Orr’s plan is a culmination of a political conspiracy to appoint an unelected emergency manger, acting as the direct representative of the banks, to attack workers’ rights and restructure the city in the interests of the rich. The cuts in pensions are aimed at establishing a national precedent, using bankruptcy courts to override benefits that are explicitly protected by the state constitution. This process was sanctioned by Judge Stephen Rhodes in his December 3 ruling.

Most city workers will have their pensions cut by up to 34 percent, while police and firemen will face a 10 percent cut. In addition, cost of living increases for all pensioners will be eliminated for at least a decade, meaning that the real value of payouts will steadily decline.

Orr is also planning on paying out less than one third of what it owes in retiree health care liabilities in order to fund a union-controlled Voluntary Employee Benefits Association (VEBA). The unions, which have functioned as co-conspirators throughout the bankruptcy process, would be tasked with slashing benefits or eliminating coverage.

With most pensioners already at or near the poverty threshold (pensions range between $19,000 and $34,000 per year), the cuts will drive a substantial portion of the city’s 24,000 retirees into destitution. Tens of thousands of works who gave their lives to the city, and were legally promised money for a secure retirement, are being kicked to the curb.

Speaking on Friday, Orr said these cuts were “very fair.”

In addition to guaranteeing 100 percent of all secured bonds, unsecured bonds would be paid 20 cents on the dollar. Many of the institutional investors that possess these bonds have insurance to cover the amount that they are not being paid by the city.

The plan also includes hundreds of millions of dollars for “blight removal,” the process of tearing down large sections of the city, which is being overseen by billionaire Quicken Loans CEO Dan Gilbert.

The adjustment plan prepares the way for the lease of the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department to a regional authority, the Great Lakes Water and Sewer Authority, a major step towards privatization.

Also included in the proposal is a plan to transfer control of the Detroit Institute of Arts to corporate-backed private foundations in exchange for about $800 million through a combination of private funds and state aid. The DIA itself would be required to contribute an additional $100 million.

The adjustment plan includes provisions to reduce the size of cuts to pensions by a small amount given a “timely settlement” on the DIA and other matters. This is intended to push the unions and pension funds to accept the proposed terms of a “grand bargain” and end any legal challenges to the bankruptcy.

The city’s main union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Council 25, issued a statement criticizing the deal, however the unions have played a central role in the bankruptcy proceedings. After first agreeing to $180 million in concessions, AFSCME executives have been jockeying to defend their interests and their role in the exploitation of workers, including through their control of the new health care VEBA. AFSCME has aggressively advocated for the sale of city assets, including the art at the DIA.

The adjustment plan is one part in a process of backroom dealing between the various ruling class and upper middle class forces seeking to benefit from the bankruptcy. The plan released Friday serves as a benchmark for these negotiations taking place behind the scenes.

The destruction of pensions and health benefits and the theft of priceless city assets is justified by the lie that “there is no money.” Even as it makes this claim, the state has committed $265 million to a new stadium controlled by billionaire Mike Ilitch. The Big Three automakers, which have minted vast fortunes from the toil of Detroit’s working class, are reaping record profits.

The banks that have already swindled the city are set to receive another big check at Detroit’s expense. Orr said Friday that a new settlement for the interest rate swaps deal, through which UBS and Bank of America extracted hundreds of millions from city revenues, should be wrapped up in the next few days. The banks will be paid an as yet unknown sum lower than the $165 million previously proposed by the Jones Day law firm.

The Detroit bankruptcy is at the center of an international social counter-revolution aimed at redistributing wealth into the pockets of the corporate and financial elite. Trillions have been handed to the banks, while the rights and benefits won by workers through a century of struggle are being revoked. In the process, laws and constitutional protections are ignored and increasingly anti-democratic forms of rule imposed.

The Detroit bankruptcy has had bipartisan support from the beginning. The Obama administration repeatedly sent representatives to meet with Detroit’s political elite, and the Justice Department submitted a court brief aimed at quashing legal challenges by retiree groups. State Treasurer Andy Dillon, Orr, and former Detroit Mayor David Bing, all Democrats, have all colluded in the carrying out of a social crime, working closely with Republican Governor Rick Snyder.

In opposition to the bankruptcy, and to expose the bankers’ conspiracy, the Socialist Equality Party organized the February 15 Workers Inquiry into the Bankruptcy of Detroit and the Attack on the DIA & Pensions. The SEP unconditionally rejects the claim that cuts to pensions and benefits are necessary to fund core services for the city.

The SEP seeks to mobilize the strength of the working class in opposition to the bankruptcy process, the trade unions, the Democratic Party, and the entire political establishment. To secure its rights, the working class must build a revolutionary mass movement to take power into its own hands and implement socialist policies, reorganizing society along democratic and egalitarian lines.

