Quebec Liberals aim to level what remains of welfare state

Laurent Lafrance

Quebec’s 10-month-old Liberal government is mounting a sweeping assault on public and social services and on the wages and working conditions of the workers who administer them. Cuts and service-fee increases of more than $3 billion per year have already been announced.

The official pretext for this brutal austerity program is the need to eliminate Quebec’s annual budget deficit and keep the province’s creditors at bay. The real aim is to dismantle what little remains of the welfare state and speed up the privatization of key sectors of the economy, including public works and the health care system.

With these anti-working class measures, Philippe Couillard’s Liberals are following in the footsteps of Stephen Harper’s federal Conservative government. Since 2011, the Conservatives have cut billions from federal programs and eliminated more than 25,000 federal public sector jobs, raised the retirement age to 67, slashed unemployment benefits, boosted the role of the private sector in the development of infrastructure, and repeatedly used “emergency” laws to break strikes, including at Air Canada and Canada Post.

In the same way, the Liberals under Couillard plan to gore public services and public sector workers’ wages and benefits, so as to further slash taxes on big business and the economic elite and bolster big business’s drive to lower workers’ wages and benefits.

Premier Couillard has repeatedly vowed that his government will not back down in the face of opposition, adding that the steps his government is taking to “streamline” and “modernize” the Quebec state will “show investors how serious we are in what we are undertaking.”

Couillard has boasted that one of his main sources of inspiration (he reportedly keeps it on his bedside table) is the Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State. Co-authored by the editor and a leading columnist at the Economist, the British weekly that speaks for the most powerful sections of world finance capital, the Fourth Revolution argues that the massive social spending and privatizations that were implemented by Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States in the 1980s and then emulated by capitalist governments the world over were only “half-measures.” Governments, insist John Micklethwait and Adrian Woolridge, must today finish this “half-revolution” by levelling all that remains of the welfare state.

This is precisely what the Couillard government has set out to do. Since coming to power in April 2014, the Liberals have:

*Adopted legislation (Bill 3) that takes the axe to municipal employees’ pensions by eliminating inflation-indexing, making workers responsible for much of any pension-plan deficits, and dramatically raising workers’ pension contributions, thereby slashing their take-home pay by thousands of dollars per year.

*Demanded sweeping contract concessions from Quebec’s half-million public sector workers. This includes a two-year wage freeze starting this April and annual increases of just 1 percent per year in the subsequent three years; an increase in the retirement age; much greater penalties for workers who take early retirement; and reduced pensions.

*Announced cuts of $1 billion in education that are to be realized by slashing university and college (CEGEP) budgets by a further $200 million, raising student-teacher ratios in public schools, eliminating supports for students with “special needs,” and lengthening public school teachers’ work-week by 10 percent with no increase in pay.

* Adopted legislation (Bill 10) that eliminates and merges local health authorities, centralizing power in the hands of the Health Minister and his appointees, with a view to eliminating nearly 1,000 health management positions and reducing health spending by more than $200 million per year.

* Slashed funding for social assistance (welfare and disability payments) by $211 million and eliminated 500 of the 1,200 “casual” jobs at the Ministry of Employment and Social Solidarity.

* Raised public day care and auto insurance fees, electricity rates, and taxes on gasoline and tobacco products.

* Transferred management of large infrastructure projects to the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec— a private investment fund set up by the provincial government to administer public pension plans—thereby tying such projects to investor returns and opening the door to their outright privatization.

The Liberal government knows full well that its austerity measures will provoke mass working-class opposition and is preparing to use emergency laws and the state repression to force them through. Couillard and his colleagues are fervent defenders of the police violence and draconian legislation the Liberal government of Jean Charest used against the 2012 Quebec student strike. One of the first actions taken by the Couillard Liberal government, in the face of a possible Quebec-wide construction strike, was to announce that it would tolerate no worker job action and illegalize any strike before even a single worker had walked off the job.

In implementing big business’s reactionary agenda, the Liberals, however, will above all rely on the trade unions to keep the working class in check. For decades, the union bureaucrats have suppressed the class struggle, torpedoing every major working class movement in the name of preserving “social peace.”

Significantly, the union bureaucrats have made a spate of statements in recent weeks expressing concern that they will not be able to control an explosion of working-class anger. “There is a groundswell in the population that we have not seen for many years,” admitted the secretary-general of theFédération des travailleurs et travaillueses du Québec (FTQ-Quebec Federation of Labour), Serge Cadieux. For his part, QFL president Daniel Boyer said, “I have been asked by members whether I’m prepared to go to prison; we have members who are ready to defy a government decree or emergency law.”

The corporate media has also expressed its fear of a return of the “Maple Spring,” a reference to the 2012 student strike, which shook the province for six months. But, as in 2012, the ruling class is banking on the unions to isolate and smother the opposition to austerity and to channel it behind Quebec nationalism and the big business Parti Quebecois (PQ).

In May 2012, when the student strike threatened to provoke a mass movement of the working class against the Charest Liberal government and its austerity program, the unions launched the slogan “After the street, the ballot box” in order to put an end to the strike and channel the opposition movement behind the election of a PQ government.

The alternate governing party of the Quebec elite, the PQ has imposed massive attacks on the working class in close collaboration with the trade unions, most infamously between 1996 and 1998, when the Bouchard-Landry PQ government implemented the greatest social spending cuts in Quebec history.

Elected to a minority government in September 2012 with support of the unions and the pseudo-left Quebec Solidaire, the PQ quickly defused the political crisis provoked by the student strike. Then, in a matter of weeks, it pivoted to the imposition of austerity measures, including university fee hikes—measures that went beyond those of Charest and foreshadowed those now being implemented by Couillard.

To prevent another, even bigger betrayal, workers in Quebec must break free of the political and organizational grip of the pro-capitalist unions and transform the struggle against the Couillard government into a Canada-wide mobilization of the working class against the destruction of jobs and the dismantling of public services. Such a mobilization must be based on the struggle for a workers’ government, which will resolve the capitalist crisis, not on the backs of the workers, but at the expense of big business and the profit system.

Britain’s GCHQ given free rein to continue mass surveillance

Paul Mitchell

Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has been found guilty of carrying out seven years of illegal surveillance by the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT).

The case was brought by a number of human rights organisations, including Privacy International, Liberty and Bytes for All, which questioned whether surveillance data collected by GCHQ from the US National Security Agency (NSA) Prism intercept system, since it was created in 2007, was legal.

The complaint was brought after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed that GCHQ infiltrates all the communications in and out of the British Isles by tapping transatlantic cables and has warrantless access to NSA databases, which include the data of all UK citizens. By using Prism (an external system), the intelligence services were able to circumvent the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) 2000 legislation, which requires intelligence officials to get a warrant from a minister before performing a wiretap in Britain.

However, the ruling makes no one in the intelligence services accountable for wrongdoing. More importantly, it declares the same sort of surveillance legalsince December 2014 on a technicality—that the government had revealed that hitherto secret “safeguards” existed.

