Volkswagen plans to dismiss all temporary contract workers in German plants

Dietmar Henning

On 4 January, the Tagesschau newspaper reported that the Volkswagen Group plans to dismiss its entire temporary contract workforce by 2020. The move is a consequence of the “Future Pact” agreed by VW, the IG Metall union (IGM), and the German automaker’s works councils one year ago.

A statement by the company read, “Unfortunately, we cannot continue to take over (temporary contract) staff as in previous years…Volkswagen and the entire auto industry is undergoing profound changes for which the Volkswagen brand has prepared with its Future Pact.”

The decision applies to the 400 temporary workers currently employed in the company’s main plant in Wolfsburg as well as temporary workers in other VW factories. In December temp contract workers demonstrated at the company’s commercial vehicle plant in Hanover to oppose 200 impending job cuts. In the end, 60 temp workers received contract extensions, 47 were transferred to the VW plant in Kassel and over 90 lost their jobs.

The 200 temporary workers had been hired at the Wolfsburg plant in 2015 through VW’s own temporary employment agency, Autovision, and transferred to the VW plant in Hanover in the spring of 2017. The temporary workers had hoped they would obtain full time positions based on the company’s “good order situation.” The fact that they have been thrown in the streets, despite the company’s full order books, has provoked widespread anger.

To add insult to injury, the laid-off workers are going to be replaced by other temporary workers currently employed in the VW plant in Osnabrück. Three hundred of these workers were previously employed at the VW factory in Emden. They were transferred to Osnabrück last April as part of the “Future Pact” plan. One hundred of the workers returned to Emden at the beginning of the year and those who are now working in Hanover are supposed to return to Emden in 2019.

The shunting of workers from plant to plant and city to city serves, above all, to disorient and discipline them. With the assistance of IG Metall and the works council, the company is able to hang the Damocles sword of job losses over the heads of these workers.

As a consequence of the Future Pact around 30,000 jobs are due to be slashed during the next few years, or more than one seventh of the company’s total workforce of 200,000 worldwide. In Germany, 23,000 jobs are to be axed. While temporary workers are the first to lose their jobs, the same fate awaits workers employed by other automakers such as Porsche or plants formerly owned by GM-Opel.

VW personnel manager Karlheinz Blessing and works council chief Bernd Osterloh—both longtime functionaries of the Social Democratic Party and IG Metall—have worked closely to prepare and enforce the bloodletting of jobs.

Blessing joined the SPD in 1974 and was active in its youth movement in Baden-Württemberg. In 1984, he was promoted inside the union to become office manager of IGM chief Franz Steinkühler. In 1991, Blessing moved from the IGM headquarters to the SPD headquarters and for two years was federal director of the SPD. He was then appointed head of personnel at the Dillinger Hütte steel works and earned his spurs slashing jobs in the steel industry of Saarland.

SPD and IGM functionaries sit on both sides of the negotiating table in the VW headquarters in Wolfsburg to finalise the company’s job cuts. Osterloh defended the latest dismissals in a detailed interview with the Wolfsburger Allgemeinen Zeitung. “The Future Pact is a success. We have already realised savings of around two billion euros.” Volkswagen is also on course with its retirement scheme, Osterloh declared, noting that “9,200 colleagues have opted for early retirement.” The Future Pact, he said, ensures “that the VW brand has the financial power to invest in its future products.”

Osterloh claimed the dismissal of temporary workers was less a consequence of the Future Pact and more a result of declining capacity utilization, even though the company chalked up record sales in 2017.

In the first half of 2018, the VW Works Council chief “called upon the company to consider how we deal with temporary work in future,” suggesting, “In future, Volkswagen should employ people directly for a limited period of time,” instead of through a temp agency. “Then at least the plant management can discharge colleagues when their contracts expire,” he declared.

In his interview Osterloh also indicated that the company planned to reduce the number of apprenticeships. In any event, the company’s plans to switch to electric-powered vehicles, together with more automation, means the current job cuts are only the beginning. Significantly less workers are needed to produce electric motors, Spiegel Online wrote recently, citing representatives of IGM, that at VW “10 to 15 plants will become redundant.”

These developments form the background to the current negotiations in the German metal and electrical industry. Wage contracts covering 3.9 million steel, auto and engineering workers expire at the end of January.

IGM officials are proposing a reduction in weekly working hours to 28 from 35—with a right to return to full-time hours after two years—for shift workers and those caring for children or other relatives. However, only workers in the lowest pay groups would receive any sort of compensation for shorter work hours. Meanwhile, IG Metall is calling for a 6 percent wage increase.

There is popular support for reduced working hours. The union regularly sanctions “exceptions” to the 35-hour week, including weekend work, when production needs demand it. IG Metall’s proposal, however, has little to do with improving “work-life balance” for workers caring for children and elderly parents. Its chief concern is mollifying the rank-and-file opposition that will erupt over the coming restructuring and downsizing of the auto industry and its impact on thousands of full-time workers.

In December, IG Metall and the works council reached a job-cutting deal, cynically referred to a “social framework agreement for a sustainable future” with the French PSA Group, which is planning to eliminate as many as 4,500 of the 19,000 jobs at Opel plants in Germany, which PSA took over from General Motors. The scheme includes early retirement packages, increased “internal mobility” and shorter hours under a scheme dubbed a “new mobile working programme,” supposedly to “contribute to the employees’ work-life balance.”

Under IGM’s proposal for VW, part-time workers presently working longer than 28 hours would be compensated for their lost hours and would make more money than part-timers currently working 28 hours. The latter would also not have a right to full-time employment, in contrast to those who benefit from the contractually agreed reduction in working time.

VW is rejecting the proposal based on its specious concern about upholding the “equal treatment of workers.”

For years VW and many other German companies, with the assistance of IGM and the works council, have carried out a systematic campaign to split workers in terms of hours worked and remuneration. In addition to temporary contract workers, VW employs agency workers and various other types of contract workers—often doing similar or the same work as full-time workers but for very different wages.

IG Metall has reacted with phony howls of disapproval and has announced a “wave of warning strikes” by VW, Porsche and other workers as the countdown to the January 31 wage contract expiration nears. This is, however, part of a well-established pattern. Any protests will be minor and ineffectual, while being limited to a select group of workers to prevent a broader mobilization of the working class.

It is clear the attack on temporary workers is the prelude to massive job cuts and attacks on other social gains of the working class. Rank-and-file workers must oppose the conspiracy of the auto companies, IGM, the works council and the SPD and build factory committees to unite full-time, part-time and temporary workers in a common fight against layoffs and the rollback of their conditions. The wildcat strike by Ford Romania workers and last year’s strikes by VW workers in Slovakia and Fiat workers in Serbia show the growing international opposition of workers to poverty wage wages and the possibility to unite the autoworkers across borders to fight the global automakers.

German foreign minister demands aggressive assertion of great power interests

Christoph Vandreier

Exploratory talks on forming a new government between the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Christian Social Union (CSU) and Social Democratic Party (SPD) have been long and drawn out because all three parties know full well that their plans for increased militarism, strengthening the repressive state apparatus and further social attacks are broadly despised among the population. However, even though these parties have agreed to not speak publicly about the state of the talks and to draft the new government’s programme behind the backs of the population, a clearer picture is emerging.

