The Battle against FIFA: Combating Corruption or Combating Power Transition?

Amit Gupta


The current allegations of bribery and corruption against some executive members of the Federation of International Football Associations (FIFA) are important because both national and international sporting bodies have to be effectively policed to display transparency and good governance.  But there is also a subtext to this war against FIFA: it is the struggle for power between the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) and the rest of the world that mirrors the ongoing power transition in the international system.

Corruption is not a new phenomenon in international sporting bodies given how allegations of cash based lobbying has been ongoing for decades in both the Olympic movement and in the award of the World Cup. Similarly, the International Cricket Council was pushed to adopt anti-corruption measures once it was revealed that match-fixing was rampant in international cricket games.  

National sporting bodies have been no better. They not only permit corruption—Italian soccer has a long history of bribing referees and fixing matches—but also engage in egregious violations of political and human rights.  The United States Olympic Committee rigged the vote in 1936 to ensure that the US participated in the Berlin Olympics (there were calls for a boycott and the decision to participate passed with a narrow vote of 58-56) while the Australian, English, and New Zealand cricket boards worked hard to retain apartheid South Africa in international cricket.  It took mass protests by students, church groups, and trade unions in England (1970) and Australia (1971-1972) to stop cricket tours by the Springboks. The respective cricket boards kept talking about not mixing sports with politics. 

FIFA has long been accused of being opaque and arbitrary in its dealings and the US indictments, while over relatively small amounts by American standards (after all $150 million in bribes and money laundering pale in comparison to the billion dollar fines that US investment bankers have paid the Justice Department to obtain a get-out-of-jail-free card) will encourage other countries to investigate their national and regional football associations. But will it bring about meaningful changes in these institutions, particularly greater transparency in their operations? 

Given how sports are tied to nationalism and corruption and the former acts as a catalyst for the latter, the answer is no.  

The prestige associated with hosting a World Cup or the Olympics will always tempt nations to use different illegal means to achieve their goals.  After all, despite four decades of measures and sanctions, doping continues in many sports. From a historical perspective, corruption in cricket did not begin with the match fixing scandals of the 1990s. It began with the 19th century British aristocracy betting on cricket games and paying professional cricketers to throw games. So one should not hold one’s breaths on substantive structural changes in the institutions of international sporting.  FIFA will survive and the world will view the organisation and its current president Sepp Blatter as victims of bullying by the lone superpower.  

This is because FIFA is one of the battlegrounds for the power transition struggle currently ongoing in the international system.  Just as China is building new international institutions such as the BRICS bank and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank to create a parallel set of international economic institutions in which it is prominent, a move is afoot in the footballing world to reduce the dominance of the European nations.  Thus, Qatar has become the battleground between a traditional European-dominated footballing order and a new one being constructed by the rest of the world.  

The Europeans are not keen to play in Qatar because it would wreck their domestic schedules—the Qatar World Cup is to be played in December because of the extreme summers in that country (the fact that Nepalese workers have been dying in construction accidents in Qatar adds a convenient human rights rationale to UEFA’s protests).  FIFA and the Blatter presidency, however, are keen on giving a World Cup to the Arab world and Blatter’s overall game plan is to increase the number of non-Western slots at the World Cup finals—at the expense of European countries that are disproportionately represented. Cancelling the Qatar cup is the first step in re-establishing European control in the organisation, something that has been slipping away for the last four decades.

European over-representation in the World Cup was particularly glaring till the early 1970s when the Brazilian Joao Havelange took over the presidency of FIFA by promising Asians and Africans more slots at the finals. Under successive European presidents, FIFA had shut out the Asians and the Africans. In the 1966 World Cup, North Korea was the only country to represent Africa, Asia, and Oceania (famously beating Australia in a playoff game to reach the finals); in 1970, Morocco was the sole representative from Africa, and Israel represented the whole of Asia. This hardly made it a universal competition. 

Blatter’s plan is to reduce European slots to get more Asian and African countries into the finals and this is a long term threat to European interests.  Thus, the battle being waged in the UN and the International Monetary Fund for greater non-Western representation is the same being waged in FIFA.  The smart money in this is on FIFA and Blatter (if he survives Friday’s vote for president) since he has the support of Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Furthermore, with the US indicting football representatives from Costa Rica and Uruguay, there is likely to be closing of ranks because the US will be seen to act as an enforcer for the Europeans.  

Therefore, the battle for FIFA is not just one of petty corruption (FIFA after all has the same market value as a medium sized US business) but also another battlefront in the ongoing power transition struggle in the international system. 

The Divergent Series: Insurgent—More talent and resources squandered

Christine Schofelt

The second film in the Divergent science fiction series, Insurgent, set in a post-apocalyptic Chicago divided into factions, seems hell-bent on negating any redeeming qualities displayed in the first film, about which we wrote last year:

“Lionsgate, which produced Divergent, has also been responsible for the teen-aimed Hunger Games and Twilight franchises. The heroine and story, however, are very different in this work. The low-key presentation when compared to the bombastic action scenes and spectacle of Hunger Games, and the broader outlook of the heroine than those of either set of films sets Divergent apart—and above.”

This installment, directed by German-born Robert Schwentke (Red, The Time Traveler’s Wife, R.I.P.D.), abandons any attempt at nuance or originality and tritely falls back on themes such as teenage romance, family betrayal and grabs for power at the top. Released simultaneously in 3D and regular format, the film is rife with unnecessary and repetitive special effects involving swooping from great heights, narrowly missing sharp edges and slow-motion breaking glass. This is a shame.

What story there is, leaving aside the obligatory budding romance between the main characters, Tris (Shailene Woodley) and Four (Theo James), involves the group of escaped teenagers hiding from Jeanine (Kate Winslet), the leader of a coup in which the Erudite class has taken power. Running from sector to sector, they are eventually pinned down and Tris gives herself up to save a number of young people from committing suicide while under mind control through brain implants over which Jeanine wields power. I wish I were making this up—sadly, this is what it’s come to.

Along the way they encounter Four’s mother, Evelyn (Naomi Watts)—previously believed to be dead—who has an eye on making a bid for power herself. As in the Hunger Games series, the message advanced here is that power, no matter the class holding it, is corrupting and to be shunned. There is no differentiating between those controlling society’s resources—including the power over life and death itself—and those who are struggling to resist oppression and build a different world. Evelyn is as malicious and violent as the established leaders against which the insurgents plot.

