Indian rail accident kills more than 120

Arun Kumar

At least 127 people were killed and more than 200 injured early Sunday morning when 14 carriages from the Patna-Indore Express train suddenly derailed at Pukhrayan, about 100 kilometres from Kanpur in northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. The train was carrying over 500 passengers.

The disaster highlights the poor safety conditions and lack of maintenance in India’s massive railway network. The death toll—the highest from an Indian rail accident in the past six years—is expected to increase as rescue workers gain full access to two of the derailed carriages. “Many more passengers are still trapped,” Anil Saxena, a senior railway official in New Delhi, told Reuters yesterday.

Yaqoob Ahmed, one of those admitted to Kanpur’s UHM hospital, told the Hindustan Times: “I woke up suddenly, at around 3:10 a.m. and felt a tremor. The train came to a screeching halt. All of a sudden, I was crushed under a crowd of people… everyone was screaming for help.”

Faizal Khan was travelling with his wife and two children, all of whom survived the accident. He said: “Suddenly I could feel the carriage overturning. I immediately held onto the metal rod near the bathroom door.” Rajdeep Tanwar, another survivor said: “I can see bodies lying near the tracks, everyone is in a state of shock. There is no water or food for us.”

While it is not yet known what triggered the disaster, some reports suggest it was caused by a fracture in the railway line. Suresh Prabhu, India’s railway minister, tweeted on Sunday that the “strictest possible action will be taken against those who could be responsible for the accident.” In reality, Indian authorities, as they have done before, will attempt to find scapegoats in order to divert attention from their own negligence toward basic safety standards.

Several senior officials from the Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janatha Party (BJP)-led government have suggested that the disaster was the result of a “conspiracy.”

Murli Manohar Joshi, a senior party leader and the MP for Kanpur, claimed the accident was part of an attempt to defame the railways and the government.

Railway Minister Prabhu said the government would launch an immediate investigation into the derailment. Numerous official inquiries have been held following similar train disasters. None has produced any serious improvements in basic railway safety, and the death toll continues to rise. Reports calling for maintenance improvements and rigorous safety checks and procedures have been ignored by successive Indian governments.

In an attempt to contain popular anger over Sunday’s disaster, senior Indian government officials and the relevant state administrations have feigned concern, shedding crocodile tears and announcing compensation payments for the victims. Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted that he was “anguished beyond words” on the loss of lives.

The Modi government will pay just 200,000 rupees ($US3,225) to the relatives of those killed, along with 200,000 rupees from the Madhya Pradesh state government and 500,000 rupees from the Uttar Pradesh state government. The three governments agreed to pay 50,000 rupees to each of those seriously injured and 25,000 rupees for those with minor injuries.

Congress Party leader Madhu Yashki Goud denounced the Modi government over the accident. “The prime minister is busy travelling to Japan and talking about bullet trains but his tenure has ignored railway safety,” he said. “This is an utter failure by the railways minister.”

Another Congress leader, Ahmed Patel, condemned the government’s refusal to guarantee basic railway safety standards. “There are over 1.22 lakh (122,000) vacant positions in the railways with 75 percent of these pertaining to safety,” he said.

However, the dangerous state of India’s railway network, including the run-down of safety jobs, is a direct product of successive Congress and BJP governments that have refused to provide the necessary funds. Rail passengers are the tragic victims.

The Indian railway system is the world’s fourth largest and one of the oldest. Carrying more than 20 million people and 1.49 million tonnes of freight each day, it is notorious for derailments, collisions and other accidents. Most of these are caused by poor maintenance and the lack of safety upgrades.

The number of fatal train accidents has risen sharply since the 1980s. In the fiscal year 2013–2014, 54 people died in 71 accidents, whilst in 2014–2015 the death toll rose to 123 in 80 accidents.

The High-Level Safety Review Committee, which was established by railway ministry, warned in 2012 that the Indian Railways were “at the brink of [financial] collapse unless measures are taken.” The committee blamed the rail authorities for not taking “concrete measures” and for covering up the role of governments in failing to allocate sufficient funds. According to some analysts, the railways need 20 trillion rupees ($293.34 billion) investment by 2020.

The Modi government has cynically exploited the financial problems confronting the Indian Railways—a crisis it has exacerbated—to push ahead with plans to privatise the system and allowing 100 percent foreign direct investment in the rail sector.

Privatisation of the rail network and the drive for profit will result in the destruction of thousands of jobs, elimination of working conditions and a further deterioration of maintenance and safety standards—precisely the processes that produced Sunday’s disaster.

Indian government’s demonetisation causes mass hardship and economic chaos

Kranti Kumara & Arun Kumar

At 8PM on Tuesday November 8, the Hindu-supremacist BJP government led by Narendra Modi made a shock “demonetisation” announcement invalidating all Rupee (Rs.) 500 and 1000 currency notes (approximately $US7.50 and $15) as of midnight that day.

The government set a December 31 deadline for depositing the withdrawn currency bills into bank accounts and fixed a daily Rs. 4,000 limit for the exchange of old notes for new currency. This limit was later decreased to 2,000 rupees per day.

The social impact has been immediate and widespread with lengthy lines forming outside banks across the country. Tens of millions of people, many of them on a daily basis, are being forced to spend hours at a time to either deposit their old bills or exchange them, severely disrupting daily life and economic activity.

Bank ATMs all over the country have repeatedly run out of lower denomination currency as people desperately try to obtain money to spend on everyday purchases.

In rural areas and in small towns where banks or even an exchange mechanism do not exist the effect has been nothing less than catastrophic, with people unable to purchase daily necessities such as food and fuel. In addition, small farmers have been unable to sell their perishable produce to middle-men, since these transactions are almost always conducted in cash.

The greatest impact has been on the working class, other toilers and the poor who comprise the overwhelming majority of India’s 1.2 billion people. On the morrow of the November 8 announcement, many were unable to eat as they did not have valid currency for making food purchases. Others were unable to obtain urgent health care.

According to press reports, at least 55 deaths since November 8 are attributable either directly or indirectly to the disruption caused by demonetisation. The Modi government has maintained a stony silence on the reported deaths, undoubtedly viewing them as inconvenient but acceptable “collateral damage.”

So contemptuous is the Modi government of the suffering masses, that Urban Development Minister Vankaiah Naidu claimed that any disruption and hardship was "temporary pain for long term gain.”

Such callous political indifference brought a caution from the Supreme Court. At a hearing on an emergency motion for the demonetisation to be suspended, India’s highest court warned the government that if it does not take immediate steps to allieviate the mass distress there could soon be riots.