The findings basically state that surveillance was okay, but the problem was the government hadn’t told anyone about the safeguards. The IPT has manipulated the court case to make the GCHQ-NSA data sharing lawful and made a mockery of the RIPA legislation.

The new ruling says that “prior to the disclosures made and referred to in the Tribunal’s Judgment of 5 December 2014 and this judgment the Prism and/or Upstream arrangements contravened Articles 8 or 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, but now comply.”

Article 8 concerns the right to private and family life and article 10 refers to freedom of expression.

A GCHQ spokesman welcomed the latest ruling, declaring, “We are pleased that the court has once again ruled that the UK’s bulk interception regime is fully lawful. It follows the court’s clear rejection of accusations of ‘mass surveillance’ in their December judgment.

“Today’s IPT ruling reaffirms that the processes and safeguards within the intelligence-sharing regime were fully adequate at all times—it is simply about the amount of detail about those processes and safeguards that needed to be in the public domain.”

A government spokesperson agreed, saying, “Overall, the judgment this morning is that the UK’s interception regime is fully lawful.… What they said was that there should be more about the rules that should be disclosed publicly.… They are not questioning in this judgment that the safeguarding of privacy was in any way jeopardised and the judgment will not require GCHQ to change in anyway what it does.”

The human rights organisations and the Guardian, which broke the Snowden revelations, have talked up the IPT decision. Since the IPT was set up in 2000, they say, it has dealt with about 1,500 complaints, but this is the first time a complaint has been upheld.

Privacy International deputy director Eric King said the IPT decision “confirms to the public what many have said all along—over the past decade, GCHQ and the NSA have been engaged in an illegal mass surveillance sharing program that has affected millions of people around the world.”

Privacy International and others are now calling for the deletion of data—but only that collected before December 2014—and an appeal to the European courts. Guardian journalist Trevor Timm called the IPT ruling “stunning” and wrote that the case “was just the first of potentially dozens of cases that will come before the court…and many of which will hopefully force the court to address the illegality of the actual mass spying conducted by GCHQ on a regular basis.”

Timm also called “for a re-examination of the British government’s deplorable actions against the Guardian and others “who have merely reported on the Snowden stories.”

By the end of his article, the sense of euphoria had died down. He stated, “It remains to be seen how the court will react, if at all, to future cases. But this should be a warning for both the UK government and the media: the law and even the most obsequious of courts are not on your side. Your citizens aren’t either.”

“[M]ore work needs to be done,” he added. “The only reason why the NSA-GCHQ sharing relationship is still legal today is because of a last-minute clean-up effort by the government to release previously secret ‘arrangements’.”

Liberty legal director James Welch said much the same thing, adding, “We now know that, by keeping the public in the dark about their secret dealings with the NSA, GCHQ acted unlawfully and violated our rights. That their activities are now deemed lawful is thanks only to the degree of disclosure Liberty and the other claimants were able to force from our secrecy-obsessed government.”

Despite the IPT case, the “secrecy-obsessed government” and intelligence services have declared their intention to press ahead with the clampdown on democratic rights. Following his appointment as the new director of GCHQ in November, one of the first acts of Robert Hannigan was to demand major technology companies including Facebook and Twitter deepen their cooperation with GCHQ or face legislation compelling them.

Following the terror assaults on the Charlie Hebdo office in Paris and a Jewish supermarket, in which 17 people were killed, demands have been made for yet more powers. The former head of Britain’s intelligence agency MI5, Lord Evans, claimed that existing anti-terror legislation was “no longer fit for purpose” and that new laws were “vital” to enable the state to monitor the Internet.

Prime Minister David Cameron has pledged that if the Conservatives return to power after the May General Election, they will speed up plans for a “snoopers’ charter” Communications Bill giving the intelligence agencies the power to access encrypted communications.

Britain’s Intelligence and Security Committee, consisting of nine senior members of parliament and peers, is also to announce “very radical” reforms of existing anti-terror provisions so as to grant the intelligence agencies new powers to intercept e-communications.

Widespread anger over killing of three Muslim students in North Carolina

Evan Blake

The killing of three Muslim-American college students in Chapel Hill, North Carolina has sparked an outpouring of anger and sympathy across the US and around the world, as police continue to investigate whether religious or ethnic hatred was a motive in the shootings. A crowd of more than 5,000 people gathered in Raleigh, North Carolina on Thursday for the funerals of the three youths.

On Tuesday evening, Deah Shaddy Barakat, 23, his wife Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, 21, and her sister Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, 19, were found dead in the apartment of Deah and Yusor, who were married less than two months ago. Barakat was a second-year student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-Chapel Hill) School of Dentistry, and his wife had recently been accepted to study there next year. Her sister, a freshman studying architecture at nearby North Carolina State University in Raleigh, had been visiting the couple. Barakat is of Syrian descent, while the two women are of Palestinian descent, and all three had lived in North Carolina their entire lives.

Officers were notified of gunshots at 5:11pm, at an apartment complex home to mostly students and young professionals in Chapel Hill. The three victims were found dead at the scene, with local WRAL News reporting that all three had been shot in the head. Police say that Craig Stephen Hicks, 46, initially fled and then turned himself in late Tuesday night. He has been arrested and charged on three counts of first-degree murder. The FBI has been brought in to help police investigate the killings.

After local police initially attributed the killings to an ongoing dispute between Hicks and the couple over a parking space at the condominium, the victims’ families appeared publicly to demand a hate crime investigation.

The women’s father, Dr. Mohammad Abu-Salha, is convinced that Hicks killed the three due to his hatred for their religion and culture. Abu-Salha told CNN, “It was execution style, a bullet in every head. This was not a dispute over a parking space; this was a hate crime. This man had picked on my daughter and her husband a couple of times before, and he talked with them with his gun in his belt. And they were uncomfortable with him, but they did not know he would go this far.”

The victims’ friends and family allege that Hicks had repeatedly gone to the couple’s apartment toting either a pistol or rifle, complaining about their guests parking in the condominium’s parking lot, and excess noise. Abu-Salha says that when Barakat lived in the condo by himself, Hicks would not bother him, but when his daughter, who wears a hijab, moved in with her husband, Hicks began to harass the couple. Abu-Salha told CNN that his daughter told him, “Daddy, I think he hates us for who we are and how we look.”

Neighbors have described Hicks as frequently angry, yelling at neighbors over parking spaces and minor noise violations. Samantha Maness, 25, who lives near the complex where the shooting took place, told the Los Angeles Times that Hicks “was very disgruntled, very aggressive. He would scream at people. He made everyone feel uncomfortable and unsafe.”

Hicks’ ex-wife has told reporters that he was obsessed with the misanthropic Joel Schumacher film Falling Down, and that he showed “no compassion at all” for other people. There are also unconfirmed reports that his alleged Facebook profile is filled with vitriolic denunciations of all religions, and that in the “About” section he describes himself as an “anti-theist.” Hicks is also a vocal advocate of gun rights. His Facebook profile also apparently states that he was studying at a local community college to begin working as a paralegal.