Members of KESK, the Turkish public-sector trade union, have reason to celebrate. A court In Istanbul has decided to release 23 union members held in jail for nearly a year. Six of their colleagues—three men, three women—remain imprisoned, however, until at least early May. And a very large number are awaiting trial on various charges.

The episode began nearly a year ago, following a suicide bombing at the US embassy in the Turkish capital, Ankara. The bomb left two dead (one the attacker) and three injured. The Devrimci Halk Kurtuluş Partisi-Cephesi (DHKP-C)—the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front—admitted responsibility. The DHKP-C, which has pursued violence for over three decades, has been branded a terrorist organisation not only by the Turkish government but by the European Union and the US as well.

Pretext

Nothing links the DHPK-C to KESK but the bombing provided a pretext for the anti-union government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan to use the country’s excessively broad anti-terror laws to crack down on an old enemy. KESK and its affiliated teachers’ union have been a thorn in the side of the AK Party government—strongly opposing unpopular neo-liberal policies, in education and elsewhere, which it has been trying to push through. Hundreds of leaders of KESK and the teachers had already been arrested following protests in Ankara.

Days after the bombing, police swept through KESK offices across the country and many trade unionists were arrested at home—nearly 170 were caught up in the raids. Many of the detainees were swiftly released and others arrested in provincial towns were eventually sent home to await trial. But in Istanbul the police decided that 29 KESK leaders were simply too dangerous to be let out on to the streets. At the request of global and European unions, LabourStart launched an online campaign, which generated nearly 13,000 protest messages.

The charges

That’s why I found myself sitting last month in a tiny, hot, airless hearing room inside the largest courthouse in Europe. The charges against the 56 KESK leaders (half of whom were on bail) were membership of an illegal organisation, making propaganda for that organisation and, in some cases, being leaders of it. The trade unionists denied all the charges.

It had taken nearly a year for the arrested KESK members to have their day in court. The three judges confirmed the identities of those standing trial and then allowed them, one by one, to state their cases.

The first was a schoolteacher who spoke at length about the history of the Turkish trade-union movement, crushed first by the military dictatorship in the 1980s and now again by the Islamist government. The lead judge interrupted her, asking how long she would go on as he was keen to take a break. “As long as I need,” she replied. “I have a lot to say!”

Her speech met rousing applause from an audience which included trade unionists from a number of European countries. During the break, they joined hundreds of KESK members in a protest on the plaza opposite the courthouse.

Pesky KESK

Though the demonstrators chanted slogans such as “Down with fascism”, Turkey is clearly not a fascist state. (Fascist states don’t allow demonstrations of this type.) But Turkey is a state that recognises few of the internationally-accepted rights for workers and won’t allow civil servants, for example, to have a collective-bargaining agreement.

There is no question that the Erdogan government is trying to break the union by jailing its leaders. As one of the visiting European union representatives put it, it’s an attempt to “decapitate” the troublesome KESK.

These trials, like those which preceded them, have been ignored by the mainstream media. In Turkey, this is to be expected, as the media are in the grip of AK. But few journalists in Europe and elsewhere have shown any interest in these events. Apparently, unless blood flows in the streets—as it did last spring in Taksim Square and Gezi Park—Turkey is of no interest to the world.

Banners stretched out along the railings of hospitals proclaimed: “Against the dismantling of the state” and “Hard-won rights cannot be stolen”.

Uncollected rubbish bins overflowed, littering the pavements of the capital Lisbon.

School gates were closed.

“The Portuguese will not accept more salary cuts and sacrifices,” said Ana Avoila, coordinator of the public sector unions, which estimated turnout for the strike varied between 70 percent and 100 percent.

Portugal’s state secretary for public services, Helder Rosalino, said she could “understand the discouragement of public workers” but she did not expect turnout to exceed 20 percent.

The 24-hour strike was launched jointly by public worker federations linked to the country’s two main unions, the CGTP, which is close to the Communist Party, and the UGT, close to the Socialist Party.

Unions are protesting new austerity measures unveiled in mid-October for the 2014 budget.

The budget increases the public sector work week to 40 hours from 35, cuts retirement pensions by 10 percent and lowers the salaries of those earning more than 600 euros gross a month by between 2.5 percent and 12 percent.

“If public sector workers want to bother the government that’s fine, but not at the cost of the children,” said 44-year-old construction worker Manuel Paulo, who found the gates closed at his 10-year-old son’s primary school in northern Lisbon.

The public sector protest follows a series of strikes in the transport sector, including railway and city bus services, which will culminate in a demonstration on Saturday in the capital.

Workers at river ferry companies Soflusa and Transtejo, which link Lisbon and its southern district, were holding partial strikes Friday.