While the CSU demanded a massive military rearmament at the end of last year, Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel (SPD) set the tone in the new year in an interview with Der Spiegel last Thursday. He advocated a great power policy for Germany, directed against Russia and China in particular, but also the United States.

The combination of his aggressive language and absurd attempt to pose as a victim, recalled nothing so much as the argument of “enforced self-defence” used by Wilhelm II to justify to the Reichstag Germany’s entry into the First World War. Gabriel stated, “Vegetarians have it tough in a world full of carnivores,” and bluntly called for rearmament and a militarist policy.

Germany could no longer depend on “France, Britain and especially the Americans enforcing our interests around the world,” Gabriel declared. The assumption that the US would come to Germany’s aid in the event of war should not be overstretched, he continued. “In an uncomfortable world, we can’t afford as Europeans to take it easy and wait on the US,” he said.

The entire world is already taking advantage of Germany, he added. “In reality, Moscow, Beijing and Washington also have something in common: they don’t value the European Union at all, they abuse it,” Gabriel insisted. Authoritarian states were making fun of the EU because its member states were failing to place their own national interests above those of the international community.

The portrayal of a moral, integral “vegetarian” EU, which has to assert itself in the shark-infested waters of global politics, is obviously nonsense. Germany and other EU states are pursuing an aggressive foreign policy, waging brutal wars in Afghanistan, Syria, and Mali, and menacing Russia with a major build-up of troops on its borders.

Gabriel’s rhetoric is aimed at initiating a further escalation of German militarism and freeing Berlin from any restrictions. Europe was “not adequately” projecting “strength, technology, and political and military influence,” according to the Foreign Minister. It had to therefore rearm and extend its influence: “We have to show that those who view us in such a way have made a mistake, that we can agree, that as a community of democratic and free states, we are economically successful and are gaining influence politically. For this, Europe also has to project its power.”

For example, Europe should challenge China in Africa, and Russia in the Balkans. “China is steadily gaining so much influence in the south and east that some European states no longer dare to take decisions against Chinese interests. It is noticeable everywhere: China is the only country in the world with a real geopolitical strategy.”

Gabriel wants to counter this with a major European military build-up, under German leadership. Although he criticised the CSU proposal for Germany to unilaterally increase its defence budget to 2 percent of GDP, he called for the same policy to be pursued in cooperation with France. This was the only way for Germany to make its voice heard on the world stage.

According to the Foreign Minister, such a policy should not be based on values, but oriented towards interests. “To date we have frequently defined European values, we are much too weak with the definition of common interests,” he said. Under these conditions, Germany could not be successful “in a world of loud, tough-talking states representing their interests.”

In a keynote foreign policy address in December, Gabriel declared that “there is no longer a comfortable place on the sidelines of international politics” for Germany. In the speech, he warned against a “fixation on law as the form for overcoming political challenges.” He called for “political-strategic thinking,” whose gaze did not drift “to the horizon of moral norms and imperatives.”

In his speech, as in the recent interview, Gabriel referred explicitly to the political scientist Herfried Münkler. The professor at Berlin’s Humboldt University has become the most important spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry. In his new book about the Thirty Years War, Münkler calls for “the placing of morals under the guardianship of strategic thinking.” Prior to that, he called for Germany to become Europe’s hegemon and “disciplinarian.”

The consequences of such policies, which are based on Germany’s imperialist interests, were summed up by Münkler’s colleague, Jörg Baberowski. The professor for Eastern European history at HU stated in October 2014 at a discussion on “Germany: an interventionist power,” referring to the war in Syria, “if one is not willing to take hostages, burn villages, hang people and spread fear and terror, as the terrorists do, if one is not prepared to do such things, then one can never win such a conflict and it is better to keep out altogether.”

The right-wing extremist professor, who came to prominence not only for such glorifications of war, but also due to his downplaying of the Nazis’ crimes and agitation against refugees, was explicitly supported last year by SPD politician and HU president Sabine Kunst and defended against criticism from students.

The militarist and inhumane agenda, developed by professors like Münkler and Baberowski, is now official foreign policy. This confirms the warnings made by the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE), which has systematically resisted right-wing and militarist ideology at HU in recent years. The youth organisation of the International Committee of the Fourth International has organised meetings, written articles and distributed leaflets which have pointed to the significance of the work of Münkler, Baberowski and others for the revival of German militarism.

In the foreword to the book “Scholarship or war propaganda,” which has documented the conflict at the HU, we wrote two and a half years ago that the book dealt with “the relationship between scholarship and politics in periods of militarism, mounting international conflict and growing social tensions. It focuses on the question: Will the universities remain centres of scholarship and free criticism? Or will they once again become state-directed cadre-training centres for right-wing and militarist ideologies, as previously in German history?”

The ruling elite, which confronts mass opposition to its war policies, is very conscious of the significance of this conflict. In the interview with Der Spiegel, Gabriel expressed disappointment that there were an insufficient number of such cadre-training centres, stating, “Unfortunately, we have no experience and no real structure for strategic considerations: there is not a think tank culture here. One of the tasks of foreign policy will be to develop this intellectual capacity in Europe and Germany.”

Gabriel’s plans for a German great power policy not only vindicate the IYSSE’s struggle at the HU. They underscore the necessity of constructing the IYSSE as an international youth movement for socialism, uniting youth and young workers around the world in a struggle against capitalism and war.

Puerto Rico, more than 100 days after Hurricane Maria: The class issues

Genevieve Leigh

Over a hundred days have passed since Puerto Rico was hit by Hurricane María, the most powerful storm to make landfall on the island in nearly a century. The prevailing devastation in the US colonial territory is a grim illustration of the attitude of the ruling class, not only to the workers and youth of Puerto Rico, but to those on the US mainland as well: one of complete indifference and contempt.

Every aspect of life for Puerto Ricans has been affected. The ongoing blackout referred to on the island as “apagón” is the longest and largest power outage in modern US history. Downed power lines still litter the streets from Aguadilla to San Juan, while bundles of wires and debris line the sidewalks. Only 55 percent of the island has had power restored, and even these “recovered” areas experience frequent blackouts from the highly unstable electrical grid.

Lack of power means that hundreds of thousands of people are struggling to survive without basic necessities, including running water, refrigeration, washing machines, ovens and internet. In the year 2018, in a territory of the “most advanced” capitalist country in the world, old fashioned washboards are being sold in every corner market.

Thousands of businesses remain closed, many of which will never reopen. With an official unemployment rate of 10.8 percent, nearly 118,000 people are out of work—a number many are predicting will skyrocket as small businesses continue to shut down and ramifications of the recent tax bill take effect.

Areas outside of the wealthy tourist destinations are drowning in garbage. Damage from the hurricane created 6.2 million cubic yards of waste and debris—enough trash to fill about 43 football stadiums with piles of waste eight stories high—overflowing the landfills which were well beyond capacity before the storm hit.

Over 250,000 homes were lost to the storm. An unprecedented flood of foreclosures is expected in the coming months. Thousands of homes and cars were left abandoned by the 200,000 people who have emigrated from the island to the mainland, many taking with them only what they could carry.

