Security Is Ruining the Internet

Ted Rall

Another major cyberattack, another wave of articles telling you how to protect your data has me thinking about European ruins. Those medieval fortresses and castles had walls ten feet thick made of solid stone; they were guarded by mean, heavily armored, men. The barbarians got in anyway.

At the time, those invasions felt like the end of the world. But life goes on. Today’s Europeans live in houses and apartment buildings that, compared to castles of the Middle Ages, have no security at all. Yet: no raping, no pillaging. People are fine.

Security is overrated.

The ransomware attack that crippled targets as diverse as FedEx and British hospitals reminds me of something that we rarely talk about even though it’s useful wisdom: A possession that is so valuable that you have to spend a lot of money and psychic bandwidth to protect it often feels like more of a burden than a boon.

You hear it all the time: Change your passwords often. Use different passwords for different accounts. Install File Vault. Use encrypted communications apps. At what point do we throw up our hands, change all our passwords to “password” and tell malicious hackers to come on in, do your worse?

I owned a brand-new car once. I loved the look and the smell but hated the anxiety. What if some jerk dented it? Sure enough, within a week and the odometer reading in the low three digits, another motorist scratched the bumper while pulling out of a parallel parking space. I was so determined to restore the newness that I paid $800 for a new bumper. Which got scratched too. That was 13 years, 200,000 miles and a lot of dings ago. Still drive the same car. I don’t care about dents.

I’m liberated.

The Buddha taught that material attachments bring misery. He was right. During the 1980s crack epidemic addicts stole car stereos to finance their fixes. To avoid smashed windows, New Yorkers took to posting “No Radio” signs on their cars.

But the really smart drivers’ signs read “Door unlocked, no radio.” It worked.

Hackers, we’re told, are ruining the Internet. I say our reaction to hack attacks has ruined it. It’s like 9/11. Three thousand people died. But attacking Afghanistan and Iraq killed more than a million. We should have sucked it up instead.

Security often destroys the very thing it’s supposed to protect. Take the TSA — please! Increased airport security measures after 9/11 have made flying so unpleasant that Americans are driving more instead. Meanwhile, “civil aviation” flights out of small airports — which have no or minimal security screenings — are increasingly popular. So are trains — no X-ray machines at the train station, either. Get rid of TSA checkpoints at the airport, let people walk their loved ones to the gate so they can wave goodbye, and I bet more people would fly in spite of the risk.

It’s not just government. Individuals obsess over security to the point that it makes the thing they’re protecting useless.

For my 12th birthday my dad gave me a 10-speed road bicycle. I still have that Azuki. It weighs a ton but it runs great. It’s worth maybe $20.

Bike theft is rife in Berkeley and Manhattan, but I tooled around both places on that banana yellow relic of the Ford Administration without fear of anything but the shame of absorbing insults from kids on the street. I often didn’t bother to lock up my beater. Never had a problem.

In my early 40s and feeling flush, I dropped $2400 on a royal blue Greg LeMond racing bike. Terrified that my prize possession might get stolen, I only ride it to destinations I deem ridiculously safe or where I’ll only have to leave it outside for a few minutes. So I hardly use it.
I’m an idiot.

Nice things are, well, nice to have. But they’re also a pain in the ass. In college one of my girlfriends (who I am not suggesting was a “thing,” obviously, and whom equally obviously I never thought I “had” in any ownership-y sense) had dazzling big blue eyes and golden blonde hair down to her waist and was so striking that guys literally walked into lampposts while gawking at her. Being seen with her was great for my ego. But every outing entailed a risk of violence as dudes catcalled and wolf-whistled; chivalry (and my girlfriend) dictated that I couldn’t ignore all of them. I sometimes suggested the 1980s equivalent of “Netflix and chill” (Channel J and wine coolers?) rather than deal with the stress. (We broke up for other reasons.)

So back to the big ransomware attack. What should you do if your ‘puter locks you out of your files unless you fork over $300? Wipe your hard drive and move on.

Back up regularly, Internet experts say, and this threat is one reason why. With a recent backup you can usually wipe your hard drive and restore your files from a backed-up version that predates the virus. Take that, villains! But no one does.

Meanwhile, our online lives are becoming as hobbled by excessive security as the airlines. Like the countless locks on Gabe Kaplan’s Brooklyn apartment door in “Welcome Back Kotter,” two-step authentication helps — but at what cost? You have to enter your password, wait for a text — if you’re traveling overseas, you have to pay a dollar or more to receive it — and enter it before accessing a site. Tech companies force us to choose a new password each time we forget the old one. Studies show that makes things worse: most users choose simpler passwords because they’re easier to remember.

The only thing to fear, FDR told us, is fear itself. What if we liberated ourselves from the threat of cyberattack — and a ton of work maintaining online security — by not having anything on our Internet-connected devices that we care about?

This would require a mental shift.

First, we should have fewer things online. When you think about it, many devices are connected to the Internet for a tiny bit of convenience but at significant risk to security. Using an app to warm up your house before you come home is nifty, but online thermostats are hardly worth the exposure to hackers who could drive up your utility bills, start a fire or even cause a brownout. Driverless cars could be remotely ordered to kill you — no thanks! I laugh at the Iranian nuclear scientists who set back their nation’s top-secret research program for years because their desire to cybercommute opened their system to the Stuxnet attack. Go to the office, lazybones!

The Internet of Things needs to be seriously rethought — and resisted.

As for your old-fashioned electronic devices — smartphones, tablets and laptops — it might time to start thinking like a New Yorker during the 1980s. Leave the door unlocked. Just don’t leave anything in your glove compartment, or on your hard drive, that you wouldn’t mind losing.

After Middle Eastern Wars End, the Medical Wars Begin

Robert Fisk

The details were horrific. Outside the besieged city of Mosul, 13,000 wounded civilians are today waiting for reconstructive surgery – from just this one seven-month battle. Another 5,000 Iraqi police militiamen are waiting for the same surgery from recent military offensives, in their case to be cared for by the Iraqi ministry of interior. But the health infrastructure that exists in the whole of Iraq cannot look after these wounded. As a result, some are turning up in Damascus – amid the frightfulness of the Syrian war – for the surgery they cannot obtain at home. A new graft in Damascus costs $200.

In the balmy early summer of Beirut this week came these detailed new horrors of Middle East war. For beside the state-of-the-art American University of Beirut Medical Center (AUBMC) in the city, doctors from across the region, from Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Palestine – along with the International Red Cross and Medecins Sans Frontieres – came to discuss their fears for the wounded and the sick and their conviction that drug-resistant bacteria are growing in hospitals in the Middle East. Just how to deal with this may be within the knowledge of the military medical authorities – but not within the hands of civilian doctors.

