Syria, ISIS, and the US-UK Propaganda War

Eric Draitser

With the war in Syria raging in its fifth year, and the Islamic State wreaking havoc throughout the Middle East and North Africa, it’s clear that the entire region has been made into one large theater of conflict. But the battlefield must not be understood solely as a physical place located on a map; it is equally a social and cultural space where the forces of the US-UK-NATO Empire employ a variety of tactics to influence the course of events and create an outcome amenable to their agenda. And none to greater effect than propaganda.

Indeed, if the ongoing war in Syria, and the conflicts of the post-Arab Spring period generally, have taught us anything, it is the power of propaganda and public relations to shape narratives which in turn impact political events. Given the awesome power of information in the postmodern political landscape, it should come as no surprise that both the US and UK have become world leaders in government-sponsored propaganda masquerading as legitimate, grassroots political and social expression.

London, Washington, and the Power of Manipulation

The Guardian recently revealed how the UK Government’s Research, Information, and Communications Unit (RICU) is involved in surveillance, information dissemination, and promotion of individuals and groups as part of what it describes as an attempt at “attitudinal and behavioral change” among its Muslim youth population. This sort of counter-messaging is nothing new, and has been much discussed for years. However, the Guardian piece actually exposed the much deeper connections between RICU and various grassroots organizations, online campaigns, and social media penetration.

The article outlined the relationship between the UK Government’s RICU and a London-based communications company called Breakthrough Media Network which “has produced dozens of websites, leaflets, videos, films, Facebook pages, Twitter feeds and online radio content, with titles such as The Truth about Isis and Help for Syria.” Considering the nature of social media, and the manner in which information (or disinformation) is spread online, it should come as no surprise that a number of the viral videos, popular twitter feeds, and other materials that seemingly align with the anti-Assad line of London and Washington are, in fact, the direct products of a government-sponsored propaganda campaign.

In fact, as the authors of the story noted:

One Ricu initiative, which advertises itself as a campaign providing advice on how to raise funds for Syrian refugees, has had face-to-face conversations with thousands of students at university freshers’ fairs without any students realising they were engaging with a government programme. That campaign, called Help for Syria, has distributed leaflets to 760,000 homes without the recipients realising they were government communications.

It’s not hard to see what the British Government is trying to do with such efforts; they are an attempt to control the messaging of the war on Syria, and to redirect grassroots anti-war activism to channels deemed acceptable to the political establishment. Imagine for a moment the impact on an 18-year-old college freshman just stepping into the political arena, and immediately encountering seasoned veteran activists who influence his/her thinking on the nature of the war, who the good guys and bad guys are, and what should be done. Now multiply that by thousands and thousands of students. The impact of such efforts is profound.

But it is much more than simply interactions with prospective activists and the creation of propaganda materials; it is also about surveillance and social media penetration. According to the article, “One of Ricu’s primary tasks is to monitor online conversations among what it describes as vulnerable communities. After products are released, Ricu staff monitor ‘key forums’ for online conversations to ‘track shifting narratives,’ one of the documents [obtained by The Guardian] shows.” It is clear that such efforts are really about online penetration, especially via social media.

By monitoring and manipulating in this way, the British Government is able to influence, in a precise and highly targeted way, the narrative about the war on Syria, ISIS, and a host of issues relevant to both its domestic politics and the geopolitical and strategic interests of the British state. Herein lies the nexus between surveillance, propaganda, and politics.

But of course the UK is not alone in this effort, as the US has a similar program with its Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC) which describes its mission as being:

…[to] coordinate, orient, and inform government-wide foreign communications activities targeted against terrorism and violent extremism… CSCC is comprised of three interactive components. The integrated analysis component leverages the Intelligence Community and other substantive experts to ensure CSCC communicators benefit from the best information and analysis available. The plans and operations component draws on this input to devise effective ways to counter the terrorist narrative. The Digital Outreach Team actively and openly engages in Arabic, Urdu, Punjabi, and Somali.

Notice that the CSCC is, in effect, an intelligence hub acting to coordinate propaganda for CIA, DIA, DHS, and NSA, among others. This mission, of course, is shrouded in terminology like “integrated analysis” and “plans and operations” – terms used to designate the various components of the overall CSCC mission. Like RICU, the CSCC is focused on shaping narratives online under the pretext of counter-radicalization.

It should be noted too that CSCC becomes a propaganda clearinghouse of sorts not just for the US Government, but also for its key foreign allies (think Israel, Saudi Arabia, Britain), as well as perhaps favored NGOs like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, or Doctors Without Borders (MSF). As the New York Times noted:

[The CSCC will] harness all the existing attempts at countermessaging by much larger federal departments, including the Pentagon, Homeland Security and intelligence agencies. The center would also coordinate and amplify similar messaging by foreign allies and nongovernment agencies, as well as by prominent Muslim academics, community leaders and religious scholars who oppose the Islamic State.

But taking this information one step further, it calls into question yet again the veracity of much of the dominant narrative about Syria, Libya, ISIS, and related topics. With social media and “citizen journalism” having become so influential in how ordinary people think about these issues, one is yet again forced to consider the degree of manipulation of these phenomena.

Manufacturing Social Media Narratives

It is by now well documented the myriad ways in which Western governments have been investing heavily in tools for manipulating social media in order to shape narratives. In fact, the US CIA alone has invested millions in literally dozens of social media-related startups via its investment arm known as In-Q-Tel. The CIA is spending the tens of millions of dollars providing seed money to these companies in order to have the ability to do everything from data mining to real-time surveillance.

The truth is that we’ve known about the government’s desire to manipulate social media for years. Back in February 2011, just as the wars on Libya and Syria were beginning, an interesting story was published by PC World under the title Army of Fake Social Media Friends to Promote Propaganda which explained in very mundane language that:

…the U.S. government contracted HBGary Federal for the development of software which could create multiple fake social media profiles to manipulate and sway public opinion on controversial issues by promoting propaganda. It could also be used as surveillance to find public opinions with points of view the powers-that-be didn’t like. It could then potentially have their “fake” people run smear campaigns against those “real” people.

Close observers of the US-NATO war on Libya will recall just how many twitter accounts miraculously surfaced, with tens of thousands of followers each, to “report” on the “atrocities” carried out by Muammar Gaddafi’s armed forces, and call for a No Fly Zone and regime change. Certainly one is left to wonder now, as many of us did at the time, whether those accounts weren’t simply fakes created by either a Pentagon computer program, or by paid trolls.

