Offering Choice but Delivering Tyranny: The Corporate Capture of Agriculture

Colin Todhunter

Many lobbyists talk a lot about critics of genetic engineering technology denying choice to farmers. They say that farmers should have access to a range of tools and technologies to maximise choice and options. At the same time, somewhat ironically, they decry organic agriculture and proven agroecological approaches, presumably because these practices have no need for the proprietary inputs of the global agrochemical/agritech corporations they are in bed with. And presumably because agroecology represents liberation from the tyranny of these profiteering, environment-damaging global conglomerates.

It is fine to talk about ‘choice’ but we do not want to end up offering a false choice (rolling out technologies that have little value and only serve to benefit those who control the technology), to unleash an innovation that has an adverse impact on others or to manipulate a situation whereby only one option is available because other options have been deliberately removed. And we would certainly not wish to roll out a technology that traps farmers on a treadmill that they find difficult to get off.

Surely, a responsible approach for rolling out important (potentially transformative) technologies would have to consider associated risks, including social, economic and health impacts.

Take the impact of the Green Revolution in India, for instance. Sold on the promise that hybrid seeds and associated chemical inputs would enhance food security on the basis of higher productivity, agriculture was transformed, especially in Punjab. But to gain access to seeds and chemicals many farmers had to take out loans and debt became (and remains) a constant worry. Many became impoverished and social relations within rural communities were radically altered: previously, farmers would save and exchange seeds but now they became dependent on unscrupulous money lenders, banks and seed manufacturers and suppliers. Vandana Shiva in ‘The Violence of the Green Revolution‘ (1989) describes the social marginalisation and violence that accompanied the process.

On a macro level, the Green Revolution conveniently became tied to an international (neo-colonial) system of trade based on chemical-dependent agro-export mono-cropping linked to loans, sovereign debt repayment and World Bank/IMF structural adjustment (privatisation/deregulation) directives. Many countries in the Global South were deliberately turned into food deficit regions, dependent on (US) agricultural imports and strings-attached aid.

The process led to the massive displacement of the peasantry and, according to the academics Eric Holt-Giménez et al, (Food rebellions: Crisis and the hunger for Justice, 2009), the consolidation of the global agri-food oligopolies and a shift in the global flow of food: developing countries produced a billion-dollar yearly surplus in the 1970s; they were importing $11 billion a year by 2004.

And it’s not as though the Green Revolution delivered on its promises. In India, it merely led to more wheat in the diet, while food productivity per capita showed no increased or even actually decreased (see ‘New Histories of the Green Revolution' by Glenn Stone). And, as described by Bhaskar Save in his open letter (2006) to officials, it had dire consequences for diets, the environment, farming, health and rural communities.

The ethics of the Green Revolution – at least it was rolled out with little consideration for these impacts – leave much to be desired.

As the push to drive GM crops into India’s fields continues (the second coming of the green revolution – the gene revolution), we should therefore take heed. To date, the track record of GMOs is unimpressive, but the adverse effects on many smallholder farmers are already apparent (see ‘Hybrid Bt cotton: a stranglehold on subsistence farmers in India’ by A P Gutierrez).

Aside from looking at the consequences of technology roll outs, we should, when discussing choice, also account for the procedures and decisions that were made which resulted in technologies coming to market in the first place.

Steven Druker, in his book ‘Altered Genes, Twisted Truth’, argues that the decision to commercialise GM seeds and food in the US amounted to a subversion of processes put in place to serve the public interest. The result has been a technology roll out which could result (is resulting) in fundamental changes to the genetic core of the world’s food. This decision ultimately benefited Monsanto’s bottom line and helped the US gain further leverage over global agriculture.

We must therefore put glib talk of the denial of technology by critics to one side if we are to engage in a proper discussion of choice. Any such discussion would account for the nature of the global food system and the dynamics and policies that shape it. This would include looking at how global corporations have captured the policy agenda for agriculture, including key national and international policy-making bodies, and the role of the WTO and World Bank.

Choice is also about the options that could be made available, but which have been closed off or are not even considered. In Ethiopia, for example, agroecology has been scaled up across the entire Tigray region, partly due to enlightened political leaders and the commitment of key institutions.

However, in places where global agribusiness/agritech corporations have leveraged themselves into strategic positions, their interests prevail. From the false narrative that industrial agriculture is necessary to feed the world to providing lavish research grants and the capture of important policy-making institutions, these firms have secured a thick legitimacy within policymakers’ mindsets and mainstream discourse. As a result, agroecological approaches are marginalised and receive scant attention and support.

Monsanto had a leading role in drafting the WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights to create seed monopolies. The global food processing industry wrote the WTO Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures. Whether it involves Codex or the US-India Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture aimed at restructuring (destroying) Indian agriculture, the powerful agribusiness/food lobby has secured privileged access to policy makers and sets the policy agenda.

From the World Bank’s ‘enabling the business of agriculture’ to the Gates Foundation’s role in opening up African agriculture to global food and agribusiness oligopolies, democratic procedures at sovereign state levels are being bypassed to impose seed monopolies and proprietary inputs on farmers and to incorporate them into a global supply chain dominated by powerful corporations.

We have the destruction of indigenous farming in Africa as well as the ongoing dismantling of Indian agriculture and the deliberate impoverishment of Indian farmers at the behest of transnational agribusiness. Where is the democratic ‘choice’? It has been usurped by corporate-driven Word Bank bondage (India is its biggest debtor in the bank’s history) and by a trade deal with the US that sacrificed Indian farmers for the sake of developing its nuclear sector.

Similarly, ‘aid’ packages for Ukraine – on the back of a US-supported coup – are contingent on Western corporations taking over strategic aspects of the economy. And agribusiness interests are at the forefront. Something which neoliberal apologists are silent on as they propagandise about choice, and democracy.

Ukraine’s agriculture sector is being opened up to Monsanto/Bayer. Iraq’s seed laws were changed to facilitate the entry of Monsanto. India’s edible oils sector was undermined to facilitate the entry of Cargill. And Bayer’s hand is possibly behind the ongoing strategy to commercialise GM mustard in India. Whether on the back of militarism, secretive trade deals or strings-attached loans, global food and agribusiness conglomerates secure their interests and have scant regard for choice or democracy.

