US economy in deflation and slump

Andre Damon

The US Commerce Department said Friday that Gross Domestic Product, the broadest measure of economic output, grew by only 2.2 percent in the fourth quarter of last year, down from an earlier estimate of 2.6 percent and a sharp fall from earlier quarters.

This followed the announcement by the Labor Department on Thursday that consumer prices fell by 0.7 percent, the largest fall since December 2008. Over the past 12 months, prices have fallen by 0.1 percent, the first annual deflation figure posted since October 2009.

These figures belie official claims that the US is an economically healthy counterbalance to the overall slump and deflation that now encompasses most of the world. In fact, US economic growth, hampered by an enormous impoverishment of the working class in the years following the financial crisis, remains far below pervious historical averages.

On Tuesday, Standard and Poor’s said that it’s Case-Shiller Index showed that home prices grew by 4.6 percent over the past year, the slowest housing price increase since 2011. “The housing recovery is faltering,” David Blitzer, chairman of the index committee at S&P Dow Jones, told the Los Angeles Times. “Before the recession, anytime housing starts were at their current level… the economy was in a recession.”

Meanwhile the number of people in the US newly filing for jobless benefits jumped by 31,000 to 313,000 last week, in the largest increase since December 2013, reflecting a series of mass layoffs and business closures announced this month.

On February 4, office supply retailer Staples announced plans to buy its rival Office Depot, which would result in the closure of up to a thousand stores and tens of thousands of layoffs. The next day, electronics retailer RadioShack filed for bankruptcy, saying it plans to close up to 3,500 stores.

Mass layoffs have also been announced at online marketplace eBay, credit card company American Express, the oilfield services companies Schlumberger and Baker Hughes, as well as the retailers J.C. Penney and Macy’s.

These disastrous economic developments come even as the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit an all-time record of 18,140 on Wednesday, though it retreated slightly later in the week. Worldwide, the FTSE All-World Index is near its highest level in history.

The rise in global stock indices reflects the satisfaction of global financial markets with the pledge by the Syriza-led Greek government to impose austerity measures dictated by the EU, as well as indications by Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen in congressional testimony this week that the US central bank is likely to delay raising the federal funds rate in response to recent negative economic figures.

The US federal funds rate has been at essentially zero since the beginning of 2009. Together with the central bank’s multi-trillion-dollar “quantitative easing” program, this has helped to inflate a massive stock market bubble that has seen the NASDAQ triple in value since 2009.

This enormous growth in asset values has taken place despite the relatively depressed state of the US economy, which grew at an annual rate of 2.4 percent in 2014. During the entire economic “recovery” since 2010, the US economy has grown at an average rate of 2.2 percent. By comparison, the US economy grew at an average rate of 3.2 percent in the 1990s and 4.2 percent in the 1950s.

The ongoing stock market bubble has led to a vast enrichment of the financial elite: the number of billionaires in the US has nearly doubled since 2009. The financial oligarchy, however, has not used its ever-growing wealth for productive investment, as shown by the decline in business spending in in the fourth quarter of last year. Instead, it has either hoarded it or used it to buy real estate, art and luxury goods.

On Thursday, Bloomberg reported that global sales of “ultra-premium” vehicles, costing $100,000 or more, surged by 154 percent, compared with a 36 percent increase in global vehicle sales overall. The report noted, “Rolls-Royce registrations have risen almost five-fold. Almost 10,000 new Bentleys cruised onto the streets last year, a 122 percent increase over 2009, while Lamborghini rode a 50 percent increase to pass the 2,000 vehicle mark.”

Meanwhile, the number of people in poverty in the US remains at record levels. In January, the Southern Education Foundation reported that, for the first time in at least half a century, low-income children make up the majority of students enrolled in American public schools.

To the extent that jobs are being created in the US, they are largely part-time, contingent and low-wage, replacing higher-wage jobs eliminated during the 2008 crash. A report published last year by the National Employment Law Project found that while American companies have added 1.85 million low-wage jobs since 2009, they have eliminated 1.83 million medium-wage and high-wage jobs.

Earlier this month, Jim Clifton, head of the Gallup polling agency, denounced claims that the US unemployment rate has returned to “normal” levels. “There’s no other way to say this,” he wrote. “The official unemployment rate, which cruelly overlooks the suffering of the long-term and often permanently unemployed as well as the depressingly underemployed, amounts to a Big Lie.”

“Gallup defines a good job as 30+ hours per week for an organization that provides a regular paycheck. Right now, the US is delivering at a staggeringly low rate of 44%, which is the number of full-time jobs as a percent of the adult population, 18 years and older.”

Clifton added, “I hear all the time that ‘unemployment is greatly reduced, but the people aren’t feeling it.’ When the media, talking heads, the White House and Wall Street start reporting the truth—the percent of Americans in good jobs; jobs that are full time and real—then we will quit wondering why Americans aren’t ‘feeling’ something that doesn’t remotely reflect the reality in their lives.”

“Jihadi John,” imperialism and ISIS

Bill Van Auken

On Thursday, the Washington Post revealed the identity of “Jihadi John,” the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) operative featured in grisly videos depicting the beheading of US journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff, as well as two British aid workers, David Haines and Alan Henning.

The Post named the ISIS member as Mohammed Emwazi, a 26-year-old who was born in Kuwait and raised in London. He is described in a CNN report as “a Briton from a well-to-do family who grew up in West London and graduated from college with a degree in computer programming.”

The media reporting on this identification has been dominated by discussions of the psychology of terrorism and the role of Islamist ideology, along with speculation as to why someone from such a background would choose to engage in such barbaric acts.

All of these banalities are part of a campaign of deliberate obfuscation. Purposefully left in the shadows is the central revelation to accompany the identification of “Jihad John”—the fact that he was well known to British intelligence, which undoubtedly identified him as soon as his image and voice were first broadcast in ISIS videos.

Not only did Britain’s security service MI5 carefully track his movements, it carried out an active campaign to recruit him as an informant and covert agent. As the British daily Guardian put it Thursday, MI5 has “serious questions” to answer about its relations with Emwazi.

Chief among these questions is whether the intelligence agency was successful in its recruitment efforts. In other words, did Emwazi go to Syria with MI5’s foreknowledge and blessings?

If there is doubt as to whether Emwazi was recruited, it is clear that other ISIS jihadists have been. The BBC reported that British intelligence has refused to name Emwazi for “operational reasons.” It adds: “The practice by intelligence agencies of approaching jihadist sympathisers to work for them is likely to continue. It’s believed both Britain and the US have informers inside the Islamic State ‘capital’ of Raqqa. Yet this seems to have been little help in stopping the actions of Mohammed Emwazi, or bringing him to justice.”

