Australia’s “Closing the Gap” fraud: Indigenous conditions worsen

Mary Beadnell

Delivering the Australian government’s annual “Closing the Gap” report on indigenous disadvantage to parliament last week, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull turned the world on its head. He extolled the report as an “exciting opportunity, to empower the imagination, enterprise, wisdom and full potential of our First Australians.”

The previous Labor government established the phoney “Closing the Gap” process in 2008, on the pretence of rectifying the gulf between the health and wellbeing of indigenous and non-indigenous people. It was launched after Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s equally cynical “National Apology” to the “Stolen Generations,” referring to Aboriginal children who were removed from their families up until 1970.

Turnbull, speaking for the wealthy elite he represents, and the privileged indigenous layer that the Australian political establishment has cultivated, declared: “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians are studying at universities at home and abroad, at Oxford and Harvard, are completing medicine degrees and apprenticeships, are sending their children to school, buying homes, starting and running businesses, and have dreams for the future that are as optimistic and as different as the rest of us.”

The reality could not be more different, even as measured by the seven limited indices set in 2008. This year’s report card reveals that most of the targets are not being met, while seeking to cover up the failure on the two targets allegedly “on track.”

Most of the statistics have not even been updated since last year’s report. This itself illustrates the fraud of the “Closing the Gap” operation and demonstrates the official indifference toward the social conditions confronting indigenous people, who are among the poorest and most vulnerable layers of the working class.

· “Not on track” is the target of halving the gap in employment by 2018. According to the report’s outdated figures, the indigenous employment rate, among people of workforce age (15–64), fell from 53.8 percent in 2008 to 47.5 percent in 2012–13.

The report attributes this to a “softening” of the labour market, marginally compounded by the closure of the work-for-the-dole Community Development Employment Projects (CDEP) program. In other words, indigenous workers are among the worst affected by the destruction of tens of thousands of jobs in mines and basic industries that accelerated in 2012–13.

This decline cannot be explained by the difficulty of finding work in remote areas. In the major cities, where the majority of Aboriginal people live, the rate was just 49.8 percent—well below the national rate for all working people of 72.1 percent.

· The target of eventually closing the gap in life expectancy by 2031 is also “not on track.” In fact, again on outdated figures—from 2010 to 2012—no progress has been made. A gap of 10.6 years for men and 9.5 years for women remained. The report claims that the overall indigenous mortality rate declined by 16 percent from 1998 to 2014, but a footnote states: “However, no significant change was detected between the 2006 baseline and 2014.”

· A target to “ensure access” to early childhood education to all Aboriginal four-year-olds in remote communities “expired unmet” in 2013, reaching only 85 percent. This year’s report provides no data on the new target of having 95 percent of indigenous four-year-olds nationally enrolled in such programs by 2025.

· Another “reset” goal, adopted in 2014 to close the gap in school attendance by 2018, also looks set to fail. In 2015, the attendance rate for indigenous students was 83.7 percent—“little change” from 2014—compared to 93.1 percent for non-indigenous students.

· One target supposedly “on track” is closing the mortality gap for children under five by 2018. According to the report, “there was a decline in indigenous child mortality rates of around 6 percent from the 2008 baseline.” But, in another example of dishonesty, a footnote states that the decline from 2008 to 2014 was “not statistically significant.”

· On closing the gap in Year 12 completion rates by 2020, the gap reportedly narrowed from 39.6 percentage points in 2008 to 28 percentage points in 2012–13. But no new data has been provided since the last report.

· On halving the literacy and numeracy gap by 2018, the report claims the numbers to be “within reach” on the basis of 2015 results in just four out of eight areas, based on NAPLAN standardised testing results for years 3, 5, 7, and 9. It admits that “caution is required as results vary from one year to the next.”

These indices are doubly misleading. First, they compare the indigenous “average” with the non-indigenous “average.” This covers over the ever-growing inequality in society as a whole, and also among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, from whom a well-to-do layer of business entrepreneurs, bureaucrats, politicians and academics has been created over the past four decades.

In other words, the results do not disclose anything of the class nature of indigenous disadvantage. For a clearer vision, the comparison would need to be between the indicators for indigenous and non-indigenous poor and working class people, and those for the non-indigenous and indigenous wealthy. Such figures would more clearly reveal the widening class divide in Australia.

Second, the seven targets exclude many critical social indicators. For example, the number of Aboriginal children taken from their families has increased by 440 percent since the Australian Human Rights Commission’s Bringing them Home report was released in 1997.

Indigenous people constitute about 3 percent of the total Australian population and yet they make up 27 percent of the national adult male prison population, and over 47 percent of the young people in the criminal justice system.

Failures on targets have been admitted in previous annual reports, but the outcomes are worsening. This is largely because of the deteriorating social conditions facing the entire working class, and government cuts to health, education and other social programs, driven by the collapse of the mining boom and the growing impact of the global financial breakdown that surfaced in 2008. This social reversal is particularly hitting the most vulnerable members of the working class, with indigenous people among the most disadvantaged of all.

One of the most offensive features of Turnbull’s speech was its patronising message. “[W]e have not always shown you, our First Australians, the respect you deserve,” he said. “But despite the injustices and the trauma, you and your families have shown the greatest tenacity and resilience.”

Far from showing any “respect,” Australia’s capitalist class drove Aboriginal people off their land, subjected them to massacres and disease epidemics, removed their children, and killed many young people in police custody and prisons. Most recently, the Northern Territory Intervention, begun by the Howard Liberal-National government in 2007 and then continued by Labor, involved welfare quarantining, forced removal of families from remote communities and funding cuts to health, welfare, employment and legal aid programs.

Behind the contemptuous references to “tenacity and resilience,” the shocking truth is that indigenous people are dying at alarming rates, being imprisoned at staggeringly high rates, and suffering from terrible levels of unemployment, ill health, disease, homelessness, drug and alcohol addiction and poverty.

Cuts lead to closure of youth centres across UK

Alice Summers

Local councils across the U.K. are slashing millions of pounds from their youth services budgets.

According to a Freedom of Information request submitted to the Department for Education in 2014, the amount of money spent on services for teenagers fell by 36 percent across England in the previous two years (2011 to 2013).

The biggest cuts came in the London boroughs of Kensington and Chelsea and Tower Hamlets, which cut their spending by 78 percent and 65 percent, respectively. Funding dropped by 10 percent across the country the following year.