Did this start in Bosnia, as one doctor suspects, where civilian and military casualties merged into each other – it was, after all, a war where a civilian turned into a soldier and then re-emerged as a civilian the moment he entered a hospital? Or do the clues lie much further back, in the vicious sanctions which the UN imposed on Saddam’s Iraq, at America’s urging, in the aftermath of the dictator’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990? The first Global Conflict Medicine Congress, arranged by Glasgow-trained Professor Ghassan Abu-Sittah, head of plastic and reconstructive surgery at AUBMC, raised these questions in stark and painful ways.

Drug resistance, he said, did not exist in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war – when 150 Iraqi soldiers were wounded each day during the Fao peninsula battles alone – so what happened during the post-1990 sanctions period? “Iraqis were allowed to use only three antibiotics for 12 years,” he says. “These were the only ones allowed in by the UN. Heavy metals had been used in the 1991 [liberation of Kuwait] war. You found celinium [present in the smashed concrete of destroyed houses], tungsten and mercury in the casing of penetrating bombs. What are the long-term effects of these metals on the human body?”

A Medecins Sans Frontieres analysis – presented at the conference by Abu-Sitta and Dr Omar Dewachi who co-direct a newly created Conflict Medicine Programme at the AUB supported by Jonathan Whittall of Medecins sans Frontieres – said that multidrug resistant [MDR] bacteria now accounts for most war wound infections across the Middle East, yet most medical facilities in the region do not even have the laboratory capacity to diagnose MDR, leading to significant delays and clinical mismanagement of festering wounds. Beyond the physical damage caused by weaponry, Whittall added, “destroyed or degraded sanitation facilitates the microbiological seeding of wounds. The body, weakened by the wound, is reinjured when it interacts with the harsh, physically degraded environment.”

Iraqi-trained and Harvard-educated Dewachi, the American University of Beirut’s assistant professor of medical anthropology, spoke at length of Iraq’s cavalry of war victims and quotes an Iraqi patient waiting for treatment in Beirut. “Most of the good doctors have left the country,” the man told Dewachi, “and those who remain have lost their humanity”. Dewachi’s forthcoming book, Ungovernable Life: Mandatory Medicine and Statecraft in Iraq, which traces Iraq’s medical history from the First World War to 2003, will reveal that successive post-2003 Iraqi governments have been sending civilians, military and security forces personnel, parliamentarians – and even militia and political party members – to hospitals in Beirut.

So dangerous is life for physicians in Iraq itself – where the families of wounded patients often want revenge for perceived poor treatment by doctors – that the Baghdad government recently allowed doctors to carry guns to their hospitals and surgeries. About half the medical force in Iraq has fled over the past 20 Saddam and post-Saddam years and the British National Health Service, where many Iraqis were trained, “hosts one of the largest populations of Iraqi medical doctors outside Iraq”, according to Dewachi. The post-World War One British mandate created UK medical training and standards in Iraq and this cooperation continued long after independence.

The MSF analysis not only raised questions about the long-term effects of the 1990 UN sanctions regime, but also the reversal of medical advances in the treatment of cancer and diabetes. “This is often due to the inability of healthcare systems and technology to provide the same level of care in harsh and complex war environments. Kidney failure patients can no longer access dialysis units and the delivery of chemotherapy to cancer patients is severely compromised…”

Dewachi is fearful of the way in which the nature of illness has changed in Middle East wars, where “the change in the base line of cancers has become very aggressive”. As he puts it, “when a young woman of 30, with no family history of cancer, has two different primary cancers – in the breast and in the oesophagus – you have to ask what is happening. You have to know what is happening.” Dewachi is overwhelmed by the sheer number of wounded patients in the Middle East. “There was a nine-year old girl with shrapnel wounds to the face. She was wounded in Baghdad in a 2007 car bombing. Her mother who was caring for her had a glass eye from a wound.  Her father had a prosthetic arm after amputation surgery in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.  We found an Iraqi policeman injured in a car bombing who was being looked after by his brother who had lost three fingers in the Iran-Iraq war.”

In Iraq, patients wounded in Saddam’s wars were initially treated as heroes – they had fought for their country against non-Arab Iran. But after the US invasion of 2003, they became an embarrassment. “The value of their wounds’ ‘capital’ changes from hero to zero,” Abu-Sitta says. “And this means that their ability to access medical care also changes. We are now reading the history of the region through the wounds. War’s wounds carry with them the narrative of the wounding which becomes political capital.” Abu Sitta believes that the building – and deconstruction – of medical care goes hand-in-hand with state-building and state-destruction. “Today, it’s about dismembering nations rather than building them.”

For Abu-Sittah, “there is no such thing as wars that end – we call all this in medicine as ‘a chronic condition with acute flare-ups!’” In other words, war wounds continue to cause pain – and kill – long after wars have ended and restarted. “A wounded body ages differently,” he says. In Gaza, for example, a bullet wound effects a patient for decades after the wound is inflicted. “We have found that Israeli snipers fire at the back of the knee of the person they are shooting at – the back of the knee and the lower third of the thigh.  This does not necessarily kill – but it almost always requires amputation. This is the junction of the sciatic nerve, the popliteal artery and the knee joint – with one bullet you manage to do all three. That’s why the IRA used to do knee-capping in Northern Ireland.”

An Italian professor of genetics says that tissue samples from the three-week 2008-2009 Israeli-Hamas Gaza war shows remnants of heavy metals in the wounds of Palestinians, both carcinogenic and teratogenic – which, she said, can lead to cancers and deformed children. Other physicians noted that Hezbollah’s medical corps had transformed the treatment of its wounded in the Syrian war. Speakers in Beirut included even those foreign doctors who witnessed the 1982 Sabra and Chatila Palestinian camps massacre at the hands of Israel’s Lebanese Christian militia allies.

All of the horrific developments in the medical history of the Middle East’s wars has prompted both the American University of Beirut Medical Centre and MSF to create a research and training partnership in conflict medicine – Abu-Sitta, Dewachi and Whittall are on its steering committee – which means that no-one expects the five major wars in the region to end soon. All in all, I guess, a sobering reflection on all the wars on “terror” which the West and Russia and its friendly dictators claim to be fighting in the Middle East – where the cancer of national and international power is just as fatal as the cancers which afflict the bodies of the victims.

