The Social Costs Of Capitalism Are Destroying Earth’s Ability To Support Life

Paul Craig Roberts

I admire David Ray Griffin for his wide-ranging intelligence, his research skills, and for his courage. Dr. Griffin is not afraid to take on the controversial topics. He gave us ten books on 9/11, and anyone who has read half of one of them knows that the official story is a lie.

Now Griffin has taken on global warming and the CO2 crisis. His book has just been published by Clarity Press, a publisher that seeks out truth-telling authors. Griffin’s book is a hefty 424 pages plus 77 pages of footnotes documenting the information that he presents. Unprecedented: Can Civilization Survive The CO2 Crisis? The book is a carefully researched document.

Readers often ask me to write about global warming, chemtrails, vaccines, and other subjects beyond my competence. However, I can see that Griffin has made a huge investment in researching climate change. His book provides a thorough account under one cover.

Griffin concludes that civilization itself is at stake. His evaluation of the evidence is that humans have about three decades to get CO2 emissions under control, and he sees hope in the agreement between Obama and Chinese president Xi Jinping that was announced on November 11, 2014.

Griffin argues that instead of rushing to their own destruction like lemmings, the human race must accept the moral challenge of abolishing the fossil-fuel economy. He makes the case that clean energy permits most of modern society’s way of life to continue without the threat posed by ever rising emissions.

Nuclear energy is not among clean energy sources–just look at the ongoing radiation pollution from Fukushima. Griffin is correct in the way he has framed the issue. It is a moral challenge.

Clearly the climate is changing, whether caused by CO2 emissions or some other cause. Every day brings more reports of perils associated with climate change. See for example: http://www.theweek.co.uk/62989/melting-antarctic-glacier-could-lead-to-11-foot-increase-in-sea-levels?_mout=1&utm_campaign=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter
and http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/24/melting-arctic-ice-banned-toxins-pops

The planet is being polluted with many forms of wastes: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2015/03/21/plastic-trash-ocean.aspx?e_cid=20150321Z1_DNL_B_art_1&utm_source=dnl&utm_medium=email&utm
_content=art1&utm_campaign=20150321Z1_DNL_B&et_cid=DM72148&et_rid=884054544

Our foods are also polluted. On one hand our food is polluted with herbicides and on the other hand by antibiotics. And then we have hormones and pesticides. The World Health Organization has concluded that the glyphosate in Monsanto’s Roundup, a herbicide widely sprayed on GMO food crops, is a likely causes of cancer in humans and animals. https://www.intellihub.com/admits-monsantos-glyphosate-probably-causes-cancer-chemical-found-75-air-rain-samples/

Glyphosate, which is also believed to be exterminating honey bees and Monarch butterflies, is now present in 75 percent of air and rain samples. Some time ago I reported on a microbiologist who wrote to the US Secretary of Agriculture about extensive findings by independent scientists that glyphosate has serious adverse effects on animal life and on animal and human fertility and on the ability of soil to produce nutrition in food crops. The scientist pointed out that the US government’s clearance of glyphosate rested entirely on the industry’s own studies of its safety and that these “studies” are not substantiated by independent scientists. He pointed out that not only are the studies done by scientists employed by Monsanto, but also many agricultural science university faculties are dependent on research funds from the chemical industry and thereby do not have an independent voice.

(On a French TV show a Monsanto representative claimed Roundup was safe enough to drink, but turned down the offer from the show’s host to demonstrate by drinking a glass by exclaiming “I’m not stupid!” http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-03-27/im-not-stupid-monsanto-lobbyist-refuses-drink-weedkiller-after-proclaiming-it-wont-h )

Martha Rosenberg writing in CounterPunch reports that 70 percent of all antibiotics are fed to livestock because it produces weight gain and saves money on feed costs. Ninety-three percent of doctors are concerned about the meat industry’s excessive use of antibiotics, and independent scientists have definite evidence that the growing resistance of bacteria to antibiotics is due to the use of antibiotics as animal feed.

Scientists at the University of Iowa found Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus in 70 percent of farmed hogs. A Consumer Reports investigation found that US meat, regardless of the meat’s source, is full of “pathogens, commensals, and antibiotic resistant bacteria.” Pork tested contained five resistant bacteria strains.

The Food and Drug Administration, severely weakened by Republicans, cannot stand up to Big Meat. Rosenberg reports that “when the FDA tried in 2008 to ban farm use of cephalosporins (antibiotics like Cefzil and Keflex) because they are needed for pneumonia, strep throat, and other serious human conditions, the egg, chicken, turkey, milk, pork, and cattle industries and the animal Health Institute stormed Capital Hill.”

Congress responded to the campaign donations, not to the health and safety of the American people. The Animal Health Institute consists of the drug companies who make profits selling 70 percent of their production to meat, egg, and milk producers. The members of the “health” institute are Abbott, Bayer Healthcare, Elanco/Lilly, Merck, Boehringer, Ingelheim Vetmedica, Novartis, etc.

In other words profits come far ahead of public health. As the drug companies have more or less stopped the development of new antibiotics, the protection antibiotics provide against infections is rapidly fading.

The horror goes on. During a time of severe drought in the western US, with California reportedly left with one year’s supply of water, the fossil-fuel fracking industry is polluting the remaining surface and ground water.

All of these activities–use of antibiotics as animal feed, use of GMO herbicides, fracking–are profitable because they impose huge external costs on the environment and on third parties who are not participants in the profits gleaned by externalizing the costs of production. And this brings us back to Griffin’s important book.

Griffin makes the point that the external cost imposed on the climate by fossil-fuel use is the source of the life-threatening crisis that humanity confronts. Capitalists make money by exploiting labor and by externalizing the costs of the wastes produced by the productive process by imposing the wastes on the environment. It is the short-term time horizon of production organized by selfish private interests focused on quarterly profits that is destroying the livability of the earth.

Almost every economist on earth will rise up in opposition to that true statement, because they are brainwashed in the neoliberal ideology that masquerades as economic science, but in fact is nothing but an apology for capitalist exploitation of labor and the earth.

I happened to be one of Ronald Coase’s graduate students the year he published his famous article on “The Problem of Social Cost” (external costs) for which, together with his article, “The Theory of the Firm,” he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics. In theory, externalities can be internalized into the process of production so that the producer bears all the costs if all inputs and waste products are subject to property rights. But no one owns the atmosphere, the oceans, the rivers and streams. They remain “common property” and thus are dumping grounds for waste disposal.