Source: http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/3/12/85921/Business/Economy/Portugal-schools,-hospitals-strike-against-new-cut.aspx

More than 4,000 riot police were dispatched to maintain order as some 25,000 protesters marched through the capital on Saturday. There were moments of tension when demonstrators passed near the headquarters of an extreme-right group, but police intervened when a few bottles were thrown.

Later, demonstrators threw eggs, firecrackers and smoke bombs outside the Finance Ministry. Police reacted by dispersing the protesters, detaining 11 of the demonstrators. There were no reports of injuries.

Ahead of the march police detained some anarchists believed to pose a security threat.

The protests were accompanied Friday by a 24-hour nationwide strike that caused disruptions for travellers. Train service was guaranteed in most cities for morning and evening commutes, but airports in Rome, Naples, Milan and Bologna had to cancel some flights. Some school and health workers also went on strike.

The USB and COBAS unions organized Friday’s strike to protest austerity measures reducing transportation budgets. USB union co-ordinator Pierpaolo Leonardi accused the Italian government of imposing EU directives without concern for the impact on workers.

Source: http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/italy-anti-austerity-protests-draw-thousands-to-rome-1.2126917

“The consciousness of a worker is not a curve that rises and falls with wages and prices; it is the accumulation of a lifetime of experience and socialization, inherited traditions, struggles successful and defeated . . . It is this weighty baggage that goes into the making of a worker’s consciousness and provides the basis for his behavior when conditions ripen . . . and the moment comes.”

– E. P. Thompson

In talking about the working class as of late I feel like Solomon “Sol” Roth in the futuristic movie, Soylent Green (1973): “There was a world, once, you punk.” Det. Thorn: “Yes, so you keep telling me.” Sol: “I was there. I can prove it.” Det. Thorn: “I know, I know. When you were young, people were better.” Sol: “Aw, nuts. People were always rotten. But the world ‘was’ beautiful.”

History is about feelings, and in order to understand it, you have to understand people. British historian E.P. Thompson had a love affair with the working class (not classes); he believed it was the motivating force behind most economic and social progress. Thompson could have easily been Sol except for the fact that his love affair was with the English working class.

In my case, I try not to romanticize the working class; at the same time, I consider many workers my teachers. I was very fortunate in the 1980s to have been part of the Keep GM Van Nuys Open campaign.

I will never forget an auto worker who told me that the thing that he would miss most if the plant shutdown was the feeling that he got after his shift was done and thousands of workers would pour into the parking lot. He felt overwhelmed, he was powerful, and he had a union.

During the GM struggle, I attended many meetings where I mostly listened. At one meeting at the International Association of Machinists Union Hall in Burbank, I sat next to my friend, Eloy Salazar, who was a member of the Machinists. He was proud of his hall and how Mexican Americans had played a leading role in the union. After the meeting he asked me, “Rudy, you got a minute?  I want to show you something.”

We went out into the lot where his new car was parked. It was a Cadillac, which he pointed out was an American made car, white with white leather seats. It kind of took me aback because in my world of so-called “cultural” workers there would have been instant criticism such “bourgie”. I reflected how Eloy who had worked hard as a machinist was proud of the product of his labor, and how in contrast I was apologetic for my Ray-Ban sunglasses. My world was one of theory; Eloy’s was one of the praxis.

My research put me into contact with labor leaders. Exploring the Great San Joaquin Valley Cotton Strike of 1933, the name that kept popping up was that of Pat Chambers, the lead organizer for the strike. Pat had done oral interviews for the Bancroft Library, but if he was alive I wanted to see him.  It was forty years after the fact so I sent out numerous emails.

One day he showed up at the Cal State Northridge campus and asked for me. When I heard he was there I was excited. Pat was a short man, 5” 6”, rotund and balding. He apologized for taking so long but he had to check me out, and it was important to him that I was an activist. In the next several years he would just show up, and was clearly emotional to see so many Chicanas/os in college.

Chambers was a pseudonym; he was a communist who at the time were hounded. Pat did not like the party leadership, saying that they caused too many problems and cost resources to hide them. It was clear that he was not an ideologue; he got into the party because he admired the Wobblies.

The strike involved 18,000 cotton pickers and their families; 80 percent were Mexicans.  It was a violent strike that saw three Mexican workers assassinated on picket lines at Pixley and Arvin. He described the Mexican women as the warriors who picketed and kept worker camps such as the one at Corcoran operating. The growers in collusion with the American Farm Bureau and the Chamber of Commerce kept the sheriffs and the elected officials pro-grower. To break the strike county and state officials denied workers relief and pressured the women to go back to work. Growers purposely starved at least nine infants to death.

There were few organizers other than Chambers and 4’ 8” Caroline Decker who was in her late teens or early 20s. Caroline was from a middle-class Jewish family; she dropped out of school to help organize oppressed workers. She was a communist because she was anti-fascist, and the Party was the only organization doing something about it, according to her. Years later when interviewing strikers, they would ask about Caroline Decker.

