European Union leaders hail Syriza austerity agreement

Robert Stevens

Over the weekend, euro zone leaders welcomed the four month austerity programme agreed between the Eurogroup and Greece on Friday.

The agreement remains conditional on the Syriza-Independent Greeks government submitting proposals to the Eurogroup, containing the exact “reform” measures that it will implement by the end of April. According to Friday’s agreement, the measures must be “sufficiently comprehensive” and in accord with the 2012 austerity programme that the government of Alexis Tsipras has now signed on to.

No final deal is yet in place, as Syriza’s proposals have to then be agreed Tuesday by the European Commission, European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund, known as the “troika.” Even as he tried to sell the deal as one that allowed Greece some respite, Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis was forced to acknowledge, “If the list of reforms is not agreed, this agreement is dead.”

The Tsipras government began work on the proposals Saturday morning and details have not yet been made public. Nikos Pappas, Tsipras’ chief of staff, said Sunday, “We are compiling a list of proposals to make the Greek civil service more effective and to combat tax evasion.”

The agreement was endorsed by Germany’s governing coalition. Volker Kauder, the parliamentary leader of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, told Welt am Sonntag, “The Greeks have to do their homework now. Then, an extension of the aid programme can be approved by the German Bundestag. Greece has finally realised that it cannot turn a blind eye to reality.”

Thomas Oppermann, the leader of Merkel’s junior coalition partners, the Social Democratic Party, cautioned that Greece had to respond with proposals that would satisfy the Eurogroup. Offering Tsipras his “full support,” Oppermann added, “It is good that Greece is ready to carry out structural reforms. But this really has to happen now.”

Hans Michelbach, an MP for the Christian Social Union (CSU) and head of the party’s small-medium business wing, warned, “Without reliable considerations from Athens, the deal is worth nothing.” Gerda Hasselfeldt, the chair of the CSU group in Bavaria, said: “We won’t make a rotten compromise. There can be no payment without reward.”

One German government official said that German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble “believes if a country doesn’t respect the rules, we are better off without them. We can’t have a situation where we are constantly having to spend our time on a country that makes up 2 percent of the bloc’s GDP.”

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung summed up by saying, “Things will get serious on Monday.”

Syriza’s strategy since they were elected was based on trying to counter the hardline position of Germany, supported by several other countries, that Greece implement all remaining austerity measures that the previous New Democracy/PASOK government agreed. Greece held regular discussions with French President François Hollande and Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, among others. The support of the Obama administration in the US, which has expressed its support for a reflationary strategy in Europe, was also solicited.

In the end this perspective failed miserably, with Greece forced to remain within the existing austerity programme and all 19 eurozone finance ministers in favour.

With a few caveats, France endorsed Germany’s position. Hollande said Saturday, “The right solution is to extend the finance allowing Greece to ensure its transition and honour its commitment.”

As the European Union displayed its reactionary character to the workers of Greece and the entire continent, Tsipras praised his capitulation to the EU as a victory. He said the deal proved the EU was “an arena of negotiation and mutually acceptable compromise and not an arena for exhaustion, submission and blind punishment.”

“We won a battle, not the war,” he said.

The Economist bluntly summed up the harsh terms to which Syriza is now committed as follows:

Syriza “was elected on a pledge to tear up Greece’s bail-outs and leave austerity behind… It is difficult to square these promises with last night’s agreement. Greece has secured no change to the terms of its epic debt, which stands at over 175% of GDP. Its behaviour will continue to be supervised by the institutions formerly known as the troika. It is obliged to refrain from passing any measures that could undermine its fiscal targets; that appears to torpedo vast swathes of its election manifesto, which included all manner of spending pledges.”

The magazine warned, “Greece still faces an immediate funding squeeze. The bail-out funds can only be released after a ‘review’ of the bail-out provisions; that, according to the agreement, will not happen before the end of April.”

Reviewing the scale of Greece’s economic crisis and the billions in due debts that must be paid back in the weeks ahead, it concluded, “The government has reached a €15 billion ceiling on T-bill [Treasury bonds] issuance imposed by the troika, and there was no suggestion… that it might be lifted. The next two months will be painful indeed.”

In response to the deal, the supposed “left” within Syriza felt obliged to make a few noises in protest.

Giorgos Katrougalos, the deputy minister of administrative reform, had announced he would resign if “red lines,” which he did not specify, were crossed.

On Sunday, Syriza’s most senior figure, 92-year-old Manolis Glezos, said the party had broken its promises to “annul the bailout, annul the troika [of bailout monitors from the European Commission, International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank] and annul all the austerity legislation.”

The government was “renaming fish as meat …without changing the actual situation.”

Pointing out that Syriza were only granted a few terminological concessions by the Eurogroup, Glezos said the troika was now known as “the institutions,” the austerity agreement “the contract” and Greece’s international lenders “the partners.”

Glezos’ comments amounted to rebellion on its knees. He concluded, “I apologise to the Greek people for participating in this illusion,” and called only for Syriza supporters to demand explanations from governing officials.

The most ludicrous statement was issued by the Communist Tendency, which is part of Syriza’s Left Platform and a section of the International Marxist Tendency (IMT).

Describing the “request to the Troika for a six-month extension of the loan agreement” as a “grave political mistake,” the statement called for, “No more retreats! The government must formulate an alternative collision plan with the blackmailers and their local lackeys, a plan that favours the working masses!”

In the most obsequious terms possible they declare, “We call upon our comrade, the Prime Minister, and the leftist ministers, to formulate an alternative plan to finance and implement the Thessaloniki programme [Syriza’s election manifesto] without relying on the loans of the extortionist ‘partners’.”

Immediately after Syriza formed a governing coalition with the right-wing xenophobic Independent Greeks, the Communist Tendency also denounced this as a “grave mistake.” One wouldn’t know from these statements that the Communist Tendency has two members on Syriza’s Central Committee. Once they spouted their rhetoric as a small opposition party. Today, they do it as the loyal opposition in a governing party committed to imposing brutal attacks on the living standards of the working class.