Governments, despite pressure from corporations, have realized that pollution is a problem, and governments have imposed some regulation. The regulation raises some costs to corporations, but the regulation is insufficient to halt very much of the externalization of the cost of production. In economic terms, this is the crisis that David Ray Griffin presents to us.

Capitalism’s pursuit of profit is destroying life on earth.

Nuclear Threat Escalating Beyond Political Rhetoric

Thalif Deen

As a new cold war between the United States and Russia picks up steam, the nuclear threat is in danger of escalating – perhaps far beyond political rhetoric.

Randy Riddel, a former senior political affairs officer with the U.N. Office for Disarmament Affairs (UNODA) told IPS he pities the general public.

“They’re being fed two competing narratives about nukes,” he said, in a realistic assessment of the current state of play.

“Oracle 1 says everybody’s rushing to acquire them or to perfect them.”

Oracle 2 forecasts a big advance for nuclear disarmament, as the bandwagon for humanitarian disarmament continues to gain momentum, said Riddel, a former senior counsellor and report director of the Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) Commission.

“The irony is that if Oracle 2 is wrong, Oracle 1 will likely win this debate – and we’ll all lose,” he grimly predicted about the nuclear scenario.

In a recent cover story, the London Economist is unequivocally pessimistic: “A quarter of a century after the end of the cold war, the world faces a growing threat of nuclear conflict.”

Twenty-five years after the Soviet collapse, it said, the world is entering a new nuclear age.

“Nuclear strategy has become a cockpit of rogue regimes and regional foes jostling with the five original nuclear weapons powers (the U.S., Britain, France, China and Russia), whose own dealings are infected by suspicion and rivalry.”

Shannon Kile, senior researcher and head of the Nuclear Weapons Project at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) told IPS he agrees with the recent piece in The Economist that the world may be entering a “new nuclear age”.

“However, I would not narrowly define this in terms of new spending on nuclear weapons by states possessing them. Rather, I think it must be defined more broadly in terms of the emergence of a multi-polar nuclear world that has replaced the bipolar order of the cold war,” he added.

Kile also pointed out that nuclear weapons have become core elements in the defence and national security policies of countries in East Asia, South Asia and the Middle East, where they complicate calculations of regional stability and deterrence in unpredictable ways.

This in turn raises risks that regional rivalries could lead to nuclear proliferation and even confrontation that did not exist when the nuclear club was smaller.

Meanwhile, the signs are ominous: the negotiations to prevent Iran going nuclear are still deadlocked.

Saudi Arabia has signed a new nuclear cooperation agreement, presumably for “peaceful purposes”, with South Korea; and North Korea has begun to flex its nuclear muscle.

Last week Hyun Hak Bong, North Korea’s ambassador to the UK, was quoted by Sky News as saying his country would use its nuclear weapons in response to a nuclear attack by the U.S.

“It is not the United States that has a monopoly on nuclear weapons strikes,” Hyun said.

“If the United States strike us, we should strike back. We are ready for conventional war with conventional war; we are ready for nuclear war with nuclear war. We do not want war but we are not afraid of war,” Hyun said.

The Economist also pointed out that every nuclear power is spending “lavishly to upgrade its atomic arsenal.”

Russia’s defence budget has increased by over 50 percent since 2007, a third of it earmarked for nuclear weapons: twice the share of France.

China is investing in submarines and mobile missile batteries while the United States is seeking Congressional approval for 350 billion dollars for the modernization of its nuclear arsenal.

Kile told IPS a subsidiary aspect of the “new nuclear age” is more technical in nature and has to do with the steady erosion of the operational boundary between nuclear and conventional forces.

Specifically, he said, the development of new types of advanced long-range, precision guided missile systems, combined with the increasing capabilities of satellite-based reconnaissance and surveillance systems, means that conventional weapons are now being given roles and missions that were previously assigned to nuclear weapons.

“This trend has been especially strong in the United States but we also see it in [the] South Asian context, where India is adopting conventional strike systems to target Pakistani nuclear forces as part of its emerging limited war doctrine.”

Kile also said many observers have pointed out that this technology trend is driving doctrinal changes that could lead to increased instability in times of crisis and raise the risk of the use of nuclear weapons.

“What these developments suggest to me is that while the overall number of nuclear warheads in the world has significantly decreased since the end of the cold war (with the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989), the spectrum of risks and perils arising from nuclear weapons has actually expanded.”

Given that nuclear weapons remain uniquely dangerous because they are uniquely destructive, “I don’t think anyone will dispute that we must redouble our collective efforts aimed at reaching a world in which nuclear arsenals are marginalised and can be eventually prohibited,” he declared.

Ohio man exonerated after almost four decades of wrongful imprisonment

Evan Blake

Last November, Ricky Jackson was exonerated of murder charges after spending 39 years, 3 months and 9 days in prison. Jackson is believed to have been imprisoned longer than any other person ever exonerated in US history. He and codefendants Wiley and Ronnie Bridgeman wrongfully served a combined 100 years in prison.

On March 19, an Ohio Court of Claims ordered the state to pay Jackson $1,008,055 in compensation for the decades he wrongfully spent behind bars. The Bridgeman brothers have yet to receive any compensation, as they have not filed the required civil lawsuit against the state for unknown reasons.

The three were convicted for the 1975 murder of Harold Franks in Cleveland, Ohio, based on the testimony of Eddie Vernon, who claimed to have witnessed them carrying out the attack. Vernon, who was only 12 years old at the time of the trial, recanted his testimony last year, admitting that police coerced him into testifying against Jackson and the Bridgeman brothers.

Vernon had been in a school bus roughly a block from the scene of the crime, from which none of his classmates had witnessed the attack. Shortly thereafter, he heard rumors that the three men were responsible for the murder, and thought he was “doing the right thing” by acting as a witness.

Vernon attempted to recant his testimony just before the trial, but police threatened to arrest his parents for his perjury since Vernon was too young to be charged himself. He ultimately testified against all three codefendants and his testimony was the only evidence that led to the guilty verdict.

At a hearing in November 2014, Vernon stated that his entire childhood testimony was based on lies provided by the police, saying “I don’t have any knowledge about what happened at the scene of the crime…Everything was a lie. They were all lies.”