Donning the guise of a corruption fighter, Modi, a self-styled Hindu-strongman and unabashed political agent of big business, has presented the government’s shock demonetisation as a “surgical strike” against “black-money,” tying it metaphorically to the unprecedented, illegal and highly provocative military strikes India carried out inside Pakistan in late September.

“For years,” declared Modi in a nationwide televised address, “this country has felt that corruption, black money and terrorism are festering sores, holding us back in the race towards development. To break the grip of corruption … we have decided that the currency notes presently in use will no longer be legal tender from midnight tonight.”

The pliant and sycophantic corporate print and television organizations have fallen over each other to hail this move as a “masterstroke” against what is termed as black money, i.e., monies that are undeclared to tax authorities and kept hidden in the form of real estate, gold, cash-hordes and overseas or even domestic bank accounts.

The vast majority of India’s “black money,” as is commonly known, is held by the most privileged sections of Indian society: businessmen, rural moneylenders, politicians and the upper middle class. This was effectively admitted in an Indian Express column by the businessman and neo-liberal economist Surjit S. Bhalla. He argued that the rise of “black money” was an understandable, even laudable, response to the high-tax rates imposed on the rich and well-to-do by Indira Gandhi’s Congress Party government in the late 1960s and the regulatory powers of government bureaucrats.

Modi’s “demonetisation” scheme will have little to no impact on these layers and their illegal fortunes.

The posturing about cracking down on corruption is a smokescreen. The government’s real aim is to further shift the burden of the capitalist crisis onto the masses—to prop up India’s banking system at their expense; and increase, as with the BJP government’s push for a new nationwide 18 percent Good and Services Tax, the tax bite on working people’s incomes.

Not surprisingly, Indian and international big business have hailed Modi’s demonetisation.

“We support the measures to fight corruption and illicit financial flows in India,” declared an IMF spokesperson.

“Demonetising high denomination notes can be an effective means of checking accumulation of wealth in cash," said Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) President Naushad Forbes.

Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FCCI) President Harshavardhan Neotia congratulated Modi and his government for “an extremely bold move.” It “will have,” claimed Neotia, “a debilitating impact on the parallel economy in the country as well as deal a body blow to terror financing.”

Far from being “high-value,” as the cheerleading corporate media and business spokespersons claim, the targeted currency notes make up the overwhelming majority of all currency in circulation and are indispensable for daily transactions. The demonitised 500 rupee notes comprised 47.8 percent of all currency in circulation and the 1,000 rupee notes a further 38.4 percent.

The first aim of the government’s demonetisation scheme is to inject desperately needed cash into India’s mainly state-owned banking sector. The Public Sector Banks (PSBs) are hobbled by mounting “Non-Performing Assets” (NPA), primarily business loans that are not being repaid or paid only sporadically. Because the threat from their NPAs is so large, India’s banks have cut back their lending to India’s capital-starved and already overstretched business houses. The paucity of lending threatens in turn to gut economic growth, which has already declined sharply in key sectors including industrial production, IT, and merchandise export.

As of June 2016, the banks’ total NPS stood at Rs. 6 trillion ($90 billion), but these figures probably grossly understate the problem.

In any event, by November 14, just 6 days after demonetisation, total new Indian bank deposits already exceeded Rs. 4 trillion ($60 billion). Although most of these deposits are expected to be withdrawn for spending, the head of the giant State Bank of India, Arundhati Bhattacharya, estimates that about 10-15 percent of these deposits will be retained within the banking system.

By compelling cash-holders to deposit their funds into the bank, the government is also hoping to collect a tax windfall so as to help plug its large fiscal deficit. The government has warned that if the total of demonetised-currency deposited in an account exceeds Rs. 250,000 ($3,700) before December 31 and there is a “mismatch” between income and deposits, the account-holder may be subject not only to paying additional tax, but also to penalties of up to 200 percent.

It is also estimated that about Rs. 3 trillion ($45 billion) out of the Rs. 14 trillion of the Rs. 500 and Rs. 1,000 notes that were in circulation prior to November 8 will not be deposited or exchanged for new bills. This sizeable sum can be marked as a credit on the balance sheet of the Reserve Bank of India, then transferred to the government exchequer as a “dividend.”

A third benefit, from the standpoint of the avidly pro-big business BJP government and the ruling elite, is that the demonetisation scheme will compel greater popular participation in the banking system. Large numbers of people in India do not have a bank account. This either because they do not have easy access to a bank—banks do not exist in many rural villages—or because they are so poverty stricken that they have little if anything to deposit.

As a result, most economic activity, even in urban areas, is carried out in cash. By forcing people to open bank accounts the Modi regime is trying to “modernize” India’s historically belated, backward capitalist economy by strengthening the Indian bourgeoisie’s banking system and its reach. The BJP government has already made clear that one of its principal goals moving forward will be to privatize large parts of the banking system.

To what extent the BJP government and India’s elite will realize the true, surreptitious goals of their demonetisation scheme remains to be seen. Whatever palliative impact it has on the Indian banking system and government finances in the short-term, demonetisation is further fueling mass popular discontent and under conditions where India’s economy, notwithstanding Modi’s claims of a high-growth rate, is being battered by the world capitalist crisis. Last week Indian President Pranab Mukherjee admitted that India, whose labour force is growing by 10 million people per year, added less than 150,000 jobs in all of 2015.

Russian minister of economic development arrested

David Levine

On November 14, Russian Minister of Economic Development Aleksey Ulyukayev was arrested at the office of the Russian oil concern, Rosneft, for attempting to extort a $2 million bribe for the sale to Rosneft of the state-owned controlling interest in Bashneft, another oil company.

The following day, Russian President Vladimir Putin dismissed Ulyukayev from his position in government “in connection with a loss of trust.” Ulyukayev is currently under house arrest. If convicted, he faces a prison sentence of up to 15 years.

Ulyukayev is the highest-ranking Russian government official to be arrested since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. His arrest has led to extensive speculation among media commentators about infighting at the highest levels of government, particularly with regard to the privatization of state assets.

Ulyukayev had initially opposed the sale of the Bashneft stock to Rosneft, as had Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov and Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich. Because the state currently owns a controlling share of Rosneft, they wanted Bashneft to be sold to private investors.

Svetlana Petrenko of the Investigative Committee of Russia, which brought a criminal complaint against Ulyukayev, told news agency TASS on Monday that the sale itself of the Bashneft stock to Rosneft was executed lawfully and was not the subject of investigation.