Whether or not Hicks is found guilty of the three killings, and whether he was driven by anti-Muslim bigotry, have yet to be determined. If this does turn out to be the case, he would of course be responsible for his own actions. But a much greater responsibility would have to be attributed to the actions of American imperialism and its subservient media apparatus that have played the central role in whipping up anti-Muslim sentiment as part of the “war on terror.”

FBI statistics indicate that in recent years anti-Muslim crimes have constituted roughly 13-14 percent of hate crimes committed with a religious bias, or nearly 100 anti-Muslim hate crimes each year between 2011-2013. In 2001, there were nearly 500 reported anti-Muslim hate crimes, whereas before 9/11 there was an average of 20-30 anti-Muslim hate crimes reported annually.

The war against ISIS and the overall escalation of American intervention in the Middle East serve as the backdrop for a recent upsurge of anti-Muslim crimes in the US, most notably last December’s hit-and-run killing of a 15-year-old boy in Kansas City.

News of Tuesday’s killings went viral on social media, with the hashtag #ChapelHillShooting being posted over 900,000 times on Twitter on Wednesday.

Many posts have emphasized that without the outpouring on social media, the killings would likely have been dropped altogether by the mainstream media, as the victims were Muslim. A typical posting reads “Muslims only newsworthy when behind a gun. Not in front [of] it.”

On Wednesday evening, at least 2,500 people attended a prayer vigil at UNC-Chapel Hill, to honor the victims. Concurrent vigils were held at dozens of campuses and cities across the US. Throughout Europe, many have also expressed their solidarity, as anti-Muslim sentiment has flared up in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo shootings in Paris in early January. Around the world, people have shared condolences with the victims’ families.

Barakat and Mohammad were well known in their communities, as they regularly volunteered to help the homeless and also raised money to help Syrian refugees in Turkey. Last summer, Barakat and Yusor Mohammad went on a volunteer mission to help at a dentistry clinic for Syrian refugees in Turkey. They were scheduled to travel with other dentists this summer to Reyhanli, Turkey, to treat Syrian refugee children with urgent dental needs, distribute dental care supplies, and work with Turkish dental clinics.

Mariem Masmoudi, a friend of the Barakats, told CNN that the couple shared “so much love and so much joy and happiness.” She said the Barakats “were really an adorable young couple. I don’t know how to say it ... they really radiated this kind of light. They radiated humility, kindness, love. You couldn’t help but be inspired by them.”

Study says US jails have become “massive warehouses” for the poor

Tom Hall

A study released Wednesday by the Vera Institute of Justice, entitled “Incarceration's Front Door: The Misuse of Jails in America,” argues that American jails have become “massive warehouses” for the poor since the early 1980s.

The study exposes the onerous conditions that even a brief stay in jail imposes on the poorest and most vulnerable sections of American society. Jails have been transformed, according to the authors, from temporary detention facilities for those awaiting trial into a “a gateway to deeper and more lasting involvement in the criminal justice system.”

According to the study, American jails process nearly 12 million admissions in a typical year, nearly double the level in 1983 and equal to the combined populations of New York City and Los Angeles. The jail population at any given time has skyrocketed even more over the same period, more than tripling to 731,000, fueled by a more than 50 percent increase in the average length of stay in jail. The study notes that because the percentage of the jail population awaiting trial has ballooned from 40 percent to 62 percent, “it is highly likely that the increase in the average length of stay is largely driven by longer stays in jails by people who are unconvicted of any crime.”

Spending by local governments on jails have likewise exploded by 235 percent over the same period, reaching $22.2 billion in 2013. “Even this figure fails to capture the true costs of jails to local jurisdictions,” the study argues, because “money spent on jails … often comes out of the budget of non-correctional agencies. Cities and counties have to cover most costs themselves, drawing on the same pool of tax revenue that supports schools, transportation, and an array of other public services.”

Despite the explosive growth of the American prison system, which has resulted in the country having the highest prison population of any country on the planet, crime has actually plummeted during the same period. The study notes that the number violent crimes and property crimes, after peaking in 1991, have fallen by 49 and 44 percent, respectively.

Nearly three-quarters of the inmate population are in jail for “nonviolent traffic, property, drug, or public order offenses,” according to the report. Three fifths have not been convicted of a crime and are awaiting either trial or resolution of their cases. African Americans comprise a disproportionate share of the jail population, at 36 percent.

The report notes that a disproportionate number of inmates are repeat offenders struggling with mental illness or substance abuse. In New York City, only 473 people, almost all of whom struggled with substance abuse or a mental illness accounted for over 10,000 admissions and 300,000 days in jail, mainly for misdemeanors and violations. The authors state that jails have become “de facto mental hospitals” that “fill the vacuum created by the shuttering of state psychiatric hospitals.” However, over 83 percent of mentally ill inmates receive no mental health care while in jail. Mentally ill inmates also spend much lengthier periods in jail, for example 43 days on average in Los Angeles, compared to an average of 18 days amongst the general population.

Huge numbers of inmates are in jail simply because they are unable to pay the increasingly onerous bails set by judges. In New York City, over half of all jail inmates are in jail because they cannot afford to pay a bail of $2,500 or less. Nationwide, only 23 percent of suspects are released on their own recognizance, down from over half thirty years ago, and bail amounts in felony cases increased 43 percent between 1992 and 2009 to $55,400. For many people who cannot afford to post bail, according to the study, “a guilty plea may, paradoxically, be the fastest way to get out of jail.”

Regardless of whether they are actually convicted, spending even a few days in jail has a damaging effect on the lives of the incarcerated. The report found that among adult males, “hourly wages decreased by 11 percent, annual employment by nine weeks, and annual earnings by 40 percent as a result of time spent in jail or prison.”

Many jails charge inmates fees for various “services,” such as clothing and laundry, medical care, and “even core functions such as booking,” according to the report. Many people find themselves back in jail for failing to pay these fees, a situation that the authors compare to debtor's prisons. A lawsuit filed this week against the city government in Ferguson, Missouri alleges that the city has “built a municipal scheme designed to brutalize, to punish and to profit” by imprisoning people unable to pay fines and traffic tickets.

The explosion of incarcerations in local jails is bound up with the increasingly vindictive policing policies towards minor offenses, especially drug-related crimes. Nearly 75 percent of all inmates are in jail for “nonviolent traffic, property, drug, or public order offenses,” according to the report.

The study singles out the “broken windows” theory of policing, according to which a crackdown on minor “quality of life” offenses supposedly reduces the level of more serious crimes. It was infamously implemented in New York City by current police chief Bill Bratton in 1994, resulting in a staggering 2,760 percent increase in misdemeanor marijuana arrests and giving rise to the Department's infamous “vertical policing” and “stop-and-frisk” programs. The authors cite an “exhaustive review” by the National Research Council that found no strong evidence that aggressively policing minor offenses reduces or prevents more serious crimes.

