New documents expose New Zealand surveillance of Solomon Islands

Tom Peters

Documents leaked by US National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden show that New Zealand’s intelligence agency, the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), used the NSA search tool XKeyscore to spy on high-ranking officials in the Solomon Islands government.

Previous leaks showed that the GCSB intercepts almost all Internet and telephone communications in several Pacific countries, including the Solomons. It also spies on China and other countries in Asia. The GCSB shares information with New Zealand’s partners in the Five Eyes alliance: the intelligence agencies of the US, Britain, Australia and Canada.

The latest revelations demonstrate yet again that the GCSB’s activities have nothing to do with preventing terrorist attacks or criminal activity, as the government repeatedly claims. Rather, the agency spies on governments, including those with which New Zealand officially has friendly relations, in order to safeguard the country’s imperialist interests in the Pacific.

According to a 2013 document, published on March 15 by the Herald on Sunday in collaboration with the web site the Intercept, the GCSB was monitoring the communications of all Solomon Islands cabinet ministers, as well as six senior public servants. These included the prime minister’s chief of staff Robert Iroga, special secretary to the prime minister Dr Philip Tagini, and cabinet secretary James Remobatu.

The agency also spied on Benjamin Afuga, a well-known anti-corruption campaigner, who has published documents leaked by whistleblowers within the Solomon Islands government.

The GCSB uses XKeyscore to sift through communications gathered by its Waihopai spy base. It also operated a secret “listening post” inside the New Zealand High Commission in Honiara, the Solomon Islands capital, between 2006 and 2013. This eavesdropping was a joint project with the Australian agency, the Defence Signals Directorate (now the Australian Signals Directorate).

A source told the Herald that “the monitoring was in response to the civil crisis in the Solomons at that time, and also the intelligence agencies were very interested in a ‘battle for hearts and minds’ occurring between China and Taiwan.” The Solomons is one of a handful of countries that has diplomatic relations with Taiwan rather than mainland China.

The impoverished country of just over half a million people in the southwest Pacific Ocean was a British colony until 1975. Since then, Australia and New Zealand, with the support of the United States, have maintained colonial-style control over the country.

Australia and New Zealand led a military-police intervention in Solomon Islands in 2003, known as the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI). While promoted as a “humanitarian” mission, RAMSI took control of key parts of the country’s governing apparatus, such as the country’s central bank, judicial system and police force. Foreign troops left the Solomons in 2013 but hundreds of Australian and New Zealand police officers remain.

New Zealand Foreign Minister Murray McCully brushed aside the latest spying revelations, declaring that “politicians in the Solomon Islands, as elsewhere in the Pacific, are smart enough not to believe what they read in New Zealand newspapers.” According to the Intercept, “A spokesman for Manasseh Sogavare, the recently elected prime minister of Solomon Islands, said the issue would be addressed through ‘diplomatic channels.’” This muted response reflects the local ruling elite’s subservience to Canberra and Wellington.

In recent years, the Pacific has become the focus major geo-strategic rivalry, fuelled by the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia”—a strategy to militarily encircle and prepare for war against China. New Zealand, Australia and the United States are all seeking to maintain their hegemony over the Pacific against China’s growing economic and diplomatic influence.

Those New Zealand opposition figures and media commentators who have criticised the GCSB’s actions have obscured the agency’s role in furthering New Zealand’s own imperialist interests. John Minto, a member of the Maori nationalist Mana Party, presented the spying purely as a US-dominated operation. He wrote on the Daily Blog that “the GCSB’s role is to conduct mass surveillance of our close neighbours in the Pacific for the US National Security Agency. It is a US operation in all but name.”

Pro-Labour Party columnist Chris Trotter wrote that the Snowden revelations demonstrated “New Zealand’s loss of diplomatic independence.” He denounced “Spanish, Dutch, British, French, German and American colonial projects” in the Pacific, and blamed New Zealand governments for “keeping the Pacific safe for imperialism.” But he said nothing about New Zealand colonialism—including the conquest of Samoa and Nauru in World War I and New Zealand’s role in the 2003 intervention in Solomon Islands.

New Zealand is a minor imperialist power, whose ruling elite has sought to exploit and politically dominate smaller countries in the Pacific for more than a century. To support its own predatory interests it has relied on an alliance with the major imperialist power of the day—first Britain and, after World War II, the US.

Trotter hailed the 1984-1990 Labour Party government of Prime Minister David Lange, for having “the courage to stand apart from the American-led Anglo-Saxon Empire” when he banned visits by nuclear-capable US warships. In fact, notwithstanding the anti-nuclear policy, the Lange government never left the Five Eyes alliance and oversaw the expansion of the GCSB, opening its Waihopai spy base in 1989.

The 1999-2008 Labour government further cemented ties with the US by sending troops to Afghanistan and Iraq, to assist in Washington’s drive to establish unchallenged domination over the resource-rich Middle East.

Following the latest spying revelations, Green Party spokesman Kennedy Graham presented the surveillance as a mistaken aberration. He declared: “Pacific countries are our friends and neighbours. Spying on friends is not the Kiwi way.” Former Green MP Keith Locke has launched what he calls an online “petition in the form of an apology to several Asian and Pacific Island nations for the GCSB spying on their government communications.”

Such statements are totally hypocritical. The Greens, like their Australian counterparts, supported Labour’s decision to send police and troops to the Solomons in 2003, on the grounds that it was necessary to restore “the rule of law.” Locke gave a speech in parliament backing the deployment. The party also supported New Zealand’s decade-long contribution to the war in Afghanistan, falsely depicted by Locke as a “peacekeeping” and “reconstruction” mission.

Germany: ThyssenKrupp workers force union-dominated works council to resign

Dietmar Henning

Workers supporting the opposition “List 5” have succeeded in their challenge to the result of the works council elections last year at steelmaker ThyssenKrupp Steel. The works council election must now be repeated. The existing works council, dominated by the IG Metall union, has announced it will resign on March 26.

In collaboration with IG Metall works council members, company representatives tried to intimidate the opposition List 5 before the works council elections last year. Just before the elections, several team leaders held individual meetings with those standing on the list. Supervisors threatened list candidates with disciplinary action and the loss of their jobs, allegedly because of a lawsuit against one of the members due to racist remarks. In fact, there has never been such a legal suit.

IG Metall works council member Wolfgang Klein then repeated the version of events provided by the team leader. He pulled out several pre-completed forms and demanded workers then sign up to indicate their withdrawal from List 5.

Four members of List 5, including list leader Fred Wans, then challenged the works council elections in the Duisburg Labour Court, which found in their favour. In response, both management and the IG Metall works council lodged an appeal to the higher court. Last Friday, the State Labour Court in Düsseldorf supported the decision of the Duisburg Labour Court and dismissed the appeal.

At the beginning of the trial, Uwe Milan, the presiding judge, did not hide his astonishment at the spectacle before him. On one side were representatives of the works council and management sitting at the same table, on the other side, Fred Wans.