Russian media network Life, citing an anonymous source within Russian government security agencies, reported that Ulyukayev had been under investigation since early 2016. The Federal Security Service (FSB) had already gathered substantial evidence of other corrupt activities involving Ulyukayev and his associates.

According to Life, wiretapping of Ulyukayev’s personal communications revealed that he was trying to lobby for the interests of certain foreign banks and companies in the privatization of state property, including the privatization of military industrial enterprises. They had allegedly caught him in several corrupt transactions and simply awaited an appropriate occasion for the arrest.

The source stated that Ulyukayev had demanded $40 million from Rosneft in exchange for the government’s approval of the Bashneft purchase. After the government approved the sale on October 10, Rosneft attempted to avoid making the payment to Ulyukayev, arguing that such a payment had not been agreed to in writing.

In response, Ulyukayev threatened to cancel the sale. On November 14, Rosneft representatives, working in cooperation with FSB agents, invited him to their office. He agreed to reduce the payment to $2 million. They gave him a bag containing $1 million, explaining that they would bring him the other $1 million later. Then he was arrested.

Life’ s anonymous source said that new charges against Ulyukayev may appear in the near future. Investigations of other high-ranking government officials may also take place.

At the head of Rosneft stands CEO Igor Sechin, who until 2008 had been deputy head of Putin’s administration and was then made a deputy prime minister of Russia, a post he held until 2012. He is a close ally of Putin and has been ranked by Forbes magazine as the second most powerful person in Russia. Sechin has been associated with a conservative tendency that opposes privatization of state-owned property.

Many commentators have pointed out that the payment to Ulyukayev seemed particularly improbable. In addition to the fact that Putin and Medvedev had approved the deal on the basis of undisputed market valuations, Sechin is such a powerful individual in Russia that he is an unlikely person from whom to attempt to extort money.

Ex-Finance Minister Aleksei Kudrin, currently head of the Russian government’s Strategic Developments Center and a fiscal hawk associated with the country’s liberals, expressed doubt about Ulyukayev’s guilt. He told the Russia 1 television channel on November 19, “I can’t even imagine that the minister [Ulyukayev] could behave in such a way toward a person with such heavyweight authority as Sechin.”

Western news sources have argued that Ulyukayev’s arrest points to the increasing power of the Russian state security services and, in the words of the BBC, a “symbolic blow to the liberal camp in government.” Similar arguments have been made in Russia. Others have been less conclusive in asserting the political implications of the arrest, simply noting that it demonstrates that no segment within the political establishment is “untouchable.”

Over the past week, a number of high-ranking regional government officials in Russia have also become subject to criminal charges, all related to bribe-taking, embezzlement and extortion. These include Aleksey Ivanov and Aleksandr Danilchenko, deputies governor of Kemerovo Region; Sergey Kalinkin, head of the Kemerovo Regional Investigative Committee, along with his subordinates Sergey Kryukov and Artemy Shevelyov; Marat Oganesyan, former deputy governor of St. Petersburg; Dmitry Koshurnikov, mayor of Pereslavl-Zalessky; and Alan Tsabiyev, director of the state property agency for North Ossetia.

These events come in the wake of a series of high-level resignations and dismissals from the Russian government, including Putin’s chief of staff, who was replaced by a young and relatively unknown political insider. The turmoil ultimately points to a mounting crisis within the elite, who are riven by disagreements over how to handle the country’s economic decline and escalating geopolitical confrontation with the US and NATO.

Allegations of corruption, although very often well-founded, have long served as a method of resolving differences within ruling circles in Russia. In post-Soviet Russia, in particular, the view that corruption is the most serious problem affecting society has been intensely promoted by right-wing opposition forces.

The Russian ruling establishment has long maintained a consensus that the privatization policies carried out in the 1990s, which amounted to a massive theft of publicly owned industries, are not to be reconsidered or otherwise put in question. However, future privatization plans have been the subject of sharp disagreements, with the so-called “economic bloc” within the government pushing for a faster pace of privatization than that preferred by other tendencies.

“Over recent years, privatization took place slowly for various reasons. The market, by the way, was also in a poor condition, possibly because we had no such urgent needs or necessity to replenish the budget through revenue from privatization. Now there is such a necessity, and we therefore have intensified our work on the privatization plan. A number of decisions have been made. This affects [diamond-producing conglomerate] Alrosa as well as the controlling interest in Bashneft,” Prime Minister Medvedev told journalists on November 11.

The implications of the “urgent needs or necessity to replenish the budget through revenue from privatization” go far beyond a reshuffling of government officials. The Russian federal state’s income fell by 5.4 percent during the first eight months of 2016, as compared to the same period of the previous year. With correction for the 12.91 percent inflation rate recorded in 2015, the drop is more severe. It is associated with the ongoing economic crisis, involving international sanctions against Russia and low world oil prices, as well as the unwillingness of the government so far to raise taxes.

The solution being prepared by the government is an intensified assault on the living standards of the working class. On November 18, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov presented to the Russian State Duma a draft budget for 2017-2019 that includes sharp spending cuts in education, health and other social services.

Fillon, Juppé win first round of French right’s presidential primary

Alice Laurençon

Yesterday, François Fillon and Alain Juppé obtained the most votes in the first round of the Les Républicains (LR) primary. They will run against each other in the second round of the primaries next Sunday, to become LR’s president candidate in the April–May 2017 presidential elections.

Fillon’s unexpected surge in the polls, after long being in third or fourth position in the LR primary, pushed former President Nicolas Sarkozy back into third position. He was eliminated with 20.6 percent of the vote. Fillon took 44.2 percent, largely beating Alain Juppé, who obtained 28.6 percent.

Other candidates, including Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, Bruno Le Maire, Jean-Frédéric Poisson and Jean-François Copé altogether received less than 8 percent of the votes.

Sarkozy acknowledged defeat from his campaign headquarters, as did Le Maine. Both called on voters to elect Fillon in the second round.

There was heavy voter participation in the primary, with around 4 million voters going to vote. This level of participation largely surpassed that of the Socialist Party (PS) government in 2011, when 2.6 million electors went to the ballots to select the current president, François Hollande, as PS candidate.

The PS is now deeply undermined by the vast unpopularity of Hollande’s policies of austerity and war. The media presented LR primary as choosing the candidate who will most likely run against Marine Le Pen of the neo-fascist National Front (FN) in the second round of the presidential elections next year. These calculations doubtless played a significant role, as well, in the significant rise of voter turnout for the LR primaries.