On Thursday, three other men who have spent a combined 54 years in prison saw their murder convictions overturned. Derrick Wheatt, Laurese Glover and Eugene Johnson all witnessed the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Clifton Hudson Jr. in East Cleveland, Ohio, and claim to have quickly left the scene for fear of their own safety. They each provided a matching description of the shooter to that given by other witnesses, but were themselves charged with the crime.

They were convicted a year later due to another witness, 14-year-old Tamika Harris, claiming she saw the shooter enter and exit their vehicle, but did not see the shooter’s face. At the trial, she identified Eugene Johnson as the shooter. Now an adult, Harris recently admitted that she could not see the shooter’s face, that she never actually saw someone enter or exit the truck, and that police had manipulated her into identifying Johnson as the shooter.

The three men will go through a trial to finalize their exoneration. When released, they will bring the total number of exonerations brought about through the work of the Ohio Innocence Project to 23. Collectively, these 23 individuals spent over 500 years behind bars in Ohio prisons for crimes they did not commit.

The Innocence Project, founded in 1992, works to exonerate wrongfully convicted prisoners across the US, often through DNA testing. The organization has been involved in 173 of the 317 total DNA exonerations in the US, with most of the remainder arising from the work of other groups affiliated with the Innocence Network.

On their web site, the Innocence Project notes that since 1989, there have been 329 post-conviction DNA exonerations in the US, with most coming after 2000. Roughly a third of those found innocent were between the ages of 14 and 22 when they were wrongfully arrested, and many had no prior criminal record.

Eighteen prisoners on death row have been proven innocent and exonerated through DNA testing, spanning 11 different states in the US. Combined, they have served 229 years in prison—including 202 years on death row.

On March 11, 2014 Glenn Ford, 64, was exonerated of murder charges and released from Angola prison in Louisiana after spending 26 years on death row. He had been on death row since August 1988, after being convicted of murder in the 1983 killing of Isadore Rozeman.

Earlier this month, Ford filed two civil lawsuits against the state of Louisiana. The first singles out Caddo Parish prosecutors, the city of Shreveport, police department members, and the city’s former coroner as playing crucial roles in securing Ford’s wrongful conviction. The lawsuit alleges that detectives “fabricated” the sole piece of evidence used against Ford and “made deliberate or reckless falsifications and omissions of evidence.”

The second lawsuit focuses on the prison’s denial of medical care for a cancer diagnosis that became terminal while Ford was in Angola. It asserts that seven Angola prison wardens, five doctors associated with the prison and other prison officials and doctors ignored Ford’s disease and denied him cancer treatment after a 2011 test that showed “a cancer-indicating marker in Ford’s blood.” After his release from Angola, Ford was diagnosed with Stage 3 lung cancer, which in the past year has progressed to Stage 4, spreading to other organs and requiring numerous treatments.

This Monday, Debra Milke, 51, was exonerated of a murder conviction from 1990, after spending 22 years on death row in Arizona. Her conviction was overturned by an appeals court in 2013, which ruled that prosecutors failed to disclose the lead detective’s long history of misconduct.

Milke was convicted based solely on the confession she gave to Armando Saladate, who was found by the appeals court to have lied under oath in multiple other cases and to have repeatedly violated suspects’ rights during interrogations. The appeals court also found that Saladate was once given a five-day suspension for sexual misconduct.

In response to these heinous revelations, Milke has sued the city of Phoenix, Maricopa County as well as several individuals, alleging violations of her civil rights, the denial of her constitutional right to a fair trial, and malicious prosecution.

Since 1989, there have been a total of 1,570 exonerations in the US. There were a record 125 exonerations in 2014, significantly higher than the previous record in 2013 of 91. The rate has been increasing steadily in recent years due to advances in DNA testing.

Roughly 60 percent of those exonerated receive compensation, with a median compensation from states of roughly $24,000 per year of time served. Presently, 20 states in the US have no statutes requiring payments to those who were wrongfully imprisoned. Outside of monetary compensation, those cleared and released are guaranteed no other support for basic necessities of life, including food assistance, help securing affordable housing, health care and counseling services, or job skills training.

On their web site, the Innocence Project notes that “Despite their proven innocence, the difficulty of reentering society is profound for the wrongfully convicted; the failure to compensate them adds insult to injury.”

Sri Lankan tea plantation workers oppose Glenugie estate witch-hunt

M. Devarajah

Glenugie tea estate Deeside division workers at Maskeliya in Sri Lanka’s central plantation district have spoken out against the police and company management frame-up of eight fellow workers. The Deeside workers were responding to a Socialist Equality Party (SEP) statement distributed last Sunday calling for unified action to defeat the witch-hunt.

On March 11, police arrested eight workers on fabricated charges that they physically attacked an estate supervisor and stoned wasp nests to disrupt work at the tea estate. The victimised workers, including an SEP supporter, G. Wilfred, were bailed-out on personal guarantees the following day. The case against them will be heard on June 24.

The management made similar bogus accusations against the eight employees and announced an internal inquiry. If the charges are “proven,” the workers could be sacked.

There are indications that Ceylon Workers Congress (CWC) trade union leaders and management prompted the supervisor to make a complaint to the police. This repressive response is a crude attempt to intimidate the workforce, following a three-day strike against increased work quotas.

The bogus nature of the allegations was demonstrated when the name of T. Jayaram, ONE of the workers arrested, was removed from the list of those charged. In his place, the management added another employee, S. Janaratnamm, to the list.

Deeside workers discussing SEP program during February strike

Jayaram told the WSWS: “Management removed my name from the list because I was far away from where the incidents are supposed to have happened. Having my name on the list could easily expose the fabricated story and so they removed it. Management created this false story, with the support of the unions, in revenge against workers who launched a strike against the increased workload.”

A retired estate worker said he fully supported the SEP campaign to defend the victimised workers. All workers at Deeside and other plantations should be mobilised, he said.

“I have my own experience,” he explained. “Ten years ago, during a wage struggle nine workers from the estate, including me, were arrested. I was then CWC branch president. CWC leader Arumugam Thondaman refused to mobilise any other workers to defend us. I took up the initiative to mobilise other workers in defiance of the CWC leadership, and we were released.”

Estate employees said they would oppose all attempts to victimise the eight workers, insisting that the management witch-hunt was an attempt to frighten the workforce and drive up productivity.

Several months ago, the estate management raised the tea-leaf pluckers’ daily workload by 2 kilograms, from 16 to 18 kilos. The company was forced to reverse its dictat after workers went on strike, independently of the estate unions, but is still attempting to increase workloads.

