anno di cui ci ricorderemo

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the first week of January, 2019.

Mickey Mouse and Batman will soon be public domain
January 01, 2019 (comments)
The world celebrates as the creators and artists in our society prepare to contextualize for us the hottest trends and thought-leadership of the Harding administration. Hackernews doesn't really give a shit about the content of any of the newly-public-domain intellectual property; they're just chomping at the bit to demonstrate their nuanced and insightful mastery of the 'copyright' and 'trademark' hashtags on medium.com.

Algorithms, by Jeff Erickson
January 02, 2019 (comments)
An academic crowdsources some free copy-editing services. This is obviously a terrible and exploitative process, as evinced by the fact that n-gate does it the same way. Hackernews doesn't have much to say about the content of the book, but once the author shows up in the comments, it turns into a Q&A session about how to academia.

Software Engineering at Google (2017)
January 03, 2019 (comments)
A Google writes a sales brochure for Google's software engineering recruiters. Literally none of the reported 'practices' are new to Google, but at least the author gets to write in the first-person plural. Hackernews reads tea leaves to associate inexplicably unpleasant experiences with Google products with the engineering practices that might have caused them, maybe. Anyone who doesn't immediately understand a given report is given an avuncular lecture about the infirmity of Man and the necessity of a heavenly father, guiding us all from the Mountain View campus.

Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App
January 04, 2019 (comments)
An elderly* webshit lectures aspirants on the ineluctability of the nodal V8-fold path. Hackernews agrees, but can't figure out why. Lots of sage opinions are expressed, but since the primary sources of app-download metrics and the primary sources of webshit-traffic metrics have every reason to juke their stats, Hackernews is doomed to strive in ignorance, with only blogspam like this to guide them.

Taxpayers Should Never Subsidize Stadiums
January 05, 2019 (comments)
A journalist is still mad about the Jets leaving Hofstra. Hackernews thinks the article is about whatever town they live in, so most of the comments are about San Francisco. The largest comment thread is devoted to debating whether the citizens of a democracy have the authority to legislate the behavior of an elected government.

How to Start Learning Computer Graphics Programming
January 06, 2019 (comments)
A mid-career* games developer provides advice at a rate of approximately eight words per day since grad school. A Hackernews wants people to try a specific university-course approach, but the rest of the pack insists that the only way to learn any topic is by rigorously following the exact protocol that any given Hackernews followed, and any other approach is doomed to failure.

Announcing unlimited free private repos
January 07, 2019 (comments)
GitHub gives us permission to keep our shit to ourselves, as long as we don't work together on any of it. Hackernews regards this move as a major business modification, since GitHub had previously worked very hard to convince these clods that anyone at all was paying for this garbage. Throwing that hypothetical revenue in the trash is regarded as brilliant, pending Hackernews' analysis of what Microsoft is playing at here.

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* - elderly, adj. possessed of more than five years of experience.
* - mid-career, adj. possessed of approximately six months of experience.

Di auguri, per noi esseri umani, c’è davvero bisogno: perché il 2019 non sarà un anno banale. Nel mondo occidentale, così bello e crudele, Adolf Hitler nasce a poca distanza da Mozart, e l’italiano brava gente si alterna con quello dei genocidi in Etiopia o in Croazia. Periodicamente un quarto degli italiani si riscopre feroce, dapprima in teoria e poi nella pratica concreta.

Siamo in una di queste fasi e ogni volta non è facile, per quelli rimasti civili, ricondurre a ragione la parte ubriaca. Oggi, in particolare, i problemi sono tre:

1. l’informazione disinformante e l’insegnamento regressivo;

2. il modello mafioso che da criminale è diventato egemone, specie ma non soltanto nell’imprenditoria;

3. il cinismo politico che compera le poltrone con l’odio fra i miserabili e la libertà dei padroni.

Per noi dei Siciliani – in quanto giornalisti, in quanto antimafiosi e come cittadini – sono questi i tre campi di battaglia, che certo non dipendono solo da noi ma in cui facciamo pure la nostra parte. Catania – metafora d’Italia – città fallita, città avvelenata e corrotta dal giornalismo mafioso, città in cui nessuno osa guardare in faccia né il fallimento né il veleno, città da cui i ragazzi fuggono in massa per non essere stritolati. Eppure città coraggiosa davanti alle grandi ferocie dalla natura: ricostruita più volte, ardita di fronte ai vulcani e ai terremoti, ma stranamente vile di fronte ai meschini tiranni che tranquillamente la spolpano ogni anno e ogni giorno.

Così, il lavoro da fare non è difficile da comprendere: combattere i distruttori, incivilire i cittadini, non cedere d’un millimetro di fronte al male e continuamente allargarsi, con curiosità e ottimismo, su terreni nuovi. La forza dei Siciliani son sempre stati i giovani, è loro questo miracolo per cui dopo tanti anni ci siamo ancora.

Quest’anno il nostro 5 gennaio sarà un po’ diverso dal solito: oltre al solito corteo silenzioso (rigorosamente senza simboli di partito) e all’incontro alla lapide di Pippo Fava a Catania, l’assemblea dei Siciliani sarà divisa fra varie città collegate in rete. È un salto di qualità del nostro tradizionale “facciamo rete”: ora le tecnologie ci consentono di lavorare insieme fra Catania e Milano, fra Napoli e Bologna, di imparare/insegnarci reciprocamente quel che sappiamo, non una volta ogni tanto ma ogni momento. Così, senza grandi parole ma concretamente, senza crederci il centro di niente ma sapendo di essere utili a qualcosa, comincia un altro anno dei Siciliani.

Foto in evidenza tratta dalla pagina Facebook “I Siciliani”

L'articolo Gli anni passano, i problemi no. La missione dei ‘Siciliani’ per il 2019 è combattere proviene da Il Fatto Quotidiano.

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the last week of December, 2018.

Countries that have preoccupied Americans the most since 1900
December 22, 2018 (comments)
A webshit conflates America and the New York Times. Hackernews contains many ideas about why other countries pay so much attention to America, all of which are completely informed by whatever the commenter remembers from secondary-school economics classes. Most Hackernews opt to bikeshed the pictograph, which leads to some wonderful new phrases, my favorite of which is about how a "line chart would forgo the act of scrolling which would eliminate the narrative feel" of a gigantic series of flags.

Congress votes to make open government data the default in the United States
December 23, 2018 (comments)
The United States Congress finally and irrevocably repairs every present and potential problem with government data by demanding that computers can read it. Hackernews performs post-mortems on all the previous times the world's problems were solved by putting data into computers.

DOOMBA
December 24, 2018 (comments)
An Internet manages to come up with a valid reason to own a robotic vacuum cleaner. Because most of the content is technical, Hackernews has almost nothing to say about it, aside from generally being pleased about it. To pass the time, they discuss methods of preventing comment spam instead.

New Office Hours Aim for Well Rested, More Productive Workers
December 25, 2018 (comments)
A credulous journalist continues the centuries-old tradition of reporting the very latest wild-ass guess about how sleep works. Hackernews doesn't slow down to read anything, much less an 1800-word treatise on sleep -- not when Hackernews has their own 1800-word treatises on sleep to post. A very large thread is derived from reports on the behavior of a handful of employees one Hackernews micromanages for a living. Most of the comments are people comparing the article in question to whichever such article the commenter encountered first.

Hospital prices are about to go public in the U.S.
December 26, 2018 (comments)
The United States Department of Health & Human Services finally and irrevocably repairs every present and potential problem with health care costs by demanding that humans can read them with computers. Hackernews recounts every fistfight they've ever had with an insurance company and trades hand-to-hand combat tips for surviving the experience. A few Hackernews recount heavenly examples of healthcare nirvana experienced in foreign lands, but for some reason they came back.

Please do not attempt to simplify this code
December 27, 2018 (comments)
A Google experiments with cutting-edge development methodologies: "understanding the code" and "documenting the code." Hackernews hails these innovations as further proof of the timeless nature of Google's natural place at the forefront of all human endeavor. Elsewhere in the comments, Hackernews formulates the Law of Conservation of Complexity, then debates where the dark matter might be hiding in Kubernetes. Theories abound, impromptu abbreviations are created to describe various flavors of complexity, and hundreds of comments appear whining that other developers never document anything well enough. Hackernews, of course, is fastidious in their documentation practices, unless they get distracted or bored.

Things I Don’t Know as of 2018
December 28, 2018 (comments)
A webshit decides to learn how computers work outside of web browsers, and makes a list of target topics to study. Hackernews pretends to like the idea, but it's not about something really important like the pursuit of sleep or new books about project management, so they don't have a lot to say. Everyone decides to talk about webshit instead.

Inter UI, a typeface designed for user interfaces
December 29, 2018 (comments)
A webshit makes a font that is designed for user interfaces, which is font-nerd equivalent of writing a Hello World program. Hackernews spends a little while arguing over whether and how to configure CSS to do things that are built into the computer. Of course, new versions of CSS will support this native thing natively Real Soon Now. Once the incisive technical debate is over, Hackernews gets back to bikeshedding ligatures, which is all anyone really wanted out of a font story.

Larry Roberts has died
December 30, 2018 (comments)
A man has died, so Hackernews presses the upvote arrow, since that's the closest approximation of human emotion any of them have. Although the deceased leaves behind a lifetime of great work, Hackernews hasn't ever heard the name, so they don't have as much to say about this as they do about, for example, some webshit's font hobby. One comment is from someone who met the deceased, but nobody responds, because everyone is too busy incorrecting each other about networks.

Netflix stops paying the ‘Apple tax’ on its $853M in annual iOS revenue
December 31, 2018 (comments)
A wealthy tenant moves out of Cupertino's garden. Hackernews recognizes Apple's rent-seeking business model for what it is, but is primarily outraged that this change might cause them to have to do business with someone who isn't Apple. The rest of Hackernews rejoices, believing that this is the beginning of the revolution which will end in their regaining control of their pocket computers. No word is handed down as to whether Netflix will accept Apple Pay.

Better luck next year.

The heart organ beats on average 60-80 times per minute, about 100,000 per day, and about 35 million times per year. The entire vascular system is approximately 60,000 miles in length and circulates nearly 5-6 liters of blood three times a minute, totaling 2,000 gallons of blood circulated each day (Cleveland Clinic, 2016).
#medicine

von Marc Speer  Seit Beginn des Jahres 2018 lässt sich ein massiver Anstieg der Flüchtlingszahlen in Bosnien ausmachen, weshalb  bordermontioring.eu im September 2018 Sarajevo und die bosnisch-kroatische Grenzregion besuchte, um ein Bild von der Situation vor Ort zu bekommen. Die Eindrücke dieser Reise und die mittlerweile zahlreichen NGO- und Presseberichte stellen die Basis für die folgenden … Neue Balkanroute über Bosnien weiterlesen →

In 1998 Disney had the copyright law changed to keep Steamboat Willie (Mickey Mouse) from entering the public domain. So no copyrighted works have entered the public domain for 20 years. That ends next year and we will start seeing stuff from 95 years ago, and year by year, more stuff.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/first-time-20-years-copyrighted-works-enter-public-domain-180971016

#Disney #MickeyMouse #Copyright #PublicDomain #HappyNewYear

@[Gabriel](/people/aeb5c9c0dab3013535016045cba866e7) 24.12.2018, 17:25:08

via @[alfredo](/people/c9983f2181bd9bc5)

The #Climate #Biz : #Corporations purchasing solar power to serve your big data

Let me think about it : If you are a clean corporation like MS, why don’t use clean energy for you bizzz?