Invasion of the Putin-Nazis

C. J. Hopkins

So, here we are, a little over one hundred days into “The Age of Darkness” and the “racially Orwellian” Trumpian Reich, and, all right, while it’s certainly no party, it appears that those reports we heard of the Death of Neoliberalism were greatly exaggerated. Not only has the entire edifice of Western democracy not been toppled, but the global capitalist ruling classes seem to be going about their business in more or less the usual manner. The Goldman Sachs vampires are back in the White House (as they have been for over one hundred years). The post-Cold War destabilization and restructuring of the Middle East is moving forward right on schedule. The Russians, Iranians, North Koreans, and other non-globalist-ball-playing parties remain surrounded by the most ruthlessly murderous military machine in the annals of history. Greece is being debt-enslaved and looted. And so on. Life is back to normal.

Or … OK, not completely normal. Because, despite the fact that editorialists at “respectable” papers like The New York Times (and I’m explicitly referring to Charles M. Blow and Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman) have recently dropped the completely ridiculous “Trump is a Putinist agent” propaganda they’d been relentlessly spewing since he won the election, a significant number of deluded persons, having swallowed their official vomitus (i.e., the vomitus of Blow and Krugman, and other neoliberal establishment hacks) like the hungry Adélie penguin chicks in those nature shows narrated by David Attenborough, are convinced (these deluded persons are) that the Russians are waging a global campaign not only to maliciously hack, or interfere with, or marginally influence, free and fair elections throughout the Western world, but to control the minds of Westerners themselves, in some Orwellian, or possibly Wachowskian fashion. Worse yet, these deluded persons are certain, the Russians are now secretly running the White House, and are just using Trump, and the Goldman Sachs gang, and capitalist centurions like General McMaster, as a front for their subversive activities, like denying Americans universal healthcare and privatizing the hell out of everything.

If you think I’m being hyperbolic, check out #MarchforTruth on Twitter, or its anonymous Crowdpac fundraising page, which at first glance I took for an elaborate prank, but which seems to be in deadly earnest about “restoring faith in American government,” uncovering Trump’s “collusion” with Russia, and reversing his “subversion of the will of the people.” The plan is, on June 3, 2017, thousands of otherwise rational Americans are going to pour into the streets “demanding answers” from … well, I’m not sure whom, some independent prosecutor, or congressional committee, or intelligence agency, or whomever is responsible for ferreting out the Putin-Nazi infiltrators that “respected” pundits like Blow and Krugman (and stark raving loonies like Louise Mensch) have convinced them are now controlling the government. Weirdly, these same “respected” journalists, the ones who have been assuring the world that The President of the United States is a covert agent working for Russia, have failed to even mention this March for Truth, and are acting like they had nothing to do with whipping these folks up into a frenzy of apoplectic paranoia.

Incidentally, one of my colleagues contacted Mr. Blow directly and inquired as to whether he’d be vociferously supporting or possibly leading the March for Truth, and was chastised by Blow and his Twitter followers. I found this reaction extremely troubling, and asked my colleague to contact Mensch and suggest she check with her handlers at The Times to make sure the Russians haven’t gotten to him. However, just as he was sitting down to do that, the “Comey-firing” brouhaha broke, which seems to have brought Blow back to the fold, albeit in a less hysterical manner than his Rooskie-hunting readers have grown accustomed to. We can only hope that both he and Krugman return to form in the weeks to come as Russiagate builds to its dramatic climax.

Oh, yeah, and if Russiagate isn’t paranoid enough, apparently, the corporate media is now prepared to deploy the “Putin-Nazi Election Hackers” propaganda in any and every election going forward (as they did in the recent French election, and as they tried to do in the Dutch elections, and presumably will in the German elections, and as The Guardian appears to be retroactively doing in regard to the Brexit referendum). Any day now, we should be hearing of the “Putin-Nazi-Corbyn Axis,” and the “Putin-Nazi-Podemos Pact,” and video footage of Martin Schultz and a bevy of former-East German hookers engaging in Odinist sex magick rituals in an FSB-owned bordello in Moscow. Soon, it won’t just be elections … no, we’ll be hearing reports of Russian shipments of rocks, bottles, and pointy sticks to the “Putin-Nazi Palestinian Terrorists,” and … well, who knows how far they’re willing to take this?

All joking aside, as I’ve written about previously, what we’re dealing with here is more than just a lame attempt by the Democratic Party to blame its humiliating loss on Putin (although of course it certainly is that in part). The global neoliberal establishment is rolling out a new official narrative. It’s actually just a slight variation on the one it’s been selling us since 2001. I could come up with a sixteen-syllable, academic-sounding name for this narrative, but I’m trying to keep things simple these days … so let’s call it The Normals versus The Extremists, (the Normals being the neoliberals and the Extremists being everyone else). The goal of this narrative is to stigmatize and otherwise marginalize opposition to Neoliberalism, regardless of the nature of that opposition (i.e., whether it comes from the left, right, or from religious, environmentalist, or any other quarters).

Now, as any professional storyteller will tell you, one of the most important aspects of the narrative you’re trying to suck people into is to make your protagonist a likeable underdog, and then pit him or her against a much more powerful and ideally incorrigibly evil enemy. During the Cold War, this was easy to do — the story was Democracy versus the Commies, traditional “good versus evil”-type stuff. Once the U.S.S.R. collapsed, the concept needed major rewrites, as a new evil adversary had to be found. This (i.e., the 1990s) was a rather awkward and frustrating period. The global capitalist ruling classes, giddy with joy after having become the first ever global ideological hegemon in the history of aspiring global hegemons, got all avant-garde for a while, and thought they could do without an “enemy.” This approach, as you’ll recall, did not sell well. No one quite got why we were bombing Yugoslavia, and Bush and Baker had to break out the Hitler schtick to gin up support for rescuing the Kuwaitis from their old friend Saddam. Fortunately, in September 2001, the show runners got the break they were looking for, and the official narrative was instantly switched to Democracy versus The Islamic Terrorists. This re-brand got extremely good ratings, and would have been extended indefinitely if not for what began to unfold in the latter half of 2016. (One could go back and locate the week when the mainstream media officially switched from the “Summer of Terror” narrative they were flogging to the new “Invasion of the Putin-Nazis” narrative … my guess is, it was early to mid-September.) It started with the Brexit referendum, continued with the rise of Trump, and … well, I don’t have to recount it, do I? You remember last year as clearly as I do, how, suddenly, out of seemingly nowhere, the Putin-Nazi menace materialized, and took the place of the “self-radicalized terrorist” as the primary target for people’s hatred and fear. OK, sure, at first, there were no Putin-Nazis. It was just that the Brexit folks were fascists, and Trump was Hitler, and Bernie Sanders was some sort of racist hacky sack Communist. But then the Putinists poisoned Clinton, and unleashed their legions of Russian propagandists on the gullible, Oxycodone-addicted denizens of “flyover country,” and, as they say, the rest is history.

