French government survives confidence vote over austerity law

Antoine Lerougetel

The Socialist Party (PS) government of Prime Minister Manuel Valls easily survived a censure motion presented after Valls used clause 49-3 of the French constitution on Wednesday to override parliament and impose the pro-austerity Macron Law without a vote. The censure motion received 234 votes, well below the majority of 289 required in the 577-seat National Assembly.

On Wednesday, it became clear that many PS deputies of the so-called “rebel” (frondeur) faction preferred not to vote openly for the law, designed by PS Economy Minister and former investment banker Emmanuel Macron. The law allows for large-scale privatizations of state assets, longer Sunday work without overtime pay, streamlining of layoff procedures and liberalization of medical and legal professions. Hollande’s free-market economic policies, aligned with the reactionary demands of the European Union (EU), enjoyed a 3 percent approval rating in a poll late last year.

Numbering some 40 deputies, the PS “rebels” had pledged to vote down the law, along with the 10 Stalinist French Communist Party (PCF) deputies as well as the Greens. Together with the right-wing Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), this might have possibly formed a majority in the National Assembly and voted down Macron's reactionary law. This would have dealt the Valls government and President François Hollande a humiliating blow and created a crisis in France's relations with the EU, which all factions of the PS are determined to avoid.

Valls therefore spared his PS colleagues the embarrassment of voting for the law and resorted to clause 49-3. He then had to face a motion of no confidence drafted by the right-wing UMP (Union for a Popular Movement), which itself called for deeper austerity. If the PS government had lost the vote, it would have been forced to resign and parliament would have been dissolved.

Predictably, however, none of the PS “rebels” wanted to vote against the Valls government, to which they had already granted confidence in a vote last autumn.

They all fear that, in the case the fall of the government triggered new elections, they would be swept out on a wave of popular hostility to the PS. As L'Obs noted, “Even for the frondeurs, who threatened to deprive the government of a parliamentary majority over the Macron law, their hearts weren’t necessarily in it.”

“No one for a moment raised voting for the censure motion,” explained PSfrondeur spokesman Christian Paul. “We are full members of the parliamentary majority.”

One PS “rebel,” Benoît Hamon declared, “I have no wish to sanction the government which I support.” He endorsed Valls' “education, foreign, defense and security policies.”

In the event, none of the frondeurs voted against the government. The 234 votes against were the 198 UMP deputies, 30 of the conservative UDI (Union of Democrats and Independents), one Green, 6 of the 10 PCF deputies, and 2 of the neo-fascist National Front.

The law will now go through the Senate which, having a right-wing majority, will doubtless be amended in way that drives policy further to the right. It will then return to the National Assembly for a final vote.

The result of the censure vote highlights the bankruptcy of any attempt to oppose the austerity policies imposed on workers through the parliamentary system, instead of through the mobilization of the working class.

The PS “rebels” and long-standing PS allies who have promoted them, such as the New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA) and Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the Left Front, stand exposed as reactionary political frauds. Despite their posturing, they have supported PS austerity measures ever since President François Hollande was elected in 2012.

The six PCF deputies who voted to censure the government—calculating that the PS majority was safe, and that they could afford the luxury of making an impotent “symbolic” protest—ended up further abasing themselves by voting for the UMP's reactionary censure motion.

They voted for a text that demands stepped up budget cuts and attacks on the working class, declaring, “By avoiding reforming the State, our pension system, trade union relations, and the labor code, this minimal measure [the Macron Law] is a missed opportunity to rebuild our country, like our European partners who have already carried out these reforms.”

US court overturns “terrorism” charge against Australian Guantanamo prisoner

Richard Phillips

After protracted legal action by former Guantanamo prisoner David Hicks, a US Military Commission Review has unanimously upheld the 39-year-old Australian citizen’s appeal against his bogus “providing material support for terrorism” conviction. The decision is yet another demonstration that the US-led “war on terror” and its associated crimes are built on lies.

The court declared yesterday that “the findings of guilty are set aside and dismissed, and appellant’s sentence is vacated.” A Pentagon spokesman told the media that the US would not appeal the decision. The ruling follows the recent quashing of the same conviction against a Sudanese citizen Noor Uthman Muhammed who was released from Guantanamo in 2014.

Of the almost 800 people who have been imprisoned at the Guantanamo hellhole since 2002, only six have been convicted by the military commissions. Three of those verdicts, including Hicks’s, were overturned after the prisoners’ release with the other three currently being appealed.

Hicks’s “terrorism” conviction violated due process and was invented after the Australian citizen had already been imprisoned. It was imposed as part of a US military commission plea deal for his release in 2007.

Commenting on yesterday’s court ruling, Hicks told a press conference that he “had been waiting for this decision for years,” and it was “a relief because it’s over.” He was not interested in an apology from the government, he added, because “it wouldn’t change anything and would, in any case, be insincere.”

Hicks, however, declared that the federal government should pay for ongoing medical expenses caused by his incarceration. “It’s due to the torture, of being kept in metal rooms in freezing conditions for years, it’s not being able to move, it’s not being able to exercise: the body deterior­ates over five and a half years, even without the added torture, such as stress positions, and being beaten,” he said.

Hicks was repeatedly asked to respond to media and government claims that the quashing of the terrorism charge was on “a legal technicality.” His lawyer Stephen Kenny said that the charges against Hicks were based on a lie and reaffirmed that his client “had never breached any Australian, international or US laws.”

Badgered by the journalists, Hicks declared: “I think they [all those accusing him of terrorism] are supporters of torture.” His brief but blunt response was spot-on. All of those who yesterday defended Hicks’s incarceration, despite the fact that the US court decision had overturned the conviction, were directly or indirectly involved in his persecution, torture and 2007 show trial.

The chief culprit, former Prime Minister John Howard, declared that, “The US verdict is about the legal process in that country” and that Hicks was “not owed an apology by any Australian government.” In fact, the Howard government gave the green light for the indefinite incarceration of Hicks, covered up his torture and refused to render him any assistance.

Current Prime Minister Tony Abbott, one of Howard’s ministers, said that Canberra “did what was needed” because Hicks had been “up to no good.” “I’m not in the business of apologising for the actions that Australian governments take to protect our country. Not now, not ever.” My government, Abbott declared, would be “absolutely relentless in the fight against terrorism.”