At its heart, the case of “Jihadi John” is of significance because of what it says about the real relationship between Western imperialism and ISIS. In the final analysis, ISIS is a product of the interventions by Washington and its allies in the region.

Armed Islamist movements existed in neither Iraq nor Syria—nor, for that matter, in Libya—before US imperialism intervened to topple secular Arab governments in all three countries.

It is not only a matter of these movements emerging out of the mayhem, death and destruction unleashed by the US military and CIA in these countries at the cost of well over a million lives and wholesale social devastation.

Like Al Qaeda before it, ISIS is a creation of US and Western imperialism, unleashed upon the peoples of the region in pursuit of definite strategic aims. In Libya, Islamists now affiliated with ISIS provided the principal ground forces for the US-NATO war to topple Muammar Gaddafi. In Syria, ISIS, the Al Qaeda-affiliated Al Nusra Front and similar Islamist militias have played a similar role in a war for regime-change that has been backed by Washington and its allies.

By all accounts, so-called “foreign fighters” comprise the largest component of the “rebels” who have sought to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad over the past three-and-a-half years. Estimates have put their number at over 20,000, with recruits drawn from throughout Europe, North America, Central Asia and elsewhere.

While the media presents the flow of these fighters into Syria as something of a mystery, the question of how they have gotten there can be easily answered. The CIA, MI5 and other Western intelligence agencies have not merely turned a blind eye to Islamists traveling from their respective countries to the Syrian battlefield, it has offered them active encouragement. Turkey, a key US ally, has facilitated the flow of these elements across its border into Syria.

It should be recalled that Western governments and media painted forces like ISIS in Syria as democratic “revolutionaries” waging a progressive struggle against a tyrant. The war, which was stoked through orchestrated provocations, was cited as a justification for “humanitarian” intervention.

Arms and funding poured in to back the largely Islamist “rebels,” even as Washington and its allies steadily escalated the threat of direct intervention. The Obama administration went to the brink of launching a savage bombardment of Syria in September 2013, only to beat a tactical retreat in the face of unexpected opposition.

The Islamist forces on the ground in Syria felt themselves the victims of a double-cross. Much like the CIA’s Cuban counterrevolutionaries at the Bay of Pigs a half-century earlier, their promised US air support did not come and they lashed out in retribution. Ultimately, this took the form not only of the serial beheadings of Western hostages, but also the debacle inflicted upon the US-trained security forces in Iraq.

Washington has hypocritically seized upon the beheadings in an attempt to whip up support for its new intervention in the Middle East. But when similar atrocities were carried out by ISIS and its cohorts against Syrian Alawites, Christians and captured conscripts, the Obama administration looked the other way.

In the wake of the revelations about “Jihadi John,” Britain’s Tory Prime Minister David Cameron issued a ringing defense of the country’s security services, describing its members as “incredibly impressive, hard-working, dedicated, courageous.” He declared his sympathy for their “having to make incredibly difficult judgments.” He insisted that “the most important thing is to get behind them.”

If Britain were a functioning democracy, the revelations about the role of MI5 and its relations with Mohammed Emwazi and ISIS generally would be the subject of a parliamentary inquiry that could spell the fall of the government.

However, in London, as in Washington, the government has been largely taken over by the military and intelligence apparatus, whose crimes are systematically covered up with the aid of a complicit corporate-controlled media.

For workers in Britain, the US and internationally, these revelations only underscore the necessity to build up a genuine antiwar movement based on a socialist and internationalist program and in intransigent opposition to all attempts to exploit the crimes of ISIS—the Frankenstein’s monster created by imperialism—to justify the escalation of war abroad and repression at home.

Workers Struggles: Europe, Middle East & Africa

Europe

Firefighters in England stage 24-hour walkout

English firefighters began a 24-hour walkout at 7 am on Wednesday. It is the latest in a long running series of industrial action in opposition to pension changes that will mean firefighters having to work longer, pay higher contributions and receive less in benefits.

In addition many firefighters fear that having to work longer will mean they are likely to fail the compulsory fitness tests when they reach 55 and so have to leave the service before being able to draw on their pensions.

UK highway maintenance staff continue action

Workers employed by the highways maintenance company, Amery, held a fourth 24-hour strike on Monday and plan to hold a seven day strike beginning March 2. They are seeking a five percent pay rise. Amery’s offer falls short of this figure.

The company is also seeking to dismantle collective bargaining for new starters. Under company proposals new starters would have their pay determined year on year by company directors.

UK television staff to ballot over pay

Staff at the UK commercial television broadcaster ITV are to ballot on strike action after they rejected the company’s two percent pay offer. Last week the National Union of Journalists, Unite and the Broadcasting, Entertainment, Cinematograph and Theatre Union (Bectu) met for talks under the auspices of the government conciliation service Acas, but were not able to reach an agreement.

Indicative votes by the three unions on balloting for strike action were all in the 80 percent region. It was recently revealed that ITV CEO Adam Crozier was paid £8.4 million last year.

Teachers strike at Welsh school

Teachers at a secondary school in the Welsh town of Aberystwyth began a three-day strike Tuesday. The 23 teachers are members of the NASUWT union. The action is in opposition to disciplinary procedures and the demands of a growing workload.

Irish children detention staff hold one hour stoppage

Staff at the national children detention centre in Oberstown held a one hour stoppage on Monday. The staff, members of the Impact trade union, are demanding the introduction of an injury and assault leave scheme for those who get injured in the course of their work.

Rally of Irish firefighters opposes staff cuts

Around 700 firefighters attended a rally outside government buildings in Dublin on Tuesday against staffing cuts. They are members of the public sector Siptu trade union which represents 3,000 firefighters nation-wide.

Siptu is currently balloting retained (part-time) firefighters on possible industrial action against government proposals which would see retained firefighter numbers cut by a third.

Action by Danish airport baggage handlers

Baggage handlers working for Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) at Copenhagen Airport went on strike Tuesday, leading to flight delays. The strike was over dissatisfaction with an agreement signed between the union and SAS management and was the third strike since summer last year.

Portuguese underground workers strike

Staff working for the Lisbon Metro were holding 18 hour strikes, Tuesday and Friday of this week in opposition to plans to sell off the state owned service to the private sector and over poor conditions.