For the teenagers, the central issue becomes the need for repeated and narrow escapes and a focus on the possibility of a stolen kiss here and there. This is disappointing, considering that the first Divergent film made an effort to suggest that Tris considered herself part of a larger society, however her role was to be officially defined. Here we have a retreat, with Woodley’s character forced into the simplistic role of a martyr.

The effective neutering of this character, after such a promising beginning, deserves to be thought about. While Divergent was far from flawless, it suggested some stirrings, some hints of deeper thought than had been typical in the fare aimed at teenagers in recent years. Director Neil Burger (The Lucky Ones) may have had something to do with that.

This generation, growing up without the memory of a time when the US was not at war, or threatening to go to war in some quarter of the world, and for whom the economic situation has become increasingly dire—including record and rising numbers of people their own age living in abject poverty—responds very vocally and powerfully to the idea of resistance, and even social revolution. But what do they get instead? Time and again, they are presented with heroes and heroines who engage in fist fights, knife-fights and perilous physical challenges to be solved through teamwork—but to what end?

In the current wave of films aimed at the younger generations, the upshot for the most part of any change in the political system is simply more of the same. While that may reflect the reality of the moribund two-party system in the US, where one corporate-sponsored warmonger replaces another, it does not offer any way out of the present crisis, and indeed it is not intended to. The protagonists generally elect to delve into matters concerning those directly connected to themselves, to turn further inward and to abandon the wider social world to its fate. On the part of the writers and directors, this expresses some combination of genuine despair and a self-serving, reactionary political agenda.

The number of films and books aimed at this age group that portray draconian—if not openly fascistic—post-apocalyptic societies in which children are pitted against each other for survival by an overclass is staggering and continues to grow.

In each instance, we are expected to swallow another iteration of the story wherein a few escape (for a little while) before coming to recognize that the supposed “revolutionary” saviors are just as dreadful and repressive as the existing rulers. They eventually make some sort of peace with the society that comes after the amorphous, fast-forwarded-through destruction of the one from which they fled. In most cases many of the symptoms are removed (we no longer have to go to The Fight, The Sector, etc.), but there is no explanation of what kind of culture has replaced it, or how.

Teenagers and young adults—and all of us, come to that—deserve better than this. We need characters drawn from life, not super-heroes, not saints, but recognizable human beings with recognizable strengths and weaknesses, in works that hold up a mirror to life. Many young people are entering into opposition, with varying degrees of consciousness, against the existing social order, its inequality, its injustice, its barbarism.

These films and film heroes have fallen far behind.

Spanish telecom workers strike against “precariousness and slave labour”

Vicky Short

Telefónica-Movistas telecommunications technicians and installers in Spain are continuing their two-month strike.

Since May 23, workers have been occupying the Mobile World Centre, formerly the telephone exchange, in the centre of Barcelona, to demand the end of “precariousness and slave labour.”

The workers are striking for higher pay rates, 30 holidays per year, two days rest per week and a proper 40-hour week. In many cases, they are paid on the basis of two or four hours of work per job, when in reality it can take eight or 10 hours, the difference being paid as cash under the counter.

This is the second time workers have occupied the building. Earlier this month, the first occupation was ended after strikers agreed to meet with the company. Management reneged on the deal, saying they would only recognise a document agreed with the main trade unions, CC OO and UGT, in negotiations behind the backs of workers.

The telephone exchange was made famous by the “May Days” events in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War.

The technicians on strike are employed by contractors and subcontractors including Abentel, Cobra, Comfica, Cotronic, Dominion, Elecnor, Itete, Liteyca, Montelnor and Teleco. The unions claim that about 30,000 of the 40,000 workers in around 200 such companies have supported the strike.

The strike began on March 28 in Madrid and was organised by the Alternative Workers Union (Alternativa Sindical de Trabajadores, AST). It was later joined by other unions—the CGT (Confederación General del Trabajo), the Basque separatist trade union LAB (Lanfile Abertzaleen Batzordeak) and Co.Bas (Comisiones de Base)—a split from the Communist Party-aligned Comisiones Obreras (CC OO). By April 7, the strike had become national.

The outsourcing of work by Telefónica has helped the company make multi-billions in profits every year. While the number of customers has risen from 10 million in the 1980s to 300 million today, making the company one of the largest global telephone operators, the number of directly-employed permanent workers has fallen by 50,000.

The strikers explain how for years Telefónica and its contractors have been replacing their permanent workforces with “chains of subcontracting, in which the conditions of every new echelon gets more precarious than the previous one.”

There has also been a big increase in the number of “self-employed workers,” who have no entitlement to unemployment benefits, holidays or pensions. In many cases, they have to provide their own Telefónica uniforms, tools and vehicles, which they have to run and maintain themselves. They often end up earning as little as 600 to 800 euros a month.

The two main trade union federations, the CC OO and the Socialist Party (PSOE) aligned UGT (Unión General de Trabajadores, General Workers Union), eventually joined the strike, only to stab it in the back. After calling their members out on six separate one-day stoppages in late April, they unilaterally signed an agreement with Telefónica-Movistar and several of the contract companies, which ignored the main demands of the majority of workers called out by the smaller unions. Strikes planned for May 6 and 7 were called off.

The CC OO-UGT agreement included new collective bargaining procedures, guarantees of employment, productivity and the levels of subcontracting. Most important for the unions was the formation of a new “joint committee for dialogue” (“commissión paritaria de interlocución”). This comprises representatives from the two unions, Telefónica and the contracting and subcontracting companies. The committee and its associated substructures will provide secure and well-paid employment for scores of trade union bureaucrats, whose role will be to police the agreement.

The CC OO and UGT justified their betrayal by claiming that the strike by the other unions was illegal (i.e., not called by themselves). As a result, they have abandoned the strikers and their supporters to their fate and succeeded in dividing Telefónica workers from those employed by the contractors. This is a tactic in which both the CC OO and UGT are past masters—having used it in disputes at Panrico, Delphi and the air traffic controllers, to name but a few.

The strikers remain defiant and buoyed up by the tremendous solidarity they are encountering, but the CC OO and UGT betrayal and the perspective of the Alternative Workers Union and other smaller unions are putting the strike in danger. They receive no strike pay and survive on contributions made by other workers. Their economic situation is becoming desperate, with some having to resort to food banks.

