The War Of The Sexes: The Origins Of Gender Inequality

Ugo Bardi

The story of Scheherazade of the 1001 Arabian Nights is the quintessence of the "war of the sexes" and of how women tend to lose it. It is said that King Shahryar would have a new lover every night and every morning he would have her killed. He stopped only when Scheherazade started telling him stories. It shows, among other things, that males behave much better when they listen to females. Picture: Scheherazade and Shahryār by Ferdinand Keller, 1880

Some time ago, I was chatting at home with a friend who is a researcher specialized in "gender inequality". I asked her what were the ultimate origins of this inequality but we couldn't arrive at a conclusion. So, I happened to have in a shelf nearby a copy of the "Malleus Maleficarum", the book that Kramer and Sprenger wrote in the 16th century on the evils of witchcraft. I took it out and I opened it to the page where the authors dedicate several paragraphs to describe how evil women are. I read a few of these paragraphs aloud and my friend was so enraged that she left the room, without saying a word. Later on, she told me that she had done that to avoid telling me what she thought I deserved to be told just for keeping that book in my shelves. Maybe she was right, but the question of the origins of gender inequality remained unanswered (BTW, later on, we became friends again).

Why are women so commonly discriminated in almost all cultures, modern and ancient? Of course, there are plenty of studies attempting to explain the reasons. It is an interdisciplinary field that mixes history, anthropology, psychology, social studies, and even more; you can spend your whole life studying it. So, I don't even remotely pretend to be saying something definitive or even deep on this subject. It is just that, after much thinking on this matter, I thought that I could share with you some of my conclusions. So, here is a narrative of how gender inequality developed over the centuries in Europe and in the Mediterranean world. I hope you'll find in it something worth pondering.

So, let's go back in time, way back; when does the phenomenon that we call "gender inequality" starts? You probably know that Marija Gimbutas has been arguing for a long time that the pre-literate ages in Europe were characterized by a form of matriarchy and by the predominance of the cult of a female goddess (or goddesses). That is, of course, debatable and it is hotly debated; there is very little that we have from those ancient times that can tell us how men and women related to each other. However, when we move to the first examples of literature we have, then we see at least hints of a different world that involved some kind - perhaps - if not female dominance at least a more assertive role of women. Indeed, the first text for which we know the name of the author was written by the Sumerian priestess Enheduanna at some moment during the second half of the third millennium BCE. From these ancient times, there comes a very strong voice: the voice of a woman asserting the rule of the Goddess Inanna over the pantheon of male Gods of her times, hinting at an even larger role of female goddesses in even more ancient times.

If we follow the millennia as they move onward, it seems that the voice of women becomes fainter and fainter. In Greece, we have Sappho of Lesbos, renown for her poetry, but she comes from a very early age; the seventh century BCE. As the Greek civilization grew and was absorbed into the Roman one, woman literates seem to dwindle. Of the whole span of the Western Roman civilization, we know of a modest number of literate women and there are only two Roman female poets whose works have survived to us. Both go with the name of Sulpicia and you probably never heard of them. As poetry goes, the first Sulpicia, who lived at the times of August, may be interesting to look at. The second one, living in later times, has survived in a few lines only because they are explicitly erotic. But but the point is that it is so little in comparison with so much Greek and Latin literature we still have. Women of those times may not have been really silent but, in literary terms, we just don't hear their voices.

On the other side of the sexual barrier, note how the "Malleus Maleficarum" bases its several pages of insult to women largely on classical authors, for instance, Cicero, Lactantius, Terence, and others; as well as on the early Christian fathers. It is not surprising for us to discover that, from the early imperial times to the early Middle Ages, most writers were woman-haters. They thought that sex was, at best, a necessary evil that one had to stand in order to ensure the perpetuation of humankind; but no more than that. Chastity, if one could attain it, was by far the best condition for man and woman alike and, for sure, sex with a woman was only a source of perversity and of debasement. An early Christian father, Origen (3rd century CE) is reported to have taken the matter to the extreme and castrated himself, although that's not certain and surely it never became popular.

With the decline and fall of the Western Roman Empire, there appeared something that had never existed before: the monastic orders. Never before so many men and women had decided that they wanted to live in complete separation from the members of the other sex. Read a book such as the "pratum spirituale" by 6th century CE the Byzantine monk John Moschos, and you get the impression that everyone at that time, males and females, were obsessed by sex; how to avoid it, that is. Chastity had never been considered a virtue before and, yet, now it had become the paramount one. At least, however, it seems that women had gained a certain degree of independence, seeking for chastity in their own ways and with a dignity of their own. Reading documents from that age, you get the well-defined impression that men and women had somehow decided that they wanted to avoid each other for a while. It was a pause that lasted several centuries. But why did that happen?

I think there are reasons, but to understand them we must go back to Roman times and try to understand what was the relationship between men and women at that age. And we may find that it was deeply poisoned by a sickness that pervaded the society of those times: social inequality and, in particular, the institution of slavery.

It is well known that the Roman Empire heavily based its wealth on the work of slaves. Their number is variously estimated as around 10% of the population, but it was larger in the richest regions of the empire. Probably, during the 1st century CE, some 30%-40% of the population of Italy was composed of slaves (1). Slavery was an integral part of the Roman economy and one of the main aims of the Roman military conquests was capturing of large numbers of foreigners, who then were turned into slaves.

Now, most slaves were male and were used for heavy or menial work, in agriculture, for instance. But many of them were female, and, obviously, young and attractive slaves, both male and female, were used as sex objects. Slaves were not considered as having rights. They simply were property. Caroline Osiek writes that (2).

To the female slave, therefore, honor, whether of character or of behavior, cannot be ascribed. The female slave can lay no claim to chastity or shame, which have no meaning. In the official view, she cannot have sensitivity toward chastity. Her honor cannot be violated because it does not exist. .. No legal recognition is granted to the sexual privacy of a female slave.

To have a better idea of how female slaves were considered in Roman times, we may turn to a late Roman poet, Ausonius (4th century CE) who had gained a certain notoriety in his times. He was not only a poet but an accomplished politician who had a chance to accompany Emperor Gratian in a military raid in Germania. From there, he returned with a Germanic slave girl named Bissula. He wrote a poem in her honor that says, among other things,

Delicium, blanditiae, ludus, amor, voluptas,barbara, sed quae Latias vincis alumna pupas,Bissula, nomen tenerae rusticulum puellae,horridulum non solitis, sed domino venustum.

that we can translate as

Delice, blandishment, play, love, desire,barbarian, but you baby beat the Latin girlsBissula, a tender name, a little rustic for a girla little rough for those not used to it, but a grace for your master

It is clear that Ausonius likes Bissula; we could even say that he is fond of her. But it is the same kind of attitude that we may have toward a domestic animal; a cat or a dog that we may like a lot, but that we don't consider our equal. Bissula was no more than a pet in terms of rights. It is true that her master was not supposed to mistreat her, and we have no evidence that he ever did. But she had strictly no choice in terms of satisfying him sexually. In this sense, she had no more rights than those pertaining to a rubber doll in our times. In modern terms, we can say that she was being legally raped. And nobody seemed to find this strange; so much that Ausonius' poem that described this legal rape was considered wholly normal and it was appreciated.