Between April 2012 and April 2014, over £60 million of funding was withdrawn from youth services across the U.K., leading to the closing of around 350 youth centres, the loss of 41,000 youth service places for adolescents, and the loss of 2,000 jobs.

New cuts to local government spending are to see a further reduction in the funding provided, despite vital youth services having already been decimated over the past four years. In his November 2015 government Spending Review, Conservative Party Chancellor George Osborne announced a 56 percent cut to local government central grants over the next four years. This is funding used to help finance local public services such as libraries, parks and youth centres.

The halving of the grants is expected to leave huge holes in local councils’ budgets, disproportionately affecting poorer areas.

Conservative Peer, Lord Porter, felt obliged to warn his co-thinkers in the House of Commons of the widespread opposition that these cutbacks would likely provoke. He said councils would be compelled to protect “life and death services, such as caring for the elderly and protecting children” at the expense of other less “vital” services such as youth work.

On the scale of the cuts the review imposes, he added, “We are not going to see hundreds of councils falling over in the next year or two. But we are close to a dozen nationally, which will, if the spending review goes the way we think it will, be right on the edge and ready to go.”

In areas such as Bournemouth in Dorset, the local council is proposing to slash £1 million from its youth services budgets, which would result in a withdrawal of funding from its 22 existing youth centres. Dorset County Council is offering up these youth centres into the hands of other organisations, to either be run by already struggling and underfunded charities, by the young people themselves, or to be outsourced to private organisations. Organisations have only been given until the end of March to come up with plans for the running of these services, and, if nothing is proposed within this timescale, the centres will be closed. A paltry sum of £200,000 will instead be provided for local communities to find “things to do” for young people.

According to a survey carried out by Dorset County Council, although only a small percentage of the county’s young people attend youth clubs, many of them are from among vulnerable groups of adolescents such as young carers and young people with disabilities. With the closure of these centres, those who are most in need of it will be deprived of the extra support provided. For these young people, time spent at a youth centre is one of the only opportunities they get to go out and socialise with others their own age.

The proposed cutbacks are widely opposed. In the London Borough of Camden, youth protested outside the local Town Hall at the end of January against planned cuts to the youth services budget. If the Labour Party dominated council’s cuts go ahead, £1.6 million of funding will be withdrawn from the area’s youth services, leading to the forced closure of many youth centres and support projects, and the loss of up to 30 jobs. Camden Council aims to mitigate the widespread opposition to these measures by redeveloping three remaining youth centres in Highgate, Kilburn and Somers Town. The result is that youth support will be condensed into only these centres, with services prioritising more vulnerable young people such as those with behavioural problems or disabilities. Many other young people will be cut off from support.

Describing these proposals as “devastating” in an interview with the Camden New Journal, two young protesters said that the cuts could leave many young people with nowhere to turn, or drive them into gangs.

Other London boroughs are proposing similar cuts, with the local council in Southwark planning to slash funding to youth services by 73 percent--a £2.5 million reduction.

Not only have youth services been drastically reduced, but the burden of the government’s welfare “reforms” also falls hardest onto the country’s youth. In his July 2015 budget, Osborne announced cuts to allowances for new welfare benefits claimants, including a “youth obligation” for young people aged between 18 and 21 to either “earn or learn”. If they do not take on an apprenticeship or traineeship within six months, young people risk losing their welfare benefits.

Means-tested student loans have also been scrapped, and, coupled with the 2011 axing of Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA) grants--which provided financial support to students aged between 16 and 19 from low-income families--these measures will result in many young people being cut off from further and higher education. The National Living Wage (NLW), which will supposedly increase the minimum rate of pay to £9 an hour by 2020, does not apply to workers under 25.

Health experts warn that Zika virus will infect millions worldwide

Kevin Martinez

Health experts are warning that it is only a matter of time before the Zika virus spreads substantially around the world, with the World Health Organization estimating that the number of cases could reach between three and four million just in the Americas, with 1.5 million in Brazil, the epicenter of the epidemic.

Tourists, particularly women of childbearing age, are being advised not to travel to countries where mosquitoes carry the virus. Around 40 million people travel to and from the US and countries that have been affected by the Zika virus, and officials warn that hundreds of thousands will be infected.

While the summer Olympics in Brazil are still months away, the virus is a concern for tourists and athletes traveling there this summer. The virus is believed to have originated in Latin America, where poverty and poor sanitation have worsened the spread of the disease to pandemic levels.

Last Friday, Brazil reported a nearly 50 percent jump in cases of dengue fever over a three-month period in January. Scientists are worried because the fever is carried by the same mosquito that carries the Zika virus, indicating that efforts to fight the spread of the disease have not been effective.

Marcos Lago, an associate professor of infectious diseases and pediatrics at the State University of Rio de Janeiro, told the Washington Post, “We will probably have a dengue epidemic. And this dengue epidemic will be accompanied by a Zika epidemic.”

The Brazilian Health Ministry reported 74,000 “probable” cases of dengue from January 3 to January 23, an increase of almost 50 percent from the same period in January 2015, which saw a record number of cases. The disease along with Zika and another disease called chikungunya, are spread by the same mosquito, the Aedes aegypti, which lays its eggs in standing water. This mosquito was also responsible for the spread of yellow fever, which was first eradicated in the mid-1950s in Brazil.

In a pathetic attempt at damage control, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and other government ministers visited the homes of ordinary Brazilians in Rio to educate the population about the virus. The deeply unpopular president, who is facing impeachment proceedings, has mobilized 220,000 troops to combat the virus ahead of the summer Olympics.

The kind of public education campaigns being initiated by the Workers Party (PT) government have little hope of stemming the spread of the disease, which is facilitated above all by endemic poverty and unprecedented levels of social inequality.

The lion’s share of Zika cases has been seen in Brazil’s Northeast, the country’s most impoverished region. Only 21 percent of the houses there are connected to sewage lines and three out of ten lack access to treated water. Last week, the government’s minister of cities acknowledged that nationwide, nearly half of the population lacks access to sewage networks. Needless to say, in the poorer areas there is little air conditioning and few houses have screens on doors and windows.

Brazil has faced a pandemic of Zika cases that the government has blamed on a huge rise in the number of babies born with microcephaly, a congenital defect that leads to abnormally small heads. This deformity causes severe neurological impairment that can lead to infant death or leave children mentally incapacitated for their entire lives.

Lúcia Noronha, a pathologist at the Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná and one of the researchers who established the ability of the virus to pass through the placenta to the fetus, warned of the potentially catastrophic implications of the epidemic.

