Trafficking or Commercial Sex? What Recent Exposés Reveal

David Rosen

Donald Trump’s consensual extra-marital affairs with two adult sex workers – along with his repeated denials, his “fixer’s” accusations and his contempt for popular indignation – has turned what once would have been a sex scandal into just another pathetic media story.

However, the recent revelations about the sexual exploits of entertainer R. Kelley and investment banker Jeffrey Epstein pose a more profound question: Is there a difference between “consensual,” adult sex work and sex trafficking with under-age girls?

A couple of weeks ago, the news media had fun reporting on the latest sex scandal involving an all-American 1 percenter. No, this one didn’t involve Trump or Stormy Daniels but rather Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots football franchise.  He reported visited the Orchids of Asia Day Spa in Jupiter, FL, on January 19^thand 20^th, mere hours before the Patriots’ AFC Championship game.  Most tantalizing, the local police released videos of the alleged sexual engagements between Kraft and women working at the spa.

Jupiter Police Detective Andrew Sharp stated at a press conference, “The video that we obtained, it shows the act that took place. On every gentleman that you have a list of, the act that took place is recorded on that video.” He added, “Does the video contain Mr. Kraft inside receiving the alleged acts? The answer is yes.” Kraft has been charged with two counts of soliciting; he allegedly paid $100 and the police-seized video apparently shows him receiving a hand-job and a blow-job. (The video also apparently shows a male client performing cunnilingus on a masseuse.)

Martin County Sheriff William Snyder claimed that the women working at the spa engaged in sexual acts, averaged eight clients a day, 1,500 men a year, with no days off.  He said that they slept on parlor tables, cooked in the back of the establishment and had no access to transportation.  “I think it is safe to say without hyperbole that this is the tip of the tip of the iceberg,” Snyder said.  He argued that a sex-trafficking ring ran the spa and that it was part of a $20-million international operation.

The good sheriff was not wrong on some parts of his story.  To date, upwards of 300 men were busted and at least 12 massage parlors on the Treasure Coast of Florida were shut down.  Law enforcement authorities have released hundreds of mugshots and the names of many of those arrested.

Four women were arrested, including the spa’s owner, Hua Zhang. She was charged with deriving support from the proceeds of prostitution, keeping and frequenting a house of prostitution and 26 counts of procuring for prostitution. Her bail was set at $528,000.  In a follow-up search of the spa, Jupiter police found $183,000 in bank safety deposit boxes belonging to the owner and an employee.  Authorities also froze the bank accounts of both women.

The scandal captured the attention of headline-craving media, both the conventional print and TV outlets as well as the sports outlets.  Among the 25 initially arrested as of February 22^nd, the oldest was 85 years old (born in 1934) and the youngest was 30 (born in 1989).  The media played up the fact that in addition to Kraft, other prominent power-players were busted, including John Childs, the founder of private equity firm J.W. Childs and Associates, as well as John Havens, former CFO of Citigroup.

The Florida Department of Health (DoH) began a secret investigation into the Orchids of Asia Day Spa last July in follow-up to a complaint received by a Martin County, FL, detective that claimed the spa was allegedly facilitating human trafficking.  DoH investigators found that the spa’s trash contained bodily fluids and the women workers appeared to be living in the parlors.

The February busts came in follow-up to a September 2018 raid of the East Spa in Vero Beach, FL, with law enforcement allegedly seeking victims of human trafficking.

Dave Aronberg, the Palm Beach County State Attorney’s Office, joined Sharp and Snyder, in claiming that the busts associated with Orchids of Asia Day Spa raid involved sexual trafficking.  He said that law enforcement viewed the women at the spa as “victims of human trafficking, which is modern-day slavery.” He insisted, “Human trafficking is based on force, fraud or coercion.  It is evil in our midst.”

Now, nearly a month since the police busts of those who worked at and frequented the Orchids of Asia Day Spa, questions are beginning to be raised as to whether the bust was really about sex trafficking.  Hallie Lieberman, writing in Deadspin, raised a question that sex workers are considering: “The sting wasn’t in fact about human trafficking at all, it was targeting consensual sex workers.”

Going to the heart of the issue, Lieberman describes her concerns as follow:

I started with two questions whose answers were surprisingly hard to find: How many people have been charged with human trafficking in the recent Florida stings that caught Kraft? And how many victims of human trafficking do police claim to have found?

The answer to the first question, stunningly, is zero. Not a single person has been charged with human trafficking in connection with multiple sex-trafficking stings in towns and cities on the east coast of Florida, including Jupiter, Vero Beach, and Sebastian.

Lieberman quotes Alex Andrews, a sex worker in the Orlando area and an advocate with the Sex Workers Outreach Project, who stated, “Our legislators and law enforcement have been led to believe that sex trafficking is huge in Florida, but studies have shown that because sex trafficking and sex work is being conflated all the time.”  To this end, Lieberman cites revealing FBI crime data about Florida’s very low-level of reported sex trafficking. Going further, she warns: “Andrews said jumping to conclusions without concrete evidence helps feed misleading narratives about the scale of trafficking. “

All sex work is not the same as, nor a form of, “trafficking.” Jeremy Lemur, former NFL staffer and now a spokesperson for Sheri’s Ranch, a legal brothel in Nevada, estimated that there are nearly 10,000 illegal massage parlors operating across the country.  He warns, “Because of the illegality of these operations, it’s impossible to know how many women working in these parlors are coerced or working against their will.”

Nevertheless, over the last decade the religious right has effectively collapsed the difference between the two forms of sexual engagement – consensual sex work and trafficking.  During this time, nearly every state has either passed or toughened existing laws concerning what is labeled “human trafficking” for labor (e.g., house cleaning, farm labor and sweatshop manufacturing) and – especially — for sex work (i.e., prostitution), often involving underage juveniles, mostly girls.  Among the venues in which sex trafficking is ostensibly facilitated are “gentlemen’s” or strip clubs, brothels, streetwalking and online advertisements.