If we can still hear Ausonius' voice, we cannot hear that of Bissula. Probably, she couldn't read and write, to say nothing about doing that in proper Latin. So, what she thought of her master is anyone's guess. Was she happy that she was getting at least food and shelter from him? Or did she hate him for having been one od those who had, perhaps, exterminated her family and her parents? Did she ever dream of sticking a hairpin in Ausonius' eye? Perhaps; but we have no evidence that she ever did. If she had done something like that, by the way, she would have condemned to death all the slave of Ausonius' household. The Roman law practiced a strict interpretation of the principle of common intention and when it happened that a slave killed his/her master, it required that all the slaves of that master were to be executed.

So, we cannot hear Bissula's voice, just as we can't hear the voice of the millions of sex slaves that crossed the trajectory of the Roman Empire, from its foundation to its end in the 5th century CE. Exploited, without rights, probably turned to menial work whenever they got older and their masters lost interest in them, their voice is lost in the abyss of time and we can only imagine their plea. But, perhaps, we can get a glimpse of their feelings from their reflection on the other side; that of their masters who, in Imperial times spent pages and pages of their writings at insulting women. Yes, because the silent side, that of the slaves, was not without weapons in the war that the masters were waging against them. The masters may have expected gratitude from them, perhaps even love. But they got only hatred and despise. Imagine yourself as Bissula. Do you imagine she could have loved Ausonius? And can you imagine how could she have taken some revenge on him? I am sure there were ways, even though we can't say whether Bissula ever put them into practice. No wonder that so many men in these times accused women of treachery. In the war of the sexes, the women had to use guerrilla tactics, and apparently they were doing that with some success.

If slavery turned woman slaves into sex objects, the resulting war of the sexes must have had negative effect also on free women. They were not supposed to be legally raped as the slaves, but surely they could not ignore what their husbands were doing (and, by the way, free Roman women were not supposed to rape their male slaves and, if they did, they were not supposed to write poems about how cute their male sex dolls were). Very likely, this situation poisoned the male/female relations of generations of Roman citizens. Thinking of that, we cannot be surprised of the avalanche of insults that Roman male writers poured on women (want an example? Seneca in his tragedies [11 (117)]: "when a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil")

That kind of poisoned relationship continued for a long time but, at a certain moment, not much later than Ausonius' times, the Empire ceased to be able to raid slaves from anywhere, and then it disappeared. Slavery didn't disappear with the Empire: we had to wait for the 19th century to see it disappear for good. But, surely, the whole situation changed and slaves were not any more so common. The Christian church took a lot of time before arriving to a clear condemnation of slavery, but turning people into sex toys was not seen any more as the obvious things to do. So, things changed a lot and we may understand how during Middle Ages men and women were taking that "pause." It was as if they were looking at each other, thinking "who should make the first move?" A shyness that lasted for centuries.

And then, things changed again. It was an impetuous movement, a reversal of the time of hatred between men and women: it was the time of courtly love. With the turning of the millennium, the amour courtois started to appear in Europe and it became all the rage. Men and women were looking again at each other; and they were looking at each other in romantic terms: they loved each other. The love between man and woman became a noble thing, a way to obtain enlightenment - perhaps better than chastity. From the Northern Celtic tradition, the legend of two lovers, Tristan and Iseult, bursts into the literary scene. And it was a dam that gave way. Lancelot and Guinevere, then Dante and Beatrice, Petrarca and Laura, Ibn Arabi and Nizham. West European and Mediterranean poets couldn't think of anything better to express themselves than to dedicate them to noble women whom they love and respect.

And we hear again the voice of women: and what a voice! Think of Heloise, pupil and lover of Abelard, the philosopher in a tragic love story that took place during the early 12th century. Heloise burst onto the scene with unforgettable words: "To her master, nay father, to her husband, nay brother; from his handmaid, nay daughter, his spouse, nay sister: to Abelard, from Heloise. And if the name of wife appears more sacred and more valid, sweeter to me is ever the word friend, or, if you be not ashamed, concubine or whore." What can you say about this? I can only say that my lower jaw falls down as I utter "Wow!!"

It was a long journey from Heloise to our times. Long and tormented, just think that not much later than Heloise, the French mystic Marguerite Porete wrote her book "The mirror of the simple souls" in a style and content that reminds the works of the Sumerian Enheduana, four thousand years before. And Marguerite Porete was burned at the stake for what she had written. And, some centuries later, the war against females continued with the various witch hunts, fueled by books such as "The Malleus Maleficarum" (1520). And think that it was only in the second half of the 20th century that women were generally considered smart enough that they were allowed to vote in general elections. But we have arrived somewhere, to an age in which "gender inequality" is considered something wholly negative, to be avoided at all costs. An age in which, at least in the West, the idea that women are equal to men is obvious, or should be. And an age in which using woman slaves as sex toys is (or should be) considered as an absolute evil.

And yet, if history moves forward, it also moves along a tortuous road and sometimes it goes in circles. The similarities of our times and Roman ones are many. Certainly, we don't have slaves any more, not officially, at least. But that may not be so much a social and ethical triumph but a consequence of the fact that our society is much more monetarized than the Roman one. The need for money can easily make a man or a woman the monetary equivalent of a slave of Roman times. We call "sex workers" those people who engage in sex for money; they are supposed to be free men and free women, but freedom can only be theoretical when, if you really want it, you have to pay for it by starvation. And while the armies of the globalized empire do not raid any more the neighboring countries to bring back male and female slaves, it is the global financial power that forces them to come to the West. They have little choice but to leave countries ravaged by wars, droughts, and poverty. In general, the social equality that the Western World had been constantly gaining after the industrial revolution, seems to have stopped its movement. Since the 1970s, we are going in reverse, social inequalities are on the increase. Are we going to re-legalize slavery? It is not an impossible thought if you think that it was still legal in the US up to 1865.

So, maybe the rich elites of our times would again turn women into sex objects? Maybe they are doing that already. Think of Italy's leader, Silvio Berlusconi. Enough has been diffused of his private life for us to understand that he behaved not unlike Ausonius with his female toys, except that, luckily for us, he has not imposed on us some bad poetry of his.

So, is the war of the sexes going to restart? Are we going to see again the relations between men and women souring because of the deep inequality that turns women into sex toys? And maybe we are going to see the monastic orders returning and, perhaps, in a far future, a new explosion of reciprocal love? It is, of course, impossible to say. What we can say is that the world empire that we call "globalization" is all based on fossil fuels and that it is going to have a short life; very likely much shorter than that of the Roman Empire. Maybe the cycle will not be restarting, maybe it will; we cannot say. Humankind is engaged in a travel toward the future that is taking us somewhere, but we don't know where. Wherever we are going, the path is something we create with our feet as we march onward.

h/t: Elisabetta Addis

1. Harper, Slavery in the Late Roman World, AD 275-425. Cambridge University Press, 2011,

2. Carolyn Osniek, Female Slaves, Porneia and the limits to obedience, in "Early Christian Families in Context: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue" David Balch and Carolyn Osniek eds. Wm. Eedermans publishing Co. Cambridge, 2003.

UK energy firms rake in profits as “fuel poverty” escalates

Emily Wilson & Robert Stevens

British Gas, the UK’s largest domestic energy company, has reported a 31 percent increase in profits for 2015. The firm’s profits rose to £574 million from £439 million the previous year. British Gas supplies energy to 10 million domestic customers and is part of the “Big Six” private energy firms operating in the UK.