The strike has been met with virtual silence on Spanish radio and TV stations. It only received coverage on the occasion of the CC OO/UGT-Telefónica agreement. The strikers have set up a website and produced a video appealing for it to be shared widely.

The alternative unions are either split-offs from the main federations and aligned with different sections of the Stalinist-led United Left (Izquierda Unida), the Pabloite Anticapitalistas, the state capitalist Militante or dissidents from the PSOE. They tell striking workers that only if they are more “militant” and make more sacrifices, can they pressure Telefónica and the contractors to make concessions, while they are also calling for the Barcelona city council, controlled since elections on May 24 by a coalition of pseudo-left and pro-independence parties including Podemos, to cancel its contracts with Telefónica.

The reason for the transformation of the unions into tools of management and government is not simply due to the widespread corruption of their officials. The degeneration of the unions is an international phenomenon and has deep objective roots in the changes in world economy.

The globalisation of production has undermined the framework of all nationally-based social and labour market policies. While the trade unions in the past could apply pressure on companies and achieve at least partial improvements for the workers, today it is the exact opposite. Now they blackmail the workers to accept cuts to wages, benefits and working conditions to secure a competitive advantage for the corporations.

Colombian peace talks continue amid renewed combat

Bill Van Auken

Negotiations in Havana, Cuba between the Colombian government of President Juan Manuel Santos and the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias Colombianas) guerrilla movement resumed Friday, despite repeated government bombardments that have claimed the lives of dozens of FARC members and a suspension by the armed opposition group of a five-month-old unilateral cease-fire.

The talks, which have been developing over the past two years, are ostensibly aimed at ending an armed conflict that has claimed the lives of nearly a quarter of a million Colombians since the FARC’s founding in 1964 and as many as a million since the onset of the undeclared rural civil war known as la violence in 1948.

In an apparent signal that the Santos government is serious about accelerating the so-called peace process in Havana, it has dispatched its foreign minister, María Ángela Holguín, and Gonzalo Restrepo, one of the country’s most powerful capitalists, to the negotiating table. Major big business interests, including oil companies in which Restrepo is a director, see an end to the armed conflict as vital to their profit interests.

Officials announced on Friday that the government and the FARC have begun working together on a joint program to locate and deactivate land mines placed throughout the country by both sides in the conflict. FARC members and a Colombian army battalion began collaborating on a pilot de-mining program in the northern department of Antioquia, even as government aircraft continued slaughtering FARC members elsewhere.

In the past week, air strikes have killed over 40 members of the guerrilla movement, including, Jairo Martinez, a participant in the Havana negotiations, who had returned to Colombia to inform members of the FARC about the state of the talks.

The FARC has charged that in at least one of the air strikes, government troops subsequently attacked the bombed encampment, finishing off the wounded execution-style.

The government has cast the renewed air war as retaliation for an April 15 armed clash in which 11 Colombian army soldiers were killed in the southwestern department of Cauca.

The military, the government and a servile Colombian media all cast the incident as an unprovoked massacre of defenseless, sleeping soldiers. People in the area, however, have reported that the incident involved a pitched battle that continued for several hours and condemned the army for bivouacking its troops in a local sports stadium, close to a residential neighborhood. There were other reports that the battle was the outcome of protracted army harassment of the FARC guerrillas. A judicial investigation has been launched to determine whether Colombian army officers deliberately falsified the events in Cauca.

Sections of the military as well as the political right, including those aligned with former Colombian president and longtime US ally Álvaro Uribe, are openly hostile to the negotiations with FARC, seeking to exploit them as a means of further weakening the guerrilla movement while backing renewed military attacks with the aim of provoking a more decisive confrontation.

The Colombian security forces have developed into a massive state within a state thanks to the pouring of billions of dollars of US military aid into the country under the umbrella of “Plan Colombia.” A program launched under the Clinton administration as part of the “war on drugs,” it was quickly widened to include the war against the FARC and to fund and arm regular and irregular forces that have carried out ruthless and bloody repression against the Colombian working class and peasantry.

These elements have no desire to see an end to the war, which for many has been a very profitable business, while serving as the pretext for generalized political repression. There are also concerns within the senior echelons of the security forces that there could be legal repercussions from the many massacres, assassinations and other crimes carried out against the population going back decades.

Among the more recent of these crimes was the so-called “false positive” campaign in which military units rounded up impoverished Colombians, executed them and then dressed them in uniforms in a bid to pass them off as slain guerrillas.

In an open letter this week, Timoleón Jiménez, the leader of the FARC, known as “Timochenko,” declared that it was “obvious that there is a smear campaign against the Santos government aimed at weakening it and forcing it break off the peace process.”

The letter reflects a broader trend within the so-called “left” in Colombia, which has posed the need to support the santistas (the big business political faction led by Santos) against the uribistas (Uribe’s backers).

While there no doubt exist tactical differences and conflicting financial interests between these two layers, there is no fundamental disagreement between Santos and Uribe, whom Santos served as defense minister. Both are committed to defending the interests of foreign and Colombian capital against those of the country masses and to continuing the close political alignment between Bogota and Washington.

While the FARC as well as the countries mediating the Havana talks—Cuba and Norway—have repeatedly called for a cease-fire on both sides, Santos has refused, deferring to the military and its refusal to halt armed attacks until a full treaty is signed.

The FARC’s aim is to turn itself into a new bourgeois party after militarily demobilizing. While the negotiations have reached accords on rural reform, political participation and drug trafficking—which became a principal source of revenue for both the FARC and the right-wing paramilitary groups aligned with the military—there are still no agreements on how crimes carried out by both sides will be adjudicated and on how the FARC fighters will be demobilized and integrated into the country’s political process.

An earlier attempt to achieve the same goal turned into a bloody debacle, when sections of the FARC joined with the Colombian Communist Party and other groups in forming an electoral front known as the Union Patriotica in 1985. Two of the party’s presidential candidates, dozens of its elected officials and some 5,000 of its members were murdered in a campaign of political extermination by the security forces and right-wing paramilitaries.

In addition to the threat of another such bloodbath, the FARC leadership also fears that demobilization could be followed by Colombia’s extradition of leading members of the organization to the US to face trial as “terrorists” or drug traffickers. This was the fate of Simon Trinidad, a leading FARC commander who was captured in 2004, extradited to the US and convicted on terrorism charges, for which he is now serving a 60-year sentence in a maximum security federal prison in Colorado. FARC negotiators in Havana have insisted that Trinidad must be allowed to participate in the talks.

