By Peter Schwarz, wsws.org

Hans-Dietrich Genscher: Longtime chiseler in the corridors of power. Whatever deal he offers won’t be good for the Russian people.

The release from jail of the Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky has been celebrated as a great success for German foreign policy.

After his release from a Russian prison just before Christmas, Khodorkovsky flew directly to Berlin, where he was met at the airport by former German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher. As it turned out, in years of secret negotiations, Genscher had sought intensively to secure the release of the oligarch and had twice met with the Russian President Vladimir Putin, acting in close consultation with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Russia expert Alexander Rahr, who assisted Genscher, described Khodorkovsky’s release in the newsweekly Der Spiegel as a “triumph for German secret diplomacy”. It showed that “Germany still enjoys channels [of communication] to Moscow that the British or Americans do not have.”

The term “secret diplomacy” is itself suspicious. Ever since the First World War, it was frowned upon because secret agreements between the great powers had contributed significantly to the outbreak of war. It was then completely discredited by the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939, with its secret clauses regarding the partition of Poland.

Rahr is regarded as Germany’s most well-known Russia expert, advising both the government and industrial corporations. His mention of “secret diplomacy” raises the question of what secret agreements are linked to the release of Khodorkovsky, and what Berlin’s objectives are in making them.

Genscher’s involvement shows that important goals are at stake. The 86-year-old Free Democratic Party (FDP) politician is a political heavyweight. He has belonged to every German government between 1969 and 1992, first for five years as interior minister and then for 18 years as foreign minister. He was involved in all the fundamental political decisions of the time, especially the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and German reunification in 1989-90.

Genscher’s account of the release—that it was for purely humanitarian reasons—is not credible. There are tens of thousands of political prisoners worldwide who have far better humanitarian grounds to justify their release than Khodorkovsky.

While it may be true that Russia’s richest man landed behind bars because he tangled with Putin and his circle of power, that does not make him a martyr of democracy. Khodorkovsky, now 50 years old, is one of that exclusive club of oligarchs who, after the collapse of the USSR, used their starting position in the Communist Youth League to enrich themselves by means of robbery, fraud and speculation to take over formerly nationalised property. They left behind not only a social wasteland, but also many dead bodies.

Once the judicial authorities were let loose on Khodorkovsky, it was not difficult to find evidence for his conviction. In September 2011, even the European Court of Human Rights approved the actions of the Russian authorities against Khodorkovsky’s oil company Yukos. His prison sentence was at most “unjust,” because other oligarchs who had perpetrated similar crimes were spared prosecution.

What makes Khodorkovsky of interest to German politicians is his absolute commitment to the looting of social wealth. “Our compass is profit, our idol is Her Majesty, capital,” is his oft-quoted credo from the year 1993. For Khodorkovsky, freedom means primarily the unrestricted freedom of the market, including the opening up of Russia to Western capital.

This brought him into conflict with Putin, who also protects the wealth of the Russian oligarchs, but regards a strong Russian nation-state, which can also act internationally as a great power, as vital to a functioning Russian capitalism.

Probably the most important reason for Khodorkovsky’s arrest in autumn 2003 were his efforts to sell up to 50 percent of the Yukos oil company to the US corporations Exxon and Chevron. For the Kremlin, this was not acceptable. After Khodorkovsky’s conviction, Yukos was broken up and incorporated into the state-dominated oil company Rosneft, which also controls the gas monopoly Gazprom, and is now the largest energy company in the world.

The strategic role of oil and gas has changed over the last ten years. New extraction methods, such as deep sea drilling and fracking, have unlocked new deposits globally, undermining Russia’s position as an energy exporter. Putin was therefore looking for new ways of strengthening the position of Russia. The main project of his third term as president is to build a Eurasian Union. This is to be modelled on the European Union, and would include large parts of the former Soviet Union and other countries.

Before the presidential elections, Putin presented the project in a detailed article in Izvestia on October 3, 2011. He stressed that the Eurasian Union did not “entail any kind of revival of the Soviet Union … It would be naïve to try to revive or emulate something that has been consigned to history.”