Iain Conn, chief executive of Centrica, the parent company of British Gas, defended the profits increase under conditions in which there has been a sharp fall in the wholesale price of gas. He said, “We saw a very mild 2014 and we saw a more normal 2015 so therefore the amount of energy that our customers used went up and therefore the actual total profit went up.”

Conn claimed that savings due to the falling wholesale price of gas had been passed onto the consumer. This was challenged by David Hunter, an energy analyst, who said, “With prices slashed by only 5 percent, standard tariffs are barely more competitive than they were, and still a long way off the fall in wholesale prices. With these tariffs still up to £450 a year more expensive than the best deals, consumers are being left out of pocket.”

In recent years, British Gas annual profits averaged £584 million. According to estimates by the Competitions and Marketing Authority (CMA), which has been conducting an investigation into the UK’s energy suppliers, consumers overpaid by £4.2 billion a year between 2009 and 2013.

As its soaring profits were declared, British Gas announced it would cut another 500 jobs, mostly in its energy efficiency business. These will affect jobs at sites in Leeds, Oxford and Leicester.

A total of 28,000 people work for British Gas in the UK and the latest cuts follow the announcement in July 2015 by Centrica that it will slash 6,000 jobs. Centrica, which also operates in several other countries, said most of the jobs would go in Britain. As with the latest job cuts, last year’s were announced alongside huge profits. In the first half of last year, Centrica recorded a doubling of profits to £1 billion. Half of this came from its British Gas arm.

The job losses are part of a restructuring operation, with the firm planning £750 million of annual cost cuts by 2020. Conn announced that he expected to achieve £200 million in savings by the end of 2016. This will be carried out in large part by cutting 3,000 jobs, with 2,000 of those are expected to come from the UK, including jobs in the North Sea.

Millions of customers struggling to pay skyrocketing bills will be disgusted with the comments of Mark Hodges, Managing Director of British Gas , who said of the latest job cuts, “We must ensure that our costs allow us to be more competitive for our customers.”

On the news of its profit surge and job losses statement, the share price of British Gas rose nearly 7 percent.

Further job losses among the Big Six were announced Tuesday, with 2,400 jobs to go at Npower. These represent a fifth of its global 11,500 workforce. Npower is owned by German group RWE and employs 7,500 in the UK. Npower is making the redundancies in response to a loss of £99 million in its domestic energy business for 2015, compared to a profit of £183 million a year earlier. RWE said the cuts were part of a "radical restructuring.”

In December, Npower was fined £26 million by the energy regulator, Ofgem, for “failing to treat customers fairly.” This was the second such fine levied against the firm.

As is now routine, the trade unions proposed nothing to defend a single job. When the 6,000 job losses were announced at Centrica, GMB national officer Gary Smith could have been speaking for the company when he said it was a “day of deep concern across British Gas,” but the “focus on the long-term and investment in customer service… gives us room for optimism over front-line jobs.”

Paresh Patel of the Unite union said only that “any compulsory job losses should be kept to a minimum” and the “reduction of the workforce should be made either through natural wastage or voluntary means.”

Such is the high cost of energy in the UK today that millions of families face the scourge of fuel poverty. Research published by the National Children’s Bureau last month found that there are now almost four million children in England alone living in fuel poverty. It documented that £10 million per year was being spent on treating patients with health conditions caused or worsened by living in cold, damp housing. Tragically, the report records that 117,000 people have died as a result of living in the cold and damp.

These conditions are the direct result of privatisation of the electricity industry, began in 1990 under the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher. Since then, the privatised companies have reaped billions and billions in profits, as bills for households have shot through the roof, with millions of people simply unable to pay mounting fuel costs.

The Blair-Brown Labour governments from 1997-2010 maintained the privatised monopoly of the big energy firms.

In his campaign for the Labour Party leadership last year, Jeremy Corbyn promised that a Labour government would bring the energy industry under government control. He said in one speech, “I would want the public ownership of the gas and the National Grid… I would personally wish that the big six were under public control, or public ownership in some form.”

The Financial Times noted, “That would have seen a Labour government nationalising British Gas, SSE, Eon, Scottish Power, EDF, Npower and the National Grid.”

Corbyn, who has since retreated on all the main planks he was elected on, ditched this policy even before a month was out. On September 29, Lisa Nandy, Labour’s shadow energy secretary, told the party’s annual conference, “Jeremy and I don’t want to nationalise energy. We want to do something far more radical. We want to democratise it.”

This deliberately amorphous statement boiled down to a policy, said Nandy, of communities around the country being encouraged to generate their own “clean energy,” via “community-based energy companies and cooperatives.”

Labour under Corbyn remains a party of big business, with the FT commenting that Corbyn’s climb-down was the “latest example of his radical ideas disintegrating on contact with the rest of the Labour party [leadership].”

According to the Guardian, the Competitions and Marketing Authority, following an 18-month investigation into the activities of the main energy suppliers, “is expected to announce next week that it has ditched plans to introduce a wide-ranging price cap on energy bills after fierce lobbying from the big six suppliers.”

The newspaper noted that the watchdog “has already retreated from other, bolder moves that it threatened to make, including the breakup of large firms such as Centrica and SSE that dominate the wholesale as well as the retail markets.”

In response, shares in Centrica rose by 4.5 percent. Centrica was already relaxed about whatever the CMA’s review would conclude with Ian Conn stating in February, “I don’t really fear the outcome.”

Poor mental health care in England is “ruining lives,” report finds

Dennis Moore

Mental health care in England is now so poor and underfunded that lives are being ruined, a review says.

The report, “The Five Year Forward View For Mental Health”, from the Independent Taskforce to the National Health Service (NHS) in England, found that many people were getting no help or inadequate care, with patients, including young children, being sent across the country for treatment.

The figures are stark considering the scale of the problem and the impact each year on hundreds of thousands of people who are affected by mental illness.

Mental health still receives just 13 percent of NHS funding, despite accounting for more than a fifth (23 percent) of the UK’s disease burden. It is estimated that more than £11 billion worth of extra funding for mental health would be required to bridge this gap. Since 2010, there have been severe cuts to staff with 5,000 fewer mental health nurses and 8 percent fewer mental health beds.

Mental health problems account for the single biggest cause of disability in the UK. In any given year, one in four people will be affected by a mental health problem, yet 75 percent receive no help.

Mental health services for children and young people in England were cut by £35 million last year alone.

The impact of the lack of services for young people is significant, with 50 percent of all mental health problems being established by the age of 14. One in 10 children between the ages of 5 and 16 have a diagnosable problem, with children from low-income families being at the highest risk, a figure two thirds higher than those from the highest income bracket.

The impact on children in later life can be immense. Those suffering with conduct disorder and persistent disobedient, disruptive behaviour are three times more likely to become a teenage parent, twice as likely to leave school with no qualifications, and 20 times more likely to end up in prison.

Many people receive no support, and those who do receive support in the form of psychological therapies are not seen immediately, with the average wait time 32 weeks.

There are a significant number of armed forces veterans struggling with mental health problems, including post-traumatic stress disorder. Some 50 percent of those with mental health problems seek help from the NHS. Many of those seeking help are rarely referred for specialist care.

Older people are affected by high rates of depression, with 40 percent of older people living in care homes being affected and one in five older people living in the community.