The growth of mass incarceration and increasingly brutal policing in the United States is a reflection of the pervasive growth of social inequality in the United States. While the most vulnerable sections of society are brutalized and imprisoned under the flimsiest of pretenses, the financial oligarchs who run society are allowed to commit crimes with total impunity.

Interpreter for 9/11 defendants at Guantanamo Bay was a CIA agent

Ed Hightower

On Monday, the military trials of five alleged 9/11 conspirators at Guantanamo Bay came to a temporary pause when it came to light that a court-appointed defense interpreter and linguist had previously worked at CIA “black sites” where the defendants had been detained and tortured.

According to the Associated Press, defendant Ramzi Binalshibh told the presiding judge that the interpreter seated next to him was someone that he and other defendants recognized from their earlier incarceration at secret CIA prisons before their transfer to the US Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Defense attorney Cheryl Bormann of Chicago represents Walid bin Attash, another 9/11 defendant who was present at the hearing Monday. She told the AP that Attash was “visibly shaken” to see an individual who “participated in his illegal torture” in the courtroom today.

“If this is part of the pattern of infiltration by government agencies into the defense teams, then the right people to be addressing this issue are not in the courtroom,” Bormann added.

Monday’s court proceedings were the first to take place since the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the CIA’s torture of detainees at CIA and military facilities, including rectal feeding and other barbaric torture practices.

Four out of the five defendants at Monday’s hearing said that they were certain that the interpreter in question was present at the CIA detention site where they were held. Their lawyers suggested to the judge that the former CIA asset’s placement on the defense team was no accident, and they requested time to further investigate this.

On Tuesday, the Pentagon responded to the previous day’s revelations with an admission that the interpreter in question had in fact worked for the CIA.

“The member of the defense team referenced in previous hearings has in the past made readily available to prospective supervisors his prior work experience with the United States government, including with the CIA,” Pentagon spokesman Myles Caggins stated.

“The prosecution does not have any role in providing linguists to defense teams in military commission,” he added.

Defense attorney Bormann contradicted this claim in a statement to the AP, saying that the interpreters are part of a pool of linguists provided to the defense teams, and their resumes and backgrounds cannot be studied in detail.

“Now the question is what other infiltration has occurred and to what extent has it destroyed our ability to represent these men,” she said.

Further undermining Caggins’ claim was the statement by Jim Harrington, attorney for defendant Binalshibh, that the interpreter lied on his resume. Harrington told the Miami Herald on Tuesday evening that his team asked the interpreter whether he had “participated in any interrogation, questioning or done any work with respect to detainees. Any place. His resume denies it. It says he worked someplace else—Reston, Virginia, from 2002 to 2006.”

“We vetted him. He denied it,” Harrington said.

The fact that a CIA operative has found his way onto the defense team representing his former victims speaks volumes about the military commission process. Taken in context, the presence of a CIA spy on the defense team fits the show trial character of the proceedings as a whole, which have been discredited time and again by interference with the defendants’ right to counsel.

From the outset, the military tribunals against the 9/11 defendants were designed with two goals: first, to railroad the defendants into conviction by any means, including confessions extracted by torture; and second, to protect the gory details of US imperialist involvement with the Islamic fundamentalist terror groups that it arms and funds one day, and denounces, persecutes and destroys the next, depending on the foreign and domestic policy needs of the American ruling class at any given time.

Thus, the alleged conspirators in the terror attacks of 9/11—an event which has the hallmarks of US government involvement—were in many cases kidnapped from around the globe, held incommunicado and tortured, brought to Cuba for further torture and indefinite detention, and now face the death penalty in proceedings that make the secret court of Star Chamber seem equitable by comparison.

The commission is housed in a $12 million “Expeditionary Legal Complex,” where reporters sit behind soundproof glass, listening to the proceedings on a 40-second delay. A large red light bulb at the judge’s bench, seen in this video, illuminates when he or a security officer presses a button to mute the audio when the testimony may concern evidence of CIA torture or other “sensitive information.”

In January 2013, this muting device was activated without the judge’s say so, indicating that someone outside of the proceeding, and essentially above the law, can intervene and silence the audio feed at will. The Guardian later reported that this “outside” silencer was the CIA.

In February 2013, lawyers for the defendants complained of advancedsurveillance devices in attorney-client meeting rooms hidden inside of phony smoke detectors. In April of that year, defense attorneys learned that some 500,000 internal emails had been seized by the Department of Defense.

In April 2014 Judge Pohl again put the proceedings on pause following revelations that the FBI had been secretly recruiting a member of the defense team’s security detail to be an informant. In fact, the CIA agent-turned-interpreter who was exposed at Monday’s hearing was serving as a replacement for an earlier interpreter who was also working with the FBI.

After allowing for the filing of motions on Tuesday, Judge Pohl denied defense motions to halt the case until further inquiry regarding the interpreter on Wednesday, saying that this was “premature.”

The uncovering of a CIA spy on the defense team underscores the sham character of the military commissions for the accused 9/11 conspirators. The defendants are systematically denied their Sixth Amendment right to an attorney, which is meaningless when attorney-client meetings are the subjects of surveillance. No attorney, no matter how skilled, can successfully represent a client who is being intimidated from having honest, open communication with his counsel.

These most recent developments in the proceedings, coming after the release of the Senate Intelligence Report on CIA torture, also highlight the terminal crisis of American democracy as a whole. Those who are accused of terrorism are tortured, indefinitely detained, intimidated and denied the right to counsel, while US government officials who invade countries, fund terrorism, institutionalize torture, and shred constitutional rights do not face so much as an indictment.

IMF announces new $17 billion loan agreement for Ukraine

Niles Williamson

Speaking Thursday from International Monetary Fund (IMF) headquarters in Brussels, IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde announced that the IMF will extend an approximately $17.5 billion bailout package to shore up Ukraine, which has been ruined by nearly a year of austerity measures and continuous fighting against pro-Russian separatists in the industrial eastern Donbass region.

Lagarde told reporters that the distribution of the loans and demanded reforms would be “a turning point for Ukraine.” Her announcement came on the same day as the declaration of a new ceasefire deal between Kiev and the separatists in east Ukraine, slated to go into effect Sunday morning.

Lagarde stated that the agreement would “support immediate economic stabilization in Ukraine as well as a set of bold policy reforms aimed at restoring robust growth over the medium term.” In Orwellian style, she claimed that the agreement was aimed at “improving living standards for the Ukrainian people.”

The response of the economic markets to the announcement of the agreement was largely negative, with the hryvnia falling as much as 3.1 percent against the dollar. The Ukrainian currency has lost 67 percent of its value against the dollar over the last year, severely impacting living standards and slashing government revenue.

The agreement is a further restructuring of the Ukrainian economy in the favor of Western business interests and away from Russia. Eldar Vakhitov, an economist at Barclays Plc in London, told Bloomberg Business, “The new program announced today covers the shortfall, though does not go much beyond that. The government in Ukraine may now turn to bondholders to discuss the restructuring of debt.”