In other words, the Abbott government not only defends the previous violations of the Geneva Conventions, due process and the presumption of innocence, but is preparing even greater attacks on basic legal rights under the banner of the phony “war on terror.”

Hicks was captured by Northern Alliance forces in Afghanistan in late 2001, sold to the US military and sent to Guantanamo where he was incarcerated for five and a half years. He was subjected to beatings, sleep deprivation and other forms of torture, including extended periods of solitary confinement. He was also denied access to a lawyer and family contact for almost two years.

From the outset the Howard government used the bogus terrorist allegations against Hicks to justify its backing for the Bush administration’s “war on terror” and invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Howard, Attorney General Phillip Ruddock and Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer constantly defamed Hicks as “a terrorist,” declaring that his on-going detention was justified.

Senior government ministers rejected detailed evidence from lawyers and international human rights bodies that the Australian citizen was tortured and insisted that Hicks was “healthy” and being treated well. Ruddock even claimed that sleep-deprivation, which was used on Hicks, was not torture.

In early 2007 Hicks was told that unless he accepted a plea bargain arrangement he would remain incarcerated in Guantanamo for years. He was one of the first to face the Guantanamo military commissions. Commenting yesterday on the plea deal, Hicks’s former military lawyer, Dan Mori, said: “Did I feel dirty participating in that little show trial? Absolutely.”

The deal, in fact, was a political “fix”, concocted by the Howard government with the Bush administration to protect Canberra from mounting domestic opposition to Hicks’s treatment. In return for pleading guilty, Hicks was given a seven-year suspended sentence, a seven-month prison term in an Australian high security prison, a one-year media gag and other anti-democratic restrictions. Australia was the only country outside the US that formally recognised the military commissions.

The Labor Party was just as culpable as the Howard government for Hicks’s ordeal. Its response yesterday was utterly hypocritical. Labor opposition leader Bill Shorten initially declared that “there has been an injustice done.” But his parliamentary secretary Jim Chalmers, like Howard, later told Sky News: “These are decisions of the US courts fundamentally and it’s probably not appropriate for Australians to apologise for a decision taken by a US court.”

During Hicks’s detention, Labor leaders, state and federal, provided unwavering bi-partisan support to the Howard government and only began voicing mild criticism in 2006 after public opposition emerged calling for his repatriation.

Elected to power in late 2007, the Rudd Labor government kept Hicks incarcerated in a South Australian high-security prison and on his release enforced the one-year media ban and a draconian control order. Hicks was required to report to police three times a week for six months and could not leave his home between midnight and dawn or use mobile phones or the internet unless authorised by the Australian Federal Police.

In 2011, when Hicks published a detailed account of his treatment (see: “Guantanamo: My Journey—David Hicks exposes torture and government criminality”), the Labor government began prosecuting him under “proceeds of crime” laws. Labor only abandoned the case after it became clear that Hicks’s lawyers could subpoena government officials.

While Hicks has now been found innocent, those guilty of illegally incarcerating him and hundreds of others, remain scot-free. No one in the Bush or Obama administrations or the US military has been held accountable for torture and other crimes committed as part of the “war on terror.”

Nor has any action been taken against members of the Howard government in Australia who aided and abetted Hicks’s detention, or the Rudd, Gillard and Abbott administrations that used the “war on terror” to justify their involvement in Washington’s criminal wars and their attacks on basic legal and democratic rights at home.

US-backed Kiev regime faces military debacle in east Ukraine war

Alex Lantier

Reports of the fighting in the strategic east Ukrainian city of Debaltseve make clear that the US-backed Kiev regime sustained a humiliating defeat this week.

Late Wednesday, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko claimed that six soldiers had been killed and 100 wounded in a hurried evacuation of Debaltseve. He justified the evacuation by claiming that 2,475 soldiers and 200 military vehicles had been pulled out in time from the encirclement maneuver launched by Russian-backed forces of the Donetsk People's Republic (DPR).

Yesterday, Poroshenko revised the casualty count upwards to 13 killed, 157 wounded, 90 captured, and “at least” 82 missing. However, according to theNew York Times, “the number of dead would likely grow considerably higher.”

With estimates of the number of Ukrainian soldiers trapped in the Debaltseve area ranging from 5,000 to 8,000, it appears the Kiev regime's losses are to be counted in the thousands. Yesterday, DPR leader Alexander Zakharchenko declared, “We have completed an operation to clear Debaltseve. Unfortunately, Ukrainian authorities have failed to listen to reason and lay down arms ... The losses of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the [Debaltseve] pocket are estimated at around 3,000 to 3,500.”

Zakharchenko said that DPR authorities were negotiating with the Kiev regime for the return of the bodies of the fallen and the release of Ukrainian prisoners of war.

“The amount of equipment Ukrainian units have lost here is beyond description. We have taken loads of ammunition both in Debaltseve and Uglegorsk,” said Zakharchenko. He added that the Kiev regime had “lost its best units and a large amount of hardware and ammunition in the Debaltseve trap.” He said many fighters from the Ukrainian 128th mountain rifle brigade, the 8th special force regiment, and the far-right Ukrainian National Guard had been killed.

DPR officials claimed yesterday that they were ending major combat operations. DPR Defense Ministry spokesman Eduard Basurin said, “On the whole, the situation along the contact line is gradually stabilizing. Units of the DPR’s armed forces strictly abide by a ceasefire and don’t fall for sporadic provocations by Ukrainian troops.”

Basurin reported, however, that fighting was still ongoing to crush isolated groups of Kiev regime fighters on the outskirts of Debaltseve.

Interviews of Ukrainian troops by Western journalists sympathetic to the Kiev regime painted a picture of total collapse. Ukrainian supply lines to Debaltseve were cut off for a week by DPR forces prior to the final assault, the Guardian reported, calling the Kiev regime’s situation in east Ukraine “catastrophic.”

“We knew that if we stayed there, it would definitely either be captivity or death,” Ukrainian Lieutenant Yuriy Prekharia told the Guardian .

Ukrainian troops refused a DPR offer to let them to retreat unharmed if they abandoned their arms, and they repeatedly came under artillery and small arms fire as they fled. Medic Albert Sardarian said that after his column of armored vehicles carrying 1,000 men came under artillery fire, survivors had to flee on foot, leaving their dead and wounded behind.