Finnish airport staff face job cuts

Aviator Finland, which provides airport services at the Helsinki-Vantaa airport, has announced it will cut 100 jobs out of its workforce of 370. This follows the company losing a contract with its biggest customer the budget airline, Norwegian. The union IAU said it is currently considering what action to take in the light of the job losses.

German IG Metall union settles pay claim

The IG Metall representing nearly four million workers, mainly in automobile and machinery production have settled their pay claim following talks with employers’ representatives in Baden-Wuerttemberg state. The deal is expected to be taken up in the rest of the country.

IG Metall members will receive a 3.4 percent pay increase from April 1. They will also get a one-off payment of euro 150 to cover the period January to March.

The union had initially put in a demand for a 5.5 percent pay rise backdated to the beginning of the year.

Turkish health workers attacked by police

In December 98 health workers at Maltepe University were dismissed after joining a union and demanding higher wages and shorter working hours. Since then the workers have been protesting outside the hospital. On Tuesday the health workers attempted to enter hospital but were brutally confronted by police who according to the DISK union left two of them injured, a further 34 were arrested.

Middle East

Solidarity support for Israeli chemical workers

The strike by Israeli Chemical Ltd (ICL) staff continues. They are opposing plans by the company to make 140 employees at its Bromine Compounds unit redundant.

There is widespread anger that ICL management has summonsed the workers due to be laid off by attaching notices on the front doors of their homes, telling them to appear at pre-layoff hearings.

On Monday residents of the city of Arad in southern Israel blocked roads leading into the city and Arad city municipal workers held a strike in support of the chemical employees.

Histadrut, the Israeli general federation of labour, has threatened to call for a general work dispute in the south of Israel if the lay-offs go ahead.

Strike by Palestinian workers in West Bank for union recognition

Last week around 20 Palestinian workers employed by M S Aluminium in East Jerusalem held a two hour strike outside the gates of the company. The strike was in response to the company’s refusal to recognize the WAC-MAAN union to which most of the works belong and the company’s refusal to discuss with the union on a plant-wide collective agreement.

UAE migrant workers die in fire

Last week at least 10 migrant workers were killed and a similar number injured when a fire swept through their illegal accommodation. The fire is thought to have begun in a car repair shop and quickly spread to the two-storey warehouse where the migrant labourers were sleeping.

The warehouse where the migrant labourers were illegally accommodated is in the al-Mussafah district of Abu Dhabi, an area on the outskirts of the capital populated with warehouses, factories and workshops.

Migrant workers, many from South Asia, suffer many abuses including confiscation of passports, terrible living conditions and suffer injury and death on unsafe building sites. The warehouse had been illegally rented out to the labourers as living accommodation.

Africa

Nigerian Polytechnics called to resume action

Nigerian polytechnic academic staff, members of the Academic Staff Union of Polytechnics (ASUP), threatened to resume strike action on Tuesday after a three month suspension of the action came to an end. The original nine month strike was called off after a newly appointed education minister promised to resolve the issues.

The central issues were the implementation of CONTISS 15 (a wage and conditions restructuring agreement), which the government had agreed to in 2009. Other unions are likely to join the strike

Bus drives in Johannesburg South Africa continue strike

A strike at the Johannesburg bus operator, Piotrans, is now in its fourth week. Over 60 percent of the drivers were sacked for taking wildcat action. Piotrans is recruiting workers to take up their positions. The strikers are affiliated to the South African Municipal Workers Union (SAMWU) and took action over shift and salary disagreements and union representation.

SAMWU does not come under the umbrella of, the SA Road Passenger Bargaining Council, the industry negotiating body, but the company says it recognises the union. SAMWU accuses the bus company of negotiating with labour brokers associated with Litsamaiso, the outgoing operating company, and not going through the union. The bus workers took strike action in 2014 that included opposition to labour agency employment.

Protest by South African coal miners

South African miners, members of the National Union of Miners (NUM), embarked on a protest march last Saturday to oppose the closure of Optimum Coal Mine in Mpumalanga. The NUM said it had not been given notice of the closure.

The march was to the offices of Glenco Mining at Middleburg in the town of Mpumalanga. The union claims that around 1,000 permanent employees and 500 contractors will lose their jobs. The NUM called on miners in the surrounding area to join the demonstration.

Zambian copper miners walk off the job

Miners at the Lumwana copper mine, owned by the Barrack Gold Zambia Company, have gone on strike after the company announced it will close the mine leading to 2,000 job losses.

The company said it was closing the mine after the Zambian government increased mining royalties from six percent to 20 percent.

Miners are demanding to know what will happen to them. Many had taken out loans on long contracts. They are demanding the company pays larger compensation on the basis of a breach of contract, rather than redundancy pay.

The closure threatens up to 4,000 direct jobs and a projection by Zambia Chamber of Commerce is that 12,000 jobs are threatened by the royalties increase.

East Timorese government promotes new “free trade zone”

John Lucas

East Timor last month formally launched a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) project, establishing autonomous free trade areas in parts of the impoverished country. The creation of the zone is the government’s first step towards establishing Timor as a cheap labour platform for transnational corporate investors.

The SEZ covers two areas of East Timor—the western enclave of Oecuse, which lies within the Indonesian territory of West Timor, and Atauro Island, 20 kilometres north of the capital Dili.

Atauro Island, a former prison centre under Portuguese and Indonesian rule that has a population of 8,000, is to be developed as a tourist and casino gambling centre. Oecuse is the focus of the project’s efforts to establish export-oriented manufacturing industries, including textiles, and cash-crop agriculture.

The Oecuse region is Timor’s most isolated and among its poorest. Most of its 60,000 people survive through subsistence farming. Unemployment is more than 50 percent, according to the government’s own figures, and the majority of young people are forced to migrate to Dili and other areas and seek work in the so-called informal sector of the economy, as street vendors, house maids, restaurant staff, and construction, transportation, and warehouse workers. Wages are as low as $US40 a month.

The government is now promoting Oecuse as a cheap labour, tax-free area for foreign investors, backed by planned multi-billion dollar public investments in pro-business infrastructure. Official documents have modelled the SEZ on free trade zones in countries like Bangladesh and Thailand.

Former Fretilin Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri is president of the “Authority for the Special Administrative Region of Oecuse.” In a speech delivered last July, he declared that the SEZ was based on a so-called “social market economy.” Alkatiri devoted part of his speech to denouncing “Marxist socialism” and “anti-capitalism [that] ignored that the market was the operative factor of economic development.” Underscoring the pro-business perspective behind the new free trade zone, Alkatiri concluded that what was required was “the expansion of the market to make it more attractive to investment,” adding that “none of this can be achieved with the welfare state.”