A recent example of the sort of social media disinformation that has been (and will continue to be) employed in the war on Syria/ISIS came in December 2014 when a prominent “ISIS twitter propagandist” known as Shami Witness (@ShamiWitness) was exposed as a man named “Mehdi,” (later confirmed as Mehdi Biswas) described as “an advertising executive” based in Bangalore, India. @ShamiWitness had been cited as an authoritative source – a veritable “wealth of information” – about ISIS and Syria by corporate media outfits, as well as ostensibly “reliable and independent” bloggers such as the ubiquitous Eliot Higgins (aka Brown Moses) who cited Shami repeatedly. This former “expert” on ISIS has now been charged in India with crimes including “supporting a terrorist organisation, waging war against the State, unlawful activities, conspiracy, sedition and promoting enmity.”

In another example of online media manipulation, in early 2011, as the war on Syria was just beginning, a blogger then known only as the “Gay Girl in Damascus” rose to prominence as a key source of information and analysis about the situation in Syria.The Guardian, among other media outlets, lauded her as “an unlikely hero of revolt” who “is capturing the imagination of the Syrian opposition with a blog that has shot to prominence as the protest movement struggles in the face of a brutal government crackdown.” However, by June of 2011, the “brutally honest Gay Girl” was exposed as a hoax, a complete fabrication concocted by one Tom MacMaster. Naturally, the same outlets that had been touting the “Gay Girl” as a legitimate source of information on Syria immediately backtracked and disavowed the blog. However, the one-sided narrative of brutal and criminal repression of peace-loving activists in Syria stuck. While the source was discredited, the narrative remained entrenched.

And this last point is perhaps the key: online manipulation is designed to control narratives. While the war may be fought on the battlefield, it is equally fought for the hearts and minds of activists, news consumers, and ordinary citizens in the West. The UK and US both have extensive information war capabilities, and they’re not afraid to use them. And so, we should not be afraid to expose them.

The Leicester City Miracle: Playing Against the Statistics

Binoy Kampmark

“The biggest sporting shock of my lifetime, and it’s only my team.”

— Gary Lineker, May 8, 2016

Being bored witless by the spectacle of gouty monarchs doing battle is exactly what most modern football is about. (The battle, of course, is waged by physically fit titan bought by those with deep wallets.) One is left to admire the specifics of individuals who are never able to justify just how much their actual value is worth. Detached from reality and inflated by the market, the latter becomes the illusion by which talent is assessed, players auctioned, and success measured.

In that particular erroneous equation, one person’s celebrated Christiano Rinaldo is as good as any other Lionel Messi, both being the grand figures in a broader game of power, capital and statistics. They represent huge clubs that take centre stage and strangle the game as a grand corporate venture rather than an emotional team experience.

English football has been particularly susceptible to the “cash flow” injection, the flood of money and the purchase of foreign players and clubs by entrepreneurs. It has meant a concentration of capital at the top end clubs, each season characterised by the next round of extortionate prices.

This season saw something quite different. Leicester City Football Club, which avoided relegation last season by six points, placing 14^th, bucked rule and trend. On Monday, victory was assured after rivals Tottenham Hotspur drew with Chelsea 2-2. Leicester itself shot three into the Everton goal at the King power stadium. A stunning story, in any one’s book of footballing romances. Frequently, the odds of the bookies for the club winning the English Premier League trophy were invariably fantastic.

An entire article in the Daily Mirror was dedicated to the subject of improbable victory. Ladbrokes, it noted, were offering odds of 5000-to-1 that the club would win. The odds for Sir Alex Ferguson to win Strictly Come Dancing? A more credible 1000-to-1.

The absurd odds put bookmakers out of pocket by $15 million. This prompted Cork Gaines to call the odds a sham, a sensible remark given that “no team in a 20-team professional league should ever be 5,000-to-1 to win the championship, even in the typically top-heavy Premier League.”[1] (By way of contrast in another competition, the Cleveland Browns are currently 200-to-1 to triumph in the Super Bowl.) Serves them right. Their ploy to earn ruddy cash in such a measure dramatically sunk them.

Even former England footballer and Leicester-born Gary Lineker bought into the odds, suggesting that he would present Match of the Day “in just my undies” should the club win the trophy.

Riyad Mahrez, Jamie Vardy and N’Golo Kante became weekly utterances of awe. They captured the interest of characters for the media opportunists, be they the vile Piers Morgan (“No superstars. No money. No fancy stadium. No excuses. No fear.”), or the British Prime Minister, David Cameron.

Not all of Leicester City’s triumph was self-grown and self-directed. Its professionalism, working alongside Claudio Ranieri’s tactical acumen, has been unquestioned, but it has found itself battling failing foes. Chelsea suffered a decline; Arsenal proved erratic when it mattered most; while Manchester United remains a scarecrow. Evidently, money cannot always buy stability. Only the raw Tottenham seemed, right to the last match, to be a credible threat.

Leicester City, however, remains a beautiful aberration in sports. Michael Lewis’s Moneyball (2003) took a hard look at the story of Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland Athletics baseball club, and decided that such factors as instinct, luck and team bonding should be abandoned before the cool crispness of numbers. This led to an obsession with money and statistical gurus, along which a good deal of passion was shed.

In the UK, this saw efforts made by such number crunchers as Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski to do the same in Soccernomics (2009). They found an 89 percent correlation between the income of teams in the Premier League with their rankings between 1998 and 2007, a sort of money bag junta.

The authors also decided to do their own bit of statistical speculation, drawing the erroneous conclusions that experience, wealth and population would inevitably lead to domination. Forget Africa as a footballing power continent, they suggested. Poverty, smaller numbers, and less experience to mine there. Focus, instead, on the US, China and India, the future football super powers.

With such thinking dominating the reading of football and its success, Leicester City’s success is even richer. But it was not something those, from the bookies to the pundits, wanted to believe. They always felt that the Leicester story was more fairy tale than miracle.[2] And they got it wrong.

Notes. 

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com.au/leicester-city-odds-were-a-sham-2016-5?r=US&IR=T

[2] http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/soccer-fc-yahoo/leicester-city-still-enjoying-unexpected-success-224348609.html

We Overpopulated The Planet Because We Could

Lionel Anet

Life’s purpose is to multiply and increase its scope wherever it can. The population of individual species are maintained and controlled by a combination of mainly cooperative and competitive interactions. Competition is wasteful and destructive; therefore, it’s avoided and is an indirect motivation for the multitude of species and the wide range that life covers. It’s what has enable life to be always in a process of changing to a balanced state for an average best condition for itself. Life therefore ventures in all direction to find a foothold.

The appearance of an upright postured ape with hands that could then carry and do things necessitated and supported an expanding brain that could usefully use hands that gradually moved its thump to oppose its fingers. Brain size always follows the ability to manipulate otherwise it’s a waste of energy. That chance coincidence of an animal that had hands like apes and gradually stood upright to walk took a few million years to evolve into modern people. It gave us an unchallengeable advantage over other life, a feat never attained before. Nevertheless, hunter-gatherers in the main manage to control their reproduction to be in balance with their local resources.