The strike drew celebrities such as Ella Winters and Langston Hughes. John Steinbeck interviewed Chambers and others about the bitter Taugus Ranch and the Cotton strike. Steinbeck modeled the protagonist after Pat.

Yet although the overwhelming majority of the strikers were Mexican and a minority black, Steinbeck decided much as in The Grapes of Wrath to whiten the characters and make them White Oklahomans because he did not believe that his readers would be sympathetic to Mexicans or blacks.

In 1934-5, the growers and their minions finally broke the union. Chambers and Decker among others were charged and tried for Criminal Syndicalism: “Any doctrine or precept advocating, teaching, or aiding and abetting the commission of crime, sabotage or unlawful acts of force and violence or unlawful methods of terrorism as a means of accomplishing a change in industrial ownership or control, or effecting any political change.”

Chambers and Decker along with other union organizers were convicted. Chambers spent two years in San Quentin, and Decker two at Tehachapi Women’s Prison before the convictions were reversed on appeal.

After this point Chambers dropped out of the Party and he went to work as a laborer. His last years were in the Local 51, San Pedro, California, of the International Pile Drivers Union.

Pat thought he had been forgotten. He was excited about the gains made by the farmworkers under César Chávez. In summer 1971, as Marc Grossman, a Chávez aide, tells it, Chambers went to the UFW’s headquarters just outside Delano. Chávez’s secretary informed Chávez that “an old guy” was in the lobby, asking to speak to someone about times past, Chávez answered, “I’m busy, have him talk to one of the organizers.”

About three hours later the secretary said the old man hadn’t left. “What’s his name?” Chávez asked. “Pat Chambers.” Chávez’s face lit up. Chambers, Chavez, and the UFW driver spent the rest of the afternoon driving around Delano.

Chambers had avoided visiting Delano during the five-year grape strike out of fear Chávez would be redbaited because of CAWIU’s Communist ties.

The Moment had arrived for workers in the 1930s. This was especially true of Mexican women who produced outstanding leaders such as Emma Tenayuca who I met at an activist reunion in San Antonio in 1989. At the age of 16, she began organizing workers. Emma was the lead organizer in the San Antonio Pecan Shellers’ Strike.  Jailed and hounded, “when conditions ripen . . . and the moment” came she rose to the occasion, and we learned from her “struggles successful and defeated . . .” form our consciousness.

RODOLFO ACUÑA, a professor emeritus at California State University Northridge, has published 20 books and over 200 public and scholarly articles. He is the founding chair of the first Chicano Studies Dept which today offers 166 sections per semester in Chicano Studies. His history book Occupied America has been banned in Arizona. In solidarity with Mexican Americans in Tucson, he has organized fundraisers and support groups to ground zero and written over two dozen articles exposing efforts there to nullify the U.S. Constitution.

Source: http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/10/11/lessons-from-the-working-class/

Klaus Probst, president and CEO of Leoni AG, Europe’s largest supplier of cables and cable systems to the automotive industry, is a perfect blend of world citizen and self-centred industrialist. With his Hollywood looks and light Bavarian accent, he looks and sounds the part, too. The German model may be cracking at the seams, but he remains confident: “Our system really is a model for others. When we look at France and see how the unions react to job cuts, we realise the advantage we have in Germany, where we all manage to agree on a reasonable solution. The social partnership in our country seems very stable to me; I don’t see any threats on the horizon.”

Last year Leoni had sales of €3.8bn and earnings before tax of €236m. It is a leading member of the Bavarian Association of Metal Processing and Electrical Companies (VBM), which represents 600 companies with more than 700,000 employees. Probst says: “The VBM is quite a powerful organisation. It lobbies politicians on our behalf — Horst Seehofer, president of the state of Bavaria, and [Chancellor] Angela Merkel. We lobby on energy policy in particular, because the price of electricity is going up all the time, and that is a threat to some of our members.”

The lobbying aims to circumvent Germany’s Energiewende (energy transition) policy, which is supposed to promote alternative energy but has been diluted by amendments introduced under pressure from lobbyists. One passed in 2011 exempts more than 2,000 companies from an ecotax levied on major consumers of fossil fuels. It is estimated that these accommodations will cost the German treasury €4bn in 2013.

There are also cash donations. Between 2002 and 2011, VBM gave €4.16m to political parties, including €3.7m to Seehofer’s Christian Social Union (1). Only BMW and Deutsche Bank were more generous.