Putin wrote that the Eurasian Union promised to strengthen Russia’s global position: “We suggest a powerful supranational association capable of becoming one of the poles in the modern world and serving as an efficient bridge between Europe and the dynamic Asia-Pacific region.”

At the same time, he denied that the project was directed against the European Union. Rather, the Eurasian Union would “join the dialogue with the EU.” The goal is “a harmonised community of economies stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok.” The partnership between the Eurasian and the European Unions would “prompt changes in the geo-political and geo-economic setup of the continent as a whole, with a guaranteed global effect.”

Putin’s article triggered disquiet in the US and Europe. There was hardly a major newspaper or a think tank which did not comment on it in detail. In particular, the German and US governments concluded that their strategy—bringing large parts of the former Soviet Union under their economic and political control, increasingly isolating Russia, and strengthening their influence in strategically important Central Asia—was at risk.

Even Beijing reacted nervously. It saw Putin’s foray as a rival project to the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, which is meant to strengthen China’s position in Central Asia.

The right-wing American think tank Heritage Foundation warned: “Russia’s Eurasian Union could endanger the neighbourhood and U.S. interests.” It advised the US and its allies in Europe and Asia, “to balance the Russian geopolitical offensive and protect U.S. and Western interests”.

At a press conference in Dublin in December 2012, then-US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton clearly indicated that the United States will not tolerate Putin’s project. There is a “move to re-Sovietise the region,” Clinton said, regarding talk of a Eurasian Union. “But let’s make no mistake about it. We know what the goal is and we are trying to figure out effective ways to slow down or prevent it.”

The EU and Germany are trying to pull former Soviet republics onto their side under the “Eastern Partnership.” This project is aimed at bringing Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, Georgia and Armenia closer to the European Union. The EU explicitly excludes simultaneous membership of the Eurasian Union and the Eastern Partnership.

The conflict escalated last November when, at the last minute, the Ukrainian government refused to sign an Association Agreement with the EU. The agreement with the EU would have meant massive cuts in pensions and social spending, as well as gas price increases for private citizens, which the government feared it would not survive politically. On the other hand, Russia was offering the almost bankrupt country loans and gas price discounts of some $20 billion.

The EU and the US responded by massively supporting pro-European protests against President Viktor Yanukovych and his government. The UDAR party of professional boxer Vitali Klitschko, a spokesman of the opposition, is sponsored and trained by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU). They do not object when Klitschko regularly stands side by side with the fascist Oleh Tyagnibok from the All-Ukrainian Association “Svoboda.”

So far, the opposition has not succeeded in forcing the government and the president, who have substantial backing in eastern Ukraine, to resign. But they are continuing demonstrations with Western support—signalling to the Kremlin that they are willing to divide the country, should it join Putin’s union. Without the 45 million inhabitants of Ukraine, the largest ex-Soviet republic after Russia, the Eurasian Union would be a rump organisation.

It is in this context that Khodorkovsky’s release must be seen. Since German reunification 23 years ago, the German government has systematically worked to gain a foothold in Eastern Europe and the ex-USSR. In this, Berlin is following the traditional thrust of German imperialism, which in the First and especially the Second World War had conquered Ukraine and parts of Russia.

Berlin has never excluded the possibility of cooperation with Putin, as long as this is on its terms. Chancellor Gerhard Schröder (Social Democratic Party, SPD) enjoyed a personal friendship with the Russian President, and attested him to be a “flawless democrat.” Now Berlin sees a new opportunity to get back in business with Putin on its own terms. While in Ukraine it supports and organises the anti-Russian protests, Berlin hopes simultaneously for a greater opening up of Russia for German capital.

This is how Alexander Rahr, Genscher’s assistant in the negotiations, interprets Khodorkovsky’s release. “If there are politicians who can influence Putin, it is the Chancellor and the former designers of German Ostpolitik ,” he wrote on 2 January in Die Welt. “The fact that Khodorkovsky was flown to Germany after his pardon shows that Putin is seeking a rapprochement with the West via Berlin.”

Sheffield unemployed men are forced to strip to lessen the effects of working class poverty in the comedy The Full Monty.

By Tom Pearse, wsws.org

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s Monitoring Poverty and Social Exclusion 2013 report offers the latest figures on poverty across the UK, revealing a growing social crisis.

