Andre Damon
Income inequality has grown in every state in the US in recent
decades, according to a new study published this week by the Economic
Policy Institute. The report, entitled The Increasingly Unequal States of America,
found that, even though states home to major metropolitan financial
centers such as New York, Chicago, and the Bay Area had the highest
levels of income inequality, the gap between the rich and the poor has
increased in every region of the country.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re looking at Hawaii or West Virginia or
New York or California, there has been a dramatic shift in income
towards the top,” said Mark Price, an economist at the Keystone Research
Center in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and one of the study’s co-authors,
in a telephone interview.
The report noted that between 2009 and 2012, the top one percent of
income earners captured 105 percent of all income gains in the United
States. This was possible because during this period the average income
of the bottom 99 percent shrank, while the average income of the top one
percent increased by 36.8 percent.
To varying degrees, this phenomenon was expressed throughout the
country. In only two states did the income of the top one percent grow
by less than fifteen percent.
The enormous concentration of wealth in the top 1 percent was even
further concentrated in the top .01 percent. In New York, for instance,
someone had to make $506,051 per year to be counted in the top one
percent, but $16 million to be in the top .10 percent. The average
income within the top .01 percent in New York was a staggering $69
million.
“Most of what’s driving income growth are executives in the financial
sector, as well as top managers throughout major corporations,” said
Dr. Price. “Those two together are the commanding heights of income in
this economy.”
Dr. Price and his co-author, Estelle Sommeiller, based their study on
the methods of Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, whose widely-cited
research analyzed the growth of income inequality for the United States
as a whole. Using state-by-state data from the Internal Revenue Service,
much of which had to be compiled from paper archives dating back almost
a century, Price and Sommeiller were able to make a state-by-state
analysis of income inequality since 1917.
Nationwide, the average income of the top one percent of income
earners is 29 times higher than the average income of the bottom 99
percent. But in New York and Connecticut, the average income in the top 1
percent is 48.4 amd 51.0 times higher than the average for the rest of
earners, respectively.
New York City is the home of Wall Street and boasts more billionaires
than any other city in the world. Connecticut is home to many of the
largest hedge funds in the world. Ray Dalio, the founder of Westport,
Connecticut-based hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, earned $3 billion
in 2011 alone.
While the average income of the bottom 99 percent of income earners
in New York state was $44,049, the average income of the top one percent
was $2,130,743. For the United States as a whole, the top one percent
earned on average $1,303,198, compared to an average income of $43,713
for the bottom 99 percent.
In California, the most populous US state, the top one percent
received an average income of $1,598,161, which was 34.9 times higher
than the average pay of the bottom 99 percent. In 2013, four of the
highest-paid CEOs in the United States were employed by technology
companies, which are disproportionately located in California. At the
top of the list was Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, with a current net worth
of $53.4 billion, who made $78 million in pay that year.
The study shows that the average income for the bottom 99 percent of
income earners is relatively consistent across states, with no state
showing an average income more than 33 percent above or below the
average for the whole country.
The average incomes of the top one percent varied widely, however:
from $537,989 for West Virginia to $2.1 million in New York. According
to Forbes, the wealthiest resident of West Virginia is coal
magnate Jim Justice II, who, with a net worth of $1.6 billion, is the
state’s only billionaire. New York City, by contrast, has four residents
worth more than $20 billion, including chemical tycoon David Koch, with
a net worth of $36 billion; former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, with a net
worth of $31 billion; and financiers Carl Icahn and George Soros, worth
$20 billion apiece.
Yet despite the broad disparity in the relative concentration of the
ultra-rich, every single state showed a pronounced and growing chasm
between the wealthy few and the great majority of society. In Alaska,
which has relatively high wages and few billionaires, the incomes of the
top one percent were on average more than fifteen times higher than the
bottom 99 percent.
The report noted that exploding CEO pay has set “new norms for top
incomes often emulated today by college presidents (as well as college
football and basketball coaches), surgeons, lawyers, entertainers, and
professional athletes.”
Price added, “As the incomes of CEOs and financiers are rising,
you’re starting to see that pull, almost like a gravity starting to pull
up other top incomes in the rest of the economy.
“A University president might claim, ‘I run a big institution, you
expect me to raise money from some of the wealthiest people in the
country, you’ve got to pay me a salary that helps me socialize with
them.’”
Price said that, while inequality figures are not available
nationwide on the local level, his work on income inequality in the
state of Pennsylvania shows that income inequality is growing in
counties throughout the state, in both rural and urban centers.
Nationwide, the income share of the top one percent fell by 13.4
percent between 1928 and 1979, a product of the New Deal and Great
Society reforms, as well as higher taxes on top earners. These measures
were the outcome of bitter and explosive class struggles. But in
subsequent years, that trend has been reversed.
As a result, income inequality in New York State was even higher in
2007 than it was in 1928, during the “roaring 20s” that gave rise to the
Great Depression. In the period between 1979 and 2007, every state saw
the income share of the top 1 percent grow by at least 25 percent.
Citing a previous study by the Economic Policy Institute, the report
noted that “between 1979 and 2007, had the income of the middle fifth of
households grown at the same rate as overall average household income,
it would have been $18,897 higher in 2007—27.0 percent higher than it
actually was.”
The enormous growth of social inequality is the result of an
unrelenting, decades-long campaign against the jobs and living standards
of workers. Under the Obama administration, the redistribution of
wealth has escalated sharply, through a combination of bank bailouts and
“quantitative easing,” which has inflated the assets of the financial
elite.
These policies have been pursued by both parties and the entire
political establishment, which is squarely under the thumb of the
corporate and financial oligarchy that dominates American society.
1 Feb 2015
New Zealand Internet and Mana Parties split following electoral debacle
J. Braddock & T. Peters
In the wake of an abysmal result in last September’s New Zealand election, the Mana and Internet parties agreed to split. The Internet Mana Party (IMP), established last May, was formally dissolved last month. The Internet Party (IP), which was founded shortly before the merger, is “reviewing” its future and may be wound up.
The IMP received just 1.4 percent of the overall party vote, well short of the 5 percent threshold to enter parliament. In a crucial setback, Mana’s leader and sole MP, Hone Harawira, lost his Te Tai Tokerau seat, one of the seven Maori electorates, to Labour.
The overall election result reflected the vast chasm that has opened up, under conditions of sharpening social crisis and preparations for war, between the working class and the entire edifice of official politics. The National Party government and the main opposition Labour Party share essentially the same program of ongoing austerity at home and support for US militarism overseas. Approximately a million people did not vote and Labour received its worst result in 92 years, with just 25 percent of the votes. The immediate beneficiary of the near-record abstention was National, which was re-elected.
Amid the collapse in support for the main parties, the IMP presented itself as an “anti-establishment” alternative. Mana leaders repeatedly declared that they represented “the poor and dispossessed” and called for reforms such as lunches in some schools and a higher minimum wage. The Internet Party criticised the state surveillance agency, the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), and invited journalist Glenn Greenwald and US National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden to address a public meeting five days before the election.
Despite its campaign rhetoric, however, the IMP was an alliance of two capitalist parties, which aimed to enter parliament to prop up a Labour-led government. Like Labour, the IMP did not call for the abolition of the state spying agencies but merely a “review” of their activities. It did not oppose the military and intelligence alliance with the US.
In the lead-up to the election, Mana joined Labour and the right-wing NZ First Party in campaigning against immigration and foreign investment, particularly from China. This xenophobic campaign dovetailed with the push by the Obama administration to strengthen its military alliance with NZ as part of Washington’s “pivot” to Asia: the US military encirclement and preparations for war against China.
Mana’s Maori nationalist platform calls for greater government payouts to indigenous tribal businesses. The IP, founded by the multi-millionaire businessman Kim Dotcom, openly represents an upwardly-mobile layer of young tech entrepreneurs. Dotcom, who had previously donated money to the extreme pro-market ACT Party, called for measures to boost the profits of technology firms like his own. The Internet Party advocated government grants for web-based start-up companies. Dotcom bankrolled the IMP to the tune of $4 million, prompting Harawira to boast that Mana could “no longer be pigeonholed as a party for Maori, the disaffected and for the radical fringe.”
The alliance exposed, in particular, the right-wing character of the pseudo-left groups affiliated to Mana—the International Socialist Organisation (ISO), Fightback and Socialist Aotearoa (SA)—and their integration into the political establishment. All three groups campaigned for the IMP, while leading members of Fightback and SA stood as IMP candidates. They falsely presented Mana as a “left wing” alternative to Labour and National, while justifying its merger with the Internet Party by absurdly claiming that Dotcom had been “radicalised” by the government’s attempts to extradite him to the US on copyright infringement charges.
Following the election defeat, Mana and IP members continued to defend the alliance. Mana’s John Minto blamed the result on the media’s attacks on Dotcom and Labour’s attempts to distance itself from the IMP. He claimed that the merger had “worried the political establishment” because Dotcom’s “massive wealth” gave the IMP the financial resources it needed to challenge “corporate wealth and power.”
Other IMP apologists cynically blamed the working class for the defeat of the so-called “left:” Labour, the Greens and IMP. Martyn Bradbury, who edits the trade union funded Daily Blog, contemptuously declared that New Zealanders rallied to support National’s “mass surveillance and dirty politics.”
Socialist Aotearoa, in a post-election article, declared that the IMP failed to win votes because “the conditions of austerity imposed elsewhere have been avoided” in New Zealand and the working class was not “desperate enough” to support Mana’s “anticapitalist programme.” The ISO similarly implied that the working class is either right-wing or apathetic. It declared that the National government had refrained from major attacks on the working class and “by and large, has succeeded” in portraying Prime Minister John Key as “competent, likeable and popular.”
In reality, Key’s government is reviled by the working class. The near-record abstention in the election demonstrated that there is widespread hostility toward every established party. National has carried out a series of attacks on living standards and public services, including at least 7,000 job cuts, cuts to healthcare, welfare and education and an increase in the consumption tax.
Claims that workers enjoy a comfortable living standard and have not suffered greatly from the economic crisis are false to the core. Throughout the country median incomes declined between 2006 and 2013; in working class South Auckland by over 16 percent. In Northland, part of the Te Tai Tokerau electorate, economist Shamubeel Eaqub has compared economic conditions to those in East Timor, one of the world’s poorest countries.
Despite the IMP’s well-funded and highly visible campaign, and the enthusiastic support it received from the pseudo-lefts, the alliance failed to gain significant support because masses of workers saw it as no alternative to the political establishment. Far from being “anti-capitalist,” Mana represents the Maori bourgeoisie and upper-middle class, a layer that promotes xenophobia and racialist politics in order to divide the working class and advance its own interests. Mana’s alliance with the Internet Party, the creation of a multi-millionaire, was the clearest expression of its pro-business agenda.
The election result—the return of a government committed to austerity and militarism—demonstrates that anger and disgust with capitalist parties is not enough. The working class urgently needs its own party, based on a socialist and internationalist program, to organise the fight against war and for social equality. Building such a party requires a struggle against all those groups, including the ISO, Fightback and Socialist Aotearoa, who seek to shackle workers and youth to right-wing parties like the IMP.
In the wake of an abysmal result in last September’s New Zealand election, the Mana and Internet parties agreed to split. The Internet Mana Party (IMP), established last May, was formally dissolved last month. The Internet Party (IP), which was founded shortly before the merger, is “reviewing” its future and may be wound up.
The IMP received just 1.4 percent of the overall party vote, well short of the 5 percent threshold to enter parliament. In a crucial setback, Mana’s leader and sole MP, Hone Harawira, lost his Te Tai Tokerau seat, one of the seven Maori electorates, to Labour.
The overall election result reflected the vast chasm that has opened up, under conditions of sharpening social crisis and preparations for war, between the working class and the entire edifice of official politics. The National Party government and the main opposition Labour Party share essentially the same program of ongoing austerity at home and support for US militarism overseas. Approximately a million people did not vote and Labour received its worst result in 92 years, with just 25 percent of the votes. The immediate beneficiary of the near-record abstention was National, which was re-elected.
Amid the collapse in support for the main parties, the IMP presented itself as an “anti-establishment” alternative. Mana leaders repeatedly declared that they represented “the poor and dispossessed” and called for reforms such as lunches in some schools and a higher minimum wage. The Internet Party criticised the state surveillance agency, the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), and invited journalist Glenn Greenwald and US National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden to address a public meeting five days before the election.
Despite its campaign rhetoric, however, the IMP was an alliance of two capitalist parties, which aimed to enter parliament to prop up a Labour-led government. Like Labour, the IMP did not call for the abolition of the state spying agencies but merely a “review” of their activities. It did not oppose the military and intelligence alliance with the US.
In the lead-up to the election, Mana joined Labour and the right-wing NZ First Party in campaigning against immigration and foreign investment, particularly from China. This xenophobic campaign dovetailed with the push by the Obama administration to strengthen its military alliance with NZ as part of Washington’s “pivot” to Asia: the US military encirclement and preparations for war against China.
Mana’s Maori nationalist platform calls for greater government payouts to indigenous tribal businesses. The IP, founded by the multi-millionaire businessman Kim Dotcom, openly represents an upwardly-mobile layer of young tech entrepreneurs. Dotcom, who had previously donated money to the extreme pro-market ACT Party, called for measures to boost the profits of technology firms like his own. The Internet Party advocated government grants for web-based start-up companies. Dotcom bankrolled the IMP to the tune of $4 million, prompting Harawira to boast that Mana could “no longer be pigeonholed as a party for Maori, the disaffected and for the radical fringe.”
The alliance exposed, in particular, the right-wing character of the pseudo-left groups affiliated to Mana—the International Socialist Organisation (ISO), Fightback and Socialist Aotearoa (SA)—and their integration into the political establishment. All three groups campaigned for the IMP, while leading members of Fightback and SA stood as IMP candidates. They falsely presented Mana as a “left wing” alternative to Labour and National, while justifying its merger with the Internet Party by absurdly claiming that Dotcom had been “radicalised” by the government’s attempts to extradite him to the US on copyright infringement charges.
Following the election defeat, Mana and IP members continued to defend the alliance. Mana’s John Minto blamed the result on the media’s attacks on Dotcom and Labour’s attempts to distance itself from the IMP. He claimed that the merger had “worried the political establishment” because Dotcom’s “massive wealth” gave the IMP the financial resources it needed to challenge “corporate wealth and power.”
Other IMP apologists cynically blamed the working class for the defeat of the so-called “left:” Labour, the Greens and IMP. Martyn Bradbury, who edits the trade union funded Daily Blog, contemptuously declared that New Zealanders rallied to support National’s “mass surveillance and dirty politics.”
Socialist Aotearoa, in a post-election article, declared that the IMP failed to win votes because “the conditions of austerity imposed elsewhere have been avoided” in New Zealand and the working class was not “desperate enough” to support Mana’s “anticapitalist programme.” The ISO similarly implied that the working class is either right-wing or apathetic. It declared that the National government had refrained from major attacks on the working class and “by and large, has succeeded” in portraying Prime Minister John Key as “competent, likeable and popular.”
In reality, Key’s government is reviled by the working class. The near-record abstention in the election demonstrated that there is widespread hostility toward every established party. National has carried out a series of attacks on living standards and public services, including at least 7,000 job cuts, cuts to healthcare, welfare and education and an increase in the consumption tax.
Claims that workers enjoy a comfortable living standard and have not suffered greatly from the economic crisis are false to the core. Throughout the country median incomes declined between 2006 and 2013; in working class South Auckland by over 16 percent. In Northland, part of the Te Tai Tokerau electorate, economist Shamubeel Eaqub has compared economic conditions to those in East Timor, one of the world’s poorest countries.
Despite the IMP’s well-funded and highly visible campaign, and the enthusiastic support it received from the pseudo-lefts, the alliance failed to gain significant support because masses of workers saw it as no alternative to the political establishment. Far from being “anti-capitalist,” Mana represents the Maori bourgeoisie and upper-middle class, a layer that promotes xenophobia and racialist politics in order to divide the working class and advance its own interests. Mana’s alliance with the Internet Party, the creation of a multi-millionaire, was the clearest expression of its pro-business agenda.
The election result—the return of a government committed to austerity and militarism—demonstrates that anger and disgust with capitalist parties is not enough. The working class urgently needs its own party, based on a socialist and internationalist program, to organise the fight against war and for social equality. Building such a party requires a struggle against all those groups, including the ISO, Fightback and Socialist Aotearoa, who seek to shackle workers and youth to right-wing parties like the IMP.
Australian government plunged into leadership crisis by Murdoch intervention
Will Morrow
Amid a deepening economic slowdown in Australia, Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s Liberal-National Coalition government has been thrown into bitter factional turmoil this week, with public speculation by ministers of a potential leadership challenge. The outcome of the Queensland state election today, in which Liberal National Party Premier Campbell Newman is considered to be in danger of losing his own seat, is being regarded as a litmus test for the federal government.
The crisis was set off by the public intervention of global media baron Rupert Murdoch on Wednesday, following Abbott’s announcement on January 26 that he had bestowed an Australia Day knighthood on 93-year-old Prince Phillip, the consort of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II. The knighting was widely ridiculed and criticised and deepened the unpopularity of the government.
Murdoch published a Twitter post declaring that Abbott had to fire his chief of staff, Peta Credlin. “Abbott again,” he wrote. “Tough to write, but if he won’t replace top aide Peta Credlin she must do her patriotic duty and resign.”
Murdoch’s tweet precipitated a crisis in the Coalition that has been developing over an extended period, above all due to the government’s inability, in the face of popular opposition, to impose austerity measures to the extent being demanded by big business. As parliament opens for the year, the Abbott government is still attempting to get several major components of its last budget passed through the upper house, while it must prepare to hand down its next budget in May.
Murdoch’s call for the removal of Abbott’s top advisor, but not Abbott himself, was a clear warning to the PM that there could be no let-up in the government’s pursuit of austerity. The Murdoch press went into over-drive, with shock-jock Andrew Bolt declaring on Wednesday that the knighthood scandal was “so damaging that it could be fatal.” Right-wing columnist Miranda Devine declared, in reference to Credlin, that Abbott had to make a “sacrificial offering… Something that causes him pain, like chopping off his right arm.”
Today’s article in the Fairfax-owned Sydney Morning Herald, “Vulnerable: Abbott still standing, just,” cited several unnamed Liberal MPs on the possibility of a leadership change. A “junior minister” told the paper: “We’re all talking to each other seriously about alternatives to Tony. Those conversations have not taken place before.” An unnamed member of Abbott’s own cabinet said: “We are in a dire position.”
The article stated: “The Abbott government is a hollow edifice, still in place and wielding power, yet without internal support and vulnerable to challenge.” It claimed that both the Deputy Liberal leader and Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop, and Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who in 2010 was ousted as Liberal leader in a narrowly-contested leadership challenge by Abbott, had been approached by colleagues to challenge for the leadership but had so far refused.