In any event, here we are now … stuck inside this simulation of “reality” where Putin-Nazi hackers are coming out of the woodwork, a partyless neoliberal banker has been elected the President of France, Donald Trump is an evil mastermind or a Russian operative, depending on what day it is (as opposed to just a completely incompetent, narcissistic billionaire idiot), and neoliberal propaganda outfits like The New York Times, The Washington Post, MSNBC, CNN, The Guardian, NPR, et al., are perceived as “respectable” sources of journalism, as if their role in generating and occasionally revising the official narrative weren’t so insultingly obvious. Personally, I am looking forward to the upcoming German elections this Autumn, wherein Neoliberal Party “A” is challenging Neoliberal Party “B” for the right to continue privatizing Greece (and any other formerly sovereign nations the banks can get their hands on) in a demonstration of European unity, and fiscal austerity … and, you know, whatever.

If this is the Death of Neoliberalism, just imagine what awaits us at the Resurrection.

The Two Most Dangerous Men in the World: Trump and Crown Prince Salman

Patrick Cockburn

Many people view Donald Trump as the most dangerous man on the planet, but next week he flies to Saudi Arabia for a three-day visit during which he will meet a man who surely runs him a close second as a source of instability. This is deputy crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, 31 – the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia since his father King Salman, 81, is incapacitated by old age – who has won a reputation for impulsiveness, aggression and poor judgement in the two-and-half years he has held power. Early on he escalated the Saudi role in Syria, thereby helping to precipitate Russian military intervention, and initiated a war in Yemen that is still going on and has reduced 17 million people to the brink of famine. Combine his failings with those of Trump, a man equally careless or ignorant about the consequence of his actions, and you have an explosive mixture threatening the most volatile region on earth.

Prince Mohammed, who is also defence minister, is not a man who learns from his mistakes or even notices that he has made them. Less than a year after his father became king in January 2015, the BND German intelligence agency issued a warning that Saudi Arabia had adopted “an impulsive policy of intervention” abroad and blamed this on the deputy crown prince whom it portrayed as a naïve political gambler. The degree of alarm within the BND about his impact on the region must have been high for them to release such a document which was swiftly withdrawn at the insistence of the German foreign ministry, but its predictions have been fulfilled disastrously in the following eighteen months.

The deputy crown prince is turning out to be not only a gambler, but one who recklessly raises his stakes when in trouble. Proof of this came in an extraordinary but under-reported interview he gave earlier this month, broadcast on al-Arabiya TV and Saudi TV, in which he threatens military intervention in Iran. “We will not wait until the battle is in Saudi Arabia, but we will work so the battle is there in Iran,” he says. Speaking in highly sectarian terms, he claims that the Iranian Shia leaders are planning to seize Mecca and to establish their rule over all the 1.6 billion Muslims in the world. He believes that “their logic is based on the notion that Imam Mahdi will come and they must prepare the fertile environment for his arrival and they must control the Muslim world.” His diatribe is as anti-Shia as it is anti-Iranian and likely to provoke fears among Shia in Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia itself, where Shia make up a tenth of the population, that they will be the victims of an anti-Shia crusade.

It is absurd to imagine that the four or five Shia countries have the ambition or the ability to take over the fifty or more that are Sunni, though Sunni fundamentalists accuse tiny Shia minorities in countries like Egypt, Tunisia and Indonesia of plotting to do so. Prince Mohammed appears to give credence to the theory of a grand anti-Sunni conspiracy orchestrated by Iran, saying that, since the Iranian revolution in 1979, Iran has been trying to “control Muslims in the Islamic world and spread the Twelver Jaafari [Shia] sect in the Islamic world so Imam Mahdi comes.”

There is more at play here than Prince Mohammed whipping up religious and nationalist feelings in Saudi Arabia to secure his own power base and fend off his rivals within the royal family. None of his foreign ventures have so far achieved their aims: in Syria in the spring of 2015 Saudi Arabia gave support to the so-called Army of Conquest, consisting primarily of the al-Qaeda affiliate the al-Nusra Front and its then ally Ahrar al-Sham. This won a series of victories against pro-Assad forces in Idlib province but their success led to Russian military intervention later the same year that was a turning point in the war. Saudi influence was marginalised, something that he blames on “former American President Barack Obama [who] wasted many significant opportunities he could have seized to achieve great change in Syria.” In practice, Saudi Arabia was hoping for US military intervention to enforce regime change in Syria along the lines of Iraq in 2003 or Libya in 2011. Obama was privately critical of Saudi actions and the tradition of the Washington foreign policy establishment of giving automatic support to Saudi Arabia and its allies.

Nevertheless, in Yemen Mr Obama gave backing until the last days of his presidency to the Saudi-led bombing campaign which has been devastating the country since March 2015 but has so far failed to win the war for the Saudis’ local allies. It has brought terrible suffering to the Yemeni population of 27 million, of whom the UN estimates that 17 million are “food insecure” including 3.3 million pregnant and breast-feeding mothers and children, some 462,000 under the age of five, who are “acutely malnourished” or, in other words, starving. Saudi-backed forces are poised to attack the Red Sea port of Hodeida, through which come 80 per cent of Yemen’s imports which make up most of its food supplies. If the port  is closed then Yemenis will face the worst man-made famine since Mao Tse-Tung’s Great Leap Forward. Prince Mohammed says the war is all but won, though, mysteriously, in finishing off the other side, “thousands of our troops can fall victims. There will be funerals in all Saudi cities.”

Trump has already ordered greater US support for the Saudi war effort in Yemen, but the deputy crown prince will be primarily bidding for US backing for his confrontation with Iran. Words are already turning into action with reports of the US and Saudi Arabia being at one in planning to stir up an anti-government insurgency among minorities in Iran such as the Baluchis in the south east, something that has been done before but with limited impact.