In April 2018, Trump signed an act that reconciled the Senate’s Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) and the House’s Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA).  The Justice Department conflated trafficking with sex work in its successful effort to close down the website backpage.com.   However, a 2012 report by the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics notes, “Two percent of prostitution and commercialized vice arrests in 2010 involved a juvenile, a proportion that has averaged between 1% and 2% since at least 1990.”  

The difference between sex work and sex trafficking is becoming an issue in states around the country and in the 2020 presidential election.  Efforts are underway in California, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island and Washington, D.C., to decriminalize sex work among consent adults.  And SenatorsBernie Sanders (I-VT) and Kamala Harris (D-CA), once a fierce San Francisco prosecutor of sex workers, are calling for the decriminalization of  prostitution.  It’s time to distinguish the two forms of commercial sex and decriminalize sex work.

What a Waste

Richard Heinberg

Our modern industrial economy traces a straight line from resource extraction to manufacturing to sales to waste disposal. Since Earth has finite resources and limited ability to absorb pollution, the straight-line economy is unsustainable; it is designed for eventual failure.

Why not make the economy circular, with waste from one process feeding into other production processes, thus dramatically reducing the need both for resource extraction and for the dumping of rubbish? We should mimic nature: it’s a central ideal of the ecology movement, with roots in indigenous wisdom worldwide. Doing so requires that we reduce, reuse, repair, and recycle—and replace nonrenewable resources with renewables wherever possible.

The circular economy is needed now more than ever. America alone currently produces almost 235 million tonnes of waste per year from homes and businesses, which works out to almost 4 kilograms per person per day. But that’s only 3 percent of all the solid waste in the US economy; the other 97 percent is generated by agricultural and industrial (e.g., mining and manufacturing) processes. If the total US waste stream (including wastewater) is allotted on a per capita basis, each American is responsible for 1.8 million kilograms of waste per year.

Only about a third of waste from homes and businesses is recycled; the rate for industrial waste is much lower, with only 2 percent of the total waste stream currently being recycled. Meanwhile, the 2,000 active landfills in the US that hold the bulk of household trash are reaching their capacity. The US is among the highest waste-producing nations of the world on a per-capita basis, and the federal government has no strategy for dealing with the problem.

Americans should recycle more. Doing so would reduce pollution, slow climate change, and mitigate resource depletion and habitat destruction from mining and logging. But, sadly, the recycling industry faces problems. Prices for scrap metals and paper have declined in recent years (though Trump’s trade war has helped domestic scrap metal prices recover somewhat), and China is no longer interested in accepting metal and plastic waste from the US.

The bigger, systemic challenge is that collecting waste in tiny, mixed amounts; transporting it to a handling facility; sorting it; cleaning it; repackaging it; and then transporting it again almost always costs more and requires more energy than just discarding the stuff into a local landfill.

Waste is what economists call an externality: it’s never an intended, and often not a priced component of the production process, though it does inevitably impose costs—which are often borne by society as a whole. Manufacturers’ mandate is to produce more, and this translates to the strategy of planned obsolescence—making products that are meant to be replaced quickly rather than being endlessly reused and repaired.

What’s needed to circularize the economy? Two things.

First, an overall systemic commitment to the project. That means buy-in from industry, government, and citizens. Make things in such a way that recycling is easier. Focus on extending producer responsibility. Automobile manufacturers, for example, already use a wide range of recycled materials in their products, and like to take credit for doing so. But making the auto industry truly circular will require participation throughout the entire supply chain, support from government via incentives and regulation, and consumer education. Other industries, such as consumer electronics, lag far behind the auto makers, so there is truly an enormous task ahead.

But the other thing we need to do will be an even bigger challenge: we need to ditch the growth imperative. As long as profit maximization and overall growth are the implicit goals of the economy, recycling will remain a boutique industry driven largely by relatively rich people who can afford to assuage their ecological consciences.

If we are to have a truly ecological materials flow, we must start with Natural Step principles. No using renewable resources at faster than replenishment. No drawing down nonrenewable resources. No polluting ecosystems with products or byproducts of industrial processes.

A truly circular economy will be one in which all industrial processes are harmless to people and nature. That means that all “growth” will have to occur in the cultural sphere rather than in flows of materials and energy. We must focus on human happiness rather than GDP; on rates of participation in education and the arts rather than quarterly sales figures.

Currently, we are far from having a circular economy, and that gap is embodied in overflowing landfills and giant barges of trash with nowhere to go—as well as a plastic gyre the size of Texas in the Pacific Ocean. Will the monuments to our civilization consist of mountains of refuse? We can certainly do far better, but that will require us to make a systemic commitment to building a circular, steady-state economy whose aim is beauty and happiness rather than growth for growth’s sake.

Hyper-Hypocrisy of The West about ISIS

Eric Zuesse

During the period of 17 September to 11 December of 2016, the United States and its allies carried out a massive operation to move ISIS’s surviving jihadists who were in the oil-producing Iraqi region of Mosul, into the Syrian oil-producing region of Deir Ezzor and Palmyra. This was done so that those oil-stealing-and-selling jihadists in Iraq would now be stealing Syria’s oil and would thereby increase the likelihood of overthrowing Syria’s long-existing non-sectarian Government. The U.S. and its allies would then replace that Government by one which would be controlled by the fundamentalist Sunni Saud family, who own Saudi Arabia, the long-time leading oil-power, and which family are America’s main foreign ally. The Sauds are crucial to maintaining the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency. The U.S. aristocracy rely upon them.

Now that ISIS is being defeated by Syria’s Government (and by its allies Russia and Iran) in Syria, the United States and its allies are trying to find other governments that will take them in as refugees. It’s part of a deal the U.S. regime reached with ISIS.

The issue of what to do with the thousands of surviving but (temporarily) defeated ISIS members — and with their spouses and children — has raised hypocrisy to perhaps the highest level in all of history. Its background needs to be understood if one wants to understand the sources of that enormous hypocrisy. Here’s this background:

When Russia started bombing ISIS in Syria on 30 September 2015, it greatly disturbed the U.S. regime, which therefore started on 12 October 2015 to air-drop weapons into that area so as to help the jihadists to shoot down Russia’s jets, which were bombing ISIS. America’s Fox News Channel headlined “US military airdrops 50 tons of ammo for Syrian fighters, after training mission ends”. The U.S. didn’t start bombing ISIS in Syria until 16 November 2015, and the U.S. Government’s excuse for not having bombed them earlier was “This is our first strike against tanker trucks, and to minimize risks to civilians, we conducted a leaflet drop prior to the strike.” They pretended that it was done out of compassion — not in order to extend for as long as possible ISIS’s success in taking over territory in Syria.