Up to 300,000 more are expected to follow. The consequences of this mass emigration will be immense both on the island and the mainland. Already there have been reports of a shortage of maternity doctors for laboring mothers in Puerto Rico; and on the mainland, school systems in areas with high numbers of Puerto Rican refugees are strained for resources to provide for the influx of new students.

As has been the case with every natural disaster in the US from Katrina in 2005, to the string of hurricanes in 2017, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has proven completely incapable of providing even a semblance of adequate relief.

After FEMA food and water finally arrived after weeks of delay due to legal restrictions bound up the island’s colonial status, the distribution process was completely botched. A WSWS reporting team found that nearly everyone on the island had a story about failed FEMA efforts: one worker in Bayamón said that it took over 30 days for the first aid packages to arrive in her town. A waitress in San Juan told our reporters that she stood in lines of 500 people nightly to receive small packages of food, which regularly run out before all those in need are served.

In the midst of the unfolding catastrophe, FEMA granted a newly created Florida company a contract worth more than $30 million to provide residents with emergency tarps, which quickly became one of the most coveted resources on the island, providing the only protection from the elements for hundreds of thousands of residents who lost their roofs in the storm.

The company, Bronze Star LLC, never delivered those urgently needed supplies, which to this day remain in demand by hurricane victims on the island.

The complete absence of planning for the hurricane and the lack of any significant response to the devastation by the local and federal government has had deadly consequences. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people died needlessly in the weeks and months following the hurricane, in darkened hospital rooms and unpowered homes, unable to receive basic medical treatment.

The recent announcement from Puerto Rico’s Governor Ricardo Rosselló that his administration will now investigate all post-hurricane deaths is an acknowledgement of what can no longer be concealed and everyone on the island already knows, that the scale of fatalities was at least 10 times the number officially claimed.

Exactly how many lives were lost as a result of the incompetent and criminally indifferent response of the Trump administration and both parties will likely never be known.

While the immediate cause of this crisis was a natural phenomenon, the destruction wrought by María during the 72 hours it tore through the island would not have been imaginable without the century of destruction wrought by the US ruling class since its seizure of the island from Spain in 1898.

Natural disasters reveal social inequality and lay bare the class character of society. In the case of Puerto Rico, Hurricane María exposed before the world the extreme poverty and social decay prevailing in what has been described as Washington’s “perfumed colony.”

The semi-colonial status of Puerto Rico has allowed the ruling class to carry out a full scale assault on Puerto Rican workers, leaving the vast majority of the island to live in desperate poverty. In addition to serving as a major base of operations for the US military, the island’s economy has been driven into the ground in order to provide cheap labor and a tax haven for US-based multinational corporations. Residents of the island cannot vote for president, send only one non-voting delegate to Congress and receive reduced welfare and other federal benefits.

Political life on the island has been dominated by sections of the local ruling class which attempt to channel the legitimate mass anger of workers behind three basic outlets: arguing either to maintain the status quo of the “free associated state,” to incorporate Puerto Rico as a US state, or to pursue national independence.

The essential question of Puerto Rico’s status, however, like that of the US and every other country, will be decided not in a three-way contest between these factions of the local ruling elite, but rather in a struggle to determine which class will rule the island; whether its economy will be developed to serve the interests of a thin layer of privileged businessmen and the comfortable middle class, or those of the masses of workers and poor.

The struggle of the Puerto Rican workers and oppressed has erupted repeatedly in opposition to both class exploitation and semi-colonial oppression, with mass strikes and protests against privatizations, layoffs and austerity measures, struggles of students against the gutting of public education and the militant protests that forced the US Navy to halt its use of the island of Vieques as a bombing range.

The effort by the local government and the ruling elite in Puerto Rico to cover over this reality of social inequality and class struggle is best expressed in their post-Hurricane Maria slogan “Puerto Rico se levanta” (Puerto Rico rises up) which has been plastered on billboards and businesses in every city and town. Their aim is to obscure the class divisions on the island by promoting a unified Puerto Rican identity.

Contrary to their claims, however, there is, in fact, no single “Puerto Rico.” As with the United States and every other country in the world, there is a Puerto Rico of the rich living in air conditioned high rises unmolested by the devastation from the storm, and a Puerto Rico of the working class struggling on the edge of subsistence, without power, without water and drowning in debris and garbage.

As the working class of Puerto Rico was living through this catastrophe with little to no assistance, the US congress was preoccupied with passing a historic tax bill, which will funnel trillions of dollars to the richest layers of society.

And what of the Democratic Party? No demonstrations were called, no new relief funds proposed, no demands made for the cancellation or repudiation of the debt. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders was dispatched for a brief visit during which he concealed the fact that the brutal austerity measures implemented over the last two years were, in fact, a direct product of Democratic Party policies.

Obama’s Financial Oversight Board, a dictatorship of the banks created in 2016 to squeeze the islands’ $70 billion debt out of its impoverished workers, made drastic cuts to education, pensions and social services. Before the storm, the poverty rate stood above 40 percent (twice as high as the poorest US state), the electrical grid was barely functioning, and unemployment was at 10 percent.

The unfolding crisis in Puerto Rico is far from unique. It parallels every other social crime committed against the working class throughout the world: Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana, the Grenfell fire in London, the poisoning of the water in Flint Michigan, the bankruptcy of Detroit. In every instance the response is the same. A pittance is thrown to working people, who are left to die or recover on their own, while billions of dollars and resources are hoarded by an ever smaller minority. “Natural” disasters are seized upon by banks, corporations and politicians as opportunities to push through new lucrative financial schemes and backroom deals.

The issues brought to the surface by Hurricane María in Puerto Rico are class issues. The fate of the working class of Puerto Rico is the fate of the entire working class, in the United States and internationally. In a country where three billionaires control more wealth than half the population, with a $700 billion annual military budget used for the destruction of peoples around the world, it is absurd to believe the lies that “nothing more could be done” to provide for an island no larger than the state of Connecticut.

The Socialist Equality Party calls for the immediate implementation of a massive public works program to rebuild the island; to ensure that every person has a safe and comfortable home; access to health care, to clean water and to free quality education. We call for the immediate abolition of the debt of Puerto Rico accrued through decades of colonial oppression and parasitic and corrupt financial schemes. We call for the immediate expropriation of the wealth of the financial aristocracy to fund these demands. The productive forces monopolized by the ruling elite around the world must be mobilized and organized to meet social need everywhere, by transforming them into public utilities.

The greatest ally of Puerto Rican workers and youth are their fellow workers in Flint Michigan who have also been denied access to clean water, and those in London who have become refugees in “their own” country after the Grenfell fire, and in Detroit where the working class has suffered the same consequences of a debt crisis they did not create. The solution for all of the problems facing these workers can be achieved only through a unified and conscious political struggle of the international working class against the capitalist system and for socialism.

The fight for a socialist solution to the crisis capitalism has created in Puerto Rico, and for the unification of the struggles of Puerto Rican workers and youth with those of working people all over the planet, requires, above all, the building of a new revolutionary leadership. This means joining and building the Socialist Equality Party and the International Youth and Students for Social Equality in Puerto Rico.