The ongoing aim is to displace localised, indigenous methods of food production and allow transnational companies to take over, tying farmers and regions to a system of globalised production and supply chains dominated by large agribusiness and retail interests. Global corporations with the backing of their host states, are taking over food and agriculture nation by nation.

Many government officials, the media and opinion leaders take this process as a given. They also accept that (corrupt) profit-driven transnational corporations have a legitimate claim to be owners and custodians of natural assets (the ‘commons’). There is the premise that water, seeds, food, soil and agriculture should be handed over to these conglomerates to milk for profit, under the pretence these entities are somehow serving the needs of humanity.

Ripping land from peasants and displacing highly diverse and productive smallholder agriculture, rolling out very profitable but damaging technologies, externalising the huge social, environmental and health costs of the prevailing neoliberal food system and entire nations being subjected to the policies outlined above: how is any of it serving the needs of humanity?

It is not. Food is becoming denutrified, unhealthy and poisoned with chemicals and diets are becoming less diverse. There is a loss of plant and insect diversity, which threatens food security, soils are being degraded, water tables polluted and depleted and millions of smallholder farmers, so vital to global food production, are being pushed into debt in places like India and squeezed off their land and out of farming.

It is time to place natural assets under local ownership and to develop them in the public interest according to agroecological principles. This involves looking beyond the industrial yield-output paradigm and adopting a systems approach to food and agriculture that accounts for local food security and sovereignty, cropping patterns to ensure diverse nutrition production per acre, water table stability and good soil structure. It also involves pushing back against the large corporations that hold sway over the global food system and more generally challenging the leverage that private capital has over all our lives.

That’s how you ensure liberation from tyranny and support genuine choice.

Researching the Unresearched: Left-Wing Extremism and the Future Rules of Governance

Bibhu Prasad Routray

In the last week of July 2019, a brother and sister pair, in a representation of the two principal adversaries in India’s left-wing extremism (LWE)-affected heartland, came face-to-face. In Chhattisgarh’s Sukma district, Vetti Rama, a member of the Chhattisgarh state police, was fired upon by a group of extremists that included his own sister, Vetti Kanni. Rama, himself an extremist until a year ago, has since surrendered and is now a part of the ‘eye and ear’ scheme of the state police. Kanni continues to be a member of the Communist Party of India-Maoist (CPI-Maoist). Both escaped unhurt in the encounter. Apart from being a human interest story, the incident can be seen as a coalescing of multiple issues that LWE, and the efforts to counter it, have laid bare. Each of these issues potentially is a subject of serious research. This article is an attempt to throw light on four of them.

First, the one and a half decades of intense conflict, beginning with the formation of the CPI-Maoist in 2004, has left tribal societies across the affected states deeply fractured. Tribals enlisted by the Maoists and the state have fought against each another, leaving villages burnt and deserted, agricultural fields untilled, and thriving self-sustaining economies of the rural belt in ruins. Schools, roads, and health care facilities have been rendered unusable. Kanni and Rama, in a way, represent this division, which has significant societal ramifications. Irrespective of the direction the weakened LWE takes in the coming months, either towards resolution or further weakening, the state will have to address such faultlines to restore normalcy. Somehow, this manmade disaster-in-waiting has escaped the attention of most researchers, barring perhaps the activists operating in the region.

Second, much has also been written about how the CPI-Maoist has lost strength and is mostly confined, in recent years, to only a few pockets in some states. The government's perception management strategy has emphasised real or imagined narratives of domination by higher caste leaders over tribal cadres within the Maoist movement; subjugation and sexual exploitation of women cadres within the organisation; and how the movement is in its dying stage. However, the decision of cadres like Kanni, a tribal woman, to continue being part of the CPI-Maoist, even when her own brother has left the organisation, adds an interesting subject to the scope of research. What motivates extremist cadres to be part of a ‘lost cause’? Kanni chided Rama for being a ‘coward’ in response to the latter's many letters asking her to surrender. Clearly, frameworks of criminality, exploitation, or intimidation are inadequate to explain this attachment to an extremist cause.

Third, in spite of enormous investment in augmenting its capacities, the state continues to fall back on former Maoists like Vetti Rama in its counter-insurgency (COIN) campaign. Close to 100 battalions of central forces are deployed in the LWE-affected states of the country, in support of an equally large state police force. Millions of rupees have been spent on projects intended to generate human as well as technical intelligence. The Supreme Court of India has disbanded the vigilante Salwa Judum movement in Chhattisgarh. And yet, the state cannot do away with the extracted services of former extremists. In September 2018, after surrendering to the police, Vetti Rama confessed that he was attracted by the state's rehabilitation policy that allows surrendered extremists to claim the entire head money. In Rama's case, it was eight lakh rupees. And yet, his 23 years of experience in the extremist organisation were too valuable for the Chhattisgarh police to allow him to gracefully retire into non-descript civilian life. He was roped into their ‘eye and ear’ informant team. Does this indicate the state’s persisting incapacity to generate adequate operational human intelligence? Does it point to its inability to win the trust of the tribals? Is the state, thus, erring in understanding the aspirations that keep the movement alive?

Finally, police insist that they will continue to make efforts to convince cadres like Kanni to surrender. Rama, reportedly, will continue writing to his sister in the hope of her surrender. In the days to come, he may succeed, or Kanni may be killed in an encounter with the security forces. The larger context in which such contestations need to be placed and analysed is about the future of the LWE-affected areas liberated by the state. Can researchers working on the subject assist in shaping it, and if yes, how? LWE has historically thrived in areas marked by the absence or retreat of governance. The government seeks to gain entry by unveiling and implementing a large number of development projects. Should some research on conflict be devoted to framing the rules of future governance in such liberated regions so that they do not lapse into extremism again?

The bulk of conflict-related research in India, unfortunately, has remained confined to the realm of security, examining the performance of the security forces and the operational loopholes. Critiques or appreciation of official COIN efforts, human rights issues, or short-lived attention to the below par implementation of development projects exhaust the entirety of the literature on the subject. This episode featuring Kanni and Rama begs for a broadening of the research horizon.

US farm equipment manufacturer John Deere calls for “organizational efficiency,” threatening jobs

George Gallanis

In a recent earnings meeting, farm equipment manufacturer giant John Deere called for the cutting down on costs and increase in profits through “organizational efficiency.” Bearing the cost of this “efficiency” will be Deere workers, who confront reduced hours and possible layoffs numbering in the hundreds, if not thousands.