The Murdoch-owned Daily Telegraph cited unnamed ministers as claiming that Abbott had a week to shore up support from within his party.
Abbott was compelled to give a press conference on Friday to refute the media speculation, during which he claimed that the government was a “very strong team” because it had “very good captain.” In an attempt to shore up support from within the government, Abbott is predicted to dump his multi-billion dollar parental-leave scheme during a speech on Monday to the National Press Club. Big business has denounced the scheme.
With Abbott’s leadership directly under threat, today’s editorial in the Australian, Murdoch’s national flagship, sought to rein in the infighting. “Despite the supercharged speculation around Mr Abbott’s leadership,” the editors wrote, “he remains the first, best hope of the conservative side.” It noted that potential alternatives to Abbott—specifically naming Bishop and Turnbull—“are not currently plausible.”
The affair has underscored the enormous weight wielded by Murdoch personally and his ability to manufacture political crises to effect right-wing shifts in the political set-up in Australia and other countries. More fundamentally, it reveals the enormous gulf that exists between the political establishment and the vast mass of the Australian population, which has no say over the decisions affecting millions of people made in the interests of the corporate and financial elite.
The Australian editorial made clear that the Abbott government’s response must be to push forward with deeply unpopular budget cuts to healthcare, education and other social services. “[W]hile the Coalition’s fiscal strategy remains in tatters—with its first budget largely blocked even as it prepares to frame its second—its commitment to spending restraint and economic reform is the only viable path for Australia.”
The editorial stated that, at present, it would not support a return of a Labor government without the opposition party enunciating clearly and publicly the means by which it would impose the economic downturn on working people. To date, Labor ministers have maintained a two-faced position—quietly signaling to big business their willingness to impose its austerity demands, while posturing as opponents of the Abbott government’s policies.
This makes clear that the real source of the turmoil facing Abbott government is the impasse confronting the entire political system. Underlying the deepening paralysis of both major parties is their fear that implementing policies that will tear up the living standards of the working class will trigger political and social unrest. Their appeals for “sacrifice” ring hollow amidst the ever-rising wealth of a tiny portion of the population.
Driving the crisis is the worsening economic downturn in Australia. Collapsing world commodity prices—including coal and iron ore—driven by global deflationary tendencies, as well as the deepening economic slowdown of China, the largest buyer of Australian mining exports, have hit government revenues. The value of the Australian dollar has fallen from $US1.10 in July 2011 to $0.77 yesterday. This is fuelling demands for the deepening of US- and European-style austerity.
At the same time, decades of falling living standards, declining real wages and rising social inequality has led both major parties to be despised by the population. Right-wing populist parties, such as mining magnate Clive Palmer’s Palmer United Party, and independents have been able to win seats in the federal parliament, further destabilising the political establishment.
The parliamentary crisis has developed over an extended period. Underlying this have been two inter-related processes: the intensifying global economic breakdown since 2008, and the growing worldwide military tensions—expressed in the Obama administration’s preparations for war against China through the “pivot to Asia.”
The defeat of the Howard government in 2007 saw a sitting prime minister lose his seat for the first time since 1929. In June 2010, Kevin Rudd, a first-term Labor prime minister, was removed in an inner-party coup and replaced by Julia Gillard, as part of a turn toward austerity and in order to align the government directly with the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia.” The backlash against Labor over the coup in the 2010 election saw it cling to office only by forming a minority government in the first hung parliament in 70 years. The political turmoil prompted the BBC to ask in 2013 whether Australia had become the “coup capital” of the world.
The continuing political impasse is fuelling deep frustration within ruling circles. Behind the scenes, discussions over alternative, authoritarian forms of rule are taking place. That is the significance of Abbott’s decision to bestow the Australia Day knighthood on two pillars of the Australian state: the British monarchy, in the person of Prince Phillip, and the armed forces, in the person of former military head Angus Houston.
Amid a deepening economic slowdown in Australia, Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s Liberal-National Coalition government has been thrown into bitter factional turmoil this week, with public speculation by ministers of a potential leadership challenge. The outcome of the Queensland state election today, in which Liberal National Party Premier Campbell Newman is considered to be in danger of losing his own seat, is being regarded as a litmus test for the federal government.
The crisis was set off by the public intervention of global media baron Rupert Murdoch on Wednesday, following Abbott’s announcement on January 26 that he had bestowed an Australia Day knighthood on 93-year-old Prince Phillip, the consort of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II. The knighting was widely ridiculed and criticised and deepened the unpopularity of the government.
Murdoch published a Twitter post declaring that Abbott had to fire his chief of staff, Peta Credlin. “Abbott again,” he wrote. “Tough to write, but if he won’t replace top aide Peta Credlin she must do her patriotic duty and resign.”
Murdoch’s tweet precipitated a crisis in the Coalition that has been developing over an extended period, above all due to the government’s inability, in the face of popular opposition, to impose austerity measures to the extent being demanded by big business. As parliament opens for the year, the Abbott government is still attempting to get several major components of its last budget passed through the upper house, while it must prepare to hand down its next budget in May.
Murdoch’s call for the removal of Abbott’s top advisor, but not Abbott himself, was a clear warning to the PM that there could be no let-up in the government’s pursuit of austerity. The Murdoch press went into over-drive, with shock-jock Andrew Bolt declaring on Wednesday that the knighthood scandal was “so damaging that it could be fatal.” Right-wing columnist Miranda Devine declared, in reference to Credlin, that Abbott had to make a “sacrificial offering… Something that causes him pain, like chopping off his right arm.”
Today’s article in the Fairfax-owned Sydney Morning Herald, “Vulnerable: Abbott still standing, just,” cited several unnamed Liberal MPs on the possibility of a leadership change. A “junior minister” told the paper: “We’re all talking to each other seriously about alternatives to Tony. Those conversations have not taken place before.” An unnamed member of Abbott’s own cabinet said: “We are in a dire position.”
The article stated: “The Abbott government is a hollow edifice, still in place and wielding power, yet without internal support and vulnerable to challenge.” It claimed that both the Deputy Liberal leader and Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop, and Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who in 2010 was ousted as Liberal leader in a narrowly-contested leadership challenge by Abbott, had been approached by colleagues to challenge for the leadership but had so far refused.
The Murdoch-owned Daily Telegraph cited unnamed ministers as claiming that Abbott had a week to shore up support from within his party.
Abbott was compelled to give a press conference on Friday to refute the media speculation, during which he claimed that the government was a “very strong team” because it had “very good captain.” In an attempt to shore up support from within the government, Abbott is predicted to dump his multi-billion dollar parental-leave scheme during a speech on Monday to the National Press Club. Big business has denounced the scheme.
With Abbott’s leadership directly under threat, today’s editorial in the Australian, Murdoch’s national flagship, sought to rein in the infighting. “Despite the supercharged speculation around Mr Abbott’s leadership,” the editors wrote, “he remains the first, best hope of the conservative side.” It noted that potential alternatives to Abbott—specifically naming Bishop and Turnbull—“are not currently plausible.”
The affair has underscored the enormous weight wielded by Murdoch personally and his ability to manufacture political crises to effect right-wing shifts in the political set-up in Australia and other countries. More fundamentally, it reveals the enormous gulf that exists between the political establishment and the vast mass of the Australian population, which has no say over the decisions affecting millions of people made in the interests of the corporate and financial elite.
The Australian editorial made clear that the Abbott government’s response must be to push forward with deeply unpopular budget cuts to healthcare, education and other social services. “[W]hile the Coalition’s fiscal strategy remains in tatters—with its first budget largely blocked even as it prepares to frame its second—its commitment to spending restraint and economic reform is the only viable path for Australia.”
The editorial stated that, at present, it would not support a return of a Labor government without the opposition party enunciating clearly and publicly the means by which it would impose the economic downturn on working people. To date, Labor ministers have maintained a two-faced position—quietly signaling to big business their willingness to impose its austerity demands, while posturing as opponents of the Abbott government’s policies.
This makes clear that the real source of the turmoil facing Abbott government is the impasse confronting the entire political system. Underlying the deepening paralysis of both major parties is their fear that implementing policies that will tear up the living standards of the working class will trigger political and social unrest. Their appeals for “sacrifice” ring hollow amidst the ever-rising wealth of a tiny portion of the population.
Driving the crisis is the worsening economic downturn in Australia. Collapsing world commodity prices—including coal and iron ore—driven by global deflationary tendencies, as well as the deepening economic slowdown of China, the largest buyer of Australian mining exports, have hit government revenues. The value of the Australian dollar has fallen from $US1.10 in July 2011 to $0.77 yesterday. This is fuelling demands for the deepening of US- and European-style austerity.
At the same time, decades of falling living standards, declining real wages and rising social inequality has led both major parties to be despised by the population. Right-wing populist parties, such as mining magnate Clive Palmer’s Palmer United Party, and independents have been able to win seats in the federal parliament, further destabilising the political establishment.
The parliamentary crisis has developed over an extended period. Underlying this have been two inter-related processes: the intensifying global economic breakdown since 2008, and the growing worldwide military tensions—expressed in the Obama administration’s preparations for war against China through the “pivot to Asia.”
The defeat of the Howard government in 2007 saw a sitting prime minister lose his seat for the first time since 1929. In June 2010, Kevin Rudd, a first-term Labor prime minister, was removed in an inner-party coup and replaced by Julia Gillard, as part of a turn toward austerity and in order to align the government directly with the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia.” The backlash against Labor over the coup in the 2010 election saw it cling to office only by forming a minority government in the first hung parliament in 70 years. The political turmoil prompted the BBC to ask in 2013 whether Australia had become the “coup capital” of the world.
The continuing political impasse is fuelling deep frustration within ruling circles. Behind the scenes, discussions over alternative, authoritarian forms of rule are taking place. That is the significance of Abbott’s decision to bestow the Australia Day knighthood on two pillars of the Australian state: the British monarchy, in the person of Prince Phillip, and the armed forces, in the person of former military head Angus Houston.
Target CEO’s “golden parachute” exceeds total severance for 17,600 Canadian workers
Carl Bronski
In the wake of one of the largest single layoffs in Canadian history, it has been revealed that the 2014 separation package for Target department store CEO Gregg Steinhafel exceeds the severance payments for all of the 17,600 employees who have lost their jobs as a result of the January 2015 Target Canada bankruptcy.
Earlier this month, Target announced that it will close all of its 133 retail outlets in the country. The laid-off employees will receive up to 16 weeks compensation in wages and benefits. The amount set aside roughly meets the minimum requirement for severance packages as set out by labour law. To cover the payments to its employees, Target has earmarked $56 million (US).
In contrast, as the company bled red ink, CEO Steinhafel cashed in with a spectacular “golden parachute” last May totaling $61 million (US) in monies and deferred stock options after he was forced by the Board of Directors to resign his position. Steinhafel had spearheaded the expansion of Target stores into Canada in 2013 which quickly turned into an epic fiasco. Seven billion dollars were invested in the Canadian expansion. In only 681 days of operation, the company recorded losses of at least half of that.
Canadian customers, reeling from stagnating wages and high unemployment rates that have been endemic in Canada since 2008, had steered away from the department store in droves due to uncompetitive price points and poor selection. In its request for Steinhafel’s resignation, the board also cited fallout from the massive January 2014 data breach of credit card information for its US-based customers that occurred during his tenure. Neither occurrence, however, was enough to diminish the CEO’s lavish payday. Indeed, after his resignation, Steinhafel was kept on for several months by the board in an advisory capacity.
Due to draconian cuts to unemployment eligibility by the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the increasing use of part-time workers by retailers, many of the Target workers will not have earned enough hours to claim unemployment insurance payments after their meagre severance payments run out.
The obscene discrepancies between the earnings of workers and those at the top of the corporate ladder will come as no surprise to working people. A new study has shown that Canada’s top 100 CEOs received compensation increases double the rate of average wage-earners from 2008 to 2013. In 2013 alone, CEO pay increased by 11 percent.In that year the country’s top executives raked in an average of $9.2 million.
In Canada, the top CEOs now receive 206 times more in annual compensation than the average Canadian worker. In the United States, where Steinhafel resides, CEOs earn 354 times as much as the average worker at their companies. Steinhafel managed to outpace even this outrageous gap. His 2013 pay was 597 times greater than those of the average Target worker, second only to Walmart CEO Michael Duke, who received 1,034 times more in compensation than workers in his company.
Overall, average wages for workers in Canada have continued to stagnate with earnings rises falling behind the annual inflation rate over the past eight years. The average Canadian income in 2013 stood at $47,358. In Ontario, the heart of the Canadian manufacturing sector, the median income has fallen by 3.2 percent since 2006. In Windsor, an ever-diminishing hub of Canadian auto manufacturing, the median income has collapsed by almost 14 percent. In Toronto, the financial centre of the country, wages have fallen by 3.2 percent over that same time period.
The pervasive and ever-increasing growth of social inequality is the most fundamental characteristic of contemporary social and political life, not just in Canada and the US, but internationally. It is rooted in the very nature of the capitalist system. In every country, corporate chiefs unashamedly enrich themselves while overseeing the wholesale destruction of jobs, wages and working conditions of ordinary working people, and demanding governments further slash essential social programs to fund tax cuts and boondoggles for the wealthy few.
The obscene levels of wealth at the top of society and growing economic distress among the broad masses is a product of the underlying capitalist economic system.
In the wake of one of the largest single layoffs in Canadian history, it has been revealed that the 2014 separation package for Target department store CEO Gregg Steinhafel exceeds the severance payments for all of the 17,600 employees who have lost their jobs as a result of the January 2015 Target Canada bankruptcy.
Earlier this month, Target announced that it will close all of its 133 retail outlets in the country. The laid-off employees will receive up to 16 weeks compensation in wages and benefits. The amount set aside roughly meets the minimum requirement for severance packages as set out by labour law. To cover the payments to its employees, Target has earmarked $56 million (US).
In contrast, as the company bled red ink, CEO Steinhafel cashed in with a spectacular “golden parachute” last May totaling $61 million (US) in monies and deferred stock options after he was forced by the Board of Directors to resign his position. Steinhafel had spearheaded the expansion of Target stores into Canada in 2013 which quickly turned into an epic fiasco. Seven billion dollars were invested in the Canadian expansion. In only 681 days of operation, the company recorded losses of at least half of that.
Canadian customers, reeling from stagnating wages and high unemployment rates that have been endemic in Canada since 2008, had steered away from the department store in droves due to uncompetitive price points and poor selection. In its request for Steinhafel’s resignation, the board also cited fallout from the massive January 2014 data breach of credit card information for its US-based customers that occurred during his tenure. Neither occurrence, however, was enough to diminish the CEO’s lavish payday. Indeed, after his resignation, Steinhafel was kept on for several months by the board in an advisory capacity.
Due to draconian cuts to unemployment eligibility by the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the increasing use of part-time workers by retailers, many of the Target workers will not have earned enough hours to claim unemployment insurance payments after their meagre severance payments run out.
The obscene discrepancies between the earnings of workers and those at the top of the corporate ladder will come as no surprise to working people. A new study has shown that Canada’s top 100 CEOs received compensation increases double the rate of average wage-earners from 2008 to 2013. In 2013 alone, CEO pay increased by 11 percent.In that year the country’s top executives raked in an average of $9.2 million.
In Canada, the top CEOs now receive 206 times more in annual compensation than the average Canadian worker. In the United States, where Steinhafel resides, CEOs earn 354 times as much as the average worker at their companies. Steinhafel managed to outpace even this outrageous gap. His 2013 pay was 597 times greater than those of the average Target worker, second only to Walmart CEO Michael Duke, who received 1,034 times more in compensation than workers in his company.
Overall, average wages for workers in Canada have continued to stagnate with earnings rises falling behind the annual inflation rate over the past eight years. The average Canadian income in 2013 stood at $47,358. In Ontario, the heart of the Canadian manufacturing sector, the median income has fallen by 3.2 percent since 2006. In Windsor, an ever-diminishing hub of Canadian auto manufacturing, the median income has collapsed by almost 14 percent. In Toronto, the financial centre of the country, wages have fallen by 3.2 percent over that same time period.
The pervasive and ever-increasing growth of social inequality is the most fundamental characteristic of contemporary social and political life, not just in Canada and the US, but internationally. It is rooted in the very nature of the capitalist system. In every country, corporate chiefs unashamedly enrich themselves while overseeing the wholesale destruction of jobs, wages and working conditions of ordinary working people, and demanding governments further slash essential social programs to fund tax cuts and boondoggles for the wealthy few.
The obscene levels of wealth at the top of society and growing economic distress among the broad masses is a product of the underlying capitalist economic system.
Fate of ISIS’s Japanese and Jordanian captives uncertain
Ben McGrath
As of today, there was still no word about the fate of a Japanese journalist and Jordanian pilot being held captive by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The group has threatened to kill both men unless its demands were met. Neither Tokyo nor Amman has reported any new developments since the latest deadline for a prisoner exchange expired Thursday sundown in Syria.
Kenji Goto, the 47-year-old Japanese reporter being held by ISIS, appeared in a video on Tuesday holding a photo of a man believed to be Jordanian pilot Lieutenant Moaz al-Kasasbeh. The pilot was conducting a bombing run on ISIS targets in northeastern Syria last month, as part of Jordan’s involvement in the renewed US-led renewed war of aggression in the Middle East, when his plane crashed and he was taken prisoner.
In the video—a still picture with audio—Goto relays an ISIS demand that the Jordanian government free Sajida al-Rishawi, an Iraqi woman currently jailed in Jordan, in exchange for his own release. Rishawi was sentenced to death for her role in a 2005 suicide bombing of an Amman hotel that resulted in the deaths of 57 people. While her husband and two others carried out the attack, Rishawi’s bomb failed to detonate and she was later arrested.
Goto states in the video: “Any more delays by the Jordanian government will mean they are responsible for the death of their pilot, which will then be followed by mine. I only have 24 hours left to live and the pilot has even less.”
The 24-hour deadline passed and while it was extended another day, there has been no progress on securing the hostages’ release, raising concerns that they may have already been executed.
ISIS had stated that Kasasbeh would be killed on Thursday unless Rishawi was presented at the Turkish-Syrian border. Jordan appeared willing to make the exchange on condition that it received confirmation its pilot was still alive.
It is not clear whether one or both hostages would be exchanged for Rishawi, but Jordan has made no moves to prepare her for an exchange. According to news reports, she has not left the country.
“At this point we want to emphasize that we have asked for proof of life from Daesh (ISIS) and we have not received anything yet,” Jordanian government spokesman Mohammad al-Momani said on Thursday.
The Japanese government said it was working closely with Jordan. Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga stated: “As the situation is developing, I shouldn’t comment on details. But, Japan and Jordan are dealing with the matter based on an extremely trusting relationship.”