Obama administration forces five-year agreement on West Coast dockworkers

Dan Conway

A tentative agreement was reached Friday between the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) and the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) that outlines terms of a five-year contract between West Coast dockworkers and their employers.

The agreement, which covers 20,000 workers and must be approved by ILWU members, was reached after the extraordinary intervention of the White House. Labor Secretary Thomas Perez flew to the West Coast late last week to give the ILWU its marching orders. Perez had threatened to move negotiations from San Francisco to Washington in order to force a settlement in the event that the union and PMA could not reach a deal by Friday.

The ILWU, which has close ties to the Democratic Party and the Obama administration, quickly capitulated and reached an agreement.

Also directly involved in last week’s negotiations were Obama’s billionaire Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti. They were joined by a growing chorus of Democratic Party politicians, business spokesmen and media representatives—all demanding that an agreement be reached as soon as possible, and that the White House use the Taft-Hartley Act to break any strike by dockworkers.

The agreement follows the PMA lockout of workers at 29 West Coast ports for six days earlier this month, resulting in thousands of dollars in lost wages for dockworkers. The PMA had earlier reduced night shifts for dock workers, which the employers organization claimed was a response to a worker slowdown on the ports. The PMA also shut off health benefits for dockworkers during this period.

While details of the agreement have yet to be released, the PMA announced a last and final offer in the days leading up to the agreement that included a miserly pay rise of 3 percent, along with an 11.1 percent increase in maximum pension benefits.

However, negotiations were mainly being used to push for even greater casualization of the port labor force, including the reintroduction of zero-hour contracts aimed at moving back toward the notorious “shape up” system, in which workers had no guaranteed hours.

The aim of the ILWU in the negotiations has been to keep a dwindling dues base of members as it collaborates in implementing measures demanded by the port companies. The union has also worked to keep the dockworkers isolated, including from the ongoing strike of oil refinery workers. In this, the ILWU has played a complementary role to that of the United Steelworkers (USW), which is involved in negotiations with the oil industry.

Port of Los Angeles Executive Director Gene Seroka expressed gratitude for the proposed agreement. “This will go a long way toward helping to move cargo efficiently through the nation’s busiest container port. More than ever, we need labor and management working together with all our stakeholders to solve industry challenges,” he said.

ILWU President Robert McEllrath and PMA President James McKenna released a joint statement, declaring their mutual collaboration. The two said they were “pleased that our ports can now resume full operations.”

The ILWU has repeatedly caved in to the PMA’s demands to eliminate the gains of dockworkers won over decades of struggle. In 2002, the ILWU explicitly gave employers the right to cut jobs, with the introduction of newer computer technologies. In 2008, it gave management the right to bypass the union hall on a case-by-case basis, paving the way for increasing casualization.

The union reached an agreement with the PMA right at the point when the latter’s bargaining position was at its weakest. After complaints on Friday by the National Retail Federation that stoppages were costing the US economy approximately $2 billion a day, and that West Coast ports were undergoing “crisis level” congestion, PMA President McKenna declared, “The system can only take so much. At some point, this will collapse under its own weight.”

The direct intervention of the White House in the dockworkers dispute underscores the nervousness within the ruling class over the growing anger among workers throughout the country—the product of record social inequality, stagnating wages and the unrelenting attack on job security and other social rights.

In addition to the oil refinery strike, which has effected numerous plants along the West Coast of the US, there is growing sentiment among teachers in Los Angeles, California for a struggle against deteriorating working conditions and the attack on public education.

In this context, the task of the unions is to isolate the working class, prevent a unified struggle and enforce the dictates of the companies, backed by the state and the Obama administration.

US oil workers strike spreads to more plants in Texas and Louisiana

Jerry White

The strike by oil workers in the United States expanded over the weekend, with 1,350 workers walking out of a refinery in Port Arthur, Texas—the largest refinery in the US—and two other refineries and a petrochemical plant in Louisiana.

As the walkout enters its fourth week, 6,550 oil workers in California, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Texas, Louisiana and Washington state are engaged in the largest oil walkout since 1980.

The expansion of the strike is the first since February 8. It takes place as the United Steelworkers (USW) is coming under sharp criticism from rank-and-file workers who are demanding an all-out strike by the 30,000 USW workers in the oil industry. (See: “Oil refinery workers denounce USW treachery, call for national strike”)

From the beginning, the aim of the USW has been to contain the struggle of oil workers, limiting it to partial strikes that have had only a minimal impact on production. This has encouraged the oil giants to maintain their hard line against workers’ demands for improved wages, safety conditions and limits on contract workers.

Last Thursday, lead industry bargainer Shell put forward another insulting offer—the seventh in a row. Well aware they could not sell such a deal to their members, USW negotiators rejected it.

Workers at the Port Arthur site, on the Gulf of Mexico about ninety miles east of Houston, walked out Friday at midnight. The 600,000 barrels per day refinery is run by Motiva Enterprises, a joint venture between Shell and Saudi Refinery, Inc. On Saturday at midnight workers at Motiva refineries in Convent and Norco, Louisiana and a Shell Chemical plant in Norco joined the strike.

On the eve of the expanded strike, Motiva President and CEO Don Romasko issued a memo to the company’s employees praising the supposed generosity of Shell and the rest of the oil industry. Romasko—who pocketed $10 million in his four years at Tesoro before taking the leading position at Motiva—highlighted a 6.5 percent wage increase over three years (less than inflation) and a proposal to maintain, rather than increase, the 20-25 percent of health costs that workers already pay to keep their families insured.

Romasko also boasted that the industry planned to do a “workload balance assessment” to evaluate fatigue on the job—a meaningless gesture that the companies would circumvent to continue the widespread practice of 12-hour days and 14 consecutive days of work before a break. Any limits on contractors, Romasko declared, were “unreasonable,” adding that that the oil companies need to keep “flexibility in hiring to accommodate economic cycles and maintenance/turnaround schedules,” according to a report in the New Orleans Times Picayune. These appeals did little to persuade workers. Oil workers at the two Louisiana plants had “overwhelmingly” voted to authorize a strike last year, according to a USW spokesman.