The Ukrainian economy, which is in shambles in the aftermath of last year’s US- and EU-backed coup, contracted by more than 7 percent in 2014 and is projected by the World Bank to contract by more than 2 percent in 2015. According to the State Statistics Service, inflation has risen dramatically from 1.2 percent at the beginning of 2014 to nearly 29 percent last month. The official unemployment rate stood at 9.9 percent at the end of September last year and is expected to rise to more than 10 percent this year.

The announcement of a new loan agreement is a prelude to the implementation of further shock therapy against the working class in Ukraine. The distribution of the tranche of loans is predicated on the implementation of deeper austerity measures that will devastate the living standards of the most vulnerable layers of society.

At the end of December the Ukrainian parliament adopted a 2015-2020 economic program with a series of policies aimed at significantly lowering the living standards of the working class throughout the country. It included “large-scale privatization of state property under the appropriate economic conditions” and the financial restructuring of the state-owned oil and gas company Naftogaz. (See: “Ukrainian government prepares extreme austerity measures”)

The state budget also calls for the layoff of 10 percent of the country’s public employees and the partial privatization of health care and education. The state will also implement large-scale reform of the coal mining industry closing 32 unprofitable coal mines, idling another 24 mines and selling off 37 mines between 2015 and 2019.

Under the terms of previous IMF agreements, the Kiev regime has already slashed subsidies for natural gas and home heating. The price paid by a regular household for natural gas and home heating was raised to 56 percent and 40 percent, respectively, of the import price in 2014. Under the new budget adopted in December, the remaining price controls and subsidies would be eliminated, increasing consumer gas prices three to five times current prices.

The new loan agreement replaces the two-year Stand-By Arrangement of $17 billion agreed to last year at the end of April. Of this previous loan, $4.6 billion will be extended, bringing the total outstanding IMF loans to Ukraine to $22 billion.

In addition to the IMF agreement, the European Union pledged $2 billion in loans late last month and the United States government has also pledged $2 billion. Further negotiations with Ukraine’s sovereign debt holders to reduce borrowing costs along with other forms of assistance will bring total effective financial aid to $40 billion over the next four years.

The Kiev regime is preparing to impose martial law in order to suppress any social opposition that may emerge to its program of austerity and militarization.

A bill was submitted in the parliament this week that would make “public denial or justification of the Russian military aggression against Ukraine in 2014-2015”a felony with a possible punishment ranging from a heavy fine to five years in prison. This bill, if approved, would criminalize any opposition to or criticism of the government’s operations against the pro-Russian separatists.

In western Ukraine the government is experiencing widespread resistance to the military draft implemented in January. Anti-conscription protests have taken place in Kiev and elsewhere in the country, while draft-age Ukrainian men are reportedly avoiding the draft by fleeing across the western border into Romania.

“I do not want to fight, everyone is trying not to fight. Nobody wants to die for corrupted politicians in this regime or for this wretched Donetsk,” a 50-year-old painter, who wished to remain anonymous, told ABC News.

It is estimated that only 6 percent of conscripts have voluntarily shown up to military service in the latest round of call-ups. Ruslan Kotsaba, a western Ukrainian journalist, was detained last week after calling for a boycott of the draft and faces 15 years in prison on charges of high treason.

Greece’s Syriza government pledges to serve the EU

Christoph Dreier

After the first round of talks on Wednesday with eurogroup finance ministers over loan terms for Greece produced no results, representatives on both sides made clear their readiness to compromise on Thursday.

Before an EU meeting in Brussels, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras of the Coalition of the Radical Left (Syriza) said it was time “to move on with the changes that the previous government did not make, to put an end to the corruption and to tackle tax evasion.”

“We will need to find a solution that respects the positions of all parties, so this agreement will have to be based on the core values of Europe, democracy and the vote of the people, but also on the necessity to respect the European rules,” Tsipras said.

Prior to the conference, Tsipras met with Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel, British Prime Minister David Cameron, and his Latvian colleague Laimdota Straujuma. A planned meeting with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko was cancelled on short notice, due to the Minsk peace talks.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel also spoke of the possibility of a compromise before the conference. “Europe is organised in a way, and this is the strength of Europe, to reach a compromise,” she said. “Germany is prepared for that.”

Today, the Greek government will meet with the troika—the International Monetary Fund (IMF), European Commission and European Central Bank—for the first time, before the next meeting of finance ministers on Monday.

In terms of content, the German side made no concessions. Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble declared that previous loan agreements with Greece were non-negotiable. “Every country is free to do what it wants. But we have this program, and this program will hopefully be brought to a conclusion, or otherwise we have no program,” said Schäuble.

His Austrian colleague Hans-Jörg Schelling spoke in similar tones, declaring, “Programs cannot be overturned by election results.”

Syriza won the Greek parliamentary elections in January with the promise to put an end to the social cuts demanded by the EU in exchange for a bailout for the indebted country. However, Syriza made clear from the outset that it would neither leave the EU nor cancel state debt.

Just two weeks after the election, the significance of the defence of the EU is clear. Far from trying to improve workers’ social conditions, Tsipras and his cabinet are trying to maintain the loan agreements with the EU under a new name and to impose this on the population.

The Greek government’s representatives began negotiations by promising to implement 70 percent of the memorandum in exchange for receiving bridge loans in the coming months. The remaining 30 percent was to be replaced by 10 reforms which are yet to be presented in detail.

As a result of EU measures, Greek state debt has skyrocketed to €320 billion, or 175 percent of GDP. By June, a total of more than €7 billion in loan and interest repayments are due, and Greece cannot finance this from its budget. The yields for short-term government bonds have recently risen rapidly. Having recognised the debt in full, it is next to impossible for the Syriza government to repay it without EU loans.

There are contradictory reports about the first round of talks among EU finance ministers on Wednesday. The German daily Handelsblatt cited a passage from a joint statement that was ultimately not agreed.

In it, it was stated, “The Greek government commits irrevocably to fulfill its financial obligations to its creditors.” Athens was prepared “to consider all possibilities for a lengthening and successful conclusion of the bailout program, although the plans of the new government must be taken in to account,” the draft stated. According to the newspaper, Greek finance minister Giannis Varoufakis initially agreed to the statement, but withdrew his consent after a phone call with Tsipras.

On the other hand, Britain’s Channel 4 News reported that Schäuble removed a formulation at the last minute that would have committed Berlin to improving the bailout program. Only then, according to this report, did Greek representatives withdraw their support.

The Greek government indicated that they had been critical of the statement from the outset and that the telephone call between Tsipras and Varoufakis had only strengthened this position. The main issue for them was that it was not about extending the current agreement, but about a new bridging agreement.

However things may have gone at the talks, the Greek government’s statements make clear that they have no fundamental disagreements with the EU leaders, but merely want to make minor modifications to and rename the EU austerity package.