“We are facing a very grave threat,” she said. “Brazil is a continental nation, with a climate that is propitious for the multiplication of the vector, as well as a young population with many women at the age of fertility. We run the risk of having an enormous contingent of children with malformations, at a gigantic social and economic cost.”

Although the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO) have yet to establish a definite link between microcephaly and the Zika virus, many scientists think they are connected. Brazil first confirmed the disease in May 2015 before it rapidly spread across the continent.

The number of dengue cases in Brazil rose from 600,000 in 2014 to 1.6 million in 2015, according to government statistics. As many as 1.5 million may have caught the Zika virus in 2015 and nearly 21,000 have cases of chikungunya, which causes fever and joint pains.

Anandasankar Ray, associate professor of entomology and the director of the Center for Disease Vector Research at the University of California at Riverside also told the Washington Post, “If there is a spike of all three of them, it could mean the mosquito is becoming more efficient.”

According to the WHO, dengue cases have spread significantly around the world with the reported number of cases in the Americas, Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific growing from 1.2 million to 3 million from 2008 to 2013.

Marcelo Castro, Brazil’s health minister told the Associated Press that officials were “absolutely sure” that the Zika virus was connected to the microcephaly cases and rejected criticism that the government was too slow in handling the pandemic. Castro said the half-year gap between the outbreak of the virus and the spike in birth defects was not coincidental.

Brazil would typically report 150 cases of microcephaly a year, but since October there have been 5,079 cases reported. Of these cases, 462 have been confirmed and 765 have been discarded. At least 41 of the microcephaly cases have been linked to Zika.

A top official from the World Health Organization said that a vaccine for the virus was 18 months away. At least 15 companies have been identified as possible candidates in the search for the vaccine and most have only just started working. Although the virus was first discovered in 1947, there has been little progress in creating a vaccine since there is no profit in treating a disease that only affects those living in poor, third world countries.

Not only Brazil, but also Colombia has been heavily affected by the Zika virus as well as cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome, which can cause paralysis. While health officials have been cautious in establishing a link between the two, people are already starting to panic. In Cúcuta, Colombia, there are 27 cases of paralysis, with 27,000 cases of Zika across the whole of the country.

Dr. Marco Fonseca, a neurosurgeon in Cúcuta didn’t rule out environmental factors in the cases of paralysis but suspected a change in the virus, calling it “Zika-plus. A mutation.”

In Puerto Rico, the CDC reported a rise in Zika cases from a single case involving an 80-year-old late last year to almost 30 confirmed cases at the end of January. Officials expect the number of cases to rise in the coming weeks and months because the A. Aegypti mosquito is prevalent throughout the island.

The CDC declared recently, “the risk to Puerto Rico is significant.” The governor of the island, Alejandro García Padilla, declared a public health emergency last week because of the increase in Zika cases.

The economies of Latin America are feeling the impact of the virus, which comes on top of an already worsening outlook. Brazil has seen a contraction of 3.71 percent in 2015, and is expected to contract 3.21 percent this year. The country’s inflation rate was 10.67 percent in 2015, the highest in 13 years. Puerto Rico is in a state of bankruptcy and the economy is on the verge of collapse.

Venezuela, which is facing enormous unrest because of its economic crisis, has seen three people die from the Zika virus. The newspaper Correo Del Orinoco reported 319 confirmed cases of the virus.

In the United States, Maryland confirmed its first case of the disease joining its neighbors in D.C., Delaware, and Virginia, with at least one confirmed case of the Zika virus each. The US has seen at least 60 cases of Zika, most of them in the south.

Although there are two advanced vaccine efforts underway, from the US National Institutes for Health and the Bharat Biotech International Limited from India, it will be many months before they are able to conduct large-scale test trials. Trials for a vaccine in the US could start before the end of summer but full approval could take years.

Most vaccines take at least two decades to develop. The relatively accelerated process was only made possible in the aftermath of the 2014 Ebola pandemic which forced the WHO to put in special procedures to fast-track vaccine creation.

Real estate statistics point to precarious state of Chinese economy

John Ward

China’s property sector faces a sharp downturn that could drag the rest of the economy down with it. While official figures show construction activity nationally increased marginally in 2015, there are signs of oversupply, lack of profitability and unsustainable credit growth. For the past seven years, speculative investment in real estate has been a prop that maintained growth in China, but this has laid the foundation for a broader crisis.

The possibility of a collapse was openly stated this week by Zhou Xiaochuan, the governor of the People’s Bank of China (BPOC), the country’s central bank. In an interview with Caixin Weekly, he said: “[W]e’ve learned lessons from the global financial crisis, which started from the 2008 subprime crisis in the US, that the cross-contagion between the real estate market, the subprime market and shadow banking system in the US produced disastrous impacts. There is also the soil for such contagion in China.”

A report released by Standard Chartered in November 2015 estimated that half of the economic slowdown in China since 2010 was due to a “slump in house-building” after “taking into account linkages with related sectors.” These “linkages” included the manufacturers of cement, steel, glass and other building products, all of which face a crisis of overcapacity and falling profitability. The report estimated housing starts to have fallen 28 percent in the past two years.

Figures released by the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) show that for 2015 overall nominal investment in real estate development rose by just 1.0 percent from a year earlier to 9.598 trillion yuan ($US1.46 trillion). Of this total, 67.3 percent was for residential real estate, up by 0.4 percent on 2014.

Across the country, however, there were significant disparities. Investment in the three north-eastern “rust bucket” provinces dropped by 28.8 percent. In the main eastern provinces, which account for more than half the total, investment was up 4.5 percent. In the central provinces it was up by 4.2 percent, but in the western provinces it was down by 0.8 percent.

According to the latest PBOC figures on real estate loans for 2015, reported last week by the Xinhua news agency, individual loans grew by 23.9 percent to 13.1 trillion yuan, with outstanding real estate loans accounting for 22.4 percent of the total. This growth was driven by five cuts to official interest rates. However these figures are likely to understate the real situation.

A McKinsey report in 2015 estimated that half of China’s non-financial sector debt—$9 trillion—was tied to property either directly or in loans to firms making building materials. A report last week in the New York Times estimated that by the end of 2016 total loans and other credit in China would be $30 trillion, up from $9 trillion only seven years ago, and that by that time up to 22 percent of these would be “non-performing,” i.e., either behind on repayments or unlikely to pay.