The widespread support for the walkout in Texas and Louisiana gives the lie to the claims that workers in the southern US states are conservative and unwilling to fight the corporations. Like their northern counterparts, they are more than willing to engage in a struggle to recoup losses after decades of eroding living standards and working conditions.

The major obstacle to developing such a fight are the trade unions, which are allied with the employers and government and have spent the last three-and-a-half decades suppressing every form of working class resistance to the corporate war against workers.

The expansion of the oil strike coincides with the capitulation of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) to President Obama’s demands that the union cave in to ultimatums from the Pacific Maritime Association. The ILWU and the PMA announced that an agreement was reached over the weekend, which must be approved by dockworkers.

Desperate to prevent a political confrontation with the Obama administration, the ILWU is working to block a potential strike by 20,000 West Coast dockworkers that would immensely strengthen the fight of oil workers and other sections of workers, including Los Angeles teachers who have not had a raise in eight years.

While providing unlimited resources to bail out the banks and fuel the stock market bubble, the Obama administration has made the permanent lowering of wages—and the shifting of health care and pension costs from the employers and the government onto the backs of workers—the center of its economic policy.

A report issued by Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors last week boasted that the US economy has recovered from the global financial crisis faster than other countries because it had dealt with “structural imbalances.” This includes reducing government spending on public education and other social services at the fastest rate since World War II and sharply lowering expenditures on health care. Real wages, the report noted, have fallen by 0.3 percent since 2010. The number of salaried workers afforded overtime protection had fallen from 45 to 39 percent.

The picture of the future painted by the Obama administration was even more chilling. Stable jobs and employer-paid health care and pensions would be replaced by greater “labor market fluidity,” reducing workers to the status of desperate migrant laborers without the slightest job protection. The administration also wants to remove “unnecessary” licensing and training, which it terms an “obstacle to work.” This coincides with the cost-cutting drive by the oil industry to replace experienced workers with lower-wage contractors.

While workers have suffered through the longest period of wage stagnation since the Great Depression, the richest one percent of the population has swallowed up 95 percent of all income gains since 2009. The top five oil companies—Shell, ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP and ConocoPhilips—made $90 billion in profits last year and are squandering billions on stock buybacks and dividends for their wealthy investors.

The oil strike is the first of many struggles that mark the resurgence of open class conflict in the US.

To oppose the corporate giants, oil workers must break through the straightjacket of the USW and other pro-company unions. The strike must be spread to every refinery, chemical plant and oil terminal in the industry. This requires the formation of rank-and-file strike committees, independent of and in opposition to the USW.

The fight for decent wages and safe working conditions brings workers into a direct political struggle with the Obama administration and both big business parties. The Democrats and Republicans will not shy from using militarized police and anti-terror laws to defend the interests of Big Oil and Wall Street.

Oil workers confront not only the intransigence of the oil companies. Behind the oil companies stands the entire ruling class in America, which is drunk with wealth and power and, having been protected from the collective resistance of the working class by the trade unions for decades, believes it can get away with anything. The ruling class is determined to make workers pay for the multi-trillion dollar bailout of the banks and the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on war and repression.

The intransigence of the corporate and financial elite must be met with an equal intransigence of workers—through the unification of their struggles in a powerful political movement aimed at breaking the grip of the financial aristocracy and reorganizing economic life, including the multinational energy conglomerates, to meet the needs of working people, not private profit.

The capitulation of Syriza and the lessons for the working class

International Committee of the Fourth International

The petty-bourgeoisie is “capable, as well shall see, of nothing but ruining any movement that entrusts itself to its hands.”— Friedrich Engels (1850).

***

It has taken less than one month for the Syriza government in Greece, led by Prime Minister Alexander Tsipras, to repudiate its anti-austerity election program and betray, totally and utterly, the impoverished working people whose votes placed it in power.

Even in the entire squalid history of “left” petty-bourgeois politics, it is difficult to find an example of deceit, cynicism and truly disgusting cowardice that quite matches that of Prime Minister Tsipras. Certainly, from the standpoint of the time that elapsed between election and betrayal, the Syriza government has probably set a new world record.

In the hours following an agreement that is nothing less than a complete capitulation to the European Union, Tsipras let loose another barrage of demagogic lies in a pathetic attempt to deny the magnitude of Syriza’s prostration and to cover up his own political bankruptcy.

“We kept Greece standing and dignified,” declared Tsipras, in a televised statement that seemed oblivious to reality. He claimed that the agreement with Eurozone finance ministers “cancels austerity.” Tsipras added: “In a few days we have achieved a lot, but we have a long road. We have taken a decisive step to change course within the euro zone.”

Not a word of this is true. The Eurogroup statement signed by Syriza commits its government to “refrain from any rollback of measures and unilateral changes to the policies and structural reforms.” In other words, the Greek government will continue to enforce the existing austerity measures implemented by the previous government.

Moreover, Syriza is to prepare further “reform measures, based on the current arrangement,” specified in the hated Memorandum, which Tsipras had previously pledged to repudiate. And though Syriza had insisted that it would write down Greece's enormous debt, the agreement with the Eurogroup states that the country will “honor their financial obligations to all their creditors fully and timely.”

Far from cutting off ties with the “troika,” the government has now promised to “work in close agreement with European and international institutions and partners,” specifically mentioning the European Central Bank and the IMF, which together with the EU make up the troika. As before, “any disbursement of the outstanding tranche of the current [European Financial Stability Facility] programme” depends on a review by “the institutions.” Thus, Greece is to remain in the stranglehold of the troika.

Tsipras and his negotiating partner, Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, received no concessions from the European Union other than minor changes in the wording of the agreement, which have no practical significance whatsoever.

While Tsipras and Syriza apologists attempt to present the government’s miserable betrayal as a heroic victory, the capitalist press in Europe and the United States has not minced words about the scale of the prime minister’s capitulation.