So we kept on populating by spreading all over the planet, which coincided with global warming, that ended the ice age, however, people weren’t responsible for that warming. The change in the climate raised the oceans by a global sea level of more than 120 metres, drowning land, as the vast ice sheets of the last Ice Age melted back. This melt-back lasted from about 19,000 to about 6,000 years ago, meaning that the average rate of sea-level rise was roughly 1 metre per century. It’s hard to imagine the turmoil that loss of land created, it left very few options but to grow one’s food if they were on fertile land that had enough rain or other water source.

Agriculture led to private property and the domination of nature

Agriculture introduced the separation of people from other life, which gave us this exceptionalism ideology to justify the exploitation of other life forms and ourselves. But its private property that agriculture gave us that changed the way we think and interact within ourselves, other life, and the physical world. For the first time in human history food, artefact, and people could be stolen as they are now private property and depending on the resources of the area those stolen people became the slave of agricultural societies. It produced statuses, hierarchy, and organised thievery of land, produce, and people that we maintained to this day in a variety of forms.

The competition for property, which includes land, people, and anything, that’s regarded of value, is a strong motivator for an insatiable need for even more stuff and people. That growth in produce and people needed specialisation that’s slaves to do the hack work, tradesman, oversees, and so on the ladder of domination. Life in cities is the outcome, which we call civilisation.

The glory of civilisation

Civilisation’s purpose and therefore its makeup are to facilitate the fewest number of individuals to control the largest number of people to extract the maximum wealth from the riches resource on the vastest area of land. How that’s accomplished depend on the location, the level of technology achieved, and the history of that society, its ecology, and the climate that it functions in. The result since the use of fossil fuels is reaching catastrophic proportions.

There’s more than enough evidence of the impossible life our young ones will face due to the unwillingness, mainly from journalist, the highly educated, the economist, and warriors to face up to the falsehoods that established civilisation. Also the pretence that democratic governments represent its people when the information they get is to maintain a system that uses people to take far more from nature than it gives to nature until its completely drained. Worst still, it’s an economy that not only must grow its population and commerce infinitely, but it’s our master. The economy demands more people and trade.

The available information on the state of our planet is overwhelmingly depressing. Yet we don’t show the concern for today’s young’s future when they will be living on a much degraded planet because of our need to satisfy the system of economics and population growth. Billionaires and their lackeys have deceived themselves in thinking that they would be immune, as it would only be that multitude of losers that would perish. Even the most concerned atmospheric scientist can only think within the civilised capitalist system, it’s our culture we know no other, but it’s our culture of more, that is destroying our planet- the life of present children’s future.

How we overcame famines by sacrificing future life

England spearheaded the energy from fossil fuel, which led to overpopulate Europe that produced the mass migration. The steam engine, particularly James Watt’s engine took England off its complete dependence on solar energy from plants and those plants to feed animals including less fortunate people, also wind, and water power as they have a large component of solar energy. A little later with George Stevenson’s locomotive, which made travel a possibility for every one and it brought goods where it was needed. This should have equalised life and increased economic security, but under that civilised economic system it expanded the disparity in wealth and health. But worst still instead of giving a better and easier life the extra energy was used to increase the population and help the powerful to conquer the world.

The use of coal to heat water to produce a variation in the pressure of the steam to that of the atmosphere to do work was the major instigator in establishing the basic of science, which’s thermodynamics. The adherence to it, when convenient within a capitalist economy, has produced our modern world of science, which enabled that economy to grossly overpopulate nations.

We mustn’t take more from nature than it can sustain, but within that limit we can have a very large population with a small foot print from individuals or fewer people with a larger footprint. There is a limit to how large societies’ footprint can be and a limit to the fewest people we can have for a sustainable life. The obvious safest size population to have on the planet would be the one to ensure the best life our children can have in a sustainable manner. It could be a population of less than two billion people, which would give us all a very comfortable sustainable and safe life. That, sustainable way of life, can’t be attained in our civilised capitalist world no matter how much we revere civilisation, it on the other hand, is bringing life to the brink of our extinction. A system that’s geared to grow can’t reduce our population, or our consumption and we are wasting valuable time expecting any progress in that line. We don’t have any other choice but to abandon that socioeconomic system if our children are to survive.

To survive, we must unlock our social genetic makeup

To reduce to that sort of population and with a comparative tiny economy, we would need a very different socioeconomic way of life to be able to cope with such drastic measures and give us all a better life. The social life that our hunter-gatherers forebear had is a good model of socialness of the highest order, but only seen last century in a few harsh areas where competition was unknown. They lived in very social groups of cooperative people of a population that their environment could easily sustain safely. The security attained in those societies, especially for children, is impossible for civilised people to imagine. Children like adults would belong to the group, who are all responsible for each other, when able. That meant a child would have multiple mothers and siblings of older and younger age helping each other. Our biggest obstacle to that life is our mind set, not the numbers of people or our technical reliance.

We need a way of life that can give a satisfying live to everyone at the same time as we have a reduction in population and consumption per capita. Doing that would make life easier, as there would be more houses without building more, we would have more choice of where to live and grow our food in the best areas.

The joy of children is not diminished by sharing them, but any stress of nurturing children is reduced by sharing that responsibility. Also, all children would grow up in fair societies because they would all have the same multiple mothers and fathers and would experience the same age position as they grew up. Loneliness for young and old could then be a thing of the past. But this set up can’t function well in an alien milieu of capitalism; nevertheless, it’s our original way of life that our hunter-gatherers live for million years. Our gens are still oriented for social living it’s our way of life the contradiction is adopting private property as our master.

Economic competitiveness of wealth is very different to competitive tennis, as winning a game doesn’t place that player in a stronger position for the next game. Competition for wealth is extremely unfair and dishonest as winning the first round increases the winner’s position for the second go. It’s more like martial arts where a severe blow to one participant makes the contest unequal; it’s like the competitive economy. The game is to annihilate opponents. Striving for equal opportunity in a competitive based economy is divisive, unfair and dishonest. As chance and location can give an advantage that can easily grow and those who have gained that advantage can’t see the need to share fairly. So they will not relinquish their privilege to attain fairness in society. On the other hand, by increasing the awareness of societies wealthiest to the disaster they are also facing, and that, their only saving strategy is to unite people in a drastic reduction in output, consumption, and babies, which will enable everyone to survive. To strive for fairness because it’s the right way to live is utopian, but we must have fairness to survive, and that can unify us all, as survival is the primary instinct for all life. Starting that journey will also give us more than survival; it will start us on the way to have an assured and satisfying life.

With a reduction in the need for private property, we would also see a lessening importance of inheritances, a major unfairness of civilisation. Without the need to compete for position and stuff we can have an increasing cooperative society that involve participation instead of compulsion in a world where life is safe and secure - to venture- able to take challenges.