Living in a bubble

Given these figures, Germany’s low wages and lack of job security are outrageous. Between 2000 and 2010, Germany saw the biggest increase (after Bulgaria and Romania) in the gap between the richest 20% and the poorest 20% (2). This does not trouble Probst: “Even if several studies confirm what you are saying, I see nothing like that around me. Social security means that everyone in Germany can live decently. I have two children who are at university, and I am not worried about the society they are living in falling apart.”

Leoni was founded in the 19th century and has been listed on the stock exchange since 1923. During the Nazi era it benefited from the forced labour of deportees. The postwar German miracle and rapid expansion of the automotive sector brought more growth. The euphoria of the period, combined with a ban on “political strikes” and anti-communist policies that intensified with the erection of the Berlin Wall, led to a social consensus unique in Europe, and the Federal Republic of Germany was able to delegate the task of negotiating collective labour agreements to employers’ organisations.

The state refrained from interference and allowed employers to agree working conditions and pay with the unions; the employers undertook to involve employee representatives in the management of their companies. This system, known as “co-determination” (Mitbestimmung) gave unions half of the seats on a company’s governing body — the works council (Betriebsrat) in small and medium enterprises or the supervisory board (Aufsichtsrat) in those with more than 500 employees. The system really only gives equal representation in the metal processing sector: in all others, company directors have a majority of one that allows them to resolve deadlocks.

Though it is the envy of southern European employers, this system is collapsing. “On paper, everything is still fine, but in reality, the social partnership only survives in traditional industries,” says Jürgen Bothner, secretary-general of the union Ver.di for the state of Hesse. It is not relevant to the services sector, the growth of which is eroding the German model. In 2012 only 58% of German workers enjoyed collective labour agreements: 60% in the west of the country and 48% in the east, compared with 75% and 63% in 1997. And in sectors where the social partnership still applies, the delicate balance between the partners is being lost. “The links between the trade union federations and the employee representatives who sit on company boards are under strain, where they are not already broken,” says Bothner. “It is not unusual for representatives elected to defend the interests of the workers to collude with the employers.”

Probst praises the “sense of responsibility” of his social partners. They have been very accommodating: in 2000, and again between 2008 and 2010, workers’ representatives in the metal processing and electronics sector, to which the Leoni group belongs, accepted management demands for wage freezes without question. As a result, Probst says, Leoni “survived the crisis and is doing very well today, which is in everyone’s interest.” His own pay rose by 8.8% between 2008 and 2009 and he is currently the 55th best-paid manager in Germany, with a salary of €1.87m plus other rewards (3).

Offshoring over the last 20 years has also weakened the social partnership. Here too, Leoni has been a pioneer. Only 4,000 of its 60,000 employees work in Germany. “When the iron curtain fell in 1989,” says Probst, “we immediately decided to transfer part of our production operations to Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic.”

It offshored more in the late 1990s to Ukraine and Romania, and in the 2000s to Tunisia, Morocco and Egypt. Have the Arab revolutions affected this competition strategy? “Not at all,” says Probst. “The maths is easy: in Germany, the cost of labour in the electronics sector is €25 an hour, including social security contributions; in Poland it’s €6 an hour and in Tunisia it’s only €2.” The 12,000 workers at Leoni’s Sousse site in Tunisia, mostly women earning €300 a month, do not enjoy the advantages of the German model. Probst sees hiring these workers as a “modern form of development aid”. “Germany is doing very well. We have never been so close to full employment,” he claims, although that is a surprising statement in a country where four million (12% of the economically active population) earn less than €7 an hour (4), and where an employment agency has published a brochure advising the unemployed to save money by drinking tap water rather than bottled water (5). Germany’s bosses are living in a bubble, increasingly isolated from the real world.

For the past six years, Markus Pohlmann, a professor of sociology at Heidelberg University, has been leading an ambitious study on the global economic elite. In Germany, his team has interviewed 82 top managers from two generations, those who were in charge during the 1980s and 90s, and those who are today, to “determine how far the principles of neoliberalism have permeated the thinking of the decision-makers, and they way they do business.”

According to Pohlmann, German bosses “devote body and soul to their company, far more than they did 20 years ago. They work an average of between 14 and 16 hours a day during the week, and 10 to 12 hours at weekends. They see society only through the filter of the company … For the older generation, there was a kind of social pact by which the search for a consensus tempered the overriding obligation to pursue profit. That concept has vanished. Today it is the principle of human capital that prevails, according to which every individual is responsible for his or her own fate. Those who do the least well — ‘lower-performing’ employees — are eliminated without scruple.”

‘Labour has a price, like pork’

You can hear this in what they say. Over the last few years, the top bosses have tended to be far more direct than their predecessors. In 2005 Walter Norbert, then chief economist for Deutsche Bank, said: “In Germany, we tend to think the head of a company has a duty to pay workers enough to keep their entire family. But that’s not possible in economic terms” (6). Also in 2005, Michael Rogowski, then president of the powerful Federation of German Industry (BDI), explained the workings of the labour market: “Labour has a price, just like pork. In the business cycle, prices are high when pork is hard to come by. When there is a lot of pork about, prices fall” (7). Rogowski has since worked as a consultant to US investment group Carlyle and presented a programme on a private German TV channel.