Varoufakis left no doubt about this. “We understand each other much, much better now than we did this morning, so I think this is a major achievement because, you know, from understanding, the agreement follows,” he commented.

In an interview published on the Stern website on Thursday, the Greek finance minister went even further in his servility. “Angela Merkel is by far the most astute politician in Europe. There is no doubt about it. And Wolfgang Schäuble, her Finance Minister, is perhaps the only European politician with intellectual substance,” he claimed.

The two politicians praised by Varoufakis are the two most important architects of the EU’s austerity policy, which has led to an unprecedented social disaster in Greece while securing untold billions in profits for the banks. His nauseating attempts at flattery illustrate Syriza’s grovelling attitude to the EU and European capitalism.

The Minsk truce: A hiatus in an escalating war

Peter Schwarz

The truce in Ukraine agreed by the German chancellor and the presidents of Russia, France and Ukraine after 16 hours of negotiations in Minsk is merely a hiatus in an escalating war. Although few details of the agreement have emerged, Western media outlets declared almost unanimously the inevitable failure of the truce—blaming the Russian president, as usual.

In reality, the Minsk agreement only came about because the Kiev regime, which came to power in a Western-backed putsch a year ago, urgently needs a respite.

The Ukrainian army has been weakened by desertions and a succession of defeats. Fewer and fewer young men are willing to fire on their countrymen and die for a regime that offers nothing but poverty and unemployment. The only forces willing to do battle are ultra-right voluntary forces, over which the Kiev regime has tenuous control.

Financially, Ukraine is bankrupt. Its economic output has slumped by 8 percent, and its foreign currency reserves have shrunk to $6.6 billion—barely enough to fund one month of imports. Immediately after the Minsk agreement was struck, the International Monetary Fund promised a $40 billion aid package to Petro Poroshenko's regime, which could implode under pressure from an impoverished, war-weary population on the one hand, and far-right forces in the state apparatus on the other.

Washington did everything it could to strengthen Poroshenko's hand before the Minsk talks. US sources advocated delivering weapons and training Ukrainian soldiers. US President Barack Obama even placed a personal call to Putin, threatening "rising costs" for Russia if it continued "its aggressive advances in Ukraine".

In Minsk, the Russian delegation made far-reaching concessions—from “full respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine,” to transferring control of the Russian border to Kiev. According to statements by Merkel and Hollande, Putin also pressed the separatists to agree to the deal. For his part, Poroshenko repeatedly threatened to repudiate the agreement.

What is occurring is not primarily an internal Ukrainian matter, nor a confrontation between Kiev and Moscow, but a far broader geopolitical conflict.

Washington financed the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine and in 2014 supported the coup against Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in order to isolate and crush Russia. For Washington, it is not just a matter of controlling Ukraine, but also of enforcing its supremacy in the Middle East, where Moscow supports the Syrian government against Washington, and in the Far East, where a strategic Russian-Chinese alliance looms.

For the same reasons, Washington is now stoking war in Ukraine. This is the purpose of the proposed arms shipments. They would not enable Kiev to win the war, but to engage Russia in "a drawn-out, larger war [that] makes it more vulnerable on other flanks, such as the restive North Caucasus and Central Asia," as military experts told the Financial Times. "There are just not enough Russian soldiers to fight a war of attrition in Ukraine,” one of them said.

Germany backed the coup in Kiev and the Poroshenko regime as part of its objective to ditch its post-war policy of military restraint and play a greater role in world politics, as announced by the German president Joachim Gauck early last year. By actively intervening in Ukraine, which German armies occupied in both the First and Second World Wars, the German ruling class is following in the footsteps of its traditional policy of expansion to the east.

Washington and Berlin initially acted in concord. They worked closely together to build up the Ukrainian opposition, prepare the coup of February 2014, and strengthen Poroshenko's regime. Recent US demands for military escalation, however, have set off alarm bells in Berlin.

While German imperialism remains intent on integrating Ukraine into the European Union and weakening Russia via economic sanctions, it wants to avoid an escalation of the war. This would have a devastating impact on Germany and all of Europe, which have close economic ties with Russia and depend on Russian energy supplies. A drawn-out war would inevitably spill over into other European countries, cause waves of refugees, and destabilize the entire European Union. This is why Merkel and Hollande campaigned in Minsk for a ceasefire.

At the Munich Security Conference, Merkel was fiercely criticized by US officials. In an editorial Thursday, the weekly Die Zeit complained: "The US's impatience is not directed at Putin but at Chancellor Merkel. Anyone who does not allow enough time for the EU's policy of sanctions to take effect is playing into the hands of the Kremlin. If there is to be an escalation, then let it be with the sanctions!"

The article concludes, "Of course the West must not become divided. For that reason this time the US must cede to Europe's leaders."

Washington is hardly likely to concede.

It was no coincidence that the First World War erupted in 1914 in the Balkans. The region was a crossroads for the overlapping interests of the imperialist powers, which went on to fight a four-year war costing millions of lives. Similarly, the crisis in Ukraine reveals the tensions and contradictions that threaten to plunge the world for a third time into a bloody holocaust that could end civilization.

Russia is the victim and not the perpetrator of imperialist aggression in Ukraine, but the Putin regime is absolutely incapable of countering the threat of war. Emerging from the dissolution of the Soviet Union, it embodies the most reactionary layers of Russian society. By fueling nationalism and threatening military retaliation, Moscow is risking global nuclear war.

The recent developments confirm the warning expressed by the International Committee of the Fourth International in July last year: “The danger of a new world war arises out of the fundamental contradictions of the capitalist system—between the development of a global economy and its division into antagonistic nation states, in which the private ownership of the means of production is rooted.”

The only social force that can counteract the danger of war is the international working class. It must be united on the basis of a socialist program and mobilized for the overthrow of capitalism, the root cause of militarism and war. This is the program fought for by the International Committee of the Fourth International and its sections, the Socialist Equality Parties.

Port owners lock out West Coast dock workers

Jerry White

The Pacific Maritime Association, which represents cargo carriers, terminal operators and stevedoring companies, has imposed a four-day lockout on 20,000 workers at 29 ports along the West Coast of the United States. The docks were closed Thursday and will be shut again on Saturday, Sunday and Monday, following a similar lockout last weekend.

The PMA took the punitive action—which will cost workers hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars in lost regular and overtime wages—in retaliation for an alleged slowdown by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU).

“PMA members have concluded that they will not conduct vessel operations on those dates, paying full shifts of ILWU workers such high rates for severely diminished productivity while the backlog of cargo at West Coast ports grows,” the PMA said in a statement.

“This is an effort by the employers to put economic pressure on our members and gain leverage in contract talks,” said ILWU President Robert McEllrath. “The union is standing by ready to negotiate, as we have been for the past several days.”

A ship waiting to be unloaded

The PMA canceled talks re-scheduled for Thursday and has not met with the ILWU since February 6. The old labor agreement expired last July 1, but the ILWU has ordered its members to continue working for nine months in hopes of reaching a federally-mediated agreement.