With recent deals, #Microsoft said it has met its target to power at least 50 percent of its #data centers with clean #energy by 2018, and the company wants to achieve 60 percent clean energy by early 2020.

https://dia.so/2NX

---

But...

the real problem is toxic waste!

Solar panels often contain lead, cadmium, and other toxic chemicals that cannot be removed without breaking apart the entire panel. “Approximately 90% of most PV modules are made up of glass,” notes San Jose State environmental studies professor Dustin Mulvaney. “However, this glass often cannot be recycled as float glass due to impurities. Common problematic impurities in glass include plastics, lead, cadmium and antimony.” -> https://dia.so/2NY

#solarpower #ecology #ambient #pollution #life

https://diasp.org/posts/11132237

If Solar Panels Are So Clean, Why Do They Produce So Much Toxic Waste?

Environmental scientists and solar industry leaders are raising the red flag about used solar panels, which contain toxic heavy metals and are considered hazardous waste. With recycling expensive,…

Article word count: 2507

HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18751049

Posted by vixen99 (karma: 1609)

Post stats: Points: 89 - Comments: 86 - 2018-12-24T08:02:28Z

#HackerNews #are #clean #much #panels #produce #solar #they #toxic #waste #why

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Article content:

Bell Labs, 1954. Solar Panel Waste, 2014Bell Labs & PV Cycle

Para la traducción al español, haga [1]clic aquí

The last few years have seen growing concern over what happens to solar panels at the end of their life. Consider the following statements:

 * The problem of solar panel disposal “will explode with full force in two or three decades and wreck the environment” because it “is a huge amount of waste and they are not easy to recycle.”
 * “The reality is that there is a problem now, and it’s only going to get larger, expanding as rapidly as the PV industry expanded 10 years ago.”
 * “Contrary to previous assumptions, pollutants such as lead or carcinogenic cadmium can be almost completely washed out of the fragments of solar modules over a period of several months, for example by rainwater.”

Were these statements made by the right-wing Heritage Foundation? Koch-funded global warming deniers? The editorial board of the Wall Street Journal?

None of the above. Rather, the quotes come from [2]a senior Chinese solar official, [3]a 40-year veteran of the U.S. solar industry, and [4]research scientists with the German Stuttgart Institute for Photovoltaics.

With few environmental journalists willing to report on much of anything other than the good news about renewables, it’s been left to environmental scientists and solar industry leaders to raise the alarm.

“I’ve been working in solar since 1976 and that’s part of my guilt,” the veteran [5]solar developer told Solar Power World last year. “I’ve been involved with millions of solar panels going into the field, and now they’re getting old.”

The Trouble With Solar Waste

The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) in 2016 estimated there was about 250,000 metric tonnes of solar panel waste in the world at the end of that year. [6]IRENA projected that this amount could reach 78 million metric tonnes by 2050.

Solar panels often contain lead, cadmium, and other toxic chemicals that cannot be removed without breaking apart the entire panel. “Approximately 90% of most PV modules are made up of glass,” [7]notes San Jose State environmental studies professor Dustin Mulvaney. “However, this glass often cannot be recycled as float glass due to impurities. Common problematic impurities in glass include plastics, lead, cadmium and antimony.”

Researchers with the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) [8]undertook a study for U.S. solar-owning utilities to plan for end-of-life and concluded that solar panel “disposal in “regular landfills [is] not recommended in case modules break and toxic materials leach into the soil” and so “disposal is potentially a major issue.”

California is in the process of [9]determining how to divert solar panels from landfills, which is where they currently go, at the end of their life.

Californiaʼs Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC), which is implementing the new regulations, [10]held a meeting last August with solar and waste industry representatives to discuss how to deal with the issue of solar waste. At the meeting, the representatives from industry and DTSC all acknowledged how difficult it would be to test to determine whether a solar panel being removed would be classified as hazardous waste or not.

The DTSC described building a database where solar panels and their toxicity could be tracked by their model numbers, but itʼs not clear DTSC will do this.

"The theory behind the regulations is to make [disposal] less burdensome," explained Rick Brausch of DTSC. "Putting it as universal waste eliminates the testing requirement."

The fact that cadmium can be washed out of solar modules by rainwater is increasingly a concern for local environmentalists like the Concerned Citizens of Fawn Lake in Virginia, where a [11]6,350 acre solar farm to partly power [12]Microsoft data centers is being proposed.

“We estimate there are 100,000 pounds of cadmium contained in the 1.8 million panels,” Sean Fogarty of the group told me. “Leaching from broken panels damaged during natural events — hail storms, tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, etc. — and at decommissioning is a big concern.”  

There is real-world precedent for this concern. A tornado in 2015 broke 200,000 solar modules at southern California solar farm Desert Sunlight.

"Any modules that were broken into small bits of glass had to be swept from the ground," Mulvaney explained, "so lots of rocks and dirt got mixed in that would not work in recycling plants that are designed to take modules. These were the cadmium-based modules that failed [hazardous] waste tests, so were treated at a [hazardous] waste facility. But about 70 percent of the modules were actually sent to recycling, and the recycled metals are in new panels today."

And when Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico last September, the nation’s second largest solar farm, responsible for 40 percent of the island’s solar energy, [13]lost a majority of its panels.

Destroys Solar Farm in Puerto RicoBob Meinetz

Many experts urge mandatory recycling. The main finding promoted by IRENAʼs in its [14]2016 report was that, “If fully injected back into the economy, the value of the recovered material [from used solar panels] could exceed USD 15 billion by 2050.”

But IRENA’s study did not compare the value of recovered material to the cost of new materials and admitted that “Recent studies agree that PV material availability is not a major concern in the near term, but critical materials might impose limitations in the long term.”

They might, but today recycling costs more than the economic value of the materials recovered, which is why most solar panels end up in landfills. “The absence of valuable metals/materials produces economic losses,” [15]wrote a team of scientists in the International Journal of Photoenergy in their study of solar panel recycling last year, and “Results are coherent with the literature.”

Chinese and Japanese experts agree. “If a recycling plant carries out every step by the book,” a Chinese expert told [16]The South China Morning Post, “their products can end up being more expensive than new raw materials.”

Toshiba Environmental Solutions [17]told Nikkei Asian Review last year that,

 Low demand for scrap and the high cost of employing workers to disassemble the aluminum frames and other components will make it difficult to create a profitable business unless recycling companies can charge several times more than the target set by [Japan’s environment ministry].

Can Solar Producers Take Responsibility?

In 2012, First Solar [18]stopped putting a share of its revenues into a fund for long-term waste management. "Customers have the option to use our services when the panels get to the end of life stage," a spokesperson told Solar Power World. “We’ll do the recycling, and they’ll pay the price at that time.”

Or they won’t. “Either it becomes economical or it gets mandated. ” [19]said EPRI’s Cara Libby. “But I’ve heard that it will have to be mandated because it won’t ever be economical.”

Last July, Washington became the first U.S. state to require manufacturers selling solar panels to have a plan to recycle. But the legislature did not require manufacturers to pay a fee for disposal. “Washington-based solar panel manufacturer Itek Energy assisted with the bill’s writing,” [20]noted Solar Power World.

The problem with putting the responsibility for recycling or long-term storage of solar panels on manufacturers, says [21]the insurance actuary Milliman, is that it increases the risk of more financial failures like the kinds that afflicted the solar industry over the last decade.

[A]ny mechanism that finances the cost of recycling PV modules with current revenues is not sustainable. This method raises the possibility of bankruptcy down the road by shifting today’s greater burden of ‘caused’ costs into the future. When growth levels off then PV producers would face rapidly increasing recycling costs as a percentage of revenues.

[22]Since 2016, Sungevity, Beamreach, Verengo Solar, SunEdison, Yingli Green Energy, [23]Solar World, and Suniva have gone bankrupt.

The result of such bankruptcies is that the cost of managing or recycling PV waste will be born by the public. “In the event of company bankruptcies, PV module producers would no longer contribute to the recycling cost of their products,” [24]notes Milliman, “leaving governments to decide how to deal with cleanup.”

Governments of poor and developing nations are often not equipped to deal with an influx of toxic solar waste, experts say. German researchers at the Stuttgart Institute for Photovoltaics [25]warned that poor and developing nations are at higher risk of suffering the consequences.

Maharashtra, India, 2014Dipak Sheelare

 Dangers and hazards of toxins in photovoltaic modules appear particularly large in countries where there are no orderly waste management systems… Especially in less developed countries in the so-called global south, which are particularly predestined for the use of photovoltaics because of the high solar radiation, it seems highly problematic to use modules that contain pollutants.

The attitude of some solar recyclers in China appears to feed this concern. “A sales manager of a solar power recycling company,” the [26]South China Morning News reported, “believes there could be a way to dispose of China’s solar junk, nonetheless.”

“We can sell them to Middle East… Our customers there make it very clear that they don’t want perfect or brand new panels. They just want them cheap… There, there is lots of land to install a large amount of panels to make up for their low performance. Everyone is happy with the result.”

In other words, there are firms that may advertise themselves as "solar panel recyclers" but instead sell panels to a secondary markets in nations with less developed waste disposal systems. In the past, communities living near electronic waste dumps in Ghana, Nigeria, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India have been [27]primary e-waste destinations.

According to [28]a 2015 United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) report, somewhere between 60 and 90 percent of electronic waste is illegally traded and dumped in poor nations. Writes UNEP:

 [T]housands of tonnes of e-waste are falsely declared as second-hand goods and exported from developed to developing countries, including waste batteries falsely described as plastic or mixed metal scrap, and cathode ray tubes and computer monitors declared as metal scrap.

Unlike other forms of imported e-waste, used solar panels can enter nations legally before eventually entering e-waste streams. [29]As the United Nation Environment Program notes, “loopholes in the current Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directives allow the export of e-waste from developed to developing countries (70% of the collected WEEE ends up in unreported and largely unknown destinations).”

A Path Forward on Solar Panel Waste

Perhaps the biggest problem with solar panel waste is that there is so much of it, and thatʼs not going to change any time soon, for a basic physical reason: [30]sunlight is dilute and diffuse and thus require large collectors to capture and convert the sunʼs rays into electricity. Those large surface areas, in turn, require an order of magnitude more in materials — whether todayʼs toxic combination of glass, heavy metals, and rare earth elements, or some new material in the future — than other energy sources.

Solar requires 15x more materials than nuclearEP

All of that waste creates a large quantity of material to track, which in turn requires requires coordinated, overlapping, and different responses at the international, national, state, and local levels.

The local level is where action to dispose of electronic and toxic waste takes place, often under state mandates. In the past, differing state laws have motivated the U.S. Congress to put in place national regulations. Industry often prefers to comply with a single national standard rather than multiple different state standards. And as the problem of the secondary market for solar shows, ultimately there needs to be some kind of international regulation.

The first step is a fee on solar panel purchases to make sure that the cost of safely removing, recycling or storing solar panel waste is internalized into the price of solar panels and not externalized onto future taxpayers. An obvious solution would be to impose a new fee on solar panels that would go into a federal disposal and decommissioning fund. The funds would then, in the future, be dispensed to state and local governments to pay for the removal and recycling or long-term storage of solar panel waste. The advantage of this fund over extended producer responsibility is that it would insure that solar panels are safely decommissioned, recycled, or stored over the long-term, even after solar manufacturers go bankrupt.