The rate of suicide is rising, coming after years of decline. In 2014, 4,882 men committed suicide in England, with a marked increase amongst middle-aged men. Suicide is now the major cause of death in men between ages 15 and 49.

Two thirds of all people with mental health problems receive no support at all, and of those helped, few have access to the full range of interventions that should be available.

Some 90 percent of adults suffering with severe mental health problems are supported by community services. However, there are long waiting times for some of the key interventions recommended by NICE, including psychological therapy.

For those people who require crisis care, the Care Quality Commission found that only 14 percent of those they had surveyed felt they had been provided with the right response.

Only 50 percent of community mental health teams were able to offer help to people on a 24/7 basis. Only a small number of Accident and Emergency (A&E) departments in hospitals were able to offer help via a casualty liaison mental health service.

Those younger than 16 who presented at a casualty department would be referred directly to children and young people’s services, but could only be seen when these services were open during office hours. At weekends, this would mean a young person having to wait. So run down is provision that the report points out many people in crisis come into contact with mental health services via the police.

The issue of inpatient psychiatric care and the increased numbers of those being detained under the mental health act place increased pressure on already overstretched services. The number of inpatient beds has decreased by 39 percent overall between 1998 and 2012. This has led to bed occupancy rising for the fourth consecutive year to 94 percent.

Many acute wards are not always the safest and most therapeutic environment to be in when trying to recover. The pressure exerted on bed spaces has been made worse by the lack of crisis care and early intervention services. This in turn leads to a shortage in psychiatric beds, with 2,000 acutely ill patients a month being sent out of area.

The report points to a number of recommendations that include being able to provide a seven-day, 24-hour service, with the expansion of home treatment and crisis resolution teams.

The Conservative government claims that it has invested up to￡1 billion in mental health services. However, this is not new money, but part of the ￡8.4 billion that Chancellor George Osborne was forced to promise, before the last election, would be made available to the NHS.

The running down of mental health services has continued alongside cuts to many of the services in the community that have provided support for people with mental health problems.

Drop-in centres, youth services, befriending projects and Sure Start children’s centres have suffered funding cuts. At the same time, unwell welfare claimants are being forced into finding work by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), via the notorious Work Capability Test.

Money is no longer centrally allocated for health care, including mental health services. Since the 2012 Health and Social Care Act, money is devolved to local Care Commissioning Groups. These groups are usually led by general practitioners (GPs), who have limited budgets and will likely spend it on contracting for existing services.

No more money is being provided to develop and improve mental health services, and what money there is will be barely enough to support already struggling and overstretched services.

Mental health services, as with all aspects of social welfare, are being cut and being pushed to the breaking point, with those in need becoming increasingly unwell, as they cannot access appropriate services when they need them. To compound this, health care workers are not able to deliver quality care due to lack of resources.

The only way to prevent the total destruction of mental health care services, and to improve them to a level that is needed, is through a massive investment programme to fully fund and develop services.

This can only happen when the wealth generated in society is used for the common good, and not for gratuitous accumulation for personal gain.

Cuba denounces continued US enforcement of embargo

Alexander Fangmann

On February 28, the United States Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control announced it had reached settlements with several companies, including two Cayman Islands-based subsidiaries of the giant US oilfield services company Halliburton, over violations of the more than half-century-old US economic embargo against Cuba.

Josefina Vidal, Director General of the United States in the Cuban Foreign Ministry, took to Twitter to say that “strict implementation of the blockade continues, US imposes new fine, now vs Halliburton,” later saying that the embargo continues to be the “principal violation of human rights” of Cubans.

Under the agreement, Halliburton has agreed to pay $304,706 for actions undertaken by its subsidiaries in Angola in 2011. Halliburton had provided goods and services for oil and gas exploration and drilling to an Angolan oil and gas drilling consortium in which Cuba’s state-owned oil company Cuba Petroleo maintains a miniscule 5 percent ownership stake.

Other companies receiving fines included the French-owned CGG Services and its Venezuelan subsidiary, Veritas Geoservices. Despite both companies being non-US companies, they agreed to pay $614,250 for having used spare parts, equipment and other goods of US-origin while working on Cuban offshore oil projects. Cuba’s Foreign Ministry complained that this confirmed the “extraterritoriality” of the embargo which has a “deterrent effect not only on foreign entities but also on U.S. ones.”

Although the violations named so far refer to activities undertaken before the normalization of diplomatic relations between the US and Cuba that went into effect on December 17 of last year, the nearly 55-year embargo remains largely in effect. The Cuban government has stated that the continued sanctions are “incongruous in the current context of relations between the two countries and corroborates that to move forward toward normalization of bilateral ties it is essential to lift the blockade.”

Embargo limitations remain in place despite a well-publicized easing of some restrictions, such as the resumption of commercial airline flights. The Commerce Department also issued new rules in January allowing certain kinds of exports in cases where it says the “Cuban people stand to benefit,” but these still require authorization on a case-by-case basis. Based on already loosened restrictions, the Commerce Department issued 490 authorizations in 2015 for US companies to do business in Cuba, worth up to $4.3 billion.

While there has been a major push for an end to the embargo from large US corporations who are eager both to exploit Cuba’s educated and cheap labor force and to sell into a market with deep needs for goods and infrastructural improvements of all kinds, ending it would require legislative action from the US Congress, where the Republican leadership is largely opposed to such a move.

The steady drumbeat towards an end to the embargo has been picking up, however, with more and more corporate sectors salivating at the possibility of entering into an economic space where sections of US businesses would have no real competition. Some of the most vocal so far have been the largest agribusiness giants, including ADM and Cargill, which have organized themselves as the US Agriculture Coalition for Cuba (USACC).

Caterpillar recently named Rimco, a Puerto Rican company, as its dealer in Cuba in anticipation of an end to the embargo. Philip Kelliher, vice president of the company’s Americas & Europe Distribution Services division said, “Cuba needs access to the types of products that Caterpillar makes and, upon easing of trade restrictions, we look forward to providing the equipment needed to contribute to the building of Cuba’s infrastructure.”

For its part, Cuba is in a hurry to normalize relations with the United States due to its own perilous financial situation and the crisis overtaking its main source of foreign aid, Venezuela. Venezuela has for years been propping up the Cuban economy through subsidized shipments of oil, but its ability to provide oil through this relationship has been undermined severely by the fall in oil prices. A Barclays report based on the tracking of oil tankers by Petrologistics estimated that shipments of oil from Venezuela to Cuba have fallen from 99,000 barrels per day in 2012 to 55,000 barrels per day, though the Venezuelan government has denied that any substantial drop has occurred.

Given its desire to lift the embargo’s restrictions on the penetration of the Cuban economy by US capital, the government of President Raul Casto is prepared to defend the actions of Halliburton, one of Yankee imperialism’s most sordid actors. Halliburton, whose CEO from 1995-2000 was former US Vice President Dick Cheney, was intimately involved in the criminal invasion and occupation of Iraq from 2003 on. Halliburton was famously awarded a $7 billion dollar no-bid contract prior to the start of the war, as part of the carving up of Iraq’s oil industry.

Washington’s continued acts of enforcement make clear that the US government intends to approach any further negotiations toward an end to the embargo with a clear message that Cuba stands in a decidedly subservient relationship to its larger neighbor.