Figures for 2011/12 show 13 million people are in poverty, with the study warning that this situation will get worse. What the report calls the “calm surface” of current poverty statistics is hiding “a sharp shift downwards.” Noting that pay is still falling relative to prices, and that the real value of benefits will fall further next year, the report warns of the danger that “this downward shift is becoming a downward spiral.”

The foundation defines poverty by net household income, adjusted for size (larger households need more money to reach a given standard of living than smaller ones) and after housing costs have been deducted. People are counted as being in poverty if their household income is below 60 percent of the median income for all UK households. In 2011/12 this poverty threshold for a single adult was £128 a week. For a couple with two children it was £357.

The study makes bleak reading. The authors point to the “discipline and demonization” that are exacted as the price of state financial support for those out of work. They note that the real value of state support, already low, is continuing to fall.

The report identifies the increased pressure on the most vulnerable caused by cuts in housing and council tax benefits. The report is written with the aspiration of a workable welfare system, but even within their limited perspective the authors are clear about the impact of the cuts. Cuts in the welfare system mean people are going hungry. The authors identify this as the reason for the growth in use of food banks.

The numbers using food banks are horrific enough, with more than 350,000 people having used them in 2012/13, even before the deepest cuts have been made. Almost half of the referrals to food banks, however, arise directly from problems with the benefit system that should be assisting the most vulnerable. At a parliamentary debate this month Conservative Party MPs laughed and jeered as the plight of those reduced to using food banks was described.

The Rowntree report examines how poverty has affected income, noting that incomes at all levels have fallen in the last two years. It identifies the group most affected as “working-age adults without dependent children.” Some 20 percent of this group now lives in poverty. This is its highest level in 30 years, with the report noting that the percentage has risen “quite steadily” in that period. The falling income level of working age adults has clearly had an impact on overall poverty, while food prices have risen faster than the rate of inflation over the last decade and utility bills have risen even more quickly.

Rising prices of consumer goods are just one of the causes of the rise in poverty. Between 2002 and 2012, the consumer price index (CPI) rose by 29 percent. That means that on average consumer items cost just under one-third more in 2012 than they did in 2002.

The largest price rises have come on utility bills, transport and rent. Over that decade, the cost of electricity, gas and other fuels rose by 140 percent. Domestic water charges rose by 69 percent. The cost of personal transport (excluding the purchase cost of vehicles) rose by 71 percent, while the cost of public transport rose by 87 percent. Over the last decade public transport has become more expensive relative to private transport.

The report does not address rent rises, which are now rising at twice the annual rate of earnings and reaping record dividends of 10.5 percent per annum for landlords. Average rent rose 12 percent from £121.50 per week to £136 per week between 2010 and 2012.

The report’s most striking statistics are its findings on work. “For the first time on record,” the authors note, “the majority of people in poverty are in working families.” Two-thirds of adults in these families are in work. Of the 13 million people in poverty in the UK in 2011/12, around 6.7 million were in a family where someone worked. The remaining 6.3 million were in work-less working-age families or families where the adults were retired. This is the first time when a majority of those in poverty have been in work.

The report points to escalating youth unemployment and an increase in low-paid work. Unemployment for young adults rose by 7 percent between 2007 and 2012. During that time the number of unemployed 18-25 year-olds increased by 290,000.

The proportion of low-paid jobs increased in 2012, with 39 percent done by people under 30. In 2012, around 27 percent of female employees and 15 percent of male employees were paid below the nominal “living wage” of £7.45 an hour. This increase in low-paid work for women was the first since figures were first documented in 2001.

The poverty figures reveal the fraudulent character of the “living wage” campaign. Two-fifths of adults in working families and in poverty were in families where the earner was paid more than the “living wage”. On average, between 2008/09 and 2010/11, 1.2 million adults were paid below the living wage in the bottom 20 percent of the household income distribution, roughly equivalent to the poverty line. As the report notes, poverty is not just created by low pay, but is complicated by factors such as benefits paid to those in work and housing costs. The report also pointed to a fall in real wages almost every month for over three years.