Moreover, the LR primary took place under the shock impact of the surprise election of Donald Trump, just over a week before, as US president.

After trailing Juppé and Sarkozy during most of the campaign, Fillon gradually won support in the month of October, with his approval rating jumping 10 points in 5 weeks, from 12 to 22 percent of the vote at the beginning of November. After Trump’s victory, just over a week before the LR primary in France, Fillon surged ahead in the polls, moving ahead of Juppé and Sarkozy and taking 30 percent of the vote—compared to 29 percent for the other two, according to an Ipsos poll.

During the last televised debate of the right-wing presidential candidates, on Thursday, Fillon was ruled “most convincing” by two polls.

Fillon’s rise came at the expense of Juppé, whom the polls systematically presented as the inevitable winner in October.

Juppé and Sarkozy are both candidates who have run discredited governments. Juppé is closely tied to the ultra-free market policy he carried out as prime minister under then-President Jacques Chirac, the “Juppé plan” that provoked a vast wave of strikes in 1995, called on the basis of defending pensions and social security.

After Trump’s election, Juppé rejected all claims that there is a “social contradiction” between the population and the elites, an expression which Sarkozy used as a rallying cry throughout the campaign.

In a remark that underscores his aristocratic contempt for the masses, Juppé denounced the idea that a social gulf exists between the working masses and the elites as “an idiotic statement.” He added, “We need elites, it is what pulls us upwards.”

Sarkozy, for his part, had praised Trump’s election as validation of his own claims to speak for the “silent majority” and as a victory for a democracy and the principle of “listening to the people.” Trump is unpopular in France, and Sarkozy’s open support for Trump doubtless played a role in his elimination in the first round.

Sarkozy explicitly centered his campaign around stigmatizing Muslims as well as occasionally moving closer to Russian policy, and his campaign was visibly close to the FN.

With the FN virtually certain to progress on to the second round, given the unpopularity and the discrediting of the PS, LR voters in yesterday’s primaries were no doubt considering which candidate might have the best chances to beat Marine Le Pen. As a candidate who is not as openly contemptuous of the voters as Juppé, and less aggressively linked to far-right and nationalistic forces than Sarkozy, Fillon apparently was able to profit from his lower media profile and from the difficulties facing his rivals.

However, Fillon’s political program and those of all the LR candidates show that the ruling class is preparing to wage deep attacks on the working class.

Fillon’s program has no fundamentally significant differences from that of Sarkozy. He wants to launch massive attacks against workers’ social rights, including public sector job cuts, drastic tax cuts for corporations and the super-rich, and reinforcing the police’s repressive powers.

The character of the policies proposed by Fillon and Juppé stand as a warning to the working class. After the wars, austerity policies, and police-state policies under Hollande, the ruling class is preparing a set of deep attacks against the working class.

Fillon and Juppé both support attacks on workers’ social rights and police-state measures like the current state of emergency imposed by the PS.

Faced with deep opposition to austerity in the French population, the fact that the LR candidates are so openly advancing such deeply anti-working class programs will doubtless reinforce the FN and Le Pen.

The FN will attempt to extract the maximum political profit from all of these parties’ promotion of reactionary policies to demagogically present its campaign as the only one to oppose traditional politicians and ruling elites.

Obama rejects pardon for Snowden

Jerry White

In an interview published Friday, President Barack Obama told Der Spiegeland German public broadcaster ARD that he would not pardon Edward Snowden before leaving office in January. The former National Security Agency contractor remains in exile for exposing the illegal surveillance operations of the NSA and other U.S. spying agencies, which target countless millions of people in the U.S. and around the world.

Obama’s decision will leave Snowden in grave danger from the incoming administration of Donald Trump, who is putting together a far-right government committed to expanded spying, torture and militarism. Trump’s pick for new CIA director, Kansas Republican Congressman Michael Pompeo, called for Snowden’s execution in an interview with the C-SPAN public affairs network last February.

In his typically dishonest manner, Obama sought to conceal the political meaning of his denial of a presidential pardon to Snowden, well aware that the young man enjoys popular support in the U.S. and around the world for his heroic actions. A campaign initiated by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) urging Obama to grant Snowden a pardon has won the support of prominent artists, academics and others.

The ongoing Democratic president reiterated the bogus argument that mass surveillance, a blatant violation of democratic rights, is necessary to defend the people of the U.S. and the world from “terrorism.”

Asked if he was going to pardon Snowden, Obama said, “I can't pardon somebody who hasn't gone before a court and presented themselves, so that's not something that I would comment on at this point. I think that Mr. Snowden raised some legitimate concerns.

“How he did it was something that did not follow the procedures and practices of our intelligence community. If everybody took the approach that I make my own decisions about these issues, then it would be very hard to have an organized government or any kind of national security system.”

The claim that the president “can’t pardon” Snowden is a lie. The U.S. Constitution confers on the president unlimited power to pardon anyone, except in cases involving impeachment. As several defenders of Snowden have pointed out, an 1866 Supreme Court ruling held that this power “extends to every offence known to the law, and may be exercised at any time after its commission, either before legal proceedings are taken or during their pendency, or after conviction and judgment.”

As Noa Yachot, who is leading the ACLU campaign, noted, “Richard Nixon hadn’t even been indicted when Gerald Ford issued a ‘full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in’ over the course of his presidency.” In January 2016, Yachot pointed out, Obama pardoned three Iranian-Americans charged with violating trade sanctions against Iran before they had stood trial. This was part of a prisoner exchange that helped seal the US-Iran nuclear deal.

Obama’s claim that Snowden should have “followed procedures” is no less bogus. Previous whistleblowers, including Thomas Drake, a high-ranking NSA official who exposed illegal spying ten years before Snowden, were arrested, charged with crimes and financially and professionally ruined. President Obama has prosecuted more whistleblowers than all previous US presidents combined, and has repeatedly used the 1917 Espionage Act against government leakers and reporters.

In his remarks in Germany, Obama said, “At the point at which Mr. Snowden wants to present himself before the legal authorities and make his arguments or have his lawyers make his arguments, then, I think, those issues [a pardon] come into play. Until that time, what I've tried to suggest—both to the American people, but also to the world—is that we do have to balance this issue of privacy and security.”

Despite Obama’s claims that Snowden would receive a fair trial in the U.S., the Espionage Act implicitly excludes Snowden’s main defense: that he was providing information to the media and the public to defend their democratic rights against the intrusion of the government. All the prosecution has to prove in an Espionage Act case is that the defendant disclosed classified defense information to someone unauthorized to receive it, such as a journalist, something Snowden has already admitted. Nothing else is admissible.