The greatest change, according to Pohlmann, has been in “ethical values”. The protestant restraint traditionally associated with German capitalism has been abandoned in the pursuit of material gain. “The top management of companies listed on the DAX [Frankfurt stock exchange index] earned four times and a half as much in 2010 as they did in 1995, with an average income of €2.9 million … In 2011 their income rose again substantially, to an average of €3.14 million per board member,” writes sociologist Michael Hartmann (8).

Tax fraud has increased, although this is not a recent phenomenon among major taxpayers: Albert Eickhoff, owner of a luxury fashion retailer targeted in a 2012 tax evasion probe along with several hundred other German millionaires, said that in the 1970s it was already considered “acceptable to hide money abroad” (9). What has changed, according to Pohlmann, is the way company bosses now openly admit their tolerance of the practice: in 2009, after Klaus Zumwinkel, the former CEO of Deutsche Post, was convicted of tax evasion, nearly everyone Pohlmann’s team talked to agreed that the €2-3m Zumwinkel had hidden in an account in Liechtenstein was nothing to make a fuss about.

Siegmar Kleinert, a member of the supervisory council of DZ Bank, Germany’s third largest financial institution with a capital stock of €11bn, is very angry about Germany being tainted by Berlusconi-style corruption. Since Gerhard Schröder began selling his contacts to Russian energy group Gazprom, Kleinert says: “The dykes have been breached and nobody is worried about conflicts of interest any more.” He mentions Wolfgang Clement, economy and labour minister under Schröder, who became an adviser to international staffing giant Adecco and banking firm Citigroup, and Peer Steinbrück, Social Democratic Party (SPD) leader and candidate for chancellor at the September general election, who gave 74 talks, for fees of €15,000-25,000 a time, to Deutsche Bank, Citigroup, BNP Paribas and JP Morgan, between 2009 and 2012.

Profiting from the losses of others

The ease with which secretaries of state (administrative heads of ministries) move from public office to the private sector shows the dividing line between politics and business is becoming blurred. According to Hartmann, only five of 20 secretaries of state at the finance ministry between 1949 and 1999 joined the private sector after leaving government, but seven of the eight who have held office since 2000 have gone on to a career in business or finance.

The revolving door allows movement in both directions. In 2003 the Frankfurt stock exchange recruited Axel Nawrath, a senior civil servant in Germany’s finance ministry and a member of the SPD, as public relations director. Two years later, he moved back to the civil service as secretary of state to finance minister Hans Eichel. Today he is a director of KfW, one of Germany’s biggest banks.

These links are advantageous to the financial sector. Heribert Zitzelsberger, once head of finance at Bayer, where he was responsible for tax optimisation strategies, was headhunted in 1999 by Schröder’s Red-Green government to be secretary of state at the finance ministry. “We have sent our best tax expert to Bonn. I hope he has been sufficiently infiltrated by Bayer and will make the necessary reforms,” Bayer’s chairman Manfred Schneider told a meeting of shareholders (10).

Zitzelsberger’s reform reduced corporation tax from 34% to 25% and exempted profits made by listed companies on the disposal of shares. After these “competitiveness support measures”, which cost the state €23bn, were announced, the DAX index jumped 4.5%. Bayer got a tax refund of €250m in 2001, which it passed on to its shareholders. When Zitzelsberger died in 2003, German bosses paid tribute to the man who had made them “the greatest gift of all time” (11).

Berthold von Freyberg is grateful to Schröder too. He was born into an influential aristocratic family (his brother Ernst is head of the Vatican Bank), and is a co-founder of the venture capital fund Target Partners, which invests its clients’ money in high-tech startups. He complains about the unfair treatment of his sector: “If you invest 100 million [euros], you get an annual commission of 2.2% or 2.2 million — for five years. But for the last 12 months, German investment funds have had to pay tax at 19% on this. Germany is the only country in Europe to have put such a measure in place; even France is more liberal. It damages the whole sector by discouraging investors. We absorb this tax, which means we lose 19% of our profits. We have to tighten our belts.”

Von Freyberg believes Schröder would not have done anything so insensitive: “Schröder created the conditions for wealth that we enjoy today. We owe him far more than we do Merkel. I don’t criticise her for defending the euro, but she hasn’t done even a quarter of what her predecessor achieved in terms of structural reforms of the labour market.”

Yet, according to a study by management consultancy Kienbaum, 78% of German entrepreneurs support Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU). German bosses are grateful to the left, but vote rightwing: German single-mindedness is weakening.