Alkatiri has since made clear that the SEZ is merely a pilot project that is to be followed by converting all of East Timor into a free trade zone. “All that I will do is so that Oecuse will be a reference for the whole country,” he told the Portuguese news agency Lusa last month.

Alkatiri is the leader of Fretilin, the main element of the resistance movement against the Indonesian military occupation of Timor between 1975 and 1999. He was elected the state’s first prime minister in 2002, only to be ousted four years later in a regime-change operation orchestrated by the Australian government, after being seen as too close to rival powers China and Portugal. Alkatiri has since joined hands with the prime beneficiary of the 2006 coup, Xanana Gusmão, while Fretilin now has four of its leading members in the ruling coalition led by Gusmão’s CNRT party. (See: “East Timorese prime minister resigns, ‘national unity’ government formed”)

Former bitter rivals within the Timorese ruling elite have come together on the basis of establishing the country as a cheap labour platform. What has emerged is a tragic lesson in the dead-end of bourgeois nationalism and the myth that the creation of an “independent” East Timor could advance the social interests and democratic rights of the working class and rural poor. In 2002, with the formal adoption of Timorese independence, the World Socialist Web Site noted: “‘Independence’ has become synonymous with attracting transnational investment, setting up free trade zones and meeting the dictates of the IMF and World Bank.”

As the unelected head of the SEZ, Alkatiri enjoys sweeping powers in Oecuse. The free trade zone law adopted by the Timorese parliament not only gives Alkatiri the right to create a separate taxation and regulatory system for Oecuse but also throws out the window existing constitutional restrictions on foreign nationals and overseas companies owning Timorese land. This law states: “The state guarantee the right to use and enjoyment of land for development of investment projects… The land is ceded to investors according to their respective needs and terms for duration of contracts, according to each type of economic activity.”

While the free trade zone projects are only now being developed, two SEZ offices have been set up, in Jakarta and Macau, as part of the government’s bid to woo corporate investors. Alkatiri has travelled around the world in the last two years, consulting with World Bank officials in Washington and meeting with potential investors in Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea, Portugal, Cuba, and China. In April last year, he accompanied Gusmão on a week-long tour of China, which included visits to that country’s Special Economic Zones.

According to Alkatiri, he received three investment proposals from Chinese companies that wanted to control the entire SEZ project. These were declined, however, with the government apparently looking to diversify investment in Oecuse. Alkatiri has nevertheless promoted “a banana plantation on an area of 400 hectares that would export to China and another for pineapple production on a 100 hectare plot.”

As outlined in the SEZ’s “master plan,” the first priority is to develop pro-investment infrastructure projects such as roads, bridges, power plant, water irrigation, telecommunications, airport and seaport facilities, and public transport. Total public investment by 2025 is projected at US$2.75 billion.

Indonesian and other companies are already working on the ground, constructing roads, bridges, irrigation facilities, and a 20-megawatt power plant. Negotiations are now underway with a Singaporean company to build a 50-room hotel, which should be ready by October.

It remains to be seen whether the government’s grandiose plans of a massive influx of investment ever eventuates. Official SEZ documents notably feature a range of identified risks to the project, including “political and social unrest” in Oecuse and a “global recession or a marked slowing down of growth in key markets such as China, India and the US” that would “greatly impact the feasibility of the [SEZ] initiative.”

The Timorese government is nevertheless pressing ahead, desperate to find some means of avoiding outright state bankruptcy as the massive Greater Sunrise oil and gas reserve remains undeveloped and the Bayu-Undan field, which currently funds more than 90 percent of total state revenue, is expected to run dry within a decade.

Mass layoffs shake India’s IT industry

Jai Sharma

Major Information Technology (IT) firms have laid off thousands of workers in India in recent months, throwing them onto the streets with meagre or no severance pay and giving a serious jolt to the notion, long-promoted by the Indian ruling class, that a job in this sector was a ticket to a secure and comfortable middle-class life.

The mass firings have been most widespread in the southern city of Bangalore, the so-called Silicon Valley of India. Both Indian and foreign-based IT companies, including Infosys, IBM, TCS (Tata Consultancy Services), Citrix, Yahoo, and Samsung, have slashed their workforces.

In the middle of last month the Times of India published an article titled “15,000 pink slips in the tech corridor and still counting.” It quoted an industry analyst as saying: “The frequency of layoffs has increased. From IBM, Dell, Cisco to HP, almost all the big companies have cut jobs. The latest being the TCS layoffs, which have culminated in techies hitting the streets to protest.”

The analyst was referring to massive job cuts at TCS, India’s largest IT company. TCS was initially said to have fired as many as 30,000 Indian employees—about 10 percent of its worldwide workforce.

This was quickly denied by company management who insisted that “only” 3,000 to 5,000 persons have been fired for “under-performance,” a term the company cynically uses to cover up its cost-cutting to boost profits. It is highly likely these three to five thousand are only a first volley, TCS management having decided that staggered layoffs will reduce the risk of opposition.

The wave of job cuts has prompted Indian IT workers to form support organizations with a view to discussing ways to fight back. Until recently there was little support among IT employees for anything that could be seen as a worker- or class-based organization, the employers having spared no small effort in promoting the conception that the IT workers should view themselves as middle-class professionals.

Two such organizations that have recently sprung up are the IT/ITES Employee Center (ITEC) in Bangalore and the Forum for IT Employees (FITE) in Chennai (formerly Madras).

In Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, and New Delhi, affected TCS employees and some of their colleagues who were also apprehensive about their own jobs have held demonstrations and meetings to discuss their next course of action.

In Chennai, police prevented a scheduled protest outside the local TCS headquarters from taking place. In New Delhi, a couple of workers whose jobs were targeted for elimination refused to “resign” and have instead filed court cases against their employer challenging their termination. In Bangalore, laid-off employees and several of their colleagues wore masks of the TCS CEO when they staged a demonstration near city government offices.

The sacked TCS workers have also held meetings with the labor commissioner and with the representatives of the major Stalinist-led union federations, the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) and the All India Trades Unions Congress (AITUC).

The Stalinist unions have issued hollow statements of support, urged the IT workers to join their ranks, and advised them to lobby ministers in India’s Union and state governments. All of these ministers are at the beck and call of big business and implacable enemies of the working class.

In addition to the aforementioned layoffs, the US transnational IBM last year fired thousands of its Indian employees and has recently announced more mass layoffs.

