The degree to which Ed Balls, as a key Treasury minister in the last New Labour government, is responsible for the government’s massive budget deficit is subject to argument. But what is not in dispute is Balls’ undying support for the unbridled, unregulated expansion of the financial sector which, as we know, went down in flames in 2008.
Balls, newly promoted as shadow chancellor following the sudden resignation of Alan Johnson, claimed yesterday that having studied economics for over 25 years, he knew what it was all about. Subsequent events prove a) how useless bourgeois economics is and b) how arrogant Balls is.
New Labour, as we know, transformed itself into a party that cheer-led the rise of corporate-driven globalisation and, in particular, the parallel growth of a financial sector that fuelled consumerism and, more to the point, had with government support, evaded all known regulatory frameworks.
As chancellor, Gordon Brown couldn’t believe it. The financial sector’s tax revenues grew apace. And in September 2006, Balls, then economic secretary to the Treasury under Brown, went to Hong Kong to sing the praises of London as a financial centre and how easy it was to do business under New Labour.
Balls told a joint meeting of the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce and the British Chamber of Commerce: “The UK’s financial tradition as a free, fair and open global market has resulted in tremendous growth in London’s international financial markets in the past decade – over-the-counter derivatives turnover up by 770%, foreign equities turnover up by 260%, cross-border bank lending up by 160% and foreign exchange turnover up by over 60%.”
After praising the growth of fantasy finance, Balls declared that central to London’s “success story” was “light-touch principle-based regulation” which New Labour was entirely responsible for. Giving the Bank of England independence was Brown’s first act in May 1997. Creating the toothless Financial Services Authority was act two.
Admiring the Big Bang of 1986, when the Thatcher government opened up the City to global competition as “decisive”, Balls went on to laud the FSA which had “confounded those who feared the FSA might become a heavy-handed and inflexible regulator.” In fact, Britain’s “regulatory regime continues to be the best in the world”.
Famous last words or what, considering there were queues outside Northern Rock branches 12 months later as people scrambled to withdrew their money from a bank that had failed in every respect?
The truth is that regulation was non-existent, not so much a light touch as light-headed. Bankers were running rings round the FSA and the Bank of England – and everyone knew it. “Products” like derivatives lay completely outside the scope of the regulators, yet Balls praised them as if they were a new form of gold.
At the time, this is how the political class and the financial elites saw it. Money could beget more money, profits would rise along with tax revenues, ordinary people could get as much credit as they wanted to buy commodities mostly made in other countries. Surely it could never end? As Brown himself said on the eve of the meltdown in July 2007, the City had entered a “new golden age”.
Then came the crash, an immediate recession and the crisis found its way into government finances, producing eye-watering deficits and interest payments on the debt heading towards £100 billion a year. So, yes, Balls does share political responsibility for the crisis. As he said in Hong Kong: “Government decisions … have an important role to play, for good or ill.”
Paul Feldman
Communications editor
For revolutionary solutions to create a sustainable, not-for-profit economy in place of global capital alongside a real democracy based on People’s Assemblies. Visit our web site at www.aworldtowin.net
Friday, January 21, 2011
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Secret police defend the status quo
The Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) is a state-sponsored, privately-owned organisation accountable to no one which has been running its own operations, both high profile and undercover, since the 1980s.
Moving forward from its role as a national police force developed during the 1984-5 miners’ strike, ACPO put itself even further outside of state control when in April 1997 It was incorporated as a limited company, one month before the election of the Blair government.
Its dramatic expansion, which saw the infiltration of the climate change movement, took place during the rule of New Labour. ACPO’s operations are funded by the Home Office and tributes levied from the 44 police forces and the income from an annual exhibition.
ACPO describes itself as “an independent, professionally led strategic body” and “in times of national need ACPO - on behalf of all chief officers - coordinates the strategic policing response.” Planting agents inside the environmental movement comes under that heading and is “proportionate to the risk”, according to Liverpool chief constable Jon Murphy. Defending the use of agents, he says:
"There are many people who have got perfectly legitimate concerns about any numbers of issues about which they may wish to protest …Unfortunately, in the midst of some of these groups – recent history would evidence this to be true – there are a small number of people who are intent on causing harm, committing crime and on occasions disabling parts of the national critical infrastructure. That has the potential to deny utilities to hospitals, schools, businesses and your granny."
This is nonsense of course. The state protects infrastructure because it is corporate property. If any part of the state were truly concerned about grannies being without energy, they would do something about energy prices. In the winter months, around nine older people die every day as a result of cold.
Two more undercover cops have been outed. Lynn Watson, real name unknown, claimed to be a care worker from Bournemouth when she appeared in 2003 at a protest at Aldermaston nuclear weapons research unit. She moved to Leeds to become active in groups who used the Common Place social centre.
Jim Boyling, a serving officer in the Metropolitan police, used the identity Jim Sutton to infiltrate Reclaim the Streets and during his five years undercover started a relationship with a fellow activist.
Murphy claims this was a breach of discipline, and that agents are specifically banned from sleeping with the enemy – but presumably acting as an agent provocateur, as Mark Kennedy/Stone is said to have done, is OK.
He was a high profile activist, who trained others to take part in the proposed action at the Ratcliffe-on Soar power station, gathering over 100 people at a nearby school where they were arrested in a dawn raid after he tipped off police.
Of course, the presence of agents is not the reason climate activists have not succeeded in changing Britain’s energy policies. Actions and protests in and of themselves cannot change the basic capitalist power relationships in society. All policing is designed to protect these relationships as part of the work of the state. It is the state itself that we need to transform.
As those who threw down the Berlin wall showed, when a moment of real political transformation arrives, agents can’t prevent it – even in a country where the Stasi was woven into the fabric of society. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be wary of the activities of agents, and expose them when we can.
We can fight for the idea of a sustainable economy and alternative energy strategies most effectively by building People’s Assemblies. Linking the struggle to defend the eco-system with actions to defend livelihoods, jobs and communities is the way forward. The only way we can shift to a green economy is by transcending the profit-driven capitalist economy and that will require mass political action.
Penny Cole
Environment editor
Moving forward from its role as a national police force developed during the 1984-5 miners’ strike, ACPO put itself even further outside of state control when in April 1997 It was incorporated as a limited company, one month before the election of the Blair government.
Its dramatic expansion, which saw the infiltration of the climate change movement, took place during the rule of New Labour. ACPO’s operations are funded by the Home Office and tributes levied from the 44 police forces and the income from an annual exhibition.
ACPO describes itself as “an independent, professionally led strategic body” and “in times of national need ACPO - on behalf of all chief officers - coordinates the strategic policing response.” Planting agents inside the environmental movement comes under that heading and is “proportionate to the risk”, according to Liverpool chief constable Jon Murphy. Defending the use of agents, he says:
"There are many people who have got perfectly legitimate concerns about any numbers of issues about which they may wish to protest …Unfortunately, in the midst of some of these groups – recent history would evidence this to be true – there are a small number of people who are intent on causing harm, committing crime and on occasions disabling parts of the national critical infrastructure. That has the potential to deny utilities to hospitals, schools, businesses and your granny."
This is nonsense of course. The state protects infrastructure because it is corporate property. If any part of the state were truly concerned about grannies being without energy, they would do something about energy prices. In the winter months, around nine older people die every day as a result of cold.
Two more undercover cops have been outed. Lynn Watson, real name unknown, claimed to be a care worker from Bournemouth when she appeared in 2003 at a protest at Aldermaston nuclear weapons research unit. She moved to Leeds to become active in groups who used the Common Place social centre.
Jim Boyling, a serving officer in the Metropolitan police, used the identity Jim Sutton to infiltrate Reclaim the Streets and during his five years undercover started a relationship with a fellow activist.
Murphy claims this was a breach of discipline, and that agents are specifically banned from sleeping with the enemy – but presumably acting as an agent provocateur, as Mark Kennedy/Stone is said to have done, is OK.
He was a high profile activist, who trained others to take part in the proposed action at the Ratcliffe-on Soar power station, gathering over 100 people at a nearby school where they were arrested in a dawn raid after he tipped off police.
Of course, the presence of agents is not the reason climate activists have not succeeded in changing Britain’s energy policies. Actions and protests in and of themselves cannot change the basic capitalist power relationships in society. All policing is designed to protect these relationships as part of the work of the state. It is the state itself that we need to transform.
As those who threw down the Berlin wall showed, when a moment of real political transformation arrives, agents can’t prevent it – even in a country where the Stasi was woven into the fabric of society. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be wary of the activities of agents, and expose them when we can.
We can fight for the idea of a sustainable economy and alternative energy strategies most effectively by building People’s Assemblies. Linking the struggle to defend the eco-system with actions to defend livelihoods, jobs and communities is the way forward. The only way we can shift to a green economy is by transcending the profit-driven capitalist economy and that will require mass political action.
Penny Cole
Environment editor
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Get ready for another banking crash
The Bank of England’s Paul Tucker pulled no punches on the BBC last night. “When banks take the upside and taxpayers take the downside, something has gone wrong with the very heart of capitalism”, he said.
Tucker, deputy governor of the Bank, with special responsibility for financial stability, aimed his advice at the Coalition government. Instead of further government intervention to bail out banks, they should be allowed to fail, albeit in an orderly fashion.
Cameron, Clegg and Chancellor Osborne are anxiously awaiting the recommendations from the Banking Commission they established in June 2010, to look at the “size, scale and function” of the banking sector. But there’s no time to lose.
Tucker’s bite-the bullet proposal to let the likes of Lloyd’s and RBS fail – and presumably to take all their depositors’ money down with them, was delivered as the climax of the BBC’s business editor Robert Peston’s retelling of the story of rapid expansion of the financial sector that preceded the crash of 2007/8.
Tucker is saying that there’s another, much bigger crash on the way. This time the banks will be just too big to save.
Peston and the BBC’s media expertise took us once again through the breakdown of regulation and the rise of derivative financial “products” whose face value grew to be ten times larger than the total of the world’s annual production of goods and non-financial services.
But, as with most accounts, no underlying explanation was given for the exponential expansion of credit from the 1970s onwards. Apart from using Toby Baxendale, a wealthy fish merchant, to top and tail the hour-long programme, the real economy hardly got a look in.
Amongst Baxendale’s biggest customers was Lehman’s. When they cashed in their chips, Baxendale lost out. Now he’s got a sensible-sounding idea to end the madness – legislation to force banks to keep a customer’s deposits safe rather than lending them out, if that’s what the customer wants. We didn’t find out whether he expects to pay for the privilege, or wants to receive interest.
Either way it’s just a variant on the idea of returning to the days when savings banks had to be kept separate from the more risky lenders of capital for investment. The chances of that happening are less than zero.
This won’t solve the main problem. The banks are still stuck with monumental mountains of toxic assets. These are the unsustainable debts that can never be repaid, because repayment depends on recovery and there can’t be a recovery before the excess productive capacity they funded has been eliminated.
It has always been part of the BBC’s role to protect the state when danger threatens, and this was one of its better attempts to keep attention focussed on the banks, and away from the real heart of capitalist production – the place where real value is produced by people working, and working longer and harder than they need to satisfy all of our needs.
With students leading the campaign against the cuts, and beginning to widen their campaign beyond blaming the bankers, and the soaring price of fuel and food enraging the population, the state is beginning to come under attack. They can’t wait for the Banking Commission. Some might even smell a conspiracy of the Coalition, the BBC and the Bank of England to confuse the public, to keep the attention on the banks and away from the system as a whole.
Without the fairy tale expansion of credit and debt, the capitalist economy could not have continued to grow and profits and interest payments could not have continued to be extracted from the value the workers produced all over the world. But, as Tucker is saying to Cameron, it’s all over now, baby blue.
Gerry Gold
Economics editor
Tucker, deputy governor of the Bank, with special responsibility for financial stability, aimed his advice at the Coalition government. Instead of further government intervention to bail out banks, they should be allowed to fail, albeit in an orderly fashion.
Cameron, Clegg and Chancellor Osborne are anxiously awaiting the recommendations from the Banking Commission they established in June 2010, to look at the “size, scale and function” of the banking sector. But there’s no time to lose.
Tucker’s bite-the bullet proposal to let the likes of Lloyd’s and RBS fail – and presumably to take all their depositors’ money down with them, was delivered as the climax of the BBC’s business editor Robert Peston’s retelling of the story of rapid expansion of the financial sector that preceded the crash of 2007/8.
Tucker is saying that there’s another, much bigger crash on the way. This time the banks will be just too big to save.
Peston and the BBC’s media expertise took us once again through the breakdown of regulation and the rise of derivative financial “products” whose face value grew to be ten times larger than the total of the world’s annual production of goods and non-financial services.
But, as with most accounts, no underlying explanation was given for the exponential expansion of credit from the 1970s onwards. Apart from using Toby Baxendale, a wealthy fish merchant, to top and tail the hour-long programme, the real economy hardly got a look in.
Amongst Baxendale’s biggest customers was Lehman’s. When they cashed in their chips, Baxendale lost out. Now he’s got a sensible-sounding idea to end the madness – legislation to force banks to keep a customer’s deposits safe rather than lending them out, if that’s what the customer wants. We didn’t find out whether he expects to pay for the privilege, or wants to receive interest.
Either way it’s just a variant on the idea of returning to the days when savings banks had to be kept separate from the more risky lenders of capital for investment. The chances of that happening are less than zero.
This won’t solve the main problem. The banks are still stuck with monumental mountains of toxic assets. These are the unsustainable debts that can never be repaid, because repayment depends on recovery and there can’t be a recovery before the excess productive capacity they funded has been eliminated.
It has always been part of the BBC’s role to protect the state when danger threatens, and this was one of its better attempts to keep attention focussed on the banks, and away from the real heart of capitalist production – the place where real value is produced by people working, and working longer and harder than they need to satisfy all of our needs.
With students leading the campaign against the cuts, and beginning to widen their campaign beyond blaming the bankers, and the soaring price of fuel and food enraging the population, the state is beginning to come under attack. They can’t wait for the Banking Commission. Some might even smell a conspiracy of the Coalition, the BBC and the Bank of England to confuse the public, to keep the attention on the banks and away from the system as a whole.
Without the fairy tale expansion of credit and debt, the capitalist economy could not have continued to grow and profits and interest payments could not have continued to be extracted from the value the workers produced all over the world. But, as Tucker is saying to Cameron, it’s all over now, baby blue.
Gerry Gold
Economics editor
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Healthcare market already worth £29 billion
David Cameron claims the mantle of Tony Blair in defending the Coalition’s plans to impose market-driven changes in the National Health Service. He is absolutely right and that’s why trade union opposition to the government’s plans is reduced to a letter to The Times.
You would think from union protests that the market had just made its ugly appearance in the NHS. Far from it. By the time New Labour left office last May, an estimated 6% of all NHS work was carried out by private firms, thanks to a series of market-led reorganisations from 1997 onwards.
According to market research consultants Key Note, in 2009, the total UK market for private healthcare was worth almost £29bn, having risen in value terms by almost 22% compared with 2005. Acute care and psychiatric care rose in value terms by 24% and 42.4% respectively.
“The overall market has expanded within the last 5 years as a result of the growing shift from public to private provision, with the NHS making increasing use of private sector healthcare to cut waiting lists,” says a recent report which notes that the market continues to “attract attention and investment from overseas firms, as well as private equity operators”.