Second, the federal government should encourage citizen enforcement of laws to decommission, store, or recycle solar panels so that they do not end up in landfills. Currently, citizens have the right to file lawsuits against government agencies and corporations to force them to abide by various environmental laws, including ones that protect the public from toxic waste. Solar should be no different. Given the decentralized nature of solar energy production, and lack of technical expertise at the local level, it is especially important that the whole society be involved in protecting itself from exposure to dangerous toxins.

“We have a County and State approval process over the next couple months,” Fogarty of Concerned Citizens of Fawn Lake told me, “but it has become clear that local authorities have very little technical breadth to analyze the impacts of such a massive solar power plant.”

Lack of technical expertise can be a problem when solar developers like Sustainable Power Group, or sPower, [31]incorrectly claim that the cadmium in its panels is not water soluble. That claim has been contradicted by the previously-mentioned Stuttgart [32]research scientists who found cadmium from solar panels “can be almost completely washed out...over a period of several months...by rainwater.”

Third, the United Nations Environment Programme’s [33]Global Partnership for Waste Management, as part of its [34]International Environmental Partnership Center,  should more strictly monitor e-waste shipments and encourage nations importing used solar panels into secondary markets to impose a fee to cover the cost of recycling or long-term management. Such a recycling and waste management fund could help nations address their other e-waste problems while supporting the development of a new, high-tech industry in recycling solar panels.

None of this will come quickly, or easily, and some solar industry executives will resist internalizing the cost of safely storing, or recycling,  solar panel waste, perhaps for understandable reasons. They will rightly note that there are other kinds of electronic waste in the world. But it is notable that some new forms of electronic waste, namely smartphones like the iPhone, have in many cases replaced things like stereo systems, GPS devices, and alarm clocks and thus reduced their contribution to the e-waste stream. And no other electronics industry makes being “clean” its main selling point.

Wise solar industry leaders can learn from the past and be proactive in seeking stricter regulation in accordance with growing scientific evidence that solar panels pose a risk of toxic chemical contamination. “If waste issues are not preemptively addressed,” [35]warns Mulvaney, “the industry risks repeating the disastrous environmental mistakes of the electronics industry.”

If the industry responds with foresight, Mulvaney notes, it could end up sparking clean innovation including “developing PV modules without hazardous inputs and recycled rare metals." And thatʼs something everyone can get powered up about.

References

Visible links
1. https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vQi__sfgZAK5HDD5IDw1mWK560owVAFBrD4tLMb6CE2y-5_vn6245o-ja8C8J8m9ouzeLjj8YHGgtyz/pub
2. http://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2104162/chinas-ageing-solar-panels-are-going-be-big-environmental-problem
3. https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2018/04/its-time-to-plan-for-solar-panel-recycling-in-the-united-states/
4. https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article176294243/Studie-Umweltrisiken-durch-Schadstoffe-in-Solarmodulen.html
5. https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2018/04/its-time-to-plan-for-solar-panel-recycling-in-the-united-states/
6. http://www.irena.org/publications/2016/Jun/End-of-life-management-Solar-Photovoltaic-Panels
7. https://solarindustrymag.com/online/issues/SI1507/FEAT_02_Act-Now-To-Handle-The-Coming-Wave-Of-Toxic-PV-Waste.html
8. https://www.solarpowerinternational.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/N253_9-14-1530.pdf
9. https://www.dtsc.ca.gov/HazardousWaste/PVRegs.cfm
10. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2bYYpyHJv8&feature=youtu.be
11. http://www.fredericksburg.com/opinion/columns/column-planting-a-mega-solar-farm-in-spotsy-is-a/article_7a0043b3-af15-58a5-80b9-98ece15c95a6.html
12. http://www.richmond.com/business/local/microsoft-says-it-will-buy-power-from-virginia-s-largest/article_a9296399-1bbf-526e-9c42-eb534c9628d0.html
13. http://www.theweatherjunkies.com/single-post/2017/09/28/Puerto-Rican-Solar-Farms-Heavily-Damaged-By-Hurricane-Maria
14. http://www.irena.org/-/media/Files/IRENA/Agency/Publication/2016/IRENA_IEAPVPS_End-of-Life_Solar_PV_Panels_2016.pdf
15. https://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijp/2017/4184676/
16. http://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2104162/chinas-ageing-solar-panels-are-going-be-big-environmental-problem
17. https://asia.nikkei.com/Tech-Science/Tech/Japan-tries-to-chip-away-at-mountain-of-disused-solar-panels?page=2
18. https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2018/04/its-time-to-plan-for-solar-panel-recycling-in-the-united-states/
19. https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2018/04/its-time-to-plan-for-solar-panel-recycling-in-the-united-states/
20. https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2018/04/its-time-to-plan-for-solar-panel-recycling-in-the-united-states/
21. http://www.milliman.com/insight/insurance/Solar-cell-guarantees-When-recycling-gets-expensive/
22. https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/04/18/solar-shake-up-why-more-bankruptcies-are-coming-in.aspx
23. https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/05/19/bankruptcies-continue-in-solar-industry.aspx
24. http://www.milliman.com/insight/insurance/Solar-cell-guarantees-When-recycling-gets-expensive/
25. https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article176294243/Studie-Umweltrisiken-durch-Schadstoffe-in-Solarmodulen.html
26. http://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2104162/chinas-ageing-solar-panels-are-going-be-big-environmental-problem
27. https://www.unenvironment.org/news-and-stories/press-release/illegally-traded-and-dumped-e-waste-worth-19-billion-annually-poses
28. https://www.unenvironment.org/news-and-stories/press-release/illegally-traded-and-dumped-e-waste-worth-19-billion-annually-poses
29. http://web.unep.org/gpwm/what-we-do/e-waste-management
30. https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/04/25/yes-solar-and-wind-really-do-increase-electricity-prices-and-for-inherently-physical-reasons/#7e796c9c17e8
31. http://www.fredericksburg.com/news/local/debate-over-solar-farm-heats-up-in-spotsylvania/article_abf2e1fd-9483-5c07-a45a-987a54bee320.html
32. https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article176294243/Studie-Umweltrisiken-durch-Schadstoffe-in-Solarmodulen.html
33. http://web.unep.org/gpwm/what-we-do/integrated-solid-waste-management
34. http://web.unep.org/ietc/
35. https://solarindustrymag.com/online/issues/SI1507/FEAT_02_Act-Now-To-Handle-The-Coming-Wave-Of-Toxic-PV-Waste.html

HackerNewsBot debug: Calculated post rank: 88 - Loop: 107 - Rank min: 80 - Author rank: 9

Every sea turtle in global study found to have synthetic fibers and microplastics in their guts

https://news.mongabay.com/2018/12/every-sea-turtle-in-global-study-found-to-have-synthetic-fibers-and-microplastics-in-their-guts/

#humor #humour

Random image from the archives

APOD: 2008 March 19 - Mercury in Accentuated Color

The colors of Mercury are subtle but beautiful. At first glance, our Solar System's innermost planet appears simply black and white, but images that include infrared colors normally beyond human vision accentuate a world of detail. One such image, shown above, was acquired by the robotic MESSENGER spacecraft that swung by Mercury in mid-January. Here, most generally, the hot world itself acquires a slightly more brown hue. Many craters that appear on top of other craters -- and so surely have formed more recently -- appear here as bright with bright rays that include a slightly blue tint, indicating that soil upended during the impact was light in color. A few craters, such as some in the huge Caloris Basin impact feature visible on the upper right, appear unexpectedly to be ringed with a dark material, the nature of which is being researched. MESSENGER continues to glide through the inner Solar System and will pass Mercury again this October and next September, before entering orbit around the desolate world in 2011.

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap080319.html

#astronomy #picture #space #NASA #APOD

35 aniversario fundación / 35 aniversario alzamiento
#EZLN #CNI #NuncaMasUnMexicoSinNosotros
http://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/2018/11/17/invitacion-a-la-celebracion-del-25-aniversario-del-alzamiento-zapatista-y-a-un-encuentro-de-redes/

Hoy se conmemoran 21 años de la Matanza de Acteal...
Recuerdas que ocurrio? acá más información https://www.acteal.org/
#Acteal #CNI #NuncaMasUnMexicoSinNosotros

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the third week of December, 2018.

My Dad's Friendship with Charles Barkley
December 15, 2018 (comments)
A student reminisces about a famous person in her late father's life. Hackernews has opinions on sports and television, but since this story is primarily about human relationships, most of what Hackernews has to say is pretty gross. No technology is discussed.

Sandspiel – A falling sand game built in Rust and WebGL
December 16, 2018 (comments)
Thanks to decades of advances in webshit technology, the Rust Evangelism Strike Force proudly demonstrates, at long last, feature parity with a Turbo Pascal demo from 1994. This triggers a massive outbreak of nostalgia amongst Hackernews, but they shake it off long enough to pedantically whine about the physics of a toy simulation. After a short break to talk about how much better their toy simulation was, they get down to serious business: naming every program ever released that bears any characteristic at all resembling this webshit.

The Yoda of Silicon Valley
December 17, 2018 (comments)
A journalist manages to profile an alive member of the miniscule class of people who have done more good than harm with computers. Hackernews, unsatisfied with the one-day scope of the journalist's experience with the subject, compensates by recounting everything else the subject ever said to anyone, and several things nobody ever said.

Glitter bomb tricks parcel thieves
December 18, 2018 (comments)
A professional attention-gatherer gathers attention. Hackernews is mad at cops, parcel delivery personnel, thieves, and each other.

Bye Bye Mongo, Hello Postgres
December 19, 2018 (comments)
The Grauniad documents a needlessly painful recovery from a series of bad decisions. Hackernews is enthralled, since it's like reading a biography of themselves. All of the technical commentary involves people ardently defending a terrible database program. Some Grauniads appear, responding to criticism of the article by agreeing with the critics.

Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada
December 20, 2018 (comments)
A webshit IRC clone enforces the long-standing United States federal government ban on providing goods and services to people with the temerity to exist in lawless inimical rogue states like Canada. A few Hackernews opine that entrusting important communications to privately-controlled unfederable webshits might be foolish, but the rest of Hackernews immediately seizes them and drowns them in a barrel of gasoline. While this is the traditional punishment for suggesting open protocols in Silicon Valley, in this case the barrel is also ignited, because someone suggested that a non-programmer is capable of using any software except Google Chrome.

Indian government to intercept, monitor, and decrypt citizens’ computers
December 21, 2018 (comments)
The government of India thinks it's the Transportation Security Administration. Hackernews invokes the Fourth Amendment, which has never applied to either organization. While the main body of Hackernews gleefully engages in some good old-fashioned armchair constitutional lawyering, the rest of Hackernews are agreed: the government has no business intruding in people's personal computers. The advertisers don't like the competition.

I sistemi con cui svolgiamo lavoro intellettuale al computer sono arretrati dal livello che avevano trent'anni fa. Così, oggi, se si cerca di essere un lavoratore della conoscenza occorre fare qualche passo indietro nella scelta degli strumenti di lavoro.

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the second week of December, 2018.

Australia’s vague anti-encryption law sets a dangerous new precedent
December 08, 2018 (comments)
A webshit mailhost denounces a bad law in another country, apparently under the impression that anyone in Australia cares about the political opinions of some Swiss nerds. Hackernews doesn't really care about the mail service; this post was selected as the Armchair Legal Theorists meeting location for the month of December. The Hackernews interpretations of this set of laws range from "end of world" to "obviously just," and maybe it would matter which one was right, if Australia produced anything worth consuming now that John Clarke is gone. One Hackernews links to a Twitter thread containing a hypothetical implementation of the bad law in which JIRA foils the spies.