And then on 26 February 2019, Syria’s government news-agency reported that the U.S. had sent to the U.S. Federal Reserve 40+ tons of gold that ISIS had accumulated from selling, on the international black markets, oil from Syria’s oil-producing region around Deir Ezzor — Syria’s oil stolen by ISIS and the proceeds now being stolen yet again by the U.S. regime — and this gold now being sent to the U.S. (On March 8th I reported the further background and context of that U.S. theft from Syria.) The U.S. regime had offered to ISIS-members who were in Syria’s oil-producing region a choice either to become captured and killed by Syria’s Government, or else for them to give to the U.S. that gold, and the option which was selected by the jihadists was to give the gold to the U.S., which is therefore now trying to find other countries to send the jihadists to as ‘refugees’ (since Syria certainly doesn’t want them, and neither does the U.S. regime). The U.S. regime is honoring its commitments to those ‘former’ ISIS members and their families, to assist them to find countries which will accept those people as ‘refugees’. Sweden, being very liberal (meaning ideologically very confused), happens to be one of these countries, and is actually considering and debating whether to allow them in.

Zero Hedge is perhaps the keenest news-site for exposing The West’s rampant hypocrisies (and so all of The West’s propagandistic ’news’-sites hate it and call it ‘fake news’ even though it actually is more reliably accurate than the mainstream ones themselves are); and, on March 10th, it pointed out that Sweden was in a flurry over whether to accept, as refugees, ISIS jihadists who have escaped, and their spouses and children. Zero Hedge truthfully pointed out that,

Sweden’s new government, which was finally formed in January after months of delay, is introducing policies that will lead to more immigration into Sweden — despite the main governing party, the Social Democrats, having run for office on a promise to tighten immigration policies.

The right to family reunion for those people granted asylum in Sweden who do not have refugee status is being reintroduced — a measure that is estimated to bring at least 8,400 more immigrants to Sweden in the coming three years. According to the Minister of Migration, Morgan Johansson, this measure will “strengthen integration,” although he has not explained how.

“I think it is a very good humanitarian measure; 90 percent [of those expected to come] are women and children who have lived for a long time in refugee camps, [and] who can now be reunited with their father or husband in Sweden”, Johansson said.

This is supposed to be ‘democracy’?

However, that article, as noted at Zero Hedge, was written by Judith Bergman, of the Gatestone Institute. Sometimes, even such vicious propaganda-organizations, as that, produce authentic news, and here was such an instance. (It’s yet another reason why arguing ad-hominem, instead of strictly — that is, 100% — ad-rem, is essential to avoid, in order to determine truth and reject lies. That was a truthful article. Though Bergman wrote for a hate-mongering anti-Muslim site, the reporting in it was honest and factual. So, here’s some ad-hominem background to it, not as a part of the argument in this particular case — regarding Sweden’s debate over whether to accept former ISIS members as refugees — but instead as context explaining how this truth came to be published by the hate-mongering Gatestone

The Gatestone Institute is a rabidly pro-Israeli-Jews, and rabidly anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim operation, which was founded and is run by the heir and grand-daughter, Nina Rosenwald, of the biggest early (1895) investor in Sears Roebuck & Co., Julius Rosenwald. He died in 1932. His heir and son was Nina’s father, and in 1939 he “was one of three founding members of the United Jewish Appeal (UJA).[12] [Nina] Rosenwald’s mother, a professional violinist, was a refugee from both the Russian Revolution and Nazi Germany.[9].” Nina, being not very bright, was never able to rid herself of the prejudices her parents felt against Palestinians and generally against Muslims (since Israel’s main supremacism is against Muslims, because Israel’s ruling ethnicity, Jews, have been stealing land from Muslims). Nina identifies herself as “a human rights activist”. (As was said at the start here, this issue “has raised hypocrisy to perhaps the highest level in all of history.”) She had, in fact, hired John Bolton as Gatestone’s Chairman; and, for his service as that, during June 2017 to March 2018 (when he became hired as Trump’s National Security Advisor), Bolton received $310,000. So, Bill Berkowitz headlined on 27 September 2018 “Meet Nina Rosenwald, the Sears Heiress Seeding Islamophobia at Home and Abroad”, and he brought together and linked to the great reporting by Max Blumenthal and by Lee Fang, documenting the Gatestone Institute’s rabid global hate-mongering for Israel.

But, in this particular case (the article by Judith Bergman), there was no deceit, because nothing in her reporting violated Nina Rosenwald’s biggest hatred, hatred of Muslims — so, these truths were acceptable to Rosenwald. Bergman’s article happened to be truthful Israeli propaganda. (After all: some propaganda is truthful.)

The Israeli regime won’t have any credibility whatsoever unless it condemns Sweden’s compassion for jihadists and for the wives and children of jihadists. Israel’s Minister of Justice had endorsed exterminating all Palestinians, but that rationale — sheer bigotry — for opposing them, isn’t suitable for foreign consumption, and so it was almost immediately disappeared from its public posting (shown there at that link). If Israel can’t pretend to be against Muslims on account of jihadists, then Israel’s barbaric treatment of its Palestinians won’t make any sense at all to the many fools (mainly in America, Israel’s chief patron) who support Israel (such as the Rosenwalds do). The U.S. regime hides the barbarous reality of Israel, but that reality isn’t blacked-out quite as much in the rest of the world; so, Israel can’t afford to be publicly silent regarding jihadists, even in cases where the U.S. regime would prefer such silence. Obviously, the U.S. regime wants Sweden to accept those ‘former’ ISIS members (because the U.S. regime aims to conquer Russia and all nations — such as Syria — that are allied with Russia, and uses ISIS, Al Qaeda, and nazis, as “boots-on-the-ground” mercenaries, in order to do that), and so this ISIS-as-refugees issue is one on which the American regime and the Israeli regime happen to disagree.