China faces a massive oversupply of property, especially residential property. This is now producing a contraction in construction. The NBS figures show that “the floor space of residential buildings started in the year amounted to 1.06 billion square meters, down by 14.6 percent.” The International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimates that China still has over a billion square metres in unsold property. Thus even the current construction levels are unsustainable.

The problem over oversupply is, for now, concentrated in Tier 3 and Tier 4 cities—those with populations smaller than five million residents. According to Wang Jianlin, chairman of property and entertainment conglomerate Dalian Wanda Group, it could take four to five years for the market to digest the inventory in these cities.

This is a direct result of massive speculation in property, resting on cheap credit supplied by the government in response to the 2008 global financial crisis. The Standard Chartered report from November estimated excess inventory in 2014 at 9 million homes, with another 40-50 million “sold but being held vacant as investments.”

The central government’s response is becoming more desperate. In 2015, it made clearing the inventory of unsold and unused housing a priority for 2016. A number of plans were outlined, such as the accelerated urbanisation of up to 270 million migrant workers (equal to around 80 percent of the population of the United States). They were to be shifted from the countryside into the cities, including by granting them residency permits, allowing them to buy homes in the cities where they work. At present rural migrant workers are treated as second class citizens with few rights and social benefits. Other measures included a reduction in the deposit required for a first home from 25 percent to 20 percent, and on second homes from 60 percent to 40 percent.

Provincial and local governments have announced subsidies and incentives to attract buyers. Puyang, in Henan province, introduced a 150-yuan per square metre subsidy to rural residents who purchased homes in towns and cities. In Anyang last August, the government started to provide a 20,000 yuan subsidy for anyone willing to buy an apartment in the city.

The consequences of an implosion in the property market could be severe for the Chinese economy as a whole. Tao Dong, a Credit Suisse economist, said in January: “China’s property market was the biggest growth engine for its economy in the past decade … It is largely over now, and for China, there is no alternative.”

Credit Suisse recently warned: “The key catalysts for a hard landing in China would be a fall in property prices of greater than 15 percent, China’s loan-to-deposit ratio rising above 100 percent or capital flight accelerating, leading to a devaluation of the yuan.”

Overall residential construction investment in China peaked in 2013 at 10.4 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), according to the IMF. This figure was only behind Spain, which peaked at 12.5 percent of GDP in 2006 , and much higher than the US, where residential construction peaked at 6.5 percent of GDP in 2006, before the crash.

After adding the office and retail sectors, all real estate investment accounts for almost 15 percent of China’s GDP. The US and Spanish implosions could be replayed, on a larger scale, in China. This would have devastating consequences, not just for the Chinese economy but for the 60 million workers—15 percent of the urban workforce—directly employed in the property sector.

In his interview, PBOC governor Zhou said the problems could be dealt with via reforms, which “should pick good windows of opportunities.” This would involve “art in timing, cooperation and skills of execution.” China, he said, could learn from international experience “that caution should be exercised to avoid ‘transition trap’ and ‘reform fatigue.’” Such reassurances should be read beside similar statements produced by the US Federal Reserve in the lead-up to the 2008 financial crisis. Then too, the possibility of crisis was denied and clever policy settings were touted as ensuring continued growth.

Oxfam Report exposes reality of Spain’s “economic recovery”

James Lerner

After years of unrelenting recession and stagnation, Spain has finally managed to string together a few quarters of timid economic growth—reaching 3.2 percent for 2015, with unemployment easing slightly.

The bourgeois media and politicians in Spain and across Europe have sought to present this as a success story. Spain has pulled itself out of the post-2008 economic downturn, they proclaim, on the strength of its “painful sacrifices” and European Union-backed austerity policies, and did so without a bailout. This was in contrast to most of the other so-called “PIIGS” (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain), they state. Spain’s Popular Party (PP) Finance Minister Luis De Guindos boasts that “Spain is now a role model.”

The falseness of this story is subjected to devastating exposure by a recent report by Oxfam International charity on global wealth inequality, “An Economy for the 1%.” The report made headlines last month by revealing that the 62 richest people in the world possess as much wealth as half the world’s population, or 3.6 billion people. A supplement to the report focusing on Spain shows that the country’s own levels of inequality have skyrocketed since the eruption of the global economic crisis in 2008.

A recital of some of the facts makes for shocking reading.

Oxfam found that the 20 richest people in Spain had as much wealth as the bottom 30 percent of the income scale. In just the past year, the net worth of these 20 people increased by 15 percent, while the wealth of 99 percent of the population fell by 15 percent.

Since the 2008 economic crisis, inequality has increased faster in Spain than in any other OECD country (except for Cyprus), and it has done so 10 times faster than the EU average.

Inequality in Spain has increased 14 times faster than even in Greece, the country used as the test case by the EU for continent wide austerity.

The report notes that, in 2014, some 13.4 million Spaniards, nearly 30 percent of the population, were at risk of poverty or social exclusion. This is 2.3 million more than in 2008 and six percentage points higher than the average among the core 15 EU countries. This 30 percent has seen its net worth grow by barely 3 percent in the past 15 years, while that of the 10 percent of richest individuals shot up by 56 percent.

Spain’s tax system helps to reinforce and consolidate the chasm between the fortune of the few and the misery of the many. For instance, 2015 was a boom year for SICAV investment funds (Société d’Investissement à Capital Variable, Investment Company with Variable Capital) which are essentially exempt from taxation, and now amount to a market worth €38 billion. Such funds are available only to the very wealthy.

Spain’s level of taxation at 8.2 percent is among the lowest in the euro zone. But this is deceptive. Some 85 percent of taxation falls on households (wages, social security contributions and VAT), rather than assets, wealth and capital. Corporate tax in 2014 brought in 58 percent less revenue for state coffers than in 2007, with the vast majority of revenue lost when the Socialist Party (PSOE) was in power from 2004 to 2011.

Seventeen of the 35 multinationals on the elite IBEX-35 stock index paid no corporate tax at all in Spain, as the number of subsidiaries domiciled in tax havens (especially the Cayman Islands), increased by 44 percent in the year 2014 alone.

The report concludes that Spain “taxes much less than it should, it taxes little those who have the most, it taxes with hardly any redistribution, and has one of the highest rates of tax evasion and avoidance in Europe.”

The result of this is that nine of every 10 euros in taxation comes from the pockets of the working class.

The increased exploitation of the working class, noted in the report, has allowed for renewed economic growth. Average wages in Spain plummeted by 22.2 percent between 2007 and 2014, while dividends paid to shareholders increased by 72.4 percent, the pay packets of senior executives leapt by 80 percent and that of CEOs by 30 percent.