The Coalition plans to deepen what New Labour started, of course, not only in its plans for the NHS but in areas such as tuition fees and academy schools. Doctors will control the purse-strings and be able to select private providers on the grounds of price and bureaucratic primary care trusts (PCTs) will be abolished.
Health union Unison general secretary Dave Prentis accuses Cameron of "cutting away at the heart of society" and adds: "The NHS is not safe in Tory hands. [Health secretary] Lansley's proposals are unnecessary, untried and will cost the taxpayer dear. They threaten the very founding principles of the NHS."
The question is: where was Prentis from 1997-2010, while the NHS was being carved up by New Labour? Where was the opposition when private firms like Ramsay Health Care and Care UK were signing contracts to provide services to the NHS at a profit to the companies? To ask the question is to answer it. Union bureaucrats sat on their hands the whole time.
Take Ramsay Health Care. From its early days in Australia, the company has become a global brand, operating more than 100 hospitals and day surgeries in several countries, including 22 acute hospitals in England. Last December, the group announced an upgrade in profits thanks in part to a rise in patient admissions in Britain. Results for the five months to November 30 showed the company was on track to report a first-half net profit 26-28% higher than the same period in 2009.
Ramsay runs the Clifton Park clinic in York, which is at the centre of a claim for compensation by 50 local people after hip replacement operations went disastrously wrong, as the York Press reported:.
“Many claim they are suffering frequent dislocations or excruciating pain resulting from metal-on-metal debris getting into their bloodstream. Some can only walk with sticks; other symptoms include audible popping and cup loosening.” All were fitted with products manufactured by US company DePuy Orthopaedics Inc. which were recalled last August by DePuy after being on the market for seven years.
It seems the NHS will have to pick up the bill for any eventual compensation settlement.
Paul Feldman
Communications editor
You would think from union protests that the market had just made its ugly appearance in the NHS. Far from it. By the time New Labour left office last May, an estimated 6% of all NHS work was carried out by private firms, thanks to a series of market-led reorganisations from 1997 onwards.
According to market research consultants Key Note, in 2009, the total UK market for private healthcare was worth almost £29bn, having risen in value terms by almost 22% compared with 2005. Acute care and psychiatric care rose in value terms by 24% and 42.4% respectively.
“The overall market has expanded within the last 5 years as a result of the growing shift from public to private provision, with the NHS making increasing use of private sector healthcare to cut waiting lists,” says a recent report which notes that the market continues to “attract attention and investment from overseas firms, as well as private equity operators”.
The Coalition plans to deepen what New Labour started, of course, not only in its plans for the NHS but in areas such as tuition fees and academy schools. Doctors will control the purse-strings and be able to select private providers on the grounds of price and bureaucratic primary care trusts (PCTs) will be abolished.
Health union Unison general secretary Dave Prentis accuses Cameron of "cutting away at the heart of society" and adds: "The NHS is not safe in Tory hands. [Health secretary] Lansley's proposals are unnecessary, untried and will cost the taxpayer dear. They threaten the very founding principles of the NHS."
The question is: where was Prentis from 1997-2010, while the NHS was being carved up by New Labour? Where was the opposition when private firms like Ramsay Health Care and Care UK were signing contracts to provide services to the NHS at a profit to the companies? To ask the question is to answer it. Union bureaucrats sat on their hands the whole time.
Take Ramsay Health Care. From its early days in Australia, the company has become a global brand, operating more than 100 hospitals and day surgeries in several countries, including 22 acute hospitals in England. Last December, the group announced an upgrade in profits thanks in part to a rise in patient admissions in Britain. Results for the five months to November 30 showed the company was on track to report a first-half net profit 26-28% higher than the same period in 2009.
Ramsay runs the Clifton Park clinic in York, which is at the centre of a claim for compensation by 50 local people after hip replacement operations went disastrously wrong, as the York Press reported:.
“Many claim they are suffering frequent dislocations or excruciating pain resulting from metal-on-metal debris getting into their bloodstream. Some can only walk with sticks; other symptoms include audible popping and cup loosening.” All were fitted with products manufactured by US company DePuy Orthopaedics Inc. which were recalled last August by DePuy after being on the market for seven years.
It seems the NHS will have to pick up the bill for any eventual compensation settlement.
Paul Feldman
Communications editor
Monday, January 17, 2011
North Africa's own Intifada
Tunisian youth, workers and professional people have drawn a line against corrupt autocracies that is having powerful repercussions from Lebanon to Libya and beyond. It is the first time since 1985 that a mass people’s movement has overthrown a regime in an Arab country.
They have defied the mantra that the Arab masses are simply passive subjects of dictatorial leaders. The majority in society are beginning to stand up and rebel. The uprising has seen tens of thousands of youth, workers and professionals, take to the streets in a country of only ten million.
The movement has been spontaneous and secular in response to sharp price increases and soaring youth unemployment, themselves a result of the economic crisis in the southern Mediterranean from Spain and Portugal to north Africa.
The revolt was sparked when an unemployed student in a central province set fire to himself when police tried to stop him selling fruit from a street cart. Unrest burst out around the country spurred on by young people using Facebook. In extraordinary scenes one soldier even embraced a demonstrator.
Small wonder that President’s Ben Ali’s first replacement, Prime Minister Mohammed Ghannouchi, did not last long. Tunisians see him as the architect of the economic policies which allowed Ben Ali’s wife to accumulate vast wealth. Details of the ruling family’s corruption were revealed in US diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks at the end of last year, confirming Tunisians’ own suspicions.
A state of emergency continues in the capital Tunis and around the country police loyal to the old regime and military are in armed conflict. The bursts of joy at the overthrow of a decaying, oppressive and corrupt regime are being tempered by the continuing conflict between the military factions and especially brutal reprisals in the rural interior like Kassarine and Thala.
As a writer for CNN notes, “North Africa is seeing its own Intifada”. Behind the surface differences between Tunisia and its neighbours, lies “a more profound and general set of conditions that serve as a common source of populist discontent”. The Tunisian uprising is part of a chain of events from Morocco to Egypt “directed at the institutionalized political oppression that each regime represents and the deeply corrupt ways in which power is manipulated and abused by ruling elites”.
The use of the term Intifada is significant. The Arabic word for “tremor”, the strategy was developed by Palestinian leader and Fatah founder Abu Jihad He organised youth committees in the Palestinian territories in a social and political uprising against Israeli occupation in 1987 – as opposed to individual terror and military action. Forced into exile Abu Jihad was assassinated in Tunis by a hail of bullet fire in front of his family by Israeli Mossad commandos.
The dizzying speed of events in Tunisia is a warning to governments and rulers everywhere in the region and elsewhere. New generations are not prepared to stand by while the fruits of independence from colonial power are squandered by corrupt and dictatorial regimes. Spurring people on is the impact of the global capitalist crisis, which lies behind demands and grievances in every country, including Britain.
Whilst the political parties try to rearrange the deck chairs at the top and as security forces loyal to the old regime kill innocent civilians, ordinary citizens in Tunisia are setting up barricades, arming themselves with sticks and attempting to take control of the streets. Developing people’s assemblies to take economic and political control away from the toothless establishment parties hiding behind the military is now an urgent matter.
Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary
They have defied the mantra that the Arab masses are simply passive subjects of dictatorial leaders. The majority in society are beginning to stand up and rebel. The uprising has seen tens of thousands of youth, workers and professionals, take to the streets in a country of only ten million.
The movement has been spontaneous and secular in response to sharp price increases and soaring youth unemployment, themselves a result of the economic crisis in the southern Mediterranean from Spain and Portugal to north Africa.
The revolt was sparked when an unemployed student in a central province set fire to himself when police tried to stop him selling fruit from a street cart. Unrest burst out around the country spurred on by young people using Facebook. In extraordinary scenes one soldier even embraced a demonstrator.
Small wonder that President’s Ben Ali’s first replacement, Prime Minister Mohammed Ghannouchi, did not last long. Tunisians see him as the architect of the economic policies which allowed Ben Ali’s wife to accumulate vast wealth. Details of the ruling family’s corruption were revealed in US diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks at the end of last year, confirming Tunisians’ own suspicions.
A state of emergency continues in the capital Tunis and around the country police loyal to the old regime and military are in armed conflict. The bursts of joy at the overthrow of a decaying, oppressive and corrupt regime are being tempered by the continuing conflict between the military factions and especially brutal reprisals in the rural interior like Kassarine and Thala.
As a writer for CNN notes, “North Africa is seeing its own Intifada”. Behind the surface differences between Tunisia and its neighbours, lies “a more profound and general set of conditions that serve as a common source of populist discontent”. The Tunisian uprising is part of a chain of events from Morocco to Egypt “directed at the institutionalized political oppression that each regime represents and the deeply corrupt ways in which power is manipulated and abused by ruling elites”.
The use of the term Intifada is significant. The Arabic word for “tremor”, the strategy was developed by Palestinian leader and Fatah founder Abu Jihad He organised youth committees in the Palestinian territories in a social and political uprising against Israeli occupation in 1987 – as opposed to individual terror and military action. Forced into exile Abu Jihad was assassinated in Tunis by a hail of bullet fire in front of his family by Israeli Mossad commandos.
The dizzying speed of events in Tunisia is a warning to governments and rulers everywhere in the region and elsewhere. New generations are not prepared to stand by while the fruits of independence from colonial power are squandered by corrupt and dictatorial regimes. Spurring people on is the impact of the global capitalist crisis, which lies behind demands and grievances in every country, including Britain.
Whilst the political parties try to rearrange the deck chairs at the top and as security forces loyal to the old regime kill innocent civilians, ordinary citizens in Tunisia are setting up barricades, arming themselves with sticks and attempting to take control of the streets. Developing people’s assemblies to take economic and political control away from the toothless establishment parties hiding behind the military is now an urgent matter.
Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary
Friday, January 14, 2011
Manchester's councillors have lost their legitimacy
While Labour was preparing to celebrate retaining its seat in the Oldham bye-election, half an hour down the road in Manchester its councillors were announcing 2,000 redundancies from April. In practice, they are doing the government’s dirty work for it – with the support of the national party led by Ed Miliband.
He has sent union representatives around the country to tell Labour councillors, to their relief, that they should blame the Coalition for the cuts but do nothing that might take them outside the law. In other words, they should make a “balanced budget” (councils are not allowed to run a deficit, unlike the government) and stay in office.
In the end, of course, holding on to political positions for their own self-interest is what Labour is all about since Blair and Brown transformed it into a party that sponsors business interests, the financial sector, private-public partnerships and corporate-driven markets.
Any councillor who had even a smidgen of concern for Manchester city council’s workers and their families would have declared that the cuts, which follow on from the savage reduction in government grant, were impossible to support. The councillors could have turned the famous town hall into a fortress and challenged the government to come and do its worst.
Of course, that was never going to happen, especially as national union officials, who knew what was on the cards, stayed silent until the news broke. Sir Richard Leese, leader of the Labour-controlled authority, while complaining about the “unfairness” of it all, announced that the authority would slash £110 million of its budget for 2011-12 and axe almost a fifth of its workforce. Resistance had not even crossed his mind.
The predictable response from union officials was … predictable. Unison leader Dave Prentis, said: "The shockwaves of 2,000 job losses will spread across the city of Manchester and beyond. It is a tragic loss to workers who will have to break the news to their families that they are losing their jobs. It is also a bitter blow to communities who will lose services they rely on and will hit local businesses and trade."
And that was that. No call to action, nothing, nada.
Unite regional officer Keith Hutson admitted that the cuts would have a “devastating effect on services and the people that use them." He threatened – wait for it – a “consultative ballot” on industrial action. That’s a consultation on whether to hold a ballot for action. By the time that’s sorted, the jobs would have gone.
Which puts incoming Unite general secretary Len McCluskey’s remarks on BBC Radio 4 this week into perspective. McCluskey has been talking loudly about industrial action against the cuts. But when it came to the crunch, McCluskey rejected any intention of bring down the government and insisted: “It's all about getting the government to change its mind" and instead of making cuts, "go for growth". With the global capitalist economy increasingly heading south, he can dream on.
His assertion that the deficit is “not high” is equally rubbish. On a number of measures, Britain’s budget deficit is the most serious of all the major capitalist economies. It reached £162 billion in 2009- 10, which represents 11% of national income (GDP), the highest of the group of 20 leading capitalist economies.
Meanwhile, jobs are disappearing rapidly. The GMB union said a total of 113,765 jobs were now under threat at 145 councils across Britain. Councils implementing Coalition cuts have lost their legitimacy. Manchester workers should take a leaf out of the books of the students and occupy their workplaces, including the town hall. That would be a major step towards creating People’s Assemblies in Manchester and elsewhere to defend every job and service and develop alternatives to the present failed social system.
Paul Feldman
Communications editor
He has sent union representatives around the country to tell Labour councillors, to their relief, that they should blame the Coalition for the cuts but do nothing that might take them outside the law. In other words, they should make a “balanced budget” (councils are not allowed to run a deficit, unlike the government) and stay in office.
In the end, of course, holding on to political positions for their own self-interest is what Labour is all about since Blair and Brown transformed it into a party that sponsors business interests, the financial sector, private-public partnerships and corporate-driven markets.
Any councillor who had even a smidgen of concern for Manchester city council’s workers and their families would have declared that the cuts, which follow on from the savage reduction in government grant, were impossible to support. The councillors could have turned the famous town hall into a fortress and challenged the government to come and do its worst.
Of course, that was never going to happen, especially as national union officials, who knew what was on the cards, stayed silent until the news broke. Sir Richard Leese, leader of the Labour-controlled authority, while complaining about the “unfairness” of it all, announced that the authority would slash £110 million of its budget for 2011-12 and axe almost a fifth of its workforce. Resistance had not even crossed his mind.
The predictable response from union officials was … predictable. Unison leader Dave Prentis, said: "The shockwaves of 2,000 job losses will spread across the city of Manchester and beyond. It is a tragic loss to workers who will have to break the news to their families that they are losing their jobs. It is also a bitter blow to communities who will lose services they rely on and will hit local businesses and trade."
And that was that. No call to action, nothing, nada.
Unite regional officer Keith Hutson admitted that the cuts would have a “devastating effect on services and the people that use them." He threatened – wait for it – a “consultative ballot” on industrial action. That’s a consultation on whether to hold a ballot for action. By the time that’s sorted, the jobs would have gone.
Which puts incoming Unite general secretary Len McCluskey’s remarks on BBC Radio 4 this week into perspective. McCluskey has been talking loudly about industrial action against the cuts. But when it came to the crunch, McCluskey rejected any intention of bring down the government and insisted: “It's all about getting the government to change its mind" and instead of making cuts, "go for growth". With the global capitalist economy increasingly heading south, he can dream on.
His assertion that the deficit is “not high” is equally rubbish. On a number of measures, Britain’s budget deficit is the most serious of all the major capitalist economies. It reached £162 billion in 2009- 10, which represents 11% of national income (GDP), the highest of the group of 20 leading capitalist economies.
Meanwhile, jobs are disappearing rapidly. The GMB union said a total of 113,765 jobs were now under threat at 145 councils across Britain. Councils implementing Coalition cuts have lost their legitimacy. Manchester workers should take a leaf out of the books of the students and occupy their workplaces, including the town hall. That would be a major step towards creating People’s Assemblies in Manchester and elsewhere to defend every job and service and develop alternatives to the present failed social system.