A Deeside worker explained: “After the strike, the Glenugie estate management, with the support of the CWC branch leadership, began imposing more burdens on workers to take revenge.”

A female worker said: “ONE manager came to the field and said that if we cooperated and worked according to the 18-kilo target, he would make some concession. We refused to do this because our three-day strike won our demand for 16 kilos and so we can’t go back.

“Every day since the strike, the management has imposed many burdens on us, such as increasing working times and ending short-leave facilities, which we had before the strike. Today a field officer declared that we had to be back at work at 2 p.m. sharp after lunch and that if we were a few minutes late we’d have to work until 5.30 p.m. Normally our work ends at 4.30 p.m.”

Another worker condemned the living conditions on the estate: “More than 60 workers have no houses in our estate. Some live in temporary huts, others live with parents, with TWO or three families congregated in one house. More than 50 percent of workers have no toilet facilities. If a worker wants to build a new toilet he has to get loans from other means. Even then, management does not want to allocate land for that. There are no proper water facilities in the estate.

“More than 30 retired people are working to earn additional income but their pay is tied to the work quota. Management always thinks only in terms of increasing company profits.”

The CWC, the National Union of Workers (NUW) and other estate unions are collaborating with management to drive up workloads. NUW area leader G. Naguleswaran supported the management’s verbal agreement to maintain the 16-kilo quota but told workers they would have to go to a labour tribunal to secure payment for the several months they worked under the 18-kilo quota. The unions have done nothing since then to obtain the money owed to the workers.

The NUW and other plantation unions, including the Up-country People’s Front (UPF), the Democratic Workers Congress and the Lanka Jathika Estate Workers Union (LJEWU), are backing the recently installed government of President Maithripala Sirisena. In fact, NUW, UPF and LJEWU leaders are among Sirisena’s ministers. In line with his government’s big-business policies, they fully back the plantation companies’ demands.

As well as the Maskeliya estates, all 22 plantation companies want to drastically ramp up work quotas, slash production costs and drive up profits.

Plantation Employers Federation chairman Rosan Rajadurai told theVirakesari newspaper on March 24 that the tea and rubber industries “face severe losses in the world market” due to falling prices and “productivity must be increased.”

Rajadurai declared: “The average quota of plucking tea leaves is 18 kilos but without increasing it by 2 or 3 kilos, the industry cannot go forward. We are demanding 23 kilos per day and we will make this demand in discussions for next collective agreement.”

As these comments make clear, the struggle to defend the victimised Deeside workers is inseparable from the fight against the attacks being prepared by the plantation companies, backed by Sirsena’s government.

The SEP urges all class conscious workers and youth to come forward to defeat the Deeside frame-up as part of a unified struggle for better working conditions, a decent monthly wage system and the defence of the democratic rights of the working class. This fight requires taking up the SEP’s socialist and internationalist program.

As EU commissioner, former Socialist Party minister demands more austerity in France

Antoine Lerougetel

In a March 11 radio interview with France Info, former Socialist Party (PS) finance minister Pierre Moscovici, now European commissioner for economic and monetary affairs and taxation, demanded that France’s PS government implement deep new cuts. He also defended the European Union’s (EU’s) demands for stepped-up austerity by the new Syriza government in Greece.

President François Hollande, having already imposed €50 billion in cuts, has failed to fulfill his pledge to bring the budget deficit down to 3.0 percent of GDP by 2015. It stands at 4.1 percent of GDP, so Paris will be required to find at least €26 billion more to add to the supplementary budget cut of €4 billion already decided for this year.

Moscovici reminded Paris that, in return for the two years’ grace that the Commission has granted it, France must, by the end of April, provide the Commission with detailed proposals for structural reforms—making it easier for employers to fire workers and cut their wages and benefits. By the end of June, Paris must detail where budget cuts will fall.

These policies head towards the type of economic and social catastrophe that EU strictures have wrought in Greece. Unemployment in France is officially more than 10.0 percent—in fact, at 19.2 percent, affecting 5.5 million people out of a total of a 28.6 million work force. Local government spending cuts are expected to cost tens of thousands of jobs in both health care and construction.

When his interviewer, Jean-François Achilli, observed France had had relatively favourable treatment compared to Greece, which had been granted no reprieve whatsoever from the EU, Moscovici said, “I absolutely reject this comparison, which I find completely disparaging.” He said France was the EU’s second largest economy and fifth largest in the world, while Greece was only 2 percent of the EU economy and had a national debt of 175 percent of its GDP.

When Achilli said that the Troika (the EU Commission, the International Monetary Fund [IMF] and the European Central Bank) were back in Athens and “sticking their noses in Greek affairs,” Moscovici leapt to their defence. Troika officials, he said, were just checking technical details. Echoing Syriza’s pseudo-left apologists internationally, Moscovici said of Syriza’s capitulation to the EU’s demand for austerity, “They haven’t betrayed.”

This is not only a travesty of Syriza’s record, but a lying defence of the policy of EU officials, including Moscovici, of demanding ruthless austerity from the devastated Greek economy.

He said, “Were we to forbid the Greek government to carry out its programme, that would be a denial of democracy.... National sovereignty does exist in Europe.” He said the EU combined “respect for two necessary things—the voters’ vote, yes, the need for social changes, yes.... On the other hand, they must understand that they have made commitments to their partners, that a debt is there to be repaid.”

In fact, Moscovici and the EU participated in a direct denial of democracy to the Greek people. Syriza and the EU signed agreements last month abandoning Syriza’s campaign pledges to write down Greece’s debts and halt austerity measures. As Moscovici’s comment that “a debt is there to be repaid” shows, he himself supported Syriza’s abject capitulation to the EU’s austerity diktat.

Moscovici epitomises the reactionary role of the PS. In the lead-up to the election of Hollande in 2012, it cynically postured as critical of German-led EU austerity policies, while it prepared to implement its austerity agenda in France. Once PS officials like Moscovici are rewarded with positions of influence in Brussels, however, they effortlessly turn to enforcing the EU’s austerity demands in France and Greece, and across Europe.

This reflects the politically corrupt character of the petty-bourgeois social layers from which the PS drew its members. Moscovici was a student member of the pseudo-left Revolutionary Communist League (LCR), the forerunner of the New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA), until 1984.