Facebook Manipulates Its Trending News Module

Lauren McCauley

Image: Esther Vargas/cc/flickr

Revelations that Facebook may have regularly "blacklisted" conservative stories from the platform's "trending" news section was met with outrage on Monday from journalists across the political spectrum who found the company's alleged abuse of power "disturbing" and potentially dangerous.

After speaking with several former "news curators," Gizmodo technology editor Michael Nunez reported Monday that the social media platform routinely censored stories "about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the highly-influential section, even though they were organically trending among the site’s users."

The contracted employees also said they were "instructed to artificially 'inject' selected stories into the trending news module, even if they weren’t popular enough to warrant inclusion—or in some cases weren’t trending at all," and were specifically asked to exclude "news about Facebook itself in the trending module."

"I believe it had a chilling effect on conservative news," said one former curator, who was kept anonymous but identified by Gizmodo as "politically conservative."

This practice of "imposing human editorial values," as Nunez put it, flies in the face of the company's claim that the section is simply displaying "topics that have recently become popular on Facebook."

Indeed, Nunez notes, Facebook's trending bar "constitutes some of the most powerful real estate on the internet and helps dictate what news Facebook’s users—167 million in the U.S. alone—are reading at any given moment."

Right-wing media was predictably incensed after the news broke. But for journalists who fall elsewhere on the political spectrum, the revelations were an alarm bell warning against the social media network's growing power—and desire—to influence.

"Aside from fueling right-wing persecution, this is a key reminder of dangers of Silicon Valley controlling content," Intercept journalist Glenn Greenwald wrote on Twitter.

Similarly, Guardian national security reporter Spencer Ackermann said, "You don't have to be a conservative to find this chilling & gross, as Facebook increasingly rules the news business."

San Jose Mercury News technology columnist Troy Wolverton agreed. "Whatever your political views, this is disturbing. Facebook needs to stop this—or be more transparent about it," Wolverton wrote.

Freedom of the Press Foundation executive director Trevor Timm raised similar concerns last month after an internal poll asked if Facebook should "help prevent President Trump in 2017."

At the time, Timm wrote, "the extraordinary ability that the social network has to manipulate millions of people with just a tweak to its algorithm is a serious cause for concern."

He continued:

To be sure, many corporations, including broadcasters and media organisations, have used their vast power to influence elections in all sorts of ways in the past: whether it’s through money, advertising, editorials, or simply the way they present the news. But at no time has one company held so much influence over a large swath of the population – 40% of all news traffic now originates from Facebook – while also having the ability to make changes invisibly.

...

But one organisation having the means to tilt elections one way or another a dangerous innovation. Once started, it would be hard to control. In this specific case, a majority of the public might approve of the results. But do we really want future elections around the world to be decided by the political persuasions of Mark Zuckerberg, or the faceless engineers that control what pops up in your news feed?

Responding to Monday's news, Timm added: "Those dismissing Facebook's suppression as 'oh, so they're just like other media orgs?' are really missing the point."

"The first half of the digital news revolution that began in the mid-1990s was defined by disaggregation," Dan Kennedy, an associate professor of journalism at Northeastern University, wrote recently.

"The second half has been defined by re-aggregation at the hands of Facebook. And that trend is only accelerating," he continued. "Mark Zuckerberg is not just the unimaginably wealthy founder and chief executive of the world’s largest social network. He also exercises enormous control [...] over how we receive the information we need to govern ourselves in a democratic society. That is an unsettling reality, to say the least."

For its part, Facebook sidestepped the allegations, telling reporters that they have "rigorous guidelines" that "do not permit the suppression of political perspectives. Nor do they permit the prioritization of one viewpoint over another or one news outlet over another."

West Asia, US, and Obama’s Statesman-like Legacy

Ranjit Gupta

The US has been the main architect and central pole of the West Asian security landscape since World War II. It has sought to maintain security through a web of bilateral and regional military alliances and militaristic solutions to political problems and issues – including direct military interventions of its own. The US’ unconditional patronage and protection of authoritarian Arab regimes has acted as a major disincentive to domestic economic, political or social reform. This pervasive American dominance and the abject subservience of the rulers of Arab countries to the West has been a major factor in the growing public anger and frustrations among the Arabs at large.

The standout hallmarks of the US’ past policies in West Asia – the unconditional patronage of and support to Israel; the fallout of the exceedingly shortsighted creation of the modern jihad in Afghanistan; the demonisation and sanctioning of Iran for decades; the utterly and completely unjustified invasion of Iraq; and the even more foolish wholesale disbanding of the former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s army and government, have been major contributors to the rise of phenomena such as al Qaeda and the Islamic State in addition to the hugely destructive and rampaging spread of militant Islamist extremism throughout the Arab world.

The surge of hope and optimism that swept through the Arab world in the winter of 2010-11 – which swiftly felled two longstanding dictators – was subsequently brutally suppressed by autocratic rulers and compounded by self-serving foreign intervention, plunging the Arab world into the worst ever period in its long blood-soaked history.

US President Barack Obama had vociferously opposed the war in Iraq and sought election on a platform of withdrawing US troops from West Asia and Muslim countries. Despite intense domestic criticism and excoriation from allies – both European and Arab, particularly trenchantly from Saudi Arabia – and from all prominent figures within his own administration, to his great credit, Obama has had both: the intellectual perspicacity to recognise the hugely negative consequences of past US policies, as well as the political courage to refuse to get militarily involved in new military interventions in West Asia, even going to the extent of effectively reneging on a red line he himself had laid down.

In that context, Obama said “I’m very proud of this moment,” Jeffrey Goldberg quotes, in his April 2016 article in The Atlantic, ‘The Obama Doctrine’ – a must read on Obama’s West Asia policy. “The overwhelming weight of conventional wisdom and the machinery of our national-security apparatus had gone fairly far. The perception was that my credibility was at stake, that America’s credibility was at stake. And so for me to press the pause button at that moment, I knew, would cost me politically. And the fact that I was able to pull back from the immediate pressures and think through in my own mind what was in America’s interest, not only with respect to Syria but also with respect to our democracy, was as tough a decision as I’ve made—and I believe ultimately it was the right decision to make....any thoughtful president would hesitate about making a renewed commitment in the exact same region of the world with some of the exact same dynamics and the same probability of an unsatisfactory outcome…..What I think is not smart is the idea that every time there is a problem, we send in our military to impose order. We just can’t do that,” Obama added.

His prescription for regional security is clear: “[The Saudis] need to “share” the Middle East with their Iranian foes … and institute some sort of cold peace.” Obama believes that leaders in West Asia are “failing to provide prosperity and opportunity for their people” and that they need to “do more to eliminate the threat of violent fundamentalism.” Obama has had doubts regarding the value of the Washington-Riyadh alliance from before he became president. April 2016 saw his fourth visit to Riyadh, but the deep chasm that has developed between the two countries remained – there was no strategic congruence about Syria or Iran.