Bergman closed her article by describing the Swedish Government’s efforts to be compassionate toward jihadists while the Swedish Government also provides an appearance of caring for the safety of non-jihadist (the vast majority of) Swedes:

On a positive note, however, at the end of February, the Swedish government presented plans to introduce legislation that would criminalize membership of a terrorist organization.This new law would enable the prosecuting of returning ISIS fighters who cannot be connected to a specific crime, but who were proven to have been part of a terrorist organization. Critics have pointed out that it has taken years for the government to take steps to criminalize membership of terror organizations.

Sweden is hypocritically ‘neutral’, but actually a vassal nation of the United States. Sweden is being pushed by its master, the U.S. regime, to accept some of the people the U.S. Government had been protecting in order for the U.S. to become enabled to take over Syria and to deliver it to the U.S. aristocracy’s chief ally the Sauds; and, so, the Swedish Government is now trying to square this circle, in order to satisfy everyone at least somewhat. This split loyalty (between the imperial master, and the domestic public) is what’s called ‘democracy’, nowadays. The master pulls one way, the public are confused or undecided, and the U.S. regime’s other main Middle Eastern ally, Israel, is pulling in the exact opposite direction, on this particular matter. This is how international affairs actually are being decided. The various aristocracies come to an agreement on how to proceed. The respective publics are virtually ignored, except as fronts for their PR. That’s today’s international order, just as has been the case for thousands of years: it is agreements that are reached between aristocracies.

Back in September of 2018, the U.S. regime was backed by the United Nations in opposing Russia’s and Syria’s plan simply to slaughter all of the tens of thousands of Al Qaeda-affiliated jihadists (and their families), whom the Syrian Government had exiled to Idlib, Syria’s most pro-jihadist province, and who were being collected there with the intention to destroy them all at the very end of the war — finally to finish them off there. Both Syria’s Government and Russia’s Government wanted simply to destroy them en-masse, at the war’s end. However, because of the success of that U.S.-based (and also U.N.-backed) international propaganda campaign arguing that bombing them would be ‘inhumane’, those jihadists survive, and will probably also be moved to other nations. Sweden could become one such nation, if they decide to take in not only ‘former’ ISIS but ‘former’ Al Qaeda, as ’refugees’. The U.S. has protected both of those groups, against Syria’s Government.

Hypocrisy exists when people don’t care enough about their values so as to think carefully through to decide what values — if any — they actually hold, and what their actual priorities are. Fools like that are the meat upon which their aristocrats constantly feast, producing, as the aristocracy’s excrements, bigots (such as jihadists, and such as the majority of Israelis — and such as people who accept those bigots). Without those fools, aristocrats would need to actually earn a living, instead of merely to live off the fat (the fools) of the land and thereby producing this waste-matter, bigots, who make things difficult for everybody else, including for any decent people who might happen to exist in the given receiving nation (such as in Sweden).

The origin of The West’s hypocrisies that claim to be supporting “human rights” and “democracy” around the world, while actually invading or overthrowing target-governments, go back at least as far as Cecil Rhodes in the late 1800s, and the rationale that’s given of it is entirely fraudulent. It is the difference between, on the one hand, an authentic revolution, which can sometimes produce a democracy, versus, on the other hand, a coup or else an invasion, neither of which can, nor is actually designed to, produce a democracy. But the PR has to say the reason for an invasion or coup or sanctions (such as against Venezuela or Iran or Syria or Libya or Iraq or Ukraine) is to promote ‘human rights’ or ‘democracy’ or ‘oppose corruption’ in the given target-country that’s to be, basically, destroyed. Suckers are necessary, in order for this fraud — the actual aristocratic control of international relations — to succeed. And that’s how the system works. It works by that combination, of liars and fools.

Ford announces 5,000 job cuts in Germany

Marianne Arens

Ford plans to cut 5,000 jobs at its plants in Germany. Management announced its plans in a letter sent to the company’s workforce on March 15. It has been known since September 2018 that the company was planning to carry out mass lay-offs and shutter plants in Europe. The IG Metall trade union and works councils at Ford’s German plants support the plan in principle and are attempting to divide and demoralise the workers in order to block the development of any organized opposition.

The mass lay-offs are a component of Ford’s global onslaught on jobs known as the Fitness Programme, which aims to eliminate 25,000 jobs around the world. Ford intends to save $14 billion with the measures in order to double its profit margin and boost share dividend payouts for investors. Last year alone, the company paid out $2.3 billion in dividends.

In Europe and Russia, where Ford employs around 52,000 workers, the company is seeking to compensate for the impact of Brexit and the diesel emission scandal by substantially reducing its operations. With regard to the transition to electric vehicles, Ford is pushing ahead with plans to cooperate with VW, while it cuts jobs to save costs where possible.

Ford’s French Blanquefort plant near Bordeaux is scheduled to close in August with the loss of 850 jobs, and 1,600 jobs are threatened, including one of three shifts, at the German plant in Saarlouis. In Russia, the Vsevoloshsk and Nabareshnyje Tchelny plants are under threat of being shuttered, with the loss of 3,000 jobs, and production is also being cut back at the Valencia and Dagenham plants in Spain and Britain.

In the March 15 letter, head of Ford’s operations in Germany, Gunnar Hermann, and business manager Rainer Ludwig demanded “at least €500 million in structural cost savings, which is to be achieved through a consolidation of all organisational structures. This includes lay-offs in Germany of more than 5,000 (including short-term contractors).”

In addition to Ford’s Cologne plant, which taken together with the research centre in Aachen employs 18,000 workers, Ford Germany also includes the Saarlouis facility with 6,000 jobs. Management is already calling into question the employment guarantees provided to these facilities, which were supposed to run until 2022. Hermann told public broadcaster Saarländische Rundfunk in December that Brexit has changed everything, stating, “You can’t rely on contracts any more. We can’t do anything about Brexit taking place.”

How are the IG Metall union and works councils now responding to the renewed declarations of war from the company’s board?