The judge initially established the facts. He cited the testimony from the Duisburg Labour Court of a worker who had presented the exact sequence of events and content of the individual conversation with his team leader, Rainer Droese. The judge stressed that this testimony clearly established a connection between the threat of disciplinary consequences and withdrawal of candidates from the list.

In his legal assessment of the case, he cited paragraph 20 of the Industrial Constitution Act and quoted from section 2: “No one may influence the election of the works council by threats of harm or by granting or promising benefits.”

He pointed out that it did not matter whether the threat had actually occurred. What was crucial was the subjective perception of the person concerned, in this case, that disciplinary consequences were threatened if he maintained his candidacy, or he might even lose his job. The way the judge then discussed the actions of works council member Klein and his pre-prepared withdrawal statements made clear that he would reject the appeal.

The lawyers for the works council and ThyssenKrupp Steel then tried to raise fundamental doubts about the right to democratic works council elections independent of the corporations and the existing works council members. The ThyssenKrupp Steel lawyer went so far as to say that on the basis of “subjective perceptions any election can be retrospectively called into question”. The judge rejected this.

During a break in the proceedings, the representative of the ThyssenKrupp Steel Human Resources Department spoke of “legal action-itis”, as the election at the factory in Bochum was also being subjected to legal challenge.

ThyssenKrupp Steel group works council chairman William Segerath, who is also an executive board member of IG Metall, then expressed his own undemocratic position. It was “impossible” that every election could always be challenged, he said.

As a full-time works council member for three decades, Segerath is in and out of the company boardroom. He has sat on the ThyssenKrupp Steel supervisory board since 1999, and has been royally rewarded. According to the company’s Annual Report 2013/14, his supervisory board compensation increased to €105,000 from €99,000 the previous year. His union colleague Oliver Burkhard transferred from being North Rhine-Westphalia regional head of IG Metall two years ago to become ThyssenKrupp head of personnel, increasing his annual income to €2.3 million, according to the annual report.

During the proceedings, the ThyssenKrupp Steel lawyer took up Segerath’s argument and declared that the question of challenging elections would probably be better clarified before the Federal Labour Court. The hurdles for disputing a works council election were far too low, he said, and subjective perception could not be made the determining factor.

The judge also rejected this suggestion and did not agree to an appeal to the Federal Court. At the same time, however, he offered a compromise. He wanted to waive making any ruling if the works council, the company, and List 5 were all agreed. He told list leader Wans that otherwise the date of the court’s decision would leave the ThyssenKrupp Steel plant in Duisberg without a works council. Should all parties agree, and the works council resigns within a short period of time, the subject of the first proceedings before the Duisburg Labour Court could be dropped.

After consultation with some members of List 5, Wans declined the offer, saying that he insisted upon a decision by the court. Judge Milan was obviously surprised and displeased at this position. Wans agreed, however, to give the works council the opportunity to resign so that the company and its 13,400 employees were not without a works council in the period leading up to the election. He feared that the company might otherwise take decisions detrimental to the interests of workforce during this period.

After Segerath clearly reluctantly said the works council would resign on March 26, the judge postponed announcing his ruling until May 22. Elections will then be held at the beginning of June.

The decision of the Düsseldorf Regional Labour Court against the IG Metall works council and the company once again highlights the role played by the union. Over recent decades, the largest union in the world, as it likes to call itself, has become the intimate ally of management, not only at ThyssenKrupp Steel, but in every company.

It has long ceased to represent workers’ interests and acts instead as an advisory agency of the company in order to increase competitiveness and profitability. It praises itself as a “profit-oriented undertaking” and is hostile to the interests of the workers.

According to a report in Wirtschaftswoche, IG Metall has assets estimated at over €2 billion, which it increasingly invests in equity shares of companies.

Some 1,700 IG Metall representatives sit on company supervisory boards, where they are rewarded handsomely and merge seamlessly with management. About 50,000 works council members and 80,000 shop stewards exert strict control over workers in the workplace. Wage cuts and job losses are often prepared directly in union headquarters and then enforced against the workers, as was very clear at GM-Opel in Bochum.

Media worries whether UAW can contain auto workers’ expectations

Shannon Jones

The United Auto Workers bargaining convention opens in Detroit today with industry analysts and the news media expressing concern over whether the UAW will be able to contain the expectations for improved wages, benefits and working conditions of workers at General Motors, Ford and Chrysler. The four-year labor agreement covering 140,000 workers at the Detroit-based automakers expires on September 14.

The corporate-controlled news outlets go through the motion of presenting the upcoming negotiations as a struggle by the UAW against the auto companies. Everyone in the know, however, understands that the next six months will involve a struggle by the UAW to impose the dictates of the corporations against an increasingly restive workforce.

Chrysler workers at Warren Truck in suburban Detroit

The quadrennial UAW bargaining conventions are stage-managed affairs, attended by vetted union delegates and closed to the rank-and-file. Expressing the anti-worker alliance of the UAW with the Obama administration, among those invited to speak this year will be US Secretary of Labor Thomas Perez. Perez recently intervened on behalf of the White House to impose a pro-company agreement on 20,000 West Coast longshoremen in order to block a potential joint strike with oil workers.

Leading the proceedings will be UAW President Dennis Williams, who currently sits on the board of truck maker Navistar. As head of UAW Region 4 based in Chicago, Williams negotiated concessionary contracts with heavy equipment maker Caterpillar in 2004 and 2011 that ended company paid pensions, slashed health benefits and imposed a two-tier wage that set a precedent for the auto industry.

A March 21 article in the industry publication Automotive News, entitled “Navistar deal shows UAW president’s pragmatism,” praised Williams for being “well aware of the pressures that companies face from global competitors.” It noted that Williams had just agreed to a four-year deal that granted “lean-manufacturing rule changes to aid Navistar’s turnaround.”

At the center of the 2015 talks will be the two-tier wage system, which the UAW agreed to in 2007 and expanded in 2009 under terms dictated by the Obama administration. Under its provisions new hires receive wages that are little more than half the standard base wage of $28 an hour. Tens of thousands of young second tier workers have been brought into the auto plants so that 42 percent of Fiat Chrysler workers are now Tier 2.

With the auto companies making profits of $10 billion in 2014 and an estimated $76 billion since 2009, sentiment is strong among both younger and veteran workers for bringing the Tier 2 workers up to the top pay level. At the same time, among workers earning the top tier wage, who have seen their pay frozen for 10 years, the sentiment is for a pay raise as well as for restoration of annual cost-of-living increases.

In the face of anger among the rank-and-file, the UAW has been forced to make certain verbal adaptations to these sentiments, while maintaining its commitment to sustain the profits of the auto companies. Of further concern to the UAW, due to Michigan’s new right-to-work law, payment of union dues will be voluntary after the expiration of the current contract.