Upon graduating from the elite National School of Administration (ENA) in 1984, Moscovici left the LCR for the PS under the guidance of one of his teachers, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who later would head the IMF. He became the secretary of the PS’s “group of experts,” working for President François Mitterrand. After holding ministerial office under Lionel Jospin’s Plural Left government, he was director of François Hollande’s presidential campaign in 2012.

Moscovici helped to draw up the European Constitution, which was rejected in France in the 2005 referendum. He was involved in formulating the EU bailout of Greece with its brutal austerity conditions that have led to a 25 percent shrinkage of the Greek economy, an official jobless rate of over 26.1 percent—60 percent for youth—and a decline in wages of more than 30 percent.

Hungarian government works closely with fascist Jobbik party

Markus Salzmann

According to the most recent polls by the Ipsos Social Research Institute, the neo-fascist party Jobbik trails the ruling Fidesz party in Hungary by just 3 percentage points. Since the government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban lost the absolute majority in February, it has worked closely with the far right.

At the moment, 18 percent of all eligible voters would vote for Jobbik. The party is the most popular among voters under 30. Twenty-one percent of those questioned would vote for Fidesz, while 37 percent said that they did not intend to vote at all.

Among voters who have decided on a party, 28 percent spoke in favour of Jobbik, the highest number that the party has ever recorded. At thirty-seven percent, support for Fidesz dropped below 40 percent for the first time since the last election.

The social democratic parties remain far behind. Support for the Socialist Party (MSZP) is at 12 percent, the Democratic Party (DP) of former prime minister Ferenc Gyurcsany at 4 percent, and the Greens at 3 percent of eligible voters. The NEXT regular parliamentary election will take place in 2018.

The official “left” parties’ right-wing policies are directly responsible for the strengthening of right-wing extremism. They have nothing to offer in opposition to the policies of Orban, which are the object of growing hostility in broad layers of the population. Since 2010, the government has carried out deep cuts in social programmes and attacks on fundamental democratic rights.

At the end of last year, tens of thousands demonstrated against government efforts to control Internet usage. Social misery—compounded by the 2015 budget—has reached dramatic proportions. The government is planning to phase out all subsidies FINANCED by the state budget over the next three years.

The first part of the budget law went into effect on March 1. It cuts income support to people of working age in half and only grants it at all under special circumstances. For families without any income, the payment is restricted to a monthly maximum of €150. People in whose families someone else is receiving unemployment benefits will receive at most €75. In addition, the payments are now left to the discretion of the authorities to a much greater degree.

The only European country in which poverty has increased more than Hungary in the past year is Greece. The consequences of government policies are reflected most clearly in child poverty statistics.

More than 730,000 (43 percent) of Hungary’s 1.7 million minors are poor. According to UNICEF, Hungary has seen the largest increase in child poverty in Europe. Fully 170,000 children in Hungary live without an indoor toilet, and more than 600,000 live in apartments and houses with mildew, leading to a high rate of respiratory ailments. Asthma rates among children are correspondingly high. Approximately 200,000 children live in housing with damp rooms and leaky roofs, and without proper light.

Unsurprisingly, under these circumstances, Orban’s popularity is decreasing. Since the election 10 months ago, Fidesz has lost the support of 50 percent of its constituency. It has lost every election at a municipal level. A Jobbik candidate won the election for mayor of Ózd with a TWO-thirds majority.

On February 22, the government also lost its direct mandate in the Veszprém electoral district. An independent candidate won, and Fidesz lost its two-thirds majority in parliament.

Since passage of many laws require a two-thirds majority, Orban has sought to base himself on the extreme right. This is not taking place in the open, because neither party wants to enter an official coalition. However, with the exception of changes to the constitution, for which two thirds of all representatives in parliament have to vote in favour, the absence of ONE oppositional member of parliament is enough to ensure that Fidesz has a two-thirds majority among the representatives who are present.

One week after the last federal election, Fidesz has already won one vote in parliament thanks to the absence of a Jobbik representative from the parliamentary session. This shows Orban can rely on the neo-fascists. Jobbik has already had several opportunities since 2010 to vote with Fidesz. For example, it supported the appointment of Fidesz adherents to the constitutional court.

The TWO-thirds majority is extremely important for the authoritarian reshaping of legislation and the constitution. In 2014 alone, a two-thirds majority was necessary for 200 votes that took place in parliament.

The unofficial integration of the extreme right into the Hungarian government is a danger that should not be underestimated. Jobbik leads the Hungarian Guard, which is officially forbidden but remains publicly active nevertheless. The paramilitary organisation spreads fear and terror in the Roma minority. It marches through Roma settlements and terrorises families. Its MEMBERS and sympathisers are responsible for several murders, including the killing of a small child.

Amid growing opposition to its antisocial and authoritarian policies, the government views the integration of Jobbik into the government as an opportunity to mobilise the dregs of society for its own ends.

Jobbik supports the radical austerity course of the Orban government, the consolidation of the national budget and the maintenance of the flat tax, which places a heavy burden on those with small and medium incomes. At the same time, it supports the taxation of foreign banks by Orban.

Hungary’s proximity to Russia has led to tensions within the European Union (EU) since the beginning of the Ukraine crisis. These tensions are likely to intensify with the growing influence of Jobbik. The party has said that it wants to limit “Euro Atlantic” relations in favour of stronger relations with countries such as Russia, Iran and Turkey. The party also denounced the “colonial policies” of the EU.

In a recent interview with the Berner Zeitung, Jobbik head Gabor Vona advocated a stronger relationship with Russia. “Jobbik stands with both feet on the ground on the issue of Russia. We are the party to which Russia is best disposed,” said Vona.

Orban had recently agreed to an atomic energy deal with Russia worth billions. The Hungarian atomic energy factory Paks will be expanded with Russian funds. Two new reactors will be built. Representatives of the EU Commission now fear that Hungary’s dependence on Russia will grow even greater as a result and have already discussed the possibility of forbidding the deal.

US troops, immune from prosecution, raped dozens of Colombian children

Bill Van Auken

US soldiers and military contractors were responsible for the rape and sexual abuse of scores of Colombian children, but faced no legal repercussions because of a treaty between Washington and Bogota granting them full immunity.

A fresh revelation of these appalling crimes came as a byproduct of ongoing peace talks between the Colombian government and the FARC (Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia) guerrilla movement taking place in Havana, Cuba.

Last month, a Historical Commission on the Armed Conflict and its Victims in Colombia, formed jointly by the Colombian government and the FARC, presented an 800-page report documenting the causes and consequences of the decades of civil war that have claimed millions of victims in terms of dead, wounded, abused and displaced. The commission was composed of leading Colombian academics and intellectuals acceptable to both parties.