Paul Feldman
Communications editor
Thursday, January 13, 2011
Market driving hunger crisis
The world is facing a hunger crisis unlike anything it has seen in more than 50 years. Some 925 million people don’t have enough to eat and almost 16,000 children die from hunger-related causes each day.
That’s the stark reality facing almost one in seven of the world’s population. With food prices reaching a new high, the head of the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), Jacques Diouf, has called for “urgent structural change” to solve global hunger. The rapid increase in hunger and malnourishment since the food crisis of 2008 reveals the inadequacy of the present global food system, he said.
The World Bank estimates that the spike in global food prices in 2008, followed by the global economic recession in 2009 and 2010 has pushed between 100-150 million people into poverty.
But all Diouf’s talk of safety nets and social protection programmes, investment and support for small-scale farming is pie in the sky at a time when the market is driving land and food production in entirely the opposite direction.
In Africa, the main development activity at present is not land redistribution, or even food aid, but an enthusiastic entry into the world of global speculation in land and food production. The dramatic weather changes caused by global warming, which governments refuse to address, is also pushing up food prices.
The role of the market in buying and selling commodity futures is a further crucial factor in driving up prices. Last year, US wheat futures prices rose 47 per cent, corn rose more than 50 per cent and soybeans jumped 34 per cent.
Catherine Flax, investment bank JP Morgan's CEO for commodities, admitted that the financial crisis and fears of inflation have made investors suspicious of banks and financial services: "I do think investors are increasingly looking at physical assets, whether agricultural assets or infrastructure type assets, in part because of the expectations of inflation but also I don't think investors are entirely over the insecurity of the financial crisis."
Rising demand in Asia is a major issue. China’s food imports are soaring, as its own agricultural development is neglected, in favour of land privatisation and industrialisation.
There is no will on the part of governments to interfere in this unbridled operation of the market. In fact, there is an increasing tendency to end subsidies and to let inflation rip.
This policy is meeting resistance, especially in North Africa. The Algerian government rapidly cut import duties when food riots threatened its own survival. The price of basic goods rose by 30 per cent in less than a month in Algeria and a popular uprising led to the arrest of more than 1,000 people, many of them minors.
In neighbouring Tunisia dozens of people have been killed in clashes between protesters and security forces in clashes centred on unemployment and rising food prices. Bureaucrats in China also fear unrest, with inflation currently running at 5 per cent per year according to official figures, but in reality as much as double that.
Food prices in Australia are likely to soar in the coming months as a result of the Queensland floods, with 50 per cent of crops having been affected and 20 per cent wiped out entirely.
In reality it is THE MARKET in food that is in crisis, not the SUPPLY of food. There is food enough in the world – the rich never go hungry. The operation of the market is preventing people from either growing or purchasing what they need.
The structural change required is more fundamental than that proposed by the FAO. We must rapidly move away from the spoliation of agricultural land by market-driven farming systems. We need a commonwealth in land and a system of food production based on co-operation and the assumption that adequate food is a human right for all.
Penny Cole
Environment editor
That’s the stark reality facing almost one in seven of the world’s population. With food prices reaching a new high, the head of the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), Jacques Diouf, has called for “urgent structural change” to solve global hunger. The rapid increase in hunger and malnourishment since the food crisis of 2008 reveals the inadequacy of the present global food system, he said.
The World Bank estimates that the spike in global food prices in 2008, followed by the global economic recession in 2009 and 2010 has pushed between 100-150 million people into poverty.
But all Diouf’s talk of safety nets and social protection programmes, investment and support for small-scale farming is pie in the sky at a time when the market is driving land and food production in entirely the opposite direction.
In Africa, the main development activity at present is not land redistribution, or even food aid, but an enthusiastic entry into the world of global speculation in land and food production. The dramatic weather changes caused by global warming, which governments refuse to address, is also pushing up food prices.
The role of the market in buying and selling commodity futures is a further crucial factor in driving up prices. Last year, US wheat futures prices rose 47 per cent, corn rose more than 50 per cent and soybeans jumped 34 per cent.
Catherine Flax, investment bank JP Morgan's CEO for commodities, admitted that the financial crisis and fears of inflation have made investors suspicious of banks and financial services: "I do think investors are increasingly looking at physical assets, whether agricultural assets or infrastructure type assets, in part because of the expectations of inflation but also I don't think investors are entirely over the insecurity of the financial crisis."
Rising demand in Asia is a major issue. China’s food imports are soaring, as its own agricultural development is neglected, in favour of land privatisation and industrialisation.
There is no will on the part of governments to interfere in this unbridled operation of the market. In fact, there is an increasing tendency to end subsidies and to let inflation rip.
This policy is meeting resistance, especially in North Africa. The Algerian government rapidly cut import duties when food riots threatened its own survival. The price of basic goods rose by 30 per cent in less than a month in Algeria and a popular uprising led to the arrest of more than 1,000 people, many of them minors.
In neighbouring Tunisia dozens of people have been killed in clashes between protesters and security forces in clashes centred on unemployment and rising food prices. Bureaucrats in China also fear unrest, with inflation currently running at 5 per cent per year according to official figures, but in reality as much as double that.
Food prices in Australia are likely to soar in the coming months as a result of the Queensland floods, with 50 per cent of crops having been affected and 20 per cent wiped out entirely.
In reality it is THE MARKET in food that is in crisis, not the SUPPLY of food. There is food enough in the world – the rich never go hungry. The operation of the market is preventing people from either growing or purchasing what they need.
The structural change required is more fundamental than that proposed by the FAO. We must rapidly move away from the spoliation of agricultural land by market-driven farming systems. We need a commonwealth in land and a system of food production based on co-operation and the assumption that adequate food is a human right for all.
Penny Cole
Environment editor
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Bank bonuses the symptom not the cause
The sight and sound of Barclays CEO Bob Diamond running rings around a committee of Westminster MPs should bring an end to the ideas that bankers’ bonuses can be controlled, that the financial sector can be regulated, or that the worst excesses of capitalism can be reined in.
These are the ideas that have sustained the economic and political debate since the crisis blew up in 2007. Those tied to the for-profit economic model, which includes most parliamentarians, took their cue from rafts of self-styled “economists”, analysts, commentators. They had in various ways blamed the removal of regulation during the Thatcher/Reagan years for the gaseous, balloons of dodgy credit that enveloped the world during the globalisation decades.
Of course, the chorus of disapproval only started when the burden of mortgage and credit card debt became unsustainable and the payment defaults detonated the balloons’ volatile contents. Until then, the world was in thrall to New Labour’s friends in the City, and the Blair/Brown triumphalism that trumpeted “the end of boom and bust”.
Diamond is pretty much the apotheosis of spokespersons for the capitalist class and he wasn’t pulling any punches when he said that the time for “remorse and apology” was over. In asserting that banks should be allowed to fail, he issued a sharp slap in the face for the whole process of bailing them in the first place.
This led governments and central banks around the world to massively expand their debt and pass the responsibility for repaying it on to their unwilling and increasingly unruly populations, their children and their children’s children, if the system is allowed to continue.
And if banks should be allowed to fail, so, it seems, should the countries who’ve tried to bail them out, or have been caught up the global debt tsunami. Portugal is in line to follow Greece and Ireland.
Philip Augar, author of The Greed Merchants: How the Investment Banks Played the Free Market Game puts it as clearly as you could want
The “business model” Augar is talking about is profitability. So now is the time to ask the question of questions: why do we need to organise the whole of society around the for-profit business model? The spectacular failures of the last three years are signs of a system at the end of its days.
Rather than trying to prop it up, at an unbearable cost to billions of ordinary people, we must put it behind us, setting our minds to the future of a society that produces for the needs of everyone, not the bonus-yielding super-profits for a few. That is the agenda for a global network of People’s Assemblies.
Gerry Gold
Economics editor
These are the ideas that have sustained the economic and political debate since the crisis blew up in 2007. Those tied to the for-profit economic model, which includes most parliamentarians, took their cue from rafts of self-styled “economists”, analysts, commentators. They had in various ways blamed the removal of regulation during the Thatcher/Reagan years for the gaseous, balloons of dodgy credit that enveloped the world during the globalisation decades.
Of course, the chorus of disapproval only started when the burden of mortgage and credit card debt became unsustainable and the payment defaults detonated the balloons’ volatile contents. Until then, the world was in thrall to New Labour’s friends in the City, and the Blair/Brown triumphalism that trumpeted “the end of boom and bust”.
Diamond is pretty much the apotheosis of spokespersons for the capitalist class and he wasn’t pulling any punches when he said that the time for “remorse and apology” was over. In asserting that banks should be allowed to fail, he issued a sharp slap in the face for the whole process of bailing them in the first place.
This led governments and central banks around the world to massively expand their debt and pass the responsibility for repaying it on to their unwilling and increasingly unruly populations, their children and their children’s children, if the system is allowed to continue.
And if banks should be allowed to fail, so, it seems, should the countries who’ve tried to bail them out, or have been caught up the global debt tsunami. Portugal is in line to follow Greece and Ireland.
Philip Augar, author of The Greed Merchants: How the Investment Banks Played the Free Market Game puts it as clearly as you could want
High bonus payments are a symptom of a problem, not its cause. The banking settlement was deficient because it did little to address the asymmetries in the universal banking business model. This model causes investment banks to jeopardise global financial stability in bad times whilst allowing bankers to cream off film star compensation in the good times. The global reforms have done a bit to improve financial stability but almost nothing to constrain the profitability that produces the bonuses. That profitability arises from a business model that gives banks in general and investment banks in particular the best possible view of global economies and markets. They are able to use this information advantage to load the dice and generate super-profits. This is where the bonuses come from and this is why the banking lobby worked so hard and so successfully to defend the model.
The “business model” Augar is talking about is profitability. So now is the time to ask the question of questions: why do we need to organise the whole of society around the for-profit business model? The spectacular failures of the last three years are signs of a system at the end of its days.
Rather than trying to prop it up, at an unbearable cost to billions of ordinary people, we must put it behind us, setting our minds to the future of a society that produces for the needs of everyone, not the bonus-yielding super-profits for a few. That is the agenda for a global network of People’s Assemblies.
Gerry Gold
Economics editor
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
The dirty hand of the state exposed
But for the exposure of police agent Mark Kennedy, there is every likelihood that six climate activists would shortly be staring at long prison sentences, framed on conspiracy charges by the state. You can be sure that no one at Scotland Yard would have given a damn.
Kennedy, known as Stone to activists, cost the state an estimated £2.25 million over nine years, most of which was spent infiltrating the climate change movement and passing information back to his masters within the sinister Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO).
No one will know how many people were victims of Kennedy’s duplicity but what is clear is that he actively encouraged activists to plan a shut-down of the Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station in Nottingham in 2009. More than 100 people were arrested before the action in a pre-emptive raid and have appeared in court recently charged with various offences.
That Kennedy acted as an agent provocateur during this whole episode is proved by the fact that the trial of the six collapsed charged with conspiracy collapsed yesterday when he indicated that he would give evidence for the defence.
Kennedy worked for the National Public Order Intelligence unit which was set up in late 1990s to spy on “domestic activists”. It now one of three groups run by the National Co-Ordinator Domestic Extremism, which has an £8 million budget. This allowed Kennedy to visit more than 20 countries on a false passport and to fund transport and other resources used by climate activists.
At the heart of the operation is ACPO, which has the status of a private company with a board of directors. There are presently 349 members of ACPO from police forces around the UK. In what are deemed times of “national need”, ACPO co-ordinates a countrywide, strategic response. During the 1984-5 miners’ strike, it was a law unto itself, setting up road blocks and organising mass arrests of strikers.
It was the alertness of those who had worked with Kennedy in Nottingham that revealed his true identity and the defence barristers’ demand for information that led to the dropping of the case – after 20 months. It’s a great thing that he has been exposed.
The state is clearly prepared to pay over the odds, and even finance activities in order to frame and arrest activists. This is also the case in anti-terror operations where people have been entrapped and sent to jail as a result of the work of agents provocateurs.
The state’s target are the leaders and those organising things so it is vital to get information from the inside. Technology cannot replace agents. But this causes moral and psychological problems – as shown by Kennedy’s breaking down after being confronted by his ex-comrades.
Does Kennedy’s “going native” indicate the existence of “conscience” in the police? No it doesn’t. The moral high ground may indeed belong to eco-campaigners, but for every one exposed, dozens if not hundreds are likely to in place as informers and provocateurs.
No organisation or group challenging corporate power and the state’s agencies can consider itself immune. The present state exists to defend the status quo and will act independently of elected politicians where necessary. It is definitely not for turning.
“Domestic terrorism” units undoubtedly operate today amongst students, eco-campaigners, anti-cuts activists, left-wing organisations and other groups small and large. What are the best means of undermining them and their aims? By organising to involve the maximum number of people in a strategy to reconstruct the state along democratic lines.
The police and their secret agencies should be exposed, disbanded and replaced with bodies accountable and under the control of communities and elected bodies like People’s Assemblies. A charter of democratic rights would guarantee the freedom to organise without the fear of state infiltration and provocation.
Corinna Lotz
Paul Feldman
Kennedy, known as Stone to activists, cost the state an estimated £2.25 million over nine years, most of which was spent infiltrating the climate change movement and passing information back to his masters within the sinister Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO).
No one will know how many people were victims of Kennedy’s duplicity but what is clear is that he actively encouraged activists to plan a shut-down of the Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station in Nottingham in 2009. More than 100 people were arrested before the action in a pre-emptive raid and have appeared in court recently charged with various offences.
That Kennedy acted as an agent provocateur during this whole episode is proved by the fact that the trial of the six collapsed charged with conspiracy collapsed yesterday when he indicated that he would give evidence for the defence.
Kennedy worked for the National Public Order Intelligence unit which was set up in late 1990s to spy on “domestic activists”. It now one of three groups run by the National Co-Ordinator Domestic Extremism, which has an £8 million budget. This allowed Kennedy to visit more than 20 countries on a false passport and to fund transport and other resources used by climate activists.
At the heart of the operation is ACPO, which has the status of a private company with a board of directors. There are presently 349 members of ACPO from police forces around the UK. In what are deemed times of “national need”, ACPO co-ordinates a countrywide, strategic response. During the 1984-5 miners’ strike, it was a law unto itself, setting up road blocks and organising mass arrests of strikers.
It was the alertness of those who had worked with Kennedy in Nottingham that revealed his true identity and the defence barristers’ demand for information that led to the dropping of the case – after 20 months. It’s a great thing that he has been exposed.
The state is clearly prepared to pay over the odds, and even finance activities in order to frame and arrest activists. This is also the case in anti-terror operations where people have been entrapped and sent to jail as a result of the work of agents provocateurs.
The state’s target are the leaders and those organising things so it is vital to get information from the inside. Technology cannot replace agents. But this causes moral and psychological problems – as shown by Kennedy’s breaking down after being confronted by his ex-comrades.
Does Kennedy’s “going native” indicate the existence of “conscience” in the police? No it doesn’t. The moral high ground may indeed belong to eco-campaigners, but for every one exposed, dozens if not hundreds are likely to in place as informers and provocateurs.
No organisation or group challenging corporate power and the state’s agencies can consider itself immune. The present state exists to defend the status quo and will act independently of elected politicians where necessary. It is definitely not for turning.