Goto first appeared in an ISIS video on January 20, alongside a second Japanese man, Haruna Yukawa. Japan was given 72 hours to pay a $200 million ransom, the same amount that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has pledged to countries fighting ISIS.
A second video featuring Goto was released last Saturday, with the reporter holding a photo of a decapitated Yukawa, although the latter’s death has not been confirmed.
While the Japanese government claimed that it was pursuing every avenue to secure the release of its citizens, it ignored offers of help last week from Ko Nakata, a Muslim scholar, and Kousuke Tsuneoka, a freelance reporter.
Tsuneoka, who was released after being held hostage in Afghanistan in 2010, visited Syria in September in an unsuccessful attempt to gain Yukawa’s release. Tsuneoka and Nakata were prevented from leaving Japan in October after the police seized their passports.
Neither government is genuinely concerned about the fate of their citizens.
Despite widespread domestic opposition to its participation in the latest US-led military aggression in Iraq and Syria, the Jordanian government remains a loyal Washington ally. Jordan has been used by the US military as a training ground for Islamist militants sent to fight Syrian President Bashar al-Assad regime. Many of these so-called rebels have gone on to join the ranks of ISIS.
Yesterday, according to one press report, Jordan has threatened to fast-track the execution of Sajida al-Rishawi and other ISIS prisoners in Jordan if the terrorist group killed Moaz al-Kasasbeh. In other words, Amman will match ISIS savagery with its own barbaric response.
The Japanese government has seized on the hostage crisis to push forward with its plans for remilitarization. Abe’s government is preparing to submit 10 bills to the Diet, Japan’s parliament, in order to codify in law the government’s reinterpretation of the constitution ease restrictions on the Japanese military.
The new laws would allow the Japanese military to be sent overseas to support US-led military interventions without the approval of the parliament. Another law would make it easier for the government to suspend basic democratic rights during any emergency situation, an indication of the sort of repressive measures that will be imposed against anti-war protesters or others opposing Tokyo’s military policies.
The Obama administration has made clear that is opposes any negotiations with ISIS. On Sunday, White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough stated: “The policies are well set: the US doesn’t pay ransoms and will not do prisoner swaps.”
The US government is intent on exploiting this hostage crisis, as it did the ISIS executions of American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff last year, to justify expanding its new war in the Middle East and operations targeting the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
As of today, there was still no word about the fate of a Japanese journalist and Jordanian pilot being held captive by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The group has threatened to kill both men unless its demands were met. Neither Tokyo nor Amman has reported any new developments since the latest deadline for a prisoner exchange expired Thursday sundown in Syria.
Kenji Goto, the 47-year-old Japanese reporter being held by ISIS, appeared in a video on Tuesday holding a photo of a man believed to be Jordanian pilot Lieutenant Moaz al-Kasasbeh. The pilot was conducting a bombing run on ISIS targets in northeastern Syria last month, as part of Jordan’s involvement in the renewed US-led renewed war of aggression in the Middle East, when his plane crashed and he was taken prisoner.
In the video—a still picture with audio—Goto relays an ISIS demand that the Jordanian government free Sajida al-Rishawi, an Iraqi woman currently jailed in Jordan, in exchange for his own release. Rishawi was sentenced to death for her role in a 2005 suicide bombing of an Amman hotel that resulted in the deaths of 57 people. While her husband and two others carried out the attack, Rishawi’s bomb failed to detonate and she was later arrested.
Goto states in the video: “Any more delays by the Jordanian government will mean they are responsible for the death of their pilot, which will then be followed by mine. I only have 24 hours left to live and the pilot has even less.”
The 24-hour deadline passed and while it was extended another day, there has been no progress on securing the hostages’ release, raising concerns that they may have already been executed.
ISIS had stated that Kasasbeh would be killed on Thursday unless Rishawi was presented at the Turkish-Syrian border. Jordan appeared willing to make the exchange on condition that it received confirmation its pilot was still alive.
It is not clear whether one or both hostages would be exchanged for Rishawi, but Jordan has made no moves to prepare her for an exchange. According to news reports, she has not left the country.
“At this point we want to emphasize that we have asked for proof of life from Daesh (ISIS) and we have not received anything yet,” Jordanian government spokesman Mohammad al-Momani said on Thursday.
The Japanese government said it was working closely with Jordan. Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga stated: “As the situation is developing, I shouldn’t comment on details. But, Japan and Jordan are dealing with the matter based on an extremely trusting relationship.”
Goto first appeared in an ISIS video on January 20, alongside a second Japanese man, Haruna Yukawa. Japan was given 72 hours to pay a $200 million ransom, the same amount that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has pledged to countries fighting ISIS.
A second video featuring Goto was released last Saturday, with the reporter holding a photo of a decapitated Yukawa, although the latter’s death has not been confirmed.
While the Japanese government claimed that it was pursuing every avenue to secure the release of its citizens, it ignored offers of help last week from Ko Nakata, a Muslim scholar, and Kousuke Tsuneoka, a freelance reporter.
Tsuneoka, who was released after being held hostage in Afghanistan in 2010, visited Syria in September in an unsuccessful attempt to gain Yukawa’s release. Tsuneoka and Nakata were prevented from leaving Japan in October after the police seized their passports.
Neither government is genuinely concerned about the fate of their citizens.
Despite widespread domestic opposition to its participation in the latest US-led military aggression in Iraq and Syria, the Jordanian government remains a loyal Washington ally. Jordan has been used by the US military as a training ground for Islamist militants sent to fight Syrian President Bashar al-Assad regime. Many of these so-called rebels have gone on to join the ranks of ISIS.
Yesterday, according to one press report, Jordan has threatened to fast-track the execution of Sajida al-Rishawi and other ISIS prisoners in Jordan if the terrorist group killed Moaz al-Kasasbeh. In other words, Amman will match ISIS savagery with its own barbaric response.
The Japanese government has seized on the hostage crisis to push forward with its plans for remilitarization. Abe’s government is preparing to submit 10 bills to the Diet, Japan’s parliament, in order to codify in law the government’s reinterpretation of the constitution ease restrictions on the Japanese military.
The new laws would allow the Japanese military to be sent overseas to support US-led military interventions without the approval of the parliament. Another law would make it easier for the government to suspend basic democratic rights during any emergency situation, an indication of the sort of repressive measures that will be imposed against anti-war protesters or others opposing Tokyo’s military policies.
The Obama administration has made clear that is opposes any negotiations with ISIS. On Sunday, White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough stated: “The policies are well set: the US doesn’t pay ransoms and will not do prisoner swaps.”
The US government is intent on exploiting this hostage crisis, as it did the ISIS executions of American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff last year, to justify expanding its new war in the Middle East and operations targeting the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Germany to send troops into northern Iraq
Johannes Stern
On Thursday, Germany’s Bundestag (parliament) agreed to send armed troops to northern Iraq. In February, Bundeswehr (Armed Forces) troops will deploy to Iraq, supposedly to train Kurdish Peshmerga to fight the Islamic State (IS). The marching orders were issued by a large majority; 457 of the 590 parliamentary deputies voted for the deployment, 79 voted “no,” and 54 abstained.
Rolf Mützenich, the foreign policy spokesman for the Social Democratic Party (SPD) parliamentary group, justified the government’s military intervention, calling the struggle against the IS a “military challenge.” The “liberation of Kobane [shows] that this struggle needs to be conducted militarily,” he said. Fighting ISIS encompasses more “than just a military approach, but without the military approach there will be no basis for political solutions,” Mützenich said.
A year after President Gauck, Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier (SPD) and Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen (CDU, Christian Democratic Union) announced the end of German foreign policy restraint at the Munich Security Conference, German foreign policy is ever more militaristic.
Last week, Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) announced expanded German engagement in Africa and support for a regional intervention force against the terrorist militia Boko Haram. Earlier this year, von der Leyen raised the prospect of new arms deliveries to the Kurds. Also yesterday, the Bundestag decided to extend the deployment of German Patriot missile batteries in Turkey.
The mission in Iraq heralds a new stage in the return of German militarism. For the first time since the terrible crimes of German imperialism in two world wars and the defeat of Nazi Germany, Berlin is sending troops into a war zone without an international mandate.
Such actions are not covered by the German constitution and set a precedent for the global deployment of the Bundeswehr into crisis areas. Strictly speaking, the constitution only allows the use of the Armed Forces in cases of national defence. After German re-unification in 1990, the Supreme Court reinterpreted the law in a judgment and declared foreign missions constitutional if they were part of “mutual collective security”. As a result, interventions agreed by the UN or NATO were legally covered.
The deployment of troops to Iraq is yet another legal quantum leap. It is not covered by a UN nor a NATO mandate. Germany is de facto intervening unilaterally into a war zone in order to arm one of the parties to the civil war—in this case, the Kurdish Peshmerga—to train them and, if possible, to support them in combat operations.
Only recently, it was announced that Canadian soldiers were attacked by IS fighters with mortars and machine guns. They were also officially sent there as “trainers”, in reality they were immediately involved in fighting the IS. As the Canadian Special Operations Forces’ commander Mike Rouleau admitted, the “trainers” supplied targets for the US-led air war against the IS in northern Iraq and Syria.
In his speech, the foreign policy spokesman for the Green Party in the Bundestag, Omid Nouripour, frankly admitted that in reality, the deployment is a combat mission. “There’s a novelty,” he said. “We are sending mandated soldiers. It may be that they get involved in combat operations; otherwise we would not have to mandate them.”
The former pacifists in the Green Party, who ever since supporting the 1999 Kosovo war have supported every Bundeswehr mission abroad, largely abstained. However, they left no doubt that they support the intervention in principle. “We are for training,” Nouripour said. His only objection was that it was “irresponsible” to send the soldiers on a mission “without rules of engagement.”
By supporting the Kurdish peshmerga, German imperialism is returning to classic forms of colonial politics. Even during World War I, plans for “alternative conduct of war” were developed in the foreign ministry in Berlin. At that time, the German ruling class worked closely with the Ottoman Empire and Arab Bedouins to pursue its geo-strategic and economic interests in the Middle East—aiming to weaken their opponents England, France and Russia, by stoking an “Islamic revolt.”
Significantly, German papers of the time repeatedly pointed out that the name of the town, Kobane, was not of Kurdish but German origin, and was based on German-Turkish collaboration. During the construction of the Baghdad railway in 1912, a small railway station was built, which the Kurds called Kobane, referring to the German “company” that was responsible. Over time, it became the Kurdish “Kobani.”
In an article titled “What is German in Kobane,” the Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote: “They were Imperial German railroad barons, dashing nobles who came and led the command; the construction of the rail track should fulfil their imperial dream of a connection between Berlin and Baghdad, the planned route went through Aleppo and Mosul.” It continues, “The route of the track of the former Baghdad Railway today marks the border between Syria and Turkey. This is what the victors of the First World War, Britain and France, wanted as they divided up the Ottoman Empire.”
Berlin’s intervention in Iraq is in line with in the historic interests of German imperialism. While the imperialist powers are not (yet) engaged in military struggle with each other, unlike a century ago, the tensions among them are mounting under the surface of the joint fight against the IS.
Mützenich tried to justify Germany’s solo effort, saying, “Some advice says we should seek a European framework. That may be. But yesterday, in the Foreign Affairs Committee, the foreign minister indicated—and we should clearly say that in public—how difficult this process is with the European partners. To mention that is part of being honest; because different governments follow different goals.”
The Left Party, which voted unanimously against the military mission, plays a key role for German imperialism in the region. It functions both as an “adviser” to help formulate imperialist policy, and to open doors across the region.
Like the representatives of the government and the Greens, Left Party foreign policy spokesman Jan Van Aken also praised military action against ISIS. “I think we should first of all celebrate together that this week Kobane has been freed,” he said at the beginning of his speech, adding: “My thanks and my deep respect to the men and women who have fought in recent months against the misanthropists of ISIS, risking their lives, which some of them lost.”
The Left Party’s criticism of the military mission is purely tactical, however. Van Aken, who regularly visits the region, said Berlin’s unilateral support of the Peshmerga would “strengthen and not weaken [ISIS] in the long term,” because it “drives forward the division of Iraq”. Even if one supported weapons deliveries and a Bundeswehr intervention, Van Aken said, “then this intervention is exactly the wrong one”. It entailed training “the wrong people for the wrong goals,” he claimed.
The Left Party’s representatives were the first to call for arms deliveries to the Kurds and demand a massive military operation against ISIS. In his speech, Van Aken took up this aggressive line, advising the government about how best to fight the IS militarily. If Berlin followed the Left Party’s ideas, he said, Germany would not only arm the Kurds, but install new puppet governments across the region.
“If you want to fight ISIS militarily, then you can only if you get rid of the hatred by installing a broad, a fair government in Baghdad which will share the wealth fairly between the Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis. This must be the political goal.” He added, “If you want to act effectively militarily against ISIS, then shut the borders and apply pressure on Turkey.”
On Thursday, Germany’s Bundestag (parliament) agreed to send armed troops to northern Iraq. In February, Bundeswehr (Armed Forces) troops will deploy to Iraq, supposedly to train Kurdish Peshmerga to fight the Islamic State (IS). The marching orders were issued by a large majority; 457 of the 590 parliamentary deputies voted for the deployment, 79 voted “no,” and 54 abstained.
Rolf Mützenich, the foreign policy spokesman for the Social Democratic Party (SPD) parliamentary group, justified the government’s military intervention, calling the struggle against the IS a “military challenge.” The “liberation of Kobane [shows] that this struggle needs to be conducted militarily,” he said. Fighting ISIS encompasses more “than just a military approach, but without the military approach there will be no basis for political solutions,” Mützenich said.
A year after President Gauck, Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier (SPD) and Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen (CDU, Christian Democratic Union) announced the end of German foreign policy restraint at the Munich Security Conference, German foreign policy is ever more militaristic.
Last week, Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) announced expanded German engagement in Africa and support for a regional intervention force against the terrorist militia Boko Haram. Earlier this year, von der Leyen raised the prospect of new arms deliveries to the Kurds. Also yesterday, the Bundestag decided to extend the deployment of German Patriot missile batteries in Turkey.
The mission in Iraq heralds a new stage in the return of German militarism. For the first time since the terrible crimes of German imperialism in two world wars and the defeat of Nazi Germany, Berlin is sending troops into a war zone without an international mandate.
Such actions are not covered by the German constitution and set a precedent for the global deployment of the Bundeswehr into crisis areas. Strictly speaking, the constitution only allows the use of the Armed Forces in cases of national defence. After German re-unification in 1990, the Supreme Court reinterpreted the law in a judgment and declared foreign missions constitutional if they were part of “mutual collective security”. As a result, interventions agreed by the UN or NATO were legally covered.
The deployment of troops to Iraq is yet another legal quantum leap. It is not covered by a UN nor a NATO mandate. Germany is de facto intervening unilaterally into a war zone in order to arm one of the parties to the civil war—in this case, the Kurdish Peshmerga—to train them and, if possible, to support them in combat operations.
Only recently, it was announced that Canadian soldiers were attacked by IS fighters with mortars and machine guns. They were also officially sent there as “trainers”, in reality they were immediately involved in fighting the IS. As the Canadian Special Operations Forces’ commander Mike Rouleau admitted, the “trainers” supplied targets for the US-led air war against the IS in northern Iraq and Syria.
In his speech, the foreign policy spokesman for the Green Party in the Bundestag, Omid Nouripour, frankly admitted that in reality, the deployment is a combat mission. “There’s a novelty,” he said. “We are sending mandated soldiers. It may be that they get involved in combat operations; otherwise we would not have to mandate them.”
The former pacifists in the Green Party, who ever since supporting the 1999 Kosovo war have supported every Bundeswehr mission abroad, largely abstained. However, they left no doubt that they support the intervention in principle. “We are for training,” Nouripour said. His only objection was that it was “irresponsible” to send the soldiers on a mission “without rules of engagement.”
By supporting the Kurdish peshmerga, German imperialism is returning to classic forms of colonial politics. Even during World War I, plans for “alternative conduct of war” were developed in the foreign ministry in Berlin. At that time, the German ruling class worked closely with the Ottoman Empire and Arab Bedouins to pursue its geo-strategic and economic interests in the Middle East—aiming to weaken their opponents England, France and Russia, by stoking an “Islamic revolt.”
Significantly, German papers of the time repeatedly pointed out that the name of the town, Kobane, was not of Kurdish but German origin, and was based on German-Turkish collaboration. During the construction of the Baghdad railway in 1912, a small railway station was built, which the Kurds called Kobane, referring to the German “company” that was responsible. Over time, it became the Kurdish “Kobani.”
In an article titled “What is German in Kobane,” the Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote: “They were Imperial German railroad barons, dashing nobles who came and led the command; the construction of the rail track should fulfil their imperial dream of a connection between Berlin and Baghdad, the planned route went through Aleppo and Mosul.” It continues, “The route of the track of the former Baghdad Railway today marks the border between Syria and Turkey. This is what the victors of the First World War, Britain and France, wanted as they divided up the Ottoman Empire.”
Berlin’s intervention in Iraq is in line with in the historic interests of German imperialism. While the imperialist powers are not (yet) engaged in military struggle with each other, unlike a century ago, the tensions among them are mounting under the surface of the joint fight against the IS.
Mützenich tried to justify Germany’s solo effort, saying, “Some advice says we should seek a European framework. That may be. But yesterday, in the Foreign Affairs Committee, the foreign minister indicated—and we should clearly say that in public—how difficult this process is with the European partners. To mention that is part of being honest; because different governments follow different goals.”
The Left Party, which voted unanimously against the military mission, plays a key role for German imperialism in the region. It functions both as an “adviser” to help formulate imperialist policy, and to open doors across the region.
Like the representatives of the government and the Greens, Left Party foreign policy spokesman Jan Van Aken also praised military action against ISIS. “I think we should first of all celebrate together that this week Kobane has been freed,” he said at the beginning of his speech, adding: “My thanks and my deep respect to the men and women who have fought in recent months against the misanthropists of ISIS, risking their lives, which some of them lost.”
The Left Party’s criticism of the military mission is purely tactical, however. Van Aken, who regularly visits the region, said Berlin’s unilateral support of the Peshmerga would “strengthen and not weaken [ISIS] in the long term,” because it “drives forward the division of Iraq”. Even if one supported weapons deliveries and a Bundeswehr intervention, Van Aken said, “then this intervention is exactly the wrong one”. It entailed training “the wrong people for the wrong goals,” he claimed.
The Left Party’s representatives were the first to call for arms deliveries to the Kurds and demand a massive military operation against ISIS. In his speech, Van Aken took up this aggressive line, advising the government about how best to fight the IS militarily. If Berlin followed the Left Party’s ideas, he said, Germany would not only arm the Kurds, but install new puppet governments across the region.