JIRA is an antipattern
December 09, 2018 (comments)
Australia fires the first volley in its campaign to discredit JIRA, which was yesterday determined to be the primary counterintelligence force stopping its spies from spying. Hackernews breaks out into factional disputes, depending on which denomination of the Agile religion the poster adheres. An argument breaks out about who is more important to a business: the programmers, or the customers? Several dozen Hackernews perform the ancient rite of webforum discussion: one, trying to explain a concept, outlines a hypothetical scenario; the rest, completely ignoring any point anyone is trying to make, bikeshed the scenario by laser-focusing on one tiny irrelevant aspect (in which they happen to be expert). No technology is discussed.

Companies use smartphone locations to help advertisers and even hedge funds
December 10, 2018 (comments)
A journalist gets the scoop: when a company measures every single element of your personal life, it's because they would like to sell that information for money. Hackernews is less concerned about outmoded flyover-state concepts like "privacy" or "dignity" and is instead super concerned with reverse engineering the location service that Google ships on their phones. A few Hackernews make a desultory attempt to theorize a world in which people weren't immediately preyed upon the moment they touch a computer, but nobody can really muster up much energy for trash-talking Google's business model.

Firefox 64 Released
December 11, 2018 (comments)
Mozilla shoves another featureless release of their web browser out the door. The only user-detectable change in this release was made by someone who does not work for Mozilla and was paid for by Google. Like all stories about browser releases, this one is five hundred comments from people who are angry about some weird-ass extension they started using in 2003, people angrily replying that some other weird-ass extension is better, and people angrily declaring you don't need an extension because that database has been built into the address bar for ten years now. Mozilla still hasn't mastered HTML 4, but now that the bug report is old enough to drink, they're at least starting to invent excuses for not fixing it.

Google transferred ownership of Duck.com to DuckDuckGo
December 12, 2018 (comments)
Something happened, but it's impossible to care about. I can't even care about it long enough to remember what it is. Hackernews doesn't like a webshit's business name, logo, or anything else about it. Most of the comments are trying to figure out why Google would do such a thing ... whatever it was.

Robinhood launches 3% checking account
December 13, 2018 (comments)
Some dipshits would like to act like a bank without doing any of the things that banks are required to do. The dipshits (motto: "Uber for financial crises") haven't even got the product defined before they start misleading potential customers about it, which is a new record for Silicon Valley efficiency. Hackernews, trying to understand, reinvents banking from first principles, even going so far as to identify places where a given society may be required to implement restrictions on financial markets. After that, it's just a matter of every single Hackernews naming every single banking product available in the iOS app store.

CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to
December 14, 2018 (comments)
A webshit refuses to leave an abusive relationship. Hackernews has lots of stories about similar abuses, but chooses to focus on how this obviously shitty behavior wasn't the fault of the innocent corporation, because it was the big mean state government that forced their hand.

Se la sola cosa che hai in testa è un martello, tutto sembra un chiodo. Con l'occasione delle linee guida della UE per l'IA in ambito giudiziazio, una tirata sullo stato leggermente emmerdé del digitale

Je rêve de toi.
Chaque jour je te vois.
Je fais pas de faux pas,
Toujours des commentaires sympas.

Ta vie est belle,
Ça se voit sur les cocotiers!
Mais mon label,
Ne pourras pas me déployer.

Une fois, chaque fois, que mon téléphone,
S’allume, s’éclaire, sonne le vibraphone.
J’espère, c’est claire, que c’est la bonne,
Fois en moi, mais cette fois, ce n’est pas toi.

J’ajoute des cœurs,
A tous les poste que tu publies!
J’envoie des merdes,
A tous les cons qui t’humilient!

Ta vie radieuse,
Illumine mes après-midi!
Quand je me lève,
Après avoir perdu encore une nuit!

Une fois, chaque fois, que mon téléphone,
S’allume, s’éclaire, sonne le vibraphone.
J’espère, c’est claire, que c’est la bonne,
Fois en moi, mais cette fois, toujours pas toi…

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the first week of December, 2018.

A Programmer's Introduction to Mathematics
December 01, 2018 (comments)
A Google wrote a book trying to teach math to computer programmers. Hackernews skips to the back to check for answers. Not finding any, they attempt to rectify the omission using the only tool they know: Github. One Hackernews declares that mathematics suffers from a 'lack of rigor,' unlike computer programming. I weathered this irony storm long enough to see that the next thread contained Hackernews arguing about the proper way to operate books. Further deponent readeth not.

I quit Instagram and Facebook and it made me happier
December 02, 2018 (comments)
A journalist abandons social media and writes an article about it, which contains a link to the journalist's Twitter account in the byline. Hackernews also deletes their accounts on all their employers' services, then bemoans the preponderance of websites where unpopular opinions are deplatformed. The complaints are made on "Hacker" "News", a web forum that automatically removes unpopular posts. The surviving opinion is that social media sucks because of the users.

Quora User Data Compromised
December 03, 2018 (comments)
Some webshits spill the beans. Hackernews briefly wonders why webshits had the beans to begin with, but immediately pivots to bitching about the tools they use to keep track of the trillions of passwords they just can't help creating.

Announcing Open Source of WPF, Windows Forms, and WinUI
December 04, 2018 (comments)
Microsoft dumps another box of junk at the charity shop. Hackernews immediately wants to know whether these unpopular garbage libraries can be shoehorned into whatever operating system Hackernews is currently using. The real question, says Hackernews, is whether Microsoft will ever open-source any software that people actually care about. The question nobody asks is "who cares?"

Canada has arrested Huawei’s global chief financial officer in Vancouver
December 05, 2018 (comments)
The Canucks toss a suit in the hoosegow. Hackernews would like to know how laws work, and does not let a lack of ability stop them from lecturing endlessly on international law, political conspiracy theories, and the ethical characteristics of nations. One Hackernews claims that someone died of blockchains, which is the closest thing to technology anyone posts.

Goodbye, EdgeHTML
December 06, 2018 (comments)
Mozilla looks forward to coming in second in a two-browser race. This thread is designated as the Monthly Firefox Opinion Repository, with the same eight complaints as all the other threads even tangentially related to Mozilla: My preferred extension was deprecated; I can't live without this obscure feature; it's too slow; I don't like the development tools; it's not made by Apple; it's not made by Google; it's funded by Google; my computer is old. Neither this comment thread nor the original article will influence anyone's opinion, either on "Hacker" "News" or at Microsoft.

Facial recognition: It’s time for action
December 07, 2018 (comments)
Microsoft announces a new lobbying campaign. Hackernews is ecstatic that technocrats are unilaterally declaring policy, as this system is much cheaper and more effective than outmoded and obviously ridiculous alternatives, such as democracy. The rest of the comments are Hackernews eagerly reading political tea leaves or angrily demanding that Microsoft be given authority to conduct capital punishment against anyone who inconveniences them.

Il Parlamento britannico ha pubblicato le 250 pagine di mail sequestrate la scorsa settimana. Sintesi: tutto il male che si pensava di Facebook non era nemmeno abbastanza. E poi una tirata personale contro quelli che "i dati non mentono mai"...

Qu’as tu fais de nous?
WTF coucou?
Qu’as tu fais de nous?
WTF coucou?

Acid est la tribe
Cyberpunk le game
Sur des reseaux de bribe
On fait monter le fame
Meme pas besoin de files
Isoles sur l’iles
On fait un tour au grotte
Pour pas que la story capotte

Qu’as tu fais de nous?
WTF coucou?
Qu’as tu fais de nous?
WTF coucou?

Si la police nous ajoute
Nouvelle vie nouveau compte
On tourne le dos au toute
On delete sans honte
Meme pas besoin d’ecrire
Tu peux m’entendre rire
En tour de face a face
Qui brise la glace

Qu’as tu fais de nous?
WTF coucou?
Qu’as tu fais de nous?
WTF coucou?

24 heures pour dechiffre
On dirait une invitation
La story que t’as balance
Cryptokids une seul nation
Celle des rave et du reve
Hilife a plein poumons
Le flux n’as pas de treve
Et en suede il mange du saumon

During the World Bank and IMF Annual Meetings in Bali, Indonesia, the Bank published its flagship World Development Report (WDR) 2019, which explored the changing nature of work.

The report triggered widespread indignation due to its support for labour market deregulation and its claim that concerns about automation are “unfounded” (see Observer Summer 2018). Rather than complementing current understandings on the future of work, the report’s recommendations clashed with key actors in the international community.

Indeed, in contrast to a recent IMF working paper warning of the dangers of automation, the WDR claimed that anxieties about the impact of technology on employment and inequality are “on balance unfounded”. Additionally, despite being released on the same month as a landmark report warning that we have 12 years to limit climate change, the WDR failed to mention just transition policies. Moreover, the Bank’s claim that “burdensome regulations also make it more expensive for firms to rearrange their workforce to accommodate changing technologies” contradicted its own WDR 2013, which stated that labour regulations had little or no impact on employment levels.

The critical responses to the WDR from wide-ranging communities, including feminists, international organisations, trade unions and diverse civil society groups alike drew further attention to the Bank’s isolated status for supporting private sector expansion at the expense of workers’ rights.

Feminists at loggerheads with Bank’s verdict

Responding to the WDR’s disregard for existing gender inequalities within the labour market, gender experts Shahra Razavi and Silke Staab highlighted that “no reference is made to the critical role of unpaid care work in building human capabilities.” Indeed, an International Labour Organisation (ILO) report this year confirmed that women perform 76.2 per cent of global unpaid care work and that – in spite of this work making a substantial economic and societal contribution – it remains mostly invisible and unaccounted for in economic decision-making.

Razavi and Staab further stated that the WDR, “remains wedded to a rather narrow neoclassical view of human capital…without considering the bearing and raising of children that creates the basic foundation which education and experience may enhance.” This analysis chimes with Elisabeth Prügl’s critique of the World Bank, which recently laid out the Bank’s role in crafting a version of a neoliberal hegemony with a “feminist face” (see Observer Autumn 2018).

Indeed, in reference to the WDR, international policy advisor for women’s rights at ActionAid International, Wangari Kinoti, stated, “efforts to increase women’s participation in labour while simultaneously weakening labour protections and ignoring the stark realities of the exploitation of women’s paid and unpaid labour represent the dismantling of decent work and international human rights standards. They will deepen and broaden gender inequalities.”

Handing capital more power to erode labour share

Civil society voices joined forces at a Civil Society Policy Forum event during the World Bank and IMF Annual Meetings in Bali to discuss the then-draft report, which they argued supports harmful policies of deregulation. Kate Lappin from France-based Public Services International stated, “If we don’t address the fact that technology is pushing down the value of labour in the economy…we will end up with an environment where capital [has] increased power against labour.”

Responding to its publication, which took place just days after the event, Oxfam stated that the WDR’s central rationale – deregulation – is discredited, and that it casts serious doubts over the Bank’s commitment to inequality reduction (see Observer Spring 2018).