“Domestic terrorism” units undoubtedly operate today amongst students, eco-campaigners, anti-cuts activists, left-wing organisations and other groups small and large. What are the best means of undermining them and their aims? By organising to involve the maximum number of people in a strategy to reconstruct the state along democratic lines.
The police and their secret agencies should be exposed, disbanded and replaced with bodies accountable and under the control of communities and elected bodies like People’s Assemblies. A charter of democratic rights would guarantee the freedom to organise without the fear of state infiltration and provocation.
Corinna Lotz
Paul Feldman
Monday, January 10, 2011
Tucson shooting and America's crisis
The attempted assassination of US Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, Arizona, has inescapable links to extreme right-wing vitriol from radio talk shows and the mouthing of populist politicians like Sarah Palin. It marks a new stage in America’s unfolding political crisis.
Only last March, Palin – who has eyes on the Republican nomination for the presidency – posted on Facebook: “The crossfire is intense, so penetrate through enemy territory by bombing through the press, and use your strong weapons – your Big Guns – to drive to the hole. Shoot with accuracy; aim high and remember it takes blood, sweat and tears to win.”
Then, in the run-up to last November’s mid-term elections, she published a map of political targets with crosshairs which looked very much like gun sights over Giffords' district, along with the districts of 19 other Democrats who voted for president Obama’s health-care bill. After posting the map on her Facebook page, Palin told her Twitter followers to go there with the message "Don't Retreat – Instead RELOAD!"
Jared Lee Loughner, 22, who is to be charged with six counts of murder – including a nine-year-old child, a federal judge and the attempted killing of Giffords – was known to share some of the fantasy views encouraged by Palin and the Tea Party movement. These include the notion that Obama is an illegitimate president, that the US currency is a fraud and that federal government in general is unconstitutional. Asked if she had any enemies, Giffords’ father said: "Yeah, the whole Tea Party."
Giffords, a former Republican turned Democrat, had been holding a public meeting in a shopping precinct when the gunman opened fire. When Giffords held a similar meeting last year, someone dropped a gun. Loughner is described by the authorities as mentally unstable. Yet he was able to purchase a semi-automatic pistol.
It’s got that bad that even the sheriff conducting the investigation, Clarence Dupnik, did not hold back: "When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government – the anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country, is getting to be outrageous. And unfortunately, Arizona, I think, has become the capital. We have become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry."
Add in the widespread belief that Obama’s modest health care changes are the first step to socialism together with the historic catastrophe that is the American economy, and you can see where paranoia among the dispossessed and disenfranchised is coming from. While Wall Street is booming, deliberately fuelled by the Federal Reserve’s programme of printing money, the rest of the country is going to the dogs.
Even the Daily Telegraph’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is disturbed by the latest data. “The numbers of people on food stamps have reached 43.2m, an all time-high of 14% of the population …. The US Conference of Mayors said visits to soup kitchens are up 24% this year. There are 643,000 people needing shelter each night."
The long-term unemployed (more than six months) have reached 42% of the total, twice the peak of the early 1990s The “labour participation rate” for working-age men over 20 has dropped to 73.6%, which he says is the lowest figure since 1948. “My guess is that this figure exceeds the average for the Great Depression … It is no surprise that America’s armed dissident movement has resurfaced.”
As Evans-Pritchard acknowledges, there is no “easy solution” to “creeping depression” in America and elsewhere which has left “very large numbers of people in the West trapped on the wrong side of globalisation, and nobody doing much about it.” Though, of course, he doesn’t put in so bluntly, the capitalist system is visibly in meltdown – socially, economically and politically. The events in Tuccon are a sign of the times.
Paul Feldman
Communications editor
Only last March, Palin – who has eyes on the Republican nomination for the presidency – posted on Facebook: “The crossfire is intense, so penetrate through enemy territory by bombing through the press, and use your strong weapons – your Big Guns – to drive to the hole. Shoot with accuracy; aim high and remember it takes blood, sweat and tears to win.”
Then, in the run-up to last November’s mid-term elections, she published a map of political targets with crosshairs which looked very much like gun sights over Giffords' district, along with the districts of 19 other Democrats who voted for president Obama’s health-care bill. After posting the map on her Facebook page, Palin told her Twitter followers to go there with the message "Don't Retreat – Instead RELOAD!"
Jared Lee Loughner, 22, who is to be charged with six counts of murder – including a nine-year-old child, a federal judge and the attempted killing of Giffords – was known to share some of the fantasy views encouraged by Palin and the Tea Party movement. These include the notion that Obama is an illegitimate president, that the US currency is a fraud and that federal government in general is unconstitutional. Asked if she had any enemies, Giffords’ father said: "Yeah, the whole Tea Party."
Giffords, a former Republican turned Democrat, had been holding a public meeting in a shopping precinct when the gunman opened fire. When Giffords held a similar meeting last year, someone dropped a gun. Loughner is described by the authorities as mentally unstable. Yet he was able to purchase a semi-automatic pistol.
It’s got that bad that even the sheriff conducting the investigation, Clarence Dupnik, did not hold back: "When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government – the anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country, is getting to be outrageous. And unfortunately, Arizona, I think, has become the capital. We have become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry."
Add in the widespread belief that Obama’s modest health care changes are the first step to socialism together with the historic catastrophe that is the American economy, and you can see where paranoia among the dispossessed and disenfranchised is coming from. While Wall Street is booming, deliberately fuelled by the Federal Reserve’s programme of printing money, the rest of the country is going to the dogs.
Even the Daily Telegraph’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is disturbed by the latest data. “The numbers of people on food stamps have reached 43.2m, an all time-high of 14% of the population …. The US Conference of Mayors said visits to soup kitchens are up 24% this year. There are 643,000 people needing shelter each night."
The long-term unemployed (more than six months) have reached 42% of the total, twice the peak of the early 1990s The “labour participation rate” for working-age men over 20 has dropped to 73.6%, which he says is the lowest figure since 1948. “My guess is that this figure exceeds the average for the Great Depression … It is no surprise that America’s armed dissident movement has resurfaced.”
As Evans-Pritchard acknowledges, there is no “easy solution” to “creeping depression” in America and elsewhere which has left “very large numbers of people in the West trapped on the wrong side of globalisation, and nobody doing much about it.” Though, of course, he doesn’t put in so bluntly, the capitalist system is visibly in meltdown – socially, economically and politically. The events in Tuccon are a sign of the times.
Paul Feldman
Communications editor
Friday, January 07, 2011
Pakistan's poor caught in the middle
The political and moral crisis wracking Pakistan in the wake of the assassination of Punjab governor Salman Taseer concentrates all the ills of our 21st century world - but also demonstrates the need for a revolutionary alternative.
Divisions have reached civil war proportions over Taseer’s violent death in Islamabad’s fashionable Kohsar Market. Pakistan Peoples’ Party (PPP) activists and opponents of religious fanaticism plus campaigners for democratic and economic rights are mourning Taseer as a courageous and cultured hero. He was close to the persecuted Bhutto family and suffered imprisonment when Pakistan was under martial law.
On the other side, Mumtaz Qadri, Taseer’s assassin, has a Facebook page dedicated to him and supporters are rallying for his release, showering him with rose petals as he gets taken to and from court. Qadri shot the man he was supposed to protect over 27 times because Taseer wanted to amend Pakistan’s notorious blasphemy laws.
But the religious powder keg could blind us to the deeper contradictions that are dividing the country. Nuclear-armed Pakistan is considered a frontline ally of America, sharing as it does, a long border with eastern Afghanistan, the stronghold of Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters.
But the billions in military and civilian aid poured in by the Obama administration have failed to achieve either economic improvement or military success. The frustrations of millions of poverty-stricken people in the country are summed by comments given to a reporter by Arif Fasiullah, 35, from the central city of Multan: "There is no electricity, no gas, no jobs, and they are fighting one another. They do not pass any legislation. They just do dirty politics."
Pakistan, with a population of more than 180 million, faces chronic power failures that can last up to 16 hours per day in some areas during the scorching summer, and up to a third of its people lack access to clean drinking water. Average income per capita is less than $3,000 a year, and most adults have less than five years of schooling.
The International Monetary Fund, which has provided Pakistan with billions of dollars in loans to keep its economy afloat, has demanded the country implement significant changes, including deep cuts to its deficit and a revised general sales tax. These have proved highly unpopular.
Even as you read this, US war planes are continuing drone attacks on north-west Pakistan, which have killed four people in the last 24 hours, with a hundred raids carried out in 2010. Despite all the dollars and US efforts to keep Pakistan onside in the so-called war against terror, the relationship between the US spy agency, the CIA and Pakistan’s equally sinister Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), the operation against south and north Waziristan has reached an all-time low.
It is the economic crisis of global capital which sparked the IMF’s demand that the government raise taxes. That led to an increase in petrol prices (since withdrawn) plus the sacking of a minister that caused the collapse of the parliamentary coalition just before the crisis over Taseer’s murder.
No wonder that reactionary religious leaders seek to cash in on cruel suffering of the majority. Those seen as favouring “western democracy” and supporting “the war against terror” can be rightly be denounced as maintaining the rule of a rich and corrupt elite while others suffer.
Neither the secular bourgeois “westernisers”, nor the military nor the Muslim establishment can take Pakistan an inch forward or resolve the extreme poverty that affects the majority. The development of a secular leadership campaigning for People’s Assemblies to challenge for political power is the issue of the day.
Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary
Divisions have reached civil war proportions over Taseer’s violent death in Islamabad’s fashionable Kohsar Market. Pakistan Peoples’ Party (PPP) activists and opponents of religious fanaticism plus campaigners for democratic and economic rights are mourning Taseer as a courageous and cultured hero. He was close to the persecuted Bhutto family and suffered imprisonment when Pakistan was under martial law.
On the other side, Mumtaz Qadri, Taseer’s assassin, has a Facebook page dedicated to him and supporters are rallying for his release, showering him with rose petals as he gets taken to and from court. Qadri shot the man he was supposed to protect over 27 times because Taseer wanted to amend Pakistan’s notorious blasphemy laws.
But the religious powder keg could blind us to the deeper contradictions that are dividing the country. Nuclear-armed Pakistan is considered a frontline ally of America, sharing as it does, a long border with eastern Afghanistan, the stronghold of Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters.
But the billions in military and civilian aid poured in by the Obama administration have failed to achieve either economic improvement or military success. The frustrations of millions of poverty-stricken people in the country are summed by comments given to a reporter by Arif Fasiullah, 35, from the central city of Multan: "There is no electricity, no gas, no jobs, and they are fighting one another. They do not pass any legislation. They just do dirty politics."
Pakistan, with a population of more than 180 million, faces chronic power failures that can last up to 16 hours per day in some areas during the scorching summer, and up to a third of its people lack access to clean drinking water. Average income per capita is less than $3,000 a year, and most adults have less than five years of schooling.
The International Monetary Fund, which has provided Pakistan with billions of dollars in loans to keep its economy afloat, has demanded the country implement significant changes, including deep cuts to its deficit and a revised general sales tax. These have proved highly unpopular.
Even as you read this, US war planes are continuing drone attacks on north-west Pakistan, which have killed four people in the last 24 hours, with a hundred raids carried out in 2010. Despite all the dollars and US efforts to keep Pakistan onside in the so-called war against terror, the relationship between the US spy agency, the CIA and Pakistan’s equally sinister Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), the operation against south and north Waziristan has reached an all-time low.
It is the economic crisis of global capital which sparked the IMF’s demand that the government raise taxes. That led to an increase in petrol prices (since withdrawn) plus the sacking of a minister that caused the collapse of the parliamentary coalition just before the crisis over Taseer’s murder.
No wonder that reactionary religious leaders seek to cash in on cruel suffering of the majority. Those seen as favouring “western democracy” and supporting “the war against terror” can be rightly be denounced as maintaining the rule of a rich and corrupt elite while others suffer.
Neither the secular bourgeois “westernisers”, nor the military nor the Muslim establishment can take Pakistan an inch forward or resolve the extreme poverty that affects the majority. The development of a secular leadership campaigning for People’s Assemblies to challenge for political power is the issue of the day.
Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary
Thursday, January 06, 2011
“A system-wide” problem indeed
In the end, of course, it was a question of saving time and, above all, money. Even the official report into the BP gulf oil disaster has been compelled to come to this conclusion.
On April 20, 2010, the disaster killed 11 workers, seriously injured many others, and spewed over four million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico for nearly three months, creating the largest oil spill ever in American waters.
President Obama set up a commission to investigate the causes. The first part of its report published today acknowledges: “Whether purposeful or not, many of the decisions that BP, Halliburton, and Transocean made that increased the risk of the Macondo blowout clearly saved those companies significant time (and money).”
Although this conclusion is somewhat buried amidst lots of talk about “management failure” in terms of bad communications and so on – it is inescapably the overriding cause of the disaster.
The panel found that mistakes and "failures to appreciate risk" compromised safeguards "until the blow-out was inevitable and, at the very end, uncontrollable". BP's "fundamental mistake", the panel wrote, was failing to exercise proper caution over the job of sealing the well with cement.
"Based on evidence currently available, there is nothing to suggest that BP's engineering team conducted a formal, disciplined analysis of the combined impact of these risk factors on the prospects for a successful cement job," the report reads.
The report lists a host of engineering mistakes and management failures. These include flawed procedures for securing the well and an ineffective response to the blowout once it began.
What the report also reveals is a cosy relationship between government regulators and the oil industry. The agency responsible was understaffed and didn't have the inspectors and technical analysts “who were up to the task fully."
Commission co-chair William K. Reilly said the inquiry had asked whether it was a case of a single company, BP, that “blundered with fatal consequences”, or a more “pervasive problem of a complacent industry”, adding: “I reluctantly conclude we have a system-wide problem.”
Bob Graham, former Florida governor and a co-chairman of the commission, said the findings showed the blow-out was in fact avoidable. "This disaster likely would not have happened had the companies involved been guided by an unrelenting commitment to safety first," he said.
But even he must know that the oil corporations – like any other capitalist business – are guided first and foremost by a commitment to shareholders, to the bottom line, to returns on capital invested. To profit.
Paul Feldman
Communications editor
On April 20, 2010, the disaster killed 11 workers, seriously injured many others, and spewed over four million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico for nearly three months, creating the largest oil spill ever in American waters.
President Obama set up a commission to investigate the causes. The first part of its report published today acknowledges: “Whether purposeful or not, many of the decisions that BP, Halliburton, and Transocean made that increased the risk of the Macondo blowout clearly saved those companies significant time (and money).”
Although this conclusion is somewhat buried amidst lots of talk about “management failure” in terms of bad communications and so on – it is inescapably the overriding cause of the disaster.
The panel found that mistakes and "failures to appreciate risk" compromised safeguards "until the blow-out was inevitable and, at the very end, uncontrollable". BP's "fundamental mistake", the panel wrote, was failing to exercise proper caution over the job of sealing the well with cement.
"Based on evidence currently available, there is nothing to suggest that BP's engineering team conducted a formal, disciplined analysis of the combined impact of these risk factors on the prospects for a successful cement job," the report reads.
The report lists a host of engineering mistakes and management failures. These include flawed procedures for securing the well and an ineffective response to the blowout once it began.
What the report also reveals is a cosy relationship between government regulators and the oil industry. The agency responsible was understaffed and didn't have the inspectors and technical analysts “who were up to the task fully."