The guerrilla group “hailed” the appointment by the Obama administration earlier this year of a US envoy to the Havana talks, declaring Washington’s participation in the talks “a necessity, given the permanent presence and incidence that the United States has had in the political, economic and social life of Colombia.”

Tapped as the Obama administration representative was Bernard Aronson, a former undersecretary of state for inter-American affairs under the Republican administration of President George H.W. Bush. Aronson, a Democrat, was elevated to the position after becoming a leading advocate for US funding of the CIA-backed contras in their terror war against Nicaragua.

Aronson began his career as a political operative within the so-called reform leadership of the United Mine Workers of America in the 1970s. He was subsequently hired as an aide within the Carter administration. He has more recently headed up a private equities firm and served as an advisor to Goldman Sachs.

After his arrival in Colombia, Aronson announced that Washington “is not playing the classic role as mediator, nor is it a neutral figure.”

US preparing direct military intervention in Nigeria

Thomas Gaist

The Obama administration is preparing for direct military intervention in Nigeria, according to unnamed US State Department officials, the New York Times reported Friday.

The announcement coincided with the swearing in of Nigeria’s former military dictator and newly elected president, Major General Muhammadu Buhari, who delivered his first official address Friday.

According to senior US officials, initial insertions of US military personnel into Nigeria could include deployments of military advisers as well as intelligence and logistical personnel.

The official purpose of US deployments to Nigeria is to support counterinsurgency efforts in Nigeria’s northeastern provinces, where, with quiet support from Washington, the militaries of Chad, Cameroon and Niger already crossed the border and began operations earlier this year.

The alleged purpose of these military operations is to combat Islamic extremism. They are being launched in one of the continent’s most strategic and resource-rich areas.

Nigeria is the largest economy and largest oil producer on the entire continent, and substantial deposits of oil, gas, uranium, timber, and diamonds are dispersed throughout the neighboring countries. The escalating US military and political moves in the area are largely directed against growing Chinese influence in West Africa.

US Secretary of State John Kerry travelled to Nigeria Friday to formally congratulate the new Nigerian president. First in line to speak with Buhari after his inaugural address, Kerry was accompanied by US Africa Command (AFRICOM) supreme commander General David Rodriguez. The three met in private to discuss the US proposals for joint US-Nigerian military operations, according to reports.

Buhari takes office under conditions of deepening crisis, with rampant unemployment, especially among youth, growing anger among Nigeria’s 70 million-strong working class. Fuel shortages have ripped through the oil-rich country in recent weeks, as the value of the Nigerian currency, the naira, has rapidly eroded.

The new government, which relies on export of oil for some 90 percent of its budget, will have to contend with steeply falling tax revenues resulting from the drop in oil prices worldwide.

Under these conditions, Buhari is calling for strong measures to “stabilize the system,” while claiming he will rule by strictly constitutional and democratic means.

In his public remarks Friday, the 72-year-old military ruler proclaimed that Nigeria now has “a truly democratically elected government in place.” The new flowering of Nigerian democracy was owed largely to “strong support from friends abroad,” Buhari said.

The US corporate media have been all too eager to burnish Buhari’s democratic credentials. In its report Friday, the New York Times proclaimed Buhari’s ascendency “a turning point in Nigeria’s democratic evolution,” describing Buhari as a “born-again democrat.”

Despite efforts to present the new government as having enthusiastic popular support, Buhari is bitterly remembered by many Nigerians for suspending democratic rights and violently suppressing protests and strike actions during his 1984–85 dictatorship.

Together with Buhari’s gratitude to his “friends abroad,” such effusive praise for the new government by the leading mouthpiece of the US corporate and financial elite only underscores that the retired military chief has been brought to power as a friend a servant of US imperialism.

The new president practically admitted as much Friday when he warned that “the international community has high expectations” for the incoming government.

Indeed, the Chicago-based consulting firm AKPD, run by close confidant of the White House and campaign adviser to President Obama, David Axelrod, has organized political work on behalf of the Buhari-led All Progressives Congress (APC) for years.

AKPD was intimately involved in preparations for the March 2015 elections, a fact which only came to light after leaked emails between APC leadership exposed as lies claims by AKPD executives that the company ceased involvement in Nigeria in early 2014.

Buhari’s presidential run was characterized by “a well-disciplined message campaign, run on a clear and singular message of change,” an anonymous source told the Washington Free Beacon in February.

“It sounds very familiar to another campaign some Americans might remember from seven years ago,” the source said.

“These guys are running a Western-style, Western-directed campaign that has identified a message through polling and research,” he said.

Signaling his full alignment with US imperialism and its “Global War on Terror”—the official ideological cover for constantly expanding US military interventions throughout the African continent and worldwide—Buhari announced that the central priority of his government will be the military struggle against Boko Haram.

“The world desperately needs a victory against cultist jihadism,” Buhari said Friday.

In the name of fighting Boko Haram, the US has already launched regular drone missions over Nigeria in 2014. The US-backed a joint invasion of northern Nigeria by Cameroon, Niger and Chad earlier this year, amid US and NATO-led AFRICOM-led war games involving the same countries and other African militaries. 

It is significant that Chadian forces have already crossed the border into Nigeria. Chad's military has served increasingly as a primary regional gendarme for the US and European powers since the dissolution of the USSR. Chad’s capital city currently hosts a permanent garrison of several thousand French soldiers, and US military teams began publicly deploying to Chad last year.

Since last year’s kidnapping of the Nigerian schoolgirls, which became the centerpiece of a propaganda campaign spearheaded by First Lady Michelle Obama, Boko Haram has been brandished by the ideologists of the war on terror as the home-grown African version of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Together with Al Shabab and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Boko Haram is one of the main “extremist threats” cited by the Pentagon to justify its constantly expanding military presence in Africa.

The US media has hyped the threat of Boko Haram with growing intensity over the past year, in a clear indication that Washington's planned for military intervention were far advanced.

In its report on Buhari’s inauguration Friday, the Washington Post warned that the Boko Haram militants “have given the Islamic State its first foothold in sub-Saharan Africa.”

In reality, Boko Haram is a loosely affiliated federation of militant formations and ethnically based factions with ties to the political establishment in Nigeria and broader West African region.