As Ukrainian soldiers fleeing from Debaltseve arrived in Artemivsk, New York Times journalists reported, “Many soldiers were in a demoralized and drunken state. Shellshocked soldiers from the battle in Debaltseve wandered the streets through the day Wednesday, before beginning to drink heavily…At Biblios, an upscale restaurant in Artemivsk, soldiers staggered about in the dining room, ordering brandy for which they had no money to pay, and then firing shots into the ceiling as other guests quietly fled the premises.”

The debacle suffered by the Kiev regime exposes the utterly reckless and frankly stupid character of the policy pursued by Washington and its EU allies in Ukraine.

One year ago, Washington, Berlin and the other NATO powers backed a putsch led by pro-Nazi forces of the Right Sector, exploiting the right-wing, pro-EU Maidan protests to topple President Viktor Yanukovych. The putsch had no popular support, and the Maidan protests rarely gathered more than a few thousand people bused in from western Ukraine. The regime that emerged, led by right-wing forces, including the fascist, anti-Russian Svoboda Party, deeply alienated the population in the more pro-Russian industrial heartland of east Ukraine.

The initial attempts of the Kiev regime and its CIA backers to subjugate east Ukraine by sheer military terror, relying on fascist militias and select units of the Ukraine army that it considered to be reliable, have failed. Popular opposition and covert Kremlin support for east Ukrainian forces has sufficed to defeat those units that Kiev could throw against the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

Nevertheless, Washington is pressing Kiev to prepare for a renewed offensive and is still discussing directly arming the Ukrainian army against Russia with US weapons. While Washington pursues a strategy that could trigger a direct conflict between NATO and Russia, a nuclear-armed power, its proxy regime in Kiev is disintegrating.

In west Ukraine, the population is evading or resisting draft orders to obtain more cannon fodder for the east Ukraine war. At the same time, Ukraine’s economy, cut off from its main industrial base in east Ukraine and its export markets in Russia, is collapsing.

“The country is at war that they cannot afford to fight. There is no economy any longer. When you look at where the industrial base of Ukraine is, and the conflict going on in the east, there is absolutely no doubt as to why it is happening,” Gerald Celente of Trends Journal told Russia Today. “That $160 billion loss of trade with Russia has destroyed the economy, when it was already in a severe recession. It went from very bad to worse than depression levels.”

Ukraine’s Gross Domestic Product has shrunk 6.5 percent. Workers’ purchasing power is collapsing, with inflation expected to reach 27 percent this year and the hryvnia, the Ukrainian currency, losing roughly half its value against the dollar. In the meantime, Kiev is slashing wages, industrial subsidies, and social spending, throwing large sections of the working class out of work.

The Kiev regime’s reverses do not, however, signify an end to the conflict in Ukraine, which is driven above all by NATO’s drive to tear Ukraine out of Russia’s geostrategic orbit, to humiliate Russia and prepare to reduce it to the status of a semi-colonial dependency of the NATO powers. The only force that can stop this offensive is the international working class, mobilizing itself in struggle against NATO’s war plans.

Without such an intervention, NATO’s Ukrainian proxies will simply regroup and launch a renewed assault—as they did in the aftermath of the previous ceasefire negotiated in Minsk last September.

Poroshenko reacted to the defeat in Debaltseve by calling for what would be a new, major escalation of the conflict: deploying European Union (EU) troops as peacekeepers to east Ukraine to confront Russian-backed forces. He claimed this deployment would aim to enforce the terms of the second Minsk cease-fire agreement announced last week, which both sides in Ukraine have ignored.

“The best format for us is a policing mission from the European Union. We are convinced that this will be the most effective and optimal solution in a situation when promises of peace have not been kept,” Poroshenko declared. He said Kiev would “launch official consultations with our foreign partners” to this effect.

Oleksandr Turchynov, the head of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, called for EU troops to also deploy to Ukraine’s border with Russia—an utterly reckless move that would position EU troops for a direct attack on the centers of European Russia.

Illinois budget to cut $6.7 billion from pensions, health care, social services

Kristina Betinis & Alexander Fangmann

The budget unveiled Wednesday by Governor Bruce Rauner of Illinois is an open declaration of class war against the working people of the fifth-largest US state, one of the major centers of the industrial working class, where some of the most important class battles in American history have been fought.

Rauner, the newly elected Republican governor, called for spending cuts totaling $6.7 billion. Nearly half of the cuts will come from the pensions and health benefits of state employees, while the remaining half will hit Medicaid, higher education, transportation and other state services.

The cuts detailed by the governor’s office include:

• $2.2 billion from shifting most state employees to a scaled-back pension plan imposed on new hires in 2011, cutting their future benefits

• $700 million from health benefits for current state employees, to be imposed in upcoming contract talks with the public employee unions

• $1.5 billion from Medicaid by tightening eligibility standards, reducing payments to hospitals and nursing homes by 12 percent, and curtailing so-called “optional” services for adults such as dental care and podiatry

• $387 million from higher education, including $209 million from the University of Illinois

• $127 million from mass transit for the densely populated Chicago metropolitan area

• $167 million by denying Department of Children and Family Services aid to young adults aged 18 to 21

• $600 million from state aid to local governments, devastating the budgets of cities, towns, counties and villages throughout the state

• $82 million from mental health and substance abuse services and services for those with special needs, including adults living with autism and epilepsy

Many of Rauner’s targets are the state’s most vulnerable residents: homeless youth, poor families, the sick, immigrants, the disabled. The Medicaid cut is particularly cruel, since both enrollment and expenditures have doubled between 2000 and 2011, an indication of the enormous social need for health care.

Rauner rejected any tax increases on the wealthy and proposed only a single minor spending increase, about $300 million for elementary and secondary education, which he had promised in his election campaign.

In his address to the state legislature, Rauner called for other longer term attacks on the working class, including significant reductions in workers compensation and unemployment insurance, further pension cuts, tax cuts for business and reduced regulation of businesses.

Far from facing opposition from the Democrats at either the state or federal level, Rauner is taking a leadership role in a bipartisan nationwide assault on the living standards of the working class, who are being bled to further enrich the financial aristocracy.

Representatives of Rauner’s office and state Republicans have met over the last several weeks to discuss the proposed budget with US Senator Dick Durbin, the state’s top Democrat, as well as Michael Madigan and John Cullerton, the Democratic leaders of the Illinois legislature.