Saudi leaders were overjoyed by the election of Trump whom they see as sympathetic to them and the Gulf leaders whom he will meet after he arrives in Saudi Arabia on 19 May, before going on to Israel. It is a chilling tribute to the authoritarian instincts of Trump that his first foreign visit as President should be to the last arbitrary monarchies left on earth and to a state where women are not even allowed to drive. On the question of confronting Iran, he is unlikely to be restrained by his Defence Secretary, James Mattis, and his National Security Adviser, HR McMaster, both former generals scarred by America’s war in Iraq, where they see Iran as the main enemy.

The White House is doubtless conscious that the one-time Trump has won universal plaudits in the US was when he fired missiles in Syria and dropped a big bomb in Afghanistan. Trump and Prince Mohammed may be very different in some respects, but both know that fighting foreign foes and waving the flag shores up crumbling support at home.

New Zealand: Police suppressed video recorded in Pike River mine

Tom Peters

On April 30 TV3’s Newshub showed video footage from inside Pike River mine in the South Island of New Zealand, where 29 men were killed in an explosion in November 2010.

The footage was leaked after being kept secret since it was taken in March 2011, when the mine was controlled by police. It clearly shows members of Mines Rescue working inside the drift, the 2.3-kilometre tunnel that leads into the mine.

The fact that the video was suppressed for six years has outraged the Pike River victims’ families and working people throughout the country. After excerpts of it were shown on TV, police released 13 hours of footage on May 4. Many more hours of footage and photos have still not been seen by the families.

Pike River families and supporters blockading mine road in 2016

The National Party government has worked to prevent any real investigation into the disaster and to shield Pike River Coal’s leadership from prosecution. No one has been held responsible for the disaster and the 29 bodies remain in the mine. After initially promising to re-enter the mine, the government and state-owned company Solid Energy, which owns the mine site, has claimed since 2014 that the mine is too dangerous to enter.

A Royal Commission in 2012 concluded that there had been flagrant safety breaches by Pike River Coal. The company violated numerous health and safety laws and placed production and profit above safety. The precise cause of the explosion, however, has not been established because no thorough investigation inside the mine was conducted.

A police investigation into the company was dropped. Health and safety charges laid by the government’s Labour Department against CEO Peter Whittall were also dropped in a sordid backroom deal.

Solid Energy’s plan to permanently seal the mine entrance was shelved in February only because of months of protests by the victims’ families.

Sonya Rockhouse, who lost her son Ben in the Pike River mine, told the World Socialist Web Site that the leaked video “shows that we’ve been deceived, that what they’ve told us, that the mine was too dangerous to enter, simply wasn’t true. It begs the question: what else are they not telling us?”

Many experts dispute the government’s statements that re-entry is unsafe. Tony Forster, who was the government’s chief mines inspector from 2013 to 2016, told a parliamentary Select Committee hearing in February how the drift could be explored safely.

The families have rejected claims by the government that the leaked video footage was made available during the Royal Commission. It had not been shown to the families or their lawyers, apart from a few minutes of grainy excerpts. It is not clear who else, aside from the police, knew about the footage.

Rockhouse said: “I’ve always thought that the Royal Commission fell short. I never really understood the purpose of it. We were so naive back then. When they said they were having a Royal Commission I imagined that because it was in a courtroom and it seemed like a court that someone would be held responsible.”

Rockhouse added that workplace safety had not improved since the Royal Commission, despite the government’s claims. On April 24 Radio NZ reported there had been seven workplace deaths within the space of a fortnight in the forestry, farming and construction industries.

Anna Osborne, whose husband Milton died in the mine, told the WSWS that the video showed the drift was “still very intact and we have been misled that the drift was in such a bad state of repair that it was too dangerous to get in.”

She said the mine was “an uninvestigated crime scene. There’s lots of evidence to be found there and it’s going to point the finger at some government departments as well.” The Labour Department knew about safety breaches at Pike River but did nothing to prevent the disaster.

Anna Osborne and Sonya Rockhouse.jpg

In February, the Court of Appeal rejected an appeal by Osborne and Rockhouse seeking a judicial review of the decision to drop charges against Whittall. The court gave the spurious justification that the Pike River directors had made unsolicited payments to the disaster victims’ families. Rockhouse said the families’ lawyers were “astonished” by the decision, which she described as “chequebook justice.” The pair intend to take the case to the Supreme Court.

Osborne explained: “We’re not just doing this for the 29 men who died, we’re doing it for every New Zealand worker. You can’t let this happen in a workplace and no one does a proper investigation.” Rockhouse said: “We have to stand up because if we don’t there’s nothing to stop this from happening again and again. We need to show them that they can’t get away with this. We’re entitled to have truth and justice.”

Rockhouse also told the WSWS: “I’m not pinning my hopes on the opposition parties being elected … We’re out for what we believe is right and we won’t stop until we get it, no matter what party is in.”

The opposition Labour Party, the Greens and New Zealand First have feigned sympathy for the families. Labour leader Andrew Little stated: “It is disturbing that such important footage, which undercuts the Government’s reasons for stopping a re-entry into Pike, has been kept from the public eye for so long.”

The Labour Party has made no promise to re-enter the mine if it wins the September election, but instead called for an investigation into the issue.

The opposition parties’ principal aim is to divert attention from their role in creating the conditions that led to the disaster. Successive National- and Labour-led governments deregulated the mining industry and dismantled the mines inspectorate, allowing companies to self-regulate their safety procedures.

NZ First Party leader Winston Peters has called the mine a “crime scene” and demanded that it be entered. As Treasurer in the National government between 1996 and 1998, however, Peters advocated deregulation, cost cutting, tax cuts and other policies to boost profitability for New Zealand businesses. This is the environment in which Pike River was allowed to cut costs by ignoring basic safety requirements.

The union bureaucracy also helped pave the way for the disaster. These organisations, which function as the adjuncts of big business and the government, did not organise any campaign against the deregulation of mine safety by Labour and National.

In 2010, the Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union (EPMU), now part of the E Tu union, had about 70 members at Pike River. Immediately after the disaster then-EPMU leader Andrew Little joined the government and opposition parties in defending Pike River Coal. He told the media there had been “nothing unusual” about the mine and praised its health and safety record.

In fact the union was aware of workers’ concerns about safety, which had prompted a walk-out on one occasion. It kept quiet about the safety breaches and collaborated with the company to keep the mine running.

The WSWS asked E Tu whether the EPMU knew about the suppressed video recording from 2011, which shows the mine can be safely entered to conduct an investigation. A media liaison replied, “We will not be making any comment at this time.”