“If you want to fight ISIS militarily, then you can only if you get rid of the hatred by installing a broad, a fair government in Baghdad which will share the wealth fairly between the Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis. This must be the political goal.” He added, “If you want to act effectively militarily against ISIS, then shut the borders and apply pressure on Turkey.”
Obama administration moves to open US coastlines to offshore drilling
Nick Barrickman
In a major giveaway to US energy corporations, the Department of the Interior announced January 27 that it would open a large section of the Atlantic coast to oil and gas drilling for the first time, as well as expanding exploration in the Gulf of Mexico and parts of the Alaska coastline.
The proposal would cover a leasing period from 2017-2022, with 10 previously-protected locations in the Gulf, three in Alaska and a single large swathe of the southeast Atlantic coast, from Virginia down to Georgia. The formal bidding process would begin after a six-month period of public comment.
Drilling would continue to be banned on the Pacific coast and on the Atlantic coast from Delaware north, as well along the entire coastline of Florida, in both the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico.
“The safe and responsible development of our nation’s domestic energy resources is a key part of the President’s efforts to support American jobs and reduce our dependence on foreign oil,” said Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell. While claiming the administration would protect “areas that are simply too special to develop,” she reassured industry groups that “the areas off the table are very small in comparison to areas on the table.”
The action by the Department of the Interior is the first major expansion of offshore drilling since the 2010 Deep Horizon oil spill, where the blowout of a BP exploration well resulted in the worst environmental disaster in US history. The Obama administration had just begun the approval process for drilling in the Atlantic off Virginia when the Gulf disaster took place, forcing it to postpone the action for nearly five years.
Besides the ten new locations in the Gulf of Mexico, the DoI draft proposal would open at least three additional areas on the Alaska coast—the Beaufort Sea, Chukchi Sea and Cook Inlet—while certain other portions of the region would remain off-limits to drilling.
The decision to open up the Atlantic coast for drilling was widely hailed by oil companies and their political allies. “It’s encouraging to see the federal government finally acknowledge what we’ve been fighting for with our federal delegation for years,” said South Carolina Republican Governor Nikki Haley of the announcement.
Similarly, Democratic Senators Mark R. Warner and Timothy M. Kaine of Virginia referred to the move as a “significant step . . . that should result in the safe, responsible development of energy resources off the Virginia and mid-Atlantic coasts.” The senators expressed eagerness to put their state on the payroll of the oil companies, noting that, “we will continue to push for legislation to allow Virginia to have the same revenue-sharing system currently applied to Gulf Coast states.”
A number of economists expressed doubt that energy executives would be interested in undertaking a significant expansion of production into new areas, given the current record low prices holding sway within the industry. “There would be a big risk that companies would take by sinking the capital to explore and develop these wells not knowing how productive they will be,” Chris Lafakis, a senior energy economist at Moody’s Analytics, said in a statement to the Raleigh News Observer .
DoI officials have sought to assuage fears of another environmental catastrophe on the scale of the 2010 BP spill. Speaking to the New York Times, Janice Schneider, the Interior Department’s assistant secretary for land and minerals management, insisted that as a result of the Gulf disaster “there were investigations to reduce the likelihood of problems in the future,” adding that “we are working actively to get those proposed rules out on the street as soon as possible, and working with industry to ensure those rules reflect the best technology.”
Despite this massive sale of resources in federally protected areas, representatives of the oil industry expressed their dissatisfaction with the relatively limited number of offerings in the Atlantic and the Arctic. “At this early stage, it would be premature and irresponsible to leave out of the draft program any area that holds the potential for significant discoveries of oil and natural gas,” stated Erik Milito, director of offshore and industry operations for the American Petroleum Institute. Similarly, Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski called the relatively small number of openings for drilling a “one, two, three kick to the gut of Alaska’s economy,” adding that her office would “do everything we can to push back” against the administration on this proposal.
The Obama administration has sought to provide assurances to the various oil conglomerates dictating its energy policies in the face of a vast decline in oil prices throughout the global market. Earlier this month, after years of effecting measures aimed at damage control, a federal judge agreed to write down the total amount of fines owed by energy giant BP for its role in the 2010 Deep Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Despite damages potentially mounting in the trillions, the firm is now liable to pay a mere $13.7 billion, a fraction of its yearly profits.
“Our coastal economies are the backbone of hundreds of towns and cities along the Southern coast, providing thousands of jobs, multibillion-dollar tourism industries, multimillion-dollar fishing industries, and critical local tax revenues,” stated Sierra Weaver of the Southern Environmental Law Center to the New York Times.
In a major giveaway to US energy corporations, the Department of the Interior announced January 27 that it would open a large section of the Atlantic coast to oil and gas drilling for the first time, as well as expanding exploration in the Gulf of Mexico and parts of the Alaska coastline.
The proposal would cover a leasing period from 2017-2022, with 10 previously-protected locations in the Gulf, three in Alaska and a single large swathe of the southeast Atlantic coast, from Virginia down to Georgia. The formal bidding process would begin after a six-month period of public comment.
Drilling would continue to be banned on the Pacific coast and on the Atlantic coast from Delaware north, as well along the entire coastline of Florida, in both the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico.
“The safe and responsible development of our nation’s domestic energy resources is a key part of the President’s efforts to support American jobs and reduce our dependence on foreign oil,” said Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell. While claiming the administration would protect “areas that are simply too special to develop,” she reassured industry groups that “the areas off the table are very small in comparison to areas on the table.”
The action by the Department of the Interior is the first major expansion of offshore drilling since the 2010 Deep Horizon oil spill, where the blowout of a BP exploration well resulted in the worst environmental disaster in US history. The Obama administration had just begun the approval process for drilling in the Atlantic off Virginia when the Gulf disaster took place, forcing it to postpone the action for nearly five years.
Besides the ten new locations in the Gulf of Mexico, the DoI draft proposal would open at least three additional areas on the Alaska coast—the Beaufort Sea, Chukchi Sea and Cook Inlet—while certain other portions of the region would remain off-limits to drilling.
The decision to open up the Atlantic coast for drilling was widely hailed by oil companies and their political allies. “It’s encouraging to see the federal government finally acknowledge what we’ve been fighting for with our federal delegation for years,” said South Carolina Republican Governor Nikki Haley of the announcement.
Similarly, Democratic Senators Mark R. Warner and Timothy M. Kaine of Virginia referred to the move as a “significant step . . . that should result in the safe, responsible development of energy resources off the Virginia and mid-Atlantic coasts.” The senators expressed eagerness to put their state on the payroll of the oil companies, noting that, “we will continue to push for legislation to allow Virginia to have the same revenue-sharing system currently applied to Gulf Coast states.”
A number of economists expressed doubt that energy executives would be interested in undertaking a significant expansion of production into new areas, given the current record low prices holding sway within the industry. “There would be a big risk that companies would take by sinking the capital to explore and develop these wells not knowing how productive they will be,” Chris Lafakis, a senior energy economist at Moody’s Analytics, said in a statement to the Raleigh News Observer .
DoI officials have sought to assuage fears of another environmental catastrophe on the scale of the 2010 BP spill. Speaking to the New York Times, Janice Schneider, the Interior Department’s assistant secretary for land and minerals management, insisted that as a result of the Gulf disaster “there were investigations to reduce the likelihood of problems in the future,” adding that “we are working actively to get those proposed rules out on the street as soon as possible, and working with industry to ensure those rules reflect the best technology.”
Despite this massive sale of resources in federally protected areas, representatives of the oil industry expressed their dissatisfaction with the relatively limited number of offerings in the Atlantic and the Arctic. “At this early stage, it would be premature and irresponsible to leave out of the draft program any area that holds the potential for significant discoveries of oil and natural gas,” stated Erik Milito, director of offshore and industry operations for the American Petroleum Institute. Similarly, Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski called the relatively small number of openings for drilling a “one, two, three kick to the gut of Alaska’s economy,” adding that her office would “do everything we can to push back” against the administration on this proposal.
The Obama administration has sought to provide assurances to the various oil conglomerates dictating its energy policies in the face of a vast decline in oil prices throughout the global market. Earlier this month, after years of effecting measures aimed at damage control, a federal judge agreed to write down the total amount of fines owed by energy giant BP for its role in the 2010 Deep Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Despite damages potentially mounting in the trillions, the firm is now liable to pay a mere $13.7 billion, a fraction of its yearly profits.
“Our coastal economies are the backbone of hundreds of towns and cities along the Southern coast, providing thousands of jobs, multibillion-dollar tourism industries, multimillion-dollar fishing industries, and critical local tax revenues,” stated Sierra Weaver of the Southern Environmental Law Center to the New York Times.
Inquiry into death of Alexander Litvinenko opens in London
Julie Hyland
An inquiry into the death of the fugitive ex-Russian spy, Alexander Litvinenko opened this week—nearly eight years after he was murdered.
Litvinenko died from radioactive polonium-210 poisoning on November 23, 2006. It is claimed that the toxic element was contained in tea he drank during a meeting at London’s Millennium Hotel on November 1, with two former Russian KGB agents, Andrey Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun.
Litvinenko had been a lieutenant-colonel in Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB, the successor to the KGB), but had reportedly fallen out with his associates over corruption allegations. In 1998, he charged that the FSB had given him the order to kill Boris Berezovsky, a Russian oligarch and opponent of President Vladimir Putin. Litvinenko was charged with abusing his office and spent nine months on remand before being acquitted. He fled to Britain in 2000 and was granted political asylum.
Berezovsky, who left Russia for the UK at the same time, became Litvinenko’s associate and patron. The oligarch died in suspicious circumstances at his home in March 2013.
Litvinenko went on to accuse the FSB of bombing Moscow apartment blocks and two other cities in 1999, as a pretext for Russia’s second invasion of Chechnya, as well as the 2006 murder of journalist and Putin critic Anna Politkovskaya. A close friend of Chechen separatist leader Akhmed Zakayev, also exiled in London, Litvinenko reportedly converted to Islam shortly before his death.
His killing was greeted with banner headlines, especially after traces of polonium-210 were discovered in hotels that Lugovoi had stayed in during his visit and the two aircraft on which he had travelled.
However, this was followed by damaging revelations that Litvinenko was working for Britain’s MI6 intelligence agency. The government has refused to confirm or deny his involvement but in 2007, the Daily Mail cited intelligence sources claiming that Litvinenko was paid about £2,000 per month for his services and alleged that then MI6 head, Sir John Scarlett, was personally involved in his recruitment. There is also evidence that he worked with Spanish, Italian and Georgian security services.
A British request in May 2007 for Lugovoi’s extradition to stand trial for Litvinenko’s murder was rejected by Moscow, on the grounds that Russia’s constitution forbids the extradition of its citizens. Lugovoi, who represents the far-right Liberal Democratic Party of Russia in the Duma, denies the charges and has accused British intelligence of involvement in the assassination.
The standoff presented major political difficulties for the British government, especially as London had become the home to numerous Russian oligarchs, many of them political opponents of President Vladimir Putin. With Litvinenko charging on his deathbed that his assassination had been ordered by the Kremlin, this raised concerns that the British capital had become the locus for internecine warfare within the Russian elite.
Russian-British relations deteriorated further, with the UK’s decision to expel four Russian diplomats in July that year. The move came as antagonisms between Moscow and Washington accelerated over a range of issues, including the US decision to station its anti-missile system in Poland and the Czech Republic. Putin responded by signing a presidential decree for Russia’s withdrawal from the Treaty for Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE).
Backing for the UK’s action was cautious in Europe, however, especially given disputes over the status of Kosovo and fears for European gas and oil security.
Moreover, under conditions in which the Russian economy appeared to be enjoying a boom thanks to rising oil and gas prices, sections of Britain’s ruling elite were anxious that any further retaliatory measures would jeopardise UK investment and alienate Russian oligarchs fuelling London’s property and stock-market boom.
The case was parked. In 2013, a coroner’s inquest into Litvinenko’s death—required under British law—was delayed. Coroner Sir Robert Owen argued that his inquest was unable to hear confidential British intelligence material relevant to the case and requested a public inquiry, which can take such evidence in secret.
The government refused and was challenged in the High Court by Litvinenko’s widow, Marina. In February 2014, it ruled that ministers should reconsider the decision. Three months later, the government agreed to a public inquiry, headed by Owen.
The inquiry is unlikely to shed any real light on Litvinenko’s death. The government has set strict limitations. Much of the most important evidence will be heard in secret, with some of the 70 witnesses testifying from behind a screen. Others will be given complete secrecy. Parts of Owen’s report, which is not expected until the end of the year, will remain classified. Even Litvinenko’s widow will not be allowed to see the secret parts of the judge’s report.
Any examination of the role of Britain’s security services, and whether they could have prevented Litvinenko’s killing, has been ruled out. Notwithstanding the claim that the inquiry will impartially consider all theories—which include that Litvinenko was involved in smuggling polonium-210 and inadvertently poisoned himself—Owen has previously stated that he has seen evidence amounting to a “prima facie case” that Litvinenko was murdered by the Russian state.
The timing of the government’s decision and the opening of the inquiry is politically significant. It came against the backdrop of the Western-backed, right wing putsch in Kiev in February 2014, and the downing of Malaysian passenger flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine in July the same year.
Without any evidence, the NATO powers seized on the MH17 atrocity to press ahead with long-standing geo-political plans for the military encirclement of Russia and the destabilisation of the Putin regime. The US and the European Union imposed financial and diplomatic sanctions against Moscow which, combined with collapsing oil prices, have devastated the Russian economy. NATO has stepped up the stationing of troops and armaments on Russia’s borders and is now directly training Ukrainian forces, which include fascist militias, for Kiev’s bloody civil war in the east.
The forces overseeing the inquiry are poised to use it not to determine the circumstances of Litvinenko’s murder, but as grist for the mill of NATO’s anti-Russian propaganda campaign. The tone of the inquiry was set by Ben Emmerson QC, in his opening statement. Emmerson, a visiting professor in human rights law at Oxford University and United Nations special rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights, charged Putin directly with ordering Litvinenko’s murder.
Litvinenko was “eliminated” because he had made an enemy of the “close knit group of criminals who surrounded and still surround Vladimir Putin and keep his corrupt regime in power,” he said.
Accusing Moscow of carrying out “an act of nuclear terrorism on the streets of a major city which put the lives of numerous other members of the public at risk,” he said the inquiry would unmask Putin as “nothing more or less than a common criminal dressed up as a head of state.”
An inquiry into the death of the fugitive ex-Russian spy, Alexander Litvinenko opened this week—nearly eight years after he was murdered.
Litvinenko died from radioactive polonium-210 poisoning on November 23, 2006. It is claimed that the toxic element was contained in tea he drank during a meeting at London’s Millennium Hotel on November 1, with two former Russian KGB agents, Andrey Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun.
Litvinenko had been a lieutenant-colonel in Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB, the successor to the KGB), but had reportedly fallen out with his associates over corruption allegations. In 1998, he charged that the FSB had given him the order to kill Boris Berezovsky, a Russian oligarch and opponent of President Vladimir Putin. Litvinenko was charged with abusing his office and spent nine months on remand before being acquitted. He fled to Britain in 2000 and was granted political asylum.
Berezovsky, who left Russia for the UK at the same time, became Litvinenko’s associate and patron. The oligarch died in suspicious circumstances at his home in March 2013.
Litvinenko went on to accuse the FSB of bombing Moscow apartment blocks and two other cities in 1999, as a pretext for Russia’s second invasion of Chechnya, as well as the 2006 murder of journalist and Putin critic Anna Politkovskaya. A close friend of Chechen separatist leader Akhmed Zakayev, also exiled in London, Litvinenko reportedly converted to Islam shortly before his death.
His killing was greeted with banner headlines, especially after traces of polonium-210 were discovered in hotels that Lugovoi had stayed in during his visit and the two aircraft on which he had travelled.
However, this was followed by damaging revelations that Litvinenko was working for Britain’s MI6 intelligence agency. The government has refused to confirm or deny his involvement but in 2007, the Daily Mail cited intelligence sources claiming that Litvinenko was paid about £2,000 per month for his services and alleged that then MI6 head, Sir John Scarlett, was personally involved in his recruitment. There is also evidence that he worked with Spanish, Italian and Georgian security services.
A British request in May 2007 for Lugovoi’s extradition to stand trial for Litvinenko’s murder was rejected by Moscow, on the grounds that Russia’s constitution forbids the extradition of its citizens. Lugovoi, who represents the far-right Liberal Democratic Party of Russia in the Duma, denies the charges and has accused British intelligence of involvement in the assassination.
The standoff presented major political difficulties for the British government, especially as London had become the home to numerous Russian oligarchs, many of them political opponents of President Vladimir Putin. With Litvinenko charging on his deathbed that his assassination had been ordered by the Kremlin, this raised concerns that the British capital had become the locus for internecine warfare within the Russian elite.
Russian-British relations deteriorated further, with the UK’s decision to expel four Russian diplomats in July that year. The move came as antagonisms between Moscow and Washington accelerated over a range of issues, including the US decision to station its anti-missile system in Poland and the Czech Republic. Putin responded by signing a presidential decree for Russia’s withdrawal from the Treaty for Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE).
Backing for the UK’s action was cautious in Europe, however, especially given disputes over the status of Kosovo and fears for European gas and oil security.
Moreover, under conditions in which the Russian economy appeared to be enjoying a boom thanks to rising oil and gas prices, sections of Britain’s ruling elite were anxious that any further retaliatory measures would jeopardise UK investment and alienate Russian oligarchs fuelling London’s property and stock-market boom.
The case was parked. In 2013, a coroner’s inquest into Litvinenko’s death—required under British law—was delayed. Coroner Sir Robert Owen argued that his inquest was unable to hear confidential British intelligence material relevant to the case and requested a public inquiry, which can take such evidence in secret.
The government refused and was challenged in the High Court by Litvinenko’s widow, Marina. In February 2014, it ruled that ministers should reconsider the decision. Three months later, the government agreed to a public inquiry, headed by Owen.
The inquiry is unlikely to shed any real light on Litvinenko’s death. The government has set strict limitations. Much of the most important evidence will be heard in secret, with some of the 70 witnesses testifying from behind a screen. Others will be given complete secrecy. Parts of Owen’s report, which is not expected until the end of the year, will remain classified. Even Litvinenko’s widow will not be allowed to see the secret parts of the judge’s report.
Any examination of the role of Britain’s security services, and whether they could have prevented Litvinenko’s killing, has been ruled out. Notwithstanding the claim that the inquiry will impartially consider all theories—which include that Litvinenko was involved in smuggling polonium-210 and inadvertently poisoned himself—Owen has previously stated that he has seen evidence amounting to a “prima facie case” that Litvinenko was murdered by the Russian state.