Like the various Al Qaeda and Islamic State groups, Boko Haram represents dissident factions of the ex-colonial bourgeoisie. While they pose as ferociously anti-imperialist, in practice these forces function as instruments of the US and European imperialists, serving simultaneously as proxy forces and as convenient bogeymen.

The supposed "war against Boko Haram" is a prextext to transform growing areas of Nigeria into a staging area for military operations throughout the oil rich Lake Chad Basin and broader West African region. African militaries are being mobilized by the US and European powers in service of their drive to reimpose colonial forms of rule on the continent.

As his first act in office, Buhari announced Friday that he will establish a massive new Nigerian military headquarters in the northern city of Maiduguri.

European Union squabbles over refugee quotas

Martin Kreickenbaum

The refugee question has once again revealed the true nature of the European Union. While military intervention on the coast of Libya to destroy refugee boats is welcomed by all member states, the question of accepting refugees has unleashed a fierce dispute inside the EU.

On Wednesday, the EU Commission presented an “immigration agenda,” which, among other things, foresees 40,000 refugees from Italy and Greece being dispersed to other EU countries over the next two years under a quota system. In addition, 20,000 Syrians from refugee camps outside Europe would also be settled in the EU.

The EU Commission created distribution quotas taking into account the respective population, gross domestic product, unemployment rate and number of refugees already recorded. Accordingly, Germany would take most of the refugees (around 18 percent), followed by France and Spain. However, the UK, Ireland and Denmark are excluded from the quota system, having agreed arrangements with the European Union some years ago freeing them from participation in such joint actions.

The basis for the EU Commission proposal is Article 78 (3) of the Lisbon Treaty, which provides for the resettlement of refugees within the European Union if individual member states face “a sudden influx of third country nationals in need.” The EU Commission has announced that it will pay 6,000 euros from an emergency pot to the host country for each resettled refugee. But despite this miserable haggling over refugees, a sharp conflict between the EU member states has broken out over the quota system.

Even before the plans were presented to the public, there was fierce opposition to the proposals. British Home Secretary Theresa May said beforehand that the UK would not under any circumstances participate in a quota system for distributing refugees. Last weekend, French President François Hollande said, “It’s out of the question to have immigrant quotas because we have rules on border checks and policies for overseeing immigration.”

He was repeating statements made by the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who rejected the planned quota system with openly xenophobic arguments, calling it a “proposal bordering on madness.” Appealing to nationalistic and xenophobic sentiments, Orban stated, “Europe must remain the continent of Europeans, and Hungary the country of Hungarians.”

Also opposing the proposed quota system are the governments of Spain, Denmark, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland and Slovakia. Those speaking in favour are those states that have so far taken the largest share of refugees, or because of their location at the external border of the EU have been most affected by the refugee influx.

The quota system is a bureaucratic monstrosity that enforces the dispersal of traumatized refugees like general cargo across the continent, in some cases transporting them to countries where there is no functioning asylum system, where they are locked up in camps or have to live on the street without any support. Of course, this not the reason why the quota system is being rejected by European governments.

Although the EU Commission proposal only concerns refugees coming from Syria and Eritrea, whose asylum recognition rate in the EU is more than 75 percent, they are being denounced as “economic refugees.”

For example, instead of a quota system, Hollande demanded that all “economic refugees” be immediately deported. He said, “People who come because they think that Europe is a prosperous continent, even when they are not hired by companies...must be escorted back, that’s the rule.”

British Home Secretary Theresa May employed similar reasoning, urging that refugee boats should not even be allowed to reach Europe, but sent back to safe landing sites in North Africa. The Hungarian, Polish and Spanish governments justified their refusal to accept refugees, saying that they were “economic migrants.”

In reality, the growing number of refugees is a direct result of the military and political interventions of the European powers and the United States in the Middle East and North Africa. The Iraq war, the bombing of Libya, the fomenting of civil wars in Syria, Yemen and other countries, and the arming of Islamist groups by the Western powers and their regional allies have destroyed whole societies and driven millions to flee their homes.

In the last 18 months alone, more than 5,000 refugees have drowned or died of hunger or thirst in a desperate attempt to reach Europe via the Mediterranean Sea. In the first four months of this year, 26,000 refugees have reached Italy and 28,000 have reached Greece. There is no functioning intake system for asylum seekers in both countries. Refugees are often left to fend for themselves and face being homeless on the street.

At the same time, refugees who drowned in the Mediterranean or live in limbo on the edges of Europe are used as justification for further military interventions by the European Union. As fierce as the dispute is over their intake and distribution of refugees, even greater is the consensus on military action off the coast of Libya.

For the European governments, it is not a question of protecting migrants from unscrupulous people smugglers, as military interventions are officially justified. Rather, refugees should be apprehended far away from the coasts and borders of Europe, and access to the resource-rich regions of Africa secured. How far the EU intends to go is clear from official documents published by Statewatch and Wikileaks last week.

An internal EU paper describes in detail the four phases of the planned operation. According to military intelligence, refugee boats should first be taken into international waters and in a second phase of the operation, destroyed. In a third phase, if possible with a UN mandate or the agreement of the Libyan government in Tobruk, operations could also be conducted on land. Special Forces would “conduct operations along the coast, in harbours or against smugglers’ ships at anchor before they are used.” Fuel depots and other facilities used by the smugglers and traffickers are to be destroyed. What remains unclear is whether the EU will also conduct these actions without a mandate if necessary.

The EU Commission does not fail to point out that “operations against smugglers in the presence of migrants pose a high risk of collateral damage” and could mean the loss of human lives. They clearly accept that military action can lead to numerous deaths. In Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and in the global drone war conducted by the United States, so-called “precision operations” against infrastructure targets have led to massive “collateral damage” among the civilian population.

The EU Commission is already preparing for such an eventuality. A report by the EU Military Council proposes an “information strategy” that minimises “the EU’s reputational loss in case of loss of human life being ascribed to the EU mission.” To this end, it should be made clear from the beginning that “the focus is [not] to rescue migrants at sea but that the aim of the operation is to disrupt the migrant-smuggling business model.”

The Military Council also proposes a massive operation on land, whose tasks include “seizure of vessels…neutralisation of smugglers’ vessels and assets…hostage rescue…temporary detention of those posing a threat to the force or suspected of crimes.”