Iran: Anti-government protests abate in face of mass repression

Jordan Shilton & Keith Jones

The wave of anti-government protests by unemployed youth and impoverished workers that swept across Iran for at least five days beginning December 28 has now abated.

While the clerical political establishment has staged a week of large counter-demonstrations and security forces are proclaiming that the challenge to Iran’s bourgeois nationalist regime has been successfully quelled, none of the acute socio-economic problems that propelled tens of thousands to take to the streets of more than 80 cities and towns have been attenuated, let alone resolved. It is only a matter of time before working class anger and opposition bursts forth anew.

The Iranian regime responded to the protests, which were driven by anger over food-price increases, mass joblessness, pervasive social inequality and years of government austerity, with repression. Police and security forces killed over 20 protesters and arrested many hundreds more.

The government has justified the security crackdown with spurious claims US imperialism and its allies fomented and manipulated the unrest.

Yesterday, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) issued a statement saying, “Iran’s revolutionary people along with tens of thousands of Basij forces (IRGC affiliated militia), police and the Intelligence Ministry” have broken the protest movement. Iranian authorities admit to arresting more than a thousand people, although they claim many have now been released after swearing to forego further “anti-state” activity.

The government and its supporters have tried to equate the protests with the 2009 Green Movement, which, egged on by the US and European imperialist powers, challenged the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But that movement was aimed at bringing to power the faction of the bourgeois elite most eager for rapprochement with Washington and drew its support overwhelmingly from the most privileged sections of Iranian society.

The current movement, whatever its political confusion, erupted against poverty and social inequality, mobilizing elements from the most oppressed layers of the population. Particularly noteworthy was its rapid spread to smaller district cities and towns that have traditionally provided a base of support for the regime, but have been ravaged by lack of investment and drought in the surrounding countryside. Moreover, the events of the past week-and-a-half were preceded by months of worker protests, sit-ins and strikes against job cuts and the failure of employers to pay back wages and benefits.

Iranian authorities have seized on the utterly hypocritical and fatuous claims of the Trump administration, fronted by a barrage of tweets from the president himself, of “support” for the protests to lend an air of truth to their charges of imperialist subversion. On Friday, the US forced a UN Security Council debate on developments in Iran.

The efforts of the billionaire would-be despot Trump to cast himself as a friend of the Iranian people would be risible were the US demonization of the Islamic Republic not bound up with its predatory war plans against Iran. Not only has Trump moved to blow up the Iran civil nuclear deal with the world’s major powers, the recently released US National Security Strategy places Iran on a par with North Korea as a “threat” to American dominance that must be countered and vanquished.

The key mobilizing theme of the Iranian regime’s rallies against the internal unrest has been opposition to the threats and bullying of Iran by the US and its regional allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia. The rallies have also targeted Britain, which held Iran in semi-colonial bondage in the first half of the 20th century, only to be supplanted by the US after the CIA restored the Shah to power in 1953. London has been Washington’s staunchest ally in the quarter-century of ruinous US wars in the Middle East. The pro-government rallies have resounded with chants of “Death to America,” “Death to Britain” and “Death to Zionism.”

The anti-imperialist sentiments of many of the pro-government demonstrators, fueled as it is by decades of US aggression against Iran and the people of the Middle East, were no doubt genuine. But the Islamic Republic’s bourgeois-clerical elite—as underscored by numerous overtures to Washington stretching back to at least 1989—would be more than willing to reach an accommodation with the US if only it abandoned its drive for regime-change and recognized Tehran as a junior partner in stabilizing the Middle East.

A key aim of the anti-working class austerity policies of the current Iranian government led by President Hassan Rouhani is to woo European and ultimately US investment. Since coming to power in August 2013, the Rouhani administration has accelerated privatization and slashed social spending, while rewriting the rules governing investment in the oil sector to satisfy Total, Shell, Eni, and other European energy giants.

The government’s proposed budget for next year would cut $5.3 billion in income support for poorer Iranians, raise gasoline (petrol) prices by as much as 50 percent, expand privatization of education and cut infrastructure spending by $3.1 billion. This in a country where, according to a report published in the IRGC’s own political organ, Sobhe Sadeq, 50 percent of the people live below the poverty line.

A study conducted by BBC Persian found Iranians are 15 percent poorer than they were a decade ago. The consumption of bread, milk and red meat has dropped by 30 to 50 percent, as growing numbers of families can no longer afford them. Meanwhile, as around the world, the income and wealth chasm between the richest 1 and 10 percent of Iranians and the rest of the population has widened.

The eruption of the anger of the long-suppressed Iranian working class at the end of 2017 took the regime by surprise. As the protests expanded across Iran on the weekend of December 30-31 and took a pronounced anti-government turn, with participants taking up slogans challenging the institutions of the Islamic Republic and clashing with security forces, Iran’s security apparatus was rapidly mobilized. Important social media platforms were suspended, and police, Basij and, in some cases, IRGC units deployed.

Repression alone, however, does not account for the sudden ebbing of the protests. The overwhelmingly young and predominantly working class demonstrators lacked a clear and worked-out political perspective.

As the regime was quick to exploit, monarchist and ultra-right-wing elements tried to latch onto the protests and misdirect them. This included not only raising reactionary slogans, but no doubt also encouraging protesters into precipitous attacks on government property and security forces.

That such elements could find any support is not the fault of the working class, but of the regime. For decades, Iranian workers have been denied any form of genuine self-organization and political self-expression.

The Islamic Republic was consolidated though the derailing of the mass anti-imperialist movement that overthrew the blood-soaked, US-sponsored regime of the Shah in 1979. After executing a few exemplars of the Shah’s tyrannical rule, the Ayatollah Khomeini and his supporters concentrated their energies on defusing the threat from the working class of socialist revolution. While some social concessions were made, this operation principally and increasingly took the form of savage suppression of all socialist and left parties and of the workers’ councils that had emerged in the many worker-occupied factories.

The attempt of ultra-right elements to leverage the protests that erupted December 28 and, above all, the lack of a clear counter-perspective articulating opposition to imperialism and all factions of the Iranian bourgeoisie caused broader sections of the working class, as well as middle class layers otherwise sympathetic to the protesters’ social grievances, to remain on the sidelines amid the mounting repression.

One indication of the character of the debate now taking place in Iran is the discussion reportedly raging on social media under the rival hashtags, “We will not become Syria” and “We will become Tunisia.”

The regime also, it should be underlined, rushed to reassure the public that the popular anger over price rises and poverty had been heard, even as it slandered the protests as foreign-fomented. Both government spokesmen and leading members of the Majlis (Iranian parliament) have promised that changes will be made.

“As concerns petrol prices, we must absolutely take into account the situation of the people because the tensions are absolutely not in the interests of the country,” said Majlis Speaker and leading Principlist Ali Larijani last week.

All factions of Iran’s deeply divided ruling elite have united to support the suppression of working class unrest. But, in a stark indication of the depth of the crisis, the various factions are now fighting over who is to blame for the deep-rooted popular alienation and anger. There are unconfirmed media reports that former president Ahmadinejad was arrested over the weekend. Some of Ahmadinejad’s rivals have accused him of initially lending support to the protests as a means of advancing his own factional interests.