VW trade union boss pockets €750,000 per year

Dietmar Henning 

It is no secret that the works council chairmen of big German corporations take home a princely salary. Nevertheless, it still comes as a surprise when the concrete figures involved come to light. It has just been revealed that the salary of Bernd Osterloh, the chairman of the joint works council of the Volkswagen Group, totals around €750,000 per year, i.e., €62,500 a month. He receives a basic salary of some €200,000, with the remainder taking the form of bonuses.

Last Friday the Braunschweiger Zeitung reported that the Braunschweig prosecutor’s office was investigating four top managers at Volkswagen on suspicion of embezzlement. The prosecutor’s office is investigating whether the current VW Group’s executive personnel director, Karlheinz Blessing, his predecessor Horst Neumann and the personnel head of the VW brand, Martin Rosik, and his predecessor Jochen Schumm had granted financial advantages to the company’s works councils. These could legally be regarded as misappropriation of assets.

The heads of personnel are traditionally appointed on the basis of recommendations made by the IG Metall (IGM) trade union. Blessing had only taken over from Neumann at the start of 2016. He began his professional career on the executive board of IG Metall as office manager of former IGM leader Franz Steinkühler. Blessing is a close confidant of former IGM CEO Berthold Huber, who headed the VW supervisory board from April to October 2015, i.e., the period when important personnel decisions were made following the company’s diesel exhaust gas scandal.

Up until 1994, Neumann had worked in the economics department of IG Metall. He also sat on several supervisory boards. In 2005, he took over from Peter Hartz as head of personnel at VW. The supervisory board awarded Neumann a pension of €23 million with the votes of the IGM and SPD functionaries, who have a majority on the VW supervisory board.

It therefore comes as no surprise that, as a result of the latest investigations, the works council and the VW Group immediately declared they would comply with company law regarding the remuneration of members of the works council.

Osterloh told the Wolfsburger Allgemeine Zeitung (WAZ) in an interview: “The most important thing is that I am not being investigated. And I have a clear conscience.” Salary is determined by the company on the basis of clear rules. In addition to the Works Constitution Act, there are provisions on employee compensation at VW. “These rules have been reviewed several times in collaboration with external experts,” Osterloh said. He is treated the same way “as all other managers [!] with corresponding status,” he said.

The VW works council has stressed that Osterloh would earn a tenfold sum if, as originally planned, he had taken up the post of head of personnel in place of Blessing. This plan failed due to the exhaust gas fraud. “If I were worried about the money, I would not be a works councillor,” Osterloh told the Braunschweiger Zeitung.

According to the Works Constitution Act, the works council is an honorary office. Membership of the council is not supposed to involve either privileges or disadvantages. The law stipulates that works councillors must remain in the same salary grouping as colleagues who carry out a comparable activity. In addition, payment should increase in line with their chances of promotion.

For trade unionists, it is clear that the most significant step towards improving their careers (and bank balances) is involvement in a works council. Osterloh is a trained industrial salesman, who joined the VW works council in 1990 and assumed its presidency 15 years later, in 2005. His predecessor Klaus Volkert, together with head of personnel Hartz, had to quit because Hartz had paid out for prostitutes and luxury trips for Volkert out of company funds. Volkert, who was later sentenced for “fraud” and imprisoned for nearly two years, received more than €300,000 a year for his works council activities.

When Osterloh succeeded Volkert in 2005, he emphasized that the “principle of total transparency” applied. At that time, he estimated his salary at €6,500 gross monthly, or €78,000 per year. This would have been the “normal” salary for an “ordinary works council member,” before becoming Volkert’s deputy one year previously. Osterloh had already admitted in 2008 that his salary had increased to €120,000 within three to four years.

Another seven years later, his basic salary was already €200,000 euros, without bonuses—a salary increase of 256 percent in 12 to 13 years.

Payments to the IG Metall executives and the chairman of the Works Council are part of a corrupt trade union network within the VW Group. Uwe Hücks at Porsche and Peter Mosch at Audi probably pocket similar sums. The interesting issue is what makes the chairman of the works council so valuable to the Volkswagen Group?

Sixty-year-old Osterloh hit the headlines as “Germany’s most powerful labour leader” in the bourgeois media. Osterloh does not earn his money because he negotiates “on equal terms” with management. He pockets millions because he does the work of management.

The so-called VW model, which involves cooperation as shareholders between the executive, trade unions, works councils and Lower Saxony’s state government, was regarded in the past as a role model of “German co-determination” and “co-management.” Today it epitomises the transformation of the trade unions and their company representatives into allies of management against the workforce.

At VW, the works council and IG Metall not only work closely with the executive to impose management decisions, they also draw up the plans for stripping jobs and playing off one plant against all others.

In an interview with the Manager magazine, Osterloh explained that the works councils had drawn up the company’s so-called Future Pact last November. “If things do not happen, that need to be done, then I am the one who raises them,” Osterloh boasted.

The IGM functionaries Blessing and Osterloh jointly drew up the “Future Pact,” which involves the dismantling of 30,000 jobs combined with a massive worsening of working conditions.

In the months that followed there were evidently differences between VW executive Herbert Diess and Osterloh about the concrete implementation of the pact, but at the beginning of May Diess then gave an the interview to the Süddeutsche Zeitung reporting that he and Osterloh had had “good talks” and “we’re in agreement.”

Now it appears a new company offensive is being prepared. It may well be the case that the complaint that led to the investigations of the Braunschweig public prosecutor’s office is part of an internal conflict between the works council and IG Metall on the one hand, and some other shareholders on the other. This was the background to the former sex and corruption affair at VW. IGM and SPD leader Hartz and works councillor Volkert lost their posts as an attempt was made to disrupt the “VW model.”

Whistleblower Chelsea Manning to be released from prison today

Genevieve Leigh 

Army private Chelsea Manning, the military intelligence analyst who made public evidence of US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, is scheduled to be released from military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, today after completing more than 7 years of her 35-year prison sentence.

Chelsea Manning was arrested by the Army in 2010 after providing WikiLeaks with hundreds of thousands of internal Army “incident logs” and about 250,000 diplomatic cables from American embassies around the world. In August 2013, she pleaded guilty to 20 of 22 charges against her and was sentenced to 35 years in prison, a sentence 10 times longer than any previous punishment imposed on a federal employee, military or civilian, for leaking classified information.

After receiving the sentence, Manning announced that she was transgendered and took the name Chelsea Manning (previously she had identified as a man and was known by the name of Bradley Manning). She later began hormone therapy and requested gender reassignment surgery, which the Army repeatedly denied.