The document of the Military Council also points out that the success of the entire mission is expected to be very low if a UN mandate is absent for military operations on the Libyan coast and it applies only to phases one and two—monitoring and military surveillance and the confiscation and destruction of boats on the high seas.

On the other hand, a successful mission, according to the document, could not exclude that migration movements are displaced to the western and eastern Mediterranean. An extension of the action to Tunisia and Egypt, and close cooperation with the local military, was therefore advisable. In plain language, this means nothing other than that the European Union is seeking to turn all of North Africa into a war zone.

Chinese premier concludes four-country tour of South America

Alexander Fangmann

China’s head of government, Premier Li Keqiang, finished his first trip to South America on Tuesday, having made stops in Brazil, Peru, Chile, and Colombia from May 18 to 26. In each country, Li announced a variety of trade and investment deals, all designed to increase Chinese involvement in a region that is fast becoming a flashpoint for conflict with the United States, which has been displaced by China as the top trading partner for a number of countries on the continent.

In Brazil, already China’s top economic partner in Latin America, with bilateral trade amounting to $86 billion in 2014, Li announced a package of investments and commercial deals totaling around $50 billion. Among the deals are China’s purchase of 22 Embraer commercial jets and four Vale ore carriers. An additional $7 billion in financing was extended to Petrobras, the heavily indebted state-run oil company, as it attempts to get out from under a corruption scandal that saw at least $1.9 billion in assets drained off. The Chinese bank ICBC also announced it would provide $50 billion in financing for infrastructure including roads, railways and power grids.

Brazil, China and Peru also agreed to participate in a feasibility study on a proposed 3,500-kilometer railroad that would stretch from Brazil’s Atlantic coast to the Pacific coast in southern Peru. Such a rail line would allow Brazilian exports to avoid reliance on the Panama Canal, giving China more options for ports. Aside from this announcement, during Li’s time in Peru, the two countries signed a joint statement agreeing to deepen cooperation in a number of areas, to increase cultural exchanges, and to more fully use the free trade agreement signed in 2010.

In Chile, Li and President Michelle Bachelet signed a series of agreements, including a currency swap deal worth $3.5 billion, which would also see the creation by China Construction Bank of the first renminbi clearing bank in South America. Such a clearing bank would present a challenge to the current position of the US dollar as the de facto international reserve currency.

While visiting Colombia, Li discussed the possibility of a free trade agreement with President Juan Manuel Santos, one of Washington’s closest allies in the region. They also mapped out a development plan for the port of Buenaventura, where much trade between the two countries is concentrated, and discussed the possibility of expanding investment for manufacturing.

The four countries involved in the trip are already China’s largest trading partners, comprising 57 percent of China’s total trade with Latin America. Trade between Latin America and China has risen tremendously over the past 15 years, with trade estimated at $270 billion in 2013, compared to only $12 billion in 2000. Much of this trade has involved the export of raw materials, including oil, from Latin America and the import of Chinese-manufactured consumer goods.

However, China’s economy has been slowing, with growth for this year estimated by the International Monetary Fund to be 6.8 percent, falling from 7.4 percent last year and down even more from the average 10 percent per year seen prior to 2010. This has been driven primarily by a general slowdown in the major capitalist economies, which has decreased demand for Chinese commodities and finished consumer goods, reflected in a drop of 19.9 percent in Chinese imports. This has translated into reduced demand for raw materials from Latin America, which has also been hit by declining demand from the US and Europe.

The deals Li announced during his trip in part seek to develop in Latin America a market for more complex capital goods through a program of infrastructure development and industrial modernization. This follows an announcement in January from Chinese President Xi Jinping, who stated that Chinese companies would invest $250 billion in the region over the next 10 years, where total previous investment has amounted to just under $100 billion.

The move towards increasing investment in Latin America is partially being driven by a slowing of the real estate boom in China, as well as serious indications that Chinese share markets are in the midst of an enormous speculative bubble which may burst at any time. The Shenzhen Composite Index, made up mainly of tech companies, has almost tripled over the past year and margin financing throughout the share markets has increased by a factor of five. It is becoming evident that the free-flowing credit introduced by central banks across the world in response to the 2008-2009 economic crisis has only served to fuel parasitism and speculation.

At the same time, China’s turn to Latin America is no small part a response to the United States’ own “pivot to Asia.” The US, however declined economically from the time it dominated the lands to its south, contemptuously referred to as its own “back yard.” It resents the Chinese intrusion into a region it has long regarded as its own domain, and as it takes on an increasingly aggressive posture, the likelihood of the region becoming a major flashpoint for military conflict will rise.

US economy contracted in first quarter

Andre Damon

The US economy shrank at an annual rate of 0.7 percent in the first three months of this year, the Commerce Department said Friday. The new figures mark a sharp downward revision compared with the already anemic 0.2 percent first-quarter growth rate estimated by the Commerce Department in April, and an even bigger slide from the previous quarter, which saw a growth of 2.2 percent.

While the White House was quick to dismiss the dismal figures as the expression of various technical quirks and one-off causes, the fact remains that, seven years since the start of the 2008 financial crisis, the US economy remains mired in stagnation and slump. Friday’s figures represent the third quarterly economic contraction since the beginning of the so-called economic recovery in 2009.

The slump is broadly expected to continue through a large section of this year, with the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta predicting a growth rate of just 0.8 percent in the second quarter. If that were the case, economic growth in the first half of this year would be effectively zero.

Apologists for the political establishment have pointed to the fall in the official unemployment rate as a sign of economic health, declaring that the US economy is on track to hit “full employment” next year. But the official unemployment rate is a fiction, as it entirely discounts the millions of people who have fallen out of the labor force since the 2008 crash. The labor force participation rate remains near a decades-long low at 62.8 percent, down from 66.4 percent in 2006.

While a number of factors contributed to the contraction in US economic output in the first quarter, the clearest and most immediate cause was the collapse in business investment, which fell by 2.8 percent, compared to an increase of 4.7 percent in the previous quarter.

This is not for lack of money. While US corporations are sitting on a cash hoard of some $1.4 trillion, they are refusing to make any significant investments, and are rather spending their cash on share buybacks and dividend hikes, while carrying out mergers and acquisitions at a record-setting pace.