The timing of the government’s decision and the opening of the inquiry is politically significant. It came against the backdrop of the Western-backed, right wing putsch in Kiev in February 2014, and the downing of Malaysian passenger flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine in July the same year.
Without any evidence, the NATO powers seized on the MH17 atrocity to press ahead with long-standing geo-political plans for the military encirclement of Russia and the destabilisation of the Putin regime. The US and the European Union imposed financial and diplomatic sanctions against Moscow which, combined with collapsing oil prices, have devastated the Russian economy. NATO has stepped up the stationing of troops and armaments on Russia’s borders and is now directly training Ukrainian forces, which include fascist militias, for Kiev’s bloody civil war in the east.
The forces overseeing the inquiry are poised to use it not to determine the circumstances of Litvinenko’s murder, but as grist for the mill of NATO’s anti-Russian propaganda campaign. The tone of the inquiry was set by Ben Emmerson QC, in his opening statement. Emmerson, a visiting professor in human rights law at Oxford University and United Nations special rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights, charged Putin directly with ordering Litvinenko’s murder.
Litvinenko was “eliminated” because he had made an enemy of the “close knit group of criminals who surrounded and still surround Vladimir Putin and keep his corrupt regime in power,” he said.
Accusing Moscow of carrying out “an act of nuclear terrorism on the streets of a major city which put the lives of numerous other members of the public at risk,” he said the inquiry would unmask Putin as “nothing more or less than a common criminal dressed up as a head of state.”
Gorbachev warns Ukraine could ignite World War III
Niles Williamson
Mikhail Gorbachev, the last president of the Soviet Union, accused the United States Thursday of initiating a new Cold War with Russia and expressed fears that the conflict could escalate into a nuclear Third World War.
Gorbachev made his comments as fighting escalated in Ukraine between forces directed by the US- and European Union-backed government in Kiev and pro-Russian separatists in the eastern Donbass region.
“Plainly speaking, the US has already dragged us into a new Cold War, trying to openly implement its idea of triumphalism,” the former Soviet leader told Interfax. “What’s next? Unfortunately, I cannot be sure that the Cold War will not bring about a ‘hot’ one. I’m afraid [the United States] might take the risk.”
He criticized the US and the EU for continuing to press for more economic sanctions against Russia. “All we hear from the US and the EU now is sanctions against Russia,” he continued. “Are they completely out of their minds? The US has been totally ‘lost in the jungle’ and is dragging us there as well.”
Earlier this month, Gorbachev gave an interview to the German news magazine Der Spiegel about the ongoing conflict between the US, EU and Russia over Ukraine. While he stated that it was “something that shouldn’t even be considered,” Gorbachev warned that a major war in Europe would “inevitably lead to a nuclear war.” He added, “If one side loses its nerves in this inflamed atmosphere, then we won’t survive the coming years.”
In the same interview, Gorbachev lamented these developments as the outcome of Washington’s construction of a “mega empire” in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Gorbachev, as the initiator in the late 1980s of the process of capitalist restoration, in the form of the policies of “perestroika” and “glasnost,” bears a huge degree of responsibility for the current crisis in Ukraine and the expansion of NATO. At the time, he argued that the relentless drive of imperialism toward war had been replaced by the pursuit of universal “human values.”
The decision of the ruling Stalinist bureaucracy to preserve its own interests by liquidating the Soviet Union and restoring capitalism allowed NATO to expand its reach to Russia’s Western border.
Gorbachev was not alone in warning of the dangers involved in the Ukraine conflict. Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who has been involved in countless crimes of US imperialism, spoke Thursday before the US Senate Armed Services Committee, declaring himself “uneasy about beginning a process of military engagement [in Ukraine] without knowing where it will lead us and what we’ll do to sustain it.”
The 91-year-old Kissinger added: “I believe we should avoid taking incremental steps before we know how far we are willing to go. This is a territory 300 miles from Moscow, and therefore has special security implications.”
The ongoing imperialist operations in Ukraine, from last year’s US- and EU-backed fascist-spearheaded coup to the ongoing fighting in the Donbass, as well as the current sanctions regime against Russia, are aimed at asserting US hegemony over all of the former Soviet Union and ultimately breaking the Russian Federation itself into a series of semi-colonies, opening the way for the plunder of its vast natural resources.
While there had been signs in recent weeks of a desire on the part of some EU states, in particular France and Italy, to begin rebuilding diplomatic relations with Russia, a deadly rocket attack on the Ukrainian city of Mariupol last weekend brought the EU members back into line behind the sanctions regime.
An emergency meeting of EU foreign ministers on Thursday decided to extend travel bans and bank account freezes against 132 Russian citizens and 28 organizations until September of this year. The foreign ministers will meet again on February 12 to discuss escalating the current tranche of economic sanctions against Russia.
Speaking after the meeting, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier stated menacingly, “If there is an offensive towards Mariupol or other regions, one will need to respond with clear and harsher measures.”
In the wake of the EU foreign ministers meeting, Donetsk was subjected to a new round of artillery shelling. At least five civilians were reported killed when mortars struck a crowd of several hundred people waiting outside a community center for the distribution of relief aid.
Another two civilians were reported killed after a mortar shell landed near a bus stop. Artillery shelling throughout the day on Friday in western Donetsk killed at least five more civilians.
The pro-Russian separatists continued their assault on a key railway hub between Donetsk and Luhansk, taking control of the village of Vuhlehirsk, just west of a city, Debaltseve, where at least 8,000 Ukrainian forces are currently entrenched. While the city’s civilian population of 25,000 has for the most part been evacuated, at least seven civilians were reported killed by shelling on Friday.
Semen Semenchenko, founder of the Ukrainian nationalist Donbas Battalion militia, which has been integrated into the National Guard of Ukraine, reported that Kiev-backed forces in Debaltseve had been fired upon by artillery shells, mortars and grad rockets.
Ceasefire talks hosted by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe that were set to resume on Friday failed to even get off the ground. Vladislav Deinego and Denis Pushilin, representatives of the pro-Russian separatists, announced they were leaving Minsk for Moscow after Kiev’s representative, former president Leonid Kuchma, failed to show.
The Ukrainian government and its backers in the US and the EU have shown little desire to reach a compromise with the rebels. Speaking in the UN Security Council last week, US Ambassador Samantha Power dismissed the latest Russian peace plan as an “occupation plan.”
On Friday, in a desperate attempt to stimulate its economy and avoid a devastating recession, the Russian central bank made a surprise announcement that it was cutting its key interest rate by two percentage points, to 15 percent. This decision came little more than a month after it raised the same interest rate by 6.5 percentage points, to 17 percent, in an attempt to stem the decline of the ruble, which has lost more than 17 percent of its value since the beginning of the year.
The sudden move by the Bank of Russia is an indication that the sanctions regime, combined with the collapse of oil prices, is contributing to a mounting political and economic crisis within Russia. According to preliminary reports from Russia’s Statistics Services, the country’s economy grew by a mere 0.6 percent in 2014. Citigroup projects that, if the average price of Brent crude oil remains deflated, Russia’s economy will contract by 3 percent in 2015.
Mikhail Gorbachev, the last president of the Soviet Union, accused the United States Thursday of initiating a new Cold War with Russia and expressed fears that the conflict could escalate into a nuclear Third World War.
Gorbachev made his comments as fighting escalated in Ukraine between forces directed by the US- and European Union-backed government in Kiev and pro-Russian separatists in the eastern Donbass region.
“Plainly speaking, the US has already dragged us into a new Cold War, trying to openly implement its idea of triumphalism,” the former Soviet leader told Interfax. “What’s next? Unfortunately, I cannot be sure that the Cold War will not bring about a ‘hot’ one. I’m afraid [the United States] might take the risk.”
He criticized the US and the EU for continuing to press for more economic sanctions against Russia. “All we hear from the US and the EU now is sanctions against Russia,” he continued. “Are they completely out of their minds? The US has been totally ‘lost in the jungle’ and is dragging us there as well.”
Earlier this month, Gorbachev gave an interview to the German news magazine Der Spiegel about the ongoing conflict between the US, EU and Russia over Ukraine. While he stated that it was “something that shouldn’t even be considered,” Gorbachev warned that a major war in Europe would “inevitably lead to a nuclear war.” He added, “If one side loses its nerves in this inflamed atmosphere, then we won’t survive the coming years.”
In the same interview, Gorbachev lamented these developments as the outcome of Washington’s construction of a “mega empire” in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Gorbachev, as the initiator in the late 1980s of the process of capitalist restoration, in the form of the policies of “perestroika” and “glasnost,” bears a huge degree of responsibility for the current crisis in Ukraine and the expansion of NATO. At the time, he argued that the relentless drive of imperialism toward war had been replaced by the pursuit of universal “human values.”
The decision of the ruling Stalinist bureaucracy to preserve its own interests by liquidating the Soviet Union and restoring capitalism allowed NATO to expand its reach to Russia’s Western border.
Gorbachev was not alone in warning of the dangers involved in the Ukraine conflict. Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who has been involved in countless crimes of US imperialism, spoke Thursday before the US Senate Armed Services Committee, declaring himself “uneasy about beginning a process of military engagement [in Ukraine] without knowing where it will lead us and what we’ll do to sustain it.”
The 91-year-old Kissinger added: “I believe we should avoid taking incremental steps before we know how far we are willing to go. This is a territory 300 miles from Moscow, and therefore has special security implications.”
The ongoing imperialist operations in Ukraine, from last year’s US- and EU-backed fascist-spearheaded coup to the ongoing fighting in the Donbass, as well as the current sanctions regime against Russia, are aimed at asserting US hegemony over all of the former Soviet Union and ultimately breaking the Russian Federation itself into a series of semi-colonies, opening the way for the plunder of its vast natural resources.
While there had been signs in recent weeks of a desire on the part of some EU states, in particular France and Italy, to begin rebuilding diplomatic relations with Russia, a deadly rocket attack on the Ukrainian city of Mariupol last weekend brought the EU members back into line behind the sanctions regime.
An emergency meeting of EU foreign ministers on Thursday decided to extend travel bans and bank account freezes against 132 Russian citizens and 28 organizations until September of this year. The foreign ministers will meet again on February 12 to discuss escalating the current tranche of economic sanctions against Russia.
Speaking after the meeting, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier stated menacingly, “If there is an offensive towards Mariupol or other regions, one will need to respond with clear and harsher measures.”
In the wake of the EU foreign ministers meeting, Donetsk was subjected to a new round of artillery shelling. At least five civilians were reported killed when mortars struck a crowd of several hundred people waiting outside a community center for the distribution of relief aid.
Another two civilians were reported killed after a mortar shell landed near a bus stop. Artillery shelling throughout the day on Friday in western Donetsk killed at least five more civilians.
The pro-Russian separatists continued their assault on a key railway hub between Donetsk and Luhansk, taking control of the village of Vuhlehirsk, just west of a city, Debaltseve, where at least 8,000 Ukrainian forces are currently entrenched. While the city’s civilian population of 25,000 has for the most part been evacuated, at least seven civilians were reported killed by shelling on Friday.
Semen Semenchenko, founder of the Ukrainian nationalist Donbas Battalion militia, which has been integrated into the National Guard of Ukraine, reported that Kiev-backed forces in Debaltseve had been fired upon by artillery shells, mortars and grad rockets.
Ceasefire talks hosted by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe that were set to resume on Friday failed to even get off the ground. Vladislav Deinego and Denis Pushilin, representatives of the pro-Russian separatists, announced they were leaving Minsk for Moscow after Kiev’s representative, former president Leonid Kuchma, failed to show.
The Ukrainian government and its backers in the US and the EU have shown little desire to reach a compromise with the rebels. Speaking in the UN Security Council last week, US Ambassador Samantha Power dismissed the latest Russian peace plan as an “occupation plan.”
On Friday, in a desperate attempt to stimulate its economy and avoid a devastating recession, the Russian central bank made a surprise announcement that it was cutting its key interest rate by two percentage points, to 15 percent. This decision came little more than a month after it raised the same interest rate by 6.5 percentage points, to 17 percent, in an attempt to stem the decline of the ruble, which has lost more than 17 percent of its value since the beginning of the year.
The sudden move by the Bank of Russia is an indication that the sanctions regime, combined with the collapse of oil prices, is contributing to a mounting political and economic crisis within Russia. According to preliminary reports from Russia’s Statistics Services, the country’s economy grew by a mere 0.6 percent in 2014. Citigroup projects that, if the average price of Brent crude oil remains deflated, Russia’s economy will contract by 3 percent in 2015.
29 Jan 2015
Xenophobic attacks on foreign shop-owners spread in Gauteng, South Africa
Thabo Seseane
On Sunday, two victims were found shot to death in Langlaagte, Johannesburg, following a spate of attacks on foreign shop-owners in Gauteng beginning January 19.
According to the South African Police Services (SAPS), a group of people looted a foreign-owned spaza (tuck-shop, or candy store) in Langlaagte and set another building alight. Shots were then fired, resulting in the death of the two South Africans. The SAPS, who reportedly found one person on the road and another at Zamimpilo, a squatter camp near Langlaagte, are investigating a case of arson and murder.
The looting and violence are in response to the shooting death of 14-year-old Siphiwe Mahori in Snake Park, Soweto. The teen is alleged to have been part of a group who set upon a shop kept by Somali national Senosi Yusuf. Mahori died when Yusuf allegedly opened fire on the group.
Dan Mokwena, a 74-year-old Malawian shopkeeper, was attacked and killed as he slept in his shop on January 21. The Star reports that on the same day, a 19-year-old was shot in Naledi, Soweto, and declared dead on arrival at hospital. The youth, Nhlanhla Monareng, was a bystander when police fired into a crowd gathered at a Pakistani-owned shop.
A baby was trampled to death when a crowd fled from a shop they had just looted in Kagiso. The group rammed into a young woman who was carrying the baby. “In that commotion, the baby fell and was trampled by the fleeing mob,” said SAPS’s Lt.-Gen. Solomon Makgale.
Another bystander, 61-year-old Hendrick Manye, died when a foreign spaza-owner fired at a crowd stoning the shopkeeper’s premises in Swaneville, west of Johannesburg, on January 22. According to SABC News, African National Congress (ANC) veteran Winnie Madikizela-Mandela said on a visit to Manye’s relatives that it did not make sense for South Africans to attack shops owned by foreign nationals, whom they accused of taking away jobs.
Deputy Minister in the Presidency Buti Manamela said the looting cannot be justified. Manamela, national secretary of the Young Communist League, the youth wing of the Stalinist South African Communist Party (SACP), said young people claimed they looted foreign-owned shops to protect the economy of townships like Soweto. “We should stand up and say, not in our name,” he blustered. “Crime is crime. You cannot justify it.”
Such statements are worthless. Manamela and Madikizela-Mandela have still stuck to the script of the ruling tripartite alliance (the ANC, SACP and the Congress of South African Trade Unions) by insisting at every turn that the violence is merely criminal and not xenophobic. This is, in turn, an attempt to cover up the scandalous response of the ruling party to a previous outbreak of xenophobia.
Beginning in settlements like Diepsloot, north of Johannesburg, residents launched an orgy of looting, raping and killing directed against foreign traders in 2008. Many of them—in some cases refugees from war and repression seeking sanctuary in South Africa—lost their homes and livelihoods to the mobs. The government blamed criminal elements for the violence.
But in addition to declassed and desperate elements, there is a petty bourgeois element of South African spaza owners who benefit from anti-immigrant violence. South African traders have had difficulty in competing against foreign nationals, who live frugally, pool their resources, buy in bulk, and are thus able to offer township residents lower prices for staples and other necessaries. Foreign shopkeepers thereby save customers the expense of catching a taxi to a mall or centrally located discounter. They are also known to offer goods on credit to regular customers.
All this is anathema to local black shopkeepers. It also goes against the ANC government’s policy of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), which explicitly excludes foreign nationals and is limited only to South African blacks, preferably members of the ruling party.
BEE is an anti-poor, bourgeois nationalist policy. With its extensions, affirmative action and preferential procurement, it relies on the wealthy middle classes and the most backward working-class elements to turn South African workers against their foreign compatriots. In this way, the ruling class seeks to build support for an economic policy that produces nothing but a thin layer of wealthy blacks whose existence depends on the redoubled exploitation of black workers.
With the breakdown of the global capitalist system since 2008, the government is under pressure to stem the tide of immigration into South Africa, which has the third highest number of asylum seekers, after the United States and Germany. According to Clementine Salami, Southern Africa Regional Representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, asylum seekers in South Africa come mostly from Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Ethiopia.
The Supreme Court of Appeal ruled last September that there is no law preventing refugees and asylum seekers from getting licences to operate South African spazas. Judge Mohammed Navsa, in delivering the verdict, chided the SAPS and the government, warning them to “guard against unwittingly fuelling xenophobia.”
There is nothing unwitting about the anti-immigrant intentions of the ANC government and those organs of the state it controls. The Supreme Court of Appeal judgment concerned Operation Hard Stick, an SAPS initiative which saw 600 spazas closed in Limpopo province, including licenced ones.
“The appellants asserted that the police often extort bribes and do not act against South African owned businesses, who are similarly not licence-compliant,” according to the Supreme Court ruling.
In the current xenophobic outbreak, various media outlets published photos of SAPS members loitering outside spazas in the process of being looted. The SAPS says it is investigating those officers.
Anti-immigrant looting and violence have since spread to Diepsloot and Alexandra, north of Johannesburg. Television news broadcaster eNCA reports that Gauteng police said a spaza in Alexandra was torched in the early hours of January 26. By then, 178 suspects (including children later released) had been arrested, 83 had appeared in the Protea Magistrates’ Court, and 95 were to appear in court on the same day.
On Sunday, two victims were found shot to death in Langlaagte, Johannesburg, following a spate of attacks on foreign shop-owners in Gauteng beginning January 19.
According to the South African Police Services (SAPS), a group of people looted a foreign-owned spaza (tuck-shop, or candy store) in Langlaagte and set another building alight. Shots were then fired, resulting in the death of the two South Africans. The SAPS, who reportedly found one person on the road and another at Zamimpilo, a squatter camp near Langlaagte, are investigating a case of arson and murder.
The looting and violence are in response to the shooting death of 14-year-old Siphiwe Mahori in Snake Park, Soweto. The teen is alleged to have been part of a group who set upon a shop kept by Somali national Senosi Yusuf. Mahori died when Yusuf allegedly opened fire on the group.
Dan Mokwena, a 74-year-old Malawian shopkeeper, was attacked and killed as he slept in his shop on January 21. The Star reports that on the same day, a 19-year-old was shot in Naledi, Soweto, and declared dead on arrival at hospital. The youth, Nhlanhla Monareng, was a bystander when police fired into a crowd gathered at a Pakistani-owned shop.