“If this was meant to be the challenge to German economic orthodoxy, it failed,” writes the Financial Times of London. “The Germans prevailed on all the substantive issues.”

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung states, “With the new government led by the left-wing Syriza party, Greece is continuing the old bailout program. Funding will only be provided if the country undertakes reforms.”

Le Monde describes the agreement bluntly: “Athens is promising to finish the work of the previous conservative government of Antonis Samaras, enacting reforms imposed by the troika of creditors (IMF, ECB, EU) that have not yet been implemented.”

And The Wall Street Journal, enjoying the spectacle of Tsipras’ surrender to the EU, predicts further humiliations. In an article titled “Tsipras Can Expect More Humble Pie,” the principal voice of US finance capital writes: “Mr. Tsipras has capitulated on many issues in the past week ... But he will have to capitulate on plenty more if he is serious about putting Greece’s place in the euro zone once again beyond doubt.”

From the standpoint of the interests of the working class, the agreement signed by the Syriza government is a criminal betrayal. But from the standpoint of the real social and economic interests represented by the Syriza regime—sections of the Greek ruling elite and the affluent upper middle class—the deal is no more than a disappointment. Notwithstanding Tsipras’ demagogy—intended mainly to deceive and disorient the working people of Greece—the negotiating strategy of Syriza was determined entirely by its subordination to capitalist interests.

The Greek ruling class and the upper middle class may have hoped to achieve an easing of conditions that inhibited the access of Greek-owned businesses to financial credits. But they had no desire for a confrontation with EU bankers and were utterly opposed to any measures that might destabilize European capitalism, let alone threaten their own corporate and financial interests in Greece.

The real economic and social agenda of the Syriza government was made entirely clear by Yanis Varoufakis in his remarks, behind closed doors, at a February 11 meeting of the Eurogroup. “We are committed to deep structural reforms,” he stated, adding that the Syriza government “will be the most reform-oriented government in Greek modern history, and among the most enthusiastic reformers in Europe.”

Lest there be any mistaking Syriza’s commitment to the protection of capitalist interests, Varoufakis declared: “On privatization and the development of publicly owned assets, the government is utterly undogmatic; we are ready and willing to evaluate each and every one project on its merits alone. Media reports that the Piraeus port privatization was reversed could not be further from the truth .” [Emphasis added]

Varoufakis also denounced “misleading reports” that “have caused misunderstandings with our partners by insinuating that we have rolled back previous reforms and added to our budget.”

Far from contemplating an exit from the euro zone, Varoufakis assured his “dear colleagues” that Syriza considered Europe to be “whole and indivisible, and the government of Greece considers that Greece is a permanent and inseparable member of the European Union and our monetary union.”

Finally, Varoufakis assured the euro zone finance ministers that they had absolutely nothing to fear from Syriza. He regretted that there were some who were displeased by Syriza’s victory. “To them I have this to say,” Varoufakis proclaimed. “It would be a lost opportunity to see us as adversaries.”

Indeed, Varoufakis was so successful in convincing the ministers of Syriza’s utter subservience to the troika that they saw no need to make any concessions at all. Having nothing to fear from the Syriza government, they treated it with same combination of contempt and ruthlessness that large banks usually display in their dealings with failing small businesses.

The events of the past month constitute a major political experience for the working class in Greece, Europe and internationally. The role played by Syriza is a devastating exposure of the essentially reactionary character of a form of “left” middle class politics that developed amidst the ruins of the radical student politics of the 1960s and 1970s. While the working class was led to defeat after defeat by the old Stalinist, social democratic and reformist labor organizations, sections of the middle class benefited, directly and indirectly, from the explosive rise in global stock exchanges following the accession of Thatcher and Reagan to power and the international ascendancy—especially after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the restoration of capitalism in China—of neo-liberal policies.

As it grew increasingly affluent, the social and political attitude of sections of the privileged middle class toward the working class passed from estrangement and indifference to increasing hostility. This socio-economic process was reflected in the ideological repudiation, by these layers, of Marxism, whose identification with the revolutionary role of the working class and the struggle against capitalism had become totally unacceptable.

In place of the politics of proletarian class struggle, the affluent middle class embraced a panoply of “identity agendas”—of race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation—which formed the base of the political program upon which it pursued its interests. Far from desiring any overturn of capitalist class relations, this affluent social milieu and its political parties have been preoccupied, principally, with achieving a more equitable distribution of wealth within the richest 10 percent of society. Envious of the extremely rich, they despise and fear the working class.

Syriza is only the most prominent of the countless political organizations spawned by this socio-economic process. It differs from such organizations as the Left Party in Germany and Podemos in Spain, not to mention many smaller groups throughout the world, only in that it is the first to assume the leadership of a national government.

The World Socialist Web Site’s characterization of these parties as pseudo-left is not a rhetorical exercise but a precise political definition. They are bourgeois parties representing elite sections of the middle class that are bitterly hostile to the workers. They are not allies but relentless enemies. Working people must break with them, and seek to destroy any political influence they have over the working class.

Syriza's various apologists, who only weeks ago hailed its election as “a new dawn for the Greek people” and “a mighty step forward,” will, no doubt, declare that nothing else could have been done. In supporting Syriza, they reveal their class interests.

As for Syriza, having endorsed the program of austerity and reaction, it is placing itself in direct conflict with the working class. As he seeks to impose the dictates of the banks in Greece, Tsipras will have to rely ever more directly on the state and police to suppress working class opposition. The pseudo-left forces that have backed the Syriza government will fall in line.

The working class cannot demand more radical policies from governments staffed by Syriza or other pseudo-left groups. It can only defend itself by building new working class parties that are entirely independent of all sections of the capitalist class, based on an internationalist revolutionary program, directed toward the establishment of workers’ power, the abolition of capitalism and the establishment of a world socialist society. This is the historic task to which the International Committee of the Fourth International is committed.

Make more than 100% gain from Digital Shares of Internet Websites.

Visit ;http://yield2me.com

What Is Your Website About?