The release of Chelsea Manning is a politically significant event. Manning is rightfully a hero in the eyes of millions of workers and young people around the world who recognize what extraordinary courage it took to inform the American public about the criminal actions being carried out by the US military.

The number of crimes exposed by the material provided by Manning is staggering. Included in the leaked material was the infamous video that went on to be published on the Internet by WikiLeaks under the title “Collateral Murder,” showing an American helicopter attack on civilians in Baghdad that killed 16 people, including two Reuters journalists.

Other documents including “after-action reports” describing US soldiers’ experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, proving that civilian deaths were far higher than officially acknowledged. The cables revealed damning evidence of official US lying, including dossiers on the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay proving that most of them had no significant role in terrorist operations.

Despite the massive evidence provided, not a single person was jailed, arrested, or even charged for any of the documented crimes. Instead, the military brass together with the Obama administration ruthlessly persecuted Manning for what is a far greater “crime” in the eyes of the ruling class: exposing the murderous nature of the US war machine. The US political and military establishment, seething with anger, used Chelsea Manning to set an example for any other potential whistleblowers.

The retaliation was merciless. Immediately following the revelations, Manning was forcibly detained in an outdoor cage in an attempt to break her psychologically. From July 2010 to April 2011, she was held under atrocious conditions at Quantico Marine brig in Virginia, much of that time stripped naked as a “security” measure. All told, Chelsea Manning spent nearly a year and a half in solitary confinement, 23 hours a day, a form of detention classified as torture by human rights groups.

After sentencing, conditions would continue to worsen for Manning, leading to two separate attempts to take her own life, for which she was threatened with more severe treatment. Just last year, the Army considered sentencing Manning to indefinite solitary confinement for possessing unauthorized reading material and an expired tube of toothpaste.

President Obama commuted Manning’s sentence to just over seven years, in one of his final actions before leaving office January 20. This was no great humanitarian action, as some sought to characterize it at the time, but rather a calculation that the global image of US imperialism would suffer if, as appeared likely, Manning had been driven by her ordeal to carry out a third and successful suicide attempt.

It was Obama and Hillary Clinton, in particular, who spearheaded the persecution of Manning and other whistleblowers. The class hatred of the Democratic Party toward Manning is demonstrated by their silence as she reaches her final day in prison. Moreover, under conditions where the Democratic Party is lining up with the military-intelligence apparatus to indict the Trump administration for handing over “secrets” to Russian envoys, the Democrats wish to distance themselves as much as possible from the example of Chelsea Manning, who offended the CIA and Pentagon by handing over evidence of their crimes to the American people.

Manning has kept in touch with her supporters and the outside world throughout her experience mainly through Twitter. Recently, she wrote of her pending release: “I want that indescribable feeling of connection with people and nature again, without razor wire or a visitation booth. I want to be able to hug my family and friends again. And swimming—I want to go swimming!”

It has recently been reported that Manning, who is now 29, will remain an active duty soldier in the U.S. Army after today’s release. She will be placed on voluntary excess leave rather than being discharged. While it is technically possible, it is highly unlikely that she will be called to actual military service. Under this status she will be unpaid, but will have access to health care and other benefits that will allow her to complete her gender reassignment surgery. It should be noted that these benefits are not guaranteed. If Manning’s appeal of her court-martial conviction is denied, she could be dishonorably discharged and lose her health benefits.

Manning has not publicly announced any plans for what she will do after today beyond her surgery. Her ACLU attorney, Chase Strangio, told NBC News, “She is waiting to experience life outside of prison before declaring any future plans. ... After so many years of government control over her body and gender, I know she is eager to grow her hair, express her gender and negotiate decisions on her own terms.”

While Manning’s release from prison will grant her physical freedom, she will still be restricted in many ways. One important aspect of the voluntary excess leave status is that it makes her vulnerable to new military retribution if she “steps out of line” in the eyes of the military establishment. Manning’s military defense counsel, David Coombs, told NBC News that “Chelsea is still subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). ... She wouldn’t be charged again for the same offenses, but if she committed a new crime, the military would still have jurisdiction over her.”

An offense warranting military action includes things such as a fistfight, speaking or writing critically of the political or military establishment, or revealing previously unreleased classified information. “You would want to be careful in terms of what you want to write or say if you’re still under military control,” Coombs warned. “Let’s say you write something critical, now you run the real chance of being called on the carpet for that.”

Nonetheless, Manning has voiced some critical political views through Twitter since her commutation. In a guest column in Britain’s Guardian, Manning wrote that “after eight years of attempted compromise and relentless disrespect in return, we are moving into darker times.” Additionally, Manning has said former president Barack Obama left a “vulnerable legacy,” noting that he had achieved “very few permanent accomplishments.”

The persecution of more whistleblowers than all other administrations combined, including Chelsea Manning, will forever be a hallmark of the Obama administration. This policy was embraced by all prominent members of the Democratic party, including then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who in December 2011, while Manning was being tortured and persecuted, defended the campaign against her on the grounds that “some information which is sensitive, which does affect the security of individuals and relationships, deserves to be protected and we will continue to take necessary steps to do so.”

For its part, the Trump administration, determined to outdo the reactionary policies of the Obama administration in every way, has recently escalated the witch-hunt and persecution of other prominent whistleblowers—Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, and Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower now in forced exile in Russia.

Snowden, in a recent comment, expressed his solidarity with Manning’s ongoing struggle, saying, “I’m grateful that Chelsea will finally have a chance to enjoy the freedoms she gave so much to defend. Courage to her—and volume to her voice.”

The increasingly vicious crackdown on whistleblowers reveals most openly the immense fear within the ruling establishment of growing opposition within the working class. The true face of US imperialism has again and again been exposed with the help of brave individuals like Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden. The defense of these individuals, and an end to the crimes that they have risked their lives to expose, can only come from the mobilization of the international working class.

Ford to cut as many as 20,000 jobs worldwide

Jerry White

Just days after shareholders and investors criticized the top executives of Ford Motor Company for the “pathetic performance” of its stock price, the Wall Street Journal reported that Ford is planning to cut 10 percent of its global workforce. The jobs massacre, primarily targeting salaried workers, could affect up to 20,000 of the company’s 201,000 workers worldwide.

The number two US automaker has reported steady profits for seven straight years, including record earnings and operating margins in the last two years, and $1.6 billion in profits in the first quarter of 2017. Nevertheless, Wall Street has punished the Dearborn, Michigan-based corporation by driving down its share value by 40 percent since mid-2014.