Infighting within the regime and above all the ever-widening class divide, under the impact of the world economic crisis and US bullying and aggression, ensure that sooner rather than later working class anger and opposition will re-erupt.

French chemical industry unions back contract violating minimum wage laws

Alex Lantier 

On Friday, it emerged that the French Democratic Labor Federation (CFDT) union had approved a base contract for chemical industries letting employers pay workers less than the minimum wage. This essentially illegal measure is a warning: the policy of the European Union (EU), inside which French President Emmanuel Macron's government functions as a key ally of Berlin, is to trample basic social rights won by the working class over generations of struggle in the 20th century.

The Stalinist General Confederation of Labor (CGT), the French Managers Confederation (CFE), and Workers Force (FO) unions issued a statement Friday reporting that the CFDT had signed an industry-wide contract on December 21 for a 1.1 percent wage increase paid in two increments. It would set the lowest hourly salary at 9.82€ on January 1 and then 9.86€ on April 1. Both are less than the 2018 minimum wage (SMIC) of 9.88€, set by a 1.24 percent increase approved on December 15—before the CFDT signed the chemical contract.

Moreover, using the Socialist Party's (PS) 2016 labor law and Macron's labor law decrees, the state, the oil bosses and the CFDT are concocting a pseudo-legal framework to ram through drastic cuts to workers' wages and conditions. Since 2009, the cumulative impact of EU wage and pension cuts in Greece was to slash incomes by 40 percent. Now, similar attacks are being prepared against workers in Europe's largest economies.

According to the CGT-CFE-FO statement, the CFDT contract will “integrate into the calculation of the minimum wage bonuses paid for seniority and working conditions (work at night, on Sundays and holidays, etc).” Up to now, such bonuses, representing up to 35 percent of total pay, were paid on top of a base salary at least equal to the SMIC minimum wage. But with the new contract, bosses can count those bonuses as part of the sub-SMIC wage agreed to by the CFDT, paving the way for wage cuts of 35 percent or more.

This announcement came only days after reports that automaker PSA Peugeot-Citroën plans to use a provision of Macron's labor decrees to impose union-approved mass job cuts at its French plants, while it slashes thousands of jobs at plants at its Opel-Vauxhall subsidiaries in Germany and Britain. The goal is to move PSA onto a largely temp workforce paid at the minimum wage, or less.

These measures are a warning to the working class across Europe and internationally. The only way to defend wages and jobs is to reject the pseudo-legal framework erected by the EU and the ruling class, and various bought-and-paid for union bureaucracies. As anger rises in France against the “president of the rich,” workers face the task of organizing independently of the trade unions for a political struggle against the illegitimate measures imposed by companies and national states.

The experience of the French labor law shows that such struggles will bring the working class into an irreconcilable conflict with the state with revolutionary implications. The PS imposed the labor law in 2016, in the face of over 70 percent popular opposition, by using the state of emergency to mount vicious police repression of mass protests against the law. Backed by petty-bourgeois parties like the New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA) and Unsubmissive France (LFI), the CGT capitulated in the face of PS threats to ban its protests and called off further action against the law.

Then Macron—elected by default in a run-off pitting him against neo-fascist candidate Marine Le Pen, and whose parliamentary majority emerged from elections in which less than half of French voters participated—imposed decrees preparing a historic assault on the working class. Now, having handed over trillions of euros to the banks and the financial aristocracy since the 2008 crash, French and European authorities aim to pauperize broad sections of the working class.

Such policies have not a shred of democratic legitimacy. Since the September German elections produced a hung parliament, European officials have been promising that a Paris-Berlin axis will oversee a new dawn for Europe. Martin Schulz, the defeated candidate of the Social-Democratic Party (SPD)—which worked with the PS, the Italian Democratic Party and others to formulate the French labor law—said last month that he was fighting for a “European framework for a minimum wage.”

In fact, the CFDT chemical industry contract shows how the PS and Macron, together with social-democratic parties across Europe, conspired behind the backs of the people to eliminate the minimum wage with the stroke of a pen.

The French chemical contract uses two key provisions of the PS labor law and Macron decrees: first, industries and firms can obtain exceptions to the national Labor Code; second, employers can impose a contract if they can obtain the agreement of unions representing 30 percent of the workers. So, with just over 33 percent of the chemical industry workforce, the CFDT approved a contract granting an exception to Article 141 of the Labor Code. That is the article that mandates the SMIC minimum wage in France.

Similar end runs around minimum wage laws are doubtless being prepared in firms and industries across France, and beyond.

Workers can place no confidence in the CGT, FO, or other union bureaucracies critical of the CFDT contract to organize opposition to the chemical industry contract. The PS labor law and Macron decrees provide a juridical expression to their common evolution into organs of the state, financed by the employers, that have lost their working class base and instead serve to plan and provide pseudo-legal sanctions for attacks on their own members.

Their criticisms of the CFDT are factional maneuvers primarily designed to shield them from rising social anger in the working class, while they pursue a nationalist policy of trying to boost French competitiveness on the world market at workers' expense.

All of them are hostile to mobilizing the working class politically against the historically regressive policies of Macron and the EU. As it joins FO in criticizing the CFDT chemical contract, the CGT is also provocatively denouncing a rail strike against job cuts called by FO in southern France as a “populist” gimmick that is “counterproductive because it aims to foment hatred against the rail workers.” As for FO, much of its leadership, including FO leader Jean-Claude Mailly, openly endorsed Macron's decrees last autumn.

The only way forward is the construction of independent workers organizations and committees in workplaces and working class neighborhoods to discuss and mobilize opposition to the various attacks emerging from Macron's decrees and approved by the unions. A key element of their work would be to coordinate their struggles internationally with those of workers facing similar job and wage cuts across Europe.

This raises also the the urgent necessity of building a new leadership in the working class: sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in every country, fighting austerity and dictatorship. The ICFI will fight to promote the growth of independent workers organizations and link them to an international socialist movement to take state power and replace the bankrupt EU with the United Socialist States of Europe.

Maritime Digital Trends in 2018

Vijay Sakhuja

At the beginning of the year, industries announce trends in their respective domains. Manufacturers publicise major products that will be available in the market; car-makers showcase new models that will be launched during the year; manufacturers of smart phones and mobile devices provide teasers of new models; and digital developers proclaim cutting edge or futuristic software.

Although not as exciting as the above, the maritime industry predicts its annual shipping and cargo outlook, shipbuilding trends, and port infrastructure developments. However, this is about to change given that the maritime industry is under rapid technological transformation. It is now characterised by increased use of digital systems, smart sensors, networks for data transfer among stakeholders, unmanned and remote controlled systems/devices. These are led by a number of disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented reality, and deep machine learning. There are at least four digital technologies related to the maritime domain that could make headlines in 2018.