Deere published a news release on August 16 citing decline of revenue in certain areas.

It reported global net sales and revenue, i.e., money earned through sales with customers before taxes, expenses etc. are taken out, decreased 3 percent, to $10.036 billion, for the third quarter of 2019. Net sales of the equipment operations were $8.969 billion for the same quarter compared with $9.286 billion last year.

Deere reduced its projected full-year net income, money left over after deducted expenses like payroll, to $3.2 billion and annual sales growth to 4 percent, from the previously expected $3.3 billion. Previously it projected annual sales growth of 5 percent.

Samuel R. Allen, Deere’s chairman and chief executive officer, stated "John Deere's third-quarter results reflected the high degree of uncertainty that continues to overshadow the agricultural sector” due in part to "concerns about export-market access, near-term demand for commodities such as soybeans, and overall crop conditions, have caused many farmers to postpone major equipment purchases.”

Growing trade tensions between China and the United States have stymied export incomes of American farmers. According to the American Farm Bureau, in 2018, China imported $9.1 billion of U.S. farm produce, down from $19.5 billion in 2017.

US shipments of soybeans to China fell to a 16-year low last year as China bought soybeans mostly from Brazil.

Meanwhile, a record-setting wet spring destroyed crop yields for large sections of the American farm belt. Heavy rains led to flooding, which delayed and prevented planting, and was made worse by hot and dry summer weather, which decreased corn and soybean yields.

According to the US Department of Agriculture, across the country some 19.4 million insured acres went unplanted due to the rains, the highest amount ever since the government started tracking it in 2007.

Illinois, the leading US state for soybean exports, has seen 15 major farm bankruptcies over the last 12 months, up from 10 the year before. At the start of August, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) declared an agricultural disaster in all 102 Illinois counties because of flooding. Due to retaliatory measures by China in response to Trump’s trade war measures, agricultural exports from Illinois to China fell 77 percent last year. Across the United States, there were a total of 535 Chapter 12 bankruptcy filings, a spike of 13 percent, or 60 bankruptcies, in the past 12 months, the highest since 2012.

Speaking to the Chicago Tribune, Caroline Bartz, whose family operates a farm in central Illinois, said, “I tell ya, it’s a nightmare. In 50 years of farming, I have never seen anything like this year—never.”

These factors have led to decreased equipment sales, affecting Deere’s fiscal bottom line.

Deere is responding to the growing trade war, decreased farm equipment sales combined with the looming threat of recession by seeking to impose this crisis on workers. In a Deere earnings call on August 16, 2019, attended by Deere’s shareholders and executives, Ryan D. Campbell, a senior vice-president & Chief Financial Officer at Deere, foreshadowed the company’s plans:

“As these challenges persist, we are now beginning more aggressive actions on our cost structure to create a more efficient and nimble organization. These actions, which will involve organizational efficiency, a footprint assessment and an increased focus on investments with the most opportunity for differentiation, are in support of our aspiration to achieve 15 percent structural operating profits by 2022 and will position us to capitalize upon the resumption of replacement demand growth.”

Campbell’s call to increase operating profits, money earned from core business operations like equipment sales, by 15 percent means the amassment of hundreds of millions of dollars on top of their current total. According to macrotrends.net, as of July 31, 2019 the current operating profit margin for Deere is 8.27 percent. A 15 percent margin means almost doubling the current figure.

Germany: Plans to break up ThyssenKrupp take shape

Dietmar Gaisenkersting

The ThyssenKrupp Group is accelerating its offensive against its approximately 160,000-strong workforce. On August 8, CEO Guido Kerkhoff announced that a number of the company’s divisions were “to be put to the test” because they were allegedly uncompetitive. About 9,600 workers are directly affected, mainly those employed in the auto parts business and in the heavy plate mill in Duisburg-Hüttenheim.

On August 8, Kerkhoff cited the concern’s latest quarterly figures. Orders received by the company were slightly in excess of the same period of the previous year and sales had also risen slightly, but in the first three quarters, the group recorded a net loss of €207 million. ThyssenKrupp now expects a profit of around €800 million for the entire financial year—€300–400 million less than planned. Former head financial officer Kerkhoff has revised the company’s earnings forecast downwards for the third time in his one-year term as CEO.

The background to the drop in profits is above all the decline in production in the auto industry, upon which several divisions of the company depend. In addition, the prices of raw materials, especially iron ore, have risen. “Global trade conflicts make the situation even more difficult,” Kerkhoff said.

The company’s three divisions—heavy plate (800 employees), springs and stabilizers (3,600 employees) and system engineering (construction of production facilities for the auto industry, 4,700 employees)—“represent 4 percent of Group sales, but account for a quarter of the negative cash flow expected in the current financial year” a press release stated.

Despite the poor quarterly figures, the company share price—currently at its lowest level for 16 years—rose after Kerkhoff made clear that the group was to be fundamentally restructured.

“Either we succeed now with restructuring, or we must seriously ask whether we can continue these businesses within the concern,” Kerkhoff said. There are opportunities for further development, “but not necessarily under the roof of ThyssenKrupp.”

Kerkhoff, who receives up to €9 million a year as CEO, said, “What will no longer happen is that divisions are allowed to permanently burn money without any clear perspective, thereby destroying value generated by other areas.”

The latest reviews are part of the plan already announced by Kerkhoff in May to transform the concern into a type of holding company and break it up in the long term.

According to this plan, the most profitable segment, the elevator division with around 50,000 employees, will be listed on the stock exchange next financial year (i.e., October 2020 at the latest). But, Kerkhoff added, a sale is possible to competitors such as Kone or, according to Reuters, financial investors such as KKR, Advent or CVC.

Kerkhoff has announced the slashing of 6,000 jobs over the next three years, including 4,000 redundancies in Germany, with 2,000 of these in the steel sector. Administrative costs in the company’s headquarters in Essen are to be almost halved next year from the current level of €380 million.

Kerkhoff claims that his plans will place steel production and materials trading at the heart of the concern’s activities, but these are currently the sectors making losses. In the first three quarters of last year, the company’s steel mills made an operating profit of €597 million. Now, in the same period of the current financial year, they recorded a loss of €75 million.

It was precisely due to such fluctuations that ThyssenKrupp originally planned to form a joint venture with its competitor Tata Steel. But the fusion failed following a decision by the European Commission that the resulting company would have monopoly status.