For its part, the Castro government has decided that the only way it can continue its privileged position in Cuban society is to turn to American imperialism and attempt to transform Cuba’s economy along Chinese lines—that is, brutal capitalist exploitation overseen by a Stalinist police-state infrastructure.

Nearly one-third of US food stamp recipients rely on food pantries

Kate Randall

Nearly one-third of US households on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) rely on food pantries to supplement their food budget, according to data highlighted this week by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), which administers SNAP.

The USDA reports that in 2014, 23 million American households received SNAP benefits, formerly known as food stamps. Of those households receiving SNAP benefits, 32 percent report they had visited a food pantry in the previous 30 days.

Households receiving other government food assistance also visited food pantries in significant numbers. Twenty-three percent of households using the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program visited a pantry, as did 23 percent of households where children are receiving free or reduced-price school lunches.

The average SNAP benefit per person is about $125 per person a month, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. The USDA data shows that these paltry benefits are not enough to sustain many household food budgets, leading families to seek assistance from food pantries.

Despite these statistics, more than one million people across the US could lose their SNAP benefits in 2016 due to the return in many areas of a three-month limit on benefits for unemployed adults ages 18-49 who are not disabled or raising minor children. The cutoffs began March 1 in 21 states, prompting food pantries and soup kitchens to gear up for an influx of people seeking support.

Following the financial crisis in 2008, virtually all US states qualified for a waiver from the three-month limit for those classified as “Able-Bodied Adults Without Dependents” (ABAWDs), imposed in 1996 under the welfare reform bill signed into law by President Clinton. The harsh “work for food” requirements are now being restored in the face of US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data that shows that more than a quarter of the 7.9 million US unemployed have been jobless for more than six months.

According to the USDA, about 4.7 million SNAP recipients are deemed ABAWDs, and only one in four of these has any income from a job. USDA data shows these individuals have gross income averages of 17 percent of the official poverty line, or only about $2,000 per year for a household of one in 2015. If these individuals fail to demonstrate that they work, volunteer, or attend job-training courses at least 80 hours a month, they will be cut off SNAP.

The assault on SNAP benefits is a bipartisan attack on the health and wellbeing of workers at a time when the government’s own figures show hunger growing across America. In 2014, President Obama signed a bill that included $8.6 billion in cuts to SNAP. The temporary 14 percent increase in benefits passed by Congress in 2009 ended completely in November 2013.

Under these crisis conditions, Obama’s fiscal year 2016 budget proposal included only $83.692 billion for SNAP, which presently serves an average caseload of 45.7 million Americans, almost 15 percent of the population. This compares to the more than $600 billion a year officially expended on the military. If all military-related expenses are added—including from the CIA, Homeland Security, Energy, State departments, the Veterans Administration and debt payments for previous wars—the real figure is closer to $1.3 trillion a year.

A USDA study showed that 14 percent of households (17.4 million households) were food insecure in 2014, meaning they did not have consistent, dependable access to enough food for an active, healthy life. In 2014, 5.6 percent of US households (6.9 million households) had very low food security, meaning that the food intake of some household members was reduced, and normal eating patterns disrupted, due to limited resources at times during the year.

A 2013 study of 3,300 SNAP households by the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service found that “SNAP households experience … financial strain that is eased but not alleviated by participation in the SNAP program.” The study found that about 45 percent of SNAP clients limited food consumption, usually by skipping meals, to make it through the month.

NPR reports on other research that shows that hospital admissions for hypoglycemia—low blood sugar, which can be treated with a healthful diet—spike by 27 percent for low-income households during the last week of the month, when many government benefits run out. High-income households showed no similar trend.

A new review of 25 studies published between 2003 and 2014 that looked at the food spending and quality of diets of SNAP recipients showed that they ate on average about the same number of calories as those not receiving benefits, but consumed fewer fruits and vegetables and whole grains and more added sugars.

Tatiana Andreyeva, the study’s lead author and researcher at the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at the University of Connecticut, said average food stamp recipients scored even worse than the average American on the Healthy Eating Index, a measure of how well diets meet the federal dietary guidelines.

While the average American received a failing grade, scoring just 58 out of 100 on the index, the average SNAP recipient scored just 47 out of 100 in one study, and 51 out of 100 in another. The study also found that both adults and children on SNAP were less likely to eat three meals a day than higher-income people not receiving benefits.

Western powers prepare military operations in Libya

Niles Williamson

The New York Times reported Tuesday that US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter has provided the White House with a detailed plan for expansive military operations throughout Libya.

The proposal was presented by Carter to President Barack Obama’s top national security advisers on February 22. Drawn up by the Pentagon’s Africa Command and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the operation would reportedly involve airstrikes on 30 to 40 targets determined to belong to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Citing anonymous government officials, the Times reported that once the plan is approved by Obama, warplanes will launch attacks on alleged ISIS training camps, command centers and munitions depots while also providing air cover to various US-backed militias, which include Islamist elements similar to ISIS.

Typically, the Times report failed to mention that the Obama administration bears responsibility for the destabilization of Libya and the growth of ISIS and other Islamist militias across the region.

Under the pseudo-legal guise of the “responsibility to protect” anti-government protesters in Benghazi from a supposedly impending massacre, the US and its imperialist allies in Europe launched a regime change operation in 2011 to oust Muammar Gaddafi, the longtime leader of the oil-rich country.

Spearheaded by Hillary Clinton, then Obama’s Secretary of State, the supposedly humanitarian operation resulted in the deaths of approximately 30,000 people; the brutal lynch-mob murder of Gaddafi; the de facto partition of Libya between multiple competing factions; and the destabilization of countries throughout the Middle East and West Africa.

Since 2011 the United States and its allies have repeatedly launched air strikes and Special Forces raids in Libya, something which US officials have insisted will continue regardless of plans for wider military operations. Last month the US launched an airstrike on an alleged ISIS training camp in western Libya near the border with Tunisia, killing as many as 50 people.

At a televised town hall event hosted by Fox News Monday night, Clinton, the Democratic frontrunner in the 2016 presidential primaries, once again led the charge for intervention, stating that she supports the deployment of US Special Forces to Libya and favors the expansion of American military operations.

“We already are, as you know from the headlines and the stories, using Special Forces, using air strikes to go after ISIS leaders,” Clinton told the audience. “We ought to be supporting [Libyans], not only with Special Forces and air strikes against terrorists, but helping them secure their borders and deal with some of the internal challenges they face.”

While the official position of the US and its European allies is that they will wait to launch military operations until the formation of a national unity government in Libya, hundreds of Special Forces troops have already been deployed covertly to Libya for the last several weeks to lay the groundwork for a much larger assault. Aircraft from the US, France and Great Britain have also been flying reconnaissance flights over the country.

Soldiers from the US, Britain, Italy and France have been deployed to Misrata in the west and Benghazi in the east to train and arm militias which, in addition to fighting each other for control of the country, are confronted with a growing branch of ISIS centered in the city of Sirte.

The main groups receiving support are the Libya Dawn, which includes fighters linked to Al Qaeda, loyal to the Islamist General National Congress based in Tripoli, and the forces loyal to the Council of Deputies based in Tobruk, including those under the command of the CIA-backed Libyan general Khalifa Hifter.