This week, the Wall Street Journal reported that “companies in the S&P 500 sharply increased their spending on dividends and buybacks to a median 36 percent of operating cash flow in 2013, from 18 percent in 2003. Over that same decade, those companies cut spending on plants and equipment to 29 percent of operating cash flow, from 33 percent in 2003.”

The same day as the Commerce Department published its updated economic figures, the financial data firm Dealogic reported that mergers and acquisitions are on track to hit a record in May, with an expected $241.6 billion in deals, topping even the previous record set in May 2007, before the 2008 financial crash.

The enormous amounts of money generated for corporate executives, hedge funds and private equality companies through these mergers—which are largely financed with free money from the Federal Reserve—is the result of the ensuing mass layoffs and cost cutting that inevitably follow such consolidations.

Corporate boards of directors have rewarded CEOs who carry out layoffs and other cost-cutting measures with ever-greater pay packages. CEO pay hit a record high last year, according to figures calculated by executive pay research firm Equilar published in The New York Times earlier this month. The 200 highest-paid CEOs got an average of $22.6 million apiece last year, up 10 percent from the year before and more than double what they were paid in 2006.

The pervasive collapse in investment amid an orgy of financial parasitism has prompted many analysts to declare that the “new normal” is one of stagnant growth. Last month, the International Monetary Fund reported that “potential growth in advanced economies is likely to remain below pre-crisis rates, while it is expected to decrease further in emerging market economies in the medium term.”

Since the official end of the recession in 2009, the US economy has grown at an average annual rate of only 2.2 percent, compared to an average growth rate of 3.2 percent during the 1990s and 4.2 percent in the 1950s.

The fall in investment was particularly sharp in the energy sector, which has been hemorrhaging jobs by the tens of thousands amid falling oil prices. The category of business investment that covers oil exploration fell at an annual rate of 48.6 percent in the first quarter, according to the Commerce Department’s report.

The continued appreciation of the dollar has also led to a decline in exports, as US corporations face lower demand from overseas. US transnational corporations have demanded that the Federal Reserve do more in order to lower the value of the dollar and stimulate exports.

The Federal Reserve, for its part, has responded to the persistent weakness in the US and global economy and the appreciation of the dollar by keeping interest rates at a record low. The Fed has pulled back from its plan to raise the federal funds rate next month, and bank officials have indicated that a rate increase may not come until next year. These actions mirror those of the European Central Bank, which this month announced an expansion of its quantitative easing program amid a persistent economic slump on the continent.

As a result of seven years of ultra-low interest rates, bank bailouts and “quantitative easing,” the major stock markets have more than tripled in value, taking the wealth of the financial aristocracy along with them. The 400 richest individuals in the United States, whose wealth has doubled since Obama was first elected, now have a combined net worth of $2.29 trillion.

The influx of cheap money from the Federal Reserve and other central banks will only continue to fuel the massive orgy of parasitism gripping the economy, facilitating mergers and buyouts that lead to mass layoffs and wage cuts while further enriching the financial elite at the expense of society as a whole.

The fraudulent debate over NSA reform

Patrick Martin

The US Senate convenes May 31 in a rare Sunday afternoon session called by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to forestall the expiration of Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act. This section of the vast police-state law passed in 2001 has been used as the basis for the National Security Agency’s collection of telephone metadata on every phone call made in the United States, as well as authorizing other forms of domestic spying.

In the week leading up to the Senate session, President Obama, Attorney General Loretta Lynch and the heads of the FBI and other security agencies have depicted the potential expiration of Section 215 in apocalyptic terms. Obama made several appearances before television cameras to demand action “because it’s necessary to keep the American people safe and secure.” Lynch said that a failure to act would cause “a serious lapse in our ability to protect the American people.”

Other administration representatives were even more strident. At a press briefing of three top officials, all unidentified at the insistence of the White House, one said, “What you’re doing, essentially, is you’re playing national security Russian roulette. We have not had to confront addressing the terrorist threat without these authorities, and it’s going to be fraught with unnecessary risk.”

This scaremongering is completely cynical. The surveillance powers embodied in Section 215 have nothing to do with defending the American people from terrorist attacks. On the contrary, the American people are the principal target of Section 215, and of the Patriot Act as a whole.

On the eve of the vote, a report by the Justice Department’s own Office of Inspector General conceded that the mass collection of data on telephone metadata—the core of Section 215 as interpreted by both the Bush and Obama administrations—has played no role in any terrorism investigation or prosecution. Another of the key powers under Section 215, authorization of “roving wiretaps” of individuals who change cellphones, has been used in only a handful of cases. A provision for wiretaps of so-called “rogue” terrorists—individuals not connected with any organization—has never been used at all.

Given these facts, how is one to account for the “sky is falling” rhetoric from the Obama administration and its congressional allies, both Republican and Democrat, over the possible expiration of Section 215?

Section 215 is of enormous importance to the government—but not for the reason given. The mass data collection on telecommunications and the Internet is a key element in the development of an authoritarian state that is accumulating vast databases on the political and social views of the entire population. The state is preparing to use this intelligence in an effort to crush popular opposition to ever-growing social inequality, police violence and militarism.

The greatest threat to the democratic rights of the American people comes not from Islamic fundamentalist terrorists or their Internet sympathizers, but from the capitalist state itself, which is the main instrument for defending the profits and wealth of the super-rich against the vast majority of the population, the working class. Whatever form the Senate debate takes on Sunday, this central issue will be evaded and covered up.

The Obama administration is pushing for Senate acceptance of the USA Freedom Act, a bill which makes cosmetic changes in Section 215 while reauthorizing it and placing it on a pseudo-legal foundation. The database of call records would be maintained by the telecommunications companies, rather than directly at NSA headquarters, and the NSA would route its data searches through the telecoms.

This bill passed the House of Representatives with overwhelming bipartisan support, but fell three votes short of winning consideration in the Senate. It appears likely that a dozen or more Republican senators, who initially opposed the bill, will switch their votes in order to beat the May 31 deadline. Procedural obstacles by a handful of Republican and Democratic opponents may delay this several days, which would supposedly lead to a temporary shutdown of the call surveillance program.

There is not the slightest reason to believe that the NSA and the vast military-intelligence complex as a whole will actually take such a step. These agencies engaged in mass domestic spying without any legal authorization long before the passage of the Patriot Act in 2001. As a federal appeals court ruled earlier this month, the Bush-Obama interpretation of Section 215 as an authorization of mass call data collection has no legal basis, meaning that the entire surveillance program has been conducted unlawfully for the past 14 years. Operating outside of and in defiance of the law is second nature to the US spy apparatus.