In contrast to the WDR, the World Inequality Report 2018, a World Inequality Lab annual publication on global inequality trends, identified that better paying jobs are key to addressing sluggish income growth of the poorest half of the population, adding that “healthy minimum-wage rates are important tools to achieve this.” The report further stressed that the “global top 1% earners has captured twice as much of that growth as the 50% poorest individuals.” This is a fact of particular concern ten years on from the financial crisis, as David M. Kotz notes that the seeds of systemic crisis stem from growing inequality and a financial sector absorbed in risky activities and a series of large asset bubbles.

The International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), which represents 207 million workers, issued a scathing written response to the WDR. The confederation avowed that the report is in denial of challenges such as the existing global inequality crisis, at times contradicted its own findings, and failed to acknowledge the Sustainable Development Goals, concluding that “together, this excludes the WDR 2019 as a serious contribution to discussions on the future of work.”

ITUC General Secretary Sharan Burrow stated that, “Support for further deregulation will only reinforce strategies of platform companies to subvert employment relationship rules, increase precarious work, pay poverty wages and undermine workers’ rights.” An ITUC report earlier this year found that workers in the informal economy are particularly vulnerable to abuses, as they are exposed to inadequate and unsafe working conditions and often earn less.

The World Bank against the tide

Adding to these voices, the ILO issued a response questioning the approach to some key issues addressed in the Bank’s report. The reaction specified that they “remain concerned about the WDR’s approach to labour market institutions, regulations, the informal economy and social protection,” adding that, “a world with deregulated labour markets combined with minimal social assistance and social insurance would have high human and economic costs.”

On the WDR’s mention of Universal Basic Income (UBI), the ILO stated that the report does not provide sufficient detail to show how a UBI would guarantee the minimum social coverage. Indeed, earlier this year the ILO issued a report arguing that while some UBI proposals can enhance redistribution and social justice, others could result in the corrosion of social protection and reinforcement of a small-state neoliberal model.

A consultation leaving a bitter taste

The superficial consultation process during the report drafting supported long-standing criticisms that the Bank is unwilling to listen to external voices. The WDR’s publication followed a year-long effort from coalitions and organisations around the world to highlight the inadequacy of its initial findings and recommendations and attempts to re-shape its findings in line with international standards.

Once the draft WDR was published in early 2018, its failings were widely documented by academics, trade unions, networks, and national and international press. A letter was sent from six global unions and over 80 civil society groups, think tanks and academics, asking that the WDR, “be rewritten to instead promote decent work and inequality reduction, and that this be made clear when the report is presented to the Executive Board.” Despite these efforts, the final report remains strikingly similar to the initial drafts, with only a small handful of alterations, such as a U-turn on support for zero-hour contracts. This approach brings into question the extent to which the World Bank has addressed concerns about its knowledge production raised in the 2006 Deaton Report, which accused the Bank of having a self-referential approach to research and learning that, “rises almost to the level of parody” (see Observer Summer 2018).

Please find fully formatted PDF version here.

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Here’s a question: If you were entrusted with $325 million of public money, would you invest it in a company whose flagship contract involved operating a scheme that was allegedly designed to loot billions of dollars from state oil revenues? Would it make a difference to your decision if these allegations had been made by the state’s head banker, the governor of its central bank?

And here’s another question: If you decided to invest, would you withdraw your investment if 10 per cent of your company’s shares were later listed in a worldwide freezing order as assets that had been obtained through the illegal diversion of oil revenues, for the benefit of the country’s then oil minister and her cronies?

If your answers are “Yes”, “Yes” and “No”, then your prospects of getting a job at the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC, the Bank’s private investment arm) or the World Bank’s Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA) are looking good, as an October report by Corner House, Global Witness, HEDA and ReCommon explains.

This is not a hypothetical example: between 2014 and 2016, both the IFC and MIGA made investment calls that chimed exactly with these decisions, investing almost a quarter of a billion dollars in Seven Energy, an oil and gas company operating in Nigeria. According to the IFC, the investments constituted its “largest equity financing in the oil and gas sector in Africa.” On 1 May 2014, the IFC committed $75 million to an equity investment in Seven Energy International Limited (SEIL, or Seven Energy). Registered in Mauritius, Seven Energy operates in Nigeria through subsidiaries, one of which is Septa Energy Nigeria Limited (Septa). Clock the name – it will feature prominently in what follows – and also note that the IFC was fully aware of the existence of Septa at the time of its investment; indeed, the project’s summary specifically stated that, “within Nigeria, [Seven Energy] operates and trades as ‘Septa Energy’.” Septa has since been renamed Seven Exploration and Production Limited.

A further investment of $30 million was made in Seven Energy at the same time through the IFC African, Latin American and Caribbean Fund, which is managed by the IFC’s Asset Management Company. A few months later, in October 2014, the IFC provided yet more funds through an anchor investment, designed to shore up investor confidence, of up to $50 million in Seven Energy’s inaugural bond issue. In September 2015 MIGA provided a $200 million guarantee for an investment in Accugas Limited, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Seven Energy.

The Governor speaks out

In September 2013, seven months before the IFC made its first investment in Seven Energy, Lamido Sanusi, the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, reported in a letter to Nigeria’s president that some $20 billion of dollars in oil revenue had been diverted from the government’s central bank account “in gross violation of the law”. Twenty billion dollars is over ten times Nigeria’s 2014 annual health budget.

Sanusi detailed several mechanisms that he held potentially responsible for this wholesale looting of the public purse. Among them were oil contracts known as Strategic Alliance Agreements (SAAs), under which the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation assigned its financing and operating role in a number of oil fields to private sector companies.

Sanusi named two companies, both founded by oil traders Kola Aluko and Jide Omokore, that had benefitted from SAA deals. One was Atlantic Energy, the other – and, at this point, those at the IFC doing due diligence on Seven Energy should have pricked up their ears – was Seven’s wholly-owned Nigerian subsidiary, Septa, which had been granted an SAA covering three oil fields in November 2010.

Sanusi argued that the use of SAAs was “illegal and unconstitutional”. He also questioned why Seven and Atlantic had been selected as SAA contractors, when, in his view, neither company had experience in crude oil production and both lacked the financial resources to bring any capital of their own to the table. The allegations are denied by Seven and Atlantic.

Arresting developments

Sanusi also detailed his concerns in a testimony to the Nigerian Senate in February 2013. Shortly after, he was dismissed from his post. But the issues that he raised have not gone away.

Fast forward to November 2018 and many of the individuals involved in the controversy over the missing oil revenues are now feeling the judicial heat:

• Diezani Alison-Madueke, the former oil minister who approved the SAA deals, is currently on bail in the UK after being arrested on suspicion of bribery and corruption. She denies the charges.
• Kola Aluko, the former oil trader who was Seven’s Deputy CEO at the time that its SAA contract was negotiated, is also under investigation in the UK and has been charged with money laundering in Nigeria. He denies any impropriety.
• Jide Omokore, a close associate of Aluko, has been charged with money laundering in relation to Atlantic’s SAA contract. He also denies the charges.

Meanwhile, the Federal Government of Nigeria has obtained a freezing order which lists 10 per cent of Seven Energy’s shares as assets to be frozen. The shares are said to have been obtained with the illegally diverted proceeds of crude oil lifted under Atlantic’s SAA contract and invested in Aluko’s name.

In the US, the Department of Justice has also moved to seize $144 million in assets said to have been bought with monies looted from the Nigerian government by Aluko, Omokore and Alison-Madueke.

A fine mess?

Our report makes no allegations against Seven Energy and readily records that the company has consistently denied wrongdoing.[i] Its concern is solely with the World Bank Group’s decision to invest in Seven Energy and the adequacy of the IFC’s and MIGA’s due diligence procedures.

The allegations made by Sanusi raised not just one red flag but several. The question is: how did the Bank deal with them?

If you were working at the IFC and tasked with undertaking due diligence on the IFC’s investment in Seven, how would you have assessed the risks? You might take the view that natural justice precludes you from taking any of the listed prosecutions and criminal investigations into account: after all, no-one has yet been convicted of anything and Seven itself has not been charged with any offense. But this would be to misunderstand the purpose of due diligence. No-one is asking you to act as judge and jury: it is for the courts to decide whether or not any criminality has occurred. But due diligence does require an assessment of the risks that related prosecutions and investigations pose to an investment and to the institutions that make the investment.

In this case, one hopes that the IFC and MIGA were following the developments closely. Because, as things currently stand, the IFC is a major shareholder in (and MIGA a guarantor of) a company that is claimed by the Nigerian government in court pleadings to be partly owned by two suspected criminals who are alleged to have used Seven Energy as a vehicle for laundering stolen oil funds.

We do not know how the IFC assessed the financial and reputational risks of its investment in Seven Energy. Despite its professed commitment to transparency, which it describes as “fundamental to fulfilling its development mandate and strengthening public trust”, the IFC does not release its due diligence reports. But we do know that the IFC’s rules require it to assess “integrity risk issues” (related to “the institutions and persons” involved in a given investment) and that these risks are supposed to be monitored “throughout the life of the project or engagement”.

We also know what information was available to anyone with access to the internet at the time that the IFC made its investment in Seven Energy and MIGA issued its guarantee, as the timeline in our report clearly demonstrates. So we are in a good position to make our own assessment of the reputational and financial risks and to judge, on the basis of common sense, whether or not the Bank’s investments were reasonable and justifiable.

And because the IFC’s rules require it to take account of money laundering risks, we are also in a position to take a view on whether or not the Bank has adequate anti-money laundering controls and procedures in place. A benchmark (albeit a low-bar benchmark) might be that set by UK law, namely, the requirement to have controls and procedures that are sufficiently robust to prevent money-laundering. To ensure prevention, the trigger for action on the part of a bank or other financial institution is not proof of criminality but “reasonable grounds for knowing or suspecting” that a person is engaged in money laundering. This would seem to be an appropriate test for whether or not the IFC should have blocked or withdrawn from the investment.

We put a series of questions to the IFC:

• When did the IFC first learn of the allegations made by Governor Sanusi?
• Did the IFC commission its own legal review of the SAA’s constitutionality?
• Did the IFC’s due diligence include an assessment of Aluko’s role as co-CEO of Septa Energy in negotiating the SAAs?
• Did the IFC seek and obtain credible assurances that no Nigerian public official had a beneficial interest in Seven Energy?
• When did IFC become aware of the Federal Republic of Nigeria’s claim that Aluko currently owns 10 per cent of Seven Energy?
• What steps did it take – and when – to satisfy itself that Aluko had not used Seven Energy as a money laundering vehicle for illegally-obtained funds?

The IFC did not respond to these specific questions. Instead, it told us that “prior to investing in Seven Energy, IFC conducted comprehensive due diligence as is standard for our investments.” This is hardly reassuring. Under the Bank’s own internal rules, due diligence is not supposed to be a “one off” event: It must be conducted throughout the lifetime of an investment, not just prior to investing.

Far from avoiding unwarranted risk, the IFC’s “comprehensive due diligence” has led to a situation where the Bank is a major shareholder in a company that is alleged to be partly owned by two suspected criminals who are said to have laundered stolen oil funds through the company.

Quite where that places the World Bank is one for the lawyers. But, should the prosecutions of Alison-Madueke, Aluko and Omokore succeed, it is surely not unreasonable to conclude that the IFC might find itself accused of having profited from money laundering and, thus, of unlawful enrichment. Watch this space.

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This briefing is based on a longer report: Nicholas Hildyard, The World Bank, Red Flags and the Looting of Nigeria’s Oil Revenues. The IFC’s investment in Seven Energy: What would have been your call? Corner House Research, United Kingdom, October 2018.