A baby was trampled to death when a crowd fled from a shop they had just looted in Kagiso. The group rammed into a young woman who was carrying the baby. “In that commotion, the baby fell and was trampled by the fleeing mob,” said SAPS’s Lt.-Gen. Solomon Makgale.
Another bystander, 61-year-old Hendrick Manye, died when a foreign spaza-owner fired at a crowd stoning the shopkeeper’s premises in Swaneville, west of Johannesburg, on January 22. According to SABC News, African National Congress (ANC) veteran Winnie Madikizela-Mandela said on a visit to Manye’s relatives that it did not make sense for South Africans to attack shops owned by foreign nationals, whom they accused of taking away jobs.
Deputy Minister in the Presidency Buti Manamela said the looting cannot be justified. Manamela, national secretary of the Young Communist League, the youth wing of the Stalinist South African Communist Party (SACP), said young people claimed they looted foreign-owned shops to protect the economy of townships like Soweto. “We should stand up and say, not in our name,” he blustered. “Crime is crime. You cannot justify it.”
Such statements are worthless. Manamela and Madikizela-Mandela have still stuck to the script of the ruling tripartite alliance (the ANC, SACP and the Congress of South African Trade Unions) by insisting at every turn that the violence is merely criminal and not xenophobic. This is, in turn, an attempt to cover up the scandalous response of the ruling party to a previous outbreak of xenophobia.
Beginning in settlements like Diepsloot, north of Johannesburg, residents launched an orgy of looting, raping and killing directed against foreign traders in 2008. Many of them—in some cases refugees from war and repression seeking sanctuary in South Africa—lost their homes and livelihoods to the mobs. The government blamed criminal elements for the violence.
But in addition to declassed and desperate elements, there is a petty bourgeois element of South African spaza owners who benefit from anti-immigrant violence. South African traders have had difficulty in competing against foreign nationals, who live frugally, pool their resources, buy in bulk, and are thus able to offer township residents lower prices for staples and other necessaries. Foreign shopkeepers thereby save customers the expense of catching a taxi to a mall or centrally located discounter. They are also known to offer goods on credit to regular customers.
All this is anathema to local black shopkeepers. It also goes against the ANC government’s policy of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), which explicitly excludes foreign nationals and is limited only to South African blacks, preferably members of the ruling party.
BEE is an anti-poor, bourgeois nationalist policy. With its extensions, affirmative action and preferential procurement, it relies on the wealthy middle classes and the most backward working-class elements to turn South African workers against their foreign compatriots. In this way, the ruling class seeks to build support for an economic policy that produces nothing but a thin layer of wealthy blacks whose existence depends on the redoubled exploitation of black workers.
With the breakdown of the global capitalist system since 2008, the government is under pressure to stem the tide of immigration into South Africa, which has the third highest number of asylum seekers, after the United States and Germany. According to Clementine Salami, Southern Africa Regional Representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, asylum seekers in South Africa come mostly from Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Ethiopia.
The Supreme Court of Appeal ruled last September that there is no law preventing refugees and asylum seekers from getting licences to operate South African spazas. Judge Mohammed Navsa, in delivering the verdict, chided the SAPS and the government, warning them to “guard against unwittingly fuelling xenophobia.”
There is nothing unwitting about the anti-immigrant intentions of the ANC government and those organs of the state it controls. The Supreme Court of Appeal judgment concerned Operation Hard Stick, an SAPS initiative which saw 600 spazas closed in Limpopo province, including licenced ones.
“The appellants asserted that the police often extort bribes and do not act against South African owned businesses, who are similarly not licence-compliant,” according to the Supreme Court ruling.
In the current xenophobic outbreak, various media outlets published photos of SAPS members loitering outside spazas in the process of being looted. The SAPS says it is investigating those officers.
Anti-immigrant looting and violence have since spread to Diepsloot and Alexandra, north of Johannesburg. Television news broadcaster eNCA reports that Gauteng police said a spaza in Alexandra was torched in the early hours of January 26. By then, 178 suspects (including children later released) had been arrested, 83 had appeared in the Protea Magistrates’ Court, and 95 were to appear in court on the same day.
Governments in Eastern Europe intensify attacks on democratic rights and immigrants
Markus Salzmann
Like the ruling elites in the West, the governments of Eastern European states are deliberately using the attack on Charlie Hebdo to restrict democratic rights and persecute refugees. Muslims in particular have been declared the enemy, strengthening extreme right-wing forces.
The Bulgarian government is planning new measures against refugees. The barriers on the existing 33-kilometre border with Turkey, which was constructed some time ago to prevent immigration from the neighbouring country, are being expanded by 82 kilometres at a cost of €46 million for this year alone.
To secure the Turkish-Bulgarian border, the right-wing government has increased its border police to more than 1,400. The regime in EU’s poorest country is also using the costs involved in its deployment at the border as a pretext for involving the army, thereby creating a precedent for military intervention in domestic affairs. Interior Minister Veselin Vutchkov demanded this explicitly. Defence minister Nikolai Nenchev made vehicles and weaponry available to the police units.
The government intends to shut down the border with Turkey for refugees under all conditions, since in neighbouring Turkey there are currently 2 million refugees, mostly from Syria. According to official statistics, around 38,500 refugees attempted last year to illegally cross the Turkish-Bulgarian border. Figures from Bulgaria’s state migration agency (DAB) suggest that 10,000 of these have applied for asylum.
Most of these people come from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, countries where the Western powers are responsible for wars, civil wars and catastrophic living conditions. Compared to 2013, the number of refugees has risen by 200 percent. Many refugees have been forced to spend the freezing winter in the border region in tents under horrendous hygienic conditions.
The Bulgarian government has justified its draconian new measures against refugees by claiming they are necessary in the “struggle against terror”. Former interior minister Svetan Svetanov, who is a member of the governing GERB party and acts as a domestic adviser to Prime Minister Boiko Borisov, bluntly declared that an increase in the flow of refugees inevitably increases the risk of a terrorist attack.
The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and some NGOs have criticised the border barrier, because it forces refugees to pursue more dangerous routes, such as crossing the Mediterranean Sea, to reach the EU.
Hungary’s right-wing Fidesz government is already well known for its inhumane treatment of refugees and minorities. Hungary has no need for any economic migrants, Fidesz parliamentary fraction head Antal Rogan told the state radio broadcaster. It had been “proven that the presence of Islamic communities in Christian countries in Western Europe disturbs domestic order, for example in the United Kingdom, France and Germany.”
Interior Minister Laszlo Trocsanyi explained the necessity of a European-wide terrorist database that should also include Hungary. At the same time, he announced further measures at the national level. According to previous reports, an action plan already announced by Prime Minister Viktor Orban will be adopted, and includes a range of measures to grant the police, army and intelligence agencies comprehensive powers.
Terrorism as a daily reality, according to the Hungarian regime, was forcing Hungary and Europe to reconsider its anti-terrorist strategy and immigration, and more. “I think the United States could serve as an example here, including its anti-terror laws,” said Rogan. Rogan’s suggestion was met with enthusiasm from the right-wing party Jobbik, the third-largest party in parliament. The neo-fascists have been conducting a campaign of hate propaganda against foreigners for years.
In the Czech Republic, the utterly discredited and unscrupulous political elite is using the attacks in Paris to conduct a disgusting campaign against Muslims. State President Milos Zeman declared publicly that immigrants have a “genetic dependency” that they could not deny. Muslims had only themselves to blame for having to live in ghettos in Europe’s major cities, Zeman claimed.
Zeman is already well known for his anti-Islamic comments. In 2011, he told a conference that Islam was “the anti-civilisation that stretches from North Africa to Indonesia, the enemy of NATO,” and that these countries, populated by around 2 billion people, were “financed partly by drugs, partly by oil.” He told a news magazine in the same year that the idea that there was a moderate Islam was just as wrong as the claim that there were moderate Nazis.
Zeman and other leading politicians have incited the dregs of society with their tirades. A crowd numbering about 600 participated in an anti-Islam demonstration two weeks ago. In front of Prague Castle, the main residence of the Czech president in the capital, they chanted racist slogans and held up placards stating, “Wake up, Europe” and “Stop Islam.” The group “No Islam in the Czech Republic” intends to collaborate with the German Pegida movement in Dresden, 150 kilometres away.
The attacks on immigrants, which go hand in hand with restrictions on democratic rights and the adoption of police state measures, are directed against the entire population. The unstable governments in Eastern Europe fear that repeated protests could turn into a mass movement in the face of worsening economic conditions.
The recently announced removal of the link between the Swiss franc and the euro threw thousands of families into poverty in Southern and Eastern Europe. The free floating of the franc will result in a sharp rise in mortgage costs. The exchange rate of the franc rose massively overnight, thereby increasing repayment rates by 20 percent. In Hungary, Poland, France, Greece, Croatia and Serbia, the majority of mortgages are denominated in foreign currencies, particularly Swiss francs.
In Poland, central bank governor Marek Belka has already announced extraordinary measures. According to the Polish financial supervisory authority, outstanding loans in Poland amounted to €31 billion.
In Croatia, the government announced it would peg the exchange rate of its currency, the Kuna, with the franc for a year. Prime Minister Zoran Milanovic announced his plan earlier this week to fix the Swiss franc exchange rate at 6.39 kuna. The official exchange rate is more than 7.60. Since the free floating of the franc, the kuna has been devalued by 18 percent. While there are strong doubts among analysts that this measure will be effective, it is definitely politically motivated. After the governing Social Democrats suffered a painful loss in the presidential elections, “Milanovic is considering the forcible transformation of the franc loans into kuna so as to win back the allegiance of supporters,” opined the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
Hungary was thrown into a similar crisis in 2008-2009. There, around 90 percent of loans were denominated in francs. “The credit rating for Hungary exploded, many of those affected could no longer service their debts, losing their houses and apartments,” Die Welt reported.
Like the ruling elites in the West, the governments of Eastern European states are deliberately using the attack on Charlie Hebdo to restrict democratic rights and persecute refugees. Muslims in particular have been declared the enemy, strengthening extreme right-wing forces.
The Bulgarian government is planning new measures against refugees. The barriers on the existing 33-kilometre border with Turkey, which was constructed some time ago to prevent immigration from the neighbouring country, are being expanded by 82 kilometres at a cost of €46 million for this year alone.
To secure the Turkish-Bulgarian border, the right-wing government has increased its border police to more than 1,400. The regime in EU’s poorest country is also using the costs involved in its deployment at the border as a pretext for involving the army, thereby creating a precedent for military intervention in domestic affairs. Interior Minister Veselin Vutchkov demanded this explicitly. Defence minister Nikolai Nenchev made vehicles and weaponry available to the police units.
The government intends to shut down the border with Turkey for refugees under all conditions, since in neighbouring Turkey there are currently 2 million refugees, mostly from Syria. According to official statistics, around 38,500 refugees attempted last year to illegally cross the Turkish-Bulgarian border. Figures from Bulgaria’s state migration agency (DAB) suggest that 10,000 of these have applied for asylum.
Most of these people come from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, countries where the Western powers are responsible for wars, civil wars and catastrophic living conditions. Compared to 2013, the number of refugees has risen by 200 percent. Many refugees have been forced to spend the freezing winter in the border region in tents under horrendous hygienic conditions.
The Bulgarian government has justified its draconian new measures against refugees by claiming they are necessary in the “struggle against terror”. Former interior minister Svetan Svetanov, who is a member of the governing GERB party and acts as a domestic adviser to Prime Minister Boiko Borisov, bluntly declared that an increase in the flow of refugees inevitably increases the risk of a terrorist attack.
The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and some NGOs have criticised the border barrier, because it forces refugees to pursue more dangerous routes, such as crossing the Mediterranean Sea, to reach the EU.
Hungary’s right-wing Fidesz government is already well known for its inhumane treatment of refugees and minorities. Hungary has no need for any economic migrants, Fidesz parliamentary fraction head Antal Rogan told the state radio broadcaster. It had been “proven that the presence of Islamic communities in Christian countries in Western Europe disturbs domestic order, for example in the United Kingdom, France and Germany.”
Interior Minister Laszlo Trocsanyi explained the necessity of a European-wide terrorist database that should also include Hungary. At the same time, he announced further measures at the national level. According to previous reports, an action plan already announced by Prime Minister Viktor Orban will be adopted, and includes a range of measures to grant the police, army and intelligence agencies comprehensive powers.
Terrorism as a daily reality, according to the Hungarian regime, was forcing Hungary and Europe to reconsider its anti-terrorist strategy and immigration, and more. “I think the United States could serve as an example here, including its anti-terror laws,” said Rogan. Rogan’s suggestion was met with enthusiasm from the right-wing party Jobbik, the third-largest party in parliament. The neo-fascists have been conducting a campaign of hate propaganda against foreigners for years.
In the Czech Republic, the utterly discredited and unscrupulous political elite is using the attacks in Paris to conduct a disgusting campaign against Muslims. State President Milos Zeman declared publicly that immigrants have a “genetic dependency” that they could not deny. Muslims had only themselves to blame for having to live in ghettos in Europe’s major cities, Zeman claimed.
Zeman is already well known for his anti-Islamic comments. In 2011, he told a conference that Islam was “the anti-civilisation that stretches from North Africa to Indonesia, the enemy of NATO,” and that these countries, populated by around 2 billion people, were “financed partly by drugs, partly by oil.” He told a news magazine in the same year that the idea that there was a moderate Islam was just as wrong as the claim that there were moderate Nazis.
Zeman and other leading politicians have incited the dregs of society with their tirades. A crowd numbering about 600 participated in an anti-Islam demonstration two weeks ago. In front of Prague Castle, the main residence of the Czech president in the capital, they chanted racist slogans and held up placards stating, “Wake up, Europe” and “Stop Islam.” The group “No Islam in the Czech Republic” intends to collaborate with the German Pegida movement in Dresden, 150 kilometres away.
The attacks on immigrants, which go hand in hand with restrictions on democratic rights and the adoption of police state measures, are directed against the entire population. The unstable governments in Eastern Europe fear that repeated protests could turn into a mass movement in the face of worsening economic conditions.
The recently announced removal of the link between the Swiss franc and the euro threw thousands of families into poverty in Southern and Eastern Europe. The free floating of the franc will result in a sharp rise in mortgage costs. The exchange rate of the franc rose massively overnight, thereby increasing repayment rates by 20 percent. In Hungary, Poland, France, Greece, Croatia and Serbia, the majority of mortgages are denominated in foreign currencies, particularly Swiss francs.
In Poland, central bank governor Marek Belka has already announced extraordinary measures. According to the Polish financial supervisory authority, outstanding loans in Poland amounted to €31 billion.
In Croatia, the government announced it would peg the exchange rate of its currency, the Kuna, with the franc for a year. Prime Minister Zoran Milanovic announced his plan earlier this week to fix the Swiss franc exchange rate at 6.39 kuna. The official exchange rate is more than 7.60. Since the free floating of the franc, the kuna has been devalued by 18 percent. While there are strong doubts among analysts that this measure will be effective, it is definitely politically motivated. After the governing Social Democrats suffered a painful loss in the presidential elections, “Milanovic is considering the forcible transformation of the franc loans into kuna so as to win back the allegiance of supporters,” opined the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
Hungary was thrown into a similar crisis in 2008-2009. There, around 90 percent of loans were denominated in francs. “The credit rating for Hungary exploded, many of those affected could no longer service their debts, losing their houses and apartments,” Die Welt reported.
German Social Democratic leader enters into discussions with Pegida
Ulrich Rippert
On Tuesday Gregor Gysi, head of the Left Party fraction in parliament, rushed to the assistance of SPD leader Sigmar Gabriel to defend his discussions with Pegida members. The SPD chief and vice chancellor participated in a discussion event with Pegida demonstrators in Dresden on Friday evening, organized by the Center for Political Education in the state of Saxony.
Gabriel’s discussion initiative provides official recognition to the movement of the self-styled “Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West” (Pegida) precisely at the moment when the openly fascistic character of this grouping has become clear.
Two days earlier, the founder of the right-wing demonstrations, Lutz Bachmann, resigned after it emerged that he had made Internet postings calling foreigners “cattle,” “garbage,” and “filth.” The Pegida founder also posted a picture of himself with a Hitler moustache and hairstyle on Facebook. The public prosecutor’s office has started investigative proceedings against him.
Nevertheless, Gabriel met with Pegida demonstrators. After the meeting, Gabriel claimed he had participated in the exchange of ideas with Pegida neither in his official government capacity as vice chancellor nor in his role as head of the SPD. He absurdly claimed he was in Dresden only by chance and had taken part in the meeting as a private individual, out of personal interest. In fact, Gabriel sought to use his position as a high ranking representative of the government and of the SPD in order to provide the right-wing movement with official legitimacy.
Gabriel and Gysi justify their discussions with Pegida by claiming that the right-wing marches reflect legitimate fears and concerns of broad sections of the population. Gysi told Tagesspiegel that the “large support for Pegida demonstrations” is a result of the “excessive demands imposed on people,” particularly in the eastern states of Germany. Former East German citizens were suddenly made “not only into German citizens, but at the same time into European and world citizens.” As a result, they experienced “how everything in their surroundings became alien when other cultures and other people began to have an influence.”
These same arguments have been used for months in order to legitimize and justify the racist and anti-Islamic marches.
The truth is that the right-wing demonstrations are the result of a deliberate political and media campaign, during which it has also become well known that Pegida initiator Lutz Bachmann has a criminal record, is still on parole, and openly voices racist and fascistic standpoints.
Last fall, when he called for Monday protests “against the Islamization of the West,” only a few dozen radical right-wingers attended. However, these demonstrations received thoroughly disproportionate attention in the media and politicians of all parties proclaimed their understanding of the “justified concerns” of the demonstrators.
The number of participants in the demonstrations was systematically exaggerated by the police and the media. As the counter-demonstrations increased in size, the media reacted by focusing even more attention on them, publishing reports, interviews with Pegida demonstrators and discussions with experts. On Sunday evening a week ago, Kathrin Oertel, chief organizer of the protests and a childhood friend of Lutz Bachmann, was invited to Günther Jauch’s prominent TV talk show.
This gave her the opportunity to present her fascistic views to a mass, primetime audience. She used the opportunity to attack multiculturalism, Koran schools and supposed hate preachers. At the same time, she demanded more restrictions on the right to asylum. She was supported by the vice president of the right-wing conservative Alternative for Germany (AfD), Alexander Gauland, who called Pegida the natural ally of his party.
It is no accident that both SPD head Gabriel and Left Party parliamentary fraction chief Gysi call for dialogue with Pegida. This becomes clear in the context of the recent developments in France and Greece.