After the budget was unveiled, Speaker of the House Madigan emphasized his openness to Rauner’s approach, saying, “There are no non-starter proposals.” Senate President Cullerton expressed his enthusiasm for getting to work with Rauner on the budget after the governor’s State of the State address on February 4.

The attack on state worker pensions builds on the momentum of attacks by local Democratic Party politicians in Stockton, California and Detroit, where flagrantly illegal and unconstitutional attacks on pension benefits have been pushed through using federal bankruptcy laws.

In Illinois the previous Democratic administration of Pat Quinn began the attack on pensions, first splitting state workers in 2011 into two tiers, then enacting a 2013 law that gradually eliminated the differences between Tier 1 and Tier 2.

Last year, a state court ruled that reducing pension benefits was a violation of the state constitution. The Illinois state supreme court is to hear arguments on the case on March 11.

Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan, a Democrat and the daughter of the House speaker, will argue that the 2007-2008 financial collapse so upset the state’s finances that it is justified under the broad grant of “police power” to the states under the 10th Amendment to the US Constitution to override the state constitutional provision protecting public employee pensions, a legal argument that is both preposterous and reactionary.

The day after Rauner’s budget was issued, President Obama visited the south side of Chicago for a photo-op ceremony establishing a US national park honoring Pullman porters, and to give his well-publicized endorsement of Mayor Rahm Emanuel for reelection. Neither Obama nor Emanuel said anything about the devastating attack on jobs, living conditions and social programs just announced in Illinois.

There was good reason for their silence. Obama at the national level and Emanuel in Chicago have carried out equivalent attacks on the social rights of working people. Obama’s budget, issued February 2, calls for record levels of military spending, continued spending freezes and cuts for most federal programs, and a draconian $400 billion cut over ten years in Medicare.

Emanuel, Obama’s former chief of staff, has spearheaded the attack on public education in Chicago, closing 50 public schools and firing thousands of teachers. He has also pushed for pension cuts to Chicago municipal workers, eliminated health care for retirees and slashed mental health and other city services.

Emanuel is personally close to Bruce Rauner, and they come from the same social milieu—the extremely wealthy North Shore—with Emanuel himself having worked as an investment banker after a stint in Congress, just before entering the White House to serve in the Obama administration. Rauner was an adviser to Emanuel in his implementation of school “reforms” which led to the Chicago teachers’ strike in 2012.

German finance minister demands unconditional surrender from Greece

Christoph Dreier

Within the space of a few hours, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble (CDU) rejected outright written requests by the Greek government on Thursday for an extension of its previous credit agreement with the EU. Schäuble wants to create a precedent for all of Europe by completely humiliating the Syriza government.

“The letter from Athens is not a substantial proposal towards a solution,” declared Schäuble’s spokesman Martin Jäger in Berlin on Thursday, adding that the application took the form of a request for a bridge loan and did not meet the requirements of the program. “The letter does not meet the criteria agreed upon in the Euro group on Monday.”

In fact, Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis has made far-reaching concessions in his letter to the head of the euro group of euro zone finance ministers, Jeroen Dijsselbloem. The letter describes the European Union’s (EU) brutal austerity program as “remarkable efforts in economic adjustment” that had to be brought to a “successful conclusion.”

Varoufakis recognized the “financial and administrative terms” of the loan agreement with the EU and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and applied for its six-month extension. The so-called Memorandum is part of this agreement, but is not explicitly mentioned in the letter.

The letter expressly welcomes the monitoring of measures by the institutions of the European Central Bank (ECB), the European Commission and the IMF, i.e. the “troika” which is so deeply hated by the Greek population. Following its election, Syriza had declared it would not work with this body.

Finally, Varoufakis said he was ready to work “closely with our European and international partners” and refrain “from unilateral action that would undermine the fiscal targets, economic recovery and financial stability” of Greece.

The letter’s far-reaching relinquishing of national sovereignty was masked only by a few vague formulations, such as proposing “flexibility in the existing arrangement” and avoiding any direct reference to the “troika” and the “memorandum”.

But for Schäuble, even these concessions by Syriza are not enough. He is demanding unconditional surrender. Already on Tuesday, Schäuble had demanded that Athens explicitly recognize the Memorandum and pledge not to reverse any of the cuts and mass layoffs previously imposed under its terms. Schäuble believes that concessions to Greece will serve to legitimize demands from other European countries—especially Italy and Spain—for a moderation of EU austerity policies.

At this point, as he negotiates the terms of surrender, Varoufakis is not being allowed even the mildest verbal concessions that are desperately needed by Syriza to maintain some small degree of political credibility. The situation confronted by Varoufakis and Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras resembles that once faced by the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. In 1988, after having already repudiated his organization’s core principles, Arafat was pressured by the US to make still more humiliating concessions to Israel. He asked, “Do you want me to striptease?”

There remains some possibility that Germany may decide to pull back slightly from its ultimatum. Schäuble’s demands on Athens had been unanimously supported by the representatives of the Euro group at its Monday meeting. On Thursday, however, some representatives urged more negotiations with the Greek government.

Germany’s social-democratic Economy Minister Sigmar Gabriel criticized his cabinet colleagues, demanding that Varoufakis’ letter “be used as a starting point for negotiations and not publicly rejected out of hand.” At the same time, he agreed with Schäuble “that what was in the letter was insufficient to reach an agreement.”

EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said the letter from Athens could pave the way for a “reasonable compromise in the interest of financial stability in the euro area as a whole.” However, he was not prepared to comment further on the proposals.

Italian Finance Minister Pier Carlo Padoan said Athens’ proposals must be “taken seriously.”

French Prime Minister Manuel Valls called Syriza’s plans “very encouraging” and indicated that a solution could be reached quickly. Schäuble’s own stance was supported by the Finnish and Latvian governments.

Greek government sources said that Tsipras and the German chancellor Angela Merkel spoke on the phone on Thursday for 50 minutes. The telephone conversation took place in a positive atmosphere, German television channel n-tv reported.

On Friday, the euro group is due to meet to discuss the Greek application. A Greek government spokesman announced on Thursday that the finance ministers could “accept or reject” Greece’s request, but no other option was on the table. He said the meeting would show “who wants a solution and who does not.”

But these are words without substance. Even if the euro group engages in further negotiations on Friday, the only issue will be how to phrase the terms of Syriza’s capitulation. Less than four weeks after its election victory, Syriza’s strategy of petty maneuvers with the EU lies in tatters.