Further, growth has been sustained by a fortuitous mix of external circumstances. First is the low price of oil, which has lowered production costs for Spanish companies. Then, a depreciated euro has boosted Spain’s exports.

Lastly, Spain has been financing itself with an ongoing injection of cheap or free loans from the European Central Bank (ECB), which has kept the money printing machines going non-stop via its quantitative easing programme in an effort to backstop the troubled finances of EU countries like Spain.

The renewed economic growth has done nothing to halt Spain’s descent into the vicious cycle of deflation, in which falling prices depress wages and vice versa. Prices fell by a huge 2.5 percent in January, making annual inflation minus 0.4 percent, down from minus 0.1 percent in December—figures that took analysts and government officials completely by surprise.

The Oxfam report shows that most of the benefits of the recovery have gone to a small group of people, all of whom could fit in a single room. However, the Oxfam report offers only a plea to the existing widely discredited political set-up as a remedy to the terrible social reality it describes. It calls on whatever new parliament eventually issues from December’s general election to take action, detailing a list of measures aimed at alleviating inequality, boosting equality of opportunities, and reining in tax evasion.

Needless to say, such a wish list will be studiously ignored by Spain’s capitalist politicians, including the pseudo-left party Podemos, which is trying to salvage the collapse of the two-party system and cobble together some sort of coalition government that will continue as servants of the financial aristocracy. Its role will be to ensure that the state will in no way hinder—indeed, that it will facilitate—the accumulation of massive wealth by the financial aristocracy.

Air conditioner maker Carrier to close two Indiana plants, slash 2,100 jobs

Steve Filips

Heating and air conditioning manufacturer, Carrier, announced last week that it would close two manufacturing plants in Indiana and eliminate a total of 2,100 jobs. Its plant in Indianapolis with 1,400 workers will begin phasing out its operations in 2017 and close in 2019, while a second plant with 700 workers in Huntington, just southwest of Ft. Wayne, will be closed in 2018.

Carrier—a division of the giant defense manufacturer United Technologies—is planning on moving production to Monterrey, Mexico. A YouTube video released last week, which has gotten over 3 million views, shows workers at the Indianapolis plant erupt in anger after a company spokesman announces the closures.

To the shouts and denunciations of workers, the manager tells them the move is necessary to “maintain high levels of product quality at competitive prices and continue to serve the extremely price-sensitive marketplace.” He adds callously, “This is strictly a business decision.”

Carrier’s parent company, United Technologies, made $15.6 billion in profits in 2015. Its CEO Gregory Hayes, whose predecessor walked away with a $195 million golden parachute, made $9 million last year. Hayes announced a ruthless cost-cutting plan at the end of last year including “reducing the manufacturing footprint in the U.S. and Europe, [that] will result in $900 million of annual savings when it’s done,” according to Bloomberg News.

“You taking away from this community by taking this job, this plant away,” Dominique Anthony, a Carrier employee for 13 years at the west side facility told the local news channel WISHTV. “I have almost 16 family members that work at Carrier. We have to tell our whole family that we have lost our jobs to feed our families,” he said.

In his final remarks, captured on the YouTube video, the company spokesman says the decision to close the plants is “subject to discussions with our local union representatives.” In 2014, United Steelworkers (USW) Local 1999 negotiated a four-year contract with Carrier that introduced sweeping concessions, including a two-tier wage system. Currently, a quarter of the factory’s workers make only $14 an hour, nearly half the $26 paid to older workers.

USW officials claimed they were “blindsided” by the plant closing decision. “It was devastating to hear, and it was not anticipated at all,” USW Subdivision Director Wayne Dale told Indystar.com. In any case, the USW is sure to use the announcement in an effort to extract further concessions from workers in the name of “saving” jobs.

The USW and local Democratic Party politicians responded to the closure announcements with calls for economic nationalism and protectionist measures. They blamed “unfair trade agreements” for the closures, suggesting that Mexican workers, to whom Carrier will pay as little as $3 an hour, are essentially stealing “American jobs.”

In a statement on its Facebook page, USW Works declared, “This is the harsh reality of what bad trade deals are doing to the working class. 1400 jobs at Carrier Corp. are being sent to Mexico under the guise of ‘strictly a business decision.’ We need to stand together and let our legislators know that we will not stand for this anymore!” USW officials are calling for a boycott of “Mexican-made” Carrier air conditioners.

The closure “is a fine example of unfair trade bills,” added Jared Evans, a Democratic city councilman in Indianapolis, “which allow American companies, who were built on American backs [sic] to move good paying jobs overseas.”

Both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have also sought to divert social anger over the destruction of jobs and falling living standards behind American nationalism. In every case, the aim of the unions and the big business politicians is to conceal the fact that it is the capitalist profit system, not “unfair trade,” that is responsible for the destruction of jobs. Above all they want to prevent US workers from uniting with their brothers in Mexico and other countries in a common fight against the global corporate conglomerates.

In fact, the policy of the unions and the Democratic Party is “insourcing,” i.e., the reduction of US labor costs to such a low level that global corporations are enticed to relocate their operations from China, Mexico and other low-wage countries to the US. The president of the USW, Leo Gerard, sits on Obama’s corporate competitiveness board where he discusses with Fortune 500 executives how to slash labor costs and boost productivity. On this basis, the USW has blocked any struggle of workers—including workers facing brutal wage and benefit cuts at US Steel and ArcelorMittal—while sabotaging struggles when they do break out, including last year’s oil refinery strike and the five-month lockout of ATI steelworkers.

The claims of “economic recovery” made by the Obama administration are belied by plant closures and mass layoffs, which only intensify what is already unbearable inequality. The closures will have a particularly devastating effect on Indianapolis, which saw the closures of the GM stamping plant in 2011 and its Navistar foundry and truck engine plant in June 2015. Both occurred after the United Auto Workers forced wage and benefit concessions on workers.

As part of his economic “stimulus package,” Obama’s Energy Department granted Carrier a $5 million federal tax credit in December 2013 to “expand production at its Indianapolis facility to meet increasing demand for its eco-friendly condensing gas furnace product line.”

The United Technologies business strategy has been growth through mergers and acquisitions in industries that are as diverse as Carrier heating and air conditioning, which was bought in 1979, to Pratt and Whitney aircraft engines. They were often followed by plant closures and the relocation of production to lower-wage states or countries to inflate profits.