Commission co-chair William K. Reilly said the inquiry had asked whether it was a case of a single company, BP, that “blundered with fatal consequences”, or a more “pervasive problem of a complacent industry”, adding: “I reluctantly conclude we have a system-wide problem.”
Bob Graham, former Florida governor and a co-chairman of the commission, said the findings showed the blow-out was in fact avoidable. "This disaster likely would not have happened had the companies involved been guided by an unrelenting commitment to safety first," he said.
But even he must know that the oil corporations – like any other capitalist business – are guided first and foremost by a commitment to shareholders, to the bottom line, to returns on capital invested. To profit.
Paul Feldman
Communications editor
Wednesday, January 05, 2011
Attack on living standards intensifies
Share and commodity prices are soaring as speculators endorse the global assault on living standards by corporations and governments.
Raising the VAT rate in Britain to 20% - its highest ever - comes as prices are rising out of control, further undermining the value of wages, salaries, pensions and benefits. The lower your income, the more badly affected you will be.
If the private sector employs any of the hundreds of thousands of workers now on their way out of public sector jobs it’ll be at much lower wages, with poorer working conditions and without pensions.
They’ll be in good company. Workers throughout the world are being forced to work harder for less money, whilst unemployment has soared, according to Wage Policies in Times of Crisis, a new report from the International Labour Organisation.
Since the crisis erupted in 2007 and 2009, the world’s 1.4 billion salaried workers have suffered a decline in wage growth - unlike the stratospheric bonuses enjoyed by traders on the global financial markets.
Across the world, real wage growth slowed from 2.2% in 2007 to 0.8% in 2008 and 0.7% in 2009. But real wages – taking inflation into account – actually fell in 12 of 28 industrialised countries in 2008 including Australia (-0.9%), Germany (-0.4%), Italy (-0.7%), Japan (1.9%), Mexico (-2.6%), S. Korea (-1.5%) and the US (-1.0%).
In 2009, real wages fell further in Germany (-0.4%), Mexico (-5.0%), Japan (-1.9%), and S. Korea (-3.3%), whilst workers in France (-0.8%), the U.K (-0.5%), and Russia (-3.5%), also saw wages fall. Wage cuts hit workers in Hungary, Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia, Jamaica, Botswana, Bahrain, the West Bank and Gaza. Among the worst affected were those in the Ukraine, where wages fell by 8%.
In the decades leading up to the crash, though wages increased, workers had to work far harder for their money, and received a declining share of the value they added. During the debt-fuelled growth of powerful global corporations from 1980, the share of value added by factory workers that came back to them in wages fell in most countries.
Wage growth lagged far behind productivity increases in most countries of the world, but particularly the industrialised countries. In the US, for example, between 2000 and 2009, labour productivity grew by 13%, whereas real average wages grew by only 2.2%. In Korea, whilst real wage growth was much stronger – at 18.3% between 2000 and 2009 – it was still way below the growth in labour productivity of 27.4%.
With the global economy in recession, the attacks on wages are certain to accelerate as corporations and governments pursue the cause of profit. Computer manufacturer Dell, for example, is moving operations inland in China in search of even cheaper labour.
Price rises are eroding wages even faster. In Britain, food costs have risen 5.5% over the past 12 months, outpacing the overall inflation rate of 3.3%. Wheat prices have just reached record levels, which is forecast to increase the price of a loaf of bread.
Unemployment is soaring, with the jobless total over reaching 210 million worldwide, adding to the pressure on wages. The GMB union today forecast that 200,000 jobs would be culled between now and April as a result of cuts in local authority spending.
With many US states including California, the eighth largest economy in the world, joining much of Europe on the edge of a new financial meltdown, the prospects for a “return to growth” in the capitalist system look remote. What is certain, however, is that the exploitation of working people in every country will increase day by day.
Gerry Gold
Economics editor
Raising the VAT rate in Britain to 20% - its highest ever - comes as prices are rising out of control, further undermining the value of wages, salaries, pensions and benefits. The lower your income, the more badly affected you will be.
If the private sector employs any of the hundreds of thousands of workers now on their way out of public sector jobs it’ll be at much lower wages, with poorer working conditions and without pensions.
They’ll be in good company. Workers throughout the world are being forced to work harder for less money, whilst unemployment has soared, according to Wage Policies in Times of Crisis, a new report from the International Labour Organisation.
Since the crisis erupted in 2007 and 2009, the world’s 1.4 billion salaried workers have suffered a decline in wage growth - unlike the stratospheric bonuses enjoyed by traders on the global financial markets.
Across the world, real wage growth slowed from 2.2% in 2007 to 0.8% in 2008 and 0.7% in 2009. But real wages – taking inflation into account – actually fell in 12 of 28 industrialised countries in 2008 including Australia (-0.9%), Germany (-0.4%), Italy (-0.7%), Japan (1.9%), Mexico (-2.6%), S. Korea (-1.5%) and the US (-1.0%).
In 2009, real wages fell further in Germany (-0.4%), Mexico (-5.0%), Japan (-1.9%), and S. Korea (-3.3%), whilst workers in France (-0.8%), the U.K (-0.5%), and Russia (-3.5%), also saw wages fall. Wage cuts hit workers in Hungary, Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia, Jamaica, Botswana, Bahrain, the West Bank and Gaza. Among the worst affected were those in the Ukraine, where wages fell by 8%.
In the decades leading up to the crash, though wages increased, workers had to work far harder for their money, and received a declining share of the value they added. During the debt-fuelled growth of powerful global corporations from 1980, the share of value added by factory workers that came back to them in wages fell in most countries.
Wage growth lagged far behind productivity increases in most countries of the world, but particularly the industrialised countries. In the US, for example, between 2000 and 2009, labour productivity grew by 13%, whereas real average wages grew by only 2.2%. In Korea, whilst real wage growth was much stronger – at 18.3% between 2000 and 2009 – it was still way below the growth in labour productivity of 27.4%.
With the global economy in recession, the attacks on wages are certain to accelerate as corporations and governments pursue the cause of profit. Computer manufacturer Dell, for example, is moving operations inland in China in search of even cheaper labour.
Price rises are eroding wages even faster. In Britain, food costs have risen 5.5% over the past 12 months, outpacing the overall inflation rate of 3.3%. Wheat prices have just reached record levels, which is forecast to increase the price of a loaf of bread.
Unemployment is soaring, with the jobless total over reaching 210 million worldwide, adding to the pressure on wages. The GMB union today forecast that 200,000 jobs would be culled between now and April as a result of cuts in local authority spending.
With many US states including California, the eighth largest economy in the world, joining much of Europe on the edge of a new financial meltdown, the prospects for a “return to growth” in the capitalist system look remote. What is certain, however, is that the exploitation of working people in every country will increase day by day.
Gerry Gold
Economics editor
Tuesday, January 04, 2011
Your vote counts for very little
News today that Britain’s voting system is said to be “broken” comes as no surprise. What is left unsaid in a report by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), however, is that the political system itself is in a state of terminal decline.
The IPPR report Worst of Both Worlds explains in convincing detail why the current first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting system is increasingly undemocratic and why things can only get worse.
it found that just 1.8 per cent of the electorate - less than 450,000 voters - decided the outcome of the May election in 108 marginal constituencies. “The overwhelming majority of us live in safe seats where we are increasingly neglected by the political parties both during and between elections –and where we have little chance of influencing the result of general elections,” the report notes.
As we know, the election produced a hung parliament and Britain’s first peacetime coalition government since the 1930s. Drawing on academic research, and conducting its own analysis of voting election data, the IPPR report suggests that the 2010 election result was not a one-off aberration.
“Instead, we believe it reflects long-term changes in voting patterns across the UK – declining support for the two main parties and divergent support for them across the nations and regions of the UK – that significantly increase the likelihood of hung parliaments in the future. Unless FPTP is reformed the UK will be left in the ‘worst of both worlds’: a voting system that neither delivers fair representation nor single-party majority government.”
The report shows the dramatic shift away from Labour and the Tories over the last 60 years. In 1951, the parties polled 96.8% of the total electorate between them at that year’s general election. By last year, the figure had slumped to 65.1%. Yet the voting system continues to reward Labour and the Tories, who between them won 86% of the seats in the House of Commons last May .
The rise in support for third parties makes it more difficult for individual MPs to secure a majority of support (50% or more) among their local electorate, which, says the IPPR, raises serious questions about the legitimacy of MPs to represent their constituents. “It also makes it much harder for governments to win an overall majority nationally, which again undermines the representativeness of governments formed under FPTP.”
The IPPR, which was a strong supporter of New Labour governments, is concerned that “Britain will become increasingly divided electorally, and governments will be formed that lack widespread support across the country”.
The report will lend support to those campaigning for the alternative vote (AV) system in the referendum scheduled for the coming May. This has already led to some bizarre alliances with, for example, some trade unions joining with right-wing Tories in a bid to block a “Yes vote”. Most Labour MPs are against AV, which is not surprising because their party only needs a three-point lead in votes in order to secure an overall majority, whereas the Conservatives need about an 11 point lead.
But surely the point is that an unfair voting system reflects a broken political system, as reflected the decline in voter turn-out (especially among new generations). Increasingly, politics is part of a state structure where corporate and financial interests predominate. The last government bailed out the banks and the Coalition is cutting the deficit to appease the money markets.
Over the last 30 years of globalisation, Parliaments and governments have become bit players in a world dominated by ultra-powerful transnational interests. No amount of fiddling with the voting system will change that. A transition to new forms of democratic government around the concept of People’s Assemblies is what beckons in 2011.
Paul Feldman
Communications editor
The IPPR report Worst of Both Worlds explains in convincing detail why the current first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting system is increasingly undemocratic and why things can only get worse.
it found that just 1.8 per cent of the electorate - less than 450,000 voters - decided the outcome of the May election in 108 marginal constituencies. “The overwhelming majority of us live in safe seats where we are increasingly neglected by the political parties both during and between elections –and where we have little chance of influencing the result of general elections,” the report notes.
As we know, the election produced a hung parliament and Britain’s first peacetime coalition government since the 1930s. Drawing on academic research, and conducting its own analysis of voting election data, the IPPR report suggests that the 2010 election result was not a one-off aberration.
“Instead, we believe it reflects long-term changes in voting patterns across the UK – declining support for the two main parties and divergent support for them across the nations and regions of the UK – that significantly increase the likelihood of hung parliaments in the future. Unless FPTP is reformed the UK will be left in the ‘worst of both worlds’: a voting system that neither delivers fair representation nor single-party majority government.”
The report shows the dramatic shift away from Labour and the Tories over the last 60 years. In 1951, the parties polled 96.8% of the total electorate between them at that year’s general election. By last year, the figure had slumped to 65.1%. Yet the voting system continues to reward Labour and the Tories, who between them won 86% of the seats in the House of Commons last May .
The rise in support for third parties makes it more difficult for individual MPs to secure a majority of support (50% or more) among their local electorate, which, says the IPPR, raises serious questions about the legitimacy of MPs to represent their constituents. “It also makes it much harder for governments to win an overall majority nationally, which again undermines the representativeness of governments formed under FPTP.”
The IPPR, which was a strong supporter of New Labour governments, is concerned that “Britain will become increasingly divided electorally, and governments will be formed that lack widespread support across the country”.
The report will lend support to those campaigning for the alternative vote (AV) system in the referendum scheduled for the coming May. This has already led to some bizarre alliances with, for example, some trade unions joining with right-wing Tories in a bid to block a “Yes vote”. Most Labour MPs are against AV, which is not surprising because their party only needs a three-point lead in votes in order to secure an overall majority, whereas the Conservatives need about an 11 point lead.
But surely the point is that an unfair voting system reflects a broken political system, as reflected the decline in voter turn-out (especially among new generations). Increasingly, politics is part of a state structure where corporate and financial interests predominate. The last government bailed out the banks and the Coalition is cutting the deficit to appease the money markets.
Over the last 30 years of globalisation, Parliaments and governments have become bit players in a world dominated by ultra-powerful transnational interests. No amount of fiddling with the voting system will change that. A transition to new forms of democratic government around the concept of People’s Assemblies is what beckons in 2011.
Paul Feldman
Communications editor
Friday, December 31, 2010
Let the sleeping giant speak in 2011
The leaders of the Trades Union Congress are not noted for dramatic statements or exaggerated, let alone rapid, reactions to political change. The TUC’s current general secretary, Brendan Barber, has spent his time in office promoting harmony between social classes and compromise not confrontation.
Therefore alarm bells should ring when Barber warns that 2011 is going to be a “horrible” year, with cuts in benefits and public services, and an increase in unemployment. And that it “could well be the year when the country starts to say no to government”.
Barber is sitting on a ticking time-bomb consisting of more than six million trade unionists, mostly in the public sector, who are about to bear the brunt of the Coalition government’s massive assault on spending. These workers are waiting for some leadership to resist the cuts – and none is, as yet, forthcoming. When their anger explodes, it will threaten men like Barber as well as the government.
The level of suffering will be enormous. A report by the Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development, predicts that unemployment will reach 2.7 million in the year to come, the highest leel in 17 years. The draconian cuts in public spending will push unemployment up rapidly, as the private sector fails to absorb the 330,000 public sector jobs due to disappear by 2015.
Job losses will coincide with rapidly rising prices of everything from basic foodstuffs to fuel and utility bills. Rail commuters in the south-east of England face fare rises of between 7.8% and 15% from Sunday for a second-rate service.
There is no question that last month’s unprecedented and militant action by school and university students and their families against soaring tuition fees foreshadows what is to come. Those cuts affected a relatively small section of the population – the middle classes and aspiring working class people. The next wave will touch almost everyone.
The most courageous amongst the union leaders, rail and tube workers’ leader Bob Crow has called for strikes: “We can expect to see workers in both public and private sectors out on the picket lines fighting for jobs and against savage attacks on pensions and standards of living. There is no reason for working people to pay the price for a crisis we didn’t create and which is wholly down to the banks, speculators and politicians.” Too right.
Barber and Labour leader Ed Miliband are fond of dismissing the government's deficit reduction plans as purely “ideological” or “politically motivated” and in so doing deliberately exempt the system known as capitalism. The Coalition’s cuts are, as we establish in our booklet Beyond Resistance, a desperate gamble to keep capitalism in Britain going under conditions of financial and economic crisis which threatens the break-up of the European Union itself.
No country, not even the much vaunted BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China) is exempt from the crisis. After the 2008 crash, China’s economic growth was artificially stimulated by what one globalisation analyst describes as a “violent domestic stimulus” of 4 trillion yuan ($580 billion) . . . about 13 per cent of gross domestic product in 2008 and constituted ‘probably the largest such programme in history, even including wars’.” (Charles Dumas, author of Globalization Fractures).
Those who have been studying the big global picture and the historic changes which are re-shaping our world are not mincing their words. Just listen to Jeffrey Garten, former US undersecretary of commerce under Bill Clinton. He warns of “exceptional turbulence as the waning days of the global economic order we have known plays out chaotically, possibly destructively.”
The fact is that the kind of corporate-driven, credit-fuelled capitalism we have known it for the past three decades has come to a shuddering halt. The prospects for 2011 are a deepening recession and further financial collapse.
We should seek a rebirth of human culture – and a decent life for ordinary people on the planet – arising out of the ashes of global capitalism’s “bonfire of the vanities”.