The plans for cuts announced in May were developed in liaison with the hedge funds that have been buying into ThyssenKrupp in recent years. These financial vultures are eager to break up and exploit the company.

The central role in the offensive against ThyssenKrupp workers is played by the IG Metall trade union and its works councils. With 10 representatives, IGM make up half the membership of the company supervisory board. They have been working closely with management and shareholders for years behind the backs of the workforce.

The merger with Tata Steel and the planned division of the two companies—now obsolete—were worked out by IG Metall and the works council in consultation with investors. A key role has been played by IG Metall Secretary Markus Grolms, deputy chairman of ThyssenKrupp’s supervisory board. He works closely with the former state head of the IG Metall, Oliver Burkhard, who in 2013 moved directly from the union into the board of directors, where he receives up to €4.5 million a year as personnel director.

Ashok Leyland autoworkers in India strike to demand higher bonuses

Deepal Jayasekera

About 1,800 autoworkers at the Ashok Leyland plant in Ennore, Chennai, the capital of the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, are conducting a sit-in strike to demand higher bonuses. The action, which began last Friday, is part of the growing resistance of autoworkers to a rolling wave of plant closings and mass layoffs throughout the global auto industry amid falling sales and signs of another worldwide economic downturn.

Workers are demanding a 10 percent increase in bonuses and have rejected the company’s offer of 5 percent, which does not come close to matching higher cost of living expenses. After the collapse of talks last Wednesday, the Ashok Leyland Employees Union (ALEU) was forced to call the action in an effort to appease the anger of rank-and-file workers.

Chennai-based Ashok Leyland is the second largest heavy commercial vehicle maker in India. During the 2018-19 fiscal year the company saw its profits rise by 21 percent to 21.95 billion rupees ($US309 million) from 18.14 billion rupees ($255 million) the previous fiscal year.

The strike takes place as transnational corporations are seeking to force autoworkers to pay for the growing crisis of the auto industry in India and around the world. Having faced the worst sales drop in a decade, car companies in India have destroyed about 350,000 jobs in recent months and have threatened to wipe out one third of the current 3 million assembly and auto components job. The country’s largest car manufacturer, Maruti Suzuki, has halved its production targets, and two days ago the company announced that it would not renew the contracts of 3,000 temporary workers at its factories.

“This is a part of the business; when demand soars, more contract workers are hired and reduced in case of low demand,” Maruti chairman R. C. Bhargava declared to TV news channels.

This is a part of a global jobs massacre being implemented in auto plants throughout the world, including those in the US, Canada, China, Mexico, Germany and India.

Autoworkers in China, South Korea, the US, Brazil, Mexico, Germany, the UK, Romania, Turkey and Hungary as well as in India have fought pitched battles over the past decade to defend their jobs and conditions against the assaults of companies. Thousands of workers at the Maruti Suzuki car assembly plant at Manesar, Gurgaon in the northern Indian state of Haryana waged a series of militant struggles, including strikes, protests and occupations against sweatshop labor conditions and the contract labor system, in 2011. They have been subjected to a brutal company-government vendetta, which resulted in the life imprisonment of 13 workers on framed-up murder charges.

In order to defend the profit interests of crisis-ridden auto companies, the Tamil Nadu state government led by All India Anna Dravida Munnethra Kazhagam (AIADMK), declared in late June that the auto component industry was a “public utility service,” effectively banning strikes in the sector. Tamil Nadu is a major location of auto component industries—with Chennai known as “India’s Detroit”—and accounts for more than 30 percent of auto parts exports from India. Facing widespread opposition from workers to this blatantly anti-democratic measure, the Madras (Chennai) High Court issued an interim order on August 1 temporarily halting the implementation of the state government’s decision. A petition to stay the decision had been filed by Pricol Thozhilaler Otrumai Sangam, the union at auto parts maker Pricol in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu. However, the court has set August 29 for a further hearing in the case.

Although its profits rose sharply last year, Ashok Leyland has begun experiencing a decline in sales and profits. In the quarter that ended in June, its volume declined by 6 percent. The company’s sales, revenue and EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) are expected to decline by 7.5 percent, 5-7 percent and 19 percent respectively from the same quarter last year.

Trump administration calls for permanent restoration of bulk phone communications surveillance

Kevin Reed 

In a declassified letter to Congressional leaders, the outgoing Director of National Intelligence Daniel R. Coats called for the “permanent reauthorization of the provisions of the USA Freedom Act of 2015 that are currently set to expire in December.” The top Trump administration intelligence official wrote that among these provisions are the National Security Agency’s (NSA) officially suspended bulk collection of “telephone records from US telecommunications providers.”

Coats’ letter was addressed to the Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Richard Burr (Republican, North Carolina) and Vice Chairman Mark Warner (Democrat, Virginia) and the Chairman of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary Lindsay Graham (Republican, South Carolina) and Ranking Committee Member Dianne Feinstein (Democrat, California). The day after his letter was declassified on August 14, Coats departed the White House following his formal resignation as Director of National Intelligence on July 29.

Writing on behalf of the Intelligence Community (IC) and the White House, Coats said—in addition to requesting restoration of bulk phone data collection—there are three key “long-standing national security authorities” contained in the USA Freedom Act that are “common sense” and “have no history of abuse after more than 18 years, and should be reauthorized without sunset.”

These three authorizations are: the “business records” provision that permits federal law enforcement to seize tangible items like business papers and documents in a FISA court approved foreign intelligence investigation; the “roving wiretap” provision that permits national security agencies to tap calls from telephone numbers not specifically authorized by the FISA court; and the “lone wolf” provision that permits national security agencies to identify someone as a terrorist without having to show that they are an “agent of a foreign power” as required by other laws.

The USA Freedom Act was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Barack Obama on June 2, 2015. The act restored several provisions of the USA Patriot Act such as the roving wiretap and lone wolf authorizations that had expired. At that time, the act was fraudulently packaged by the Obama administration and the corporate media as a “reform” of intelligence practices following the revelations by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that the government was carrying out secret bulk collection of telephone records of the entire population.

As explained at the time on the World Socialist Web Site, the 2015 USA Freedom Act is a fig leaf behind which the vast electronic illegal surveillance activities of the NSA was continued and expanded with explicit Congressional approval. The passage of the act is an object lesson in the complicity of the entire American government and its two-party system in ever-deepening attacks on democratic rights.