The Carrier plant in the east Texas city of Tyler was shuttered in 2013 with the loss of 1,200 jobs. Production was also moved to Mexico.

Carrier also announced additional layoffs at its parts warehouse in Syracuse, New York. Once the largest manufacturer in the Syracuse area, with over 7,000 workers at its manufacturing and research and development facilities in DeWitt, New York, a suburb of Syracuse, Carrier has nothing left but its parts warehouses in the area.

In 2004, Carrier halted manufacturing in DeWitt, laying off the 1,200 remaining workers. In September of 2009, Carrier announced it was eliminating 140 of 245 workers at the two remaining parts warehouses. In January 2015, the company announced the layoff of another 62 of those workers.

The International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers union Local 58 has offered concessions totaling $4 an hour to keep the warehouses operating in Syracuse. Carrier declined the offer and stated the average wage of $16.61 needed to be reduced by $8 in order to retain the jobs in Syracuse.

In each case of layoff and closure the sheet metalworkers union has been a reliable corporate “partner” and blocked any worker resistance to the destruction of jobs. Like the USW, it has scapegoated workers in other countries.

OECD downgrades global growth forecast

Nick Beams

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development has downgraded its forecast for global growth to the lowest level in five years and warned of “substantial” risks to the international financial system.

Releasing its first report for the year, the Paris-based organisation, comprising 34 major economies, reduced its prediction of global growth from 3.3 percent in November to 3 percent and said growth in 2017 would be 3.3 percent rather than 3.6 percent.

“Global growth prospects have practically flat-lined, recent data have disappointed and indicators point to slower growth in major economies and low interest rates,” OECD chief economist Catherine Mann said in issuing the report.

The downturn is centred in the world’s largest economies. Growth prospects have worsened over the past three months for every member of the G7 group of the world’s major industrial economies—the US, the UK, Germany, Japan, Italy, France and Canada.

The OECD cut its forecast both for the US, the world’s largest economy, and for Germany, the fourth largest, by 0.5 percentage points. The US is now expected to expand by 2 percent this year and 2.2 percent in 2017, with growth in Germany expected to come in at 1.3 percent and 1.7 percent respectively.

It said the US was facing “an intensification of headwinds, including a drag on exports from the stronger dollar and energy investment from low oil prices.” It also cut the growth forecast for the Canadian economy, which has been hit by the slump in oil prices, from 2 percent to 1.4 percent this year.

Slow growth in the euro zone was a major drag on global economic recovery and left the world vulnerable to global economic shocks, the OECD said. It cut 0.4 percentage points off the growth forecast for 2016 and reduced its estimate for 2017 growth by 0.2 percentage points, lowering its estimates to 1.4 percent and 1.7 percent respectively.

The biggest reduction in growth estimates was for Brazil, the world’s ninth-largest economy that was once touted as a new basis for world growth as part of the so-called BRICS group of countries. The OECD said its economy would contract by 4 percent this year, a downward revision from its previous forecast of negative growth of 2.8 percent, following a 3.8 percent recession last year.

This follows last month’s downward revision by the International Monetary Fund which has forecast that the Brazilian economy will contract by 3.5 percent. Both organisations expect that Brazil’s economy will not grow in 2017 after earlier forecasting expansion of 1.8 percent.

On Wednesday, the credit-rating agency Standard & Poor’s downgraded Brazilian sovereign debt, saying that fiscal adjustment—government spending cuts—and political uncertainty were preventing the economy from resuming growth.

The OECD also added its voice to those warning of growing financial instability. “Financial instability risks are substantial,” it said. “Some emerging markets are particularly vulnerable to sharp exchange-rate movements and the effects of high domestic debt.”

Concern over financial stability and the realisation that the low-interest rate regime flowing from cuts in official rates by central banks, as well as their quantitative easing programs, is not bringing about an economic revival and is in fact increasing financial instability, prompted a major shift in the OECD’s policy recommendations.

Previously, it has called for reductions in government spending—fiscal consolidation—combined with so-called structural reforms, aimed at cutting working-class living standards, to boost growth. It has kept the call for structural reforms but, in a measure of how seriously it regards the fall in growth, has called for a boost to government spending.

“Monetary policy cannot work alone. Fiscal policy is now contractionary in many major economies. Structural reform momentum has slowed,” the report said.

In a criticism of the reliance on monetary policy, Mann said: “Given the significant downside risks posed by financial sector volatility and emerging market debt, a stronger collective policy approach is urgently needed, focusing on a greater use of fiscal and pro-growth structural policies, to strengthen growth and reduce financial risks.”

She said that with interest rates at very low levels “there is room for fiscal expansion to strengthen demand in a manner consistent with financial sustainability.” According to the report, a “more supportive demand environment” would enable governments to proceed more vigorously with structural reforms, which are principally aimed at introducing more “flexibility” into labour markets.

Noting that budget policy in the US, the UK and Japan was “contractionary” and a number of developing countries had made budget decisions that would lower growth, the OECD called for a change of course. It said governments should now either lift their overall spending or undertake infrastructure projects that would make up for “the shortfall in investment following the cuts imposed across advanced economies in recent years.”

However, there is no sign at all that major governments are going to make the “course correction” now urged by the OECD, which has also been advanced previously by some global economists. In the first phase of the global economic meltdown of 2008–2009, there was a certain turn to government stimulus measures. But this was reversed at a meeting of the G20 group in June 2010 when the emphasis was placed on “fiscal consolidation.”

In an indication of the likely response from all major governments, a spokesman for the US Treasury, which has been instrumental in imposing major cuts, said the OECD’s advice to Britain had not changed and “we have the right strategy and have made significant progress over the past five years.”

Furthermore, the present crisis is not the result of a cyclical downturn, which can somehow be overcome by a turn to “demand management” of the kind practised in an earlier period, but is the outcome of deep-going forces within the global capitalist economy.

Economic and financial analyst Satyajit Das, who warned in 2006 of the key role played by derivatives and other complex financial instruments in creating the conditions for a financial crisis, noted at a recent financial conference that debt had only grown since 2008 and was crushing the ability of the global economy to resume growth. He said there was only a 0.5 percent chance of a bounce back in the world economy and a normalisation of interest rate policy.

Noting the longer-term changes in the global economy, he said that since the late 1980s only 15 to 20 percent of borrowed money had gone into productive investment, with the rest used to finance takeovers of companies, real estate or the financing of personal spending.