Reflecting the thinking of the financial elite, an article in the March 22 edition of Automotive News rejects the notion that the Tier 1 wage should be the standard for all workers. The piece headlined, “Is higher paying Tier 1 at risk in UAW Talks?” cites unnamed analysts and industry sources, who, the author writes, “say the outcome of negotiations could just as readily find the Tier 1 system in jeopardy rather than the Tier 2.” He further notes, “The Detroit 3 see the expansion of the entry-level wage system as key to achieving labor-cost parity with their Asian rivals eventually.”

The article cites the position of Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne, who has publicly opposed the two-tier wage and called for its elimination by phasing out the Tier 1 pay scale. Another analyst quoted by Automotive News said that eliminating the Tier 2 wage was not acceptable to the auto companies who, he said, are “eventually hoping to land at Tier 1.5”

With some 5 million workers facing contract expiration deadlines in 2015, big business and the Obama administration are relying on the UAW to hold the line on wages. The UAW auto contract has historically set a pattern for manufacturing wages. Indeed, according to the National Employment Law Project, a liberal advocacy group, the two-tier wage in auto set a precedent throughout manufacturing leading to sharply lower wages. According to their statistics, one quarter of auto parts workers now make less than $13 an hour, down from $18 an hour paid before the implementation of two-tier wages.

Auto workers contacted by the World Socialist Web Site were adamant that the two-tier wage had to be eliminated, but not at the expense of senior workers. Perez, a Tier 2 worker at Chrysler’s Warren Truck plant outside of Detroit, told the WSWS, “I think they are going to have to put a plan in place to bring up Tier 2 to the Tier 1 level.” He reacted to the threat to eliminate the top-tier wage. “It doesn’t go. It is not fair that the top tier has not had a raise in 10 years.”

Earl, a veteran Tier 1 worker, also at Warren Truck, said he favored raising the wages of Tier 2 workers, but not at the expense of Tier 1. “They are not going to bring down the top tier. If they try it there would be strike action right there.”

An article in the March 22 Wall Street Journal noted the anger in the plants over the two-tier wage. Titled “UAW’s ranks press to close pay gap,” it warned the UAW against bending to the pressure for significant improvements. Saying that UAW President Williams was “in a tough spot,” the piece continues, “If he doesn’t take a hard line, his base will be demoralized. If he commits to abolishing the tiers, he paints himself into a corner before negotiating with the Big Three executives uninterested in cost increases.”

It concludes with this admonition, “Regardless of the solution, any wage increases won this year will need to be paid back with reduced pension benefits or higher health costs for UAW members in the years to come. Explaining that reality for the delegates gathered in Detroit may be the most important item on Mr. William’s agenda.”

Auto workers should be forewarned that the UAW is preparing to betray their aspirations for improvements in their working conditions and living standards. The UAW represents not the interests of workers, but of the well-paid executives that staff its offices. Over the past 35 years the UAW has presided over the decimation of the jobs, wages and benefits of auto workers, leaving a trail of misery and ruin in its wake.

The fight to defend jobs, wages and living standards can only be waged successfully if workers build new organs of industrial struggle. This requires not only a break with the UAW, but rejection of its program of economic nationalism, support for the Democrats and the capitalist profit system.

USW imposes sellout, seeks to wind down remaining oil strikes

Jerry White

Thousands of oil workers remain on strike at BP, Marathon, LyondellBasell and Tesoro refineries and petro-chemical plants in six states as the United Steelworkers (USW) union seeks to impose its pro-company deal on workers throughout the United States and isolate those still resisting.

Voting on local contracts at refineries owned by San Antonio-based Tesoro refineries in the states of California and Washington began Sunday and is scheduled to continue this week. Workers were scheduled to return to work this week at three Motiva Enterprises refineries in Texas and Louisiana, which are co-owned by Shell and Saudi-based Aramco. Striking hourly employees at Shell's refinery in Deer Park, Texas, approved a new contract last Thursday and are expected to return to work within two weeks.

The pattern agreement the USW reached with Shell on March 13 contains no commitments from the oil companies to address dangerously high levels of mandatory overtime and the practice of replacing full-time unionized maintenance workers with contractors who have no guaranteed hours or health care and pension benefits. It also includes a meager 12 percent pay raise over four years, barely keeping up with inflation, and allows the oil companies—the top five of whom made $90 billion last year—to force workers to pay one-fifth of their health care costs.

The vote to return to work at several locations is not an endorsement of this sellout, which is an insult to the workers who have sacrificed for nearly two months. Instead, many workers recognize the USW has led them into an impasse and that continuing the strike under the direction of the USW, would be fruitless.

From the beginning, the USW called out only a fraction of the 30,000 workers it organizes in the industry, and then worked with management to starve striking workers into submission. The union offered no cash benefits from its $350 million strike fund, and forced workers to beg the union to pay bills, or to apply for welfare.

The major concern of the USW was to prevent the strike from escalating into a political confrontation with the Obama administration, with which the USW is closely allied.

During the vote by striking workers at the Tesoro Carson refinery near Los Angeles on Sunday, hundreds of workers took leaflets from supporters of the Socialist Equality Party, which called for a rejection of the sellout deal and a general strike by all oil workers despite efforts by USW Local 675 officials to intimidate them.

One worker told campaigners, “I voted against this contract. We are unhappy, but after seven weeks on the picket line, with the union not paying benefits, a lot of guys were frustrated and just wanted to get back to work. They kind of feel like we were striking for nothing.”

Several officials came out of the union hall and sought unsuccessfully to prevent workers from taking the leaflets. A leading figure in USW Local 675 is secretary-treasurer Dave Campbell, a supposed “left” union leader who has close ties to Democratic Party officials, including Black Congressional Caucus member Maxine Waters. Campbell played the central role in blocking workers at the ExxonMobil refinery in nearby Torrance, California from defying the USW and joining the strike after a February 18 explosion at the plant.

Well aware that the USW will do nothing to defend the workers remaining on strike, the corporations are taking a hard line in local talks at BP-operated plants in Whiting, Indiana and Toledo, Ohio, LyondellBasell Industries’ Houston refinery and Marathon Petroleum Corporation’s Galveston Bay, Texas, and Catlettsburg, Kentucky, refineries.

At the Catlettsburg refinery, a federal mediator joined the talks between the USW and Marathon last week.

USW officials at the BP refinery in Indiana are seeking to posture as defenders of workers’ “collective bargaining rights,” with Local 7-1 president Dave Danko telling the Chicago Tribune the oil company’s strategy is “right out of Gov. (Scott) Walker's playbook in Wisconsin.”

In fact, Danko, like the rest of the USW does not give a hoot about the rights of oil workers. While fully endorsing the sellout agreement with Shell, Local 7-1 officials have tried to prevent WSWS reporters from discussing the expansion of the strike with workers at the refinery, where 1,100 are on strike. “Collective bargaining” for USW local officials, like the USW International, only means a seat at the table and more positions on labor-management committees to collaborate in the undermining of workers’ wages and work conditions, while maintaining a minimal number of dues paying members.