Syriza hoped to exploit differences between the European powers and policy differences between Germany and the United States to obtain some political leeway.

In another development, Syriza’s subordination to the ruling elite within Greece was confirmed, with the election of the new President.

The government nominated right-winger Prokopis Pavlopoulos, who received the votes of 233 of the 300 seats in the Greek parliament. This vast majority was not necessary to secure Pavlopoulos’ election; just 151 votes would have been enough in the final round of voting.

The 64-year-old Pavlopoulos sits on ND’s central committee. He has repeatedly held high state and government posts, including most recently that of Minister of the Interior from 2004 to 2009.

In this latter position, Pavlopoulos in 2008 sent in police to brutally attack protesters after the police shooting of 15-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos. Hundreds of people were arrested in the ensuing police crackdown.

Pavlopoulos’ election has already sparked off conflicts inside Syriza. European MP Manolis Glezos described the election as blatant disregard for the will of the people. One member of parliament refused to vote for Pavlopoulos. The adoption of a deal with the EU on the terms demanded by Schäuble could rapidly provoke a major government crisis.

Obama’s terror summit: An exercise in hypocrisy, falsification and self-delusion

Bill Van Auken

President Barack Obama, on both Wednesday and Thursday, addressed sessions of a summit on “countering violent extremism” convened in Washington and attended by representatives of 65 countries.

While repeatedly insisting on the need to talk “squarely and honestly” about “root causes” of terrorism, the American president’s remarks amounted to a string of barely coherent banalities—including quotations from a Valentine’s Day card from a 12-year-old—all aimed at covering up the incontrovertible causal connection between terrorism and the chain of catastrophes unleashed by US wars of aggression over the past decade.

The three-day talk shop involved no decisions, commitments or changes in policy. Threadbare rhetoric about religious inclusion was joined with laughable tips on how to recognize a young person being swung to “radical extremism” that seemed to have been cribbed from a Drug Enforcement Administration brochure on warning signs that your child may be using marijuana.

To the extent that the gathering had a discernible purpose, it was to bolster propaganda justifications for continuing war abroad and police state measures at home.

Obama vowed that the US would remain “unwavering in our fight against terrorist organizations,” outlining plans to continue and expand US military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Nigeria and beyond.

He argued that the crusade against “violent extremism” was to be waged not just against “terrorists who are killing innocent people,” but also at the “ideologies, the infrastructure of extremists—the propagandists, recruiters, the funders who radicalize and recruit or incite people to violence,” a category so broad and ill-defined as to potentially include virtually anyone who condemns the supposedly “moderate” policies of US imperialism.

The contradictions underlying the propaganda exercise were beyond glaring. Obama proclaimed in his speech that the struggle against terrorism required “more democracy” and “security forces and police that respect human rights and treat people with dignity.” Yet Washington counts as its closest allies in this struggle the tyrannical monarchy in Saudi Arabia and the military-controlled regime that rules Egypt, infamous for their repression, beheadings and mass killings.

Obama absurdly attempted to present terrorism as the product of “twisted ideologies” of groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS along with mistaken “ideas,” “notions,” and “strains of thought” among broader sections of the Muslim world.

“The notion that the West is at war with Islam is an ugly lie,” Obama insisted in his remarks. Indeed, Washington is an equal opportunity aggressor. It is preparing even bigger wars against non-Muslims from Eastern Europe to East Asia.

This “notion” may have arisen from the fact that the populations residing in countries containing some of the world’s greatest energy reserves as well as pipeline routes for their extraction happen to be majority Muslim, and therefore have borne the tragic brunt of Washington’s drive to militarily assert hegemony over these lands.

The struggle against terrorism, Obama stated, requires confronting the fact that too many people “buy into the notion that the Muslim world has suffered historical grievances—sometimes that’s accurate—... buy into the the belief that so many of the ills in the Middle East flow from a history of colonialism or conspiracy ...”

Historical grievances? Who does Obama think he’s kidding? Millions throughout the Arab world do not have to harken back to French and British colonialists in pith helmets when it comes to grievances. In recent decades, US imperialism has laid waste to one predominantly Muslim country after another.

It thrust Afghanistan into never-ending carnage that has killed millions since the US-sponsored mujahideen war of the 1980s. In Iraq, it carried out an illegal war of aggression that claimed over a million lives. In Libya it backed a war for regime change that left the society in ruins and ravaged by armed conflict between rival militias. And in Syria, it has stoked a civil war that has killed nearly 200,000 and turned millions into refugees.

In Iraq, Libya and Syria, Washington has carried out interventions to overthrow secular Arab regimes, acting as the catalyst for the growth of Islamist forces like Al Qaeda and ISIS. In the last two countries, it actually armed and supported these elements, using them as proxy forces.

If the top officials in the Bush and Obama administration had been paid agents of Osama bin Laden, they could not have done a better job at promoting the rise of those ostensibly targeted by the US-sponsored summit against “violent extremism.”

All of the hypocrisy, deceit and self-delusion on display at this week’s summit could not mask the fact that the policies pursued by Washington over more than a decade have resulted in a debacle.

In the wake of the Soviet Union’s dissolution, US imperialism embarked on a series of escalating interventions based on the conception that it could use its military superiority to offset its economic decline. The end result has been havoc and destruction.

This extends now to Ukraine which has been plunged into a civil war that has torn the country in two as its economy implodes and its army disintegrates, and which threatens to draw the US and nuclear-armed Russia into military confrontation. Washington’s fostering of a fascist-led coup to effect regime change in Kiev, portrayed as a master stroke a year ago, has only produced another disaster.

In any functioning democracy, there would be consequences for global catastrophes on the order of those produced by the last two US administrations. They would not only be the subject of public debate and congressional hearings, but the cause of forced resignations and criminal prosecutions.

In the US, there is nothing. There is no mechanism for any criticism of a government that only continues lying to the public and lying to itself. No one takes responsibility, and no one is held accountable.

With next year’s presidential campaign taking shape, the front-runners are Republican Jeb Bush, whose brother oversaw the criminal war in Iraq, and Democrat Hillary Clinton, who as secretary of state hailed the savage lynch-mob murder of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi by an Islamist militia, declaring amid gales of laughter, “We came, we saw, he died.” There could be no clearer measure of the sclerotic character of the US political system.