 

Through decades of collective action, civil society has made headway in making governments, donor agencies, and multilateral platforms commit to conceding some space for civil society organisations (CSOs) to articulate the perspectives and demands of their constituencies in policy dialogues. United Nations agencies, global and regional forums, international financial institutions and multilateral development banks have introduced various ‘CSO engagement mechanisms’ to prove their transparency, accountability, and effectiveness.

Such gestures, however, have been overshadowed by the increased stifling of movements and organisations, as recently demonstrated by the clampdown on dissent during the 2018 Annual Meetings of the IMF and World Bank, which took place in Bali, Indonesia, in October. While the red carpet was rolled out for high-ranking state officials and big business interests in Nusa Dua, social movements and CSOs were subjected to blatant violations of their rights to free expression and assembly by the government of Indonesia for attempting to participate in independently organised side events.

Konfrontasi in Bali

Outside the Bank and Fund spaces, government-sponsored repression descended on the Peoples’ Global Conference against IMF-World Bank (PGC), an independent initiative of 34 Indonesian and international social movements and non-governmental organisations. The PGC represented grassroots communities and sectors that have been excluded from the development process in their respective countries and have suffered from rights violations associated with the policies and programmes of the IMF and World Bank (see Observer Autumn 2017, Autumn 2018).

A week before the PGC was scheduled to begin, the Bali Intelligence Police denied the local organisers a permit for the conference scheduled at the Radio Republik Indonesia. The organisers were told by hotel establishments that the police had instructed them to refuse services to the PGC. Anonymous numbers blasted a series of text messages maligning the PGC as “anti-development” and threatening the lives and security of coordinators. Hoax event posters were seen around Bali, linking the PGC to outlawed radical Islamic organisations, such as Hizb ut-Tahrir, seemingly to justify the escalation of violence against the conference and its organisers.

Meanwhile, the national police insisted on a new set of ludicrous requirements, such as copies of passports and the itineraries of PGC’s international delegates, as well as details of the conference’s programme. This harassment soon morphed into physical violence against organising members of the PGC. In the early morning of October 11, a local militia attacked the Bali Legal Aid office in Denpasar and chased away PGC youth volunteers staying there. Intelligence personnel were also seen around the hotels where PGC delegates were staying, taking their pictures and videos without consent.

A win for resilient peoples’ movements

While the Indonesian government succeeded in disrupting the event, the PGC earned the recognition as the people’s alternative forum to the official IMF-WBG meetings. With good flexibility, creativity, quick wit, and firm political resolve, the PGC broke the imposed silence in Bali.

Civil society groups at the Bali International Convention Center (BICC) – the official Annual Meetings venue – held a lightning rally to denounce Indonesia for attacking the PGC and shutting down public activities. The rally exposed the pretence of hospitality, openness, tolerance, and good governance peddled by the Indonesian Government with complicity of the IMF and World Bank.

Seemingly to avoid embarrassment, Bank and IMF staff and the Indonesian police swiftly herded the protesters into a holding room and offered to host the PGC, all expenses paid. Meanwhile, outside the negotiation room, security personnel armed with guns peeping out of their Batik shirts harassed the demonstrators and denied entry to six West Papuans seeking to register at the official Civil Society Policy Forum. Despite these apparent attempts to co-opt the event’s independence, the PGC organisers stood firm and continued.

Upon regrouping, PGC organisers and participants jointly decided to proceed with the activities, albeit scaled down and decentralised to avoid further police sabotage. At least 250 individuals attended discussions, workshops, and solidarity actions held in different venues around Bali. PGC statements and mass actions were extensively covered by both local and international media. Civil society, peoples’ movements, and individuals across the globe expressed their support for the PGC. Towards the end of the week, the PGC issued a declaration calling on organisations to build a strong peoples’ front to contest international financial institutions in every arena of struggle.

Another low for global governance diplomacy

Infringement of civil liberties and freedoms by a host country during an international meeting is not unprecedented. Complete bans on protests were imposed during the IMF and World Bank Annual Meetings in Dubai in 2003, as well as the 2006 Annual Meetings in Singapore. Last year, the Argentine government revoked the accreditation of 63 civil society members a few days prior to the 11^th World Trade Organisation Ministerial meetings in Buenos Aires. The extreme actions undertaken by the Indonesian government bring global governance diplomacy to another low and reinforces a worrying precedent for all future international meetings.

This year marks the 20^th Anniversary of the UN Declaration on Human Rights defenders. Ironically, harassment, criminalisation, enforced disappearances, and at times, killings of frontline defenders are on the rise. Multilateral institutions and organisations ostensibly acknowledge the importance of civic participation and social accountability in development and have promised to advance civil society inclusion and empowerment. By failing to prevent reprisals against defenders, the IMF and particularly the World Bank in relation to its projects, have not only failed to uphold their human rights obligations, but also significantly contributed in fostering a climate of intimidation that dissuades civil society organisations from exercising their role as development actors (see Observer Spring 2016, Winter 2018).

The 2021 Annual Meetings of the IMF and World Bank will be in Marrakech, Morocco. In light of the current global democratic deficit, global civil society should press the IMF and World Bank and the future host country to honour their legal commitments to respect peoples’ rights to organise and mobilise, including through independent conferences and protest actions, and concretely demonstrate ways to allow the exercise of such rights without fear of reprisals. We call on peoples’ movements everywhere to forge solidarities, push back attacks on fundamental human rights and carve their own democratic spaces of engagement and resistance in the face of adversity and repression.

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by Ivan Phell Enrile, Asia Pacific Research Network (APRN) and the People Over Profit campaign. Enrile, representing APRN, was part of the international coordinating committee of the Peoples’ Global Conference against IMF-World Bank and is speaking from his direct experiences.

The approach the IMF and a number of member states have recently taken to address gender inequality appears to be mostly instrumental, rather than anchored in a human rights-based approach that frames the achievement of gender equality as a goal in and of itself. The report I submitted a few weeks ago to the United Nations General Assembly, building on decades of feminist work and analysis, documents the shortcomings of this approach and how austerity, still often prescribed by the IMF, continues to hit women hardest.

The instrumental approach is in serious conflict with the intrinsic importance of gender equality as a key component of human rights standards, particularly in light of the economic policies proposed and promoted by international financial institutions (IFIs) in recent years. While some research shows that securing certain human rights is good for growth and for the distribution of its benefits, there is no conclusive evidence to show that gender equality is always good for growth. In fact, other evidence shows that gender inequality can be conducive to some forms of economic growth.

Cambodia, for example, has seen impressive economic growth over the last two decades, attributed to garment and footwear exports, which account for a massive 80 per cent of its export earnings. While the labour force for this industry is composed almost entirely of women, the gender wage gap in the country more than doubled between 2004 and 2009, raising the question of whether Cambodia’s competitive advantage is reliant at least in part on the very structures that maintain and exacerbate gender discrimination and inequality.

While instrumental justifications could in theory complement human rights-based arguments if governments actually ensure that the fruits of growth are fairly distributed, global trends suggest that this is not happening and that we are moving towards ever increasing inequality.

The Structural Adjustment Programmes of the IMF and the World Bank of the 1980s and 1990s were criticised for imposing harsh austerity measures that significantly and disproportionately impacted the poor and exacerbated inequality, including gender inequality. Yet, this is not just a critique of the past, because even in 2018, the IMF and World Bank continue to prescribe policies that undermine gender equality and the fulfilment of women’s human rights (see Observer Summer 2017, Spring 2018). Some of these include targeting food subsidies, privatising public utilities, downsizing social safety nets, and lowering public wages and the number of public jobs, along with labour deregulation, reductions in pensions, public service cuts and regressive tax regimes through the introduction of, or increases in, VAT, while reducing corporate tax rates (see BWP briefing, The IMF and Gender Equality and VAT).

The effectiveness of the IFIs’ approach to gender equality also raises important questions that are relevant to ongoing policy debates, such as the reduction of coverage of social protection benefits, contracting fiscal space for social services and investments in mega-infrastructure projects over those that are sustainable and gender-responsive. The IMF’s failure to address structural barriers to women’s enjoyment of economic and social rights, like violence against women and girls, and its continued silence about the impacts of illicit financial flows, regressive tax regimes and privatisation of public services that affect women’s human rights also reflect the IMF’s blind spots when it comes to gender just policy interventions.

Meanwhile, the IMF’s ‘gender work’ remains largely centred on the positive growth effects of closing gender gaps in labour force participation. While it might be the case that a specific policy that encourages women to enter into the paid labour force is good for growth, if entry is not on equal terms with men and no attention is paid to internationally agreed standards of ‘decent work’, it could lead to the reinforcement of gender inequality by building an economy around embedded structural inequalities in labour markets.

Similarly, while the 2016-2023 Gender Strategy of the World Bank takes into account some barriers to women’s economic participation, some argue that a more comprehensive understanding of women’s economic empowerment in work-related areas would be needed to achieve substantive equality, and that the Bank continues to push for the same macroeconomic policies as the IMF. The 2019 World Development Report on the changing nature of work constitutes the latest example of the Bank’s pro-business, growth-led agenda that undermines labour rights and gender equality, about which I wrote a letter to the Bank in August (see Observer Winter 2018).

It seems these institutions are neglecting both the ways in which the bulk of their macroeconomic policy prescriptions continue to undermine women’s rights and gender equality, and the macroeconomic and institutional enabling conditions required to foster gender equality. At the very least, IFIs should assess and address the harms caused to women’s rights by their own policy advice, enhance the voices of those impacted most, and support governments in progressively creating the fiscal space needed to deliver on their human rights obligations.

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Juan Pablo Bohoslavsky, United Nations Independent Expert on Foreign Debt and Human Rights

After years of preparation, the new World Bank safeguards for project lending – the Environmental and Social Framework (ESF) – came into force on 1 October, amidst lingering concerns that they will dilute the Bank’s environmental and social standards at a time when it is pivoting towards more risky project lending.

The rollout of the new ESF occured after the Bank’s shareholders agreed a general capital increase (GCI) in April for the International Bank of Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) – the Bank’s middle income lending arm – and the International Finance Corporation (IFC) – the Bank’s private sector investment arm (see Dispatch Spring 2018). The GCI will increase the Bank’s lending volume. The Bank will undertake more relatively risky lending in fragile and conflict-affected states (CAS) and lower-middle income countries, and will continue efforts to ‘de-risk’ and mobilise private sector investment (see Observer Summer 2017).

Despite a long period of consultation between 2012 and 2016 (see Observer Autumn 2016), and an extended process of creating ESF guidance notes for borrowers (see Observer Summer 2018), many civil society organisations (CSOs) remain unconvinced that the reform of the Bank’s safeguards has been for the better.

A race to the bottom? Vague clauses leave ESF open to interpretation

The World Bank’s new ESF includes ten new core ‘standards‘ with guidance notes for borrowers and ‘best practice’ notes for staff developed over the past two years to guide the ESF’s implementation. It will apply only to the Bank’s new project lending, not to existing project loans or to the Bank’s development policy lending.

The new framework includes a ‘use of country system’ provision, which stipulates that safeguards of borrowers may be used for Bank-funded projects if they are ‘materially consistent’ with the new ESF. Given the difficulty of assessing country systems – and the complexity of monitoring implementation of safeguards in such systems – CSOs are concerned that the widespread use of borrower systems could lead to a considerable dilution of safeguards in Bank-financed projects.