Doug Sparkman, BP’s chief operating officer, Fuels North America, wrote in an email to employees, “We are proposing collective bargaining agreements for Whiting and Toledo that ensure safe, sustainable and competitive operations, continue to fairly compensate employees and allow management the flexibility to make necessary changes during the life of the agreement…”

Danko told the Tribune, “We will continue to work with BP to get back to work. I'm confident at some point we'll agree.”

New defeat for Socialist Party as neo-fascists rise in French local elections

Antoine Lerougetel

The 21.85 percent poll for the ruling Socialist Party (PS) in the first round of France’s departmental elections on Sunday is a stinging rebuke to the PS government of President François Hollande and its policies of austerity and war. The 25.19 percent poll for the neo-fascist National Front (FN) of Marine Le Pen, like the 50.17 percent abstention rate, testify to the bankruptcy of the French political establishment and its alienation from broad masses of working people.

The Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) of former conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy, allied to the centre-right Union of Democrats and Independents (UDI), took first place with 29.4 percent of the vote. This dashed the FN’s hope of again leading after the first round, as it did in municipal and European elections last year. The total vote of the UMP and associated conservative parties was 36 percent.

Through its participation in local elections, however, the FN has achieved its aim of establishing itself throughout France, including in many areas where it had no presence previously. The FN is in the lead in 43 of the 98 departments up for election and will be present in the second round in 1,100 of France’s 2054 cantons—the administrative level below the departments. It can hope to enjoy a majority of seats in departmental councils in the Vaucluse, Gard, and Aisne departments, and even in one former PS stronghold, the Pas-de-Calais.

The vote of the PS combined with its longstanding political satellites, such as the Stalinist French Communist Party (PCF), the Greens, and the Left Party of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, was 36 percent, as well. It testifies to the deep unpopularity of the PS and of Hollande personally that these longstanding defenders of order felt compelled to run independently from the PS in certain areas.

Elsewhere, however, they ran together with the PS, belying the pretense that they represent an alternative to the PS government—a pretense which has increasingly little influence over working people, which are deeply disillusioned not only with the PS but with its allies.

The second round of elections in the cantons, to determine the make-up of the departmental councils, will take place on Sunday. PS chairman Cambadélis has called for unity with the UMP to “block the FN everywhere,” as did the national secretary of the PCF, Pierre Laurent.

Each canton inside the department elects to the departmental council a pair made up of a man and woman, who can be of two different allied parties. A pair is directly elected on the first round if it receives at least 50 percent of the vote. Otherwise, the two pairs with the highest number of votes go forward to the runoff, together with any other pairs that have received votes amounting to 12.5 percent of the total electorate. This means that they need 25 percent of the vote to advance if only 50 percent of voters actually vote.

On this basis, the PS was eliminated in 524 cantons, over one quarter of the total. It stands to only win control of some 20 of the 61 departments it currently administers and lose some 15 of its historical strongholds—including the Nord, the Pas de Calais, and Seine-et-Marne.

The incoming departmental councils, whatever their political complexion, are set to impose massive cuts in the coming period. Due to budget cuts imposed by the PS at the national level, some €11 billion (US$12 billion) of state subsidies to local government are to be eliminated. This will have a devastating effect on infrastructure and health care, including layoffs of thousands of construction and medical workers.

The outcome of the election reflects the class gulf separating the workers from the PS and its political and trade union satellites. These forces have worked constantly to suppress mass opposition in the working class to the austerity agenda of the PS and the European Union (EU), including mass sackings and tens of billions of euros of cuts to social spending. It is this political suppression of the working class that allows the FN to grow by posing as the only oppositional force, with demagogic criticisms of the PS’ record and appeals to anti-immigrant chauvinism.

PS officials sought to put the best face on the defeat by claiming they were relieved by the FN’s failure to come in first—that is, by the first-place finish of the conservative UMP.

“The far right is not the leading political organization in France ... I am proud of that, because I personally fought hard for it,” Valls declared. His office informed the media that he lit a cigar to celebrate the election results, upon hearing them.

Valls’ cry of victory amid a catastrophe for his party is absurd, and the claim that he has been carrying out a political struggle against the FN is a fraud. The entire political establishment in France—the UMP, which Valls sees as a barrier to the FN, but also the PS and the pseudo-left parties—are promoting ever more right-wing, law-and-order and authoritarian conceptions.

In the final days of the election campaign, Sarkozy made a sharp turn to the right, adopting racist themes favoured by the FN. In line with the FN’s call for “national preference,” he called for banning substitute meals respecting children’s religious beliefs, such as kosher or halal recipes, and called for a crackdown on immigration.

An unpopular president voted out of office after one term in 2012, Sarkozy is straining to hold together the UMP’s feuding factions, many of which favor alliances with the FN.

As for the PS, it has endorsed bans on the burqa and on Muslim veils in public schools and carried out mass ethnic deportations of the Roma, thus helping legitimize the FN, with the support of the PCF and the pseudo-left parties. These forces are now seeking to minimize the electoral disaster facing the PS by rallying around it.

Benoît Hamon, a leader of the “rebel” (frondeur) faction of the PS that at times postures as an opponent of austerity, advised the government: “Unite the left.”

Patrick Apel-Muller in the Stalinist daily L’Humanité said that the PS had made “attractive promises which have been sadly betrayed,” and encouraged his readers to wait for a shift in the PS’ policies, since “the ruling duo [Hollande and Valls] cannot … turn a deaf ear to the message.”

In fact, Valls has arrogantly insisted that the PS will continue with its unpopular policies, “whatever the outcome of the second round next Sunday.”

Tsipras in Berlin: Germany and Greece pledge “cooperation” in imposing austerity

Johannes Stern

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras made his first official trip to Germany yesterday. As is customary for such visits, Tsipras was received with full military honors in Berlin. Together with Chancellor Angela Merkel, he reviewed an honor guard from the Bundeswehr (Armed Forces). Subsequently, the two held a joint press conference, followed by an evening dinner.

An uninformed observer of the ceremony would have had difficulty ascertaining that before Tsipras’s arrival there had been a serious conflict between the German government and the regime in Athens headed by Syriza. Tsipras’ inaugural visit took place in a seemingly normal, almost friendly atmosphere. At a joint press conference on Monday evening, both leaders struck a conciliatory note and invoked the spirit of mutual cooperation.

Tsipras stressed that just like his social democratic and conservative predecessors, he was ready to continue the austerity measures in close cooperation with the EU and the German government. “We need to better understand ourselves,” said Tsipras. “There is no other way to overcome the existing difficulties than dialogue.” His government would adhere to all existing contracts and make the necessary structural reforms. The joint meeting with Merkel could prove “fruitful.”

For her part, Merkel stressed the need for “sincere collaboration” in the “spirit of cooperation.” Both countries are part of the European Union and NATO, and thus have a major responsibility for “establishing peace in Europe” and its future. The Greek prime minister was “very welcome” in Berlin.