First, digital twinning, which is being referred to as the fourth industrial revolution or Industry 4.0 that offers a new way to design and undertake maintenance during the full life cycle of a product. In this process, a physical asset is digitally mapped and continuously monitored using data from sensors fitted in the equipment and seen on the ‘digital twin’ offshore to obtain real-time performance reports. This facilitates analyses and helps predict breakdowns before the equipment fails, and enables remedial measures through replacements and repair, thereby enhancing operational efficiency. For instance, at the global quality assurance company DNV GL, 'digital twins' are connected to control system software on ships and offshore units, and help in monitoring machinery, equipment and systems on these platforms. The company claims that it has successfully "twinned" over 150 vessels and the "technology can easily be adapted to any ship or asset type." According to a study, up to 85 per cent of Internet of things (IoT) platforms will contain some form of digital twinning by 2020.

Second, the exponential growth in usage of cloud computing. The shipping industry, including supply chain managers, were initially hesitant but have slowly started using cloud computing services to securely store data, which allows industry executives to understand and address market and operational risks effectively. For instance, the United Arab Shipping Co. started using a cloud-based fuel management system to meet the fuel needs of its fleet of 70 vessels. This saved the company bunker fuel costs by 3 to 5 per cent by using real-time  pricing data, ship location, and other related information.

Similarly, cloud-based management helps in monitoring the progress of a shipbuilding project. The owners can watch over the construction of a ship and exchange "comments and replies" by simply using a single drawing of the ship which could be over gigabytes of data, and cloud computing can handle thousands of such drawings.

At the operational level, cloud computing is being put to use in autonomous ships that use enormous amounts of data from numerous sources including on-board systems such as the Automatic Identification System (AIS) and radar. For instance, Rolls-Royce is partnering with Google for its Cloud Machine Learning Engine to train Rolls-Royce's AI-based object classification system. This software can detect, identify and track objects that a vessel may run into at sea.

The third technology is the ‘Chatbot’. With rapid advancement in digital technologies it has become easy for companies to interact with customers and shoppers through messaging applications. However, it is now time to say 'goodbye, apps' and instead use ‘hello, bots’, despite the fact that Facebook’s Messenger already has 900 million users and WhatsApp has one billion users.

Chatbot is a conversation tool and is built on “machine learning and evolutionary algorithms" that facilitate interactions with humans. AI whizzes are developing Chatbots that can closely replicate general human conversations. Google is developing a speech synthesis programme that will be able to "generate human-like speech and even its own music compositions." Chatbots work as virtual assistants and are capable of accessing data and answering questions, which can support maritime operations. It is useful to mention that Chatbots can soon become "pervasive in day-to-day company-to-customer and online communications" and explode in popularity.

Fourth, blockchain technology used in cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin has found application in the maritime domain. One of the early users of blockchain technology is the marine insurance sector which confronts a number of challenges in terms of transparency of goods being transported, regulatory compliance of the shipment, etc. These affect the business of marine insurers, shipping companies, and law enforcement agencies alike. The latter must verify the legitimacy of the goods being transported, truthfulness of bills of lading, cargo manifests, and port documents. Distributed ledger, the technology behind blockchain, will ensure transparency across an interconnected network of clients, brokers, insurers and other third parties.

Finally, technology has historically been in a state of continuous mutability and some technology trends can be transitory and easily become obsolescent and forgotten. However, the ongoing digital transformation, unlike any other technological revolution, is highly disruptive and is preordained to dominate the maritime industry for many decades into the future.

Who Will Pay The $250+ Billion Reconstruction Cost In Syria?

Eric Zuesse

The United States Government says that Syria’s Government caused the U.N.-estimated “at least $250 billion” cost to restore Syria from the destruction that Syria’s war produced, and so Syria’s Government should pay those reconstruction costs. That link is to a New York Times article, which explicitly blames Syrian “President Bashar al-Assad’s ruthless triumph” — which was won against all of the jihadist groups (which the U.S. and its allies had brought into Syria to overthrow and replace Assad’s Government) — for having caused the devastation in Syria; the U.S. and its allies say they aren’t to blame for it, at all, by their having organized and armed and trained and manned that 6-year invasion of Syria; and, so (they say, and the NYT article implicitly assumes it to be true), if the invaders-occupiers of Syria might ultimately agree to pay some portion of these $250B+ reconstruction costs, then this would be sheer generosity by the U.S. and its allies — nothing that these governments are obligated to pay to the surviving residents in Syria. It would be charity — not restitution — according to them. The way that this NYT news-report presents this case is, first, to ask rhetorically, regarding the U.S. and its allies in the invasion of Syria, “Can they afford to pour money into a regime that has starved, bombed and occasionally gassed its own people?” and then promptly to proceed by ignoring this very question that they have asked, and instead to provide a case (relying heavily on innuendos) for the immorality of the U.S. and its allies to provide restitution to Syria’s Government to restore Syria. That’s how this Times’s news-report argues for the U.S. Government, against Syria’s Government, regarding Syria’s postwar reconstruction: The Times news-report repeatedly simply assumes that Syria’s Government is evil and corrupt, and is to blame for the destruction of Syria, and thus shouldn’t receive any money from good and honest governments such as ours. It implicitly accepts the viewpoint of the U.S. Government — a viewpoint which blatantly contradicts the actual history of the case, as will here be documented by the facts:

America’s Government (including its press, such as the NYT) simply refuses to recognize the legitimacy of Syria’s Government (even after the first internationally monitored democratic election in all of Syria’s history, which was held in 2014, and which the incumbent candidate Bashar al-Assad (whom the U.S. alliance has been trying to overthrow) won, by 89%), and the U.S. Government has, itself, evilly been trying to conquer Syria (a country that never threatened the U.S.), ever since at least 1949, when the CIA perpetrated a coup there (the new CIA’s 2nd coup, the first one having been 1948 in Thailand — and here is the rest of that shocking history) and ousted Syria’s democratically elected President; but, then, in 1955, Syria’s army threw out the U.S.-imposed dictator, and restored to power that democratically elected Syrian President, who in 1958 accepted Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s offer to unify the two countries (Syria and Egypt) into the United Arab Republic (UAR), in order to protect Syria against a then-imminent invasion and attempted take-over by NATO member Turkey (which has traditionally been hostile toward Syria). It was a peaceful and voluntary transfer of power, to Nasser. However, Nasser became an unpopular President in Syria, as the nation’s economy performed poorly during the UAR; and, so, on 28 September 1961, Syria’s army declared Syria’s secession from the UAR; and it then installed-and-replaced seven Presidents over the next decade, until 22 February 1971, when General Hafez al-Assad resigned from Syria’s military and was promptly endorsed by the Army for the Presidency; and, soon thereafter, on 12 March 1971, a yes-no national referendum on whether Assad should become President won a 99.2%”Yes” vote of the Syrian people. President Assad initiated today’s Syria, by assigning a majority of political posts to secular Sunnis, and a majority of military posts to secular Shiites. All of the Sunnis that he allowed into the Government were seculars, so as to prevent fundamentalist-Sunni foreign governments — mainly the Sauds — from being able to work successfully with America’s CIA to again take over Syria’s Government. Assad’s Ba’athist democratic socialist Party chose his son Bashar, to succeed Hafez as President, upon Hafez’s death on 10 June 2000; and, when Barack Obama became U.S. President in 2009, Obama carried forward the CIA’s plan to overthrow Bashar al-Assad and to install a Saud-allied fundamentalist-Sunni Syrian government to replace the existing non-secular, but Iran-allied, Ba’athist Government. However, since Bashar had built upon Hafez’s secular, non-sectarian, governmental system, the old CIA plan, to apply fundamentalist Sunnis to destroy the basically non-sectarian state (which is the basis of the Assads’ political support), ultimately failed; and, so, America’s Government and media are trying to deal with the consequences of their own evil, as best they can, so as to have only Syria and its allies suffer the Syrian war’s aftermath. U.S. President Donald Trump has been continuing President Obama’s policy, and he loaded his Administration with rabidly anti-Syrian and anti-Iranian people.