But it will certainly not be achieved through the TUC’s call for everyone to huddle together on a demonstration at the end of March, by which time tens of thousands of council workers will have lost their jobs as local authorities – many of them Labour controlled – implement the Coalition’s spending cuts.
Nor will plans for protest strike action aimed at forcing the government to change course and stop the cuts be adequate to the task. That is a key lesson from the general strikes in Greece, Spain and Portugal during 2010 where “socialist” governments have smashed public services and pensions.
There is a sleeping giant at the base of our society who has yet to speak. That is the vast majority of people who have everything to gain by throwing off not only the bankers, speculators and politicians who serve them, but the system of private ownership for profit over which they preside.
Let’s make 2011 the year to begin the struggle for power against the ruling political, financial and economic elites, building a network People’s Assemblies to complete this absolutely necessary transformation.
Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary
Therefore alarm bells should ring when Barber warns that 2011 is going to be a “horrible” year, with cuts in benefits and public services, and an increase in unemployment. And that it “could well be the year when the country starts to say no to government”.
Barber is sitting on a ticking time-bomb consisting of more than six million trade unionists, mostly in the public sector, who are about to bear the brunt of the Coalition government’s massive assault on spending. These workers are waiting for some leadership to resist the cuts – and none is, as yet, forthcoming. When their anger explodes, it will threaten men like Barber as well as the government.
The level of suffering will be enormous. A report by the Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development, predicts that unemployment will reach 2.7 million in the year to come, the highest leel in 17 years. The draconian cuts in public spending will push unemployment up rapidly, as the private sector fails to absorb the 330,000 public sector jobs due to disappear by 2015.
Job losses will coincide with rapidly rising prices of everything from basic foodstuffs to fuel and utility bills. Rail commuters in the south-east of England face fare rises of between 7.8% and 15% from Sunday for a second-rate service.
There is no question that last month’s unprecedented and militant action by school and university students and their families against soaring tuition fees foreshadows what is to come. Those cuts affected a relatively small section of the population – the middle classes and aspiring working class people. The next wave will touch almost everyone.
The most courageous amongst the union leaders, rail and tube workers’ leader Bob Crow has called for strikes: “We can expect to see workers in both public and private sectors out on the picket lines fighting for jobs and against savage attacks on pensions and standards of living. There is no reason for working people to pay the price for a crisis we didn’t create and which is wholly down to the banks, speculators and politicians.” Too right.
Barber and Labour leader Ed Miliband are fond of dismissing the government's deficit reduction plans as purely “ideological” or “politically motivated” and in so doing deliberately exempt the system known as capitalism. The Coalition’s cuts are, as we establish in our booklet Beyond Resistance, a desperate gamble to keep capitalism in Britain going under conditions of financial and economic crisis which threatens the break-up of the European Union itself.
No country, not even the much vaunted BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China) is exempt from the crisis. After the 2008 crash, China’s economic growth was artificially stimulated by what one globalisation analyst describes as a “violent domestic stimulus” of 4 trillion yuan ($580 billion) . . . about 13 per cent of gross domestic product in 2008 and constituted ‘probably the largest such programme in history, even including wars’.” (Charles Dumas, author of Globalization Fractures).
Those who have been studying the big global picture and the historic changes which are re-shaping our world are not mincing their words. Just listen to Jeffrey Garten, former US undersecretary of commerce under Bill Clinton. He warns of “exceptional turbulence as the waning days of the global economic order we have known plays out chaotically, possibly destructively.”
The fact is that the kind of corporate-driven, credit-fuelled capitalism we have known it for the past three decades has come to a shuddering halt. The prospects for 2011 are a deepening recession and further financial collapse.
We should seek a rebirth of human culture – and a decent life for ordinary people on the planet – arising out of the ashes of global capitalism’s “bonfire of the vanities”.
But it will certainly not be achieved through the TUC’s call for everyone to huddle together on a demonstration at the end of March, by which time tens of thousands of council workers will have lost their jobs as local authorities – many of them Labour controlled – implement the Coalition’s spending cuts.
Nor will plans for protest strike action aimed at forcing the government to change course and stop the cuts be adequate to the task. That is a key lesson from the general strikes in Greece, Spain and Portugal during 2010 where “socialist” governments have smashed public services and pensions.
There is a sleeping giant at the base of our society who has yet to speak. That is the vast majority of people who have everything to gain by throwing off not only the bankers, speculators and politicians who serve them, but the system of private ownership for profit over which they preside.
Let’s make 2011 the year to begin the struggle for power against the ruling political, financial and economic elites, building a network People’s Assemblies to complete this absolutely necessary transformation.
Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary
Thursday, December 30, 2010
'False victories won't save the planet'
The Cancun Agreement, hailed by climate secretary Chris Huhne as a “significant turning point”, is in reality a further step down the road to runaway global warming and resulting ecological disaster. Not one of the key points of the agreement signed earlier this month gives any hope for the kinds of radical actions that are urgently needed.
It is even a step back from the 2009 Copenhagen Accord, which committed UN member states to cuts in greenhouse gas emissions that would keep warming below 2 degrees. Despite the fact that Cancun includes commitments by China and the US, which were not parties to the Kyoto Protocol, total pledges on emissions reductions would put the world on track for between 2 and 4 degrees of warming by 2050.
At this level, a series of feedback mechanisms will come into play, leading to dangerous, runaway climate change. There is no reason to believe that in the midst of the economic and financial crisis, countries will improve on their current pledges.
The agreement on finance for countries who protect forests is riddled with loopholes. For example, palm oil plantations and other arboreal cash crops, even those planted on land illegally cleared of virgin forest, will qualify for funding. And even worse, it extends the failed market in carbon credits into this crucial area of the world’s eco-system.
The offers of finance for developing countries of $30bn now and $100bn dollars “later”, is contemptible. The $30bn figure is about one year’s average profits for the world’s biggest oil corporation Exxon-Mobil. And whilst the climate fund will be run by a panel of developing countries, rather than the World Bank, what money will they have to distribute?
There was no agreement on who will donate the money, or when. Rich countries will continue to recycle their existing aid commitments or simply fail to live up to their promises, as they did with the Millennium Goals.
A new inspection regime will check that countries are meeting their targets – but given that the targets themselves are voluntary and too little, too late, this is not going to have any impact on rising temperatures.
The commitment to a scientific review of progress after five years is laughable, given that the agreement reached in Cancun ignores entirely the climate science which should be the foundation of these global discussions.
The final fate of the Kyoto Protocol will be decided next year at another climate summit to be held in Durban. The Protocol is the only legally binding agreement on emissions reductions, and it runs out in 2012. It requires emissions cuts from only 37 or the richest industrialised nations – not including China and the US – and it is likely now to wither on the vine. Amongst those countries who ratified it, Japan, Russia and Canada have made clear that they will not support its continuation.
Amidst the cheering and clapping with which delegates greeted agreement in Cancun, just one country stood out against – Bolivia, whose ambassador Pablo Solon denounced the talks as being swamped by diplomacy and nothing to do with real action on climate change. He said:
He is quite right, and if the governments of the world are so in thrall to the needs of the corporations that they cannot deliver such an agreement, then the peoples of the world will have to find another way forward to protect themselves, their families and the eco-system of which we are a part.
Penny Cole
Environment editor
It is even a step back from the 2009 Copenhagen Accord, which committed UN member states to cuts in greenhouse gas emissions that would keep warming below 2 degrees. Despite the fact that Cancun includes commitments by China and the US, which were not parties to the Kyoto Protocol, total pledges on emissions reductions would put the world on track for between 2 and 4 degrees of warming by 2050.
At this level, a series of feedback mechanisms will come into play, leading to dangerous, runaway climate change. There is no reason to believe that in the midst of the economic and financial crisis, countries will improve on their current pledges.
The agreement on finance for countries who protect forests is riddled with loopholes. For example, palm oil plantations and other arboreal cash crops, even those planted on land illegally cleared of virgin forest, will qualify for funding. And even worse, it extends the failed market in carbon credits into this crucial area of the world’s eco-system.
The offers of finance for developing countries of $30bn now and $100bn dollars “later”, is contemptible. The $30bn figure is about one year’s average profits for the world’s biggest oil corporation Exxon-Mobil. And whilst the climate fund will be run by a panel of developing countries, rather than the World Bank, what money will they have to distribute?
There was no agreement on who will donate the money, or when. Rich countries will continue to recycle their existing aid commitments or simply fail to live up to their promises, as they did with the Millennium Goals.
A new inspection regime will check that countries are meeting their targets – but given that the targets themselves are voluntary and too little, too late, this is not going to have any impact on rising temperatures.
The commitment to a scientific review of progress after five years is laughable, given that the agreement reached in Cancun ignores entirely the climate science which should be the foundation of these global discussions.
The final fate of the Kyoto Protocol will be decided next year at another climate summit to be held in Durban. The Protocol is the only legally binding agreement on emissions reductions, and it runs out in 2012. It requires emissions cuts from only 37 or the richest industrialised nations – not including China and the US – and it is likely now to wither on the vine. Amongst those countries who ratified it, Japan, Russia and Canada have made clear that they will not support its continuation.
Amidst the cheering and clapping with which delegates greeted agreement in Cancun, just one country stood out against – Bolivia, whose ambassador Pablo Solon denounced the talks as being swamped by diplomacy and nothing to do with real action on climate change. He said:
Unfortunately, a convenient realism has become all that powerful nations are willing to offer, while they ignore scientists’ exhortations to act radically now. Bolivia may have acted unusually by upsetting the established way of dealing with things. But we face an unprecedented crisis, and false victories won’t save the planet. False agreements will not guarantee a future for our children. We all must stand up and demand a climate agreement strong enough to match the crisis we confront.
He is quite right, and if the governments of the world are so in thrall to the needs of the corporations that they cannot deliver such an agreement, then the peoples of the world will have to find another way forward to protect themselves, their families and the eco-system of which we are a part.
Penny Cole
Environment editor
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
German corporations demand survival of the fittest
The Eurozone is cracking apart as German-based industrial corporations demand the end of support for poorer, peripheral debt-laden countries so that wages can be forced down. In the back rooms of the financial powerhouses the talk is of leaving Portugal, Ireland, Spain and Belgium to collapse, throwing millions into permanent unemployment.
Why? Because globally co-ordinated attempts to bring the world’s financial institutions back from the brink of Armageddon by printing money, failed to produce anything more than a temporary – and phony – recovery of growth.
Phony, because the figures did nothing to hide the close to 10% unemployment in much of the developed part of the world, rising to 20% in Spain. Phony, because increased manufacturing filled stock levels but didn’t translate into enough increased sales. Phony because investment in China is giving way to inflation and export-dependent growth is slowing there and in India.
And now the debt contagion that is the principal feature of the global capitalist crisis, has spread to local and municipal authorities in the United States and other countries.
More than 100 US cities are already facing the prospect of bankruptcy. American cities and states have debts in total of as much as $2 trillion. In Europe, local and regional government borrowing is expected to reach a historical peak of nearly €1.3tn (£1.1tn) this year.
Cities from Detroit to Madrid are struggling to pay creditors, including providers of basic services such as street cleaning. Last week, Moody's ratings agency warned about a downgrade for the cities of Florence and Barcelona and cut the rating of the Basque country in northern Spain. The debts of Naples, Budapest and Istanbul's have achieved unenviable “junk” status.
You don’t need to try to imagine the consequences. Just look at Detroit. Fifty years ago, Detroit was home to almost 2 million people. Today, many of the once bustling, car-clogged streets of the motor city are largely abandoned. The population is less than half what it was. One in five houses is empty – in some areas it is eight out of ten. Property prices have collapsed to the point where houses can be had for $100, although the average price is $7,500 (£5,000). The city council gives homes away to those prepared to pay the outstanding property taxes.
Now the city authorities, faced with talk of bankruptcy, plan to downsize Detroit by cutting off services, such as policing and sewerage, to large parts of the blighted metropolis in an effort to pressure residents to move to core neighbourhoods of a smaller city.
The mayor of Detroit, Dave Bing, said that his administration cannot afford to go on providing services such as schools, firefighters, buses and rubbish collection to large areas of the city where the population has dropped sharply. The fall in the number of people paying property taxes has left a $300 million hole in the budget.
Bing told the Detroit Free Press that no one will be forced to move but those who remain outside of designated parts of the city "need to understand that they're not going to get the kind of services they require".
In Britain, rising interest rates and declining tax income are hitting hard already, driving the government’s deficit to record levels yet again. This can only intensify the increasingly shaky Coalition’s drive to cut spending, forcing hundreds of thousands out of work.
It couldn’t be clearer. Capitalist society is no longer able to provide the basics of life for the majority. Its replacement cannot come a moment too soon. People’s Assemblies can surely become the organising focus for a new kind of not-for-profit society. Remaking the financial system will be amongst their first tasks.
Gerry Gold
Economics editor
This will be our last blog before the holiday period. We will resume publication on Thursday, 30 December.
Why? Because globally co-ordinated attempts to bring the world’s financial institutions back from the brink of Armageddon by printing money, failed to produce anything more than a temporary – and phony – recovery of growth.
Phony, because the figures did nothing to hide the close to 10% unemployment in much of the developed part of the world, rising to 20% in Spain. Phony, because increased manufacturing filled stock levels but didn’t translate into enough increased sales. Phony because investment in China is giving way to inflation and export-dependent growth is slowing there and in India.
And now the debt contagion that is the principal feature of the global capitalist crisis, has spread to local and municipal authorities in the United States and other countries.
More than 100 US cities are already facing the prospect of bankruptcy. American cities and states have debts in total of as much as $2 trillion. In Europe, local and regional government borrowing is expected to reach a historical peak of nearly €1.3tn (£1.1tn) this year.
Cities from Detroit to Madrid are struggling to pay creditors, including providers of basic services such as street cleaning. Last week, Moody's ratings agency warned about a downgrade for the cities of Florence and Barcelona and cut the rating of the Basque country in northern Spain. The debts of Naples, Budapest and Istanbul's have achieved unenviable “junk” status.
You don’t need to try to imagine the consequences. Just look at Detroit. Fifty years ago, Detroit was home to almost 2 million people. Today, many of the once bustling, car-clogged streets of the motor city are largely abandoned. The population is less than half what it was. One in five houses is empty – in some areas it is eight out of ten. Property prices have collapsed to the point where houses can be had for $100, although the average price is $7,500 (£5,000). The city council gives homes away to those prepared to pay the outstanding property taxes.
Now the city authorities, faced with talk of bankruptcy, plan to downsize Detroit by cutting off services, such as policing and sewerage, to large parts of the blighted metropolis in an effort to pressure residents to move to core neighbourhoods of a smaller city.
The mayor of Detroit, Dave Bing, said that his administration cannot afford to go on providing services such as schools, firefighters, buses and rubbish collection to large areas of the city where the population has dropped sharply. The fall in the number of people paying property taxes has left a $300 million hole in the budget.
Bing told the Detroit Free Press that no one will be forced to move but those who remain outside of designated parts of the city "need to understand that they're not going to get the kind of services they require".
In Britain, rising interest rates and declining tax income are hitting hard already, driving the government’s deficit to record levels yet again. This can only intensify the increasingly shaky Coalition’s drive to cut spending, forcing hundreds of thousands out of work.
It couldn’t be clearer. Capitalist society is no longer able to provide the basics of life for the majority. Its replacement cannot come a moment too soon. People’s Assemblies can surely become the organising focus for a new kind of not-for-profit society. Remaking the financial system will be amongst their first tasks.