   
Our website provides synthetic stock exchange market where you can purchase digital shares of Internet web sites. Buying digital shares of a web site you are receiving rights to gain dividends from this web site and at any time you can sell your shares for the best price (you do not have any rights to the web site property). Each digital share brings a dividend on your account on the daily, weekly, or monthly basis. The amount of dividend depends on share.Your income includes dividends and growing price of shares. Some stocks are rising in price by 100% or 200% per month that profit from their sale can be very high.

How Do I Make Money On Your Website?

       

You have money as dividend from your shares. You can purchase shares at the Shares page.Also big part of revenue comes from the purchases made by your referrals.You will get paid 25% commission from every transaction they made. Invite referrals from blogs, forums, and traffic exchange sites. Please see promotion materials at the "Invite Referrals" web page.

The upcoming Academy Awards: Selma, American Sniper and other issues

David Walsh

The 87th Academy Awards ceremony will take place Sunday evening, hosted by actor Neil Patrick Harris, at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, California. If recent ceremonies are anything to go by, the event will be thoroughly scripted and lacking in spontaneity. Occurring at a time of unprecedented global tension and volatility, virtually no hint of the external world will be permitted entry into the self-absorbed proceedings.

As much as the Academy Awards broadcast becomes more embalmed with each passing year, it still passes for a major public occasion in the US. In fact, its generally stilted and meticulously stage-managed character places the awards show in the same category as every other event on the official calendar.

For good reason, the audience for the tedious three-hour plus broadcast has generally shrunk in recent years. The 2014 show attracted some 44 million viewers, one of the highest totals of the new century, but was still considerably down from the 57.25 million in 1998.

The awards show remains big business, both in terms of box office revenue eventually generated for the films that win major honors and advertising money for television network ABC, which broadcasts the ceremony. The price of a 30-second commercial this year is $1.95 million, and the network anticipates netting some $100 million.

The American film industry as a whole remains big business ($31 billion in revenue in 2013), despite declining ticket sales. According to the tracking firm Rentrak, North American movie ticket revenue was down more than five percent in 2014, to an estimated $10.35 billion (about 30 percent of the global total), the third such year-over-year decline in the past five years.

The declines in frequent film attendance among 18- to-24-year-olds (17 percent) and 25- to 39-year-olds (also 17 percent) were especially marked. According to one industry analyst, the film industry is “losing that younger audience because they’re agnostic about how they get their content.” The generally poor quality of the films coming out is also no doubt a factor at a time of widespread economic hardship.

The entertainment and media market in the US is estimated to be worth between $550 and $600 billion dollars, the largest in the world and a third of the global total. The export of US entertainment services, including film, television, music, sports, gaming, Internet, etc., is calculated to be worth half a trillion dollars worldwide.

Too much is at stake on Sunday evening, in other words, to let genuine considerations of artistic excellence ultimately hold sway.

As for the nominations themselves, a host of arbitrary, subjective and “political” factors no doubt plays a role. This is Hollywood, after all.

The eight nominees for best picture, for example, vary widely in quality. The crassest elements in the film industry and media are protesting, as they have done in response to the Academy Award nominations a number of times in the past several years, that the highest-costing and largest-grossing films are “underrepresented” in this category. In fact, none of the seven top-grossing films received a best picture nomination. The budgets of the highest-grossing films averaged $151 million, while the budgets of the nominated films averaged $21 million (low by contemporary Hollywood standards).

Boyhood, The Grand Budapest Hotel and Selma, despite their limitations, are worthwhile nominations. Whiplash, Birdman, The Imitation Game and The Theory of Everything contain intriguing moments and performances. Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper is a terrible film, which mythologizes the Iraq war and one “American hero,” sniper Chris Kyle. Mr. Turner, which did receive three other nominations, and Foxcatcher, with five, certainly deserved to be nominated for best film.

Complaints have been raised about the failure of Ava DuVernay and David Oyelowo to receive nominations for best director and best actor, respectively, for their contributions to Selma, the film about the 1965 voting rights march. Certainly, the inclusion of Bradley Cooper, who does little more than drawl and draw a bead on outgunned Iraqis in Eastwood’s film, at the expense of Oyelowo, is a travesty.

The failure of any black performers or directors to gain nominations this year has stirred the charlatan Al Sharpton and his National Action Network into action. In a statement, the group, which plans a protest outside the award ceremony Sunday, called on the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences “to accelerate [its] push to be more inclusive. With all of this year’s acting contenders being white and no women in the directing or writing categories. It’s obvious that the Academy has a diversity problem they are going to have to fix.” Sharpton’s outfit exists to pressure large corporate entities to employ a greater share of the African American upper middle class that it speaks for.

The question of American Sniper is a more vexing one. Why has the film found a popular response?

There are no doubt numerous factors. For one thing, Eastwood’s film had the good fortune to appear in movie theaters when there was virtually no competition. A number of the big-budget films that came out simultaneously were ignominious flops. Moreover, in its action sequences, American Snipercontains a certain tension and drama, and the film claims to depict a war the concrete facts and details of which few Americans know much—and are no doubt curious—about.

Eastwood’s own personality and career are somewhat complex issues. The actor-director, deservedly or not, has the reputation of being vaguely “antiestablishment.” His body of work as a director is generally poor, often abysmally poor, but it does contain a few genuine and humane bright spots, including True Crime (1999) and Letters from Iwo Jima (2006). His love of jazz and jazz musicians is also well known, reflected in his directing Bird(1988), a fictional tribute to legendary saxophonist Charlie Parker, and producing the documentary Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser (1989).

As we have noted, American Sniper ’s script downplays the filthy right-wing and anti-Muslim bigotry to be found in Kyle’s autobiography. Unlike the actual sniper, who apparently reveled in the killing of Iraqis, Cooper’s character looks sorrowful after each murderous episode and even tells a fellow soldier on one occasion to shut his mouth when he begins to celebrate.

Nonetheless, the claim that American Sniper is any sense “antiwar” or has merit because, in the words of producer Harvey Weinstein, “it introduces America to PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder],” is preposterous.