Had the US intervened in Syria, the nuclear negotiations with Iran would not have taken place. Obama reaching out to Iran and the nuclear deal are testaments of a particularly statesman-like and visionary approach that he has also exhibited vis-à-vis Myanmar and Cuba. Historians will judge him positively for his transforming US policy approaches towards and in West Asia.

Washington refraining from military interventions in West Asia is the first absolutely indispensable step that is necessary for new approaches to conflict resolution in that region. The most immediate consequence has been that Riyadh’s traditional calibrated, cautious, circumspect foreign policy has been jettisoned and replaced by completely uncharacteristic reckless assertiveness in Syria and particularly, in Yemen. Despite Turkey’s even more aggressive stance against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, they cannot militarily defeat and overthrow him; and if Assad has to go, it will only be via a negotiated settlement with Russia and Iran being on board.

Saudi Arabia cannot militarily trump Iranian influence and power in West Asia even in tandem with other Sunni powers such as Turkey and Egypt; and although bloodletting is likely to continue for some more time, ultimately, Riyadh will have to talk and negotiate amodus vivendi with Tehran, even if it is likely to take time and increasingly rising costs for this realisation to finally sink in.

History will give Obama great credit for forcing this to happen, ultimately.

North Korea’s 7th Party Congress: Context and Content

Sandip Kumar Mishra

After a long gap, North Korea is holding the 7th Workers’ Party Congress from 6 May. There are more than a hundred journalists from various countries who have been invited to report the event - but there is not much reporting about the actual context and reasons for the Party Congress. The Congress, which was supposed to happen every five years, has earlier been quite irregular after the third edition. The last three Party Congresses were held in 1961, 1970 and 1980 after an interval of ten years each. However, the current one is happening after a gap of 36 years.

The first concern is the reason for such a long gap. Generally, it is attributed to the decline in the North Korean economy, increasing isolation after the demise of socialist allies, the death of Kim Il-sung, natural calamities of the mid-1990s, political instability of the Kim Jong-il regime and so on. The consensus is that since North Korea was facing one crisis after another, the Workers’ Party Congress could not be held. The explanation is not satisfactory as there were many other state and party activities that continued during the period. However, it needs to be underlined among all other events, the Party Congress witnesses the largest participation and any mishap means a huge embarrassment for the ruling regime. Furthermore, in the Party Congress, the future policy orientation and leadership are decided. Since the North Korean leadership has not been very clear about their future orientation in these years, the leadership has normally avoided any such gathering. Also, Kim Jong-il’s political weakness warranted that he should bring together leaders in relatively smaller gatherings than in the Party Congress.

The next important issue is, why has North Korea decided to hold the Party Congress now when the situation is, if not worse, at least similar? Is there any shift in North Korea’s path, which might be announced in the Party Congress? These questions are not easy to answer since there is limited information about North Korea. However, it would be pertinent to flag a few points and predictions, which might be helpful in understanding the Party Congress.

First, Kim Jong-un wants to show his confidence and stability to both domestic as well as international audiences by having the Party Congress. Even if no big outcomes are announced, the very occurrence of the Congress means that the leadership has a strong grip on the country. By having a Congress, Kim Jong-un wants to project ‘normalcy’ in North Korea.

Second, there is optimism that North Korea through the Party Congress wants to announce some kind of a roadmap for economic reforms. Kim Jong-un has modified his father’s ‘military-first’ policy to byungjin policy, which means emphasis on both military and economy. North Korea has had two rounds of nuclear and several missile tests in the Kim Jong-un era and it is time to venture into the difficult but dire issue of economic reforms.

Third, the pessimist may argue that since the Party Congress was not held for many years and North Korea had no option but to organise it now. Thus, expecting something dramatic or even important to emerge from the Party Congress would be over-ambitious. Generally, even the smallest moves by North Korea are over-analysed and debated but ultimately they do not result in any significant changes in North Korea.

Fourth, North Korea is going through its worse phase of international sanctions because of its nuclear and missile tests and the regime wants to convey that these sanctions have no effect and North Korea’s nuclear and missile programmes are non-negotiable.

Fifth, it is also said that when North Korea announced last year that it would have its Party Congress in May 2016, there were possibilities that North Korea-China relations would improve, and a breakthrough in the inter-Korea relations was also imminent. During those months, North Korea was trying to reach out to as many countries as possible and the North Korean Prime Minister and Foreign Minister visited more than a dozen countries including India to diversify Pyongyang’s relations with the outside world. At that point, North Korea expected that after these important achievements along with its progress in nuclear and missile programmes, it could have a Party Congress that would consolidate regime. Even though all these calculations have gone wrong, North Korea has no option but to have the Party Congress as any withdrawal would show weakness.

Having enumerated these explanations for the timing and context of the 7th Workers’ Party Congress, it is difficult to say which one is more appropriate. However, the Party Congress must be seen at least as a search for future stability and confidence for the Kim Jong-un regime. The new leadership is trying to move beyond the Kim Jong-il era and establish an image of Jong-un similar to Kim Il-sung period, when the leader was considered to be supreme, confident and overt. In the past five years, Kim Jong-un has tried to achieve this objective by being bold in his moves, including punishing and rewarding military and political elite and also by incessant and aggressive nuclear and missile tests. It is hard to say whether he has been successful until now, but it would not be inappropriate to see the 7th Workers’ party Congress in the light of this objective.

Thousands of jobs cut in Australia as slump deepens

Terry Cook

One of the central issues in the 2016 Australian federal elections on July 2 is the right to a secure, full-time job. Amid a gathering world recession and slowing global demand, major companies are continuing to restructure their Australian operations, destroying thousands of jobs, cutting production and closing facilities. The implosion of the mining boom is being compounded by increasing numbers of workers throughout the country being pushed into insecure, part-time employment.

This reality finds no expression in the political and media establishment, with the Liberal-National government claiming that last week’s federal budget was all about “jobs and growth” and the Labor Party promising to generate “full employment.” Both are peddling far-fetched Treasury estimates that the Australian economy, now mired in deflation, will suddenly grow by at least 3 percent every year for the next five years.

According to the official figures published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for March dropped 0.1 percentage points to 5.7 percent. But that was primarily due to the growth of part-time work at the expense of full-time jobs.

Part-time employment increased by 34,900, while full-time employment declined by 9,000. As a consequence, working hours fell. Seasonally adjusted monthly hours worked in all jobs decreased 17.5 million hours (1.1 percent) to 1,632.3 million hours.

Moreover, the ABS data counts anyone who has worked for just one hour a week as employed. An alternative survey by Roy Morgan Research showed unemployment rose from 10.0 percent to 11.0 percent in March, with another 7.8 percent of the workforce under-employed, that is, seeking more work. By this measure, more than 2.4 million workers were unemployed or under-employed.