A phony debate between Congressional Democrats and Republicans, along with bromides from Obama about the importance of “the safety of the American people” were played up in the media as an effort to “strike a balance” between national security and privacy rights. In the end, the legislation was signed into law and it enabled the resumption of the NSA’s bulk data operations contained in the expired USA Patriot Act by adding a step whereby the telecom companies had to collect and hold the data.

Coats wrote in his letter that the NSA “has suspended the call detail records program” that was authorized by the USA Freedom Act and deleted all of the data that was gathered under its authorization.

This decision was widely reported in June when it was revealed that the NSA had been “improperly” collecting phone records as far back as October 2018 outside the provisions of the 2015 law. Basically, what had been revealed was that the NSA had not modified its practice and, after this fact came to light, the agency said it was deleting three years of data going back to 2015, some 685 million phone call records.

Mass layoffs for workers; millions for GM, Ford and Chrysler CEOs

Andre Damon

Next month, with the expiration of the labor contract for 155,000 US autoworkers at Ford, GM, and Chrysler, auto executives will once again demand that workers sacrifice their own livelihoods for the “good of the company.”

Tough economic times are around the corner, the companies will say. The automakers are strapped for cash and need a war chest to confront a turbulent world economy, stiffening global competition, and the disruption caused by driver-less cars and electric vehicles.

If workers do not want to see more layoffs—like the thousands already fired at GM this year—they had better work longer, harder, and for less money. The United Auto Workers (UAW) —whose executives took kickbacks from the auto companies—will say that workers have no choice but to accept the companies’ demands.

But the fact is that every dollar taken from workers through pay cuts goes to pay for stock buybacks, financial speculation and the yachts and mansions of the corporate executives and the billionaire capitalists whose interests they represent.

This was made clear in a new report on executive pay by the Economic Policy Institute, which showed that CEO pay at the top 350 companies grew by 1,000 percent over the past four decades, while workers’ wages stagnated.

The average CEO got $17.2 million in pay, according to the report, meaning he or she makes in a day what the average worker makes in a year.

GM CEO Mary Barra typifies the social inequality that pervades American society. Last year, Barra received $21.87 million in executive pay, 281 times the pay of the median GM employee, and nearly 600 times the pay of an entry-level employee.

CM CEO Mary Barra - Credit - GM Promotional Photo

In November, Barra announced that GM would close five plants in the United States and Canada, leading to over 6,000 layoffs, including the closure of the Detroit Hamtramck and Warren Transmission auto plants in the Metro Detroit area.

This was followed by a massive “downsizing” among white-collar employees, leading to the loss of 8,000 jobs.

The company’s profits last year amounted to $10.8 billion, enough to pay the annual wages of some 300,000 new-hire employees. But instead, as the company carried out mass layoffs, the money sweated out of workers was funneled to executives and shareholders.

Ford CEO Jim Hackett got $17.8 million in compensation last year, while FCA CEO Mike Manley stands to make as much as $14 million in the coming year. Matthew Simoncini, the CEO of auto parts maker Lear, was paid over $32.4 million, up by 14 percent over the past year.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk was paid a staggering $2.2 billion last year, in order, as Tesla’s board put it, to “motivate Mr. Musk to continue to…lead Tesla over the long term.”

Last year, Tesla announced that it would cut its workforce by 9 percent, followed by another 7 percent this year, in an ongoing jobs bloodbath.

Across the economy, chief executives are being paid millions for overseeing mass layoffs. US Steel CEO David B. Burritt, who was paid over $11 million last year, has just announced hundreds of layoffs with the idling of U.S. Steel’s blast furnace in Ecorse, Michigan.

Overall, CEOs at the 350 largest US companies received 278 times more than a typical employee, according to the EPI report. By comparison, a typical CEO was paid 20 times more than a typical employee in 1965.

Between 1978 and 2018, CEO pay grew by over 1,000 percent, or more than tenfold. Workers’ wages grew by just 11.9 percent over the same period.

Amidst a roaring stock market fueled by money printing from the Federal Reserve, CEO pay has grown by 50 percent during the economic “recovery” after the 2008 financial crash. Over the same period, workers’ wages grew by only five percent. According to the EPI, wages actually fell between 2017 and 2018.

Social inequality has been soaring for decades as the capitalist class succeeded in driving down wages, destroying workers’ health care benefits, and making working conditions worse.

This is a global phenomenon. This year, to cite one example, French fashion billionaire Bernard Arnault became the third person with a net worth of over $100 billion, having made some $25 billion over the past year alone. Arnault’s fortune now equals 3 percent of the economic output of the entire country in one year.

The response of the American ruling class in particular to the erosion of the economic domination of American capitalism in the late 1960s and 1970s was to launch a policy of class war, deindustrialization and financialization. The role of the “celebrity CEO,” epitomized by Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca, was to spearhead this assault and serve as the representatives of Wall Street in the corporate boardroom—for which they were, and are, handsomely paid.

The unions have been the partners of the capitalists in their fight against the workers. The UAW and other unions approved countless plant closings, mass layoffs, and benefit cuts, all in the name of making the companies more “competitive,” and defending “American jobs.” They long ago transformed themselves into agents of the companies and the state.

The biggest exposure of what the unions have become is the United Auto Workers, whose leaders have been charged with taking millions of dollars in bribes from the auto companies to make sure contracts favorable to the corporations were passed despite opposition from workers.

Whatever their tactical differences, the Democrats and the Republicans are equally committed to policies that increase social inequality and defend the capitalist system that is responsible for it. As the Trump administration had dedicated itself above all to the continual rise of the stock markets, the Democrats are terrified more than anything else of the explosion of social opposition in the working class.

United Auto Workers President Gary Jones, and General Motors CEO Mary Barra shake hands to open the 2019 contract negotiation - Credit - GM promotional photo.jpg

The same conditions that have created unprecedented social inequality are also producing mass protests and strikes all over the world, from Hong Kong and Puerto Rico, to France and Africa. In Puerto Rico, days of mass protests forced the resignation of the governor, a corrupt stooge for Wall Street.

And in January, as autoworkers were fighting mass layoffs in Detroit, tens of thousands of workers went on strike in Mexico’s auto parts factories, with class-conscious Mexican workers sending greetings to American autoworkers and calling for them to join their fight.