Investors anticipating an end to the long boom in US vehicle sales want automakers to quickly slash the number of salaried and hourly employees they hired to meet growing demand since 2010.

While it more than halved its US hourly workforce, from 88,386 in 2004 to 40,398 in 2010, the automaker added roughly 15,000 mostly low-paid hourly workers over the last seven years. It also has 30,000 salaried workers in the US, and a 10 percent cut would wipe out 3,000 jobs.

Chicago Ford Assembly

Insiders who spoke to the Journal said Ford would outline its job cuts as early as this week. They said it was unclear whether the plan would include reductions in the hourly workforce at Ford’s factories in the US and abroad. “Ford has said it expects its profits to fall in 2017 and has flagged slowing sales in the U.S. and China—two of the world’s largest auto markets,” the Journal noted.

GM has already responded to a growing inventory of unsold cars by slashing thousands of jobs and eliminating shifts in Michigan, Ohio and other states. It has also spun off its German-based Opel and UK-based Vauxhall divisions to French carmaker Peugeot-Citroen, ending nearly 90 years of GM manufacturing in Europe.

The job cuts explode the myth propagated by the Trump administration and the news media about supposed “full employment” in the United States. Trump, with the full backing of the United Auto Workers (UAW) and other unions, claims that his “America First” nationalism and threats of trade war against China and Mexico, along with proposals for drastic deregulation of business, would be a boon for American workers.

The stock market boom has only concealed the crisis of the real economy in the US, which is profoundly impacted by the global economic slowdown and the decades-long decay of American industry. The fall in auto sales, which is closely bound up with rising interest rates, record car loan defaults and increased sales of used and formerly leased vehicles to large number of Americans who cannot afford new cars, could signal a far broader economic downturn.

In a statement, Ford said it would not speculate on any “new people efficiency actions,” a euphemism for mass layoffs, but would remain focused on its three strategic priorities to “create value and drive profitable growth.” This included: “[F]ortifying the profit pillars of our core business, transforming traditionally underperforming areas of our core business and investing aggressively, but prudently, in emerging opportunities.” The statement added that “reducing costs and becoming as lean and efficient as possible also remain part of that work.”

During Ford’s Investor Day event last September, the company’s chief financial officer, Bob Shanks, said Ford expects to cut “about $3 billion annually in 2016, 2017 and 2018” to support investments and expansions into capital-heavy investments in the areas of electrification, autonomy and mobility, which Ford calls “emerging opportunities.”

Reuters, citing a person briefed on the new job cuts, reported that Ford plans to “offer generous early retirement incentives” to reduce its salaried headcount by October 1, but does not plan cuts to its hourly workforce or its production.

Ford, however, is already reducing the number of its hourly workers in Europe. In Germany, where the company employs 24,000 workers, Ford has made voluntary buyout offers to “a limited number of staff over the past few months,” according to the IG Metall union, which claims it has not been informed of a bigger job-cut program.

Ford has already discussed job cuts with the Unite union in the United Kingdom. The company plans to cut 1,160 jobs from its Bridgend plant by 2021, leaving only 600 workers at the Welsh engine facility and casting doubt on its future. The site makes small engines for Ford and more-powerful V6 and V8 engines for Jaguar Land Rover.

“The company’s performance has been lagging, even during times when the US market was doing extremely well,” Sascha Gommel, a Frankfurt-based automotive analyst with Commerzbank, told Reuters. “Ford, like other carmakers, is under pressure to stem increasing investments in future technologies, so they need to make adjustments elsewhere,” he said, adding that the US and South America could see the biggest hits.

At the close of the day on US markets Tuesday, Ford and General Motors were trading at $10.94 and $33.42 per share respectively, a fraction of the stock price of specialty carmaker Tesla ($317.01 per share), which has yet to make a profit.

The descent of the Detroit automakers’ share value—despite record profits—is part of a longer trend, in which financial parasitism has surpassed industrial production as the main means through which the American ruling elite accumulates its vast fortunes.

The Ford job cuts were announced the same day as the New York Times reported that hedge fund manager Ray Dalio made $1.4 billion in 2016. Summing up the ruling elite’s contempt for production and the working class, Dalio once said, “The money that’s made from manufacturing stuff is a pittance in comparison to the amount of money made from shuffling money around.”

Like Ford’s CEO Mark Fields, General Motors top executive Mary Barra has also been under pressure by Wall Street to funnel even more money into the pockets of its richest investors. Having failed to push up its share values, despite squandering some $10 billion on a stock buyback program, Barra is facing demands by Greenlight Capital Inc., a hedge fund run by David Einhorn, to restructure GM’s debt and bring in new board members.

In 2015, Harry Wilson, a former member of President Obama’s auto taskforce, led the charge of four hedge funds to demand that GM increase its stock buyback program. This only underscored the real meaning of Obama’s auto industry restructuring in 2009, when the Democratic president handed GM and Chrysler over to Wall Street sharks like Wilson to halve the wages of young autoworkers, wipe out tens of thousands of jobs, free the auto companies of their retiree health care obligations and impose brutal speed-up on workers to enrich the financial aristocracy. Although Ford did not go into bankruptcy, with the backing of the UAW it followed the same cost-cutting path.

Commenting on the Ford CEO, the Wall Street Journal noted, “Mr. Fields, a 28-year veteran of the company, ran Ford’s core North American unit for several years and served as architect of many of those downsizing efforts. He has overseen several tense negotiations with United Auto Worker officials. He also shrank the company’s European operation earlier last decade, earning a reputation as a hard-nosed leader willing to attack the cumbersome cost structure that long burdened Detroit’s car companies.”

Far from engaging in “tense negotiations” with the UAW, Ford has relied on the union apparatus to suppress opposition to its downsizing plans. Following the ratification of the UAW-Ford contract in 2015, which workers said only passed due to ballot-stuffing by the UAW, Ford executives hailed their union “partners” for pushing through a deal that kept labor cost increases below the rate of inflation—despite a push by workers to recoup lost income after a decade-long wage freeze—and expanding the number of part-time and temporary employees who could be quickly sacked at the first sign of declining sales.

“We’ve just had a bunch of new people hire in,” James, a worker with five years at Ford’s Chicago Assembly Plant, told the World Socialist Web Site. “I can’t imagine how that would affect you, if you had just started getting your financials in order, and now you’re about to lose your job.

“At the end of the day, investors’ dividends have been breaking records. They’ve got plenty of money. The company and us, we have different needs altogether, but they’re more concerned about the investors’ profits. That’s the problem with capitalism, this whole society and the powers that be.”