The same survey also indicates that 66% of the heads of companies still have full confidence in the euro, which they believe is beneficial to Germany. Hans-Olaf Henkel, former head of the BDI, who is campaigning against the euro alongside the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, has a hard time convincing his colleagues: only 1% of German entrepreneurs would like a return to the deutschmark. “The euro has been a great success for German companies. In spite of the uncertainty, they have confidence in the single currency and in the Merkel government’s rescue policy,” says a senior executive at Kienbaum (12).

Probst confirms this: “Obviously, the depreciation of the euro against the dollar, following the poor economic performance of our European neighbours, has stimulated our exports and enhanced our competitiveness on the global market. If Germany returned to the deutschmark, it would trigger an appreciation of our currency that would be disastrous for German industry. We must recognise that the financial pressure on the EU at the moment is keeping the euro at an artificially low level, which is advantageous to us.”

Profiting from the losses of others seems to be the new German model. Lothar Reininger and his brother run Reininger AG, a Mittelstand company (medium-sized business, traditionally associated with values of integrity, hard work and perseverance). They import medical equipment and supplies: wheelchairs from China, beds from Poland, personal hygiene products from Thailand, and employ 190 people, but Lothar Reininger doesn’t like to be called an entrepreneur. He used to work for Triumph-Adler, but lost his job in 1994 after a protest strike over the restructuring of the group by a US investment fund. Since 2006 he has represented leftwing party Die Linke on the Frankfurt city council.

He is familiar with the Mittelstand contradictions: “In our sector, there are many precarious workers — ‘independents’ — who earn five to six euros an hour doing deliveries or cleaning work that our competitors contract out to them. At Reininger, our own employees do that work, and earn a minimum of 10 euros an hour. No matter what employers’ organisations say, it is still possible, even in the face of fierce competition, to pay people a decent wage and treat them fairly. But for how long? The only way to end social dumping would be to set a federal minimum wage of 9 or 10 euros. By refusing to do that, the Merkel government is threatening the survival of the few employers who want to do an honest job.” In 2012 Reininger AG made a profit of €414,000, which it redistributed to its employee shareholders — “the equivalent of two week’s pay per employee: not enough to go to the Bahamas.” The company may not be able to repeat that performance in 2013.

by Olivier Cyran

Olivier Cyran is a journalist.

(1) Official figures published by the Bundestag.

(2) Source: Eurostat. Quoted by Michael Dauderstädt inEuropas unterschätzte Ungleichheit (Europe’s Underestimated Inequality), Friedrich-Ebert Foundation, Berlin, 2010.

(3) Annual ranking of executive pay published byManager Magazin Online.

(4) Source: Institut Arbeit und Qualifikation (Institute for Work, Skills and Training), University of Duisburg-Essen. Quoted by Michael Hartmann in Soziale Ungleichheit, Kein Thema für Eliten? (Social Inequality: no Theme for the Elite?), Campus, Frankfurt, 2013.

(5) “Gehen Sie nie hungrig einkaufen” (Never go shopping when you’re hungry), Die Süddeutsche Zeitung, Munich, 19 July 2013.

(6) Interview with the daily Volksstimme, Magdeburg, 11 February 2005.

(7) Quoted by Norbert Blüm, former conservative labour minister, in Ehrliche Arbeit, ein Angriff auf den Finanzkapitalismus und seine Raffgier (Honest work: an attack on financial capitalism and its rapacity), Gütersloher Verlagshaus, Gütersloh, 2011.

(8) Michael Hartmann, Soziale Ungleichheit, op cit.

(9) Interview with Bild Zeitung, Berlin, 13 November 2012.

(10) Quoted by Hans Weiss and Ernst Schmiederer inAsoziale Marktwirtschaft (Unsocial Market Economy), Kepenheuer and Witsch, Cologne, 2005.

(11) “Das grösste Geschenk aller Zeiten” (The Greatest Gift of All Time), Die Zeit, Hamburg, 8 September 2005.

(12) “Deutsche Unternehmen vertrauen dem Euro” (German Entrepreneurs Trust the Euro), Kienbaum, Berlin, 26 July 2013.

Source: http://mondediplo.com/2013/10/06germany

At recent local elections on September 29, where abstentions stood at a record 47 percent, the CDU — an alliance between the PCP and the Greens, in which the Communists carry much more weight — was, along with the independent candidates, the only political group that gained ground. It earned over 10 percent of the vote (11.1 percent), winning the mayor’s office in 34 municipal governments, six more than four years ago. Ahead of it lie only the Portuguese Socialist Party (PS) with 148 mayoralties and the conservative PSD of Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho, with 86.