With a critical battle looming for American autoworkers, workers must understand that they are fighting not just for themselves and their own families, but for all workers: in the United States, in North America, and around the world.

The antidote to social inequality is the class struggle. But the coming struggles can only be successful if they are waged with a new strategy: against the nationalism and capitalist apologetics of the unions, and for the international unity of the working class against capitalism.

The fight against social inequality requires the building of a new political leadership, the Socialist Equality Party, to organize and unify the struggles of workers on the basis of a revolutionary program. The capitalist profit system must be replaced with a socialist society based on equality, international planning and democratic control of production.

New Zealand: Outrage over babies taken by the state

John Braddock & Tom Peters

On July 30, several hundred people gathered outside parliament in Wellington for a protest titled “Hands Off Our Tamariki [children].” They delivered a petition with 17,000 signatures calling for the government to stop “stealing Maori children.” Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson, a partner in the ruling Labour-led coalition government of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, accepted the petition.

The protest’s immediate trigger was the attempted seizure in May of a child from the maternity ward at Hawke’s Bay Hospital, which was filmed on cellphones and exposed in an online documentary by Newsroom journalist Melanie Reid. The report highlighted the extraordinary power of Oranga Tamariki (OT), formerly Child, Youth and Family Services (CYFS), to forcibly take babies from parents who are overwhelmingly poor and powerless to defend themselves against the state apparatus.

Thousands of people were outraged by the video, which laid bare the workings of a system that traumatises some of the most vulnerable members of society. The government has promised numerous inquiries into the agency, which, like many previous inquiries, will do nothing to change its brutal function.

The midwives were locked out of the hospital leaving a distressed 19-year-old mother alone in a room overnight, while OT staff tried to pressure her to hand over her newborn child. Police officers were called to block the woman’s family from entering the hospital.

OT had been granted a custody order from the Family Court based on a social worker’s affidavit citing “lack of parenting skills,” domestic violence and the 17-year-old father’s use of marijuana. The mother’s family disputed these claims and filed for an urgent injunction against OT’s custody order, but this did not stop the attempted “uplift.”

Law professor Mark Henaghan told Newsroom he doubted that OT’s custody order should have been granted by a court which heard only from a social worker. Midwife Jean Te Huia said the parents had no “opportunity to defend themselves against the allegations being made against them.” She said both parents were “kids” who were “victims of circumstance,” having grown up in homes with family violence. The mother had already had her previous child taken by OT, despite never having been accused of any crime.

In the end, with legal support and pressure from the Newsroom report, the mother was granted temporary custody of the child and was placed in an OT home for young mothers.

The events at Hawke’s Bay Hospital were not an aberration, but an example of what has become increasingly common. The Family Court grants 90 percent of Interim Custody Orders filed by OT. Three Maori babies a week are currently being taken. In 2017, 45 babies were taken the day they were born. Of 283 babies taken into care last year, more than 70 percent were from Maori or Pacific Island families, who together represent about 23 percent of the population.

Individual social workers are not to blame for the crisis they confront, which is the result of the drastic under-funding of the welfare system. However, under deepening austerity, state agencies such as OT operate as punitive institutions. There are hardly any programs to assist families affected by severe problems related to entrenched poverty, including alcoholism, drugs, gang-related crime and family dysfunction and violence.

In 2016, the National Party government boosted the child protection agency’s powers; it reduced parents’ rights by making them ineligible for legal aid, and established a system with no independent oversight. Newsroom reported “a sharp 33 percent increase in the removal of babies in the time period 2015–

2018: a rate increase from 36 to 46 per 1000 births.” The rate is much higher for Maori: 102 per 10,000 births. Last year there were 6,300 children in state care—the highest number ever—two thirds of them Maori.

The Labour-led government claims that children are taken into care to protect them. However, once in state custody they are often abused and are more likely to end up on drugs, in prison, and to commit suicide. In 2018 alone, 220 children were physically or sexually abused while in OT’s care. Data published in November 2016 revealed five children a year die in state care, and 550 had been abused in the previous five years, in one third of cases by their state-appointed caregivers.

Outrageously, Deputy Prime Minister and NZ First leader Winston Peters, who is Maori, sought to blame Maori people for the soaring child uplifts, saying there was “deep disquiet” about the “treatment of women and children in particular.”

In reality, Maori and Pacific Island families are disproportionately affected by child removals because they represent the most exploited section of the working class. It is overwhelmingly families in the poorest areas, such as Porirua and South Auckland, which are targeted.

The high levels of family distress, dysfunction and violence cannot be separated from the social crisis produced by decades of attacks on living standards. The previous National Party government slashed healthcare, education and other services and pushed thousands of single parents off welfare and into low-paid, insecure and part-time work. Labour has not reversed, but has deepened the austerity measures.

Nearly five million people in the UK live in “deep poverty”

Dennis Moore 

A study by the Social Metrics Commission (SMC) finds that more than 4 million people in the UK are mired in “deep poverty,” with an income at least 50 percent below the official poverty line. Many families in this bracket struggle to pay for the most basic essentials.

Led by a Conservative peer, the SMC includes representatives from charities and think tanks including the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the Office of the Children’s Commissioner and the Institute for Fiscal Studies. It was established in 2016 to develop a new way of measuring poverty.

As well as measuring the incidence of poverty, the SMC developed a broader measurement framework that provides a deeper understanding of the factors that affect the experience of poverty, influence the future likelihood of poverty, or are consequences that flow from being in poverty.

An army of 14.3 million people are in poverty and a third (4.5 million) are in deep poverty and living on the breadline. They account for fully 7 percent of the population. For a couple with two children, deep poverty means a combined income of less than £211 a week, after housing costs. A single parent with one child in poverty lives on less than £101.50 per week.

Research from other sources shows that destitution as a result of benefit cuts and high rents was experienced by an estimated 1.5 million people in the UK. Destitution is defined as an income for a couple with two children of just £140 a week.

General levels of poverty have changed relatively little since 2000-2001. However, there are certain groups that have seen hardship levels rise since 2013—reversing what for a period had been a slight downward trend—with pensioners, and children of lone parents facing the consequences of austerity measures such as the implementation of the Tories benefit freeze .

Since 2013-14, there has been a 9 percent increase in child poverty in families with three or more children—in large part due to the benefit freeze imposed on larger families. This figure does not include the impact on families who are affected by the two-child benefit limit introduced in 2017. The limit restricts the “child element” in Universal Credit and tax credits, worth £2,780 per child per year to only the first two children.