The pleas by the union for some accommodation on management’s terms have only been exploited by the highly profitable companies to go on the offensive. The PMA is reportedly offering a 2.8 percent raise in each year of a new five-year agreement. The association has also pointed to the 40 percent excise tax being imposed on so-called Cadillac health plans, under Obama’s Affordable Care Act, to press for an end to fully paid benefits, something won by dockworkers through generations of struggle.

Like other employers, the PMA is drawing a line in the sand against workers who are seeking to recoup income lost during the longest period of wage stagnation since the Great Depression. They are pressing for even more concessions even as corporate profits and stock markets soar in the sixth year of a so-called recovery.

The lockout occurs as the strike by oil workers nears the end of its second week. Lead bargainer Royal Dutch Shell walked out of talks this week, and negotiations have been suspended at least until February 18. Though the top five Big Oil companies (Shell, ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron and ConocoPhillips) made $90 billion in profits last year despite falling crude prices, they are resisting any demands for improved wages and working conditions.

The companies have responded to the partial strike by the United Steelworkers (USW)—involving only 5,200 of the 30,000 workers in the union—by cutting off the strikers’ health benefits and drawing in managers, contractors and other personnel to maintain production.

The employers are fully backed by the Obama administration and both big business parties. On Thursday, a bipartisan group of congressmen called for a “swift resolution” of the West Coast dispute.

“We believe this is the greatest threat our nation faces right now,” said US Representative Kurt Schrader (D-Oregon), using language normally associated with supposed terrorist threats. Schrader urged Obama—who was in the San Francisco Bay area for a cybersecurity summit Friday—to meet with the head of the PMA and the ILWU, the Los Angeles Timesreported.

In the event of a strike or lockout, the congressmen said, Obama should use the “threat to the national economy” to invoke the Taft-Hartley Act, as President George Bush did in 2002, to reopen the docks.

Port of Oakland

Echoing similar remarks made about the oil strike, White House spokesman Eric Schultz said Thursday that the president was closely monitoring the situation on the docks. He added, “We believe it should be resolved at the negotiating table.”

At this point Obama is relying on the ILWU and USW to contain and ultimately shut down these struggles before they become a catalyst for other sections of workers, including 139,000 GM, Ford and Chrysler workers whose contract expires this September.

If the unions proved incapable, however, Obama and both big business parties would use the repressive powers of the capitalist state—anti-terror laws, militarized police, national guard troops, the FBI, etc.—to try to suppress such a movement.

Since imposing deep pay and benefit cuts on auto workers during the 2009 restructuring of General Motors and Chrysler, the White House has made lowering wages and shifting health care and pension costs from corporations to workers the center of its economic policy.

In doing so, Obama has enjoyed the full collaboration of the United Auto Workers, USW, ILWU and other unions. Obama appointed USW International President Leo Gerard to his corporate competitiveness board in 2013 to cut labor costs in the manufacturing and energy sector.

The unions have done everything possible to suppress working class opposition. The slowdown by the ILWU and the limited walkout called by the USW, including small pickets with no attempt to mobilize broader sections of the working class, are largely ineffectual—and deliberately so.

The unions are allied to Obama and the Democratic Party, having spent decades collaborating with the employers to drive down the living standards of workers. The union executives are just as hostile to a movement by the working class as their corporate masters.

USW President Gerard and ILWU President Robert McEllrath are looking for some cosmetic concession, which they hope will be enough to appease workers and get them to accept yet another concessionary contract. The corporations have responded by calling the unions’ bluff and doubling down: locking out workers, cutting off health benefits and organizing strikebreaking operations, with the federal, state and local governments held in reserve.

At the same time there is a growing mood among workers that they must respond in kind and fight just as determinedly to recoup their years of losses. The re-emergence of such a sentiment is the result of the unprecedented levels of social inequality and the imperviousness of the government, which bails out banks, wages criminal wars and sanctions the looting of society by the corporate and financial elite.

For workers to find a way forward, they must break free from the grip of pro-company unions and build new organizations of struggle controlled by the rank-and-file, to mobilize oil and dockworkers in a powerful strike movement to reverse the erosion of living standards and working conditions. In the face of globally organized shipping and oil companies, workers must reject the nationalism of the unions and fight to unite with their international brothers in a common fight.

Above all, the fight to defend jobs and living standards, just like the fight against dictatorship and war, is a political struggle against Obama, both big business parties and the profit system they defend.

Education for Human Rights

 Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein

I am increasingly supportive of the proposition that education of any kind, if it is devoid of a strong universal human rights component, can be next to worthless when it should matter most: in crisis, when our world begins to unravel.

What good was it to humanity that Josef Mengele had advanced degrees in medicine and anthropology, given that he was capable of committing the most inhuman crimes? Eight of the 15 people who planned the Holocaust at Wannsee in 1942 held PhDs. They shone academically, and yet they were profoundly toxic to the world. Radovan Karadzić was a trained psychiatrist. Pol Pot studied radio electronics in Paris. Does this matter, when neither of them showed the smallest shred of ethics and understanding?

Of course we need schools to nurture curiosity and intelligence. Knowledge of complex geometry, or molecular cell biology, or Cartesian philosophy – or thousands of other facets of the great kaleidoscope of human brilliance – can be a precious thing. But when humanity topples on the cusp of real and vicious self-destruction, we don’t necessarily need people who are smart.

We need people who are kind.  People with PhD-level compassion. People who feel joy, and generosity, and love, and who have fully integrated the values that are essential to life in freedom and dignity. We need people with a strong moral compass.

Before every child on this planet turns 9, I believe he or she should acquire a foundational understanding of human rights. And I am far from being alone in this. Sixty six years ago, the authors of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – which is perhaps the most thoughtful and resonant international agreement of modern times – felt that human rights education would be so crucial that they wrote it into that great, foundational text. Article 26 reads “Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms.”

Moreover, all UN Member States have affirmed on many occasions their belief in the centrality of human rights education as a long-term strategy for the prevention of human rights violations and conflicts; for the promotion of equality and sustainable development; and to enhance people’s participation in decision-making processes. The World Programme for Human Rights Education has been set up to encourage stronger and more consistent national action. 
  
Even in kindergarten, children should learn – and experience – the fundamental human rights values of respect, equality and justice. From the earliest age, human rights education should be infused throughout the program of every school – in curricula and textbooks, policies, the training of teaching personnel, pedagogical methods and the overall learning environment.

Children need to learn what bigotry and chauvinism are, and the evil they can produce. They need to learn that blind obedience can be exploited by authority figures for wicked ends. They should also learn that they are not exceptional because of where they were born, how they look, what passport they carry, or the social class, caste or creed of their parents; they should learn that no-one is intrinsically superior to her or his fellow human beings.