The most optimistic scenario in the present situation was for “managed depression,” consisting of low growth and disinflation with monetary policy used to try to contain it, with a 30 percent chance of a major crisis that would lead to social breakdown.

“Essentially, you get overvalued assets, debt, capital flight as we see in China, deflation starts, emerging markets start to have problems, and then you get cross-contagion,” he said. The response of financial authorities to the crisis was the crux of the problem, rather than the solution, because they had created a kind of Ponzi scheme in which nations and individuals needed to borrow ever-increasing amounts just to pay off existing debts.

White House steps up drive to outlaw encryption

Andre Damon

The court order to force technology company Apple Inc. to create a “backdoor” to its iOS mobile operating system is a substantial new offensive in the US government’s drive to spy on the data and communications of everyone in the world.

The ruling comes as the Senate Intelligence Committee is preparing to introduce a bill that would create criminal penalties for companies that do not comply with court orders to decipher encrypted communications, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

On Tuesday, Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym of the US District Court for the District of Central California ordered Apple to create a fraudulent software update that intelligence agencies could use to access encrypted data on the company’s mobile telephones and tablets.

Formally, the order stipulates that Apple must provide “technical assistance” to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in hacking an Apple iPhone seized while executing a search warrant into the car owned by Tafsheen Malik, one of the shooters in the December 2, 2015 mass killing in San Bernardino, California.

But as Apple chief executive Timothy D. Cook made clear in an open letter published Wednesday, the ruling would create a technical and legal precedent for the government to hack into phones on demand.

The ruling is another step toward the US intelligence agencies’ goals of being able to intercept and monitor all data stored or transmitted anywhere in the world, or to, “sniff it all, collect it all, know it all, process it all and exploit it all,” as one internal document leaked by Edward Snowden put it.

Pym’s order is a pseudo-legal travesty. It is based on a false reading of the All Writs Act of 1789, which states that the courts may issue orders “agreeable to the usages and principles of law.” Pym’s ruling simply ignores this latter clause and interprets the act to mean that the courts are given effective plenipotentiary powers to do whatever they declare “necessary or appropriate.” This is simply a prostitution of the judiciary to grant the executive branch effectively unlimited spying powers.

As Cook notes, “The implications of the government’s demands are chilling. If the government can use the All Writs Act to make it easier to unlock your iPhone, it would have the power to reach into anyone’s device to capture their data. The government could extend this breach of privacy and demand that Apple build surveillance software to intercept your messages, access your health records or financial data, track your location, or even access your phone’s microphone or camera without your knowledge.”

In this case, the ruling would require the world’s largest technology company to “hack our own users and undermine decades of security advancements that protect...tens of millions of American citizens.”

The ruling mandates Apple to create a version of the iOS operating system with key security features disabled, and then create a false digital signature certifying the operating system as genuine in order to install it onto the phone in question. This would then allow the Federal Bureau of Investigation to carry out a “brute force” hack of the phone’s password in order to gain access to the phone’s data.

Once such software is created, there is no way to prevent it from being used at will by intelligence agencies.

The ruling is the latest stage in the Obama administration’s drive to expand government spying in the wake of Edward Snowden’s 2013 revelations of mass illegal government surveillance. In May 2015, Congress passed the USA Freedom Act, which was designed to give the veneer of ending illegal government surveillance while in reality allowing it to continue in slightly modified form.

In the wake of the November 2015 terror attacks in Paris and the December mass shooting in San Bernardino, the White House shifted to the offensive, demanding that electronics and computer manufactures create backdoors to encryption.

This is entirely in keeping with the Obama administration’s record on democratic rights. The Obama White House has carried out twice as many prosecutions of reporters and whistleblowers for leaking classified information than all previous administrations combined, including the jailing of Chelsea Manning and the witch hunts of Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

The Obama White House has refused to prosecute those within the Bush administration responsible for torture, and instead conspired with CIA Director John Brennan, whom Obama appointed, to suppress the Senate Intelligence Committee torture report. The administration then defended Brennan when his hacking into Senate Intelligence Committee staffers’ computers was exposed.

This is in addition to having been the first president to claim the right to kill American citizens, including inside the borders of the United States, without a trial. To date, the White House’s drone murder program has led to the deaths of thousands of people in Pakistan, Yemen and other countries, including at least four American citizens.

Now, amid an intensification of its wars in the Middle East and on the threshold of a potential conflict with Russia and China, the White House is seeking to clamp down on encrypted communications in order to threaten and intimidate popular opposition to war, attacks on democratic rights and social inequality.

No one should be under any illusion that corporations such as Apple, who have collaborated with illegal spying in the past and whose qualms now are based on financial considerations, will be either willing or able to mount a successful effort to restrain the drive to criminalize encryption.

The defense of democratic rights requires the building of a mass movement of the working class in opposition to war and social inequality, armed with the socialist program of reorganizing society to meet social need, not private profit.

Turkey escalates war threats after terror attacks

Johannes Stern

The Justice and Development Party (AKP) government in Turkey has seized upon a terrorist attack carried out in the capital of Ankara as a pretext for escalating its military campaign against Kurdish-dominated regions in eastern Turkey, northern Syria and Iraq.

At the same time, Ankara is pushing ahead with plans for a ground invasion into Syria. In so doing, NATO member Turkey is deliberately stoking a conflagration in the entire region and risking a military confrontation with Russia, which could rapidly develop into all-out war between the great powers.

On Thursday, the Turkish military command announced that its warplanes had bombed PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party) positions in northern Iraq the previous night. Targets were attacked in the Haftanin border region—an area considered to be a stronghold of the PKK militia.

On Friday, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu boasted in a televised speech: “Our armed forces conducted a large-scale operation against the Haftanin camp. … Around 70 members of the separatist terrorist organization ... were neutralized.”

In an attack on a military convoy in the Turkish capital of Ankara on Wednesday night, at least 28 people were killed and another 60 injured. All of the dead except one were members of the Turkish military. The attack took place just a few hundred metres from the parliament and Turkish army headquarters. At least six people were killed in another attack on Thursday on a military convoy in the predominantly Kurdish province of Diyarbakir in southeastern Turkey.

Davutoğlu and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan promptly assigned responsibility for the attack to the PKK along with the Syrian Kurdish organizations, the Democratic Union Party (PYD) and the People’s Protection Units (YPG), and vowed retaliation.