As we noted in a comment January 31 on the WSWS: “The sequences set in Iraq present the American forces as engaged in a righteous campaign against an almost inconceivably savage and evil foe. American Sniper ’s attitude toward Iraqis, and Arabs generally, is hostile and contemptuous. The US forces represent order, modernity, civilization and sanity; the Iraqis—superstition, backwardness, treachery and violence. The American soldiers are obliged, according to the logic of the film, to exterminate great numbers of Iraqis both in self-defense and as some sort of act of public hygiene.”

The success of American Sniper is nonetheless troubling, and indicates some of the cultural and political problems in America, where the population has been bombarded with foul notions on a daily basis for the past several decades. The promotion of militarism has been especially poisonous. The American people are led to believe at every opportunity that the professionalized armed forces, with whom they have little to do on a daily basis, are made up of “heroes” protecting them from unspeakable evil. Skepticism and mistrust no doubt abound, but the relentless propaganda has its impact, including in weakening the instinctive empathy for the suffering of others.

The population is unaware to a large extent, thanks to the campaign of lies of the government and the media, of the atrocities being committed by the American military on a daily basis, and it is largely unprepared for the sinister role this mercenary force is readying to play in every part of the globe and in the US itself.

What’s being celebrated in American Sniper, after all, is especially despicable. Snipers have more often than not been portrayed in American films as cowards or worse. In films like The Manchurian Candidate (1962),The Day of the Jackal (1973), Two-Minute Warning (1976) and numerous others, the killer-sniper is presented as the lowest form of human life. And America has had its experience with real-life snipers, from the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, the University of Texas tower shootings in 1966 and beyond.

Whether American Sniper wins the best picture award or not depends to a large extent on how intimidated and cowed Hollywood liberalism is by the ultra-right and its spurious claim that wide layers of the population are enamored of the American military and the semi-fascist Kyle. By any logical artistic or intellectual standard, Eastwood’s film should not have a chance, but one shouldn’t hold one’s breath.

Marcel Ophüls’ Memory of Justice and other documentaries

Hiram Lee

This is the second of a series of articles on the recent Berlin international film festival, the Berlinale, held February 5-15, 2015. The first part was posted February 19 .

Director Marcel Ophüls (born 1927 in Frankfurt, Germany) has devoted much of his career to an examination of the crimes committed during the Second World War and the fate of those who either collaborated with the Nazis or who opposed them.

The son of filmmaker Max Ophüls, he remains best known for his 1969 filmThe Sorrow and the Pity, which documented life under the collaborationist Vichy regime in France. He won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 1988 for what is perhaps his best film, Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie about the infamous Nazi torturer’s escape to Bolivia with the help of US intelligence.

This year’s Berlin Film Festival exhibited the world premiere of a newly restored version of Ophüls’ 1976 documentary Memory of Justice. Prior to the screening, Ophüls was also presented with the Berlinale Kamera award, given to artists who “have made a unique contribution to film and to whom the festival feels especially close.”

Like nearly all of Ophüls’ films, Memory of Justice comes with a long running time, approaching five hours in this case. It covers a wide range of subjects including the Nuremberg Trials, the bombing of Dresden by the US military, US war crimes in Vietnam and the brutal methods employed by French colonial rule in Algeria.

There is much in the film that is valuable. Ophüls’ serious approach to historical questions, and in particular his investigations into the foundations on which postwar society was built, have real significance for contemporary audiences. Given the campaign of historical falsification currently underway in Germany aimed at relativizing the crimes of the Nazis, the screening of the film in Berlin was a significant event.

Nazis on trial in Nuremberg

The first part of Memory of Justice centers on the Nuremberg Trials and features footage of the sessions. Retired Brigadier General Telford Taylor, chief counsel for the prosecution during most of the trials, is interviewed extensively, as are defendants Albert Speer and Karl Dönitz, both convicted of war crimes.

Dönitz, the naval commander who briefly succeeded Hitler as head of state following his suicide, remains unrepentant and provides some of the more outrageous commentary in the film. Speer, architect and Minister of Armaments and War Production for the Third Reich, who had already completed a 20-year prison term at the time the film was made, was by this time largely “rehabilitated.” In expressing regrets about his role in the Nazi regime, however, Speer was never as forthcoming as he would have liked viewers to believe.

Daniel Ellsberg in Memory of Justice

The second part of the film takes up Vietnam and Algeria, and exposes acts that violate the precedents established in Nuremberg. This section features extended interviews with whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, whose leaking of the Pentagon Papers exposed the war plans of the US government, and Henri Alleg, whose book La Question described his torture at the hands of the French armed forces in Algeria.

There is a striking moment when Ophüls confronts Edgar Faure of the Radical Party in France, then serving as president of the National Assembly. Faure had earlier functioned as French counsel for the prosecution during the Nuremberg Trials, but dismisses Ophüls’ questions about the methods used by France in Algeria, asserting that it is unfair to compare the actions of France, which had slowly built up colonies over time, to that of an invading war power such as the Nazis.

While he is adept at cross-examining many of his interview subjects, Ophüls is at his strongest as a filmmaker when he allows groups of ordinary people to talk amongst themselves, and argue over differing impressions of historical events and their implications. One is allowed a glimpse into some of the attitudes of the time and the often frustrated search for answers.

In another section of the film, a theater recounts to his fellow performers how a denazification officer once asked him, “Why didn’t you stand on stage and denounce the Nazis?” “They would have hanged us the next day!” he exclaims. Among the more significant sections of the film is the sequence concerning those who made fortunes collaborating with the Nazis and who continued to rake in massive amounts of money after the war.

Telford Taylor in Memory of Justice

In particular, Taylor laments that industrialist Friedrich Flick, who profited from slave labor in the concentration camps, was granted an early release from his already minimal seven-year prison sentence.

Another commentator notes that SS Colonel Kurt Becher, who had been appointed commissar of all German concentration camps just prior to the end of the war, was now a big industrialist living in Bremen.