As Snowden’s lawyer, the ACLU’s Ben Wizner, explained, “When Daniel Ellsberg stood trial under the Espionage Act, his attorney asked him why he decided to leak the Pentagon Papers to journalists. The prosecution objected to the mere question, and the judge sustained the objection. No matter the egregiousness of the government’s actions, a whistleblower’s motivation has no place in an Espionage Act trial.”

Obama denounced those opposed to massive government spying, saying, “Those who pretend that there's no balance that has to be struck and think we can take a 100 percent absolutist approach to protecting privacy don't recognize that governments are going to be under an enormous burden to prevent the kinds of terrorist acts that not only harm individuals, but also can distort our society and our politics in very dangerous ways.”

He continued, “I want my government—and I think the German people should want their government—to be able to find out if a terrorist organization has access to a weapon of mass destruction that might go off in the middle of Berlin.

“That may mean that, as long as they do it carefully and narrowly, that they're going to have to find ways to identify an email address or a cell phone of a network… But we shouldn't assume that government is always trying to do the wrong thing.”

Trump’s pick for CIA director, Michael Pompeo, supports the lifting of virtually all restrictions on NSA spying. As a member of the House Intelligence Committee, he has called for the NSA to resume its phone records program and urged Congress to pass “a law reestablishing collection of all metadata, and combining it with publicly available financial and lifestyle information into a comprehensive, searchable database.”

In an interview on C-Span last February, Pompeo said, “It's absolutely the case that we have not been able to secure all the American information that we needed to, and that we've had the traitor Edward Snowden steal that information. He should be brought back from Russia and given due process, and I think the proper outcome would be that he would be given a death sentence for having put friends of mine, friends of yours, who served in the military today, at enormous risk, because of the information he stole and then released to foreign powers.”

According to State Department sources, Hillary Clinton is reported to have said, “Can’t we just drone this guy,” during a 2010 internal discussion on WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

In December 2010, Democratic strategist and Clinton supporter Bob Beckel told Fox News: “The way to deal with this is pretty simple. We've got Special-Op forces. I mean—a dead man can't leak stuff. This guy's a traitor…I am not for the death penalty, so if I am not for the death penalty, there is only one way to do it… Illegally shoot the son of a bitch.”

Trump’s authoritarian government of nationalism and war

Joseph Kishore

The Democratic Party and the media are doing everything they can to normalize the transfer of political power to Donald Trump, even as his initial appointments confirm the extreme and historically unprecedented character of the administration he will head.

For attorney general, Trump has tapped Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, long known for his opposition to civil rights and his support for the most invasive forms of government spying, beyond even those backed by the intelligence agencies. He has called for an expansion of police militarization and fiercely denounced immigrants, once declaring that “almost no one from the Dominican Republic” is coming to the US with “a provable skill that would benefit us.”

For CIA director, Trump is proposing Representative Mike Pompeo, another advocate of unconstitutional spying programs, who said earlier this year that NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden should be prosecuted, convicted and executed.

For national security advisor, Trump has selected retired general Michael Flynn, a fanatic anti-Islamic militarist who supports the removal of nominal restrictions on torture, saying he believes “in leaving as many options on the table right up until the last possible moment.”

Other choices will follow a similar pattern. Reportedly, the top contender for secretary of defense is retired Marine General James Mattis, who led the brutal onslaught against Fallujah, Iraq in 2004 and notoriously declared a year later that “it’s fun to shoot some people.”

Most significant, however, is the central role of Trump’s new “chief strategist” Stephen Bannon, the former head of Breitbart News, who has been hailed by the white nationalist organizations that surround the so-called alt-right (which have also praised the selection of Sessions).

Bannon will play the central role in crafting the overall political agenda of the new administration. In an interview published Friday by Hollywood Reporter, Bannon outlines a policy of economic and political nationalism, with fascistic overtones.

“I’m not a white nationalist,” Bannon states, “I’m a nationalist. I’m an economic nationalist.” He denounces the “globalists”—a term popular among the alt-right to refer to anyone who does not support restrictions on trade and the movement of peoples—for having “gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia.”

Bannon’s aim, he says, is to “build an entirely new political movement” based on this nationalist economic policy combined with debt-fueled infrastructure spending. He declares, “With negative interest rates throughout the world, it’s the greatest opportunity to rebuild everything… We’re just going to throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks. It will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution—conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement.”

This is a type of language that has not been heard before at the summit of American power. While Trump, Bannon and others seek to couch their program in populist language, exploiting the widespread hostility to the Democratic Party and the identity politics of privileged sections of the upper-middle class, the program of economic nationalism is one of brutal class warfare.

Domestically, it means the suppression of all class struggle in the interests of the “nation” and “national security.” Internationally, it means resort to war, both to divert social tensions at home and to subordinate the United States’ principal competitors in Europe and Asia to the interests of the American ruling class. The new administration will be dominated by the military-intelligence-police apparatus, acting as the violent instrument of Wall Street and the financial aristocracy.

No less significant than the character of the incoming Trump administration is the response of the Democratic Party. With extraordinary speed—within just two weeks—the Democrats have moved from hysterical warnings that a Trump victory would be a catastrophe for the country to assurances that they will support the incoming administration and work with it on key elements of policy.

Trump’s initial cabinet appointments have coincided with the election of Charles Schumer as the Democratic Senate minority leader. Of all Democrats in the Senate, Schumer is perhaps the closest to Wall Street and the most fervent advocate of trade war measures, particularly against China.

Schumer has elevated Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders to a leadership role in the Senate. During the presidential election campaign, Sanders worked to channel oppositional sentiment of a left-wing and anti-capitalist character behind Hillary Clinton, the candidate of war and Wall Street. As the World Socialist Web Site noted, his nationalist economic program closely paralleled that of Donald Trump.

In interviews over the weekend, both Schumer and Sanders declared that they hoped Trump would “work with us” on issues of “trade” and “infrastructure.” Sanders said Americans were “sick and tired of seeing their jobs go to China and other low-wage countries.”

The Democrats are proposing an alliance with Trump on economic proposals that are being spearheaded by Trump’s fascistic chief strategist, Bannon.

American presidential elections are characterized by all manner of lies, mudslinging and rhetoric, behind which various tactical divisions and conflicts within the ruling elite are fought out. It is in this way that the ultimate policy and trajectory of the ruling class asserts itself.