Major companies that have gone into administration this year include steel and iron ore company Arrium in South Australia, Queensland Nickel and electronics retailer Dick Smith. Between them, they employed more than 11,000 people.

Layoffs are continuing in the mining and resources sector as commodity prices remain at low levels because of reduced global demand, especially in China, Australia’s biggest export market.

After recovering slightly in recent months, the iron ore price dropped 4.1 percent last week to $US62.50. The Australian reported that “several commentators have earlier warned that iron ore’s rebound over the first months of the year is unsustainable, tipping the price to fall into the $US40s over the rest of 2016.”

On April 15, Linc Energy, which has oil, gas, shale and coal operations, went into administration. It had already shed 200 jobs over the past six months, amounting to a third of its regular workforce and three-quarters of its contract workers.

Also last month, Royal Dutch Shell announced cut jobs across its Australian operations, tipped to be around 250 from a 3,400-strong workforce. The cuts are part of a global restructure driven partly by falling gas and oil prices that will see the company shed 10,000 jobs worldwide. Oil prices, to which gas prices are aligned, have halved since last June.

British-based mining giant Rio Tinto announced it will eliminate 40 positions at its Weipa bauxite operation in Queensland. The company, which employs 1,400 staff and contractors at Weipa, cited falling aluminium prices and increasing competition.

In March, Rio confirmed it would shed around 170 jobs at its Western Australian Pilbara iron ore operations. Another 300 positions are expected to be cut at the company’s Perth office. Last year Rio, axed 800 jobs in the Pilbara region as it reduced its global workforce by more than 8 percent to 54,938.

These cuts are having a terrible impact on mining towns, where big companies have made super-profits for years by exploiting the labour of workers, only to abandon them as the crash has unfolded.

Pilbara Shire Council president Kerry White told the media that the towns of Tom Price and Paraburdoo have been “devastated” by the latest downsizing. “The roll-on effect is enormous, for businesses and for people’s well-being,” she said. “Kids lose their friends, families are just packed up and gone within a month, empty houses everywhere. What can they do? Nothing. There’s no other employment opportunities in these towns because they’re purely mining.”

According to a recent analysis of company announcements, 2,300 mining industry jobs had been axed across the country this year by the beginning of March.

At the end of February, base metal and coal mining firm South32, another spin-off from BHP Billiton like Arrium, announced it would axe 770 jobs nationally after posting a half year statutory loss of $US1.7 billion when impairments were taken into account.

Other job cuts in the mining and associated industrial sectors in March and April include:

BHP Billiton’s Mount Arthur coal mine near in the Muswellbrook in the New South Wales (NSW) Hunter Valley laid off 300 workers, reducing the mine’s workforce to 1,400.

Perilya announced it will cut 100 jobs from its 460-strong workforce at its Broken Hill Southern Operations silver, lead and zinc mine in far western NSW, along with 40 contractors’ positions.

Southern Operations, along with the CBH Resources Endeavour mine in Cobar, is the main source of employment for Broken Hill. Earlier this year, CBH announced it would shed 116 jobs at Endeavour.

Consolidated Mining and Civil (CMC), which contracts to Perilya, laid-off 22 workers in March.

Perth-based Engineering group RCR Tomlinson announced in April it will wrap up its engineering group’s coal services businesses, destroying 270 jobs across Australia and New Zealand in its fabrication division.

Many jobs have gone in associated industries, often without being reported. Peter Dyball of Pit Crew Management Consulting Services, noted: “[T]here are engineers and other professionals, typically in capital cities, out of work. The number of high calibre, experienced people that are out of work at the moment is probably the most substantial number I have seen in 30 years in the industry.”

Job cuts in other areas continue to mount.

Retailer Target announced in April it will close its headquarters in Geelong, near Melbourne, destroying 900 jobs in the area. This is a further blow to Geelong, following Alcoa’s closure of its aluminium smelter last August at the cost of 500 jobs. Ford will shed the remaining 350 jobs there by October when it closes its Geelong manufacturing plant.

Communications provider Optus last month confirmed it would slash 500 jobs. As of last December, the company employed 9,235 people.

State-owned Western Power in Western Australia announced it will axe 215 jobs from its network planning and project management staff, on top of 153 jobs destroyed through attrition.

White goods manufacturer Electrolux closed its factory in the NSW regional city of Orange, axing the remaining 300 jobs and ending more than 70 years of production. At its peak in the 1970s, the plant employed some 2,000 people.

Employers are also exploiting the job crisis to lower wages and conditions. Office supplies giant Staples last month sacked 45 contract delivery drivers via SMS after they demanded increases in their pay rates, which are as low as $8 an hour.

Venezuela on the knife’s edge as economy collapses

Neil Hardt

The free fall of the Venezuelan economy has produced an explosive situation with widespread repercussions for the Latin American region.

The Venezuelan bolivar has lost 98 percent of its value versus the US dollar since 2013, with inflation rising to roughly 600 percent by the end of 2015. Inflation is expected to double to above 1000 percent in 2016, with the IMF expecting growth to shrink by 10 percent this year after last year’s fall of 8 percent.

Poverty has skyrocketed since 2013, increasing from roughly 35 percent to roughly 80 percent today. Fifty-one percent of the population is in extreme poverty, up from less than 10 percent in 2012. Food riots, malnutrition, and disease are becoming more common due to an absence of basic consumer goods.

According to a recent study from the University of Simon Bolivar, only 19 percent of the population had enough to meet their basic needs. In 2015, only 52 percent of the population could afford to buy vegetables, 46 percent could buy sugar, and 32 percent could buy cheese and coffee. Nearly 20 percent of Venezuelans cannot even afford to buy rice.

The country’s infrastructure is collapsing. A shortage of electricity led the government to announce forced electricity blackouts beginning in April, and state-run industries are now closed five days a week in an effort to save energy. Last week, Venezuela’s largest beer producer, Empresas Polar, was forced to shut down production due to a lack of supplies.

The worsening economic situation has produced widespread opposition to the “Chavista” government of the Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), which has been in power since Hugo Chavez’s first term as president began in 1999.

The PSUV government’s shortsighted and unplanned economic model was based on using high oil prices to enrich a layer of what is known as the “boliburguesia” [Bolivarian bourgeoisie] while buying political stability through moderate increases in social spending. When this nationalist program buckled under the impact of the international collapse in oil and commodity prices, the PSUV cut social spending and relied increasingly on state violence against strikes and protests.

Last week, for example, President Nicolas Maduro deployed the military to the streets of Maracaibo along the Northwest coast to quell riots in which dozens of shop windows were smashed and blockades set up. In a March poll, Maduro enjoyed the support of only 26.8 percent of the population—a figure that has likely fallen in the last two months.