The outcome of the GCI negotiations presents further challenges to the ESF’s implementation, with the Bank set to take on more high-risk projects, as well as more projects in fragile political contexts. As independent researcher – and long-time CSO observer – Korinna Horta noted in an article for German-based website Development + Cooperation following the ESF’s launch, this will take place alongside an important shift in the Bank’s pre-project risk assessments: “A much used ESF term is ‘risk-based management’. It means that risks are only addressed as they emerge in the course of a project. …In the past, environmental impact assessments (EIAs) had to be [done beforehand and] made available to the public before the Bank’s Board could approve them.”

Horta added that, “civil-society organisations…are increasingly being threatened in many places. Indeed, activists run great personal risks when they campaign to protect vulnerable minorities and the environment from the detrimental impacts of large infrastructure projects,” funded by the Bank and other international financial institutions (see Observer Winter 2018).

Indeed, at a Civil Society Policy Forum event on the ESF during the World Bank and IMF Annual Meetings in Bali in October, Indonesian CSOs complained that under existing Bank safeguards, military police were often present in consultations about World Bank-financed projects, raising fears of reprisals for those who spoke out against proposed projects. Later in October, a proposed World Bank geothermal project in Indonesia attracted widespread opposition, with Indonesian CSOs claiming that the environmental and social assessment of the project was inadequate.

Given the challenges confronting the new ESF, CSOs remain unconvinced that it is fit for purpose if the Bank is to deliver on its mandate to implement policies that benefit the poorest.

In September, the IMF increased Argentina’s original $50 billion loan agreed in June, bringing the total programme to an unprecedented $57.1 billion over three years. The programme was agreed in the face of Argentina’s financial crisis, the underlying cause of which was a rapid build-up of public and external debt, accelerated by abrupt financial deregulation by the Macri government (see Observer Summer 2018).    

IMF policy prescriptions: treatment worse than the disease?

Through its programme, the IMF, which former Argentinian Central Bank Governor Alejandro Vanoli described in November as having “total control of economic policy”, prescribes a familiar policy mix with the aim of eliminating the primary fiscal deficit by 2019. To achieve this, the agreed IMF loan programme includes “an increase in [grain] export taxes, scaling back energy subsidies, containment of capital spending [that] will be compensated for by Private Public Partnership projects, limiting [tax] exemptions for cooperatives and mutual organizations, a reduction of discretionary transfers to provinces,” and, “a freeze in the new hiring of public employees”.

Eerily similar to the tried and failed Greek and 2001 Argentina programmes, but now with a much larger amount of money at stake, the new programme once again reflects the flawed economic theory that claims there is no alternative to austerity as a response to economic recession, and promises to restore market confidence in Argentina (see Observer Autumn 2018, Update 79). In fact, prescribing concurrent fiscal and monetary contraction for a consumption-based economy in recession with relatively high unemployment is more likely to be procyclical and further “deepen and extend Argentina’s recession”, according to business magazine Forbes’ Frances Coppola. Perhaps reflecting a lack of confidence in the IMF’s ability to avoid this happening, the peso lost 20 per cent of its value in the two-day period in August after Macri announced he was seeking to renegotiate the IMF loan. In response, Professor Daniela Gabor of University of West England Bristol commented on Twitter, “that ‘#IMF feeling’ when your star pupil does everything you ask and is doing worse than Turkey.”

Argentina’s past experience proves this approach has not worked – and is likely to make things worse in the short-term. Independent estimates suggest that it will “require at least $40 billion in the next 14 months” alone to keep Argentina solvent, with another $48 billion projected to be needed in 2019, and that is still considered optimistic by some. In its own first review of the loan programme in October, the IMF assessed Argentina’s debt as sustainable, “but not with a high probability”, seemingly acknowledging the likelihood of its baseline assumptions not holding true and Argentina once again becoming insolvent. This begs the question of why the IMF is not following its own 2017 advice on the necessity of underpinning debt sustainability assessments with “realistic – rather than heroic – assumptions”, where, “it is not feasible for the problem to be solved through further belt tightening,” and instead turning to sustainable debt restructuring, as long suggested by civil society organisations such as Belgium-based Eurodad.

Burdens of IMF loan conditionality

Without requiring upfront restructuring of Argentina’s current debt stock to private creditors, the programme will continue to “put the burden of adjustments entirely on the shoulders of Argentina’s population,” according to an October Eurodad blog, in particular on the poorest and most vulnerable. With the programme taking place in a context of a cost of living increase of 54 per cent during the past two years, mass public layoffs, a decline of 12 per cent in average salaries, quadrupling of gas tariffs and a six-fold increase in electricity rates, it should come as no surprise that only three months after its introduction, regional ministers declared a state of food emergency, while poverty was reported to be spreading “like wildfire” by October.

Responding to concerns raised in Argentina, in an October interview, the IMF’s Managing Director Christine Lagarde highlighted the programme’s social protection minimum spending floor as a safeguard for the most poor and vulnerable, and expressed hopes of enforcing a new “safety valve” in allowing increases in social spending, “if the situation improves”. Having calculated that the social spending floor in the current programme amounted to $6 for each of Argentina’s 13 million poor for the last six months of 2018, Argentinian civil society groups described these safeguards as “a mockery”. This reflects a wider civil society critique on the inadequacies of the Fund’s approach to social protection floors, which can exclude large numbers of poor people, as recently brought to the fore as the Fund designs its new ‘strategic framework on social spending’ (see Observer Summer 2018, Spring 2018).

As a predictable result of these policy choices, the country has been paralysed by mass general strikes and historic mobilisations under the banner, “no to the IMF, no to adjustment”. Despite the supposed urgent need for more belt-tightening, according to national newspaper the Buenos Aires Times, ahead of December’s G20 Summit, Argentina nonetheless found the resources to invest, “100 million pesos in the purchase of…180 shotguns, 15 million rubber bullets, 2,000 tear gas projectiles and police vests,” for the occasion (see Observer Winter 2018).

Thus, the IMF is choosing to continue to apply its old broken model in Argentina, insisting on a familiar adjustment programme, while many economists, civil society groups, trade unions and the United Nations continue to offer alternative solutions. One such example is the establishment of an international debt workout mechanism, another is the use of human rights impact assessments (as the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural rights recommended to Argentina in October) to guide macroeconomic reform programmes. The question is whether the IMF is capable of changing course.

The IMF was established in 1944 following the Great Depression of the 1930s and World War II, with the initial aim of seeking exchange rate stability within the international monetary system. The 1970s and 1980s witnessed an expansion of the IMF’s remit, to respond to countries’ balance of payments difficulties, most notably with the introduction of structural adjustment programmes. In 2012, the IMF’s mandate was broadened to include all macroeconomic and financial sector issues that it deemed to have a bearing on global stability (see Update 82). There are several mechanisms it relies on in order to deliver on its mandate, one of which is surveillance, established in Article IV of the Fund’s Articles of Agreement. The IMF conducts surveillance at the bilateral (member state) and multilateral (regional and global) levels.

At the member state level (there are 189 member states of the IMF), surveillance is designed to enable the IMF to continuously monitor a country’s fiscal policies and overall economic conditions and to identify perceived risks, which it classifies as posing present or future threats to global economic stability. Having identified such risks, surveillance recommendations include suggested policy adjustments to mitigate against perceived triggers and root causes of economic instability. This forms the basis for the Article IV consultations, which are described in more detail below. While the recommendations made by the Fund through Article IV consultation reports are not binding, bilateral surveillance is mandatory for both the IMF and all members, who have an obligation to consult with the Fund for this purpose. Additionally, in 2010, the IMF made it mandatory for 29 member countries, which it deemed to have systematically important financial sectors, to undergo financial stability assessments, known as the Financial Sector Assessment Program (FSAP), every five years.

Regional surveillance examines both economic developments within regions and the policies of currency unions. Every year, IMF staff hold separate consultations with the regional institutions responsible for common policies in four currency unions – the Euro Area, the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union, the Central African Economic and Monetary Union and the West African Economic and Monetary Union – including engagement with the IMF’s Executive Board. IMF staff also prepare separate Regional Economic Outlook reports, detailing recent economic developments as well as perceived opportunities and challenges for policymakers in countries in various regions.

The IMF conducts multilateral surveillance through periodic flagship reports in consultation with its Board. In its 2011 surveillance review, the IMF stated that “developing top-down approaches of globally (or area-wide) relevant aggregates and policies, and ensuring that they translate into bilateral surveillance, is essential to ensure multilateral consistency and relevance of policy recommendations.” The biannual World Economic Outlook examines trends within the global economy and undertakes growth projections, while the Global Financial Stability Report focuses on the stability of the international financial system and markets, highlighting perceived vulnerabilities that pose potential risks. The Fiscal Monitor, meanwhile, makes medium-term fiscal projections and examines global public finance developments. Additionally, the IMF analyses the external positions of 29 of the world’s largest economies plus the Euro Area in the External Sector Reports. Every year, the findings from all the multilateral reports are collated into the Global Policy Agenda, which proposes responses to perceived challenges for the IMF and its member states.

How do the IMF’s Article IVs work?

Article IV activities begin with regular visits to the Fund’s member states. Although IMF staff monitor members’ economic outlooks continuously, these staff visits provide a more focused state-level examination and normally take place annually.

During visits, IMF staff typically meet with the member state government and central bank officials to discuss the states’ monetary, fiscal and regulatory policies, and perceptions of growth and exchange rate stability. IMF staff are recommended by IMF guidance to request meetings with parliamentarians and representatives of business, labour unions and civil society. Based on these meetings, staff complete country evaluations for wide-ranging policy recommendations for reforms, referred to as Article IV consultations. These staff reports are then shared with the member state governments for consultation.

In finalising the Article IV consultation, completed evaluations are followed by the presentation of the report to the IMF’s Executive Board. The Board then discuss the report and its views are summarised and presented in the final Article IV report in the Executive Board Assessment section alongside the staff report.

The publication of IMF surveillance has undergone changes following the introduction of its transparency policy in 2013, which states that publication of Article IVs are “voluntary but presumed” and a member state’s consent to publish is typically obtained on a “non-objection” basis. It has become standard practice for most member states to allow the IMF to release the final Article IV report and the views of the Board on its website. However, the publication of summaries remains at the discretion of individual member states. Indeed, a 2017 paper by the IMF revealed that seven countries evaluated in 2016 had not given the IMF permission to publish their reports. 

Why does IMF surveillance matter?

IMF surveillance reports are non-binding and member states do not have to act on the recommendations. Nevertheless, the IMF’s position at the apex of the international financial architecture and as a key determinant of both ‘sound’ economic policies and creditworthiness means that failure to follow advice can place countries in a precarious position in terms of access to IMF lending programmes, financial markets, investment outlook, and negatively impact their relationship with other international institutions. In such cases, as Domenico Lombardi and Ngaire Woods suggest, a state intending to borrow from the IMF may feel that the Fund has “bargaining power” to potentially enforce rules and policies through surveillance before approving any lending programmes. Even in cases where the IMF’s immediate lending leverage does not come into play, low-income countries (LICs) and emerging markets (EMs)  may be motivated to implement the IMF’s advice to maintain perceptions of creditworthiness and build a good relationship. The IMF surveillance can therefore be significant in shaping countries’ macroeconomic policies, from tax structures and debt to the scale and scope of public sector provision of essential services.