Gerry Gold
Economics editor
This will be our last blog before the holiday period. We will resume publication on Thursday, 30 December.
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
Don't let capitalism off the hook
Embarrassed by the vitality and determination of the student movement against higher tuition fees, some trade union leaders are making militant noises about co-ordinated strike action against the government’s spending cuts. Whether words become deeds is debatable.
Len McCluskey, the new general secretary of Unite, Britain’s largest union, has written in The Guardian that trade unions ought to be “preparing for battle” and should not let the anti-union laws paralyse them in the face of the cuts onslaught.
The Trades Union Congress (TUC), says McCluskey, will meet early in 2011 to discuss “co-ordinated industrial action and to analyse the possibilities and opportunities for a broad strike movement.” But before anyone gets too excited, let’s examine what is happening on the ground.
Yesterday, the TUC general secretary Brendan Barber and union leaders met David Cameron for mince pies and tea at Downing Street at their request. Afterwards, Barber would only say that they had warned Cameron of the consequences of the deficit-reduction plan, as if the prime minister didn’t know already. Only Bob Crow, leader of the RMT transport union, voiced support for McCluskey.
McCluskey, whose union’s endorsement was critical in getting Ed Miliband elected as Labour’s new leader, criticised the party’s front bench for meeting the Tory cuts programme halfway. Somehow he managed to excuse Miliband himself, although the Labour leader accepts that the budget deficit should be reduced. He simply wants the Coalition to move more slowly.
While Miliband quickly distanced himself from McCluskey’s support for strike action – showing that he who pays the piper doesn’t necessarily call the tune – in practice they agree in one key area. Labour-controlled local councils are busily preparing to make substantial cuts. Some like Lewisham have started implementing them already.
Instead of demanding that Labour councils refuse to draw up cuts budgets for 2011-12 based on substantial reductions in central government grant, McCluskey only says they should not be blamed “for the problem” because to do so is a “shortcut to splitting our movement”.
No-one is actually blaming them for the crisis. But local trade unionists rightly are demanding that Labour councils refuse to make the cuts as a matter of principle. Work on drawing up the budgets will begin immediately after the holiday season is over, with a view to getting them through the council by early March.
The TUC demonstration against spending cuts scheduled for March 26 will, therefore, be too late to save tens of thousands of jobs and services from the axe. Conflict between workers and Labour councils is inevitable in the next few months and trade unionists will want to know why McCluskey has nothing to say on this issue.
There is also meeting of minds between McCluskey and Barber on the ground of economic illiteracy. Both insist that the cuts are purely “ideologically driven”, being simply an attempt to destroy public services and the welfare state and are, therefore, totally unnecessary. If only it were that simple.
As we show in our downloadable Beyond Resistance booklet, the cuts are “ideological” only in the sense that capitalist governments are motivated to do everything they can to sustain the profit system. Britain’s budget deficit is part of the same global debt crisis that brought down the banks.
Deficits are a clear and present danger in so far as both governments and the financial markets are concerned. More to the point Barber and McCluskey cannot explain, for example, why parties in Greece, Spain and Portugal who call themselves socialist, have implemented massive cuts and faced down a series of general strikes.
Contrary to what McCluskey and Barber think, economic growth and tax justice is not an alternative to the cuts and lets capitalism off the hook. For any strike action to be effective, is will have to be part of a wider movement to bring down the Coalition while working up plans to replace the present madhouse with a not-for-profit economic and financial model. In other words, we need an ideologically-driven struggle against capitalism itself.
Paul Feldman
Communications editor
Len McCluskey, the new general secretary of Unite, Britain’s largest union, has written in The Guardian that trade unions ought to be “preparing for battle” and should not let the anti-union laws paralyse them in the face of the cuts onslaught.
The Trades Union Congress (TUC), says McCluskey, will meet early in 2011 to discuss “co-ordinated industrial action and to analyse the possibilities and opportunities for a broad strike movement.” But before anyone gets too excited, let’s examine what is happening on the ground.
Yesterday, the TUC general secretary Brendan Barber and union leaders met David Cameron for mince pies and tea at Downing Street at their request. Afterwards, Barber would only say that they had warned Cameron of the consequences of the deficit-reduction plan, as if the prime minister didn’t know already. Only Bob Crow, leader of the RMT transport union, voiced support for McCluskey.
McCluskey, whose union’s endorsement was critical in getting Ed Miliband elected as Labour’s new leader, criticised the party’s front bench for meeting the Tory cuts programme halfway. Somehow he managed to excuse Miliband himself, although the Labour leader accepts that the budget deficit should be reduced. He simply wants the Coalition to move more slowly.
While Miliband quickly distanced himself from McCluskey’s support for strike action – showing that he who pays the piper doesn’t necessarily call the tune – in practice they agree in one key area. Labour-controlled local councils are busily preparing to make substantial cuts. Some like Lewisham have started implementing them already.
Instead of demanding that Labour councils refuse to draw up cuts budgets for 2011-12 based on substantial reductions in central government grant, McCluskey only says they should not be blamed “for the problem” because to do so is a “shortcut to splitting our movement”.
No-one is actually blaming them for the crisis. But local trade unionists rightly are demanding that Labour councils refuse to make the cuts as a matter of principle. Work on drawing up the budgets will begin immediately after the holiday season is over, with a view to getting them through the council by early March.
The TUC demonstration against spending cuts scheduled for March 26 will, therefore, be too late to save tens of thousands of jobs and services from the axe. Conflict between workers and Labour councils is inevitable in the next few months and trade unionists will want to know why McCluskey has nothing to say on this issue.
There is also meeting of minds between McCluskey and Barber on the ground of economic illiteracy. Both insist that the cuts are purely “ideologically driven”, being simply an attempt to destroy public services and the welfare state and are, therefore, totally unnecessary. If only it were that simple.
As we show in our downloadable Beyond Resistance booklet, the cuts are “ideological” only in the sense that capitalist governments are motivated to do everything they can to sustain the profit system. Britain’s budget deficit is part of the same global debt crisis that brought down the banks.
Deficits are a clear and present danger in so far as both governments and the financial markets are concerned. More to the point Barber and McCluskey cannot explain, for example, why parties in Greece, Spain and Portugal who call themselves socialist, have implemented massive cuts and faced down a series of general strikes.
Contrary to what McCluskey and Barber think, economic growth and tax justice is not an alternative to the cuts and lets capitalism off the hook. For any strike action to be effective, is will have to be part of a wider movement to bring down the Coalition while working up plans to replace the present madhouse with a not-for-profit economic and financial model. In other words, we need an ideologically-driven struggle against capitalism itself.
Paul Feldman
Communications editor
Monday, December 20, 2010
The revolution will be digitised
US vice-president Joe Biden has raised the stakes in a global cyber war between those fighting for the right to information about the secret activities of governments and those who protect the warmongering interests of global capital.
By denouncing WikilLeaks founder Julian Assange as “a high-tech terrorist who has put lives and jobs in jeopardy”, he virtually signed a death warrant. Biden also confirmed that the US government is actively seeking a way of charging Assange with espionage.
After originally downplaying the leaks, the second most powerful man in the US Biden has added to Sarah Palin’s baying for blood. Palin has called for Assange to be pursued "with the same urgency we pursue al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders”. And we know how the US treats “enemy combatants”.
Assange and his lawyers are currently fighting his extradition to Sweden where the WikiLeaks founder faces charges of sexual molestation, the subject of a salacious witch-hunt in yesterday’s Mail on Sunday. Accusations by two Swedish women he met last August are being talked up in order to cloud the real issues and fuel a character assassination campaign.
The real problem, as Assange himself has said, for the world’s political leaders is not simply that WikiLeaks continues to exist as an organisation. It is the courage of the whistleblowers inside state institutions who actually provide the leaks in the first place.
People like US army intelligence officer Bradley Manning. Manning, who is accused of handing over 90,000 classified Afghan war logs to WikiLeaks, has just turned 23 after being held in solitary confinement for 200 days.
He is detained at Marine Corps Base Quantico, in Virginia. He spends 23 hours a day alone in a standard-sized cell, with a sink, a toilet, and a bed. US website, The Daily Beast, writes:
Manning is not the only young person who involved in this secretive cyber and information war. In the past fortnight, the conflict over WikiLeaks drew in thousands of “hacktivists” who brought down credit card companies who refused to process WikiLeaks transactions. A hackers’ collective called Anonymous, organised a mass “DDoS” attack on websites which acted against Assange and WikiLeaks.
DDoS means “Distributed Denial of Service”, and involves the use of “collaborative tools where supporters can voluntarily attach their machines to a botnet in order to assist with a DDoS attack. The preferred tools are usually some version of the Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC) software.”
Sound like a sci-fi thriller? It is – except it’s true. And young people around the world are being arrested for it. Two Dutch hackers, one aged 19 and another 16 were seized last week, as was a 17-year-old in Manchester. The Met now even has a special e-crime unit called PCeU which specialises in tracking down such people. In Switzerland and Sweden this hackers’ movement has taken the political form of the Pirate Parties.
The case of Julian Assange is about much more than one Australian campaigner. It has taken the war against non-democratic, repressive and secret states into a new dimension. For all Biden’s bluster, the Americans can’t shut down WikiLeaks because its site is replicated by supporters around the globe.
In Britain, students used social networking and micro-blogging to mobilise recently, giving the police the run-around. The notion of the all-seeing, all-powerful state is taking a battering. There is no doubt that the revolution will be digitised!
Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary
By denouncing WikilLeaks founder Julian Assange as “a high-tech terrorist who has put lives and jobs in jeopardy”, he virtually signed a death warrant. Biden also confirmed that the US government is actively seeking a way of charging Assange with espionage.
After originally downplaying the leaks, the second most powerful man in the US Biden has added to Sarah Palin’s baying for blood. Palin has called for Assange to be pursued "with the same urgency we pursue al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders”. And we know how the US treats “enemy combatants”.
Assange and his lawyers are currently fighting his extradition to Sweden where the WikiLeaks founder faces charges of sexual molestation, the subject of a salacious witch-hunt in yesterday’s Mail on Sunday. Accusations by two Swedish women he met last August are being talked up in order to cloud the real issues and fuel a character assassination campaign.
The real problem, as Assange himself has said, for the world’s political leaders is not simply that WikiLeaks continues to exist as an organisation. It is the courage of the whistleblowers inside state institutions who actually provide the leaks in the first place.
People like US army intelligence officer Bradley Manning. Manning, who is accused of handing over 90,000 classified Afghan war logs to WikiLeaks, has just turned 23 after being held in solitary confinement for 200 days.
He is detained at Marine Corps Base Quantico, in Virginia. He spends 23 hours a day alone in a standard-sized cell, with a sink, a toilet, and a bed. US website, The Daily Beast, writes:
The conditions under which Bradley Manning is being held would traumatize anyone. . . He lives alone in a small cell, denied human contact. He is forced to wear shackles when outside of his cell, and when he meets with the few people allowed to visit him, they sit with a glass partition between them … When he was first arrested, Manning was put on suicide watch, but his status was quickly changed to “Prevention of Injury” watch (POI), and under this lesser pretence he has been forced into his life of mind-numbing tedium.
Manning is not the only young person who involved in this secretive cyber and information war. In the past fortnight, the conflict over WikiLeaks drew in thousands of “hacktivists” who brought down credit card companies who refused to process WikiLeaks transactions. A hackers’ collective called Anonymous, organised a mass “DDoS” attack on websites which acted against Assange and WikiLeaks.
DDoS means “Distributed Denial of Service”, and involves the use of “collaborative tools where supporters can voluntarily attach their machines to a botnet in order to assist with a DDoS attack. The preferred tools are usually some version of the Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC) software.”
Sound like a sci-fi thriller? It is – except it’s true. And young people around the world are being arrested for it. Two Dutch hackers, one aged 19 and another 16 were seized last week, as was a 17-year-old in Manchester. The Met now even has a special e-crime unit called PCeU which specialises in tracking down such people. In Switzerland and Sweden this hackers’ movement has taken the political form of the Pirate Parties.
The case of Julian Assange is about much more than one Australian campaigner. It has taken the war against non-democratic, repressive and secret states into a new dimension. For all Biden’s bluster, the Americans can’t shut down WikiLeaks because its site is replicated by supporters around the globe.
In Britain, students used social networking and micro-blogging to mobilise recently, giving the police the run-around. The notion of the all-seeing, all-powerful state is taking a battering. There is no doubt that the revolution will be digitised!
Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary
Friday, December 17, 2010
Community 'gang-masters' heading your way
Even as local authorities were digesting the destructive impact of the Cameron-Clegg Coalition’s savage assault on their funding, it was revealed that the government is hard at work preparing plans to deal with a sharp downturn in 2011.
These plans will have been given added urgency by the latest uunemployment figures, showing the total without jobs in the UK rose by 35,000 to 2.5 million in the three months to October – the first increase since the spring.
In a surprise for the many economists deluded by self-created dreams of recovery, the private sector failed to create enough jobs to offset those that are starting to be lost in the public sector as the cuts begin to bite.
The jobless rate rose to 7.9 per cent of the workforce, up from 7.7 per cent in the three months to September and taking it close to the 8 per cent peak seen in the first quarter. Unemployment among 16-24 year-olds rose by 28,000 to 943,000, a rate of 19.8 per cent, one in five, and close to the record set last year.
As the latest round of cuts begin to take effect, threatening a further 100,000 jobs in the next few months, research by homeless charity Shelter shows that almost a million households are already in arrears with their rent or mortgage, twice as many as a year ago.
According to Campbell Robb, Shelter’s chief executive: “Every two minutes someone faces the nightmare of losing their home and this research paints a disturbing picture of sharply rising numbers of people who face a daily struggle just to keep a roof over their head.
“We know from the cases we see every day that just one single thing, like a bout of illness, rent increase or drop in income, is all that’s needed to push people into spiral of debt and arrears that can lead to the loss of their home. With tough times ahead and homelessness already on the rise, we’re extremely concerned that this could be the beginning of a surge in the numbers of people losing their homes next year.”
Publication of the Localism Bill provides a clearer view of the government’s direction as it cuts revenue for local authorities, abandons services like housing, education, libraries, social care, focuses on channeling declining tax revenues into restoring the profitability of the banking and finance sector.
Whilst community-run enterprises across the country are already filling some of the void left by Post Office and pub closures, the Bill suggests that this can be scaled up to take on libraries, schools and social care. But the reality is that surviving local services will increasingly be passed into the control of for-profit corporations, be staffed by unpaid volunteers or fall apart altogether.
What the Coalition is really envisaging was revealed in the startling results of a consultation with business leaders participating in the Prince of Wales Business in the Community charity. As well as urging the government to eliminate the checks that prevent unsuitable people volunteering, they asked the government to help them promote the idea of “brokers” on the ground in communities to establish connections between companies and voluntary organisations.
Pretty soon, if the Coalition’s friends and sponsors have their way, those in need will have to depend on profitable paid-for services like the already privatised home care. They’ll be staffed by low-paid workers managed by well-paid “brokers” or “connectors” employed by Sainsbury’s, Tesco or even the global financial conglomerate UBS.
It’ll be just a “community” version of the gang masters who organise people-trafficked cheap labour to pick and pack vegetables, but dressed up in the comforting Big Society newspeak.