A section prepared by Renan Vega Cantor, a professor of history at the National Pedagogical University of Bogota, dealt with the role played by the US military. The Pentagon has sent advisers and contractors to the country as part of Plan Colombia, which has included $6 billion in mostly military aid directed at combatting both drug trafficking and the anti-government guerrilla movements.

The report cites 54 cases of rape and sexual abuse of minors, some as young as 12. “In one of the best known cases, in Melgar and in Giradot [both are to the southwest of the capital of Bogota, with a major Colombian air base that housed US “advisers” located in Melgar], 53 minors were abused sexually by mercenaries, who also filmed it and sold the tapes as pornography,” the report states. The young girls were subsequently threatened with death, and they and their families had to leave the area.

Another infamous case included in the report was that of a 12-year-old child, who in August 2007 was drugged, kidnapped and raped by a US Army sergeant and a military contractor in Melgar. The two men accosted the child in a restaurant, drugged her and took her back to their barracks at the Tolemaida Air Force Base, where she was raped. In the morning, she was again sexually abused and then driven to a municipal park where they left her.

The young girl’s mother, Olga Castillo Campos, learned the identity of the two men, Sgt. Michael J. Coen and defense contractor Cesar Ruiz, and confronted them. She recounted that they dismissed her child as “a little whore” and told her, “yeah, we raped her, so what? We’re in Colombia, the law doesn’t affect us.”

“They laughed at me and said they had immunity,” she recalled in a recent interview. “I didn’t even know what it meant.”

Colombia, like well over 100 other countries, signed a so-called bilateral immunity agreement, a condition imposed by Washington for the receipt of aid. The agreement bars prosecution under Colombian law of US military personnel as well as contractors for any crimes committed in the country. Prosecution under US law would require the intervention of American prosecutors and judges, unlikely to say the least. The result is that US personnel can effectively commit crimes with impunity.

Olga Castillo Campos sought justice for her daughter, going first to the Colombian Air Force, then to federal prosecutors and even the country’s supreme court. Turned away by all of them, the results of her efforts was that she and her children were followed by what appeared to be Colombian security forces and subjected to death threats, forcing her to move repeatedly to different cities.

Coen was sent home from Colombia, while Ruiz stayed on. Neither was ever prosecuted for the rape or spent a single day in jail, either in Colombia or in the US.

The 54 cases cited by the historians’ commission, acknowledged by the Colombian government, Washington’s closest ally in South America, represent only the tip of the iceberg.

As the web site El Turbion, set up by the Movement for the Defense of the Rights of the People (MODEP) reports, another 23 cases of sexual abuse by US soldiers were reported in 2006 alone, as well as 14 such cases in 2007. Given the refusal of the Colombian government to take any action, and the extreme pressure and threats against anyone reporting such crimes, the real number of rapes of minors by US personnel undoubtedly numbers in the hundreds if not thousands.

These crimes committed by US personnel are by no means unique. According to a report released by Oxfam in 2013, close to 50,000 minors are known to have suffered sexual violence in the course of Colombia’s armed conflict. Another report found that 98 percent of such crimes go unpunished.

The Office of the High Commission of Human Rights reviewed the situation in Colombia at a session Wednesday. While it expressed hope that a negotiated settlement between the government and FARC would improve conditions in the country, it noted that “impunity persisted for gross human rights violations, particularly at command levels” of the military.

The UN’s deputy human rights commissioner, Flavia Pansieri, also warned that the Colombian government’s “efforts to continue expanding the reach of military jurisdiction for these crimes [human rights violations] are contrary to Colombia’s international obligations.”

It is noteworthy that the report on the rape and sexual abuse carried out by US troops in Colombia, while widely reported in that country, has effectively been blacked out by the corporate media in the US.

Syriza government submits new list of austerity proposals to Greece’s creditors

Robert Stevens

The Greek Syriza-led government sent a list of austerity measures to its international creditors on Friday.

Syriza’s proposals have to be agreed by the “Brussels Group”, consisting of the Eurogroup, European Central Bank (ECB) and International Monetary Fund (IMF), before any of the outstanding €7.2 billion in loans can be made available to the bankrupt state.

The government of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras had previously agreed to send the list by Monday. Specific austerity measures were demanded of Greece following last week’s summit of European leaders.

The content of Syriza’s proposals has not yet been publicised, but the conservative daily newspaper Kathemerini has reported that they include some €3 billion in “much-needed revenue.” Other measures include pro-business “reforms to improve Greece's investment climate,” as well as “privatizations, such as regional airports.”

The government’s position on the possible lifting of VAT exemption is unclear, and it is also not known whether or not there will be an extension of the hated property tax.

It is by no means certain that these measures will be enough to convince the creditors, especially as Syriza claimed for days beforehand that the list will not include “recessionary” measures such as cuts to salaries and pensions.

Greece will be unable to make it past April 20 without access to external funding, Reuters reported. Such a scenario would quickly trigger a default on a total debt of €320 billion.

Greece’s banks, excluded from international money markets and reliant on a tightly monitored trickle of funding from the ECB’s Emergency Liquidity Assistance scheme, are functionally insolvent. Depositors fearful that Greece may be forced to exit the euro continue to scramble to withdraw their money. The banks are bleeding cash, with deposits dropping by more than €7.5 billion in February alone.

The Greek government suffered a further financial blow this week when the European Financial Stability Facility refused its appeal for €1.2 billion. This proposal was linked to a scheme for recapitalising the continent’s banks, which the Eurogroup claimed was “legally impossible.”

The German government, despite claims of improved relations with the Syriza government after Tsipras’ meeting with Chancellor Angela Merkel on Monday, continues its hard-line stance. Insisting that money be kept from Greece pending the legislation of specific austerity measures, German Finance Ministry spokesman Martin Jaeger said, “We see no reason to release it.”

Also being withheld is €1.9 billion the ECB raised in profits made from its 2010 purchase of Greek government bonds.

The Greek government, which must pay out billions in debt servicing over the coming weeks, is being forced to take desperate measures. It can only pay state workers’ wages and pensions through short-term “repo” transactions—e.g., borrowing money from state entities and passing them to the central banks’ Common Fund. The Financial Times reported Friday that when the board of the OAED, the unemployment benefits fund, voted unanimously against investing with the Common Fund, Syriza forced its chair to resign. A Syriza-appointee then forced through a €120 million transfer to the central bank.