A revealing interview providing an answer to this question was published by the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger on January 22 with Martin Hennig, chairman of the joint works council at Ford. “I expect a large number of job cuts,” he said. “When it comes to job cuts, Cologne will certainly be hit the hardest.” Asked if he thought the measures were appropriate, the works council chairman answered that he felt it is “correct in principle to subject everything to review and deal with the issues that are affecting the entire auto sector.”

The works council leader speaks like a top manager. He repeatedly makes clear that he considers himself part of company management, thinking and acting in terms of Ford’s profit margin. In an earlier interview given to the Kölnische Rundschau last summer, he noted (of course in the “we” form), “In Europe, we live on small and medium-sized cars. They run well, and we make good money with them. But nothing is left from the profits. So we have to take a look at costs. This is top management’s most important task ... If we have control over costs, then the European business can contribute to Ford’s profits.”

Hennig responded to the job cuts by seeking to place the blame on suppliers and sub-contractors. He told the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, “The overall total of external contracts in Europe amounts to €11 billion. I get the impression that the European headquarters isn’t even aware of this figure. If they want support from us in the current situation, company management has to deal with this.”

Hennig was merely formulating IG Metall’s official policy, which generally refuses to defend contract workers, sub-contractors, and the workers at parts suppliers, thus driving a wedge between them and Ford employees. Ford has thousands of short-term contract workers in Cologne and Saarlouis whose contracts have either already expired or will do so in June. Although contract workers pay union dues to IG Metall, the union and works council accepts lower pay and poorer working conditions for them, and are supporting them being laid off.

IG Metall also encourages divisions between plants, countries, and continents. Saarlouis works council chairman Markus Thal notes at every opportunity that IG Metall will protect German jobs (with the emphasis on “German,” and not French, Romanian, or American jobs). And in Cologne, Hennig rails against the advantages enjoyed by the “US owner.” He told the Kölner Stadt-Anzeigerthat in the US, Ford “obtains better terms from global suppliers as we do in Europe as a subsidiary,” and can thus achieve “a higher rate of profit ... This is hard to comprehend and unfair.”

This was the same policy used by IG Metall five years ago to play one location off against another as Ford’s plant in Belgium was shuttered virtually simultaneously with VW’s Bochum plant.

The reality is that Ford Motor Company attacks its workforce just as brutally in the United States as it does in Europe or Latin America. In Brazil, Ford is closing an entire plant in Sao Paolo and withdrawing from truck production in Latin America. At the same time, Ford is eliminating 1,000 production jobs at its Flat Rock plant in Michigan. It is being supported in this by the United Auto Workers, IG Metall’s US counterpart.

These examples underscore that Ford workers can only defend their jobs if they organise themselves independently of the unions and take the struggle into their own hands, uniting with their brothers and sisters around the world.

Autoworkers and parts workers in the supplier industry face the threat of a global jobs massacre. In North America, General Motors is currently closing five plants with the loss of 15,000 jobs, while in Germany, Opel, Audi, and VW are also laying off workers. Things are similar for workers in the parts industry, such as for workers at Bosch.

Ford workers must form rank-and-file action committees to organise the defence of jobs and initiate contact with their colleagues at other Ford plants and other sections of the working class. The working class is a powerful social force, with around 800,000 workers in Germany alone employed in the auto industry.

But under capitalism, every progressive development is being turned against them. Even tremendous technological advances—electric vehicles, self-driving cars, and artificial intelligence—do nothing to improve the lives of workers, but are merely used to increase exploitation, intensify surveillance and accelerate rearmament.

A socialist programme is required, which aims at confiscating the vast wealth of the banks and super-rich, placing it under workers’ control, and deploying it for the benefit of humanity as a whole.

French army receives authorization to shoot “yellow vest” protesters

Alex Lantier

Yesterday, the governor of the Paris military district told France Info that soldiers of the Operation Sentinel counter-terror mission had been authorized to fire today on the “yellow vests.” Asked about whether soldiers were capable of carrying out law enforcement duties, General Bruno Le Ray replied: “Our orders are sufficiently clear that we do not need to be worried at all. The soldiers’ rules of engagement will be fixed very rigorously.”

“They will have different means for action faced with all types of threats,” he continued. “That can go as far as opening fire.”

Le Ray added that soldiers will have the same rules of engagement for shooting protesters as those for gunning down terrorism suspects inside France: “They will deliver warnings. This has happened in the past, as in (attacks at) the Louvre or at Orly. They are perfectly able to assess the nature of the threat and to respond proportionally.”

These threats against a protest movement against social inequality that is largely peaceful must be taken as a warning by workers and youth not only in France but internationally. As mass protests and strikes erupting outside the control of the union bureaucracies spread across the world, the military and security agencies of the financial aristocracy are preparing to carry out ruthless repression. Even in countries like France with long bourgeois-democratic traditions, they are rapidly moving towards military-police dictatorship.

Soldiers from Opération Sentinelle on patrol in Strasbourg in 2015

Since the imposition of a state of emergency suspending basic democratic rights after the 2015 Paris attacks, the army’s Operation Sentinel has sent squads of soldiers marching in France’s streets, wearing bulletproof vests and carrying assault rifles. The current crisis vindicates the WSWS’s longstanding warnings. In every country, the ruling class has used the “war on terror” as a pretext to reinforce state repression that is aimed above all at opposition in the working class.

Amid yesterday’s European Union summit in Brussels, French President Emmanuel Macron spoke to downplay the significance of sending the army against the “yellow vests.” The army is “in no way responsible for maintaining order and public order,” he claimed, mocking criticisms of his resort to the army as a “false debate” fueled by “those who play at scaring themselves and others.”

French Defense Minister Florence Parly followed Le Ray onto France Info and also trivialized the decision to send troops to police the protests. Without explicitly contradicting Le Ray’s report on the orders given to Operation Sentinel forces, she said: “The soldiers of the French army never fire on protesters. … All those who play around with fantasies, who speak about opening fire, are only sowing confusion.”