The Fund has emphasised that “the ability to influence policy making” is “the cornerstone of effective surveillance”, and has highlighted the importance of increasing the influence of its surveillance over national policies to gain “traction”. More recently, it has indicated that effective surveillance must generate more “multilateral traction” to influence policymakers across multiple states.  In its 2014 surveillance review, the IMF found that its multilateral surveillance flagship reports were “highly valued” in surveys and interviews with country authorities and market observers. These surveys indicated that a large share of LICs and emerging markets see the IMF as their external advisor on macro-policy decision, with “no other institution coming close to  that position.” The review noted that the member country authorities interviewed had indicated that the greatest value-added of surveillance came from the Fund’s work on fiscal developments and policy, and that they were looking to the IMF for more “concrete and actionable” advice.

However, a study from November 2008 showed that in advanced economies, the influence of the IMF – particularly its surveillance activities – is limited by its perceived inability to integrate spillovers into its analysis and to adapt its advice so that assessments are thorough and relevant to individual countries. The IMF itself has even stated that advanced economies do not always find Article IV consultations practical, as they tend to have substantial “economic debate and scrutiny” of domestic policies. In its 2014 review, Fund indicated the priority for surveillance for advanced economies is labour market and fiscal reforms in order to “boost growth and restore sustainability”, while “public expenditure management and financial deepening” are priorities for LICs. A 2012 Guidance Note stipulates that the scope of surveillance in Article IV consultations in LICs is generally broader than is the case for other countries and can include areas like management of aid flows, natural resources, the promotion of financial deepening, and “macro-critical social issues” (such as poverty reduction and employment).

Labour unions, academics, UN bodies, activists and civil society organisations have long argued that the types of macroeconomic policies the IMF promotes through its surveillance – as well as lending – undermine the capacity of states to fulfil their human rights obligations, exacerbate inequalities within and between countries, and disproportionately hurt the poor and marginalised (see Observer Autumn 2018). More broadly, the IMF has faced accusations of promoting western capitalist interests through neoliberal economic orthodoxy in low-income countries and “co-opting elites” in these countries to support its surveillance recommendations. It has also received criticism for promoting an economic model based on accelerating financialisation, whereby markets are the primary means to organise the economy and society (see Observer Summer 2018).

Surveillance reviews

The IMF carries out a comprehensive review of its surveillance activities to identify areas for potential improvements, with the next review expected in 2020. In the last comprehensive review in 2014, the IMF highlighted a need to focus on improving responses to emerging challenges following the 2008 global financial crisis. It found that surveillance around financial and macroeconomic analysis was fragmented, and further efforts were needed to integrate bilateral and multilateral surveillance. In light of the review, the IMF made commitments to integrate analysis of risks and spillovers, continue accounting for growth and sustainability implications in advice, and achieve greater impact by strengthening policy dialogue.

The IMF has also increasingly incorporating what it deems to be “structural issues”, such as social protection, income and gender inequality. Using a piloting approach, the Fund has included analysis and recommendations on these issues in several Article IV reports since 2014. A 2017 civil society report found that in 2016, policy advice on gender issues was included in one out of five surveillance reports, while it had seldom received a mention in policy advice before 2015. In 2018, the IMF synthesised the lessons learned from its gender and income inequality surveillance pilots in three ‘how-to‘ notes for IMF staff.

In response to this year’s interim surveillance review, the IMF Board emphasised that the piloting initiative had better integrated structural issues into macroeconomic analysis and highlighted that the IMF should extend coverage of macrofinancial surveillance and increase focus on debt vulnerability. The Board highlighted that the forthcoming comprehensive review should evaluate the traction of Fund surveillance in terms of proposed “take up” by member states and the importance of engaging with members and other stakeholders. The 2014 review stipulated that surveillance reviews will henceforth take place every 5 instead of 3 years, which means that the next review was due in 2019. However, the IMF’s 2019 work plan indicates that the next review is delayed by one year and now scheduled for 2020.

Once again, the World Bank has been under fire from civil society and academics for the Doing Business Report, its flagship text that monitors and ranks the business environment of 190 countries (see Observer Spring 2018).  After criticisms of fluctuating methodology and political motivation following Chile’s fall and India’s sudden jump in the rankings last year, civil society responses to Doing Business 2019 continue to raise concerns of bias towards business deregulation and low corporation taxes.

The report highlights so-called ‘improvers’ – countries the World Bank considers to have implemented the most business-friendly regulatory laws across ten areas. In practice, this means countries that are deemed to have cut “unnecessary red tape”, like minimising regulations around construction permits and merging or eliminating taxes. This year’s report includes in its top ten improvers China, which abolished its business tax, and Togo, which lowered its corporate tax rate.

Responding to criticism from independent evaluations, the World Bank has adapted the report’s methodology, but it remains under question (see Inside the Institutions). Commenting on Chile earlier this year, former World Bank Chief Economist Paul Romer stated that he did not have “confidence in the integrity” of the rankings and suggested that the data may been unfairly skewed towards some countries over others. He later retracted his comments and resigned.

Doing Business and inequality

This year’s Doing Business ranking highlights Hungary’s corporate tax rate reduction, now the lowest rate in the European Union, as a positive reform. This reflects the ranking’s promotion of low taxes on business through its tax rate sub-indicator, which gives a higher score to countries that have a total tax and contribution rate equal to or lower than 26.1 per cent of profit (see Observer  Winter 2017). The ranking also criticises Oman’s increased corporate income tax rate for making it “more difficult to do business” while rewarding Cyprus’ abolition of property tax, in contrast to advice in a recent IMF blog.

The report runs in stark contrast to Oxfam’s Commitment to Reducing Inequality Index, launched at this year’s annual meetings. Nadia Daar of Oxfam International commented that, “While Doing Business encourages a ‘race to the bottom’ on corporate taxation, Oxfam’s index asks governments to consider the equity outcomes of their policy choices and scores countries worse if their tax policies are regressive. Singapore, Bahrain, Latvia, Lithuania, and Mauritius rank among the highest for tax policies by Doing Business 2019, but those same countries come close to the bottom of Oxfam’s tax pillar. The Bank wants to remain relevant to today’s pressing issues, yet its flagship product continues to reward governments for policies that worsen inequality.”

While the Bank removed an earlier indicator that rewarded the undermining of labour rights (see Update 66), this year, in the Labour Market Regulation Annex, it warned of “cumbersome labor regulatory framework[s],” and cautioned that, “labor markets may not operate effectively if overregulated.”

Peter Bakvis of the ITUC noted that, “The World Bank claims to promote inclusive, sustainable economic growth while Doing Business continues its hostile stance towards labour rights.” He added that the World Bank’s “stubborn refusal to address considerable criticism over the purpose and methodology of the Doing Business rankings shows that it’s sticking to tunnel vision over reform.”

An October report by Philip Alston, the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, on the effect of privatisation on human rights, has heavily criticised the World Bank and IMF’s aggressive promotion of it, arguing that widespread privatisation of public goods in many societies is “systematically eliminating human rights protections and further marginalising those living in poverty.”

Following in the footsteps of numerous UN reports, this report warned against a “tsunami of unchecked privatisation” that has transformed arguments for fiscal deficit reduction into an ideology of governance that devalues public goods and services (see Observer Spring 2017, Autumn 2017). The IMF and World Bank, it claims, are at the heart of this process.

World Bank paves the way for financialisation

A 1992 World Bank report stated that, “There are virtually no limits on what can be privatized.” More than two decades later and the Bank’s Private Participation in Infrastructure Database – which tracks projects in 139 countries – lists $1,758 billion in total private investment. Indeed, commenting on the Bank’s Billions to Trillions and subsequent Maximizing Finance for Development agendas – which explicitly prioritise private financing and private sector solutions – Alston noted that these result in “profitable enterprises being reserved to the private sector and unprofitable activities remaining publicly financed” (see Observer Summer 2017).

The report argues that voluminous materials promoting this “entirely one-sided solution to development financing” make no mention of its human rights implications, adding weight to the wealth of civil society resistance towards the Bank’s leveraging of private sector investment (see Observer Summer 2017, Winter 2017-18). For example, earlier this year, 5,700 Indonesian women activists fought to ensure the government’s compliance with the Indonesian Supreme Court’s decision to ban water privatisation in Jakarta, which was initially introduced following World Bank advice (see Observer Autumn 2018).

Alston’s report also noted that – unlike the tracking of business performance – impact studies on human rights and poverty were rare for private sector projects. A 2017 report by Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, lamented that while, “Infrastructure, if well-conceived and implemented, is vital for the realisation of many human rights … human rights are rarely given more than lip service [in] the macho world of mega-infrastructure” (see Observer Summer 2017).

A central recommendation in Alston’s report is a call to “reverse the presumption, now fully embraced by actors such as the World Bank, that privatization is the default setting and that the role of the public sector is that of a last-resort actor that does what no one else can or wants to do.”

IMF and privatisation: A hidden friendship

In 2014, when asked about the legacy of IMF’s Structural Adjustment Programmes, IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde responded, “Structural adjustment? That was before my time, I have no idea what it is. We don’t do that anymore.” In contrast, the Alston report declared that while the Fund “claims to have introduced major changes to some of its Washington Consensus-era policies, the emphasis on the privatization of a range of public sector enterprises and activities continues to feature prominently.”

The report includes an appraisal of ten recent African Article IV staff reports – the Fund’s tool for conducting economic surveillance at a country level (see Inside the Institutions) – revealing that the IMF promoted privatisation in six cases, with most of the remaining governments already demonstrating a commitment to public private partnerships (PPPs) and associated projects. Awkwardly for the IMF, these findings were published just days after the IMF released a note warning against PPPs, emphasising that, “while in the short term, PPPs may appear cheaper than traditional public investment, over time they can turn out to be more expensive and undermine fiscal sustainability.”

Alston’s report further highlighted the indirect way in which privatisation can be promoted, whereby fiscal consolidation encourages governments to retreat from direct service provision. According to new research by Brussels-based civil society network Eurodad, 23 of the 26 IMF loans approved in 2016 and 2017 aimed to achieve fiscal consolidation, with 30 structural conditions in these programmes explicitly calling for privatisation measures.

In October, the International Finance Corporation (IFC, the private sector arm of the World Bank) released a statement expressing its position on client retaliation against civil society and project stakeholders. According to the text, the “IFC does not tolerate any action by an IFC client that amounts to retaliation – including threats, intimidation, harassment, or violence – against those who voice their opinion regarding the activities of IFC or our clients. We take seriously any credible allegations of reprisals.”

The statement came after Defenders in Development, a campaign launched in 2016 by the Coalition of Human Rights in Development, published an open letter condemning increased violence against human rights and development campaigners (HRDs). According to international NGO Global Witness, 2017 was the deadliest on record for land and environmental defenders, as “at least 207 land and environmental defenders were killed…indigenous leaders, community activists and environmentalists [were] murdered trying to protect their homes and communities from mining, agribusiness and other destructive industries.”

The coalition welcomed the IFC’s statement, but implored development institutions like the World Bank to develop more specific procedures, in particular in the context of its ongoing push for privatisation through its Maximising Finance for Development approach (see Observer Summer 2017). As noted by Gretchen Gordon, of Defenders in Development, “We urge the IFC to develop a comprehensive and detailed approach to this issue that integrates not just the assessment of reprisal risks, and addressing risks as they arise, but proactive engagement to prevent reprisals, robust human rights due diligence, reprisal-sensitive stakeholder engagement, and a response protocol so that when threats and reprisals materialize the institution is positioned to respond in a timely and effective manner to minimize and remedy harm, and to prevent future attacks.”