In fact, both convicted war criminals could be counted among the richest men in West Germany by the 1970s. Flick, in fact, was one of the wealthiest individuals in the world at the time of his death in 1972. While Ophüls exposes the hypocrisy of all the post-Nuremberg justifications offered for crimes in Vietnam and Algeria, and provides some sense of the social roots of fascism in Germany, he stops short of the more in-depth analysis required to truly understand the crimes documented in his work.

Ophüls may not agree with musician Yehudi Menuhin who declares in an interview conducted early in the film: “I go on the assumption that everyone is guilty.” But when Ophüls asks the mother of Mike Ransom, an American soldier killed in Vietnam, who wonders aloud what the Second World War really accomplished, “What was the alternative? Allowing hate to take over?” one suspects the director has accepted too many of the official stories about the Second World War.

In the end, one is left with something of an enormous tapestry, in which some of the threads do not hold together as well as they should, but in which others are richly stitched together. Ophüls has not told the whole story, but he has contributed much to our knowledge of some of the most barbarous crimes committed by imperialism in the last century.

Other documentaries

Along with Iraqi Odyssey , which we reviewed in our coverage of last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, one of the more significant films shown at the Berlinale was Tell Spring Not to Come This Year. Directed by Saeed Taji Farouky and Michael McEvoy, it documents a year in the life of soldiers from the Afghan National Army in the Helmand province following the withdrawal of NATO troops.

Most of the soldiers are terribly poor and have joined the army for that reason, though one complains he hasn’t received his salary in nine months. The film is thoughtfully made, with the directors able to capture a number of little moments—perhaps just a look, or a comment made to no one in particular—that often speak volumes.

Sequences in which the soldiers are deployed to confront local villagers are chilling. One soldier with his face covered by a mask tells a group of local police that if they don’t find out who has been shooting at their army base, the soldiers will “come back here and kill all ten of you.” They go on patrols, kicking down the doors to private homes and take their prisoners away in blindfolds. An opium farmer protests against their harassment: “If the government paid a good price for wheat, then everybody would grow wheat!”

Their role is to intimidate and subjugate the population. One is left asking: in what methods were these soldiers trained by NATO?

Getting to the heart of the matter, one soldier explains: “Everybody came to Afghanistan for their own personal gain. I live in a village on a hill. One day two foreigners came and said, ‘That’s our hill.’ They wanted what was under it.”

Kurt Cobain

Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck and Fassbinder: To Love without Demandsdeal with the lives of Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain and German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder, respectively, both of whom died at an early age.

Fassbinder was responsible for some of the better films of the 1970s, including Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), Fox and His Friends (1975) andMother Kuster ’ s Trip to Heaven (1975). Director Christian Braad Thomsen, who knew Fassbinder personally, has given us a psychological portrait of sorts, demonstrating Fassbinder’s apparent capacity for jealousy and extreme selfishness. There are tell-all interviews with Fassbinder’s frequent collaborators Irm Hermann and Harry Baer. Fassbinder, we are told, came to behave like the child he never had. It is another contribution to the depiction of the iconic filmmaker as a “bad boy” of cinema.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

As to what conditions in postwar Germany, the period of the “Economic Miracle” and the radical movements of the 1960s and 1970s contributed to Fassbinder’s personality and the direction of his work, including its strengths and weakness, Thomsen never really bothers to ask.

With only the material shown to us in Thomsen’s documentary, it would be difficult to understand why Fassbinder remains a figure worth our attention today.

Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck also places its subject, the Nirvana front man, on the analyst’s couch. The film focuses on a difficult home life, Cobain’s addiction to heroin and his often rocky relationship with his wife, singer Courtney Love.

Excerpts from Cobain’s journal entries, in which he rails against hypocrisy, the Reagan administration and everything he found phony about official life, provide at least some sense of what was on the troubled artist’s mind much of the time. The anger and disaffection (and much of the pessimism) of the generation that came of age in the 1980s and 1990s found expression in his music.

Early in the film, Cobain’s mother describes the town of Aberdeen, Washington, prior to Cobain’s birth in 1967, as a boomtown in which “even if you didn’t have much, you had enough.” Later, Cobain himself describes Aberdeen as “an isolated wasteland.”

Through what processes did this all-too familiar transformation take place and what was its impact on young people living through it? This is the question the film avoids, and the missing piece in all the biographies about the singer that have appeared over the years.

“Cultural appropriation,” “white privilege” and the attacks on rapper Iggy Azalea

Nick Barrickman & David Walsh

In recent months, the hip hop music industry has witnessed a controversy surrounding the musical success of Australian-born rapper Iggy Azalea (born Amethyst Amelia Kelly in 1990, Sydney, Australia).

Azalea, a white rapper affecting a cadence and drawl similar to artists associated with the southern American hip hop scene, received four Grammy nominations this year (among them, best rap album, record of the year and best new artist), including for her work on 2014’s “The New Classic.” As it turned out, she did not take home any of the awards at the recent Grammy ceremony. Her single “Fancy” has been a huge hit, with seven million copies sold worldwide.

Iggy Azalea

Iggy Azalea’s growing fame in a musical genre largely associated with African Americans has led to verbal assaults on the Australian rapper by a number of well-known figures, including Snoop Dogg, Nicki Minaj and, most notably, the Harlem-born singer-songwriter Azealia Banks.

Banks, who has something of a penchant for conflicts with fellow performers, first took exception to an Azalea lyric on the 2012 song “D.R.U.G.S,” in which the Australian raps: “Tire marks, tire marks, finish line with the fire marks/ When the relay starts I’m a runaway slave-master.” Banks responded on Twitter to the effect that she had issues with anyone “outside of my culture trying to trivialize very serious aspects of it.” Azalea later apologized for the tasteless lyric, admitting that it was “careless.”

Matters escalated after news surfaced late last year that Azalea was nominated for several 2015 Grammy awards. Banks appeared in mid-December on New York City’s Hot 97 radio talk show, accusing the Australian rapper in a lengthy interview of appropriating “black music” for her own ends.