Samsung is said to have fired around 1,500 Indian employees due to falling profits in its mobile phone division. eBay is reportedly planning on laying off 2,400 employees worldwide out of which 1,000 would be in India.

In 2014 Yahoo fired a majority of its Bangalore employees and moved others back to its US headquarters.

Another large Indian IT company, HCL Technologies, has been systematically reducing its workforce under the guise that employees’ skills are obsolete or no longer fit the company’s needs. In 2013 HCL refused to issue formal “joining-letters” to many of the fresh graduates it had recruited through campus interviews.

A young IT employee recently laid off from his job commented: “Even in my wildest dreams, I had not imagined I would be thrown out of my job. ... My world turned topsy-turvy in just 20 minutes when I was summoned in the afternoon and given the marching orders. I did not know how to react. I could see some of my sacked colleagues crying aloud, some begging with the HR personnel to give them time and some reacting angrily.”

Since the 1990s the rapid growth of India’s software development and Business Process Outsourcing (call center and back office) industries has been hailed by the Indian elite as a means of propelling India into the club of developed countries.

Successive Indian governments, both at state and national level, have lavished support on the IT and IT-enabled sector, including providing innumerable tax breaks and cheap and easy land acquisition, and setting up Special Economic Zones (SEZ) with tax holidays and exemptions from standard labor and workplace laws.

India’s IT and BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) sector reportedly employs up to 3.1 million persons directly and generates some $120 billion in revenue annually, including more than $70 billion in foreign revenue. In 2012, the IT services and BPO sectors constituted, according to some estimates, as much as 7.5 percent of India’s total GDP.

However, India’s IT sector is increasingly being hammered by the world capitalist crisis, by anemic growth in the US and Europe and increasing competition from other countries with abundant cheap labour. Like many of India’s other industries, its IT sector is also being undermined by the deplorable state of public infrastructure, everything from the speed of transport and reliability of utilities to the low quality of the education provided by all but India’s premier universities and technical institutes.

India’s IT and BPO sector has steadily lost business to other Asian countries, especially the Philippines, where salaries are even lower, as well as to Eastern Europe.

According to a recent study by the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (ASSOCHAM) and the global financial services company KPMG, India is losing about 70 percent of all “incremental” (new, not-previously contracted) voice and call center business to Asia and Eastern Europe. ASSOCHAM’s principal recommendation to India’s BPO firms is that they slash their costs still further by relocating their facilities to smaller Indian cities and towns.

India’s giant IT companies such as Infosys, TCS and Wipro have long operated as what are termed “body shops,” sending cheaply paid Indian engineers to work on IT projects in the West while pocketing huge profits. This “model” is also now increasingly unravelling due to a drop in investment and the imposition of new restrictions on temporary work visas by countries such as the US and UK.

Indian IT companies have responded to their loss of projects in the West by putting the squeeze on their employees. One oft-used tactic is to lay off experienced, better-paid workers and replace them with newer ones earning far smaller salaries. So abysmal are Indian pay scales that software engineers making $16,500 per year are considered “high-earners.”

India’s IT workers are increasingly realizing that they are not much different from assembly line workers in manufacturing who have long faced brutal working conditions and arbitrary firings. And like other workers, the problems of IT workers can only be addressed through the development of class struggle, that is, through the building of an independent political movement of the working class that systematically challenges the diktats of big business and fights for a workers government, which will radically reorganize socioeconomic life so production is organized to meet social need, not enrich a tiny minority of capitalists.

Opposition to Japanese government’s lies on “comfort women”

Ben McGrath

Opposition to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s attempt to whitewash the history of the Japanese military’s war crimes has emerged in Japan and also the United States. Earlier this month, a group of American historians issued a statement criticizing the Abe government’s attempts to pressure a US publishing company McGraw-Hill to amend its textbook’s treatment of so-called “comfort women.”

During the 1930s and 1940s, some 200,000 Korean, Chinese and other women were coerced into sex slavery in “comfort stations” established for Japanese officers and soldiers. Abe and other right-wing nationalists falsely claim that the women were not forced but willingly acted as prostitutes. This revision of history is bound up with the government’s plans to remilitarize and to end the current constitutional restrictions on the dispatch of the Japanese military in overseas interventions and wars.

Abe’s efforts to rewrite history could cloud plans for him to address a joint session of the US Congress, which, according to the Japan Times last weekend, could take place in late April. He would become the first Japanese prime minister to speak to Congress since 1961 when Hayato Ikeda addressed the House of Representatives. Abe’s grandfather, Nobsuke Kishi, also spoke before Congress as prime minister in 1957.

A bipartisan group of US lawmakers who visited Japan last week raised questions about Abe’s view of history. Democrat Congresswoman Diana DeGette warned that the issues surrounding World War II “could really put some cracks in the relationship… It’s really important that Japan not be seen as backtracking… on the comfort women issue and some other issues around the end of the war.”

Republican congressman James Sensenbrenner told the Wall Street Journalthat Abe’s “revisionist history” was hurting “Japan’s standing with its neighbors. That has to be cooled down.” His warning reflects concerns in Washington that the Abe government’s whitewash of Japanese war crimes was undermining relations with South Korea, the other major US ally in North East Asia.

Regardless of these misgivings, Abe’s congressional address appears to be going ahead. The Obama administration regards Tokyo as a crucial ally in its “pivot to Asia” and military build-up throughout the Indo-Pacific region against China.

It should be noted that the criticisms of Abe’s stance on Japan’s atrocities are rather hypocritical. The US political establishment remains silent on its own crimes during World War II, including the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians in the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the firebombing of Tokyo and other Japanese cities.

Within Japan, right-wing nationalist groups continue to wage a vicious campaign against the Asahi Shimbun after it retracted a series of articles last August based on the testimony of Seiji Yoshida, a former soldier, who claimed to have forcibly rounded up “comfort women” on Korea’s Jeju Island. Yoshida later admitted that he had made up parts of his story, which has been seized on to claim there is no evidence that women were coerced into sex slavery and to demand the retraction of Japan’s 1993 Kono statement—a formal, but limited apology over the abuse of “comfort women.”

In an interview last month with the Asia-Pacific Journal, Yoshiaki Yoshimi, a leading historian on comfort women, said in, “As early as 1993 at the latest, no one took seriously Yoshida’s testimony claiming that he had witnessed the Japanese Army’s forcible relocation of women in Jeju Island. The Kono Statement was not based on Yoshida’s testimony. Nor do scholars researching the comfort women issue draw on it for their argument. In short,Asahi’s retraction of Yoshida’s testimony due to its falsity should not affect the discussion.”