The SMC confirms the impact of disability on levels of poverty, with 6.8 million people living in a household that includes someone who is disabled.

The working poor are a growing social phenomenon internationally. Millions in Britain are struggling to get by, despite having regular employment. The report notes that at the millennium 54 percent of children living in poverty were also part of a family where an adult worked. This figure shot up to nearly three-quarters (73 percent) in 2017-18.

Just under half of those in poverty (49 percent) or 7 million people, are in “persistent poverty.” This is defined as being in poverty now and having been in poverty for at least two of the last three years. Those affected by persistent poverty include 1.8 million workless households and 1.2 million people in lone parent families.

Over two-thirds of those living in poverty (69 percent) live in families where nobody saves money, compared to 38 percent of those not in poverty. One in five (18 percent) of those in poverty are in a family where no one has any formal qualifications, compared to 9 percent for those not in poverty.

Among some groups in the population, such as pension-age individuals, the fall in poverty levels over the last two decades is being sharply reversed. The SMC claims that rates of poverty among pension age adults fell from 19 percent in 2000/01 to 9 percent in 2014/15 but have now risen to 11 percent. There is a similar trend among children, with poverty rates falling from 36 percent in 2000/01 to 31 percent in 2014/15 but has since increased to 34 percent.

US: Homelessness, housing insecurity top list of college student stressors as new year begins

James Vega & Phyllis Steele

This year’s RealCollege survey, the largest annual assessment of basic needs security among college students in the United States, reveals that a staggering number of youth are experiencing food insecurity, housing insecurity and homelessness every day.

The survey, completed in fall 2018 and published in April 2019 by the Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice, interviewed nearly 86,000 students from 123 different two-year and four-year post-secondary institutions across the US and found that 45 percent of respondents reported being food insecure during the 30 days prior to taking the survey.

The breakdown of responses to the survey questions, known as the “Percentage Endorsing Statements,” provides a sobering view of the conditions facing today’s youth.

• 33 percent of four-year college students and 38 percent of two-year students agreed with the statement: “I ate less than I felt I should because there was not enough money for food.”

• 44 percent of four-year students and 51 percent of two-year students “worry whether my food will run out before I have money to buy more.”

• 8 percent of four-year students and 12 percent of two-year students “did not eat for a whole day because there was not enough money for food.”

Over half of the respondents said they were housing insecure over the previous year and 17 percent said they had been homeless. Housing insecurity includes a broad set of challenges, such as the inability to pay rent or utilities, or the need to move frequently. The study considers homelessness as a situation in which a person does not have a stable place to live. Students were identified as homeless if they responded affirmatively to a question asking if they had been homeless or they identified living conditions that are considered signs of homelessness.

Sixty percent of survey respondents at two-year institutions and 48 percent at four-year institutions experienced housing insecurity. The most commonly reported challenge is experiencing a rent or mortgage increase that made it difficult to pay, affecting 30 percent of students at two-year institutions and 25 percent at four-year institutions. Eight percent of survey respondents at two-year institutions and 6 percent at four-year institutions left their household because they felt unsafe. Rates of student homelessness range from 10 percent to 32 percent at two-year institutions and 8 percent to 28 percent at four-year institutions.

The report highlights, “food and housing insecurity undermine academic success. Housing insecurity and homelessness have a particularly strong, statistically significant relationship with college completion rates, persistence, and credit attainment. Researchers also associate basic needs insecurity with self-reports of poor physical health, symptoms of depression, and higher perceived stress.”

Similar to the previous studies, the current research shows that working or receiving financial aid does not alleviate the stress of finding adequate housing. As the authors explain, “Students who experience basic needs insecurity are overwhelmingly part of the labor force. For example, the majority of students who experience food insecurity, 68 percent, housing insecurity, 69 percent, and homelessness, 67 percent, are employed. Also, among working students, those who experience basic needs insecurity work more hours than other students.”

Students who are forced to work while they go to school often come from families that are themselves suffering from poverty and are less likely to be able to help financially.

Likewise, most students eligible for a Pell Grant, a subsidy from the federal government for low-income students, are, in fact, more likely to be housing and food insecure.

Japan-South Korea conflict intensifies

Nick Beams

Japan and South Korea are locked into a deepening economic and political conflict which shows no sign of ending, despite urgings by the United States to settle the dispute involving two of its crucial allies in North-East Asia.

South Korea announced this week that it had removed Japan from a list of countries that qualify for accelerated supply of South Korean products, after Tokyo had imposed a similar measure against South Korea on August 2.

Announcing the decision, Sung Yun-mo, South Korea’s minister of trade, industry and energy said: “It’s difficult to work closely with countries whose practices don’t abide by basic principles of the international export-control system and continuously are applied inappropriately.”

He said Seoul was open to negotiations with the Japanese government. However, that does not seem likely because the attitude of both sides has been hardening over the course of the dispute.

It first came into prominence in early July when Japan announced it would tighten controls over the exports of three chemicals—fluorinated polyamides, photoresists and hydrogen fluoride—crucial for the production of semi-conductors in South Korea.

The decision brought an immediate response from electronics giant Samsung, South Korea’s largest company. “It’s one of the worst situations we have ever had,” an unnamed senior Samsung official told the Financial Times. “Politicians take no responsibility for the mess, even though it has almost killed us.”

The Bank of Korea also weighed in, with the central Bank governor Lee Ju-yeol citing Japan’s export restrictions as one of the factors behind its decision last month to revise its growth forecast downward from 2.5 percent to 2.2 percent.

“If export restrictions are realised and expanded, we cannot say its impact on exports and the economy is small,” he said.

The conflict was set in motion by a decision of the South Korean Supreme Court last October that Japan had to pay compensation to four workers who had been used as forced labour by Nippon Steel during the Second World War.

Japan hit back at the decision saying the question of compensation was covered by a 1965 agreement under which Japan paid $800 million to South Korea. It feared the verdict could open the way for claims by more than 220,000 victims of forced labour and their relatives, resulting in compensation claims that could reach $20 billion.

Concerns were further raised in January when a South Korean court gave the green light for the expropriation of some of Nippon Steel’s equity holdings in a joint recycling venture with a South Korean steel-making firm to fund payments to the four plaintiffs. This raised fears that other Japanese assets could be seized in the future.