Even the present half-hearted and thoroughly insincere discussion is only taking place in response to the revelations by whistleblowers like Edward Snowden and Thomas Drake about the massive police-state buildup under the guise of “anti-terrorism.” The same senators who claim to be concerned about the “surveillance state” have joined in condemning the actions of the courageous individuals who done the public service of exposing it.

There will be much posturing in Sunday’s debate, both from those hyping the threat of terrorism, and those, a small minority, claiming to defend constitutional rights. But Republican Rand Paul, Democrat Ron Wyden and other professed opponents of Section 215 are objecting to only a small portion of the Patriot Act, which is itself only a series of amendments to earlier police-state laws like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The collection of telephone metadata, moreover, is only one of hundreds, if not thousands, of programs through which the US military-intelligence apparatus collects information on the American population.

Every Republican and Democratic politician defends this state machine as a whole. The struggle to defend democratic rights and to dismantle the police-state apparatus of spying and repression is the task of the working class, and it requires the building of an independent working-class political movement based on a socialist program.

Austerity budget deepens Puerto Rico’s economic crisis

John Marion

Puerto Rico’s House and Senate have passed similar versions of an austerity budget for the year beginning July 1, increasing the sales and use tax from 7 percent to 11.5 percent and cutting $674 million from the budget. The cuts will hit a long list of social needs, including public schools, the University of Puerto Rico system, domestic violence programs, art museums, and the Puerto Rican League Against Cancer.

Despite this plan to balance the island’s budget on the backs of its workers, Moody’s last week downgraded the debt of Puerto Rico’s Government Development Bank by three levels, to Ca; Bloomberg Business is reporting that the GDB will run out of cash by September 30 unless it sells a new bond issue backed by taxes on oil. There is only one rating lower than Ca on Moody’s scale.

Moody’s also downgraded Puerto Rico’s General Obligation bonds by one notch to Caa2. The latter rating falls in Moody’s “extremely speculative” category.

Puerto Rico’s economic crisis, which began in 2006, predates the global crash of 2008 and is causing social devastation. According to US Bureau of Labor Statistics data, the island’s labor force has dropped from more than 1.4 million in January 2006 to less than 1.15 million currently. Approximately 144,000 people left for the US mainland in 2014. The official unemployment rate, which was 15 percent at the end of 2013, is now slightly less than 12 percent even though the number of employed workers has increased by only 10,700.

Puerto Rico, officially a “commonwealth” of the United States, is suffering not just from predatory lending by large banks, but also from inadequate federal funding. While Pedro Pierluisi, the island’s non-voting Resident Commissioner in the US House of Representatives, is advocating an amendment to Chapter 9 of the federal bankruptcy code so that it covers Puerto Rico, its Medicare block grant is so underfunded that it likely will be spent out two years early.

According to the Independent, the grant has not paid doctors’ fees since March. The paper quotes the president of the Physicians and Surgeons Association as comparing the austerity to “genocide” after an insurance company refused to pay for post-surgery drugs for a liver transplant patient. Three hundred and sixty one doctors left Puerto Rico last year.

Pierluisi, a member of both the New Progressive Party and the US Democratic Party, favors austerity over a sales tax hike. While opposing the latter, he told a recent NPP legislative conference that “what the government needs to do is go line by line in the budgets of all the agencies and eliminate all excessive and unnecessary expenses,” according to the Puerto Rican newspaper La Esquina .

The Puerto Rican government’s planned cuts of $674 million represent nearly 7 percent of its total budget of $9.8 billion. The government is claiming that there will be no layoffs, even though 4,000 of its workers will be affected by the consolidation of 18 different agencies. Nearly 100 public schools will be closed, while the University of Puerto Rico system will suffer cuts of $166 million.

On May 13, thousands of university students marched from the state capitol building toward the Governor’s residence at La Fortaleza, but were blocked by police who used a baton to attack one marchers. The police had also set up fencing on the steps of the capitol to keep protesters out. The students carried placards protesting the cuts, including one proclaiming that “Education is an investment, not an expense.”

More than 40 percent of Puerto Ricans live below the poverty line, and US Census figures show a median household income of only $19,500 in 2012. Any increase in the regressive sales tax will worsen conditions for workers. Adding insult to injury, a dedicated portion of the sales tax goes directly to debt service. The island’s next debt service payment of $630 million, scheduled for July, is only slightly less than the ruthless cuts in the budget that are being worked out for next year.

The Puerto Rican government’s net tax-supported debt per capita is almost $15,100 according to Nuveen Asset Management. By comparison, the highest level for a US state—Connecticut—is slightly less than $5,500. Using May 2014 data from Moody’s, Nuveen calculates that Puerto Rico’s net debt per capita is 87.5 percent of personal income while the average for all US states is only 3.2 percent.

An 11.5 percent sales and use tax will be split so that 1.5 percent goes to municipalities, 5 percent goes to the Puerto Rican treasury, and 5 percent to the Puerto Rico Urgent Interest Fund Corporation (known by its Spanish acronym, COFINA). COFINA was created in May 2006 and “strengthened” later that year by a law which guaranteed it first dibs on sales tax revenues. That law also set a base for COFINA’s sales tax funding, which increases by at least 4 percent each year no matter what the rate of inflation.

While municipal and institutional investors from the mainland are worried about the possibility of a Puerto Rican default, hedge funds are seeking to benefit from the crisis. Some 70 percent of the $3.5 billion General Obligation bond sale of March 2014 was purchased by hedge funds. The price of those bonds, which have an 8 percent coupon, has increased from 77.6 to 82 cents on the dollar this month, as predatory lenders bet on the outcome.

Sales and oil taxes are not the only methods being used by predatory lenders to bleed Puerto Ricans dry. Companies like UBS are also trying mercilessly to unload their bond holdings on small investors. Wall Street’s Financial Industry Regulatory Authority recently ruled that UBS has to pay $1 million to the retired owner of a bodega after he lost $737,000 of his life savings to bad bond investments. According to FINRA, UBS was involved in an “internal push” to sell the worthless bonds and “solicited” Juan Burgos Rosado to put all his money in them.

Reuters reported this month that UBS deliberately tried to dump “its own inventory” on such investors, and that hundreds of additional claims are pending.