Other former Japanese soldiers have provided evidence of the military’s system of sexual slavery. Masayoshi Matsumoto, currently 92, has spoken out against the crimes he witnessed as an army medic. “I feel like a war criminal. It is painful to speak of such things and I would rather cover it up. It is painful, but I must speak,” he said in a 2013 interview with Reuters.

In a more recent interview in the Asia-Pacific Journal in October 2014, Matsumoto described working at a base in Yu County in Shanxi Province in China during the war. “Our battalion had approximately one thousand men. We took about 5 or 6 ‘comfort women’ with us. I was a corpsman…I had to help the army doctor to do tests for venereal disease on comfort women.”

After describing the instruments and testing methods, Matsumoto said, “These [women] had definitely not arrived there of their own will. Nobody would be willing to travel to such a remote area. The money was handled by Japanese civilians employed by the military, who took care of the women.”

Matsumoto made clear that rape of captured village women was rampant and that the setting up of the “comfort stations,” where soldiers forced women to have sex, was an attempt to curb the spread of disease among the troops. Matsumoto described finding several women in a captured village.

“When we raided a village, there happened to be some villagers left behind. Normally during a raid all the villagers would flee. Among them were seven or eight women. The soldiers grabbed them and took them away to the barracks. Knowing that they would be killed if they resisted, these women came along without resisting. The women were made to live inside the barracks, and whenever the soldiers felt like it they would visit them to have sex,” he said.

Matsumoto explained why he spoke out: “While reading all kind of things, I realized that if we don’t face our past squarely, we’re bound to repeat the same mistakes. When I look at Abe, I think he’s starting to do exactly that. Someone needs to speak up.” Asked about Abe’s claim that there was no coercion of women, Matsumoto responded: “Such a thing is not true! It’s…nonsense. A lie.”

The evidence proving that the Japanese army engaged in the wide-scale and systematic coercion of women into its “comfort stations” is not limited to such personal accounts, but has been found in wartime documents unearthed by historians. Nevertheless Matsumoto’s first-hand testimony is not only telling refutation of Abe’s lies but also points to the fact that the whitewashing of war crimes is the preparation for new ones.

Germany and Austria discriminate against Kosovo refugees

Markus Salzmann

In the course of the past six months, according to media reports, 50,000 people have left Kosovo, some 35,000 in the last month-and-a-half alone. Their main destinations are Germany, Austria and Scandinavia.

The exodus is the result of the catastrophic economic and social situation in Kosovo, which is making life unbearable for the majority of the population. “Kosovo is the poorest country in southeast Europe,” migration researcher Besa Shahini, from the European Stability Initiative think tank, told Der Spiegel. “The numbers of refugees have been increasing continuously for several years, so in that respect it is not a new phenomenon.”

Average wages in Kosovo are €220 per month. Without remittances from Kosovars who have found work abroad, many families would be unable to survive. The official unemployment rate is 27 percent, but the real rate is estimated at more than double that. Youth unemployment is thought to be around 70 percent. According to figures from the World Bank, around a third of residents are living below the poverty line, on less than €1.50 per day.

The annual income per head in 2013 was somewhat more than €2,500. This is not even half the figure of the European Union’s (EU) poorest state, Bulgaria, and roughly one-tenth of the EU average.

Deutsche Welle reported on an unemployed father, Fitim S., who travelled with his family to Germany. He said he did not even receive social welfare in Kosovo of €80 per month, because, according to the justification, he has a house and did not have to pay rent. “We were told that we could get asylum in Germany,” said the desperate father.

The British Daily Telegraph quoted a woman in Kosovo, who stated, “It is sad for Kosovo, but there is no hope here for the people. They are leaving the country because they are desperate.”

There is no organised medical care. Health care from a doctor or at a hospital can only be obtained in exchange for cash. The country, with a population of 1.8 million, is dominated by criminal clans that are closely connected to the major political figures in the country and enrich themselves through prostitution, people trafficking, and the drugs and arms trade. Corruption is rampant.

“Those with no connections or associations with the clans in the political parties have no career prospects,” states Der Spiegel. “Many people in Kosovo are just fed up with the situation and simply want to escape,” said Iliriana Kaçaniku, who works as an expert on EU integration at the Kosovo Foundation for an Open Society (KFOS). Kosovo is one of Europe’s most corrupt countries. On Transparency International’s index, the country is in 111th place.

Since Kosovo’s independence in 2008, the European powers have not improved the situation at all, but are themselves deeply implicated in the network of corruption and the black market. The Eulex mission, aimed at establishing an independent judiciary, is discredited.

The daily Koha Ditore uncovered that a number of corrupt state prosecutors and judges involved with Eulex had called a halt to prosecutions or handed down milder punishments in exchange for money. German news magazineDie Zeit named the Italian judge Francesco Florit, who allegedly received €300,000 in exchange for clearing a man charged with murder.

The catastrophe in Kosovo is the direct result of the intervention by the major western powers. They deliberately provoked the ethnic conflicts in Yugoslavia for their own interests.

In 1991, Germany’s foreign policy backed the breakup of the Yugoslav state by rushing to recognise Slovenia and Croatia as independent states. The United States followed suit and forced the independence of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The result was the extremely bloody four-year Bosnian war, in which the western powers intervened with their own troops.

The NATO states subsequently used the separatist strivings in Kosovo they had promoted in order to move against Serbia. In 1999, US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright presented the Serbian government with an unacceptable ultimatum at the Rambouillet meetings. When it was rejected, NATO went to war with Serbia.

Even then, Albright and German foreign minister Joschka Fischer relied on the support of dubious elements like Hashim Thaci, currently deputy Prime Minister of Kosovo. Thaci, as head of the Kosovo Liberation Army militia, was wanted by Serbian authorities for terrorist attacks against security forces, and had also been accused of liquidating rivals within his own ranks. He also had ties to the drug mafia.

After the war, Kosovo was under United Nations administration, practically under the military and political control of the countries who led the war. The country’s declaration of independence in 2008, which was only recognised by the western powers, further intensified ethnic tensions in the region.

The governments of the countries that pressed for Kosovo’s separation and independence are now responding with an inhumane policy of deporting refugees fleeing the catastrophe they have produced. Almost none of the asylum seekers from Kosovo are permitted to stay in Germany or other European countries. The human rights organisation ProAsyl estimates that only 40 Kosovars were given the right to reside in Germany in 2014. Almost 9,000 applications were lodged.