In the American Government’s view, the least that Syria’s Government should now do is to pay all the costs for the consequences of America’s lengthiest-ever effort against Syria — or, if Syria’s Government won’t do that, then the U.S. Government will continue its occupation of Syria, and won’t help the Syrian people at all, to recover from the devastation, which they blame entirely on Assad (who never threatened the U.S.).

However, the Syrian Government says that the countries which invaded it with their weapons and their jihadists and their organization — not only the United States and its weapons-supplies to the jihadists, but also Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Turkey, UK, France, and other U.S. allies, the entire U.S. coalition who organized and supplied the six-year international jihadist invasion against Syria — are to blame for the destruction of Syria; and, “If you break it, you own it, and need to replace it.” So, Syrians think that the invaders — and not the people of Syria — must pay the reconstruction cost.

The U.S. Government blames Syrian President Bashar Assad for everything. That charge is, however, quite problematic, given the facts in the case. The U.S. CIA was behind the “Arab Spring” movements to overthrow and replace Assad and other Arab leaders who dissatisfied the U.S. regime, and it then fed into Syria the ‘rebels’ until now. Few of them are still remaining under U.S. protection — which is mostly east of the Euphrates River, where America’s Kurdish proxy-forces are in control, after having finally defeated, with American air power, Syria’s ISIS.

That NYT article used the word “rebel” six times to refer to the jihadists who were fighting against Syria’s Government, and didn’t even once use the word “jihadist” or “terrorist” or anything like that, to refer to even a single one of them. However, almost all of the anti-Assad fighters were, in fact, jihadists (or, some people call them, instead, “radical Islamic terrorists”).

Western-sponsored opinion polls have been taken of the residents of Syria, throughout the war, and they have consistently shown that Bashar al-Assad would easily win re-election there in any free and internationally monitored election, and that the Syrian people overwhelmingly (by 82%) blame the United States for having brought the tens of thousands of foreign fighters into Syria to overthrow and replace their nation’s Government. Consequently, if Syrians will end up bearing the estimated $250B+ reconstruction cost of a war that 82% of them blame on the U.S., then the Syrian people will become even angrier against the U.S. Government than they are now. But, of course, the U.S. Government doesn’t care about the people of Syria, and won’t even allow in any of them as refugees to America; so, Syrians know whom their friends and enemies are. America’s absconding on its $250+B reparations-debt to them wouldn’t surprise them, at all. It’s probably what they’re expecting.

Some U.S. propaganda-media, such as Britain’s Financial Times, have field-tested an alternative, a blame-Russia approach, in case the U.S. team can’t get the blame-Syria story-line to gain sufficient international acceptance. For example, that newspaper’s Roula Khalaf headlined on 1 March 2017,  “The west to Russia: you broke Syria, now you fix it”, but most of the reader-comments were extremely hostile to that designation of villain in the case.

Although some readers, such as “Airman48,” seemed eager to blame anything on Russia, most of the readers, even at that rabidly anti-Russian, neoconservative-neoliberal (or, to use old terminology, pro-imperialist) publication, seemed to be somehow uncomfortable with that view. Perhaps that view would have been popular in 1900 (America and UK were proudly imperialistic at that time), but it seems to be unpopular today. It’s not as easy to fool the American and British people into an invasion as it was, for example, when we invaded and destroyed Iraq on the basis of lies, in 2003. Barack Obama managed to win public support for a repeat of that performance in Libya in 2011, and, of course, for the anti-Syria campaign, and also for a very bloody coup overthrowing Ukraine’s democratically elected government in 2014 — a trifecta of U.S. invasions on the basis of lies (and all of which were invasions of countries that never endangered U.S. national security) — but the bipartisanship of that U.S. hyper-aggressiveness (first with the Republican Bush, and then with the Democratic Obama) has made clear to many Americans, that the U.S. Government itself is the problem, that this is not a partisan problem; it is a problem with the Government itself, by both Parties, which is evil in what it is bipartisan about (such as supporting invasions by lies, against countries that never threatened us).

Voice of America is no more propagandistic than all of America’s major media are, even though it’s openly a U.S. Government medium; and it headlined on 30 December 2017, “Pentagon Preparing for Shift in Syrian Strategy” and reported the latest variant of the U.S. regime’s plan to dump all the costs of the invasion of Syria, onto the Syrian people. Secretary of ‘Defense’ James Mattis said, “What we will be doing is shifting from what I call an offensive, terrain-seizing approach. … You’ll see more U.S. diplomats on the ground.” The article continued, “‘When you bring in more diplomats, they’re working that initial restoration of services. They bring in the contractors. That sort of thing,’ the defense secretary said. ‘There’s international money that’s got to be administered so it actually does something and doesn’t go into the wrong people’s [the Syrian Government’s] pockets.’” He wants U.S. international corporations to be placed into position to skim off some of that reconstruction-money. (Some of this cash might then become recycled into Republican political campaign donations, which would please the Republican U.S. President, and Republicans in Congress. But the Democrats in Congress are ‘patriotic’, and so will not resist Republicans’ effort to continue crushing Syria.)

Mattis was threatening Syrians with America’s absconding with all the damages it left behind, unless Syria’s Government will give America’s Government at least some of what it wants (but never earned). This VOA article said, “There are questions about how the initial recovery efforts will work, given that much of Syria is now under the control of forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.” The implication there is that America has a right to overthrow Syria’s Government; and, that, unless Syria’s Government will bend at least part-way in recognizing this right, the U.S. Government will abscond totally from this matter. The U.S. regime is blaming everything on Assad, and expects him to be grateful for any financial assistance that the U.S. Government, in its kindness and generosity, provides, to his land, which it has destroyed. (Of course, Syria’s Government has also bombed targets in Syria, but the only alternative that was available for President Assad would have been to surrender Syria to the jihadists whom the U.S. team had brought into and armed there.) However, VOA’s presumption that Syria’s Government is to blame and that the invading jihadists aren’t, isn’t likely to be accepted by any nations except some of America’s allies. For example, Poland might back it, in order to retain the U.S. regime’s support, which is especially important to the Polish regime, because their support from some of the other European regimes has been fraying recently, and because beggars (such as Poland is, when it becomes widely criticized by the rest of the EU) can’t be choosers. Apparently, the Trump regime believes it can assemble a sufficient number of such regimes, so as to win its way.