Its examination of social security and welfare reform also highlighted continued changes in benefits. In February 2013, some 5.2 million people in the UK were claiming an out-of-work benefit. This is around 50,000 fewer than the previous year, but 400,000 more than five years earlier.

The benefit cut which had the greatest impact was the change to Council Tax Support in April 2013. Most of those affected were already living in poverty. In the financial year 2013/14, an estimated 2.6 million families (8 percent of families in the UK) saw their benefit entitlement cut as the result of three welfare reforms. They lost on average £16.90 a week. Two million families saw only a reduction to their Council Tax Support, the largest group affected by only one benefit loss. Of the 660,000 families hit by the so-called “bedroom tax,” two-thirds have also had their Council Tax Support cut.

The report offers a stark evaluation of government policies on welfare reform. “The problems that this government and the last [Labour] see themselves as addressing through their welfare reforms—a soaring benefit bill, worklessness, poverty—are serious indeed. But their roots do not lie in the people caught up in them. Instead they lie elsewhere, in the behaviour of both financial and non-financial corporations, in the laxity of regulators, in an unwillingness to contemplate a low-cost, good-quality alternative to private rented homes, in confused thinking that treats valid answers to questions about individuals (why this person is unemployed rather than that) as if they were valid answers for social ones too (why there is unemployment at all).”

It ends with the warning that “If poverty is really to be ‘tackled’… it is the shortcomings of powerful institutions and ideas that must be the object of relentless attention, not the poor themselves.”

What cannot be said is that this means putting an end to government of, by and for the super-rich and fighting for socialism.

Hipocrisy writ large

Snowden’s (and Manning’s) popularity is solid around the world. Here Germans demonstrate for his asylum last year.

By Eric London, wsws.org

The statement released on New Year’s Day by the editorial board of the New York Times calling for reduced punishment for Edward Snowden will be welcomed by many as a belated acknowledgment of the heroic work of the man who exposed the totalitarian operations of the National Security Agency (NSA). But the editorial inevitably draws attention to the Times’ contribution to the vilification and persecution of Snowden in the aftermath of his initial revelations of secret government spying operations.

In the editorial, titled “Edward Snowden, Whistle-Blower,” the Times requests that the Obama administration make a bargain with Edward Snowden, trading leniency for his return to the United States.

“When someone reveals that government officials have routinely and deliberately broken the law, that person should not face life in prison at the hands of the same government,” the editorial reads, adding that “President Obama should tell his aides to begin finding a way to end Mr. Snowden’s vilification and give him an incentive to return home.”

On its surface, the editorial would seem to indicate a substantial turnaround in the position of the Times. The Times has played a central role in contributing to the climate that forced Snowden to flee the United States earlier this year. It is, in part, because of the loyalty of outfits like the Times to the Bush and Obama administrations that the responsibility for exposing the criminality at the highest levels of the US government falls to whistle-blowers like Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and Bradley Manning.

Far from defending Snowden, the Times has filled its pages with categorical denunciations of the young whistle-blower. Last June, when Snowden went public with the first leaks, the Times’ response was unequivocally hostile.Times columnist David Brooks wrote that Snowden “betrayed the constitution” and declared that “the founding fathers did not create the United States so that some solitary 29-year-old could make unilateral decisions about what should be exposed.”

In August, chief foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman opined: “[Snowden] dumped his data and fled to countries that are hostile to us and to the very principles he espoused. To make a second impression [in Friedman’s words, to prove he is “not a traitor”] Snowden would need to come home, make his case and face his accusers,” despite the fact that Snowden would likely face “a lengthy jail term.”

Andrew Sorkin: An ambitious establishment media worm for all seasons.

In a July television appearance, Times financial columnist and Wall Street toady Andrew Ross Sorkin said: “We’ve screwed this up, even letting [Snowden] get to Russia… I would arrest him, and now I would almost arrest Glenn Greenwald.”

Bill Keller, the former Times executive editor who continues to oversee the alignment of the newspaper with the interests of the national security state, menacingly argued that a successful terrorist attack would require the US government to “ratchet up the security state, even beyond the war-on-terror excesses that followed the last big attack.” Therefore, he concluded, civil libertarians would be advised to give the NSA plenty of leeway.