Italy in particular is playing a crucial role in preparing for the opening of renewed military operations in its former colonial possession. A joint military operations center has been established in Rome, and an agreement was reached in February to allow the United States to carry out airstrikes in defense of Special Forces deployed in Libya, using manned aircraft and drones stationed at Sigonella airbase in Sicily.

Last Friday US Ambassador to Italy John Phillips told Corriere della Sera that Italy was preparing to deploy 5,000 troops to Libya to fight ISIS. “We need to make Tripoli safe and ensure that ISIS is no longer free to strike,” he stated.

Italian Prime Minister Mateo Renzi responded over the weekend in a televised interview denying that Italy was preparing an “invasion” but left the door open to a wider military intervention. “If there is a need to intervene, Italy will not back down,” Renzi stated. “But this is not the situation today. The idea of sending 5,000 men is not on the table.”

Despite Renzi’s public denials, the Italian government has already deployed at least 40 secret service agents and 50 Special Forces troops to prepare the ground for a much larger operation. According to a western diplomat in Rome quoted anonymously by the Financial Times, Italy is “in pretty good shape operationally once they have the green light to go in. They have a clear model for what they would like to do.”

A main factor in the current press for expanded military operations in Libya is the broader effort to block hundreds of thousands of refugees who continue to flee to safety in Europe from their home countries in the Middle East and North Africa, areas which have been devastated by a decade and a half of imperialist military intervention.

“Clearly the spring approaching and the prospect of a new influx of refugees from Libya are accelerating western plans to agree on a military intervention and its outlines,” IHS Country Risk MENA senior analyst Ludovico Carlino told Tunisia Live late last month. In recent days the European Union and NATO have ramped up military operations in the Aegean Sea, seeking to push back those refugees, mainly from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, seeking to reach Greece by boat from Turkey.

Five years after Japan’s nuclear disaster, TEPCO executives charged

Ben McGrath

In the lead up to the fifth anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, three former Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) executives were indicted late last month over their role in the meltdown of three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant.

Tsunehisa Katsumata, TEPCO chairman during the accident, and Sakae Muto and Ichiro Takekuro, both former heads of the company’s nuclear division, have all been charged with negligence. It is the first time anyone has been indicted over the nuclear disaster. While the limited charges are largely to deflect continuing public anger, they have been opposed by the government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

Three out of six nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant went into meltdown after being hit by a tsunami caused by a magnitude-9 earthquake on March 11, 2011. From the outset there has been a conscious and ongoing effort to cover up the gross negligence of the company and the government.

TEPCO only admitted last month that it had known that a meltdown had occurred but waited two months before making the information public. Widespread confusion marked the evacuation process in 2011 and is believed to have caused the deaths of at least 44 people, mostly hospital patients or residents in nursing homes.

In 2008, three years before the disaster, an internal TEPCO document predicted that a 15.7-meter high tsunami could potentially strike the Fukushima plant. These warnings were ignored. TEPCO, the fourth largest power company in the world, did nothing to increase the height of its existing 10-meter seawall, which proved completely inadequate when the 14-meter tsunami struck the plant in 2011.

The government has consistently attempted to protect TEPCO, which has a long record history of covering up safety incidents.

Prosecutors initially declined to bring any charges against TEPCO officials making it likely that the three executives will only receive a slap on the wrist if they are found guilty at all. The three face up to five years’ jail or can pay a paltry fine of one million yen ($8,800). The trial is not likely to start for at least six months.

Ruiko Muto of the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster Plaintiffs Group told the media, “This is a relief for the tens of thousands of victims who are still dealing with hardships and anguish.”

Muto’s citizen group was formed to review the prosecutors’ decision after they initially refused to press charges against the TEPCO officials. Under Japanese law, citizen groups can demand such a review.

After the first group’s demand for charges against TEPCO officials was rejected, a second body, known as a Committee of Inquest for Prosecution, was formed. It reached similar conclusions but once again no charges were filed. Another committee was established to demand indictments and while rare, its decision is binding on prosecutors.

The culpability of TEPCO and Japanese governments, present and past, is beyond doubt. A report by the Japanese parliament’s Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission (NAIIC) in 2012 stated that there was a “cozy relationship between the operators, regulators and academic scholars” that “prioritized the interests of their organizations over the public’s safety.”

Over 15,000 people were killed in the earthquake and tsunami in northern Japan. While no deaths have been directly linked to the release of radiation from the reactors, there are widespread concerns that health problems may emerge in the future. It is also unclear what impact the disaster will have on the environment. Greenpeace Japan has stated in a recent report that it had found high concentrations of radiation in new leaves and mutations in fir trees and butterflies.

Five years since the disaster, water continues to flow into the stricken TEPCO plant where it becomes contaminated with radioactivity. The radioactive water is being pumped into tanks with more than 1,000 tanks now full and the number growing. TEPCO has stated that it may take 40 years to complete the complex decommissioning of the reactors and clean-up.

More than 160,000 people were forced to evacuate the area following the Fukushima meltdown and about 59,000 people continue to live in barrack-style temporary homes. While the government has built some public housing, 7 percent of the homes built in the three prefectures of Fukushima, Iwate and Miyagi remain empty, highlighting the refusal of the government to adequately meet the needs of the victims. High rents have prevented some of those in temporary housing from moving.

Nuclear plants in Japan are being brought back online in defiance of public opinion polls which regularly indicate that a majority of those surveyed oppose the use of nuclear power.

Two reactors were restarted last August and October respectively at the Sendai nuclear plant in Kagoshima Prefecture by the Kyushu Electric Power Company. The Sendai plant is just 50 kilometres from the Mount Sakurajima volcano, which erupted on February 5. Kyushu Electric Power management said there was no impact from the eruption and the company would not be taking any special precautions.

In January, Kansai Electric Power Company activated its No. 3 reactor, followed by its No. 4 reactor in late February, at the Takahama plant in Fukui Prefecture. The No. 4 reactor, however, has experienced operating problems on two occasions and has been shut down. Contaminated water was found leaking during tests on February 20. It was reactivated on February 26 but shut down suddenly three days later. The exact cause is still not known.

While these issues continue to fuel popular hostility to nuclear power, the opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) is attempting to capitalise on this by placing the blame solely on Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

Naoto Kan, the DPJ prime minister at the time of the nuclear disaster, pleaded ignorance during a recent interview with the Telegraph. “There was so little precise information coming in,” he cynically told the British newspaper. “It was very difficult to make clear judgments. I don’t consider myself a nuclear expert, but I did study physics at university.”

Kan’s immediate goal is to deflect criticism over the DPJ government’s behavior during the disaster ahead of this summer’s election for the upper house of the Japanese Diet. He criticized Abe’s government for “closing its eyes” to the lessons of the disaster, and warned of the potential for a second, claiming that his previous support for nuclear power had changed “180 degrees.”

The ongoing attempts of Japanese governments to protect TEPCO over the Fukushima disaster are another demonstration that the drive for profits takes precedence over the health and safety of millions of ordinary people.

As the World Socialist Web Site explained in “Nuclear power, private ownership and the profit system” published on March 24 2011, “The problem is not nuclear power per se, but the social and economic order under which it is developed.

“So long as nuclear power remains the province of private corporations and the market, the health of the environment and the safety of humankind will be subordinated to the drive for profit and enrichment of executives and big shareholders. Only under public ownership and democratic control by the working population—i.e., under socialism—is the safe harnessing and development of nuclear power conceivable.”