Responsibility extends beyond the White House, Congress and the two major parties to the media, whose “terrorism experts” continuously churn out lies and drivel justifying US militarism, and to academia, which remains either directly complicit or silent.

That every section of the US ruling establishment is deeply implicated in these crimes and catastrophes is symptomatic of profound economic, social and political crises gripping a capitalist system that is fully subordinated to the enrichment of a tiny minority engaged in financial parasitism at the expense of working people, the vast majority of the population.

With no progressive solution to these crises, the American ruling class is driven toward even more bloody military adventures, posing the increasing threat of the ultimate act of “violent extremism,” a Third World War.

Australian Interest in the Indian Ocean: Domestic Motivations

Stephen Westcott

Australia has been edging closer to embracing the Indian Ocean region for several years and finally openly declared in the 2013 Defence White Paper that it considered the Indian Ocean to be a key interest of the country. The international compulsions behind Australia’s new focus, from the rise of India to the concern over China’s recent posturing to the securing of its neighbouring sea lanes from criminal activities, are all relatively well known. Less widely discussed are Australia’s domestic factors that have led to this relatively new policy approach. This dearth of analysis naturally beggars the question: what, if any, are the domestic motivations behind Australia’s relatively new interest in the Indian Ocean?

The answer to this question rests first and foremost on the growing concern about the state and nature of the Australian economy. Though services such as education are an increasing part of the Australian economy, Australia still predominately relies upon its export of primary resources, especially mineral resources and agricultural products. Indeed, Australia managed by and large to avoid the worst of the Global Financial Crisis in primarily due to its strong export growth to Asia and in particular the People’s Republic of China. According to figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics quoted by Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Australia’s exports to China in 2013 broke approximately US$94 billion, which amounts to nearly a third of Australia’s total exports. Indeed, this figure is effectively double the second highest export partner, Japan, and certainly dwarfs Australian-Indian trade which reaches approximately US$46 billion and US$10 billion respectively. The sheer volume of Australia-China bilateral trade, which is only expected to grow following the reaching of a free trade agreement in November 2014, has caused consternation amongst a few Australians who worry the country is becoming too dependent on the Asian giant.

Even with such worries aside, the degree to which the Australian economy is linked to China’s has made it particularly susceptible to any shifts. With the Chinese economy now definitely slowing, there has been concern from industry groups in Australia that the country could dip into a recession owing to a subsequent decline in the country’s exports. With decreasing demand from other traditional trading partners in Asia and Europe, Australian diplomats have naturally begun to look around for other markets for export in order to mitigate the impact of any economic slowdown and ensure that Australia does not, as the current Trade Minister articulated, “have all our eggs in one basket.” With two of the BRICS countries, India and South Africa, and several other key growing economies, such as Indonesia, having a presence in Indian Ocean, it is a natural for Australia to take more of an interest to events off its western shores. 

Of course the growing interest has not been completely driven by economic concerns. The fact that there have been three prominent Defence and/or Foreign Ministers over the past seven years from the Indian Ocean facing Western Australia has certainly helped as they have sought to raise the state’s profile by highlighting the importance of the Indian Ocean at the national level as well as hosting international summits in Perth. More influential has been the increasing concern within Australian society over the potential impact of asylum-seekers, who largely originate from the Indian Ocean. A 2014 poll conducted by an influential Australian think-tank, the Lowy Institute, found that approximately 75 per cent of Australians consider asylum-seekers, especially those that arrive via boat, to be a threat to the stability of the country and believe they should be discouraged, if not actively repulsed. Even though the extent to which asylum-seekers attempting to reach Australia realistically constitute a threat is contentious, these perceptions have been highly influential on recent Australian domestic politics. As Indian Ocean littoral countries are typically where these asylum-seekers come from, Australia has inevitably taken greater interest and sought ways to improve stability in the region, if only to address the flow of refugees at the source.  

Part of the shift also has to do with Australia’s perception of itself as a ‘middle power’ that should have a significant interest and engagement with its neighbourhood. Indeed, this is a near universal belief within the Australian polity that the only real debate has been over whether the country is stronger than a middle power and how best to exercise this power. In essence, Australia’s strong self-conception of itself as a middle power has led it to pursue policies that seek to contribute, as a ‘good international citizen’, to the security of the international community and to be a source of diplomatic influence. This has manifested most visibly with Australia’s maintenance and utilisation of a relatively small but highly effective defence force. The ADF is utilised by Australia not only as a deterrent against encroachment on its interests, but also frequently for expeditionary missions alongside the US and also on of its own initiative within its neighbourhood, as Australia did in 1999 in Timor Leste and in 2003 in the Solomon Islands. The recent interest that Australia has shown in the Indian Ocean clearly has the imprint of its middle power mentality, and it will clearly attempt to ‘punch above its weight’ as it enters the region in earnest.

Sri Lankan foreign minister visits US to strengthen ties

Sanjaya Jayasekera

Sri Lankan Foreign Minister Mangala Samaraweera’s three-day trip to the US last week highlighted the rapid shift in relations between the two countries since President Mithripala Sirisena took office in Colombo, after defeating Mahinda Rajapakse in the January 8 presidential election.

Hostile to Rajapakse’s close ties with China, the Obama administration supported Sirisena’s installation. His entire campaign, which involved his defection from Rajapakse’s cabinet and the gathering of several parties, including the pro-US United National Party (UNP), around his presidential candidacy, was a US regime-change operation aimed at shifting Colombo’s foreign policy away from Beijing and toward Washington.

Sirisena’s government is steadily tilting Sri Lankan policy in line with the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia”—aimed at undermining China and encircling it militarily in preparation for war. Following the Sri Lankan election, the US has speedily moved to integrate Colombo into the “pivot.” The Obama administration sent its Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs Nisha Biswal to Sri Lanka early this month.

Samaraweera’s visit sought to forge closer ties with Washington. He met with US Secretary of State John Kerry and other senior officials. During a joint press briefing before their meeting on February 12, Kerry hailed Sri Lanka’s “historic election in which there has been really a vote for change, a vote to move Sri Lanka in a new direction.”

Samaraweera responded: “We also hope to revive and strengthen the very strong bonds we have had with the United States for several decades, but of course … the relations have been somewhat strained given the last few years.”