As Syriza was drafting its measures, the pressure was again ramped up, with the head of Germany’s Bundesbank, Jens Weidmann, warning that austerity must be deepened. “The economic adjustment process is more like a marathon than a sprint,” he said. “The second half is well known to be harder than the first in a marathon, and the finish line is still a long way from being reached.”

The Times bluntly advised, “Tsipras has until this summer, when the ECB will be obliged to make an assessment of how much capital the banks need, to convince the markets that he is committed to transforming Greece into a fully functioning capitalist economy.”

Various scenarios for a Greece exit from the euro, or Greece running out of euros and being forced to begin using another form of currency, are being discussed in ruling circles.

“A Greek exit from the euro zone would be a political disaster, not only for the euro zone but for the whole idea of Europe,” said Thomas Oppermann, Social Democrat Party leader in the German Bundestag. “Of course we can’t rule that out. It’s first of all down to the Greek government whether it does what is required to stay in the euro zone.”

On Friday a “senior euro zone official” told Reuters that Greece could remain within the euro, but, “At some point, when the government has no more euros to pay salaries or bills, it might start issuing IOUs—a paper saying that its holder would receive an x number of euros at a point in time in the future.”

He added, “Such IOUs would then quickly start trading in secondary circulation at a deep discount to the real euros and they would become a 'currency', whatever its name would be, that would exist in parallel to the euro.”

Another euro zone official commented, “If they were to default, it is better to do that inside the euro zone rather than outside, because then it would become a problem of all the countries sharing the euro, rather than just Greece.”

Billionaire investor George Soros concluded this week, “It’s now a lose-lose game and the best that can happen is actually muddling through.”

“You can keep on pushing it back indefinitely,” he added, “But in the meantime there will be no primary surplus because Greece is going down the drain.” He warned the current negotiations could lead to a “breakdown,” forcing Greece into a withdrawal from the euro. “Right now we are at the cusp and I can see both possibilities,” Soros concluded.

In his March 15 letter to Merkel, published this week by the Financial Times, Tsipras said his government would do everything to meet the conditions laid out in the February 20 austerity extension agreement. However, “Given that Greece has no access to money markets” and under the “ECB’s special restrictions” it was “impossible for any government to service its debt obligations.”

Tsipras warned that the ECB’s economic stranglehold over Greece was jeopardising the country entering into a further comprehensive austerity agreement, as stipulated by the February agreement, at the end of June. He advised Merkel “not to allow a small cash flow issue, and a certain ‘institutional inertia’, to not (sic) turn into a large problem for Greece and for Europe.”

The extent to which Syriza is committed to remaining in the EU and carrying out the demands of its creditors was underscored this week, when former Bew Democracy Prime Minister Antonis Samaras published the February 20 four-month loan extension Syriza signed up to.

“The government not only did not tear up the memorandum, it signed on to it,” Samaras said. As for the loan extension Syriza agreed, “We had done the same to receive a 2-month extension. The two texts are almost identical, with the same terminology.”

Samaras demanded that Syriza now “quickly implement what it has signed.”

Republican budget plan slashes Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps

Patrick Martin

The Republican-controlled House of Representatives and US Senate went on record this week approving budget resolutions that would eviscerate basic social programs on which tens of millions of elderly, poor and sick Americans depend.

The actions came Wednesday in the House and early Friday morning in the Senate, in each case by nearly party-line votes. The House voted 228-199, with 17 Republicans and all Democrats voting against the budget. The Senate voted 52-46, with two Republican presidential hopefuls, Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, breaking ranks because they wanted even deeper cuts.

The budget resolutions now go to a conference committee to negotiate the comparatively minor differences between the House and Senate, with a final vote required by April 15 to meet the provisions of the 1974 Budget Act. The resolution is not subject to a presidential veto, because it does not actually have the force of law, but sets down certain procedural limits on further congressional action on spending legislation.

The main goal of House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is to invoke a procedure known as “reconciliation,” which, once a budget resolution passes Congress, bars a Senate filibuster on three subsequent “reconciliation” bills, one on taxes, one on spending, and one on the federal debt ceiling.

The Republican leadership plans to use reconciliation as the vehicle for an outright repeal of the entire Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare. Senate Democrats would not be able to filibuster the bill, but since Obama would then veto it, the repeal would have no practical effect. It is no more than a political gesture to the ultra-right Tea Party elements in the Republican Party.

In addition to reconciliation, the House version of the budget resolution gives specific mandates to the 13 appropriations subcommittees on how much they must cut from the programs under their jurisdiction, in appropriations bills due by mid-July for the fiscal year beginning October 1. The Senate version contains spending mandates for only two committees, and it is not clear how the conference committee will resolve the difference.

In either version, the cuts proposed are far beyond anything ever enacted by an American government: $5.5 trillion over 10 years in the House budget, $5.1 trillion over 10 years in the Senate budget. Pell grants, job training and housing programs are all targeted. But the biggest cuts come in so-called entitlement programs, including Medicare, Medicaid and food stamps.

The House budget calls for the privatization of Medicare for anyone younger than 55, while the Senate version would slash the program by $400 billion—the same cut proposed in Obama’s own budget.

Both the House and Senate would transform Medicaid from an entitlement program, expanding automatically with social need, to a fixed block grant to the states. The House version would slash Medicaid by $900 billion over 10 years, by allowing states to slash eligibility for benefits. The Senate version would cut the program by “only” $400 billion, maintaining present eligibility requirements.

The House budget would also turn the food stamp program into a block grant, cutting an estimated $125 billion over 10 years from food aid to the poor. The Senate budget would impose cuts of similar dimensions without prescribing the specific form of the program.

Both budgets call for the total abolition of Obamacare, while retaining the cuts in Medicare spending and tax increases enacted to finance the program.

The Senate version includes several amendments that, while lacking the force of law, indicate the aspirations of the majority. By a 54-46 vote, the Senate voted to repeal entirely the estate tax, which has already been reduced to the point that it is levied only on estates worth more than $5.4 million. More than half of all senators are multi-millionaires, making them prime beneficiaries of this tax break.

The only major dispute among House and Senate Republicans was over how to finance the huge increase in military spending which both houses (and both parties) avidly support. The Obama administration has proposed to put an end to the caps on spending provided under the “sequestration” procedure enacted in 2011 as part of a bipartisan deal with the Republicans.