Ahead of the meeting, many German politicians and media commentators who had sharply criticized the Greek government in recent days had already begun to tone down their verbal assaults. Even Bild, the newspaper that in recent months has led the witch-hunt against Greece and “the Greeks,” ran a headline, “Welcome to Germany, Herr Tsipras!” and listed 50 reasons why “we like Greece.”

Over the weekend, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and his Greek counterpart Nikos Kotzias also emphasized the cooperation between Germany and Greece. “We must not allow the undoubtedly large and difficult issues that we must resolve together in Europe erode the strong foundation of German-Greek relations,” Steinmeier said after a dinner with Kotzias at the foreign ministry.

Kotzias emphasized in comments to Deutsche Welle, “There is a long-term friendship and common interests. The most important thing is that we better understand each other, that we break down the stereotypes that exist on both sides.”

There are two main reasons for the ostentatious show of cooperation between Berlin and Athens. First, Syriza has completely capitulated to the European Union and the German government over the past several weeks, making clear that it will not only continue the austerity measures dictated by the “troika” (European Union, International Monetary Fund, European Central Bank) but will intensify them.

At a high level meeting with European Union political heavyweights last Thursday in Brussels, Tsipras personally pledged to enforce all cuts as agreed and promised a new austerity list. According to media reports, the list being prepared contains far-reaching attacks on the working class.

Spiegel Online wrote that “the hated privatization programme of the previous government, which Tsipras’s government had stopped, will be resumed.” Among other things, it provides for the Frankfurt airport operator Fraport to take over 14 regional Greek airports as previously agreed. However, at other important transport facilities, including the Port of Thessaloniki, the Greek government would “only” sell up to a 49 percent share.

At the same time, Syriza wants to raise the retirement age and introduce retirement at 67, following the German model. In the future, only those who have worked for at least 40 years will be able to receive a pension at 62. For anyone retiring earlier, there will be sharp cuts in pensions.

In addition, and jointly developed with the OECD, there will be a “tool kit” for structural reforms, a synonym for further liberalization of the Greek economy and labor market. Officially, Syriza wants to break up monopolies and fight corruption in public procurement. In plain English, this means creating better conditions for international financial capital to exploit Greek workers and the resources of the country.

The second reason for the rediscovered German-Greek “friendship” is of a geopolitical nature. Brussels, Washington, Berlin and Athens are of the opinion that a Grexit (Greek exit from the euro) must be avoided at all costs.

In an interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung early last week, the president of the European Council, Donald Tusk, invoked EU unity and the alliance with the United States. “We must prevent a Greek departure. It would certainly be a catastrophe. ... We now need to focus and understand that it’s not just about money but about a geopolitical context.”

He asked, “Can you imagine Europe without Greece? With the crisis in Libya, the fragile situation in the Balkans, Moldova, Transnistria, Cyprus. And then a dramatic Greek departure too?” Then he warned, “The consequences for Europe would not only be financial. A withdrawal of Greece would be the most dramatic chapter in the history of the European Union.”

Last week, the head of the European Department at the US State Department, Victoria Nuland, travelled to Greece to push for an agreement between Athens and the troika. According to a report by the Deutsche Presse Agentur, Washington wanted a “quick solution,” since Greece’s exit from the euro could have “serious consequences for the southeastern flank of NATO.”

Nuland is one of the hawks of US foreign policy who want to increase pressure on Russia militarily in the Ukraine crisis. They regard the unity of the EU and NATO under American leadership as a precondition for this.

Despite German-American tensions regarding the type of joint action against Russia, at least for the time being the German ruling class is generally of the opinion that a Grexit must be prevented.

While Tsipras and Merkel met in Berlin, and invoked European unity, during a brief visit in Slovakia Steinmeier warned, “We have had a much too long discussion about a Greek exit from the euro. Now we need to talk seriously again.” He warned that a failure of the Greek bailout would be felt by “the whole world,” and would undermine the “credibility” of the EU.

The German bourgeoisie is increasingly openly pursuing the aim of uniting the continent under its leadership. Only last Friday at a meeting in Brussels of the transatlantic think tank German Marshall Fund, Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen supported the establishment of a European army.

Despite Tsipras’s subservience, the international financial markets are keeping up the economic pressure on Greece in order to ensure the unity of the EU on an extremely reactionary militarist and anti-working class basis. For example, citing internal calculations of the EU Commission, the Sunday edition of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported that the Greek government only has sufficient liquidity to pay salaries and to meet the claims of creditors in the financial markets until April 8. Tsipras only had a “good two weeks to coordinate a complete list of reforms with donors,” the newspaper declared.

Behind the tensions between Obama and Netanyahu

Bill Van Auken

One week after the Israeli election victory of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud Party, tensions between Washington and Tel Aviv remain at a level unseen in decades.

President Barack Obama on Sunday gave a videotaped interview to the Huffington Post in which he recounted a mealymouthed rebuke that he said he had delivered to Netanyahu over his 11th-hour appeals to the most reactionary and racist sections of the Israeli electorate to win the seats needed to secure his reelection.

On the eve of the vote, the Israeli prime minister issued a clear statement that as long as he remained in office, there would be no Palestinian state. Netanyahu declared that giving up Israeli-occupied territories would amount to “simply yielding territory for radical Islamic terrorist attacks against Israel.” Asked whether that meant there would be no Palestinian state as long as he remained Israel’s premier, he replied, “Indeed.”

On election day itself, in an openly racist appeal for right-wing Zionists to vote for Likud, Netanyahu warned: “The right-wing government is in danger. Arab voters are heading to the polling stations in droves. Left-wing NGOs are bringing them in buses.”

In his interview, Obama said he had told the Israeli prime minister in a telephone conversation the day before: “...we continue to believe that a two-state solution is the only way for the long-term security of Israel, if it wants to stay both a Jewish state and democratic. And I indicated to him that given his statements prior to the election, it is going to be hard to find a path where people are seriously believing that negotiations are possible.”

The US president’s problem is that in his desperate bid for a fourth term in office, Netanyahu clearly proclaimed the real policies of his government and the entire ruling Zionist establishment in Israel, exposing the so-called “peace process” brokered by Washington as a cynical fraud.

For over two decades, since the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, Washington, Tel Aviv and the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank town of Ramallah have all promoted the notion that a “two-state solution” could be achieved at the negotiating table. During this period, the Israeli regime has steadily created new “facts on the ground,” doubling the number of Zionist settlers in the occupied West Bank to over 300,000, while leaving 2.7 million Palestinians trapped in bits of discontiguous territory divided one from the other by Israeli settlements, checkpoints, military outposts, walls and security roads.

Another 1.7 million are imprisoned within the Gaza Strip, blockaded by both Israel and Egypt and subjected to continuous military assaults such as the criminal Israeli siege of last summer that claimed the lives of over 2,300 men, women and children.