In effect, Samaraweera pledged that the Sirisena government will make a definitive break from Rajapakse’s orientation to China. He added: “And my job I feel is to ensure that we put back our relations to an irreversible state of excellence in the coming months… For us, for the new administration, the United States of America, is not a threat but a great opportunity.”

Later, addressing the National Press Club in Washington, Samaraweera stated: “I have come with the message that we want to broaden and strengthen these ties and I have discussed with Secretary Kerry about the way forward.” The fact that Samaraweera was invited to speak at the Press Club underlines the importance that the US political establishment has given to the change of government in Sri Lanka.

On the first date of his visit, February 11, Samaraweera addressed a large gathering at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a key US think tank. He said his government wished for “our relations with the United States to be as comprehensive as possible, encompassing a multitude of areas of cooperation.” Samaraweera signaled the Sirisena government’s readiness to fully embrace the US strategic agenda in the Indo-Pacific region.

A major aim of Samaraweera’s US visit was to secure Washington’s assistance to delay a UN report on Sri Lanka. In recent years, the Obama administration sponsored a series of United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) resolutions over the war crimes committed by the Rajapakse government and the military during its onslaught against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). These resolutions sought to pressure Rajapake’s government to fully line up with Washington’s anti-China “pivot.”

The UN report is the product of an international inquiry, established in line with a US-sponsored resolution last March. It was scheduled to be tabled at the UNHRC session next month. Sirisena’s government requested a delay, citing Colombo’s readiness to launch a “domestic inquiry” into war crimes allegations.

During his Carnegie Endowment speech, Samaraweera said: “Unlike the previous government, we are not in a state of denial, saying that such violations have not happened…We believe such violations have happened. We are ready to ensure that those who have violated human rights in Sri Lanka will be brought to justice.”

However, Sirisena himself is directly complicit in the war crimes. Not only was he a central figure in Rajapakse’s cabinet, he was acting Defence Minister at times during the final weeks of the war against the LTTE, when tens of thousands of Tamils were killed.

Noting the new government’s foreign policy realignment, sections of the US ruling elite are advocating concessions to Colombo over the war crimes issue. These calls highlight the fact that the raising of the “human rights” issues by the US never had anything to do with concerns about the victims of such violations, or basic democratic rights, but was based on its geo-strategic interests.

In a “counseling article” to the Brookings Institute, former US ambassador to Colombo Teresita Schaffer called on the US State Department to “lower its voice” on human rights in Sri Lanka, citing the change of the government. ANew York Times editorial last week declared: “Sirisena has moved swiftly to usher in a new chapter of hope for Sri Lanka.” It backed a delay in the release of the UN report, while stating that the postponement should be “brief.”

On February 16, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Raad al-Hussein, duly recommended delaying the report’s release from March to September. Such a postponement rests on clear political calculations. For its part, the Sirisena government wants to preserve what Samaraweera termed a “rainbow coalition” and head off any chauvinist campaign in support of Rajapakse’s comeback in the general elections to be called in late April.

The Sirisena government’s rapid change of policy toward the US includes building better relations with US allies and strategic partners. Samaraweera’s first foreign trip was to India. En route to the US he met with British Foreign Office Minister Hugo Swire in London. Swire also visited Colombo at the end of January. Sirisena this week conducted a three-day visit to India—his first trip abroad as president.

Sri Lanka is being more closely integrated into Washington’s war preparations, which include controlling major sea routes that can cut off China’s essential supplies of energy and raw materials from Africa and the Middle East. These developments are a warning to the working class and the oppressed masses throughout South Asia and the world of the growing danger of war.

Finance capital pushes for Australian economic “restructuring”

Nick Beams

The ongoing turmoil in Australia’s governing Liberal-National Coalition, which ten days ago saw about 40 percent of the Liberal Party’s federal MPs vote to end Tony Abbott’s prime ministership, was sparked by mass opposition to the currently-stalled spending cuts in the government’s budget brought down last May.

Two recent statements by corporate analysts, however, make clear that for the dominant sections of finance capital, the political impasse goes far beyond the government’s budgetary measures. They are seeking nothing less than a restructuring of the Australian economy, including a drastic reduction in real wages, in order to make it “internationally competitive.”

In a research note issued on Monday, JP Morgan analyst Stephen Walters said Australia was “sliding down the precipice,” due to “glacial” reform efforts.

The next day, former Treasury official and now chief economist at the Edinburgh-based global asset manager Standard Life Investments, Jeremy Lawson, told an investment seminar that Australia needed a recession to focus political minds on the growing imbalances in the economy.

In his research note, Walters pointed to a “recession-like” weakness in domestic demand as investment in the mining industry fell away without any replacement. “We knew for some time a plunge of mining investment was fast approaching,” he said. “The economy is now sliding down a precipice pretty much as expected, as the sector moves from expansion to production.” Investment in areas outside of resources had been “slow to appear.”

Walters outlined what he considered to be the main problems holding back investment spending. These included “chronic reform inertia”—with the regressive goods and services tax, introduced in 2000, being the last major and enduring change—as well as lack of spending on infrastructure.

But Walters’s main focus was on wage levels and working conditions. “Australia now has, on key measures, more rigid labour markets than many competitors and punishingly high penalty rates,” he said, adding that “Australia’s minimum wage is double that in the US.” In 2013, he noted, average weekly earnings were 70 percent above the global mean.

Picking up on this theme, Business Spectator columnist Alan Kohler wrote that while the “circus in Canberra” was no doubt a factor in reduced investor confidence, “for most people the real problem is the cost of doing business in Australia.”

“In a globalised world, and open economy, you don’t have to look much further than wage levels that are 70 percent above the global mean to discover why businesses aren’t feeling that great and are not investing,” Kohler wrote.

During his seminar presentation, Lawson recalled the experiences of the 1980s when the Hawke Labor government invoked the worsening economic climate—summed up in Treasurer Paul Keating’s phrase in 1986 that Australia was in danger of becoming a banana republic. Labor pushed through major economic restructuring, including the privatisation of major state-owned enterprises and the “restructuring” of wage rates and working conditions.

“If you look at Australia’s history, major reform episodes, tended to follow crises,” Lawson said. “It’s when you have that next recession, when unemployment is not 6.5 percent but 8 or 9 or 10 percent, you’ll really concentrate minds.”