“There is no asylum for Kosovars,” Manfred Schmidt, President of the federal office for refugees and immigration, bluntly stated. Almost all asylum applications from Kosovar nationals are rejected because they cannot prove any political persecution. Many of the refugees have used all of their savings for the journey and face an even more hopeless situation after their return.

In Germany, the interior ministers at the federal and state levels enacted several measures two weeks ago to restrict the flood of refugees from Kosovo. The German police will provide support to the Serbian border police. This could mean that Kosovars who possess a Serbian passport will be prevented from crossing the Hungarian border.

In contrast to past practices, asylum seekers from Kosovo are not to be distributed among the municipalities after they have been registered. Instead, their asylum proceedings are to be completed at arrival centres within two weeks. European spokesman for ProAsyl, Karl Kopp, criticised the plan, commenting, “There will certainly not be impartial proceedings.” It was merely about “declaring the people to be ready for deportation as quickly as possible.”

Discussions are also ongoing about classifying Kosovo as a secure third country. The most recent states to be classified were Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia and Serbia. Since November of last year, applications for asylum from nationals of these countries have been rejected in sped-up proceedings as “obviously unjustified.” Subsequently, deportations must take place within a week. The interior minister in Saxony, Markus Ulbig (Christian Democratic Party), has already demanded such a classification for Kosovo.

The state president in Baden-Württemberg, Winfried Kretchmann (Green Party), spoke out cynically in the Süddeutsche Zeitung in favour of denying asylum to Kosovars. “We have a right to asylum which is meant for people who are politically persecuted. Currently, the mass migration of people from Kosovo is beyond that—but this can’t go on, they are not politically persecuted. It is overwhelming and endangering the right to asylum.”

In Austria, interior minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner (Austrian People’s Party) has provoked a campaign against the refugees on behalf of the Social Democratic-Conservative government. She described it as her mission to restrict the storm of refugees from Kosovo. In the name of this goal, she arranged for statements to be distributed in Kosovo making it absolutely clear that refugees are not desired in Austria and could be punished with prosecution.

The text states, “Smugglers lie. There is no asylum in Austria on economic grounds.” For breaching the EU’s travel ban, a fine of up to €7,500 is threatened.

German trade union approves 1,400 layoffs at Karstadt department store

Dietmar Henning

The job and wage cuts at German department store Karstadt are proceeding without interruption with the full support of the United Services Union (Verdi) and the joint works council.

At the end of last week, Verdi and the works council agreed to lay off 1,400 employees. Dismissal notices are supposed to be sent out as early as March. “The employers want to push this through as fast as possible,” explained Verdi chief negotiator Arno Peukes.

Hellmut Patzelt, the chair of the joint works council, called the agreement a compromise with which he was “very satisfied.” “We have reached our goal—the establishment of a transfer company and the prevention of downgrading. Obviously we have also arranged for severance pay,” he explained.

The corporate leadership was more direct. It spoke of a “breakthrough” for the company which leaves restructuring efforts entirely on schedule.

In fact, the company has now nearly reached its target. In October of last year, Karstadt CEO Stephan Fanderl announced that he would slash 2,750 of the then 17,000 jobs within the company. The works council and Verdi dutifully expressed their indignation over these “massive cuts.” Since then, approximately 1,000 employees have been forced out of jobs into early retirement or part-time work. With the now-stipulated 1,400 layoffs, Fanderl is just 350 jobs short of his initial target.

For the 1,400 employees who will now be terminated, the well-paid Verdi and works council functionaries have arranged a meager settlement amounting to one half of monthly wages for each year of employment. A salesperson who worked full time for 20 years at Karstadt, will receive approximately €20,000, from which they must pay taxes.

Additionally, laid off workers will have the possibility between June 2015 and February 2016 to enter a transfer company, where they will receive roughly 80 percent of their last net wage. For most, this only means that their trip to the unemployment office will be delayed for a few months, where they will then receive even less support.

The company has also split up personnel into cashiers, sales associates and stock clerks. This means the latter category will now earn €300 less than sales clerks.

For theses workers, Karstadt is relying on voluntary redundancies and turnover within the workforce rather than on dismissals with the option for reemployment under new terms and downgrading. That is the only concession that the company has made. In practice, it means that older workers will be pressured until they “voluntarily” agree to downgrading and wages for new hires will be considerably lower.

This week, Verdi and the company put forward further drastic cuts during negotiations. As early as 2013, they quit the contract bargaining protections for retail workers, which meant that employees were forced to relinquish contractually agreed pay raises worth €50 million.

Fanderl wants to extend this “contract pause.” He further demands that employees now give up part of their vacation and Christmas pay and that the workweek be lengthened from the current 37.5 hours to 40 hours.

“We will not accept that,” said a Verdi spokesperson. But the trade union and works council functionaries have said that before every other cut. The signatures of Verdi and the joint works council can be found at the bottom of every contract agreement, which have deprived the Karstadt workforce of millions of euros over the last ten years.

The latest job cuts will not be the end to the wave of layoffs. Last year, Verdi and the works council already accepted the closure of six locations with a combined 350 employees. In a letter from October, Fanderl announced “painful decisions” and threatened the closure of 20 of his 83 stores, or their sale in the event that they still generated losses. In November, the joint works council wrote in a leaflet that the corporate leadership will place all of the Karstadt stores on trial, and placed an exclamation mark next to the word “all.”

In January, financial director Miguel Müllenbach confirmed in a memo: “There is no doubt about it, drastic personnel changes in our stores and especially in the Service Center in Essen are unavoidable.” There are currently about 1,700 workers employed in the Karstadt headquarters in Essen, referred to internally as the “Service Center.” Ninety percent of staff at the online portal Karstadt.de are also expected to lose their jobs.

At the beginning of this month, the Supervisory Board—including heads of the works council and Verdi functionaries—discussed a 32-page Future Concept marked “strictly confidential.” It described in detail the now impending cutbacks and restructuring measures. It was there that the process was evidently set into motion.

In order to quiet the growing resentment among workers, Verdi and the works council collected signatures for a petition from customers and conducted a postcard campaign on behalf of employees. For the beginning of March, a one-day strike is planned in order to placate staff without harming the company. With the restructuring agreements already in place, the union is now largely irrelevant.

Fanderl, appointed by Karstadt owner René Benko, can now carry out the planned job cuts. In the end, only fragments of the long-established company will remain, leaving behind the only thing that interests real estate speculator Benko: Karstadt real estate. In 2012 Benko, who was convicted that year of what a Vienna judge described as a “model of corruption,” had already grabbed the choice cuts, including the 28 Karstadt sporting goods stores and the three luxury shopping centers in Berlin, Hamburg and Munich. All this was made possible by the joint works council and Verdi representatives.