These predations have underscored the reactionary, antidemocratic character of any so-called Palestinian “state” that might emerge under the aegis of US imperialism, the Zionist ruling elite and the Palestinian bourgeoisie, should that ever come to pass. It would be an impoverished, discontinuous, demilitarized entity, essentially a prison for the Palestinian masses.

Under these conditions, the pretense that the so-called “peace talks” provided a way out for the Palestinian people was not merely a fiction, but an obscenity. Yet the pretense served a useful purpose for all those involved.

For Israel, it provided a mask for the predatory policies it pursued in effectively annexing ever-greater portions of the territories it seized in the 1967 war. For the Palestinian Authority, it served as a rationale for the Palestine Liberation Organization’s transformation into a client regime of US imperialism and an auxiliary police force for the Israeli occupation, securing in the bargain foreign aid and loans that flowed into the pockets of the corrupt leadership around PA President Mahmoud Abbas.

For Washington, the “peace process” allowed it to posture as a neutral party attempting to secure a just settlement for both Israel and the Palestinians, a lie seen as essential to its attempt to secure the collaboration of Arab states in US imperialism’s unending wars of aggression in the region.

Everyone—most of all the Palestinians—knew that the process was a fraud, but those directly involved were not supposed to say so publicly. In his explicit rejection of a Palestinian state, Netanyahu has cut across US interests in the region.

This comes on top of his March 3 anti-Iranian tirade to the US Congress, which was organized in league with the Republican Party leadership in an attempt to sabotage any negotiated agreement on Tehran’s nuclear program. The Israeli regime remains intent on using the spurious claims of a nuclear threat from Iran to draw the US into a war for regime change in order to further Israel’s own strategy of exercising unassailable dominance over the countries of the region.

This runs counter to the current policy pursued by the Obama administration, which aims at reaching at least a temporary accommodation with Tehran as Washington prepares for new military confrontations around the globe.

While Obama vowed that, his disagreements with Netanyahu notwithstanding, “our military and intelligence cooperation to keep the Israeli people safe continues,” the recent clashes underscore the crises gripping both US imperialism and its obstreperous Zionist client state. Both seek a way out of their respective crises by military means, but their immediate timetables and agendas are significantly at odds.

For both the Palestinian and Israeli working class, the reelection of Netanyahu on a platform of unconcealed Zionist aggression and reaction only underscores the absence of any way forward based on the program of nationalism.

For Jewish workers in Israel, Zionism is a trap, subordinating their interests to those of a narrow oligarchy of capitalist billionaires and multimillionaires, while the ruling establishment seeks to divert the immense tensions generated by poverty, rising prices, austerity cutbacks and record inequality into ever more dangerous military provocations against the Palestinian people, the surrounding Arab countries and beyond.

For Palestinians, the protracted fraud of the “peace process” has laid bare the dead end of Palestinian nationalism and all of its variants, from Fatah to Hamas, all of which articulate the interests not of the working masses, but of rival sections of the Arab bourgeoisie.

Nowhere is the necessity for the international unity of the working class posed more sharply than in the Middle East. There is no way out of the present impasse and the threat of ever bloodier catastrophes outside of Arab and Jewish workers uniting against imperialism and its Zionist and Arab bourgeois agents in a common struggle for the United Socialist States of the Middle East.

Jump Out Of The Pot!

William T. Hathaway

"I'm getting hot," croaked the frog as he floated in a pot of water from which steam was beginning to rise.

"Me too," croaked the other frog as she paddled listlessly. "This water used to be warm. Now it's too hot."

"Oh well...nothing we can do about it. Maybe it'll get better."

"Let's enjoy what we can," she croaked. "We'll listen to the music and watch the pictures on the ceiling that keep changing. They're pretty."

"OK...I'm feeling dreamy."

As the water simmered, the frogs slipped into a stupor; they were unconscious as they began to boil.

Like the frogs, we are provided with pictures, music, and other pleasures to distract us from the worsening conditions of our lives and render us incapable of changing them. These entertainments lull us with subjective emotions that offer solace and escape from our objective reality. They range from the crude to the refined, but all are characterized by glorifying the inner life of the supposedly sovereign individual. This esthetic trend, part of the romantic movement, began with the ascendency of capitalism and expressed the self-oriented mentality of the rising bourgeoisie. The new rulers supported institutions and art that reflected their personalities: extreme individuality that rejected all fetters and pursued its desires regardless of the consequences for others. In exalting the superior autonomous spirit over the mediocre masses, it served to isolate the growing socialist movement. By the mid 19th century this had trickled down to become a widespread mentality of the educated population, cutting them off from the working class. Marx summed it up: "The ruling ideology is always the ideology of the rulers."

As the crises of capitalism deepened in the 20th century, the emphasis on subjectivity increased, especially in the realms of art and philosophy. The inner world, the joys and pains of our private emotions, was portrayed as the highest and most authentic topic for art. The artist became the new priest, guiding us to sublime planes of existence. This prevailing esthetic encouraged us to leave the crass social reality behind and become an aristocrat of the spirit. It reinforced passivity and turned the personal life into a refuge from and a substitute for the public life. This trend has now reached its effete endstage in postmodernism with its deconstruction of reality into conceptual narratives which have only subjective meanings.

We are saturated with art and entertainment that tell us to shun the social deterioration surrounding us and focus instead on romance, violence, and the shimmers of our interior zones, while outside the heat is gradually turned up and the conditions of our lives degraded. Our eyes are captivated by images on electronic screens and our minds captivated by hyper-stimulated feelings flooding our mental screen. We are losing the capacity for clear thinking and objective analysis, so effective action is slipping from our grasp. We're on our way to becoming frog soup.

We are in desperate need of an esthetic that will enable us to recognize our calamitous situation, identify the causes of it, and act to change it. Once we can understand how destructive capitalism really is, the necessity of socialism will be obvious.

Some works of art do criticize the system, protest it, and urge reforms, but very few challenge it fundamentally. Instead they seek to improve it. But this gradual ameliorative approach has been tried for over a century now and has yielded only superficial changes. Capitalism can't be fixed from the inside; it is inherently savage and must be replaced.

The qualities of a radical esthetic are described by David Walsh, arts editor of the World Socialist Web Site: "True art in the modern world necessarily must be revolutionary. It is impossible to produce a significant work of art without taking a rejection of the injustice and irrationality of modern life as a starting point. Further, this rejection must be informed by a revolutionary political perspective if it is not to lapse into hopelessly idealistic clichés."

It is time to move beyond criticism, protest, and reform and instead build a mass movement that can eventually overthrow the government and the corporations it serves. This impulse inspired my new novel, Lila, the Revolutionary, a fable for adults about an eight-year-old girl -- smart, charming, and tough as can be -- who sparks a world revolution for social justice. She not only jumps out of the pot but shows everyone else how to do it. No one ever told her she couldn't end poverty and inequality, so she doesn't doubt that she can Just Do It! Starting with the Nike shoe factory where she works. Like the boy in "The Emperor's New Clothes," Lila can see the reality that adults are blind to. And she's not shy about pointing it out. The book is a call to action: If Lila can do it, so can we. Her story convinces us that Yes, a better world is possible, and we're the ones to create it.