The former president of the Socialist Party and current French president, François Hollande, has systematically exploited the terror attack on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in a campaign against Muslims. At the same time, he has curried favor with the fascistic Front National (FN) by inviting its leader Marine Le Pen to the Elysée Palace.
And on Monday, Alexis Tsipras used Syriza’s election success in Greece to enter into a coalition with the openly racist right-wing conservative party, the Independent Greeks (Anel).
This alliance of social democrats and “lefts” with right-wingers, racists and fascists is symptomatic of the rapid intensification of the international economic and social crisis. Amid unprecedented social inequality and the division of society into rich and poor, the entire bourgeois political spectrum—parties from the “left” to the right—is closing ranks on the basis of nationalism. They all seek to divert growing class tensions in a right-wing, nationalist and racist direction.
On Tuesday Gregor Gysi, head of the Left Party fraction in parliament, rushed to the assistance of SPD leader Sigmar Gabriel to defend his discussions with Pegida members. The SPD chief and vice chancellor participated in a discussion event with Pegida demonstrators in Dresden on Friday evening, organized by the Center for Political Education in the state of Saxony.
Gabriel’s discussion initiative provides official recognition to the movement of the self-styled “Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West” (Pegida) precisely at the moment when the openly fascistic character of this grouping has become clear.
Two days earlier, the founder of the right-wing demonstrations, Lutz Bachmann, resigned after it emerged that he had made Internet postings calling foreigners “cattle,” “garbage,” and “filth.” The Pegida founder also posted a picture of himself with a Hitler moustache and hairstyle on Facebook. The public prosecutor’s office has started investigative proceedings against him.
Nevertheless, Gabriel met with Pegida demonstrators. After the meeting, Gabriel claimed he had participated in the exchange of ideas with Pegida neither in his official government capacity as vice chancellor nor in his role as head of the SPD. He absurdly claimed he was in Dresden only by chance and had taken part in the meeting as a private individual, out of personal interest. In fact, Gabriel sought to use his position as a high ranking representative of the government and of the SPD in order to provide the right-wing movement with official legitimacy.
Gabriel and Gysi justify their discussions with Pegida by claiming that the right-wing marches reflect legitimate fears and concerns of broad sections of the population. Gysi told Tagesspiegel that the “large support for Pegida demonstrations” is a result of the “excessive demands imposed on people,” particularly in the eastern states of Germany. Former East German citizens were suddenly made “not only into German citizens, but at the same time into European and world citizens.” As a result, they experienced “how everything in their surroundings became alien when other cultures and other people began to have an influence.”
These same arguments have been used for months in order to legitimize and justify the racist and anti-Islamic marches.
The truth is that the right-wing demonstrations are the result of a deliberate political and media campaign, during which it has also become well known that Pegida initiator Lutz Bachmann has a criminal record, is still on parole, and openly voices racist and fascistic standpoints.
Last fall, when he called for Monday protests “against the Islamization of the West,” only a few dozen radical right-wingers attended. However, these demonstrations received thoroughly disproportionate attention in the media and politicians of all parties proclaimed their understanding of the “justified concerns” of the demonstrators.
The number of participants in the demonstrations was systematically exaggerated by the police and the media. As the counter-demonstrations increased in size, the media reacted by focusing even more attention on them, publishing reports, interviews with Pegida demonstrators and discussions with experts. On Sunday evening a week ago, Kathrin Oertel, chief organizer of the protests and a childhood friend of Lutz Bachmann, was invited to Günther Jauch’s prominent TV talk show.
This gave her the opportunity to present her fascistic views to a mass, primetime audience. She used the opportunity to attack multiculturalism, Koran schools and supposed hate preachers. At the same time, she demanded more restrictions on the right to asylum. She was supported by the vice president of the right-wing conservative Alternative for Germany (AfD), Alexander Gauland, who called Pegida the natural ally of his party.
It is no accident that both SPD head Gabriel and Left Party parliamentary fraction chief Gysi call for dialogue with Pegida. This becomes clear in the context of the recent developments in France and Greece.
The former president of the Socialist Party and current French president, François Hollande, has systematically exploited the terror attack on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in a campaign against Muslims. At the same time, he has curried favor with the fascistic Front National (FN) by inviting its leader Marine Le Pen to the Elysée Palace.
And on Monday, Alexis Tsipras used Syriza’s election success in Greece to enter into a coalition with the openly racist right-wing conservative party, the Independent Greeks (Anel).
This alliance of social democrats and “lefts” with right-wingers, racists and fascists is symptomatic of the rapid intensification of the international economic and social crisis. Amid unprecedented social inequality and the division of society into rich and poor, the entire bourgeois political spectrum—parties from the “left” to the right—is closing ranks on the basis of nationalism. They all seek to divert growing class tensions in a right-wing, nationalist and racist direction.
Delinquency rates for auto loans hit highest level since 2008
Douglas Lyons
The rate of missed payments for auto loans has reached the highest level since 2008, showing the effect of the stagnation of workers’ incomes and the increasing prevalence of predatory practices by banks and auto lenders.
The Wall Street Journal reported that more than 2.6 percent of auto loan borrowers who took out loans in the first quarter of 2014, had missed a payment by the end of the year. Default rates were even higher for borrowers with credit scores lower than 620, which hit 8.5 percent.
In 2014, subprime auto loans (those issued to borrowers with bad credit) reached the highest levels since 2007, and were up by 15 percent over 2013. “It’s clear that credit quality is eroding now, and pretty quickly,” Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, told the Wall Street Journal .
Writing on the growth of subprime auto loans, New York Times noted that, “a growing number of lenders are using new technologies that can remotely disable the ignition of a car within minutes of the borrower missing a payment. Such technologies allow lenders to seize collateral and minimize losses without the cost of chasing down delinquent borrowers.”
Some auto lenders target people with risky credit, since they can gouge high interest rates out of them and use compulsory methods to force then into borrowing more.
One example is 48-year-old Patrina Thomas from upstate New York, who was convinced by a dealership to trade in her 2002 Jeep for a car with a sticker price of $17,000, according to the Wall Street Journal. A lender gave her a loan with an interest rate of 20.4 percent, making monthly payments total $385. The car eventually was repossessed.
“The industry is starting to do some stupid things,” Honda’s American vice-president of sales told the Wall Street Journal. “The longer-term loans coupled with greater use of subprime financing can leave buyers paying interest rates as high as 22%, much higher than what is typical for prime buyers,” he said.
Auto financing has been one of the fastest-growing lending sectors, and total auto loan balances reached $943.8 billion by the end of last year, an increase of about $134.8 billion, according to the Federal Reserve.
Amid growing concerns over predatory auto lending, regulators have said they may scrutinize some of these practices. Darrin Benhart, a risk management supervisor for the Office of Comptroller of Currency, an agency that regulates the largest US banks, told the Wall Street Journal, “We’re putting banks on notice that we have concerns. It’s definitely an area that warrants some attention.” It is clear from the experience of the 2008 financial meltdown, however, that the government will do nothing to reign in this type of predatory lending.
Located in Detroit, Michigan, Ally Financial was bailed out by the federal government in 2009 after it suffered billions in losses on subprime mortgages. It is currently the largest auto lender in the United States. A spokeswoman from Ally, Gina Proia, sought to downplay the increase in default rates, telling the Wall Street Journal that the increase can be attributed “to growth in the consumer portfolio as well as our strategy to diversify the business and book a more balanced mix of assets. The increase in losses was expected and in line with our expectations. We continue to have a robust underwriting policy and price for risk appropriately.”
While the subprime auto loan sector is still substantially smaller than the subprime mortgage market that helped trigger the 2008 financial collapse, it is an indicator of the types of practices that major lenders continue to engage in. Nearly seven years since the 2008 crash, the same types of speculative and fraudulent activities that helped cause the financial meltdown are back in full swing.
The rate of missed payments for auto loans has reached the highest level since 2008, showing the effect of the stagnation of workers’ incomes and the increasing prevalence of predatory practices by banks and auto lenders.
The Wall Street Journal reported that more than 2.6 percent of auto loan borrowers who took out loans in the first quarter of 2014, had missed a payment by the end of the year. Default rates were even higher for borrowers with credit scores lower than 620, which hit 8.5 percent.
In 2014, subprime auto loans (those issued to borrowers with bad credit) reached the highest levels since 2007, and were up by 15 percent over 2013. “It’s clear that credit quality is eroding now, and pretty quickly,” Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, told the Wall Street Journal .
Writing on the growth of subprime auto loans, New York Times noted that, “a growing number of lenders are using new technologies that can remotely disable the ignition of a car within minutes of the borrower missing a payment. Such technologies allow lenders to seize collateral and minimize losses without the cost of chasing down delinquent borrowers.”
Some auto lenders target people with risky credit, since they can gouge high interest rates out of them and use compulsory methods to force then into borrowing more.
One example is 48-year-old Patrina Thomas from upstate New York, who was convinced by a dealership to trade in her 2002 Jeep for a car with a sticker price of $17,000, according to the Wall Street Journal. A lender gave her a loan with an interest rate of 20.4 percent, making monthly payments total $385. The car eventually was repossessed.
“The industry is starting to do some stupid things,” Honda’s American vice-president of sales told the Wall Street Journal. “The longer-term loans coupled with greater use of subprime financing can leave buyers paying interest rates as high as 22%, much higher than what is typical for prime buyers,” he said.
Auto financing has been one of the fastest-growing lending sectors, and total auto loan balances reached $943.8 billion by the end of last year, an increase of about $134.8 billion, according to the Federal Reserve.
Amid growing concerns over predatory auto lending, regulators have said they may scrutinize some of these practices. Darrin Benhart, a risk management supervisor for the Office of Comptroller of Currency, an agency that regulates the largest US banks, told the Wall Street Journal, “We’re putting banks on notice that we have concerns. It’s definitely an area that warrants some attention.” It is clear from the experience of the 2008 financial meltdown, however, that the government will do nothing to reign in this type of predatory lending.
Located in Detroit, Michigan, Ally Financial was bailed out by the federal government in 2009 after it suffered billions in losses on subprime mortgages. It is currently the largest auto lender in the United States. A spokeswoman from Ally, Gina Proia, sought to downplay the increase in default rates, telling the Wall Street Journal that the increase can be attributed “to growth in the consumer portfolio as well as our strategy to diversify the business and book a more balanced mix of assets. The increase in losses was expected and in line with our expectations. We continue to have a robust underwriting policy and price for risk appropriately.”
While the subprime auto loan sector is still substantially smaller than the subprime mortgage market that helped trigger the 2008 financial collapse, it is an indicator of the types of practices that major lenders continue to engage in. Nearly seven years since the 2008 crash, the same types of speculative and fraudulent activities that helped cause the financial meltdown are back in full swing.
Mass layoffs at northwest Indiana steel mills
Jeff Lusanne
Under the impact of falling oil prices and the global economic slowdown, layoffs have begun in northwest Indiana—a major center of the US steel industry. Last week, US Steel announced the idling of its tin mill in East Chicago, Indiana, laying off 369 workers. ArcelorMittal, the world’s largest steel producer, also announced the closure of a portion of its massive Indiana Harbor complex, the Long Carbon facility, which will affect 300 jobs.
The layoffs are likely only the beginning, as a combination of factors in the world economy lead to reduced demand internationally for steel. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil, a major benchmark for oil prices, has fallen from $110 per barrel in the summer of 2014 to $45 per barrel at present. The collapse of oil prices has reversed the rapid growth of American shale oil and Canadian tar sands production and led to mass layoffs, with 16,000 job losses in Texas and North Dakota alone announced in January.
Shale oil production, using the process of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, relies on a large quantity of steel pipe to pump fluids and sand into a well and pump oil out. With the collapse of shale production, steelmakers are pulling back on so-called oil country tubular goods, which had been a large growth segment of their production.
Every week brings more announcements of layoffs at US Steel, where job losses have now surpassed 1,300. In the first week of January, it announced the idling of its plant in Lorain, Ohio, leading to 614 layoffs. Another 142 workers in Houston, Texas, also lost their jobs. More recently, US Steel announced it would significantly scale back operations at its Fairfield Tubular Operations and Fairfield Works in Fairfield, Alabama, as well as its Lone Star Tubular Operations in Lone Star, Texas. Both facilities produced pipe and tubes for the oil and gas industry, and as many as 1,918 workers will be affected by those layoffs.
In East Chicago, US Steel is idling its tin plant, which makes tin-plated metal largely for canned foods. US Steel also warned it would permanently close is coke-making operations at its Granite City, Illinois, works, near St. Louis, laying off 176 workers. Aside from falling oil prices and production, there is also falling demand globally for steel and a supposed glut of production. Asia, especially China, has been a major market for steel, but China’s growth rate for 2014—at 7.4 percent—is the lowest since 1989. The stagnant Eurozone economy offers no outlet for steel production. Steel and the raw materials that make it are plummeting in price; iron ore is trading at its lowest level since 2009.
ArcelorMittal’s Indiana Harbor Long Carbon plant makes steel bars that are primarily used in the auto industry. Formerly run by Inland Steel, the mill was originally opened in 1901, shut down temporarily in 2009, and reopened in 2010. ArcelorMittal officials claim the facility has lost money since 2011 and that it can produce its steel bars more cheaply in Germany and Canada.
The 246 unionized workers at the mill—members of the United Steelworkers of America (USWA) Local 1101—and 58 salaried employees are being affected by the closure. In December 2014, ArcelorMittal also idled the Indiana Harbor West No. 2 galvanizing line as production was transferred to a plant in Alabama. In both cases, the company has claimed workers will be transferred to other facilities in Indiana Harbor complex, which is the largest integrated steel mill in North America, employing approximately 4,850 people.
The USWA has not even made a pretense of opposing the layoffs. Instead it is engaged in a reactionary, chauvinist campaign against the “dumping” of cheaper steel by foreign countries, particularly Korea. Allied with steel company executives and Democratic Party politicians in the Alliance for American Manufacturing, the USWA is demanding protectionist measures in the name of defending “national security” against China and other countries.
The USWA, along with other unions like the United Auto Workers, used such nationalist “Buy American” campaigns in the 1970s and 1980s to prevent a struggle by workers against the corporations and the capitalist system responsible for plant closings and layoffs. These campaigns, which sought to drive a wedge between American workers and their international brothers, never saved a single job.
In any case, US Steel and ArcelorMittal are both global corporations that seek, with the assistance of the unions, to pit workers against each other in a race to lower costs.
With an increasingly dire world economic outlook for steel demand, these are likely not the last steel industry layoffs in northwest Indiana, which has several large ArcelorMittal and US Steel mills. A significant amount of total production goes to the auto industry, and any drop in auto sales will ripple back. Additionally, the new Ford F-150 pickup truck, the best-selling vehicle in America, is using a mostly aluminum body instead of steel.
Northwestern Indiana has already been devastated by the long-term loss of industrial jobs. East Chicago had a population of 29,698 in 2010, down from a population of 57,669 in 1960. The Census Bureau’s five-year (2009-2013) survey estimates a poverty rate of 35.7 percent for individuals and a median household income of $27,500 in the city on the Indiana-Illinois border. The latter figure is barely half of the national mean income.
One neighborhood, Marktown, is surrounded by plant closures and is already pockmarked with boarded-up homes. On its southwest border, the US Steel tin plant will close. To the southeast, the ArcelorMittal Long Carbon plant will close. Across from that lie acres of the Indiana Harbor complex that were abandoned long ago. Indiana 912/Cline Ave, an abandoned elevated highway, is nearby, partially demolished. Some four-lane concrete roads are already empty of traffic, even during a weekday.
To the northwest of Marktown, there is the massive BP Whiting Refinery. The global energy giant is pointing to the drop in oil prices to justify freezing the wages of its non-union workforce at the refinery and demands for concessions from the USWA after the current labor agreement runs out January 31. More than 2,800 construction jobs were lost in northwest Indiana in 2014 as construction wound down from the refinery’s expansion.
Under the impact of falling oil prices and the global economic slowdown, layoffs have begun in northwest Indiana—a major center of the US steel industry. Last week, US Steel announced the idling of its tin mill in East Chicago, Indiana, laying off 369 workers. ArcelorMittal, the world’s largest steel producer, also announced the closure of a portion of its massive Indiana Harbor complex, the Long Carbon facility, which will affect 300 jobs.
The layoffs are likely only the beginning, as a combination of factors in the world economy lead to reduced demand internationally for steel. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil, a major benchmark for oil prices, has fallen from $110 per barrel in the summer of 2014 to $45 per barrel at present. The collapse of oil prices has reversed the rapid growth of American shale oil and Canadian tar sands production and led to mass layoffs, with 16,000 job losses in Texas and North Dakota alone announced in January.
Shale oil production, using the process of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, relies on a large quantity of steel pipe to pump fluids and sand into a well and pump oil out. With the collapse of shale production, steelmakers are pulling back on so-called oil country tubular goods, which had been a large growth segment of their production.
Every week brings more announcements of layoffs at US Steel, where job losses have now surpassed 1,300. In the first week of January, it announced the idling of its plant in Lorain, Ohio, leading to 614 layoffs. Another 142 workers in Houston, Texas, also lost their jobs. More recently, US Steel announced it would significantly scale back operations at its Fairfield Tubular Operations and Fairfield Works in Fairfield, Alabama, as well as its Lone Star Tubular Operations in Lone Star, Texas. Both facilities produced pipe and tubes for the oil and gas industry, and as many as 1,918 workers will be affected by those layoffs.
In East Chicago, US Steel is idling its tin plant, which makes tin-plated metal largely for canned foods. US Steel also warned it would permanently close is coke-making operations at its Granite City, Illinois, works, near St. Louis, laying off 176 workers. Aside from falling oil prices and production, there is also falling demand globally for steel and a supposed glut of production. Asia, especially China, has been a major market for steel, but China’s growth rate for 2014—at 7.4 percent—is the lowest since 1989. The stagnant Eurozone economy offers no outlet for steel production. Steel and the raw materials that make it are plummeting in price; iron ore is trading at its lowest level since 2009.
ArcelorMittal’s Indiana Harbor Long Carbon plant makes steel bars that are primarily used in the auto industry. Formerly run by Inland Steel, the mill was originally opened in 1901, shut down temporarily in 2009, and reopened in 2010. ArcelorMittal officials claim the facility has lost money since 2011 and that it can produce its steel bars more cheaply in Germany and Canada.
The 246 unionized workers at the mill—members of the United Steelworkers of America (USWA) Local 1101—and 58 salaried employees are being affected by the closure. In December 2014, ArcelorMittal also idled the Indiana Harbor West No. 2 galvanizing line as production was transferred to a plant in Alabama. In both cases, the company has claimed workers will be transferred to other facilities in Indiana Harbor complex, which is the largest integrated steel mill in North America, employing approximately 4,850 people.