Top British politicians caught in cash for access sting

Robert Stevens

Two former UK government ministers—Labour MP Jack Straw and Conservative MP Sir Malcolm Rifkind—have been exposed in a Channel 4Dispatches documentary as ready to accept thousands of pounds from a private company in return for access to their political and business contacts.

Straw, an MP since 1979, was foreign secretary from 2001-06 in the Labour government of Tony Blair. He played a key role in Britain’s illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq. He also served as home secretary and justice secretary in the Labour government.

Rifkind has been an MP for more than 40 years and served as a minister in the cabinets of Conservative prime ministers Margaret Thatcher and John Major. So trusted was Rifkind in ruling circles that in 2010 he was nominated by parliament to be chairman of its critical Intelligence and Security Committee. In that position he has had access to classified intelligence from the UK security agencies MI5, MI6 and Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). GCHQ, in concert with the US National Security Agency, conductsmass surveillance of the world’s population.

The Dispatches documentary, “Politicians for Hire”, was a joint investigation with Daily Telegraph reporters and was broadcast Monday evening. In the programme, undercover reporters posed as staff of a fake Chinese communications agency, PMR, and held discussions with the MPs about joining the company’s “advisory board”. The choice of a Chinese company was to make what happened doubly embarrassing.

On camera, Straw states that his services would require payment. “So normally, if I’m doing a speech or something, it’s £5,000 a day, that’s what I charge,” he stated.

He revealed that he used his position to operate “under the radar” in order to assist ED&F Man, a commodities trading company that paid him £60,000 a year, to demand a change in European Union legislation regarding sugar production in Ukraine. Straw began work for ED&F Man in 2011, just months after Labour was kicked out of office. The legislation was subsequently changed, in favour of what the company had requested. He told the reporters that on another occasion he used “charm and menace” to convince the then Ukrainian prime minister, Mykola Azarov, to change laws on behalf of ED&F Man.

While Straw was being recorded, he said that he would not take up a paid position with PMR while still an MP but, he said, he expected to be soon elevated to the House of Lords and “The rules there are different and plenty of people have commercial interests there. I will be able to help you more.”

Rifkind told the undercover reporters that he has extensive political contacts and although not a minister, could arrange “useful access” to every British ambassador in the world. Among the contacts cited by Rifkind was Madeleine Albright, the former US Secretary of State. “I still have the contacts with all these people who have served at a very senior level. Some of them still do serve—are still active,” he said.

As a former defence minister, Rifkind said that he had contacts in that area, and for good measure boasted, “I am involved with the World Economic Forum, Davos, and they have a number of specialist committees—one of which looks at nuclear security, nuclear weapons security.”

Describing how he could establish what government “thinking” was on a particular issue, he said, “[I]n my own case I could write to a minister… I wouldn’t name who was asking.”

Explaining how much he expected to earn in return for political influence, Rifkind said his usual fee for half a day’s work was “somewhere in the region of £5,000 to £8,000.”

Asked if he could commit the necessary time to PMR, he explained, “I am self-employed—so nobody pays me a salary. I have to earn my income.”

This will no doubt come as a surprise to many. Rifkind, as with all MPs, receives a taxpayer-funded £67,000 salary. On top of this, MPs can claim many thousands of pounds in expenses. As chair of the ISC, Rifkind was paid thousands in addition, taking his basic parliamentary pay to more than £80,000 a year. In these circles, income of well over £100,000 with expenses is considered chump change.

Due to the fallout resulting from the scandal, Rifkind and Straw both suspended themselves from their parties, pending parliamentary inquiries which are to investigate if they have breached the parliamentary code of conduct. After initially saying he would not stand down from the ISC, Rifkind was forced to resign his position Tuesday. Straw was due to stand down as an MP at this year’s election and Rifkind said he would also stand down.

Sir Alistair Graham, a former chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, said if Rifkind wrote to a minister in the way he described, it “would be a clear breach of the code of conduct.”

From the comments of both MPs since the exposé, their main concern is apparently that they have fallen for a ruse previously used by Dispatches to expose the financial skulduggery of MPs. Monday’s broadcast was a replica of a 2010 Dispatches investigation in which senior Labour figures Geoff Hoon and Stephen Byers were also recorded offering their services for money.

Today, any divisions between the political elite and big business have been effaced, with MPs viewing their political careers as just a stepping stone to eventual personal enrichment. Many MPs get on the gravy train while still in parliament, and establish the future contacts with big business necessary for more lucrative future earnings.

According to the Telegraph, 180 MPs have second jobs, bringing in a total of £7.4 million a year. Rifkind declares five other jobs outside Parliament, through which he has raked in £800,000 in the last five years. 30 MPs were paid at least the equivalent of their MP’s wage for other employment. One Conservative MP, lawyer Geoffrey Cox, declared annual extra earnings of £820,000—12 times his MP’s salary. Working a total of 1,953 hours of outside work, he pocketed an hourly rate of £420, or £20 every three minutes. All told, MPs spent more than 26,600 hours on non-parliamentary duties last year.

The scandal is just the latest confirmation of the revolving door tht exists between parliament/government and the banks and major corporations. The fees being discussed by Rifkind and Straw are chickenfeed compared to the fortunes they know can be amassed once their parliamentary careers are over.

Although not shown in the aired Dispatches, Straw also told their reporters he assisted a furniture company, Senator International, to win two government contracts, one of which was worth up to £75 million over four years, after he lobbied a minister on its behalf. He said for the firm it was “about getting on the ladder for government contracts,” which are a “big” target for any office furniture business. According to the Telegraph, Straw had not previously disclosed his relationship with Senator International.

Straw told the reporters that he was now “considering an offer” from Senator International to go on their board as an executive, which he would “almost certainly take.”

This path is well-trod for bourgeois politicians of all stripes in the UK and internationally. Former German Chancellor and Social Democratic Party leader Gerhard Schröder took over as the head of the supervisory board of the North European Gas Pipeline (NEGP) after his election defeat in 2005.

In 2009 Joschka Fischer, the ex-German Green Party leader and foreign minister in the former Social Democratic Party-Green government, took up a post as adviser for the Nabucco pipeline project.

For this grasping, avaricious layer, however, Tony Blair is the man to emulate. By 2014, according to estimates, through his Tony Blair Associates consultancy and extensive property holdings, his personal wealth stood at around £100 million.