After her family are evicted from their land and have to take subsistence jobs in the city, Lila inspires her fellow workers to a strike that forces the factory owners to negotiate. A selection:

The negotiating room in the city hall was high ceilinged with gold chandeliers and big windows. On one wall were pictures of the men who had been mayors of the city, the new ones photos and the old one paintings going back hundreds of years. On the other wall was an aerial photo-mural of the city showing all the skyscrapers but none of the poverty.

The worker reps sat on the photo-mural side of the long, polished-wood table and the owner reps on the pictures-of-mayors side. The owners looked like the mayors, men in dark suits. A woman in a white uniform brought glasses of orange juice (too sour, Lila thought) and cookies (not sweet enough). On Lila's chair was a cushion that helped her not to feel so little. Her feet dangled in the air, but she was used to that. She was wearing the special blouse her mother had made and embroidered for her birthday, and her dark hair was pulled away from her face with a red barrette.

The owners' reps smiled condescendingly at her, and everyone introduced themselves. Lila said, "I'm Lila. I work in the shoe factory."

The rep of the shoe factory, plump and balding, said with an indulgent grin, "I've heard very good reports about your academic performance at our school and also about your diligence during the business practicum."

"I lace shoes and put them in boxes."

"Yes, and you do it very well. I'm sure you're learning a lot." He leaned back in his chair and smiled.

"Are you the owner of the factory?" she asked.

"No, Lila. There are a lot of misconceptions about this idea of owners. There is no one owner. Our factory...and I think I can speak for the other factories too" -- he glanced around at his colleagues, who nodded -- "is owned by thousands of stockholders. They each own shares in it. A share is a little part of the company, and that's what they own, not the company itself. And it's democratic because everyone who owns a share can vote at the meetings."

"Do you own shares?"

"Yes, but I work there too. I'm a worker like you."

"How many shares do you own?"

He glanced away, then back at her and spoke with an index finger raised in gentle admonishment. "That's my private concern, Lila. We're not here to discuss private matters. We're here to discuss how we can make your life better. Let's talk about that."

He turned away from Lila and said to the socialist woman, "If you get the people back to work, we're prepared to give them a five percent raise. Plus if they're injured on the job, we'll pay half their wages until our doctor says they can go back to work. As you can see, this is a very generous offer, and we're not open to a lot of haggling about it."

With that, the haggling began. The socialist woman became the main negotiator for the workers, demanding a ten percent raise, time-and-a-half for overtime, full wages when injured, better ventilation and fire safety, and a retirement plan. The shoe factory manager did most of the arguing for the owners, explaining why such demands were economically impossible given the global competitive environment.

The lady in the white uniform brought tea and coffee and milk for Lila. "We used to have a cow," she told the lady. "I could milk it. But these men took it away from us. Now they give me a glass of milk back. And the cookies aren't very good." The lady walked quickly away.

After two hours the owners had agreed to six percent higher wages. They showed a PowerPoint about how higher labor costs would force them to close the factories here and move to another country. "There are lots of people in the world who would love to work for what you're getting paid," the leader stated sternly.

"Why are we talking about pay?" Lila asked. "I like what you said about shares. The company is divided up into shares, and people own those. How many shares are there?"

"Well, Lila," the leader replied, "it varies from company to company, but usually very many shares."

"OK, we take all the shares and divide them up among all the people who work there, same for everybody. Then the money the company makes gets divided up the same way. You don't have to pay us anything. We're all in it together."

"But, Lila, those shares already belong to someone else," the leader explained patiently. "You can't just take them away."

"Who do they belong to?"

"They belong to people all over the world."

"If they're all over the world, how can they work in the factory?"

"They don't work in the factory. They buy the shares. The company needs money, so people give the company money and get the shares in return."

"So they own part of the company but they don't work," Lila said.

"Well, some of them also work in the company," the leader explained.

"You said you work and you own shares."

"Yes."

"Then that's how it's going to be for all of us. We all work and we all own shares. You wouldn't tell me how many you own, but from now on everybody has the same."

He drummed his fingers lightly on the table, patience waning. "I already told you many shares are owned by people all over the world. You can't just take them away. They're not going to give them to you."

"Doesn't matter. We don't need them. We cancel all those shares and make new ones. Only people who work own the company."

"How old are you, Lila?"

"I'm eight."

"Well, Lila, even an eight-year-old should know you can't just cancel their shares. That would be stealing. You can't steal from people."

"Well, even an adult should know that it's not stealing. It's just taking back what they took from us. Our work makes the shoes and the clothes worth a lot of money, but we get only a little of that. Most of it goes to the owners. They stole it, they stole the money we made. Now we take their shares. We're the owners, so we divide it up equally."

The leader leaned towards her with a sneer. "We'll see about that, little lady." He turned to the socialist woman. "Now I see why you brought this child with you. It's a clever tactic, I must say. You're having her throw up an ideological smokescreen to distract us from the issues at hand. If you want a settlement, you better call her off and get down to the business of negotiating. We're all busy people, and we don't have time for these games."

"OK, brass tacks," the socialist said. "Six percent is not enough. There has to be overtime pay. We accept the medical insurance, and we'll wait on the pension plan until next year. But we want worker representation on the board of directors."

He sighed with relief. "Your demands are outrageous, but they're not insane like the girl's. We can talk about that." He turned to the lady in the white uniform: "Take Lila out and let her choose any movie in town she wants to see." He gave Lila a forced smile. "Any movie you want. And ice cream...whatever you want to eat."

"We'll do that later," Lila said. "We'll all have a party. I have some good ideas. But now we need to get the factories."

He stared up at the high ceiling with his mouth open. "I can't stand it."

The socialist said to Lila, "You can stay, but you need to be quiet for a while so we can get a good deal."

Lila nodded in sullen consent.

After an hour of hammer and tongs, the two sides reached a tentative agreement. Exhausted, they took a break and the lady in white brought drinks and doughnuts. Lila had kept her word and stayed quiet even though there were lots of things she wanted to say.

"I think this is as good as we can get," the socialist told her as people were wandering around the room in a daze of fatigue. "We got eight percent more pay, time-and-a-quarter for overtime, ventilation and fire safety, and one worker rep on each board of directors. Your father will be on the board at the shoe factory and you mother at the sewing factory. They'll get more money for being on the board, and they can bring up problems of the workers. They'll have a voice in the company. And you'll have a better life.

"The owners' rep and I will work together to deal with labor problems for the whole city. The money I'll get from that will be a big help for the party. We've won!"

"Won what? Do we own the factories?" Lila asked.

The socialist paused. "No...but -- "

"How many shares does everyone get?"