The coming period will be one of immense shocks and political upheavals. Trump’s economic policies, financed by ever greater levels of debt, combined with massive tax cuts for the rich and cuts in social programs, will produce economic chaos and class conflict. They will not resolve the intractable contradictions of American and world capitalism.

Moreover, while Trump could exploit social grievances during the election campaign and benefited from the collapse in voter turnout for Clinton, the program he is planning on implementing does not have mass support.

In preparing for the struggles to come, the basic political task is the organization and mobilization of the working class as an independent political force. This requires a complete and decisive break with the Democratic Party and all of the organizations that operate in its orbit. It is only in this way that the working class can advance a socialist, internationalist and revolutionary opposition to the economic nationalism, authoritarianism and militarism of a Trump administration.

University of Manchester President’s Doctoral Scholar Awards 2017 for PhD Students

Application Deadline: 9th December, 2016

To be taken at (country): UK

Eligible FieldS of Study: Only those applicants with an offer of a place on the Accounting and Finance, Business and Management or Science, Technology and Innovation Policy PhD programme for September 2017 entry can be considered

About the Award: Alliance Manchester Business School provides a thriving research environment, and the opportunity to work with the top international scholars in the full range of business and management disciplines, accounting and finance, and information systems. The University normally has a range of scholarships, studentships and bursaries available for students commencing their doctoral studies. The University seeks exceptional students who will both benefit from, and make a contribution to, our research community.

Type: PhD

Eligibility: To be eligible, candidates:

• must have obtained a First or Upper Second Class Honours degree (or equivalent) and hold (or expect to obtain) a Masters-level qualification with Distinction.
• should have a track-record of research engagement (including relevant research experience and dissemination) and/or potential for outstanding research, as demonstrated in the quality of the proposal submitted as part of the application.

Selection Criteria:  Consideration will be based on academic track record and evidence of research potential.

Number of Awardees: Not specified

Value of Scholarship: In addition to standard awards which include tuition fee and stipend, successful PDS Award candidates are entitled to an additional £1,000 p.a. enhancement to their funded stipend/living allowance.

They will also have the opportunity to:

• Attend a series of exclusive events where you’ll have the opportunity to meet the University of Manchester President and Vice Chancellor, interact closely with our academic community and network with other PDS Award students
• Benefit from international research leadership under distinguished scholars
• Become a PDS Award ambassador for the University
• Receive a President’s Doctoral Scholar medal at graduation
• Benefit from our extensive postgraduate researcher development and training

Duration of Scholarship: 3 years

How to Apply: To be considered for one of these awards, candidates should submit a PhD application and indicate that they wish to be considered for this funding opportunity.

Candidates are advised to submit the application as early as possible. Candidates who do not submit the required supporting documents by the specific deadlines will not be considered.

Visit Scholarship Webpage for details

Award Provider: University of Manchester, UK

City of Killers: the Battle for Tal Afar

Patrick Cockburn

Tal Afar is a small city notorious for sectarian hatred and slaughter, which may soon be engulfed by a final battle between Isis and its bitterest enemies. Shia paramilitaries seeking revenge for past massacres of their co-religionists may soon assault the place which has provided many of the most feared Isis commanders, judges and religious officials.

“Isis is full of killers, but the worst killers of all come Tal Afar,” says a senior Iraqi official who did not want his name published. Abbas, a 47-year-old Shia Turkman from Tal Afar living in exile in the Kurdish city of Zakho, agrees, saying that several of the senior military commanders of the self-declared Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi come from there. He adds that officers from the Shia paramilitaries have been told that they will soon attack the city. The Turkmen are on of Iraq’s smaller minorities but important because of their links to Isis and to Turkey.

Between 10,000 and 15,000 Shia Hashd al-Shaabi are now massing to the south and west of Mosul with Tal Afar in their sights. A spokesman for them said on Tuesday that they were within twelve miles of Tal Afar airport.

The paramilitaries.often referred to as militia, include an estimated 3,000 Shia Turkmen from Tal Afar who were forced to flee in 2014 when Isis seized the city, though it had long been infamous for its death squads operating on behalf of both the Sunni majority and Shia minority. Sectarian killings began in 2003 when Saddam Hussein was overthrown by the US-led invasion and the city, strategically placed between Mosul and the Syrian border, became a stronghold, first for Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and later for Isis.

“Fear fills the city like a great cloud,” says Abbas. “Many senior members of Isis have left for Syria, but locals who worked with al-Qaeda and Isis are still there and are frightened. I am sure that after the battle of Tal Afar there will be a great massacre.” But, though the Sunni Turkmen believe they may be slaughtered they are determined not to surrender.

Abbas says that he believes that the Iraqi Army can take the city though only after heavy fighting because “the locals of Tal Afar which are with Isis will never leave the the city. They have a strong belief that Tal Afar is Sunni not Shia and they prefer Isis to the Iraqi government.” But, bad though occupation by the Iraqi Army would be in their eyes, its capture by the Hashd would be even worse says Abbas.

But this is what is most likely to happen according to Khasro Goran, a former deputy governor of Mosul who now leads the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) MPs in the Iraqi parliament. After a visit to the area, he said in an interview that though the Iraqi prime minister Haider al-Badi had promised “that only the Iraqi Army would enter Tal Afar, I believe the Hashd will do so also.” The difference between the paramilitaries and government security forces is not entirely clear cut, because the former have been known to change into federal police and other uniforms in the past to hide their presence in the battle zone.

What happens next in Tal Afar has international implications because Turkey has threatened military intervention in defence of the Sunni Turkmen if the Shia paramilitaries enter the city. A Turkish mechanised brigade has been moved to the Turkish Iraqi border to give substance to the threat. The KDP, the dominant Kurdish party in this part of northern Iraq, is likewise worried by the presence of powerful Shia militia forces in the region.

In a recent paper on “The Looming Problem of Tal Afar” for the Wilson Centre in Washington DC, Professor Gareth Stansfield of Exeter University gives a warning that the struggle for Tal Afar could be the flashpoint leading to a wider conflict. He writes that “because of Tal Afar’s early and close association with Sunni jihadism in Iraq, and perhaps also because of the astonishingly brutal nature of the sectarian conflict that engulfed Tal Afar from 2005-2007, the town has taken on the reputation of being Isis’s very own heart of darkness among Shia and Kurds alike.” He adds that the political implications of what happens in Tal Afar has the potential to destabilise the US-orchestrated operation to take Mosul.