It is impossible to know in advance whether or how many lives will be lost during army operations against the “yellow vests” today. But the soporific and historically inaccurate statements of Macron and Parly are being openly contradicted by certain soldiers, who are violating military discipline to tell the media about their anger and concern at the orders they are receiving.

“We have no business interfering in this ‘yellow vest’ business,” one soldier anonymously told France Info. “We do not have the necessary equipment, we just have truncheons and little pepper spray bottles like what girls have in their purses. After that, the next thing we have is our assault rifles. … So, if we go up against too many protesters, unfortunately we will probably see fatalities.”

Another soldier stressed his anger at receiving orders from Macron to target the French people: “It is absurd, it’s arbitrary. We are not prepared for this. In technical terms, we fight military enemies. And the enemy cannot be the entire population, that is not possible. That is the situation they are trying to put soldiers in today.”

General Vincent Desportes, the former head of the War Academy, made clear his skepticism about claims from within the Macron government that riot police will always manage to get between protesters and the soldiers, to ensure that the latter do not fire on the former.

He said, “Until now the security forces have not shown themselves entirely capable of controlling large crowds of protesters. If violent protesters come into contact with the soldiers, there is a serious risk that blood will be spilt. … The last time soldiers were used for law enforcement was in Algeria, more than 50 years ago. As you well know, at that point blood was spent, a lot of blood was spent.”

The result of the last intervention of the army against workers on what is currently French soil, in the insurrectionary strikes of 1947-8 against the bourgeois Republic established by the Gaullists and Stalinists after World War II and the fall of European fascism, was a massacre. As 350,000 miners went on strike, the army occupied the mines with an authorization to fire on the strikers. The resulting clashes led to six dead, thousands of wounded, and the firing of 3,000 miners, a decision legally recognized as discriminatory in 2011.

In Algeria, the use of the army to torture and kill Algerians rising up against French colonialism, barely more than a decade after these same methods were used in France itself by the Nazis and the Nazi-collaborationist Vichy regime, left over 300,000 dead in the 1954-1962 war.

These historical events are a warning as to the implications of mobilizing the army against the working class. They vindicate the strategy proposed by the Parti de l’égalité socialiste (PES) amid the “yellow vest” movement. Amid widespread hostility of workers internationally against the union bureaucracies and established political parties, the PES called for building independent committees of action and stressed the necessity of transferring state power in France and across Europe to such organizations of the working class.

This also requires building the PES as the political alternative to the petty bourgeois political parties, rejected by a broad majority of “yellow vests.” These parties try to tie the workers to Macron by proposing to negotiate a democratization of society with him and the trade unions.

Many of these parties—including the French Communist Party, the New Anticapitalist Party, the Greens, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Unsubmissive France, and the Independent Democratic Workers Party—came together yesterday to issue a pathetic “united” appeal to Macron.

Criticizing “the government’s authoritarian excesses,” they begged Macron to cease ignoring them and negotiate more with them to try to calm the situation: “The sidelining of the social, ecological and trade union movements, contempt for those who speak truth to power, is a way of preventing all dialog, all positive outcomes to the crises of our time. … The calming of tensions we desire also requires the state power to respond concretely to the aspirations for social justice that are widely expressed in our country.”

But there is nothing to negotiate with Macron. By sending the army against the “yellow vests,” he is sending a clear signal that the financial aristocracy and the state authorities have no intention of realizing the social aspirations of the working class. They want to crush these aspirations, and if necessary to drown them in blood.

The current crisis exposes the utter bankruptcy of their strategy of tying the workers to capitalist politicians and the capitalist state. During the 2017 election, all these parties adapted themselves to the official propaganda presenting Macron as a lesser evil than neo-fascist candidate Marine Le Pen. Now that Macron has declared his admiration for fascist dictator Philippe Pétain and sent the army against the “yellow vests,” this propaganda is exposed as an utter fraud.

Faced with Macron’s historic threat against the workers, the turn is to the construction of independent organizations of the working class and of sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International as their revolutionary vanguard.

Twenty years since the US bombing of Yugoslavia

Bill Van Auken

March 24 marks 20 years since the US and NATO launched a one-sided war against Yugoslavia, bombing Serbia and its capital Belgrade for 78 straight days. Factories, schools and hospitals were destroyed, along with bridges, roads and the electrical grid in a bid to bomb the Serbian population into submission to US and Western European imperialism’s domination of the Balkans.

The airstrikes killed around 2,500 people and wounded another 12,500 according to Serbian estimates.

One of the US-NATO airstrikes used laser-guided bombs to take out a railway bridge in southern Serbia, killing at least 10 people on a passenger train. Another slaughtered 21 people in a nursing home. And a deliberate strike on the TV broadcaster RTS in Belgrade took the lives of 16 civilian workers.

In one of the most provocative acts of the war, the US carried out a strike on the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing three people. Washington claimed that the bombing was an “accident,” but Beijing and the Chinese population rightly saw it as an act of aggression that foreshadowed an escalating US military buildup against China.

“Operation Noble Anvil”, as the bombing campaign was dubbed, was launched without any authorization from the United Nations after Serbia’s President Slobodan Milosevic refused to accept the so-called Rambouillet Agreement, which in reality was a US-NATO ultimatum that demanded Belgrade allow NATO troops to occupy the province of Kosovo and be granted free rein over all of Yugoslavia. Even the veteran imperialist war criminal Henry Kissinger acknowledged that the so-called agreement “was a provocation, an excuse to start bombing.”

The war constituted the final chapter in the imperialist dismemberment of Yugoslavia, a country that had existed since 1918. Having pulled the rug out from under the Yugoslav economy, the major imperialist powers encouraged the growth of ethnic nationalism—spearheaded by ex-Yugoslav Stalinist bureaucrats turned communalist capitalist politicians—warming their hands over the fire as they pushed Serbs, Muslims and Croats to slaughter one another, and using Yugoslavia as a testing ground for military intervention and a new generation of so-called precision-guided munitions.