The Times’ hostility to Edward Snowden followed the pattern established by the newspaper in its treatment of Julian Assange, who exposed, among other things, evidence of US war crimes in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In January 2011, Keller called Assange “an eccentric former computer hacker of Australian birth and no fixed residence,” who was “elusive, manipulative and volatile,” and who threw the media into “a state of information anarchy.”

Seven months after Snowden identified himself as the NSA whistle-blower, what has accounted for the Times’ change in tone?

First, the scale and staggering character of the content of Snowden’s revelations have since been laid bare, exposing the architecture of a police state in the United States. The Times editorial, noting that “government officials have routinely and deliberately broken the law,” enumerates some of the chilling constitutional violations perpetrated by the NSA.

The partial list includes criminal acts of breathtaking gravity: the “mass collection of phone and Internet data,” the decoding of encryption systems, the breaking of communication links “allowing [the NSA] to spy on hundreds of millions of user accounts,” and the official agency practice of “repeatedly providing misleading information about its surveillance practices” to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

The editorial might also have noted that the US government tracks the physical movements of hundreds of millions of people worldwide; extracts and stores content from the phone conversations, text messages and emails of innocent civilians; spies on the leaders of foreign governments, including formal allies; and performs economic espionage on behalf of American corporations. The extent of the operations make clear that the purpose of the surveillance is not—as Obama administration officials claim—to fight the “global war on terror,” but rather is part of an effort to monitor and track innocent Americans in full violation of the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution.

Second, the entire political establishment is now well aware of the vast chasm that exists between officially sanctified public opinion—of which the Times is a principle representative—and the sentiments of broad masses of people. Much to the chagrin of the Obama administration, the Times and the rest of the corporate media, the effort to whip up popular antagonism to Snowden has been rejected by the public.

That the apparent shift in the Times’ tone is part of an effort to limit public hostility to the political establishment is evidenced by the fact that the newspaper’s positive proposals are thoroughly ambiguous and ambivalent in terms of what Snowden’s fate would be were he to return to the United States. As David Firestone, a member of the editorial board, reminded readers on Thursday, the editorial board “didn’t say [Snowden] should be given a presidential pardon or a medal.”

Nor does the Times call for any major changes to be made to the surveillance programs. The Times editorial bemoans the “excesses” of the surveillance of the world population, but it wholly accepts the government’s justification for the build-up of the totalitarian apparatus.

“Many of the mass-collection programs Mr. Snowden exposed would work just as well if they were reduced in scope and brought under strict outside oversight, as the presidential panel recommended,” the editorial argues.

Though the editorial references the fact that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is guilty of perjury, the Times merely notes that “there has been no discussion of punishment for that lie.”

The revelations made public by Edward Snowden have created an awareness amongst the American public of the advanced stage of decay of democratic norms. Snowden has blown the cover off of a degree of government criminality unsurpassed in American history.

Revelation after revelation has discredited the agencies of the national security apparatus and shown how each of the three branches of American government—legislative, executive and judicial—is complicit in approving and rubber-stamping government spying on hundreds of millions of Americans, world leaders and international civilians.

He has exposed as lies the ideological pretenses of the “war on terror” and called into question the motives behind the dangerous antidemocratic shifts that have dirtied all aspects of political, social and cultural life in recent years. He has also exposed as lies the justifications provided by the staff of theTimes and other media outlets for his own persecution.

There may also be a sense amongst some government officials that the information Snowden has yet to leak is so damaging that it would be best to bring him to the United States and “shut him up” in one way or another. The Obama administration, the Times and the entire political establishment are justifiably concerned about what is still to come.

The basic question posed by the revelations and the anxious response of theTimes remains: from which layer of society will the constituency to defend the basic democratic rights enshrined in the US Constitution arise?

The fate of Edward Snowden depends entirely on the development of a working class movement in the United States and internationally to defend democratic rights.

In opposition to the efforts of the political establishment to protect and expand the national security state, the working class must put forward its own program and strategy to tear down the repressive apparatus of the US government and halt the attack on democratic rights. A mass political movement of the working class must be built to defend all social rights on the basis of a fight for genuine equality and for socialism.