Portugal’s communist bastions lie in the rural Alentejo region and in Lisbon’s industrial belt, on the southern bank of the Tagus. Barreiro lies in the latter, a working-class area, born out of industry and with an above-average unemployment rate, which currently runs around 17 percent. Mayor Humberto de Carvalho says the PCP’s continuing success in the city of 80,000 comes down to a matter of trust: “Because we say what we do and we do what we say,” he says. “Here you don’t say one thing and do another. People like consistency.

He admits that, as in towns across Portugal, they have had to cut back in the last four years, including on garbage-collection services and local bus routes. But he says he has given local residents the chance to have their say on the new bus routes in assemblies. “It was difficult. One woman asked me why we were taking away the stop on her street if she was paying as much in taxes as her neighbor, who had one below her house that remained. I can’t force all the residents to understand. But I am obliged to explain it to everyone,” he says.

But if there have been cuts, what differentiates his management from that of the central government? “Well, we would never privatize anything. And we would never throw a public worker out on the street,” he replies, adding: “There will always be resources to open school cafeterias during the holidays so that children from families on lower incomes can eat.”

Experts say that the PCP has known how to attract the punishment vote of a population fed up with seeing their quality of life worsen on a daily basis. Political scientist António Costa Pinto says you have to look for the reasons behind the PCP’s rude political health in its establishment at the local level; in how it has been capable of capitalizing on a certain Euro-skepticism; in the inability of the Socialists — more to the center than their Spanish counterparts — to scrape together support for the left; and in its strong roots in labor unions. “Portuguese communism knew how to survive the Cold War well,” he explains. “Paradoxically, in the hands of its long-serving leader Álvaro Cunhal, it never modernized nor adhered to Eurocommunism. It stayed faithful to itself through the ideological storm that tore across the planet. And now, the other European communist parties have almost disappeared, while the old Portuguese Communist Party is still alive.”

Source: http://elpais.com/elpais/2013/10/07/inenglish/1381168014_804776.html

Onder de noemer ‘Onze programma’s bezuinig je niet 123 weg’, voerden de publieke omroepen de afgelopen weken actie tegen de bezuinigingsplannen van Dekker. Presentatoren en andere BN’ers drukten in radio- en tv-spotjes de politiek op het hart dat extra snijden de doodsteek voor veel programma’s, series en films betekent.

Niet slopen maar bouwen
Namens de FNV sprak vice-voorzitter Ruud Kuin. Onder het motto ‘Niet slopen maar bouwen’ benadrukte hij het belang van een sterke publieke omroep. “Als je wil dat burgers meedoen, moet je ze ook toegang geven tot goede en betrouwbare informatie. Tot kwalitatief goede onderzoeksjournalistiek. En die kwaliteit wordt nu bedreigd. Minder geld is minder mensen. Minder mensen is minder tijd om echt iets goeds te maken. En minder tijd is uiteindelijk minder kwaliteit.”

Steunbetuigingen
Meerdere artiesten beklommen het podium om hun steun te betuigen, onder wie Freek de Jonge, Pieter Derks, Tim Knol, De Staat, Lenny Kuhr en de blazers van het Residentie Orkest. Rond het middaguur overhandigden MAX-directeur Jan Slagter en NPO-voorzitter Henk Hagoort de petitie aan staatssecretaris Sander Dekker. De Nederlandse Publieke Omroep (NPO) zette woensdag 45 bussen in om demonstranten vanuit het hele land naar Den Haag te brengen. In totaal maakten daarvan zo’n 2250 omroepmedewerkers en sympathisanten gebruik.

Source: http://www.fnv-kiem.nl/nieuws/media-en-communicatie/2378

We live in a historical moment. As the reality suggests is not imposed only with tanks. It can also be imposed with black screens, with Legislative Acts and by abolishing public goods. The Greek prime minister attacked once more the workers, their rights and their freedom. The political parties that are holding power since 1974 are responsible for the corruption in public television as well as in all public institutions. They should be brought to justice and get punished for this!

Their attempt to mislead the public opinion stating that they shut down the public television due to corruption will extend in the short future to the closure of the public electricity company (DEI), the public hospitals, the public water company (EIDAP) and the public schools.

The issue of ERT provided the sparkle for the mobilization of thousands of people. The journalists, who have devoted their lives to freedom of press, the technicians, the typographers, the audio engineers, the administrative employees and all the media workers decided to continue their struggle and reveal the truth to the Greek people.

Association of newspaper editors of Athens

Association of journalists of periodicals and electronic press

Association of personnel of daily newspapers of Athens

Association of personnel of daily newspapers of Thessaloniki

Association of technicians of daily periodical press of Athens

Association of personnel of newspaper agencies of Athens

Association of technical personnel of private television of Attica

Association of technical personnel of the Greek Radio

Association of photo reporters of Greece

Association of personnel of periodical and electronic press

Panhellenic association of lithografers

Athens, June 13th 2013