The essential precursor of the war was the dissolution of the Soviet Union at the hands of the Moscow Stalinist bureaucracy. During the Cold War, Washington and its NATO allies had supported the unity of Yugoslavia as a counterweight to the influence of the USSR in the lands to its south. But after the Stalinist bureaucracy’s drive for capitalist restoration culminated in the breakup of the Soviet Union, the imperialist powers launched a reckless and ultimately catastrophic scramble for the Balkans.

Germany began by recognizing the independence of the Yugoslav republics of Slovenia and Croatia, flexing its new-found muscles as an imperialist power in Europe following its 1990 re-unification. While Washington first opposed the move, it subsequently threw itself into the carve-up by recognizing Bosnia-Herzegovina as an independent “nation” meriting its own state. This set the stage for a bloody conflict between the territory’s three constituent populations –Muslims, Serbs and Croats–and ultimately imperialist intervention.

Underlying the drive to war over Kosovo was the imperialist imperative of bringing Serbia, the strongest power in the region, to heel in order to solidify US-NATO hegemony.

The war was launched by the Democratic administration of President Bill Clinton under the thoroughly discredited and hypocritical banner of “humanitarian intervention” and the claim that the US and its allies were intervening to stop a massacre of Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian population at the hands of Serbian security forces.

Washington and its European imperialist allies, backed by a thoroughly pliant capitalist media, cast Serbian leader Milosevic as a new “Hitler” and the Serbian people as a whole as “Nazis,” obscenely comparing the repression in Kosovo to the Holocaust.

Claims that 100,000 ethnic Albanians had been slaughtered that were floated in advance of the US-NATO war were debunked in its aftermath. The real death toll in Kosovo before US and NATO bombs began to fall was revealed after the war to have been closer to 2,000, with the majority of the killings committed by the armed separatist group, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA)

The KLA, previously classified by Washington as a terrorist organization, was elevated in the run-up to the war as the sole legitimate representative of Kosovo’s population. Its extensive ties to organized crime throughout Europe as well as to Al Qaeda were swept under the rug as the CIA poured money and arms into the group, which carried out terrorist bombings and ethnic killings against the Serbian population. The KLA, working in close collaboration with its US sponsors, sought to create as much violence and death as possible in order to pave the way to Western intervention.

Twenty years later, the former chief of the KLA, Hashim Thaçi–proclaimed in Washington as “the George Washington of Kosovo”–has headed a succession of governments, even as control of the landlocked mini-state’s economy remains in the hands of European Union officials and its territory is still occupied by 4,000 NATO troops, including 600 US soldiers.

Thaçi has been exposed in numerous investigations as the head of a criminal organization involved in drug trafficking and prostitution as well as in the appalling trafficking in human organs “harvested” from captured Serbs. Washington and the EU have repeatedly intervened to prevent him from being prosecuted for war crimes and other criminal activity.

The “humanitarian” intervention to halt “ethnic cleansing” has resulted in massive ethnic cleansing, including the driving out of two-thirds of the 120,000 Roma and Ashkali living in Kosovo as well as many thousands of ethnic Serbs.

Despite Kosovo being the largest per capita recipient of foreign aid on the planet, the landlocked mini-state remains the poorest territory in Europe, with an official unemployment rate of 30 percent (55 percent for youth) and wages averaging just $410 a month. With all of its wealth and military power, US and German imperialism have managed to create only a failed state and a government controlled by a Mafia.

None of the wounds inflicted upon the former state of Yugoslavia by imperialist intervention have healed. The Balkans remain a powder keg that can be set off at any moment, igniting–as they did in the 20th century—a wider war that can bring in the major powers.

Among the most politically significant features of the 1999 Kosovo war was the unabashed and enthusiastic support lent to the US-NATO bombing of Serbia by former opponents of the American intervention in Vietnam and even self-proclaimed socialists in both Europe and America. This emerging pseudo left, whose social base was among privileged layers of the middle class, would go on to provide crucial political support to imperialism in similar bloody “humanitarian” regime change operations that have devastated both Libya and Syria.

The World Socialist Web Site and the International Committee of the Fourth International opposed this reactionary outlook from the start, denouncing the onslaught against Yugoslavia as an imperialist war waged to assert US hegemony over the Balkans as part of a re-division of the territories of Eastern Europe and Central Asia left in a political vacuum following the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

In June of 1999, after the relentless bombing of Serbia forced Belgrade to withdraw security forces from Kosovo and open the way to US-NATO occupation, the World Socialist Web Site warned in an statement by David North, the chairperson of the WSWS and the Socialist Equality Party (US) titled “After the Slaughter: Political Lessons of the Balkan War,” “The bombing of Yugoslavia has exposed the real relations that exist between imperialism and small nations.”

The statement continued, “The great indictments of imperialism written in the first years of the twentieth century—those of Hobson, Lenin, Luxemburg and Hilferding—read like contemporary documents. Economically, small nations are at the mercy of the lending agencies and financial institutions of the major imperialist powers. In the realm of politics, any attempt to assert their independent interests brings with it the threat of devastating military retaliation. With increasing frequency, small states are being stripped of their national sovereignty, compelled to accept foreign military occupation, and submit to forms of rule that are, when all is said and done, of an essentially colonialist character.”

It went on to warn that the “cult of precision-guided munitions” promoted on the basis of the United States’ casualty-free Kosovo war, ignored the more basic tendencies of economic development. “Neither this advantage [in the arms industry] nor the products of this industry can guarantee world domination,” it said. “Despite the sophistication of its weaponry, the financial-industrial foundation of the United States’ preeminent role in the affairs of world capitalism is far less substantial than it was 50 years ago.”

Nearly two decades later, this prognosis has proven correct. For more than a quarter century, the US ruling elite has sought to sustain its global dominance through the uninterrupted and reckless use of military power. This has resulted in a string of failures from Afghanistan to Iraq, Libya and Syria–as well as Kosovo—that have served only to exacerbate the crisis of the global system, while exposing the limitations of American military power.

The US-NATO war in Kosovo has been followed by NATO’s relentless expansion eastward, bringing US troops to the very border of Russia. While still playing the “humanitarian” card on occasion, Washington has jettisoned the “war on terror” as the central rationale for global US militarism, adopting a strategy of “great power” conflict, openly preparing for war against nuclear-armed Russia and China, as well as potential challenges from its erstwhile allies in Europe and Asia.