Japan did not take immediate action but according to a report in Foreign Policy, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was “highly frustrated with the situation and was looking for a weapon he could use.” He settled on action over exports.

The restrictions on the three key chemicals were announced at the beginning of July. The timing of the decision was politically significant as it coincided with the opening for the election campaign for Japan’s upper house. Abe was seeking to promote nationalism in order to boost support for his planned revision of the Japanese constitution to overturn Article 9 of the constitution—the so-called pacifist clause.

Japanese officials said some South Korean companies were inadequately managing the chemicals and that some, with military applications, were finding their way to North Korea, without providing any specific examples.

Tokyo then upped the ante earlier this month when it removed South Korea from its list of countries entitled to receive preferential treatment in trade. The measure, which comes into effect on August 28, will impact on the export of more than 1,000 different products.

Japan claimed the restrictions were being imposed on “national security” grounds. The decision brought a strident denunciation from South Korean President Moon Jae-in.

Addressing an emergency cabinet meeting on August 2, Moon said: “We will never again lose to Japan. As we have already warned, if Japan intentionally strikes at our economy, Japan itself will also have to bear significant damage.”

The conflict has set off a growing consumer boycott movement of Japanese products involving beer, cars, cosmetics and clothing. The anti-Japanese sentiment is being deliberately encouraged by sections of the Moon administration, which, like Abe, are seeking to whip of nationalism and chauvinism to divert away from deteriorating social conditions.

Questions continue over Russian nuclear accident

Andrea Peters

Questions surrounding the nature of the nuclear-military accident that occurred in Russia’s far north last week continue. On August 8, an explosion at a military facility near the town of Nyonoksa killed seven people and injured more than a dozen others.

After initially denying that any radioactive substance had been leaked into the environment, government representatives were forced to acknowledge unusually high levels of background radiation in nearby Severodvinsk, as much as 16 times the normal level. Shipping in Dvina Bay, possibly the precise site of the accident, is now off limits for a month. Naval vessels equipped to handle radioactive waste have arrived in the area.

On Tuesday, a full five days after the explosion, officials issued and then retracted an order evacuating those living in close vicinity to the accident. Residents of Nyonoksa report that in subsequent days personnel in military uniforms arrived to gather information as to who was in the town on August 8. Doctors, possibly from Moscow, also appeared on the scene. Local authorities told journalists inquiring about these statements that such matters were in the hands of the federal ministry of health and they had no further information.

Greenpeace Russia maintains that the government is not being forthright about the scale and scope of the radiation spike in the area following the explosion. According to the environmental group, state agencies have not told the public that beta, as well as gamma, radiation was released and that Arkhangelsk, a city of 350,000 about 90 kilometers from Nyonoksa, also experienced a significant rise in radiation levels from August 9 to 11.

The Norwegian government is detecting trace amounts of radioactive iodine in Svanhovd, near its border with Russia, although it is not clear whether this is linked to events in Nyonoksa.

Residents in towns and cities near the accident are frightened and angry over the official effort to hide the incident and the lack of information about what happened and the dangers posed to the population. Adding to the fears is the news that emergency responders who initially treated victims have themselves been transferred to Moscow for medical care. Pharmacies in Arkhangelsk, where the media monthly per capita income is about $500, have run out of iodine products, which can be used to treat certain types of radiation exposure.

“We remember Chernobyl,” one local resident told a press outlet.

As concerns over the dangers posed by the accident continue, speculation mounts over what exactly happened at the military facility. The Kremlin has released very little information, stating only that the explosion occurred as part of a test and involved liquid propellant.

In recent years, the Putin government, facing military and geopolitical threats from the United States, has been working to rapidly modernize its nuclear arsenal, ensuring that it is capable of carrying out or responding to a first strike and obliterating its opponent.

Oslo mosque targeted in attempted far-right terrorist attack

Sam Dalton 

On Sunday, 21-year-old Norwegian Philip Manshaus appeared in court on charges of murder and terrorism, one day after he attempted to carry out a fascist assault on the Al-Noor Islamic Centre in Bærum, Oslo. He was ordered detained for four weeks while awaiting trial.

Wearing body armour and carrying two shotguns and a handgun, Manshaus entered the Oslo mosque on Saturday afternoon by shooting through its locked glass outer door, with the aim of killing those inside. The attack was only thwarted because one of the three worshippers present, identified as Mohamed Rafiq, an ex-member of the Pakistani armed forces, tackled and apprehended him. Rafiq and two other people were able to subdue Manshaus until police arrived.

While only three people were present at the time of the attack, more than a dozen had been praying in the mosque for the Eid al-Adha Islamic holiday only 10 minutes earlier. Had Manshaus struck a short time before, a large number of people may have been killed. Manshaus is also suspected of murdering his 17-year-old adopted Chinese stepsister, whose body was found at the family home on Saturday.

The attack came one week after the August 3 shooting at an El Paso, Texas Walmart by Patrick Wood Crusius, also aged 21, killing 22 people.

Manshaus had posted on an anonymous online message board named “Endchan” with a link to his Facebook profile the same day. In it, he stated that the attack was part of a “race war,” and, like Crusius, that he was inspired by Brenton Tarrant, who murdered 51 people in an attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, on March 15. Manshaus refers to Tarrant as “Saint Tarrant.”

The post makes an appeal for others to carry out similar far-right attacks, stating, “If you are reading this you have been elected by me.” Manshaus attempted to livestream the attack using a GoPro camera, but the stream appears to have failed for technical reasons.

Saturday’s attack occurred in the same city where Norwegian neo-Nazi Anders Breivik detonated a car bomb on July 22, 2011, killing eight people and injuring 209. Less than two hours later, dressed in a fake police uniform, Breivik shot and killed another 69 people in an attack on the Norwegian Labour Party’s youth camp on the island of Utoya. Both Tarrant and Manshaus cited Breivik as a role model. Manshaus’ Instagram account contains three pictures: two of himself, and one of Breivik performing the Nazi salute in court.

According to police reports, Manshaus has also stated his admiration for Norway’s Nazi collaborationist president in World War II, Vidkun Quisling.

In response to the attack, Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg condemned Manshaus’ actions and committed to “fight hatred and anti-Muslim attitudes.” The government’s response is aimed at covering up the fact that it bears political responsibility for promoting the anti-immigrant hysteria and chauvinism which breed such fascistic atrocities.