Children can learn to recognise their own biases, and correct them. They can learn to redirect their own aggressive impulses and use non-violent means to resolve disputes. They can learn to be inspired by the courage of the pacifiers and by those who assist, not those who destroy. They can be guided by human rights education to make informed choices in life, to approach situations with critical and independent thought, and to empathise with other points of view.

Sadly, they must learn that the Zeppelin Field, the shadow of Buchenwald, the glint of the machete and the horror of life today in Syria, Iraq, South Sudan, Central African Republic and elsewhere – wherever we live, they are never that far away. These lessons are surely as fundamental to life on Earth as advanced calculus.

Today, at schools such as the International School of Geneva – and it should be true of every school, everywhere – children can learn that no human being can properly be defined by a single point of reference: not nationality, not ideology or religion. As the Indian economist Amartya Sen points out in his thought-provoking book Identity and Violence, every human being has many identities,  related to gender, nationality, language, location, class, religion, occupation, political beliefs and personal inclinations. As he says, “The best hope for peace in the world lies in the simple but far-reaching recognition that we all have many different associations and affiliations; we are not rigidly divided by a single categorization of hardened groups which confront each other.”

Every child should be able to grasp that this recognition of blurred and cross-cutting identities – of the wonderful diversity of individuals and cultures within our shared membership of humanity – is a source of tremendous enrichment. It is my experience that every child, after some discussion, is enthused by the famous Martin Luther King quote looking forward “to a day when people will not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

Children are fully able to grasp the implications of human rights. And they are able, too, to understand the power that human rights principles bestow on them. Every child can help to shape her or his universe: this is the lesson of that physically tiny and yet symbolically immensely powerful young woman, Malala, who has enriched the moral heritage of humanity. We do not have to accept the world as it is; indeed, we must not. We do not have to give in to the dark allure of hatred and violence: indeed, it is vital that we find the energy to resist it.

As we progress into this century, all of us will face moments of doubt, and even despair. We may well encounter terrible suffering. But the clarity of human rights values provides the only possible basis for solutions. And only with them can we answer Witold Pilecki’s simple question posed as he marched down that road near Auschwitz: Yes, indeed, we are all people. And it matters very much what happens to every single one of us.

May every educator become a human rights defender and every educational institution, a zone of tolerance and dignity. 

German Karstadt department store plans more layoffs and pay cuts

Dietmar Hennings

The German department store chain Karstadt is planning to implement up to 1,500 job cuts—15 percent of its workforce—by 2016, together with pay cuts and speedups, according to internal plans recently made public.

Just over half a year ago, Austrian real estate entrepreneur René Benko took over billionaire Nicolas Berggruen’s Karstadt group for the price of one euro. Benko’s firm, Signa Holding, then appointed Stephan Fanderl to head the company. Fanderl began by announcing the elimination of about 2,000 jobs and closure of six stores in order to make Karstadt profitable again.

Now the company’s supervisory board—which includes leading works council members and Ver.di trade union officials—is discussing a proposal stipulating detailed plans for imminent cuts and reorganisation measures.

The merchandise service centres in Dortmund and Bremen are to be closed this year. The service centre in Saarbrücken will meet the same fate in the next few years, and the one in Stuttgart will be relocated to Leonberg.

By 2016, only 8,170 full-time employees will be working in the 83 Karstadt stores, or 1,271 fewer than today. Several hundred jobs may also be eliminated at the chain’s administrative branch in Essen. Staff cuts resulting from store closures that have already been announced are not included in these figures.

The greatest bloodletting will involve sales department managers, whose numbers are to be reduced by half. This will allow a whole management level to be eliminated from the stores in order to effect a “greater and broader integration of the branches,” as the document puts it.

While hundreds will lose their jobs to reduce business costs, the remaining employees will also have to accept cuts in their Christmas and holiday pay.

The most severe measure, however, will be the division of Karstadt staff into three groups of workers: sales personnel, cashiers and employees in the newly created “product service teams.” Up to 1,100 of these workers will have the job of unpacking goods and stocking shelves. This division of labour will soon make it possible for Karstadt to pay these employees at the significantly lower rates prevalent in the logistics industry. Such wage reductions would amount on average to about €300 a month.

Responding to these concerns, Karstadt claimed it did not intend to pay these employees at the same rate as logistics workers. But employees grouped in the new “product service teams” will certainly be getting less money. General works council chairman Hellmut Patzelt has confirmed that this proposal is being discussed among representatives from Karstadt management, Ver.di and the works council.

Management justifies the assault on wages by citing Karstadt’s significantly lower “productivity” compared to its main competitors—especially the Kaufhof department stores. Karstadt’s “productivity” is allegedly 25 to 30 percent less than that of its competitors. According to the proposal, staff costs are to be cut by €64 million to €308 million per year, amounting to a reduction of 20 percent. In the future, personnel costs for all branches—with the exception of the company’s original store in Wismar, opened by Rudolph Karstadt in 1881—will not be permitted to exceed 14.5 percent of sales revenue.

The remaining employees will have to take on additional work. Going forward, one salesperson per floor will thus be considered sufficient for “basic staffing” throughout a store’s opening times, and fewer cash registers will be operated. Goods will, in future, be delivered directly to the department stores in line with the “just-in-time” retail model, which in turn will help to reduce storage costs.

Either the new product service team employees will continue to act as sales staff—renamed only for the sake of having their wages cut—or the new system has been deliberately designed to drive the entire company into bankruptcy. This would then clear the way for a break-up of the whole concern. In that case, Benko, a convicted criminal, would be able to concentrate on what really interests him: highly profitable inner-city real estate.

In 2012, Benko had already grabbed for himself the best of Karstadt, including the 28 Karstadt sports stores and three KaDeWe luxury department stores in Berlin, as well as the Alster building in Hamburg and the Oberpolling in Munich, which are also part of Karstadt property. In the meantime, Benko has profitably sold half of these two business divisions to Israeli diamond dealer Beny Steinmetz.

Benko can depend on assistance from Ver.di and the works council leadership, led by Hellmut Patzel, to implement his plans to cannibalise the company and squeeze concessions from the workforce. For more than 10 years, these functionaries have agreed to all the cuts and job dismantling plans put before them. Untold millions have been extorted from the workforce and a vast number of jobs destroyed. Investor Nicolas Berggruen, who picked clean the Karstadt group, was lauded by Ver.di as a social benefactor. His successor, Benko, was also welcomed by Ver.di with open arms.

The regional Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (WAZ) newspaper reports that the planned attacks are already underway. The paper claims to have learned “from people participating in the negotiations” that “talks involving management and employee representatives (have) already progressed quite far” behind the backs of the workforce. According to WAZ, “Among other things planned are semi-retirement deals, severance packages, a transfer company to retrain Karstadt employees, and programmes for compulsory retirement at age 63.”

The gradual dismantling of the long-standing company may be entering its final stage. Ver.di has unequivocally stated that it will continue to stand by Benko and future investors. Karstadt workers, in fighting to defend their jobs and wages, are thus confronted not only by management, but also the Ver.di service industry union.