The destructive policies pursued by US imperialism are giving rise to an immense growth of social tensions and class struggle around the world, including in Kosovo, which has seen a wave of strikes against the abysmal conditions facing the working class, as well as in the United States itself. This rising movement of the international working class provides the only viable answer to the growing threat of multiple military conflicts across the globe igniting a new world war. The decisive lesson of the Kosovo war and what has followed is the necessity of building an international, socialist antiwar movement based upon the working class.

Australian property prices fall faster than during global financial crisis

Oscar Grenfell

Australian house prices have continued their precipitous fall, prompting warnings from analysts and financial institutions of a crash of the inflated property market, which could trigger a broader economic slump.

Australian Bureau of Statistics data released this week showed that house prices in Australia’s capital cities fell by a combined 2.4 percent over the 2018 December quarter. This equates to a market contraction of $133.1 billion in just three months. The declines were sharpest in Sydney, where prices fell by 3.7 percent, and Melbourne, where they were down 2.4 percent.

There are growing signs that the slowdown is spreading beyond the east coast capital cities, with price reductions also registered in many other locations.

The latest decline follows price falls in Sydney every quarter since September 2017, and in Melbourne, during the past 12 months. Sydney values have plunged by 16 percent since their peak in 2017, while in Melbourne, the price decline is approaching 10 percent.

Indicating the magnitude of the slowdown, 2018’s national price fall of 5.1 percent is greater than the annual drop of 4.6 percent in 2009, in the immediate wake of the global financial crisis.

Analysts have declared that house prices are falling more quickly than in any previous property market contraction. Recent modelling by BIS Oxford Economics senior manager Angie Zigomanis found that price falls were occurring at roughly twice the speed of an average downturn.

Commentators noted that the current reversal is taking place under conditions of far greater global economic and geopolitical turbulence than during previous property market slumps, including a protracted slowdown in the 1980s.

They have warned that a host of global factors, including US trade war measures against China and other countries, political upheavals in Europe and the slowing of the Chinese economy, could transform the downturn into a full-blown crisis.

Others have insisted that unlike previous property slowdowns, the current declines are intersecting with deep-rooted structural factors, including soaring household debt and the unprecedented exposure of the banks and financial institutions to mortgage debt.

In comments to news.com.au this week, John Adams, a former Liberal-National Coalition advisor, pointed to the parallels between Australia’s property slowdown and the Irish housing market crash that began in 2007, and triggered a full-blown financial crisis.

Adams noted that Australian household debt to gross domestic product (GDP) stood at 120 percent, compared with 100 percent in Ireland in 2007. In that year, Ireland’s household debt to disposable income ratio was roughly 200 percent, while the Australian figure stands at around 188 percent, one of the highest ratios in the world. Some two thirds of net Australian household wealth is invested in real estate, compared with 83 percent in Ireland before its crash.

Adams said that while Australia had “never been the first economic domino to fall during a global economic crisis,” it “may buck this trend and go first.”

Eddie Hobbs, an Irish financial advisor, similarly drew a parallel between the financial speculation that led to the Irish crash and the flood of investment into the Australian property market over the past decade. “Much like Ireland ingesting mispriced capital caused by the aftermath of German reunification, which stoked the Irish bubble, Australia has had a similar steroid after the GFC [global financial crisis] and precisely at the wrong time,” he said.

Martin North of Digital Finance Analytics commented that international experience had indicated that if price falls exceeded 20 percent, it often led to “second order falls as buyers seek to sell,” so that “further falls then become self-perpetuating.”

North stated: “We have already passed this benchmark in some postcodes like Liverpool [a Sydney working class suburb] (with 23 percent falls). Plus, we know many households are finding it hard to manage their finances as flat incomes, rising costs and large mortgages create medium-term pressure on many.”

Already there are indications that the property slowdown is hitting the broader economy. An estimated 40,000 jobs have been destroyed in the construction sector over the past year.

Property developers, who have amassed immense wealth, are increasingly abandoning projects for fear they will not be sufficiently profitable. BCI Australia, a construction group, recently surveyed the fate of property developments planned in 2015. Only half had reached the construction stage in New South Wales and South Australia, while the figure was just 20 percent in Victoria.

The reduction in building activity threatens further mass job losses, amid a broader destruction of permanent positions, enforced by state and federal governments and the trade unions. The construction sector employs an estimated 1.1 million people across the country.

The property slowdown is creating a social crisis for millions of working class mortgage holders. More than one million households, accounting for 30 percent of owner-occupiers, are already afflicted by mortgage stress, meaning they struggle to meet their repayments.

Moody’s Investor Service this week predicted an increase in the number of mortgage delinquencies over the coming months. An estimated 400,000 homeowners owe more on their mortgage than the current value of their homes. In other words, they are unable even to sell off their property and clear their debt.

Moody’s wrote: “Meanwhile, a large number of interest-only mortgages are due to convert to principal and interest loans over the next two years, which will cause some delinquencies over this period.”

The widespread provision of interest-only loans, whereby the borrower pays just interest for a fixed term before beginning to pay the principal, was part of a broader promotion of risky lending practices by the banks, assisted by financial regulators. The major banks are therefore heavily exposed to any housing crisis, with mortgage debt comprising up to 60 percent of their assets.

Having promoted a frenzy of speculative investment, governments and financial regulators confront a dilemma. The Reserve Bank has held the official interest rate at a record low 1.5 percent for 30 consecutive months. It fears that any move to raise interest rates could lead to a sharp contraction in lending, precipitating a major slump. Already, a limited tightening of lending practices by some banks has led to warnings of a broader credit crunch.

That is why the Reserve Bank has recently flagged the possibility of further rate cuts. This would be a desperate attempt to stimulate the economy. The major private banks, however, are under pressure to increase their own lending rates, in line with hikes on international markets, where they borrow their funds.

Whatever measures are carried out, the banks and financial institutions, and the Labor and Liberal-National governments that represent them, will do everything they can to place the burden of the deepening crisis on the backs of workers, young people and the poor.