Steel workers strike in Mexico

Rafael Azul

On Saturday March 5, more than 3,500 workers at the ArcelorMittal (AM) steel plant in the port city of Lázaro Cárdenas in Michoacán, México went on strike against the world’s largest steelmaker. The workers rallied at the Miners Monument, marched to the plant, and set up a picket line to protest summary dismissals and other violations of their contract. There are also reports that workers are engaged in a plant occupation.

Last year 300 workers were laid off from the coke facility at the plant. The strikers are demanding their rehiring and the reopening of the sheet steel facility, where over one thousand workers were sacked in 2014.

ArcelorMittal management released a statement declaring the walkout illegal and calling for three-party talks between management, the union and the administration of President Peña Nieto. The workers are members of the National Miners, Metal and Steel workers Union (SNTMMSRM). The Labor Ministry (STPS) issued a statement, saying, “With respect to the occupation of the AM Mill, the STPS calls on the National Miners, Metal and Steelworkers Union (SNTMMSRM) to take the road of negotiations and respect for the law.”

The STPS has a history of intervening on the side of big business to make strikes illegal, or “inexistent,” in the language of Mexican legislation. It has happened repeatedly, both under National Action Party governments (PAN) as well as under PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) administrations. In some cases dubious interpretations of Mexican law have been rubberstamped by the Labor Ministry to justify mass layoffs and other attacks on Mexican miners.

AM and a Mexican firm, the Villacero Group, benefited from the 1991 privatization of the state-owned Sicarsa steel mill, at fire sale prices. The government of president Raúl Salinas justified the give away price (USD 170 million, a fraction of its yearly revenues) declaring that the firm required an investment of USD 2 billion to modernize. Far from modernizing the mill, the new owners allowed it to continue to deteriorate.

In 2006, AM absorbed Villacero’s half, following the events of jueves negro(Black Thursday). On April 20, 800 federal police officers violently invaded the plant to expel 500 workers who had been occupying it for nearly three weeks. They killed two workers and wounded 41.

Last March, AM threatened to close the mill and lay off thousands of workers. At the time, the SNTMMSRM bureaucracy argued against a strike claiming they could keep the layoffs to a minimum. SNTMMSRM again stood in the way of the strike last July insisting that it was necessary to aid management as it faced critical competition in the Mexican market from Chinese steel. The union sided with the company’s economic nationalism, claiming China was dumping steel products at below market prices.

The Lázaro Cárdenas mill, the largest in Mexico, employs 7,000 workers. ArcelorMittal, a Luxemburg-based transnational corporation headed by Indian billionaire steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, operates in 27 countries and has a work force of 320,000.

In parallel with the negotiations with ArcelorMittal México, the company is also negotiating with the United Steelworkers union (USW) in the US, which has forced 13,000 AM workers in the US to work without a contract since last September. The USW has offered massive concessions to the steelmaker, in line with the sellout agreements it has imposed on workers at US Steel and specialty steelmaker Allegheny Technologies (ATI). At the same time, the USW has pledged to strengthen its “partnership” with US Steel and AM by pushing a virulently nationalist campaign for tariffs against steel from China, Russia, Japan, Brazil and other countries.

Mass layoffs at Bombardier hit Germany

Dietmar Henning

In mid-February, Canadian aerospace and train manufacturer Bombardier announced around 7,000 global job cuts in the coming two years, approximately 10 percent of its worldwide workforce. Of these, 3,200 jobs will be eliminated in the train division, which has its headquarters in Berlin.

The specific details of the international layoff plans have been announced over the last week. Several days ago, the 5,500 Bombardier employees in Belfast, Northern Ireland, involved in the production of aircraft wings were informed that 1,080 jobs would be lost. The largest number of lay-offs will take place in Canada, where 2,400 positions are to go in Quebec and an additional 430 in Ontario.

The 1,430 job cuts announced in Germany by Bombardier will chiefly impact its three plants in eastern Germany: Hennigsdorf near Berlin, as well as Görlitz and Bautzen on the Polish and Czech borders.

As many as 700 jobs will be shed in Görlitz, where 2,800 workers are currently employed, and 230 in Bautzen, which has a workforce of 1,200. The approximately 1,000 workers at the two neighboring plants are temporary contract workers who will be affected most of all by the lay-offs.

In Hennigsdorf, 270 jobs will be cut, including 70 contract workers. Currently, 2,850 workers are employed there, making it the company’s largest German location.

The remaining 230 job cuts are distributed across Bombardier’s five sites in western Germany: Kassel, Frankfurt, Mannheim, Braunschweig and Siegen. According to company spokesman Andreas Dienemann, the company’s headquarters in Berlin will not escape layoffs, Tagespiegel reported. Around 600 workers are employed there.

When the Hennigsdorf workers were informed about the lay-off plans at a special employees’ meeting, around 1,000 workers protested against the job cuts in front of the factory gates.

While workers have reacted with surprise and anger, the works council and IG Metall trade union are already collaborating with company management to work out the details of the lay-offs. Bombardier’s Dienemann said that the job cuts would be implemented by the end of 2017 in line with a so-called social agreement. To this end, talks had been initiated with the works council to negotiate a plan.

Central works council chair Michael Wobst claimed that the timetable for commencing talks on a social plan was “totally unclear.” At the same time, he said the works council feared the ending of production at Hennigsdorf and the retention of only development work and a small prototype production facility. An additional several hundred jobs were at risk. “Details about the planned measures have to be presented in full,” he demanded.

Wobst’s claim that he is not fully informed lacks all credibility. He knows very well about the planned measures. He is, after all, deputy chairman of the supervisory board. On this body, he sits alongside the investor representatives as well as the heads of the works councils from each location: Jürgen Runge (Mannheim), Gerd Kaczmarek (Bautzen), Jürgen Korstian (Siegen) and Erhard Peter (Kassel). For IG Metall, two representatives from the Berlin-Brandenburg-Saxony district sit on the supervisory board: district head Olivier Höbel and Anne Karl, trade union secretary for student work, employees and engineering.

IG Metall and the works council’s claims of surprise are not genuine, but rather part of a deliberate double-game. The contrived outrage and calls for a few symbolic protests are aimed at concealing the fact that the works councils, IG Metall officials and company management are collaborating intimately to enforce the lay-offs with as little opposition as possible.

At the beginning of a joint meeting of IG Metall and the central works council last Friday, several trade union officials announced plans for major actions. “The planned job cuts are from our point of view a short-term smash-and-grab operation which is definitely not necessary,” said Jan Otto, IG Metall chief for eastern Saxony. “We are not going to accept it lying down.”

After the conference in Schönefeld (Dahme-Spreewald), things sounded very different. “The lack of a concept from management is becoming an existential threat to the sites in the east and west,” IG Metall district leader Höbel stated in the manner of a co-manager.

The works council and IG Metall consider that management failures are to blame for Bombardier Transport’s poor finances. The company was criticised again for outsourcing some production to low-wage locations, where “quality of work [is] lower.” “Over the course of years, we have pointed out the mistakes from our point of view,” said Bautzen’s works council chair Kaczmarek.

Höbel demanded negotiations with the employer’s side after the conference. According to Dienemann, these have already begun.