Abbas says that as of last weekend the Hashd were within four miles of Tal Afar. He believes that for Isis the city has always been of great importance because of its position close to the border with Syria and Turkey. He says that under Saddam Hussein there was no sectarian friction between Sunni and Shia Turkmen, but this changed after the invasion of 2003. Aside from their sympathy for Isis, Abbas says that these days “the Sunni Turkmen lean towards Turkey and the Shia Turkmen lean towards the Baghdad government and Iran.”

For the moment living conditions in Tal Afar are not too bad as Isis is giving local fighters their basic needs. Food still comes through from Syria, but over the last week supplies have been more limited and Abbas says that, though most things are still available, people “don’t have the money to buy anything.”

The capture of Mosul and Tal Afar by the Iraqi government and the Hashd would severely weaken Isis and re-establish the authority of the Baghdad government in northern Iraq. The Sunni population of Iraq, a fifth of the population, would lose their last urban strongholds. Turkey may be tempted to intervene, but this will be opposed by the US and Baghdad. Isis has evidently decided to draw out the fighting for Mosul and Tal Afar, and, if it is able to do so, not much of either city will survive the battle.

Uber UK verdict highlights super-exploitation through “self-employment”

Thomas Scripps

A UK employment tribunal has ruled that Uber––the £50 billion [$US62 billion] app-based taxi service company––can no longer treat its drivers as self-employed and should pay them the national living wage of £7.20. This opens Uber to claims from its drivers for holiday pay, pensions and other workers’ rights. The company has appealed the ruling.

Since its founding seven years ago, Uber has extended its reach to 66 countries and 507 cities worldwide, with over 1 million drivers––40,000 of those in the UK. The company’s business model classifies its UK drivers as self-employed workers, merely put in touch with customers via the Uber app. The company then takes a commission of the fares earned by the drivers. Under this setup, Uber are not required to provide the employment rights associated with full or part-time work or to pay government-set wage rates.

In their decision the tribunal ruled “that working hours began the moment most drivers logged into the app.” The ruling went on, “The Uber driver’s working time starts as soon as he is within his territory, has the App switched on and is ready and willing to accept trips and ends as soon as one or more of those conditions ceases to apply.”

If the recent ruling is upheld, Uber’s drivers will be entitled to back-payment equal to the amount they have been underpaid while working for the company.

It could be years before the courts reach a final decision––one which Uber will work hard to delay––and before drivers see any money at all. Uber’s regional general manager for the UK, Jo Bertram, stated the company’s position: “The overwhelming majority of drivers who use the Uber app want to keep the freedom and flexibility of being able to drive when and where they want.”

It remains to be seen how Uber will respond long-term if it is forced to classify its drivers as employees and compensate them correspondingly. After the state of California ruled in June of last year that an Uber driver was an employee and not a contractor, American delivery company Instacart––which runs on a similar model––began shifting some of its contractors over to part-time status. The company ensured these part-timers were only allowed to work 30 hours a week and therefore not entitled to company–provided health insurance. One can imagine similar, legal, tricks being pulled in this case.

The UK Uber ruling comes on the heels of a series of protests and legal actions carried out this year by workers facing similar conditions at various companies. In March, drivers in Leeds and Manchester protested against Uber’s plans to cut fares by 13-14 percent, forcing them to work longer hours for the same money. In April, four bike couriers took Excel, City Sprint, Addison Lee and eCourier to an employment tribunal. The couriers were all classified as self-employed contractors, despite working in the case of one firm for some 50 hours a week.

In August, workers for the restaurant food delivery company Deliveroo staged a protest outside the company’s London office. The couriers were campaigning against plans to pay workers £3.75 per delivery instead of an hourly rate of £7 plus £1 per delivery. Deliveroo currently has 3,000 couriers working in the UK and is set to earn £130 million in 2016. In the same month, drivers for UberEats, Uber’s food delivery service, demonstrated outside an Uber office in Bermondsey demanding the company pay the London living wage of a guaranteed £9.40 per hour, plus costs. According to drivers, some were at risk of earning less than the minimum wage.

A large portion of the general workforce, including many young people, are working under such super-exploited conditions in the so-called “gig economy.” Uber and courier firms, including Hermes and Yodel, are among those relying on 4.7 million workers classed as “self-employed.” A Guardian investigation in July found that Hermes––the UK’s second largest parcel delivery company––was paying many of its 10,500 delivery drivers, also classified as self-employed, below the national living wage. Employees were working through illness due to the lack of sick pay and a fear of having delivery rounds withdrawn. Hermes, a subsidiary of the £12 billion Otto Group, made £36 million in 2015, three times its profits five years ago.

In recent years, companies have moved towards this style of employment as a means of slashing labour costs. This has resulted in a drastic lowering of living standards for self-employed workers, 80 percent of whom in the UK were living in poverty in the year 2012-13. Following the court case against Uber, taken forward by the GMB trade union, another union, Unite, declared it was setting up a new unit to investigate cases of false self-employment. The Trades Union Congress has launched a review of the scale and nature of such employment in the UK.

Meanwhile, the government has announced a six-month review of working practices and Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs is setting up its own department to investigate firms over this issue.

For their part, Labour Party politicians have criticised Deliveroo’s pay deals as “Victorian,” with MP Frank Field declaring the “clock is ticking” against companies exploiting the gig economy.

There is more than a little cynicism here. Both parties of the British bourgeoisie and their industrial police in the trade unions are wholly complicit in allowing such abuses to be normalised. The World Socialist Web Site recently reported on the scandalous treatment of workers at Sport Direct warehouses, who were paid below minimum wage, harangued from a public address system, submitted to regular searches and subject to a “six strikes” rule, over a six-month period, after which they faced instant dismissal. The “strikes” included “errors,” “excessive/long toilet breaks” and a “period of reported sickness.”

Businesses are only able to force hundreds of thousands of people into such hyper-exploitation because Labour and Conservative governments alike have given them a free hand according to the mantra of creating a “globally competitive economy.” Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May said this week, “The government I lead is unequivocally and unashamedly pro-business.” Despite the occasional criticism of the practices of firms such as Uber, nothing of any fundamental character will be done to infringe on the profitability of big business.

In regard to the likes of the GMB and Unite, workers at Uber, Deliveroo and across the self-employed sector should beware. Over the last three decades, the trade unions have carried out one betrayal after another. To the extent that the unions now wish to intervene in this growing section of the labour market, it is in order to slot themselves into the potentially lucrative role of managing formerly self-employed workers on behalf of multi-million and billion pound companies. In their struggle against appalling wages, terms and conditions, couriers and drivers at Uber Deliveroo, and other such firms must wage their struggle independently of the labour and trade union bureaucracy.