"Well, we don't get shares this year. We'll have to wait on that."

Lila shook her head.

The owners' rep -- jacket off, tie loosened, sleeves rolled up -- tapped his spoon against his cup and said, "Let's reconvene, vote, wrap this up, and go home." When everyone was seating again, he said to Lila with an attempt at a smile, "So the settlement has been explained to you. We all agree this is a fair deal. It gives people excellent benefits and lets them get back to work and get on with their lives. Now we're going to vote and make it final."

"We don't want eight percent," Lila said. "We want the shares."

"Speak for yourself, young lady," he said sternly. "All the other workers' representatives agree this gives them a fair share of the profits of the company."

"They should have asked me. I would have told them. The only fair share is an equal share for everybody. We need to take all the shares and divide them up equally."

"We've been through this before," he said, despair creeping into his voice.

"Yes, but you didn't get it."

"No, Lila, you didn't get it! What you're demanding is totally unreasonable."

"What's 'unreasonable' mean?"

"You can't think logically, you're irrational. That's not your fault. You're just too young. So you want things that are impossible. You don't listen to reason."

"I know the reasons. The reason we're poor is you own the company and you're stealing our money. The reason I won't do what you want is that would keep us poor. As long as you own it, we're going to be poor. That's how you get your money. And that's the reason we're taking the shares and dividing them up."

"I work there too!" he insisted.

"You work, we work, but you end up rich and we end up poor. No more. Now you get an equal share like everyone else."

The socialist, looking distressed, spoke to Lila. "We can't do everything at once. We have to go step by step. This is something we can bring up next year."

"If they don't give us the shares this year, why should they give them next year?"

"We can threaten to go on strike again," the socialist said.

One of the other worker reps spoke up. "Realistically, people aren't going to want to do this again next year. I know I don't. It's too hard. What we're going to get, we should get now while we have the momentum."

Another worker rep said, "I'm beginning to think Lila's right in going for the whole thing now. That gradual, step-by-step approach sounds good, but it hasn't gotten us anywhere. I've been on the job 25 years. Every few years there's been a strike, and they give us a little bit here or there, but when things settle down, they take it away from somewhere else. Overall, things haven't gotten better. Like she says, why should they next year? Giving in now is just a way of avoiding a fight. Maybe we should dig in for the battle and stop putting it off."

The owners' rep broke in and said, "Look, if you want shares, we'll give each worker five shares a year. You'll own part of the company. You'll get dividends for those shares, and you can vote in the annual meeting -- one vote per share. That gives each worker a voice in policy."

"I have a voice now: No!" Lila said. "It's our company. Equal shares."

Red faced and trembling, the owners' rep burst out, "Enough! This is madness. We're done negotiating. We vote now. If you reject it, you're cutting your throats. I promise you you'll never get a deal like this again. We will close these factories and relocate. You think things are bad now, just wait. There won't be any jobs in this city." He pointed his finger at the socialist. "And I'll make sure everyone knows it's your fault!

"Call the question. How many of the worker reps vote for the proposal?"

The socialist and two others raised their hand. The owners' rep glared and ground his teeth. "How many vote against it?" The other four raised their hand. "So be it," he said quietly. "You'll be sorry." He pointed to the socialist and said, "I'll never negotiate with you again. You put this little monster up to this. I know you did. You wanted to make a deal impossible, and you voted for it just to cover your tracks. Well, it's not going to work. We're going to crush this communist movement once and for all." Face twitching, one side of his mouth lifted away from his teeth, he packed his pocket calculator and stalked out.

Middle Income Nations Home To Half The World’s Hungry

Thalif Deen

IPS

Nearly half of the world’s hungry, about 363 million people, live in some of the rising middle income countries including Brazil, China, India, Indonesia and Mexico, according to a new report released Wednesday by the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).

The 2014-2015 Global Food Policy Report (GFPR) calls on these developing nations, described as “rising economic powerhouses,” to reshape their food systems to focus on nutrition and health, close the gender gap in agriculture, and improve rural infrastructure to ensure food security for all.

It may seem counterintuitive, but these growing economies play a key role in our ability to adequately and nutritiously feed the world,” said Shenggen Fan, director general of IFPRI.

The report traces the link between sanitation and nutrition, with findings in Bangladesh that show “dramatic reductions in open defecation contributed to large declines in the number of stunted children.”

The research also found that “Bangladeshi children living in places where open defecation had been reduced were taller than children in neighboring West Bengal, India, where open defecation is still common, even at the same levels of economic wealth.”

“It has become clear that the factors that influence people’s nutrition go well beyond food and agriculture to include drinking water and sanitation, the role of women, the qual¬ity of caregiving, among others,” Fan said.

The study also finds strong evidence that food insecurity was a contributing factor to instability in the Middle East.

Additionally, it draws attention to the pressing need to regulate food production to prevent food-borne diseases, help small family farmers move up by increasing their incomes or move out to non-farm employment, improve social protection for the rural poor, and support the role of small-scale fishers in satisfying the global demand for fish.

Asked specifically about the impact of Middle East conflicts on food security, Clemens Breisinger, a senior research fellow in the Development Strategy and Governance division at IFPRI, told IPS food insecurity is quite obviously often a consequence of political instability and conflict.
As such, he said, the number of food insecure people has risen in many Arab countries since 2011, especially in Syria, Iraq and Yemen (three countries ravaged by political turmoil).

“But new research shows that food insecurity can also fuel conflicts, particularly in countries that are net food importing countries and thus vulnerable to global food price shocks,” Breisinger said.

He pointed out Arab countries import about 50 percent of their food and were thus hard hit by the global food price spikes in 2008 and 2011. Meanwhile, Imed Drine, a senior economist at the Islamic Development Bank, says the slump in oil prices continues to upend the global economy and experts believe this is likely to last for several years.

Oil prices dropped by about 50 percent from the fourth quarter of 2014 to the first month of 2015, the second largest annual decline ever where the falling oil prices have helped to push food prices down, according to the Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

Of the regions affected by these declining oil prices, said Drine in a blog post, the MENA region (Middle East and North Africa) is affected the most.
That is due to the fact that the majority of its countries depend on oil revenues for growth and because it is the most food imports-dependent region where food dependency ratios exceed 50 percent on average.

Drine says the strong relationship between oil and food prices may be explained by a key fact: “Our modern global food system is highly oil-dependent.”

Oil is the key fuel for production and for transporting food from field to market, and fuel costs, he said, make up as much as 50 to 60 per cent of total shipping costs.

In addition, energy related costs such as fertilisers, chemicals, lubricants and fuel account for close to 50 percent of the production costs for crops such as corn and wheat in some developed countries.

“As a result, declining oil prices will have a direct influence on production costs,” he added.

Furthermore, grain prices have become increasingly linked to the movement of oil markets since more corn is being diverted to biofuel production. Generally, as demand for these alternative fuels decreases, crop prices are forced down, making food more affordable, Drine added.