However, only 57 percent of those polled said they would vote to have Maduro removed, an indication that hostility to Maduro does not equate to support for the right-wing opposition. The CIA supported Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD) is widely disliked by Venezuelan workers, who recall the role of leading opposition figures in murdering hundreds of workers and youth during the 1989 Caracazo protests, as well as for their support for the US-backed coup attempt of April 2002 in which dozens of demonstrators were killed.

The opposition recently launched its official campaign to remove Maduro from office. On May 2, they delivered almost 2 million signatures to the National Election Institute (INE), well above the 200,000 required, in a petition to call for a recall referendum against Maduro. Once the petition is accepted, the opposition would be required to collect 4 million signatures to force a referendum. If the referendum is held and if Maduro is recalled before the date at which Maduro completes the fourth year of his six-year term, new elections will be held. If a referendum is held and Maduro is recalled after the cut-off date, Maduro’s vice-president Aristobulo Isturiz would take power until the 2019 elections.

Setting the stage for a constitutional crisis similar to that unfolding in neighboring Brazil, this is further complicated by the fact that the commencement of Maduro’s term in 2013 is disputed. While Maduro began serving as acting president in January due to Chavez’s poor health, his official term arguably began after the March elections.

The opposition has denounced the Chavez government’s INE as filled with government sympathizers and has called for massive demonstrations if the recall process is halted or prolonged by the INE. In reply, Maduro stated he would call for large counter-protests to what the government describes as a “coup.”

Meanwhile, the Maduro government has significantly depleted currency and gold reserves and has prioritized paying off debt at the expense of consumer goods importation, which has produced scarcities for millions of Venezuelan workers.

There are increasing concerns that Venezuela will be unable to meet bond payments, triggering a domino effect with repercussions across Latin America and the world.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies published an article on May 2 titled “Venezuela’s impending collapse,” in which the US government-linked think tank noted that Venezuela must meet $10.5 billion in debt servicing costs this year. The article notes that the government will have to squeeze imports in order to service its debt, which “raises the question of whether the government could endure further shortages in basic supplies. Given the choice between default and political suicide, the Maduro government would likely choose default.”

In response to the crisis, the United States is engaged in operations aimed at removing Maduro without triggering a social explosion. Speaking in April, Secretary of State John Kerry told the Miami Herald: “We are prepared to help Venezuela get back on its feet economically. But we’ve got to have an executive authority in Venezuela which is ready to respect the people and respect the rule of law.”

Such “help” from the United States would have disastrous implications for Venezuelan workers and youth. After over a century of imperialist subjugation, South America is subject to a renewed pivot by the US to the region, aimed at eliminating Chinese influence and providing new exploitative opportunities for Wall Street and US corporations. Nothing, not the least military invasion, is off the table for US imperialism in its attempts at world domination.

The Berlin Senate’s inhuman deportation policy

Carola Kleinert

The solidarity of broad social layers with the refugees in Berlin remains considerable but the policy of the Berlin Senate of SPD and CDU is diametrically opposed to this sentiment. Refugees are being crammed into inhumane camps, bullied and brutally deported.

The latter is now to be massively expanded. In early April, the Berlin interior senator (state minister) Frank Henkel (CDU, Christian Democratic Union), welcomed the call by Chancellery Minister Peter Altmeier (CDU) to double the forced deportations of refugees and the number of those “returning voluntarily.”

Henkel believes this demand is “absolutely realistic,” and stressed, “Berlin is working consistently on increasing the number of deportations.” He identified himself completely with the demand from the Chancellery, saying, “This is consistent with our ambitions and, given the situation, is also called for.”

The interior minister, who was elected in April as the CDU’s lead candidate in Berlin for the House of Representatives (State Assembly) elections in September, has for months been agitating aggressively against refugees. He has repeatedly stressed that Berlin has to “significantly reduce” the number of refugees.

In October last year, Henkel had already announced an “increase in the number of deportations,” and boasted that Berlin was at the top of the table compared to other federal states. The state government would increasingly encourage “voluntary return.” However, “If this did not happen voluntarily, then in the end it must come down to deportation,” Henkel told the dpa news agency.

According to official figures, 512 people have been deported in the first quarter of 2016. If this trend continues, it will be more than double the 806 deported in the previous year. In 2014, 602 were deported.

Henkel is using his attacks on the weakest of the weak to erect a veritable police state in Berlin aimed essentially against all workers. He allows the deportation of families that have lived in Germany for many years.

Without prior warning, the police turn up in the middle of the night or early morning outside the rooms of desperate people, who are given only a short time to get their children out of bed and gather their belongings.

This is intended to prevent refugees avoiding deportation. Also, it ensures they cannot access legal protections and support, nor lodge an appeal against their deportation.

The actions of the Berlin Senate have repeatedly led to protests by the population. School classes, teachers, neighbourhood and support organizations have tried to obtain stays of deportation for those classmates and families torn from their midst.

To avoid attracting attention and to enable the deportations to proceed as smoothly as possible, the police follow a so-called “sensitization strategy.” Accordingly, night deportations should be avoided whenever possible in order not to disturb people’s sleep! In addition, children should, if possible, not be taken out of school. However, in practice this strategy is not worth the paper on which it is written.

Currently, more than 10,000 people are at risk of deportation. These are mostly people from the Balkans whose asylum applications have been rejected in the past year and a half. The new package of asylum laws, combined with the intensification of the deportation law adopted in record time, means refugees live in constant fear of the police knocking on their door.

A recent example is the deportation of the Gambian Surakata C., who had just turned 18. He had arrived in Berlin, aged 16, and been housed in a youth facility supported by social workers. On March 16, in the middle of the night, he was seized from the hostel and deported directly to Gambia.

According to the Berlin Refugee Council, his roommates said the police suddenly appeared at the apartment and took Surakata away. He had been granted temporary permission to remain, had never had any trouble with the police and was studying German and taking other qualifications.

In mid-January 2016, the Berlin police deported eight-year-old Denica, who suffers from a heart condition, and her father back to Bosnia. For the eight-year-old, however, her father is more like a stranger because he spent several years in prison in Bosnia because of racist persecution. The desperate mother and Denica’s brother, who also has a heart condition, had received temporary permission to stay because of the severity of his condition, but then decided to travel back to Bosnia “voluntarily.” It is uncertain whether the children, or the father who had been tortured in prison, would receive proper medical treatment back in Bosnia.

At the end of March, the Berliner Zeitung publicised the case of single mother Ariane Demiri and her three children, aged 16, 14 and 6, from Albania. In autumn 2015 they had received a letter rejecting their asylum application demanding that they emigrate “voluntarily” by April 7, 2016. Mrs. Demiri had come to Germany in the summer of 2015 because there was “no hope of a decent education in Albania” for her children, which they could receive in Germany.