The works councils and IG Metall have received backing from local SPD and Left Party politicians. Stefan Brangs (SPD), state secretary for labour in the state economic ministry in Saxony, spoke of a shock for the region. Brangs was sent to the eastern region after 1989 by the public sector and transport union (ÖTV), subsequently the united services union ver.di, first to Leipzig and then Dresden.

In 2001, he became ver.di spokesman in Saxony, and from 2004 he sat in Saxony’s state parliament for the SPD. Since 2006, he has also been a member of the SPD’s Saxony state executive. In December 2014, he moved from parliament into the state ministry of economy, labour and transport. He called for conducting talks with the company, stating, “We expect Bombardier to provide a sustainable future concept for the company.” But this is precisely what Bombardier is working on. From the standpoint of the internationally active corporation, the lay-offs are absolutely unavoidable if it is to remain “secure for the future,” a euphemism for maintaining competitiveness.

Mirko Schultze, Left Party state parliament member for Görlitz, expressed his disappointment for workers at the Görlitz plant and in the region. It was now necessary to try everything “together with IG Metall” to either avoid the cuts or at least “make them in as socially responsible a manner as possible.”

From Diegfried Dainege, the mayor of Görlitz, he demanded a “clear recognition of the workforce’s position.” Prior to taking over the mayoral post at Görlitz city hall in 2012 with the support of the Greens, CDU and the free market FDP, he was a Bombardier manager at the Görlitz facility.

Dainege is a typical example of the transformation of Stalinist bureaucrats. He began working as an engineer at WEB carriage construction in Görlitz in 1979, while at the same time joining the Stalinist state party (SED) and assuming several leading regional positions.

During the reintroduction of capitalism in the GDR in 1990, he was head of production and rose to become director of production (1995) and general manager (1998) for Bombardier Transportation, which took over the remnants of the East German train manufacturing industry. In 2010, he switched to the company’s head office in Berlin, serving for two years as general manager, “Head of Operations Performance Management & Production Technology.”

If the works council and IG Metall now claim to have developed a “plan of action,” which is to commence with nationwide protests at Bombardier sites on March 17, this has only one goal: a means is to be created to allow the justifiably outraged workforce to let off steam, while enforcing the lay-offs and diverting attention away from the close collaboration between IG Metall, the works council and company management.

Behind the scenes, the works council and IG Metall have long reached an agreement with management to facilitate the job cuts. All that is now being negotiated are the conditions and course of action.

IMF issues new warning on global economy

Nick Beams

The International Monetary Fund warned this week of a further weakening of the global economy following the release of figures showing a significant decline in Chinese and global trade.

In a major speech to the National Association for Business Economics in Washington on Tuesday, the first deputy managing director of the IMF, David Lipton, said that it was “most disconcerting” that the rise in “risk aversion” was leading to a “sharp retrenchment in global capital and trade flows.”

He noted that emerging markets experienced a capital outflow of $200 billion last year compared to a net inflow of $125 billion in 2014. “Trade flows meanwhile are being dragged down by weak export and import growth in large emerging markets such as China, as well as Russia and Brazil, which have been under considerable stress,” he said.

Lipton made his remarks following the release of data showing that Chinese exports experienced their biggest contraction since 2009. It was another sign that, far from the world economy being on the road to “recovery,” global demand is continuing to fall.

Chinese exports in February were down by 25.4 percent in dollar terms from a year earlier, after falling by 11.2 percent in January, while imports declined by 13.8 percent, after dropping by 18.8 percent in January. While the figures may have been somewhat distorted because of issues related to the lunar New Year holiday, the combined January and February falls add up to a marked decline over the previous year, and no one is expecting the March data to show any improvement.

The Chinese results are the latest in a series of reports showing a decline in world trade, especially over the past two years, as a result of intensifying recessionary trends. In the years before the financial meltdown, world trade grew at about twice the rate of growth for the world economy. Since 2011, it has been in line with or even below that figure.

Last year, the value of global trade fell by 13.8 percent in dollar terms, the first contraction since 2009. Figures released last week for the US, the world’s largest economy, show the same trend as the second largest economy, China. US exports fell by 2.1 percent, while imports were down by 1.3 percent. The value of goods exports from the US was the lowest since February 2011.

Lipton concluded his speech by repeating the official mantra that “global economic recovery continues.” However, everything that came before showed the opposite to be the case.

“The IMF’s latest reading of the global economy shows once again a weakening baseline,” he said. “Moreover, risks have increased further, with volatile financial markets and low commodity prices creating fresh concerns about the health of the global economy.”

These concerns were being fed by the “perception that in many economies policymakers have run out of ammunition or lost the resolve to deploy it.” Repeating the call issued by the IMF prior to the recent G20 meeting in Shanghai, he said it was “imperative that advanced and developing countries dispel this dangerous notion by reviving the bold spirit of action and cooperation that characterized the early years of the recovery effort.”

He claimed the G20 meeting had recognized that the global economy remained too weak and had provided “some reassurance that countries stand ready to act if necessary.” In fact, such are the divisions within the G20 that proposals for cooperation did not even make it onto the agenda of the meeting. As a number of media reports noted, the gathering was characterised by the efforts of every country to blame every other country for the worsening situation.

Lipton pointed both to what he called “unresolved legacies” and the “emergence of new risks.” In many parts of Europe, government and private debt remained high, as well as banks’ non-performing loans. In the US, unfilled infrastructure needs “diminish economic prospects,” while in Japan, “deflation is putting the recovery at risk.”

On top of these “legacies,” new risks had developed. “The global economic slowdown is hurting bank balance sheets and financing conditions have tightened considerably,” he warned. “In emerging markets, excess capacity is being unwound through sharp declines in capital spending, while rising private debt, often denominated in foreign currency, is increasing risks to banks and sovereign [government] balance sheets.”

Lipton pointed out that the decline in stock market indices for this year implied a loss of market capitalization of more than $6 trillion, equivalent to about half the total losses incurred in the most acute phase of the 2008 financial crisis. While the decline on a global scale was 6 percent, some markets had experienced losses of 20 percent.

He warned that protracted low global demand coupled with financial turbulence created the risk of “negative feedback loops” between the real economy and markets, generating deflation and “secular stagnation”—a situation where the level of savings permanently outstrips the demand for investment funds.

In other words, low global demand, in large measure the result of low investment, leads to financial volatility, which in turn leads to reductions in investment, further lowering demand.

Lipton said commodity exporters had to recognise that commodity prices “may well be permanently lower.” This assessment has also been made by Goldman Sachs, one of the largest banks operating in commodity markets. In a series of reports issued this week, it said the recent spike in prices was likely to be temporary, and the 20-month decline had further to run before supply was cut and markets rebalanced.

Lipton repeated the now obligatory statement from the world’s major economic institutions that the lessons of history had to be learned and zero-sum policies, in which one country attempts to alleviate its position at the expense of others, had to be eschewed, because in the long run, they made all countries worse off.

One of the chief mechanisms of such zero-sum games is competitive currency devaluation. But such measures are being intensified, not reduced. While all central banks insist that their quantitative easing programs, through which they pump money into the financial system, together with negative interest rates are not aimed at lowering the value of their currency, this is their effect.

Following the decision by the Bank of Japan to introduce negative interest rates at the end of January, a further step in this direction is expected today when the European Central Bank governing council meets. It is widely forecast to extend its quantitative easing program and take interest rates further into negative territory, exacerbating the tensions in financial markets.