Volkswagen plans 30,000 job cuts

Dietmar Henning

Over the course of the next nine years, Volkswagen will cut 30,000 jobs at its core VW brand, including 23,000 in Germany. This was the announcement by the works council and management at a joint press conference on Friday at the company headquarters in Wolfsburg.

As part of the so called Pact for the Future, VW and the works council agreed to the destruction of more than one in seven of the company’s current 200,000 staff worldwide. The billions in fines and charges incurred through the diesel emissions scandal--the scale of which has still not been established as ever new offences keep being uncovered--as well as the cost of investment in electric vehicles and digitalisation are being pushed onto the backs of the workforce.

VW brand head Herbert Diess, supported by the main VW works council chair Bernd Osterloh, said, "With the Pact for the Future, Volkswagen is making a big step forward." The finalisation of the "Pact for the Future" was the precondition for an investment plan up to 2021, which the Supervisory Board discussed yesterday. This involves the dispostion of around 100 billion euros worldwide.

According to the Pact of the Future, VW operating profits should rise to 3.7 billion euros a year by 2020. In addition to the savings contained in the last cuts programme, three billion euros are to be saved in Germany and 700 million euros at international locations. There are still some 2.5 billion euros of savings outstanding from the previous cuts programme.

Works council head Osterloh not only gave the job-cuts his blessing, but called them a success. The Pact for the Future meant that the uncontrolled destruction of jobs was no longer on the table, he said, and stressed that all VW plants in Germany would remain in operation. Compulsory redundancies for the core workforce were now excluded for the next years, he said. Those to go were only agency workers. That amounts to 3,000 at the Emden plant alone, who will lose their jobs by the end of the year, as the Ostfriesen Zeitung reported.

Instead of compulsory redundancies, the job cuts would take place through early retirement. That was to be welcomed, Osterloh said. The IG Metall union, works council and company are agreed that the postions vacated by those taking retirement will not be replaced. Additionally, the regulations governing part-time retirement and early retirement would serve to push workers out of the factories.

"Volkswagen must start earning money again quickly and arm itself for the coming storm", Diess said at the press conference. Productivity at the German plants in Wolfsburg, Hannover, Braunschweig, Emden, Kassel, Salzgitter, Zwickau and Chemnitz should rise by 25 percent.

The core VW brand, which produces models such as the Golf and Passat, has been accused in the past by shareholders of realising too little profit. Every 100 euros turnover should produce around 1.6 euros profit, from which interest and tax is then levied. With the help of the Pact for the Future negotiated with the works council in the last months, VW wants to raise its profit rate in the next four years to four percent.

The negotiations over the massive job cuts were mainly conducted between the VW personnel dirctor Karlheinz Blessing and the works council chair Osterloh. Volkswagen boss Herbert Diess was also involved in support of Blessing. Diess and Blessing have put the component plants in Braunschweig, Kassel and Salzgitter up for closure. The engine plant in Salzgitter has been specifically targeted to be closed down and production outsourced.

Along with Blessing and Osterloh, representatives of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the IG Metall were sitting on both sides of the table. Personnel Director Blessing began his professional career on the IG Metall executive--where he headed the office of the IG Metall chief Franz Steinkühler--and in the SPD, where he was federal manager for a short time under the SPD chair Björn Engholm.

In 1994, Blessing moved to the Dillinger smelter and Saarstahl AG as labour director, following Peter Harz, who switched to VW. In 2011, he then took over the chief post and imposed a rigerous programme of cuts. Blessing is a close confidant of former IG Metall chairman Berthold Huber, who, until recently, also sat on the VW board.

In the negotiations with Osterloh, Blessing, as the representative of the company, called for thorough-going measures and blamed workers in the componant factories for the low profits. Diess called for a clearer orientation on the production of electric cars. Recently, CEO Matthias Müller was also involved in the negotiations.

What emerged was the decision to cut 30,000 jobs. The three component plants received commitments to produce electric motors and batteries. New electric cars are to be built at the main plants in Wolfsburg and Zwickau. The battery system for the modular transfer matrix will continue to be assembled in Braunschweig, and the plant will also take over the development and manufacture of the battery system for the so-called modular electric toolkit (MEB). Kassel will develop the MEB-drive and as well as assembling the E-Gearbox take on responsibilty for the assembly of the overall system. The MEB-drive component manufacturing is to be passed to Salzgitter. In addition, a pilot plant for battery cells will be built.

Moreover, the majority of the 23,000 jobs to be eliminated in Germany will be cut at these three plants, which currently employ around 30,000. This will have serious consequences, especially for younger workers. If not enough older colleagues take retirement, they could be forced to work in other plants.

Moreover, a smaller workforce increases the danger that it could fall victim to the next round of cuts. Given the tense international political and economic situation, this might come sooner than expected. Even now, the media is criticisng the pact as too weak. Spiegel Online called it a "half-hearted rescue plan", since no plants were being closed and wages for the core workforce were not being cut.

While the workforce is being made to pay for the costs of the diesel emission scandal as well as the reorganisation of a large part of production, those on the board are safe in their seats. Apart from the former CEO Martin Winterkorn, who had to give up his place as a result of the emissions scandal, while keeping his salary, hardly anyone from the top management has been held responsible for the billions of losses.

This has been made possible by the close collaboration between the corporate management, the IG Metall and the works council. These have always collaborated more closely at VW than elsewhere, since along with the trade union and works council representatives, the SPD state government of Lower Saxony also sits on the Supervisor Board as a major shareholder. However, this has further intensified in the last eighteen months.

When information about the emissions scandal began to emerge, the long-standing Supervisory Board chair Ferdinand Karl Piëch resigned his post on April 25, 2015. His position was taken on by IG Metall chair Berthold Huber, who had also been the VW Supervisory Board deputy chair for years. It was the first time in German coprorate history that a union functionary was appointed the supreme controller of such a large concern.

In September 2015, during Huber's term in office, news of the exhaust emissions fraud became known. The IG Metall, works council representatives and SPD have a majority on the supervisory board and could have held those responsible to account. However, under the aegis of Supervisor Board chair Huber, the directors not only remained secure in their posts but were given record bonus payments.

Meanwhile, the IG Metall and main VW works council were developing measures to shift the full cost of the emissions scandal onto the backs of the workforce. Only when everything was ready was the leadership of the Supervisory Board transferred to Hans Dieter Pötsch, VW's long-standing finance director.