Classmates of the middle son, Glendis (14), at the Lichtenberger Manfred-von-Ardenne School, along with their teacher, launched a struggle against the imminent deportation of the family. But as part of the asylum package II laws, Albania has been classified by the German government as a safe third county, along with Montenegro and Kosovo. The danger is great that the family will be forcibly removed “quietly.”

“Glendis was quick to learn German,” said his teacher. “He is popular in class and was immediately integrated.” An Internet petition set up by the teacher, directed at Berlin’s immigration authorities, received 48,919 signatures within a short time.

Various aid agencies warn that the number of those “legally obliged to leave” could quadruple this year due to the restrictive policy of the Senate rejecting asylum applications.

The brutal deportations continue the policies of the SPD and Left Party-led state executive, which governed Berlin from 2001 to 2011. Even then, the capital was infamous for its for harsh deportation policy.

The current verbal opposition of the Greens and the Left Party in the state assembly is therefore hypocritical because, wherever they are in government, the same parties organise the detention and deportation of refugees.

Volkswagen board pockets €63 million in 2015

Dietmar Henning

Despite the company losing billions, and the exhaust emissions scandal, the members of the Volkswagen Executive Board have pocketed more money in 2015 than in the previous year. The nine members of the board received €63.2 million collectively, up from the €54 million they were paid in 2014.

The Executive Board’s remuneration is signed off by the Supervisory Board, in which representatives of the Works Council, the IG Metall union and the Social Democratic Party-led state government have a majority.

Their pay has risen even though the board members are responsible for the exhaust emissions scandal, which threatens thousand of jobs, and despite VW finishing the year with losses of €1.6 billion. The losses are the result of a provision of €16 billion for costs arising from the exhaust emission scandal. In 2014, the most successful year for the company, VW made a record profit of €12.7 billion.

The exorbitant salaries of the board members have clearly risen without regard to the negative impact of their actions, although the variable element of their remuneration is supposedly linked to the profitability of the company.

The long-standing VW boss Martin Winterkorn, who was forced to resign in September 2015 as a result of the manipulation of exhaust emissions results, received €7.3 million for his last nine months in office. Moreover, he will receive pension allocations worth nearly €30 million. For many years, Winterkorn was German’s top-earning manager.

His successor Matthias Müller received around €4.2 million. Before becoming VW CEO, he had headed the company’s Porsche division for five years.

The new Volkswagen brand boss Herbert Diess received €7.1 million for just half a year’s work (he moved to VW from BMW in July 2015). This includes a “transfer premium” of €5 million.

Doing even better was Andreas Renschler, who moved from Daimler to VW in February 2015, where he is now responsible for heavy goods vehicles. He received a golden hello of €11.5 million, giving him an annual income of more than €14.9 million. Renschler is thus the best-paid board member in the VW group.

The other board members received €3-5 million: Purchasing chief Francisco Garcia Sanz (€3.5 million), Jochen Heizmann, head of the company’s China business (€3.5 million) and Audio boss Rupert Stadler (€4.1 million).

The lowest earner was Frank Winter, the chief financial officer. He received “only” €900,000. But this was for just three months work, as he replaced Hans Dieter Pötsch in October 2015, who was paid €2.9 million for 2015.

Pötsch moved across to take on the post of Supervisory Board chairman, which is paid €1.5 million. He also received a sweetener to move of almost €20 million.

Since the VW workforce face sackings and pay cuts as a result of the emissions scandal, the VW Works Council chairman Bernd Osterloh and SPD state Premier Stefan Weil, who represents Lower Saxony on the Supervisory Board, called in the media for a cut in the Executive Board’s bonus payments.

This was just a deceit. In the end, the Supervisory Board agreed to put aside 30 percent of the bonuses, to be paid later. A cut is not foreseen. It involves just €5.4 million euros, or around 8.5 percent of the remuneration of the Executive Board. Since the value of the bonuses that were set aside will be recalculated in 2019 on the basis of the share value at that point, they might walk away with even more. According to calculations by the Tagesschau, VW CEO Müller could expect an additional payment of up to €8.6 million.

The Supervisory Board was even more generous when it came to the pension allocations of former Executive Board members. The VW Group reserved €243 million at the end of 2015 for this purpose.

Among the main beneficiaries here, with €23.7 million, is the former IG Metall functionary Horst Neumann. He has used the union as a springboard to gain a rise in income, the dimensions of which even politicians and SME entrepreneurs can only dream. Since 1994, he worked as human resources director, a post usually granted to union officials—first at Rasselstein GmbH, a subsidiary of the ThyssenKrupp Group, then at ThyssenKrupp Elevator AG, then at Audi and from 2005 until his retirement last year at VW.

VW CEO Müller justified this enrichment of the top management at the press conference announcing the company’s annual results, saying, “The Executive Board remuneration had been agreed by the Supervisory Board.”

On the Supervisory Board, the union, Works Council and SPD control 12 of the 20 votes. In the Supervisory Board Presidium, which prepares all the company’s important decisions, sit six men: Supervisory Board chair Pötsch, Wolfgang Porsche, as spokesman for the owners’ family, Lower Saxony’s state Premier Weil (SPD), IG Metall leader Jörg Hofmann, Works Council leader Osterloh and his deputy Stephan Wolf.

While the Works Council, IG Metall and SPD support the Executive Board’s orgy of enrichment, they are simultaneously negotiating massive attacks on the workforce. Accordingly, productivity in the core VW brand will generally increase by 10 percent. In administration, 3,000 jobs, almost one in 10, are to go. Over 1,000 contract workers have already been sacked, and others will follow. Even the closure of two sites, one of them in Lower Saxony, is under discussion, possibly the engine plant in Salzgitter.

Apparently, they are considering selling off parts of the business: “The need for finances to cover the risks can lead to disposing of parts of the business dependent on the circumstances.”

For this reason, the current contract negotiations are stalled at VW, which has a company-wide contract covering its 12,000 employees in Germany, and also in the electronics and metal-working industries, where the contract covers the other large auto companies.

For both contracts, the IG Metall is calling for a rise of 5 percent. The employers association has offered 2.1 percent more pay in a contract with a two-year duration. At VW, the management made no further offer at the second round of negotiations last week.

IG Metall’s chief negotiator, Hartmut Meine, is the union’s district chief in Lower Saxony and Saxony Anhalt. The social democrat sat on the Supervisory Board for the union up to last November.

Meine warned the company that its “estimation of the mood of the people in the six Volkswagen plants was completely wrong. There are debates there: Why haven’t we had any bonus and why does the management get a bonus? And if no offer is forthcoming in the negotiations, that will make people really angry.”

Works Council leader Osterloh is currently preparing to negotiate with management regarding a “pact for the future.” Osterloh will negotiate with Personnel Director Karlheinz Blessing over jobs cuts, plant closures and a worsening of working conditions. IG Metall man Blessing welcomed the “negotiation stance” put forward by Osterloh at the beginning of April.