“At the very least y’all owe me the right to my f***ing identity and to not exploit that sh*t,” said Banks in a clearly emotional state, adding, “That’s all we’re holding on to with hip-hop and rap … I feel like it’s being snatched away from me or something … The blackness is gone.” Banks was later more explicit, demanding on social media that “We [African Americans] are the children of the people who perished in the name of modern capitalism and we deserve a piece of that f***ing pie.”

Azealia Banks

On cue, media commentators, fellow performers and other entertainment industry personalities began weighing in on “Azalea-Gate,” chastising Azalea for her perceived lack of humility and contrition. “She [Azalea] seems clueless as to why hip-hop is black dominated, but she’s absolutely sure that she deserves a place in it,” remarked Reni Eddo-Lodge, a commentator on “race and gender issues” for the British Telegraph. “She’s succeeding in a genre with no idea of its social and historical significance,” Eddo-Lodge added.

Sorting through the confusion and social backwardness that the “Azalea-gate” controversy has generated would take more than one comment, but we can offer a few points.

First of all, the effort to examine music and popular culture through the prism of race is a hopeless and reactionary one. There is no such thing as “black music” or “white music.” The musical cross-fertilization between the various national populations in the US goes back to the earliest days of the country. Obviously, that process took place, in the first place, under conditions of the savage oppression of the African population brought to America as slaves. Nonetheless, it took place. In the modern era, one of the glories of American popular music has been the enormous variety of influences and traditions.

Distinct music genres have specific (sometimes specific ethnic) roots, but that has never stopped the mixing and evolution of styles and trends, which is an entirely healthy and often quite spectacular feature of pop music in particular. In fact, that speaks to the essentially democratic character of popular thinking and feeling, when it has a chance to develop organically. To call this virtually unstoppable process “appropriation” is fraudulent and regressive. It should be celebrated rather than denounced.

Rejecting the racialist attacks against Iggy Azalea should not be taken for an instant as a denial of the long history of discrimination against and exclusion of black artists, performers and athletes. The persecutions of boxer Jack Johnson and Chuck Berry are well known. Black jazz and pop musicians were subjected to humiliating conditions for decades, not being allowed to eat or stay in the same restaurants or hotels as their white counterparts. The former were often cheated out of their rightful careers or earnings.

However, the apartheid-like conditions engendered political opposition to the entire existing order among the most perceptive and insightful black artists and musicians. The great singer Paul Robeson, of course, but also blues and folk artists Leadbelly, Brownie McGhee, Sonny Terry, Josh White and others, turned toward the Communist Party (along with many African American writers and poets.). Later, in the 1960s and 1970s, Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield and The Temptations performed openly anti-Vietnam War songs. Stevie Wonder was identified with opposition to Richard Nixon in the early 1970s. (In another field, of course, there was Muhammad Ali, who gained an enormous following because of his opposition to US intervention in Vietnam.)

The American ruling elite was frightened by the inner city rebellions of the 1960s, and the level of black popular disaffection. It set out consciously to cultivate a layer of African American politicians, entertainers and performers who identified with and were committed to capitalism. And this policy has had some success. Hip hop, which emerged in the mid-1970s, was born within that general atmosphere, although there have been and continue to be oppositional voices within it.

However, the general climate of the last several decades has been dominated by individualism, worship of money and status, and political conformism. Much of the noise, posturing and bravado in hip hop, in reality, is an effort to conceal the fact that, on all important matters, the leading artists, often aspiring or successful businessmen and women, align themselves with official public opinion.

So, to suggest that the “radicalism” and “anti-authoritarian sneer” of African American-dominated rap music, which supposedly “valorizes outsiders and underdogs,” is threatened by Iggy Azalea’s “empty white echo,” in the manner of Washington Post pop music critic Chris Richards, is a fantasy. The anti-establishment image of hip hop, in fact, has been largely a marketing and public relations gimmick, which has helped build up careers and bank accounts for a host of performers, producers and record company executives.

Azealia Banks’ comment is revealing. She is not a political figure, and her remarks reflect more widespread attitudes, but they are still a self-indictment. On the one hand, she points out that slavery was bound up with the birth of “modern capitalism,” but then, far from calling for opposition to such a brutal economic system, she pathetically asks for “a piece of the … pie”! This is the outlook of an entire stratum of African American performers, academics, politicians, union officials, “activists” and such—they simply want in, or, in many cases, further in.

Hip hop is a multi-billion dollar industry. Nervousness about the economics of the record industry no doubt lies behind some of the shrill cries about “white privilege” and “cultural appropriation” and the attacks on performers like Iggy Azalea. Total profit from US music sales and licensing was $6.3 billion in 2009, less than half the industry’s $14.6 billion in profits ten years earlier, according to CNN Money. Major label rap music, which makes up a significant portion of the industry’s proceeds, has itself seen a decline in profits as it has been exposed to the proliferation of downloading software and other such technology.

As for the trivializing of “very serious aspects” of history and culture, one doesn’t have to look very far, or search out someone of Azalea’s nationality and skin color. Just one example: Kanye West’s 2013 album Yeezus(nominated for two Grammy awards in 2014), on which the rapper absurdly likened his difficulties with the opposite sex at public venues to South African apartheid and his troubles buying satisfactory luxury goods to chattel slavery in the American South!

If Iggy Azalea’s music is neither challenging nor innovative but immensely popular, that’s part of the general cultural situation under capitalism and the specific impact of the entertainment industry’s immensely powerful marketing apparatus. No serious singer or musician takes to heart such success or lives and dies on sales figures or largely meaningless awards. As the Post’s Richards says himself, speaking of awards ceremonies like the Grammys: “These are private business parties designed to radiate an aura of prestige and pad television ratings.”

Big social and artistic questions face every musician and performer. To do important work in our day means, first of all, rejecting self-absorption and selfishness and struggling with all one’s might to express the broadest social realities and truths. It is absolutely certain that music like that will find a wide and receptive audience.