The USWA has not even made a pretense of opposing the layoffs. Instead it is engaged in a reactionary, chauvinist campaign against the “dumping” of cheaper steel by foreign countries, particularly Korea. Allied with steel company executives and Democratic Party politicians in the Alliance for American Manufacturing, the USWA is demanding protectionist measures in the name of defending “national security” against China and other countries.
The USWA, along with other unions like the United Auto Workers, used such nationalist “Buy American” campaigns in the 1970s and 1980s to prevent a struggle by workers against the corporations and the capitalist system responsible for plant closings and layoffs. These campaigns, which sought to drive a wedge between American workers and their international brothers, never saved a single job.
In any case, US Steel and ArcelorMittal are both global corporations that seek, with the assistance of the unions, to pit workers against each other in a race to lower costs.
With an increasingly dire world economic outlook for steel demand, these are likely not the last steel industry layoffs in northwest Indiana, which has several large ArcelorMittal and US Steel mills. A significant amount of total production goes to the auto industry, and any drop in auto sales will ripple back. Additionally, the new Ford F-150 pickup truck, the best-selling vehicle in America, is using a mostly aluminum body instead of steel.
Northwestern Indiana has already been devastated by the long-term loss of industrial jobs. East Chicago had a population of 29,698 in 2010, down from a population of 57,669 in 1960. The Census Bureau’s five-year (2009-2013) survey estimates a poverty rate of 35.7 percent for individuals and a median household income of $27,500 in the city on the Indiana-Illinois border. The latter figure is barely half of the national mean income.
One neighborhood, Marktown, is surrounded by plant closures and is already pockmarked with boarded-up homes. On its southwest border, the US Steel tin plant will close. To the southeast, the ArcelorMittal Long Carbon plant will close. Across from that lie acres of the Indiana Harbor complex that were abandoned long ago. Indiana 912/Cline Ave, an abandoned elevated highway, is nearby, partially demolished. Some four-lane concrete roads are already empty of traffic, even during a weekday.
To the northwest of Marktown, there is the massive BP Whiting Refinery. The global energy giant is pointing to the drop in oil prices to justify freezing the wages of its non-union workforce at the refinery and demands for concessions from the USWA after the current labor agreement runs out January 31. More than 2,800 construction jobs were lost in northwest Indiana in 2014 as construction wound down from the refinery’s expansion.
New figures show continued decline in US union membership
Shannon Jones
The rate of US union membership continued its fifty-year decline in 2014, falling from 11.3 percent to just 11.1 percent of the workforce. The new numbers released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) show that unions added just 50,000 members last year compared to an overall employment growth of over two million.
Unionization rates are now at their lowest level in the US in 100 years. According to a study by two Rutgers economists, the 1916 US unionization rate was 11.2 percent. While public sector unionization showed a tiny rise in 2014, the private sector unionization rate collapsed to just 6.6 percent.
Even more striking was the decline in unionization in Michigan, once one of the most heavily unionized US states. The overall rate fell from 16.3 percent to 14.5 percent of workers in the state, representing a drop of 11 percent. In absolute numbers union membership fell by about 48,000 out of a prior total of 633,000. In 1964, 44.5 percent of Michigan workers belonged to unions, and, as late as 2004, some 21.6 percent of the state’s workers were still unionized. The state now ranks 11th in overall unionization. In 2003 it ranked third.
The decline in Michigan reflects in part the impact of recently enacted right-to-work legislation. The law, which took effect in 2013, prohibits the payment of union dues as a condition of employment. The intent of the measure was to criminalize any form of collective resistance by the working class. This does not alter the fact, however, that the UAW and other trade unions are essentially business entities, which have prospered through their collaboration in the destruction of the jobs and living standards of workers. After decades of such betrayals, the unions were incapable of generating popular opposition to the passage of the reactionary law.
With union membership now voluntary, tens of thousands of workers have stopped paying dues, seeing no reason to subsidize organizations that are hostile to their interests. The Michigan Education Association alone lost nearly 5,000 members, its rolls falling to 110,000.
The full impact of right-to-work in Michigan has yet to be felt, since the law did not cover workplaces with existing labor contracts. The contracts for the major auto manufacturers covering tens of thousands of workers in Michigan employed by General Motors, Ford and Chrysler expire in September 2015, and the new agreements will be barred from making union membership mandatory.
This presents a serious problem for the UAW, since it has alienated and angered workers through its decades-long policy of union-management collaboration that has decimated the wages and benefits of auto workers, once among the highest-paid industrial workers in America. The cuts imposed by the UAW have had a particularly terrible impact on younger workers, who now start at just a little more than half of the standard wage.
As a consequence of its betrayals, UAW membership has plummeted; it is now down to less than 400,000 compared to 1.5 million in 1979. In anticipation of a further massive decline once workers are no longer compelled to pay dues, the UAW forced through a 25 percent dues increase at its constitutional convention last year.
However, the UAW apparatus has been largely insulated from the impact of its repeated sellouts. The union has developed new sources of income based on its suppression of the class struggle: joint training, real estate and investment funds, and the control of multibillion-dollar retiree health care trust funds set up during Obama’s 2009 restructuring of Chrysler and GM. Despite the decline in membership, the UAW had nearly a billion dollars in assets in 2013, including $661 million in marketable securities, with hundreds of union executives on its staff earning more than $100,000 per year.
The UAW is not the only union whose treasury and officers are doing well financially. The American Federation of Teachers boasted net assets of $104 million in 2014, not counting the assets of affiliated locals, which in some cases are quite substantial. AFT President Randi Weingarten alone took in $557,000 in salary and expenses. The rival National Education Association, meanwhile, had total assets $336 million, according to its 2014 report and outgoing NEA President Dennis Van Roekel pocketed some $541,000 in salary and expenses. The Service Employees International Union, meanwhile, had $258 million in total assets, paying SEIU President Mary Kay Henry $295,000 in salary and expenses. Robert Buffenbarger of the International Association of Machinists topped this, taking in $319,000.
While feathering their own nests, the unions have worked to crush all manifestations of working-class militancy. The moribund character of the unions is reflected in the collapse in strike activity, which remains at historic lows. There were just nine strikes involving 1,000 or more workers in the United States in 2014, according to BLS figures. That compares to 235 in 1979, two years before the smashing of the air traffic controllers’ strike, and 424 in 1974.
Where the unions have called strikes they have been token affairs that were quickly sold out. An example was the one-day walkout called by the UAW at the Lear seating plant in Hammond, Indiana last September. The UAW ended the walkout claiming it had abolished the two-tier wage at the facility, which makes seats for Ford. In fact, the agreement called for the creation of a “third tier” of low-paid workers, starting a just $12 per hour.
The unions are able to stagger on only because of the support of a section of the corporate-political establishment, which values their services in disciplining the working class. Indeed, one of the highest points in US union membership came during World War II, when the Roosevelt administration brought the unions directly onto government-management boards, relying on the union leadership to drive up production, impose a wage freeze and enforce a no-strike pledge.
In the recent period, the UAW has sought and received management support in its effort to “unionize” Volkswagen’s Chattanooga, Tennessee assembly plant. The UAW and VW are working to establish what amounts to a company union at the facility by setting up a works council based on the German model of “co-determination.” After workers voted against the UAW in a union representation election, VW allowed the UAW into the plant anyway. The union is permitted to use company meeting rooms, post literature and meet regularly with plant management. If the UAW can convince an auditor hired by VW that it represents more than 50 percent of workers, it could be installed without another union representation election.
In exchange for recognition the UAW has pledged to maintain the factory’s cost-advantage over facilities run by the Detroit automakers and to underbid VW workers in other countries.
These facts speak for themselves. The US unions, like their counterparts globally, are anti-working class organizations defending the interests of a privileged upper-middle class layer whose income is dependent on its defense of capitalism and its suppression of workers struggles. To defend their interests workers must break with these organizations and build democratic rank-and-file organizations based on a new perspective and program. This means a struggle for the political independence of the working class based on a socialist and internationalist perspective.
The rate of US union membership continued its fifty-year decline in 2014, falling from 11.3 percent to just 11.1 percent of the workforce. The new numbers released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) show that unions added just 50,000 members last year compared to an overall employment growth of over two million.
Unionization rates are now at their lowest level in the US in 100 years. According to a study by two Rutgers economists, the 1916 US unionization rate was 11.2 percent. While public sector unionization showed a tiny rise in 2014, the private sector unionization rate collapsed to just 6.6 percent.
Even more striking was the decline in unionization in Michigan, once one of the most heavily unionized US states. The overall rate fell from 16.3 percent to 14.5 percent of workers in the state, representing a drop of 11 percent. In absolute numbers union membership fell by about 48,000 out of a prior total of 633,000. In 1964, 44.5 percent of Michigan workers belonged to unions, and, as late as 2004, some 21.6 percent of the state’s workers were still unionized. The state now ranks 11th in overall unionization. In 2003 it ranked third.
The decline in Michigan reflects in part the impact of recently enacted right-to-work legislation. The law, which took effect in 2013, prohibits the payment of union dues as a condition of employment. The intent of the measure was to criminalize any form of collective resistance by the working class. This does not alter the fact, however, that the UAW and other trade unions are essentially business entities, which have prospered through their collaboration in the destruction of the jobs and living standards of workers. After decades of such betrayals, the unions were incapable of generating popular opposition to the passage of the reactionary law.
With union membership now voluntary, tens of thousands of workers have stopped paying dues, seeing no reason to subsidize organizations that are hostile to their interests. The Michigan Education Association alone lost nearly 5,000 members, its rolls falling to 110,000.
The full impact of right-to-work in Michigan has yet to be felt, since the law did not cover workplaces with existing labor contracts. The contracts for the major auto manufacturers covering tens of thousands of workers in Michigan employed by General Motors, Ford and Chrysler expire in September 2015, and the new agreements will be barred from making union membership mandatory.
This presents a serious problem for the UAW, since it has alienated and angered workers through its decades-long policy of union-management collaboration that has decimated the wages and benefits of auto workers, once among the highest-paid industrial workers in America. The cuts imposed by the UAW have had a particularly terrible impact on younger workers, who now start at just a little more than half of the standard wage.
As a consequence of its betrayals, UAW membership has plummeted; it is now down to less than 400,000 compared to 1.5 million in 1979. In anticipation of a further massive decline once workers are no longer compelled to pay dues, the UAW forced through a 25 percent dues increase at its constitutional convention last year.
However, the UAW apparatus has been largely insulated from the impact of its repeated sellouts. The union has developed new sources of income based on its suppression of the class struggle: joint training, real estate and investment funds, and the control of multibillion-dollar retiree health care trust funds set up during Obama’s 2009 restructuring of Chrysler and GM. Despite the decline in membership, the UAW had nearly a billion dollars in assets in 2013, including $661 million in marketable securities, with hundreds of union executives on its staff earning more than $100,000 per year.
The UAW is not the only union whose treasury and officers are doing well financially. The American Federation of Teachers boasted net assets of $104 million in 2014, not counting the assets of affiliated locals, which in some cases are quite substantial. AFT President Randi Weingarten alone took in $557,000 in salary and expenses. The rival National Education Association, meanwhile, had total assets $336 million, according to its 2014 report and outgoing NEA President Dennis Van Roekel pocketed some $541,000 in salary and expenses. The Service Employees International Union, meanwhile, had $258 million in total assets, paying SEIU President Mary Kay Henry $295,000 in salary and expenses. Robert Buffenbarger of the International Association of Machinists topped this, taking in $319,000.
While feathering their own nests, the unions have worked to crush all manifestations of working-class militancy. The moribund character of the unions is reflected in the collapse in strike activity, which remains at historic lows. There were just nine strikes involving 1,000 or more workers in the United States in 2014, according to BLS figures. That compares to 235 in 1979, two years before the smashing of the air traffic controllers’ strike, and 424 in 1974.
Where the unions have called strikes they have been token affairs that were quickly sold out. An example was the one-day walkout called by the UAW at the Lear seating plant in Hammond, Indiana last September. The UAW ended the walkout claiming it had abolished the two-tier wage at the facility, which makes seats for Ford. In fact, the agreement called for the creation of a “third tier” of low-paid workers, starting a just $12 per hour.
The unions are able to stagger on only because of the support of a section of the corporate-political establishment, which values their services in disciplining the working class. Indeed, one of the highest points in US union membership came during World War II, when the Roosevelt administration brought the unions directly onto government-management boards, relying on the union leadership to drive up production, impose a wage freeze and enforce a no-strike pledge.
In the recent period, the UAW has sought and received management support in its effort to “unionize” Volkswagen’s Chattanooga, Tennessee assembly plant. The UAW and VW are working to establish what amounts to a company union at the facility by setting up a works council based on the German model of “co-determination.” After workers voted against the UAW in a union representation election, VW allowed the UAW into the plant anyway. The union is permitted to use company meeting rooms, post literature and meet regularly with plant management. If the UAW can convince an auditor hired by VW that it represents more than 50 percent of workers, it could be installed without another union representation election.
In exchange for recognition the UAW has pledged to maintain the factory’s cost-advantage over facilities run by the Detroit automakers and to underbid VW workers in other countries.
These facts speak for themselves. The US unions, like their counterparts globally, are anti-working class organizations defending the interests of a privileged upper-middle class layer whose income is dependent on its defense of capitalism and its suppression of workers struggles. To defend their interests workers must break with these organizations and build democratic rank-and-file organizations based on a new perspective and program. This means a struggle for the political independence of the working class based on a socialist and internationalist perspective.
Whistleblower who exposed CIA nuclear sabotage operation convicted under Espionage Act
Thomas Gaist
Former Central Intelligence Agency officer Jeffrey Sterling was found guilty of violating the 1917 Espionage Act Monday for providing information to the New York Times regarding covert operations conducted by the CIA against Iran. Sterling was convicted of nine felonies including illegally possessing and transferring secret government information. He could receive up to 100 years in prison after sentencing in late April.
Sterling allegedly spoke to Risen about the CIA efforts, codenamed Operation Merlin, as part of research for Risen’s 2006 book State of War. Operation Merlin sought to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program by selling the Iranian government flawed nuclear reactor blueprints through a foreign intermediary.
Risen resisted years-long efforts by the Justice Department to force him to testify against Sterling, stating that he would accept a prison term before doing so. The Obama administration dropped its efforts to coerce Risen once prosecutors became convinced they could convict Sterling without Risen taking the stand.
CIA officers who did testify in the case were concealed behind a dark screen. The federal prosecution team never introduced evidence that Sterling even spoke directly to Risen about the Iran operations. The only correspondence between the two presented to the court related to a separate issue.
Sterling informed the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2003-04 about CIA operations against Iran, and the leak could have originated from Senate staffers, Sterling’s defense attorney argued, pointing to the prosecution’s lack of direct evidence.
The case represents yet another victory for the Obama administration’s assault on investigative journalism, including the secret wiretapping of the Associated Press to identify “leakers” and the prosecution of Chelsea (Bradley) Manning for providing information to WikiLeaks. The administration has prosecuted more cases under the Espionage Act than all previous presidential administrations combined.
The Obama administration’s surveillance and prosecution of journalists has produced a “chilling effect,” with sources in the government and corporate bureaucracies suddenly going silent, according to leading journalists. As Risen noted in an interview with the Times last August, President Obama is “the greatest enemy to press freedom in a generation.”
The Obama administration is “going to bring these cases continuously to demonstrate that type of conduct by a government employee or a government contractor is going to be prosecuted,” a prominent New York lawyer told the Washington Post, referring to Sterling’s conviction.
Attorney General Eric Holder responded by declaring that Sterling’s conviction was the “just and appropriate outcome” of the trial. Sterling’s communications with Risen “placed lives at risk” and represented “an egregious breach of the public trust,” Holder said.
In essence, Sterling has been convicted for allegedly leaking information about illegal CIA covert operations, that is, for helping expose a criminal conspiracy orchestrated at the highest levels of government.
Holder, on the other hand, has committed grave crimes against the US Constitution. While serving on behalf of President Obama, Holder has overseen the destruction of central elements of the US Constitution, including the right to due process and protection from arbitrary searches and seizures. The attorney general will be known above all for his arguments in favor of the right of the president to assassinate US citizens without any legal procedure.
Former Central Intelligence Agency officer Jeffrey Sterling was found guilty of violating the 1917 Espionage Act Monday for providing information to the New York Times regarding covert operations conducted by the CIA against Iran. Sterling was convicted of nine felonies including illegally possessing and transferring secret government information. He could receive up to 100 years in prison after sentencing in late April.
Sterling allegedly spoke to Risen about the CIA efforts, codenamed Operation Merlin, as part of research for Risen’s 2006 book State of War. Operation Merlin sought to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program by selling the Iranian government flawed nuclear reactor blueprints through a foreign intermediary.
Risen resisted years-long efforts by the Justice Department to force him to testify against Sterling, stating that he would accept a prison term before doing so. The Obama administration dropped its efforts to coerce Risen once prosecutors became convinced they could convict Sterling without Risen taking the stand.
CIA officers who did testify in the case were concealed behind a dark screen. The federal prosecution team never introduced evidence that Sterling even spoke directly to Risen about the Iran operations. The only correspondence between the two presented to the court related to a separate issue.
Sterling informed the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2003-04 about CIA operations against Iran, and the leak could have originated from Senate staffers, Sterling’s defense attorney argued, pointing to the prosecution’s lack of direct evidence.
The case represents yet another victory for the Obama administration’s assault on investigative journalism, including the secret wiretapping of the Associated Press to identify “leakers” and the prosecution of Chelsea (Bradley) Manning for providing information to WikiLeaks. The administration has prosecuted more cases under the Espionage Act than all previous presidential administrations combined.
The Obama administration’s surveillance and prosecution of journalists has produced a “chilling effect,” with sources in the government and corporate bureaucracies suddenly going silent, according to leading journalists. As Risen noted in an interview with the Times last August, President Obama is “the greatest enemy to press freedom in a generation.”
The Obama administration is “going to bring these cases continuously to demonstrate that type of conduct by a government employee or a government contractor is going to be prosecuted,” a prominent New York lawyer told the Washington Post, referring to Sterling’s conviction.
Attorney General Eric Holder responded by declaring that Sterling’s conviction was the “just and appropriate outcome” of the trial. Sterling’s communications with Risen “placed lives at risk” and represented “an egregious breach of the public trust,” Holder said.
In essence, Sterling has been convicted for allegedly leaking information about illegal CIA covert operations, that is, for helping expose a criminal conspiracy orchestrated at the highest levels of government.
Holder, on the other hand, has committed grave crimes against the US Constitution. While serving on behalf of President Obama, Holder has overseen the destruction of central elements of the US Constitution, including the right to due process and protection from arbitrary searches and seizures. The attorney general will be known above all for his arguments in favor of the right of the president to assassinate US citizens without any legal procedure.
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