In other words, only when wide sections of the population are subjected to economic devastation will governments be able to impose the agenda being demanded by finance capital.

Lawson made clear the critical questions went far beyond the budget and said the government had decided to tackle the wrong problems. “It has invested in a lot of capital in some unpopular things that actually aren’t going to be the critical determinants of whether Australia’s potential growth rate and productivity growth ends up being lifted,” he said.

The “critical determinants” are those outlined by Maurice Newman, the head of the Abbott government’s Business Advisory Council, shortly after the government took office. Under conditions of falling national income, due to the sharp downturn in commodity prices, Newman said the Australian minimum wage was far higher than the UK, Canada and New Zealand and more than double US levels, in a system “dogged by rigidities.”

The demands of finance are finding their reflection in the manoeuvring over the Liberal leadership. Amid growing criticism of Abbott’s government in business circles, leadership rival and Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull made an appearance on the “Q&A” television program on Monday night to outline his agenda, albeit somewhat guardedly because publicly, at least, he is still professing loyalty to Abbott.

In speeches over the past few years Turnbull, who has the closest connections with corporate finance and banking, has emphasised that economic globalisation signifies major changes for the Australian economy. On “Q&A,” he placed the conflict over the budget in that context.

“Everything we do has to be designed to ensure that our prosperity is secure, and that is by being more productive, more innovative, smarter, faster, leaner,” he told the audience. “That is what this budget repair thing is all about.”

These are the same free-market “buzz words” employed during the “restructuring” carried out under the Hawke and Keating governments, which resulted in the redistribution of wealth up the income scale, the closure of large sections of industry and the growth of financial parasitism. Now in worsening global economic conditions, finance is demanding that this program be intensified.

With around a quarter of the last budget’s measures still blocked in the Senate and amid growing concerns in ruling circles about the viability of the present parliamentary system for carrying through major economic changes, Turnbull indicated that he was looking for collaboration with the Labor Party in carrying out his program.

Both sides of politics, he said in the “Q&A” discussion, agreed on the need for changes in government revenue-raising and spending measures. The Liberals should put forward their proposals while Labor set out its alternative and then there should be a discussion. A third set of measures would emerge, possibly better than the two original plans.

The Labor Party has, for electoral reasons, opposed some of the more egregious measures in the May budget, while signing off on cuts worth billions of dollars in funding to the states. It is now increasingly making clear its readiness to carry through the demands of the corporate elites.

Writing in today’s Australian Financial Review, shadow treasurer Chris Bowen said the Liberals had not been “honest” either about the economic problems or their solution. Instead, they engaged in “Santa Claus economics,” with Treasurer Joe Hockey suggesting that the return of a Liberal government would boost business confidence and profits. Abbott’s government had not been serious about “ending the age of entitlement” when at the same time it was promoting a paid parental leave scheme.

The Labor Party has yet to announce specific measures but Bowen wrote that it acknowledged economic growth was not enough to return to a budget surplus—a clear indication that it is aligning itself with the demands of finance for major cuts and “restructuring.”

Study shows inequality much higher in Germany than previously estimated

Denis Krassnin

The distribution of wealth in modern society resembles an inverted pyramid. The higher up the pyramid, the fewer the people who share in total wealth. The top layer of society conceals its fortunes, and official figures are hard to come by, making it difficult to say precisely how rich they are. A new study by the trade union-run Hans Böckler Foundation aims to illuminate this “great statistical uncertainty.”

What the researchers at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) discovered, on the basis of an approximation of peak assets, far surpasses previous assumptions about social inequality in Germany—even though the reevaluation, in the words of the author, is “fraught with uncertainty.” Unfortunately, researchers could only draw on data that was three years old.

According to the study, the richest 10 percent possess over 63 to 74 percent of the total wealth of private households, which amounts to 8.6 to 9.3 billion Euros in the estimation of researchers. That means approximately 400,000 households possess more wealth than the remaining 3.5 million. Earlier data had indicated a share of only 60 percent.

In the case of the super-rich, the authors had to make even stronger corrections to earlier figures. The wealthiest one percent possesses not just 18 percent of total wealth as previously believed, but 31 to 34 percent—almost twice as much. The richest tenth of one percent control three times as much wealth as previously thought—instead of five percent, between 14 and 16 percent. These approximately 80,000 people are wealthier than the poorest half of the German population, roughly 40 million people.

The previous methods used to determine the distribution of wealth demonstrate severe weaknesses. The German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), established by the same institute in 1983, surveyed the wealth of thousands of representative households. It would be highly unlikely, according to the authors of the latest DIW study, that a millionaire or even a billionaire would participate in such a poll conducted by telephone. On the basis of the SOEP data, at most, the wealthiest households, with tens of millions of euros, were included in the calculations. The results were distorted.

In order to incorporate the super-rich into the calculations of the distribution of wealth, researchers used, among other things, the richest persons list ofForbes magazine, which includes only individuals with assets of more than one billion dollars

Their wealth and numbers have sharply increased in the last year. Despite, or thanks to, the financial crisis, the number of billionaires in Germany climbed from 34 in the year 2002 to 55 in 2012. The collective wealth of this tiny layer amounted to 130 billion euros in 2003, and grew to as much as 230 billion by 2013.

These figures are so high, that they themselves raise concerns among the defenders and beneficiaries of such vast inequality. As the charity organization Oxfam reported in mid-January, the top one percent of the world’s population will have more wealth next year than the remaining 99 percent. The S üddeutsche Zeitung wrote of the “explosive force of social inequity.”

The ongoing concentration of wealth at the top of society is observed not only in Germany, but throughout the world. The magnitude of social inequality is ever more sharply expressed on a global scale.

In 2010, approximately 380 billionaires possessed exactly as much wealth as the poorest half of humanity. In the course of only three years, this number sank to 92 billionaires. One year later, just 80 billionaires possessed more wealth than three and a half billion people.

“The growth of social inequality,” the World Socialist Web Site wrote following the publication of the Oxfam report, “is the consequence of policies enacted by the ruling class in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. … Governments responded to the collapse of asset values and the insolvency of major banks by pumping some $12 trillion into the financial markets by means of bank bailouts, near-zero interest rates, and central bank money-printing (Quantitative Easing).”

The richest layer in Germany controls far more wealth than previously known. To return to the initial image of this article: no pyramid can stand on its peak for long without toppling over—or being overthrown from the bottom.