This would make possible a $38 billion increase in military spending, together with a proposed $51 billion in Overseas Contingency Operations, a category created under the Bush administration to provide open-ended funding of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Congressional Republicans fought bitterly over whether to maintain the sequester caps or lift them, with the debate driven by concerns that without the caps, there would be greater pressure to allow increases in domestic social spending. Instead, the House Republican leadership settled on a procedure that keeps the cap on social spending, and effectively lifts the cap on military spending by transferring the entire increase proposed by the White House into the Overseas Contingency Operations, which one senator described as a Pentagon “slush fund.”

It is noteworthy that both parties agree on the level of military spending. The House Republicans ended up approving $2 billion more for the military than requested by the Pentagon, only in order to show that they were even more devoted to American militarism than the White House.

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham remarked cynically, “At the end of the day, the fight in the House—this is all about spending as much money on defense as Obama… That’s what the $2 billion is about—getting above Obama by a billion. It’s sort of a silly exercise.”

Obama has vowed to veto any budget that does not formally lift the cap on defense spending, and defense secretary Ashton Carter reiterated the Pentagon’s opposition to any continuation of the sequester, in a speech Thursday.

US layoffs mount amid signs of economic slowdown

Andre Damon

US corporations announced thousands of layoffs this week amid a series of plant closures, mergers and consolidations and signs of declining economic growth.

On Wednesday, US Steel announced 2,080 layoffs at its Granite City Works in Illinois. The Pittsburgh-based steelmaker plans to lay off over 4,500 employees nationwide, including over 1,800 workers in Alabama. Job cuts are also planned in Minnesota and Texas.

The same day, steelmaker Worthington Industries of Columbus, Ohio announced plans to lay off 555 employees nationwide. Of these, 310 are to lose their jobs as a result of the closure of a plant in Florence, South Carolina.

On Thursday, Ohio-based Republic Steel announced 200 layoffs at its Lorain, Ohio plant.

The steel companies said the layoffs were a response to a fall in demand stemming from the drop in oil prices and appreciation of the dollar, which have led to a reduction in international orders.

Also on Wednesday, HJ Heinz announced plans to buy Kraft Foods Group in a $36.6 billion deal that, according to one analyst, could lead to 5,000 job cuts, affecting nearly one quarter of Kraft’s North American work force.

The fate of tens of thousands of RadioShack workers and their families hung in the balance Friday as lenders and hedge funds wrangled at auction over the remains of the bankrupt consumer electronics chain, which presently employs 27,000 people at more than 4,000 locations nationwide.

Salus Capital Partners said Friday that it had outbid its nearest competitor, hedge fund Standard General, offering $271 million in cash as part of a plan that would completely dismantle the company, laying off all employees and selling off inventory and fixtures. Standard General had offered $16 million in a plan that would have kept 1,740 stores open, saving 7,500 jobs, but still laying off nearly 20,000 workers.

Office supply retailer Staples, which announced plans to merge with Office Depot in February, filed documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission showing that it intends to pay CEO Roland Smith $46.78 million for 16 months of work if the deal goes through. The merger would entail the closure of up to 1,000 stores and the potential layoff of tens of thousands of workers.

The plant closures and layoffs came as figures from the Commerce Department confirmed that the US economy slowed significantly in the fourth quarter of last year. The economy grew at an annual rate of 2.2 percent in the final three months of 2014, down from an initial estimate of 2.6 percent released in January.

The fourth quarter marked a significant slowdown compared with the second quarter, in which the economy grew at a 5 percent rate, and the third quarter, which had a growth rate of 4.6 percent. Analysts had expected the economy to grow at a 2.4 percent annual rate in the final quarter of last year.

Business investment on equipment in the fourth quarter was revised downward to show a 0.6 percent increase, down from a previously reported 0.9 percent. Reuters reported that the slowdown in investment likely reflected “the impact of the strong dollar and lower crude oil prices, which have caused a drop in drilling and exploration activity.”

Government spending contracted at a rate of 1.9 percent, led by cuts to federal spending.

Even the anemic pace of economic growth in the last quarter of 2014 was significantly higher than what is expected in the first quarter of this year, which ends next week. Economists from JPMorgan Chase, Macroeconomic Advisers and Goldman Sachs recently cut their estimates for first-quarter economic growth, all of them forecasting a rate of 1.4 percent to 1.5 percent. The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta is predicting even worse results, with a first-quarter GDP growth rate of just 0.2 percent.

A number of recently released economic figures underscore this gloomy outlook. The Commerce Department said Wednesday that orders for durable goods fell by 1.4 percent in February compared with a month earlier. The report also showed that non-defense capital goods orders fell for the sixth straight week.

The University of Michigan’s survey of consumer sentiment fell to 93.0 in March, down from 95.4 in February. Richard Curtin, chief economist at the University of Michigan’s Surveys of Consumers, told the Wall Street Journalthat, “most of the recent variation was among lower-income households, whose budgets are more sensitive to higher utility costs and disruptions in work hours.”

The significant appreciation of the dollar, which hit 0.95 euros earlier this month, up from 0.75 euros a year ago, has had a negative impact on the US trade balance and US corporate earnings.

Corporate profits fell 1.4 percent in the previous quarter, according to figures released by the Commerce Department on Friday. For the whole of 2014, corporate profits were down by 0.8 percent, the first annual fall in US corporate profits since 2008.

US corporations have responded to the appreciation of the dollar and falling profits with the demand that the Federal Reserve delay its plans to begin raising interest rates this year. Last week, Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen hinted that the US central bank might begin raising rates later than it had previously indicated, and the Fed issued interest rate projections for 2015 and beyond showing a slower pace of rate hikes than previously predicted once the increases begin.

Yellen reinforced this message in remarks at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco on Friday, declaring that she expected the “level of the federal funds rate to be normalized only gradually” and warning of raising rates “too quickly.”

The continued influx of cash from the Federal Reserve has led the Dow Jones Industrial Average to nearly triple over the course of the past six years, while allowing Wall Street bonuses to hit the highest levels since 2008. Average CEO pay in the US is higher than ever.

The response of the corporate-financial aristocracy to the renewed slowdown in the US economy will no doubt be an intensification of the policies that have characterized official economic policy since the 2008 crash: virtually unlimited amounts of cash for the financial markets coupled with a relentless offensive against the jobs, wages and living standards of working people.