Erdoğan announced that Turkey would “use its legitimate right to defend itself at all times and everywhere. … These actions only serve to increase our determination to retaliate in Turkey and abroad to such attacks on our unity and our future.” The terror tested the patience of Turkey, Erdogan declared, adding menacingly: “If someone fires on Turkey, he will receive a clear answer.”

Davutoğlu threatened: “Yesterday’s attack was directly targeting Turkey and the perpetrator is the YPG and the divisive terrorist organization PKK. All necessary measures will be taken against them.” Davutoğlu vowed that Turkey would continue to shell YPG positions in northern Syria and equated the YPG with the terrorist organizations Al Qaeda and Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), insisting that they could not be a party to Syrian peace talks.

The Turkish prime minister asserted: “This attack has been carried out by the members of the terrorist organization inside Turkey together with an individual YPG member who had crossed from Syria.” Davutoglu then identified the suicide bomber as Salih Neccar, born in 1992 in the Kurdish town of Amudah in northern Syria.

Representatives of the PKK, the YPG and the PYD categorically rejected the allegations launched by Ankara. The PKK commander Cemil Bayik told the PKK-affiliated agency Firat on Thursday: “We do not know who did it. It might, however, have been in retaliation for the massacres in Kurdistan.”

A member of the YPG told reporters, “We have no connection to the man who is named as the assassin.”

The PYD denies any connection to the attacks and has no record of carrying out any actions in Turkey. Its leader, Saleh Muslim, accused the Turkish government of exploiting the attacks to escalate the fighting in northern Syria. “We vehemently deny responsibility,” Muslim said in a telephone interview with Reuters. “Davutoğlu is preparing something else. They have bombarded us for a week, as you know. I can assure you that not a single YPG bullet was fired in the direction of Turkey. They don’t consider Turkey an enemy.”

Whoever has followed events in Syria and the fiercely aggressive response of the Turkish government in recent days can only conclude that the latest terror attacks play into the hands of Davutoğlu and the Turkish government.

For the past week, the Turkish Air Force has bombarded YPG positions in northern Syria and the Turkish army has shelled them with artillery on the Turkish-Syrian border. On Tuesday, the US, which works closely with the YPG in the latter’s offensive against ISIS in Syria, called upon Turkey and the Kurdish militia to end their conflict. Erdoğan replied angrily that such a proposal was “not up for debate” and that Turkish security forces would carry out their fight against the “Kurdish terrorists in Syria” to the bitter end.

He accused the UN and the West of being passive for too long with regard to the fighting in Syria. “Right now I have difficulties understanding the United States. Why do they not call the PYD and YPG terrorists? Why do they say they support the YPG?” On Thursday, Turkey summoned the ambassadors of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council.

Turkey has intensified its rhetoric in the wake of the attacks. “Those who directly or indirectly support a group hostile to Turkey risk losing their status as a friend. … We cannot tolerate any NATO country, including first and foremost the US, having relations with a terrorist organization that attacks us in the heart of Turkey,” Davutoğlu declared. He said the Syrian regime was “directly responsible” for the attacks, calling the YPG “a pawn” of Damascus, and insisting that Turkey had the right to take all measures against the Assad regime.

Regarding Russia, which supports the Syrian army in its offensive in northern Syria, Davutoğlu stated that Moscow’s condemnation of the attacks was a “positive sign”, but was not enough. “I warn Russia again against using terrorist organizations against innocent people in Syria and Turkey,” he said.

How can one account for the thoroughly reckless and aggressive stance of the Turkish government?

Recent weeks have seen the collapse of the Western-backed Turkish strategy to forcibly topple the Assad regime through arming and financing so-called moderate Islamist “rebels” in Syria.

An article on the news website al-Monitor states: “On Feb. 3, the Syrian army and its allies dealt a strategic blow to Ankara when they cut the land route between Aleppo and the Bab al-Salameh border crossing with Turkey in the Turkish province of Kilis.”

The road link was important for Erdoğan and Davutoğlu for one reason in particular. Al-Monitor writes: “The fighters, weapons, munitions and various supplies that flowed via this route to Aleppo allowed the rebels to sustain their military presence in Syria’s most populous city and therefore preserve their political ambitions in the conflict. … Thus, with the fall of Aleppo, Ankara would find itself largely sidelined from the Syrian process.”

Since then, there are increasing indications that the Turkish regime is planning a ground offensive in Syria to rescue its dwindling influence and prevent the emergence of a Kurdish-occupied territory in the north of Syria. Just one day after the Syrian army occupied the Turkish-Syrian route to Aleppo, a spokesman for the Russian Defence Ministry stated that Turkey was “actively preparing for a military invasion in Syria. … We’re detecting more and more signs of Turkish armed forces being engaged in covert preparations for direct military actions in Syria.”

According to reports, the Turkish military has been reticent up until now about a military invasion in Syria. The Turkish newspaper Hurriyet reported recently that the Turkish army would not invade Syria without a resolution from the UN Security Council.

Erdoğan and Davutoğlu have been seeking for some time to change this attitude. An article on al-Monitor, significantly entitled, “Can Erdogan bully Turkey's armed forces into invading Syria?” reports the Turkish president pushing for an early intervention in Syria. Erdoğan has repeatedly spoken of an “mistake” in 2003 when Turkey refused to march alongside the US into Iraq. Now this “mistake” should not be repeated in Syria.

Already in 2014, Davutoğlu had sought, in his capacity at the time as Turkish defence minister, to provoke an invasion by the Turkish army. A leaked audio recording revealed that he had met with, among others, the head of the Turkish intelligence service MIT, Hakan Fidan, to discuss the possibility of an attack on Turkey from across the Syrian border, or at the grave of Suleiman Shah—a former Turkish enclave inside Syria—serving as a pretext for a full-scale Turkish intervention of Syria. At one point in the conversation, Davutoğlu declared that such an attack “in the current situation should be seen as an opportunity for us”.

Today, the Turkish government is less isolated than in 2014, and enjoys, in particular, greater support from the German government. Just two days ago, German Chancellor Angela Merkel confirmed in a government statement her support for a no-fly zone in Syria, a central demand of the Erdoğan government and an important prerequisite for a Turkish military invasion in Syria. After the latest terror attacks, she stated that the German government stood “alongside Turkey in the fight against those responsible for such inhuman acts”.

The threat of another major war is becoming more acute on a daily basis. Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev warned at the Munich Security Conference last weekend against the danger of a “new world war” should Western or Arab ground troops invade Syria, adding, “The Americans and our Arab partners must think it through: do they want permanent war?”