Trump has the support of the entire U.S. aristocracy on this. A leading voice of the U.S. aristocracy (and funder of its agents — such as U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner — when they are in the revolving door between government-service and Wall Street or other private agencies of the aristocracy) is America’s Council on Foreign Relations, which publishes Foreign Affairs magazine, which is perhaps the chief public voice of America’s billionaires, concerning international relations. On 4 October 2017, it published an article, “Don’t Fund Syria’s Reconstruction: The West Has Little Leverage and Little to Gain”, which presumed that “The West” is democratic and its governments represent their publics, and that Syria’s Government isn’t and doesn’t; so, “The West” has a supposed right to ignore the plight it caused in Syria (and which “The West” constantly lies to deny that it caused, and to blame Syria’s Government for the devastation that “The West”s hirees actually produced there).

Here are key excerpts from this CFR Foreign Affairs article, showing the position that America’s billionaires collectively argue for, on this matter — displaying their guidance on this issue, for their vassal aristocracies, in America’s allied countries:

Now that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has successfully defeated or neutralized much of the insurgency in his country, domestic and international attention has begun to turn toward stabilization and reconstruction. …

Yet large sections of the international community — including, critically, key donor countries — continue to reject the legitimacy of Assad and his regime. …

There is a less complicated solution: Do not fund the reconstruction of Assad’s Syria. …

Syria’s reconstruction cannot be dictated or meaningfully shaped by Western donors — at least not to any satisfactory political ends. …

The cost of Syria’s reconstruction will be immense — between $200 billion and $350 billion, depending on the estimate. These sums are far beyond the capacity of Syria, or the willingness of its Iranian and Russian allies, to pay. The burden of reconstruction, then, is expected to fall on the United States, members of the EU, and Japan, as well as on multilateral institutions that are likely to take cues from their major Western donors, such as the World Bank. …

On September 21, a meeting of “like-minded” actors (including Saudi Arabia, the United States, and the EU) announced that “recovery and reconstruction support for Syria hinges on a credible political process leading to a genuine political transition that can be supported by a majority of the Syrian people.” Reconstruction funding is “the biggest lever” the United States and its allies have to push for a credible political process, said David Satterfield, a U.S. State Department official, after the meeting. And according to British Foreign Minister Boris Johnson, “We have one big card left to play in a pretty poor hand and that is the cash we can provide for the reconstruction of Syria.”. …

The country, in other words, cannot be put back together by working around the regime that tore it apart. …

Some analysts believe that the West can use funding to win concessions short of regime change. …

The regime will end up trading away “things that don’t matter,” said one European diplomat. “But it will hold out for so long, they’ll seem like concessions when you get them. If there’s something that Damascus has that most others don’t, it’s time.”

Donors will not be permitted to do an end run around Assad. …

Westerners who want to drive a hard bargain will find that they have less leverage than they thought. To begin with, the international community — and the universe of possible donors and investors — is not limited to the West. Syrian officials are keen to advertise the country’s nascent economic recovery and attract investment, but they have also said that they will give priority to investors from countries that stood by Damascus. …

Western donors should not finance the regime-led reconstruction effort. …

The West does not get unlimited tries to remove Assad or to dictate Syria’s politics. Thinking otherwise will be an expensive delusion.

Or, in short: America’s billionaires view the entire question as a business deal between themselves and the ‘regime’ that they have hired the U.S. Government since 1949 to overthrow and control; and the advice that they are giving to their vassal aristocracies is: “The West does not get unlimited tries to remove Assad or to dictate Syria’s politics”; and, so, “The West” should just walk away from the matter: there shouldn’t be any deal — Syria should just become a failed state, such as Libya, or Afghanistan.

Another prominent institutional voice of America’s billionaires is the similarly solidly neoconservative-neoliberal (or pro-imperialistic) Brookings Institution, whose Steven Heydemann headlined on 24 August 2017, “Rules for reconstruction in Syria”, and he wrote:

For the Assad regime, however, reconstruction is not seen as a means for economic recovery and social repair, but as an opportunity for self-enrichment, a way to reward loyalists and punish opponents, and as central to its efforts to fix in place the social and demographic shifts caused by six years of violent conflict. Assad himself affirmed this intent in a speech he delivered to mark the inauguration of the Damascus Exhibition. Thanking Iran, Russia, and Hezbollah, Assad said that Syria had “lost its best youth and its infrastructure,” but had “won a healthier and more homogenous society.” The prominent Arab [Qatari-Palestinian-Israeli] political analyst Azmi Bishara described Assad’s claim as “Hitlerian” and as confirmation of the “genocidal” intent of the regime’s policies of displacement.

Thus, a statement by Assad expressing satisfaction that Syria has even a smaller percentage of its citizens who support jihadists today than it had prior to the U.S.-Saudi-UAE-Qatari-Turkish importation of the world’s jihadists into Syria, was there being called “Hitlerian.” America’s billionaires (or at least their policy-propagandists) view Assad’s loathing of jihadists as bigotry, just like Hitler’s loathing of Jews was.

Furthermore, Bishara, who was being cited there by Brookings as an authority about Assad, was a big supporter of the U.S. coalition against Syria: for example, he said about Assad’s Government, at 2:17 in this 20 May 2013 telecast on Syria’s enemy Qatar’s Al Jazeera television in Arabic (Al Jazeera is pro-jihadist in its Arabic broadcasts, but anti-jihadist in its English ones), “Now, it’s shelling its own people, ferociously, an ongoing massacre, and yet the people resist. They haven’t stopped.” He didn’t mention “jihadists” or “terrorists” at all (because he represents their backers). There is no available evidence as to whether Bishara is being paid by the CIA, or perhaps by the Thani family who own Qatar, but Brookings’s failure to disclose information like that (Bishara’s statement’s falsely implying that Assad is anti-Syrian instead of anti-jihadist), in such a context as this passage by Heydemann, indicates the extent to which Brookings should be presumed to be merely an extension of the same international aristocratic group that ultimately controls the CIA, CFR, etc. (Bishara then went on there to use the phrase “we, the Israelis”; so, maybe he instead represents Israel’s Mossad. But that’s just as bad, and maybe even the same thing as the rest of them.)

The argument by America’s billionaires (via their agents), regarding restitution to the Syrian people, for the catastrophe that those billionaires (via their political contributions) spearheaded against Syrians, is: If anyone should pay it, then Syria’s Government should.

Apparently, “The West” intends simply to keep on destroying nations and leaving behind more and more failed states.

Of course, that long war to get rid of Russia’s allies might be a profitable policy for the owners of corporations such as Lockheed Martin, but there are big downsides to this policy, for the billions of people whom “The West” seems to care nothing about, such as in Syria, and in Libya, and in Ukraine. And this evil policy is also bad even for the American people, who are increasingly coming to loathe the Government that America’s billionaires have increasingly bought and impose upon us.

America’s corruption deserves a Nobel Prize, like was won by Henry Kissinger and Barack Obama; but, this one should be called the “Hypocrisy Prize” and awarded directly to the U.S. Government — an invoice, “amount due,” totaling the damages done by this Government to all of the governments that had posed no threat to U.S. national security but that the U.S. Government nonetheless overthrew, starting with Thailand in 1948. Of course, the rogue U.S. Government would not pay it, but the bill should still be presented, because that bill would be the first Hypocrisy Prize, and it would show what hypocrisy can amount to.