The Localism Bill expects communities to pick up the pieces as the Coalition destroys the last vestiges of the welfare state to protect the capitalist economy. Expect no opposition from local councillors, especially those in Ed Miliband's party. They plan to make the cuts as instructed.
Communities should seize the initiative and form networks of Peoples’ Assemblies which can take over the resources owned by shareholders and run for profit and turn them into not-for-profit enterprises that will serve local people’s needs. The alternative is a bleak wasteland of broken services and mass unemployment.
Gerry Gold
Economic editor
These plans will have been given added urgency by the latest uunemployment figures, showing the total without jobs in the UK rose by 35,000 to 2.5 million in the three months to October – the first increase since the spring.
In a surprise for the many economists deluded by self-created dreams of recovery, the private sector failed to create enough jobs to offset those that are starting to be lost in the public sector as the cuts begin to bite.
The jobless rate rose to 7.9 per cent of the workforce, up from 7.7 per cent in the three months to September and taking it close to the 8 per cent peak seen in the first quarter. Unemployment among 16-24 year-olds rose by 28,000 to 943,000, a rate of 19.8 per cent, one in five, and close to the record set last year.
As the latest round of cuts begin to take effect, threatening a further 100,000 jobs in the next few months, research by homeless charity Shelter shows that almost a million households are already in arrears with their rent or mortgage, twice as many as a year ago.
According to Campbell Robb, Shelter’s chief executive: “Every two minutes someone faces the nightmare of losing their home and this research paints a disturbing picture of sharply rising numbers of people who face a daily struggle just to keep a roof over their head.
“We know from the cases we see every day that just one single thing, like a bout of illness, rent increase or drop in income, is all that’s needed to push people into spiral of debt and arrears that can lead to the loss of their home. With tough times ahead and homelessness already on the rise, we’re extremely concerned that this could be the beginning of a surge in the numbers of people losing their homes next year.”
Publication of the Localism Bill provides a clearer view of the government’s direction as it cuts revenue for local authorities, abandons services like housing, education, libraries, social care, focuses on channeling declining tax revenues into restoring the profitability of the banking and finance sector.
Whilst community-run enterprises across the country are already filling some of the void left by Post Office and pub closures, the Bill suggests that this can be scaled up to take on libraries, schools and social care. But the reality is that surviving local services will increasingly be passed into the control of for-profit corporations, be staffed by unpaid volunteers or fall apart altogether.
What the Coalition is really envisaging was revealed in the startling results of a consultation with business leaders participating in the Prince of Wales Business in the Community charity. As well as urging the government to eliminate the checks that prevent unsuitable people volunteering, they asked the government to help them promote the idea of “brokers” on the ground in communities to establish connections between companies and voluntary organisations.
Pretty soon, if the Coalition’s friends and sponsors have their way, those in need will have to depend on profitable paid-for services like the already privatised home care. They’ll be staffed by low-paid workers managed by well-paid “brokers” or “connectors” employed by Sainsbury’s, Tesco or even the global financial conglomerate UBS.
It’ll be just a “community” version of the gang masters who organise people-trafficked cheap labour to pick and pack vegetables, but dressed up in the comforting Big Society newspeak.
The Localism Bill expects communities to pick up the pieces as the Coalition destroys the last vestiges of the welfare state to protect the capitalist economy. Expect no opposition from local councillors, especially those in Ed Miliband's party. They plan to make the cuts as instructed.
Communities should seize the initiative and form networks of Peoples’ Assemblies which can take over the resources owned by shareholders and run for profit and turn them into not-for-profit enterprises that will serve local people’s needs. The alternative is a bleak wasteland of broken services and mass unemployment.
Gerry Gold
Economic editor
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Ethiopia drives farmers off their land
It’s Christmas time, and the old favourites are being wheeled out, including Band Aid’s Do they know it’s Christmas, which in 1984 brought together top musicians in response to the terrible famine then raging in Ethiopia. No-one who saw the Michael Buerk’s reports for the BBC will ever forget them.
Now Ethiopia is one of Africa’s booming economies with a current annual growth rate of 8%. Addis Ababa, itself hosts one of the world’s biggest charity events. The Great Ethiopian Run harnesses the national passion for running to raise money for those in the countryside whose lives have not been improved by the boom.
In the next phase of economic expansion, the government of Meles Zenawi plans to lease 100,000 hectares of land over the next five years to global agribusiness. Companies include Saudi Star, owned by the Saudi royal family, which plans to grow water-hungry crops like rice and sugar.
The Ethiopian government claims the land is empty and unused and that inward investment will improve infrastructure and lift people out of poverty. But In reality this is an enforced land requisition, complete with repression and bribery. Ten people have already been killed in protests.
In a BBC report from the south west of the country, one of those protesting against the plans, explained how the land has been used by Ethiopia’s pastoralist, criss-crossing it with their animals in annual cycles, literally from time immemorial.
He told reporter Ed Butler: “There is no empty land in Gambella without a history. Village areas have been cleared and villagers have been bribed to sell their own farm. They can’t sell the land, it’s not theirs. That land is ancestral land.”
Ethiopian writer Dr Magn Nayang argues that it is possible to achieve modernisation WITHOUT handing over land to the global food companies who are “arguably the greatest generators of poverty, and consequently social and political instability in the world today”.
He recalls how farmers in the 1990s were encouraged to plant coffee, and as a result the price of coffee fell as the market was flooded and the incomes of more than 25 million coffee growers, including Ethiopians, were devastated.This is what happens when you drag farmers who want to stay on their land forever, into the capitalist farming model without the kind of state subsidies enjoyed by European and American farmers. Dr Nayang puts is succinctly:
Agricultural commodity prices are soaring – cotton is up 100% over the year; soybeans 27% and wheat has also increased dramatically. Food prices are rising across the globe. This is partly due to demand from the growing economies of China, India and Brazil. But it is also a result of the US Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing, where money pumped into the economy is finding its way into speculation on commodity prices.
In the meantime, marginal land is being despoiled by intensive farming, water wasted on inappropriate cash crops – and at the end of the day the agri-corporations will move on leaving a desert behind them.
To protect the land, the farmers and the world’s food supply we need a new concept of commonwealth – a local and community-based framework for land use. It would reject the idea that the land belongs to the state, or to anyone – whilst protecting the rights of farmers to go on farming it and having agreed rights over it.
Penny Cole
Environment editor
Now Ethiopia is one of Africa’s booming economies with a current annual growth rate of 8%. Addis Ababa, itself hosts one of the world’s biggest charity events. The Great Ethiopian Run harnesses the national passion for running to raise money for those in the countryside whose lives have not been improved by the boom.
In the next phase of economic expansion, the government of Meles Zenawi plans to lease 100,000 hectares of land over the next five years to global agribusiness. Companies include Saudi Star, owned by the Saudi royal family, which plans to grow water-hungry crops like rice and sugar.
The Ethiopian government claims the land is empty and unused and that inward investment will improve infrastructure and lift people out of poverty. But In reality this is an enforced land requisition, complete with repression and bribery. Ten people have already been killed in protests.
In a BBC report from the south west of the country, one of those protesting against the plans, explained how the land has been used by Ethiopia’s pastoralist, criss-crossing it with their animals in annual cycles, literally from time immemorial.
He told reporter Ed Butler: “There is no empty land in Gambella without a history. Village areas have been cleared and villagers have been bribed to sell their own farm. They can’t sell the land, it’s not theirs. That land is ancestral land.”
Ethiopian writer Dr Magn Nayang argues that it is possible to achieve modernisation WITHOUT handing over land to the global food companies who are “arguably the greatest generators of poverty, and consequently social and political instability in the world today”.
He recalls how farmers in the 1990s were encouraged to plant coffee, and as a result the price of coffee fell as the market was flooded and the incomes of more than 25 million coffee growers, including Ethiopians, were devastated.This is what happens when you drag farmers who want to stay on their land forever, into the capitalist farming model without the kind of state subsidies enjoyed by European and American farmers. Dr Nayang puts is succinctly:
According to the economic theory of commodity industries, rising production and falling prices continue until profits are so low that investment capital moves elsewhere. The Karuturi Global, the Saudi Star, and the likes are bound to move somewhere else, once they deplete the long-term fertility of the soil. However, poor farmers do not have this option. In fact, poor farmers typically keep trying to expand production even when costs exceed prices in desperate attempts to maintain their incomes and stay on their land.
Agricultural commodity prices are soaring – cotton is up 100% over the year; soybeans 27% and wheat has also increased dramatically. Food prices are rising across the globe. This is partly due to demand from the growing economies of China, India and Brazil. But it is also a result of the US Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing, where money pumped into the economy is finding its way into speculation on commodity prices.
In the meantime, marginal land is being despoiled by intensive farming, water wasted on inappropriate cash crops – and at the end of the day the agri-corporations will move on leaving a desert behind them.
To protect the land, the farmers and the world’s food supply we need a new concept of commonwealth – a local and community-based framework for land use. It would reject the idea that the land belongs to the state, or to anyone – whilst protecting the rights of farmers to go on farming it and having agreed rights over it.
Penny Cole
Environment editor
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Time to remove cuts councillors
Absolutely savage cuts in council spending announced by the Coalition yesterday will lead to tens of thousands of jobs losses and the devastation of essential local services. The question is: How can this be stopped?
The reduction in government grant will hit poorer inner-city areas hardest. Hackney, Tower Hamlets, Newham, Manchester, Rochdale, Knowsley, Liverpool, St Helens, Doncaster and South Tyneside face grant cuts of nearly 9% from next April.
With council tax frozen by Whitehall order, the only way these councils can balance their books is to sack workers and shut down services. And it will get worse, with similar sized cuts scheduled for the following three years.
A number of things are already clear. Many if not most city councils are Labour controlled – and they are without question going to make the cuts. This is already happening in places like Manchester, Doncaster, Lewisham and Lambeth.
The official leaders of council trade unions like the GMB, Unite and Unison, agree with Labour councillors. In fact, Unite is calling Labour councillors to meetings to tell them what they wanted to hear and were already planning – that they should not defy the government. Labour leader Ed Miliband is backing this message.
Unison yesterday came out with the obvious statement that “the scale of the cuts means that communities will be feeling the pain for years to come.” Its main campaign is get a million signatures for public services, as if that will make the slightest difference as far the Lib-Con government is concerned.
Unison is supporting the TUC’s call for a demonstration for public services on March 26 next year – by which time the cuts will have been made.
Britain’s record budget deficit – with interest payments on loans alone heading towards the £100 billion a year mark – is what lies behind the cuts. In turn, the deficit results from the global recession that followed the 2008 financial meltdown.
From a capitalist point of view, the Coalition has no choice but to slash and burn. And inevitably, the burden of the capitalist crisis falls on local communities, which will resemble wastelands if these cuts are allowed to stand.
As the students have discovered, the Coalition has no intention of yielding to protest. Nor will Labour councillors, who overwhelmingly are New Labour types without principle or backbone who would like to be allowed to get away with say "we are only carrying out government orders".
A broad strategy is required that goes beyond resistance.
Councillors that refuse to stand up for their communities have no right to continue to represent local voters. A campaign should begin immediately, organised by council trade unionists, to force them to step aside.
They could organise their own ballots on the cuts as a way of mobilising local communities against those planning to vote for job losses and shutting down services.
Trade unionists and communities have to be prepared to take over the town halls themselves and block all attempts to pass cuts budgets.
Local government democracy was wiped out a long time ago. Councils exist to carry out government orders and communities have to create their own local democratic process.
Council chambers should become a base for creating genuine People’s Assemblies in local areas. A network of People’s Assemblies emerging out of the fight against council cuts would be in a position to defy central government and challenge the authority of Whitehall.
Assemblies could begin to work on economic and financial alternatives to a capitalist system that has patently broken down.
A groundswell of resistance is building throughout Britain. Hundreds of council workers marched through Doncaster yesterday against the Labour council’s plans to slash £80 million off spending. They were joined by students from Sheffield University and applauded calls to strike and occupy council offices to fight the cuts. They are heading in the right direction.
Paul Feldman
Communications editor
The reduction in government grant will hit poorer inner-city areas hardest. Hackney, Tower Hamlets, Newham, Manchester, Rochdale, Knowsley, Liverpool, St Helens, Doncaster and South Tyneside face grant cuts of nearly 9% from next April.
With council tax frozen by Whitehall order, the only way these councils can balance their books is to sack workers and shut down services. And it will get worse, with similar sized cuts scheduled for the following three years.
A number of things are already clear. Many if not most city councils are Labour controlled – and they are without question going to make the cuts. This is already happening in places like Manchester, Doncaster, Lewisham and Lambeth.
The official leaders of council trade unions like the GMB, Unite and Unison, agree with Labour councillors. In fact, Unite is calling Labour councillors to meetings to tell them what they wanted to hear and were already planning – that they should not defy the government. Labour leader Ed Miliband is backing this message.
Unison yesterday came out with the obvious statement that “the scale of the cuts means that communities will be feeling the pain for years to come.” Its main campaign is get a million signatures for public services, as if that will make the slightest difference as far the Lib-Con government is concerned.
Unison is supporting the TUC’s call for a demonstration for public services on March 26 next year – by which time the cuts will have been made.
Britain’s record budget deficit – with interest payments on loans alone heading towards the £100 billion a year mark – is what lies behind the cuts. In turn, the deficit results from the global recession that followed the 2008 financial meltdown.
From a capitalist point of view, the Coalition has no choice but to slash and burn. And inevitably, the burden of the capitalist crisis falls on local communities, which will resemble wastelands if these cuts are allowed to stand.
As the students have discovered, the Coalition has no intention of yielding to protest. Nor will Labour councillors, who overwhelmingly are New Labour types without principle or backbone who would like to be allowed to get away with say "we are only carrying out government orders".
A broad strategy is required that goes beyond resistance.
Councillors that refuse to stand up for their communities have no right to continue to represent local voters. A campaign should begin immediately, organised by council trade unionists, to force them to step aside.
They could organise their own ballots on the cuts as a way of mobilising local communities against those planning to vote for job losses and shutting down services.
Trade unionists and communities have to be prepared to take over the town halls themselves and block all attempts to pass cuts budgets.
Local government democracy was wiped out a long time ago. Councils exist to carry out government orders and communities have to create their own local democratic process.
Council chambers should become a base for creating genuine People’s Assemblies in local areas. A network of People’s Assemblies emerging out of the fight against council cuts would be in a position to defy central government and challenge the authority of Whitehall.
Assemblies could begin to work on economic and financial alternatives to a capitalist system that has patently broken down.
A groundswell of resistance is building throughout Britain. Hundreds of council workers marched through Doncaster yesterday against the Labour council’s plans to slash £80 million off spending. They were joined by students from Sheffield University and applauded calls to strike and occupy council offices to fight the cuts. They are heading in the right direction.
Paul Feldman
Communications editor
Monday, December 13, 2010
Student revolt shows state in turmoil
The continuing wave of student protests against increased fees and education cuts is highlighting a deepening crisis within the British state, one that presents opportunities as well as threats.
Plans for more demonstrations, including today’s against the abolition of the education maintenance allowance, show the real concern not only of students but also parents and teachers about how education is increasingly run along business lines.
It has emerged that Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson almost quit over the incident last Thursday when Prince Charles and Camilla’s vehicle came under attack from protesters. The episode made it evident that 3,000 officers failed to seal off streets in central London, once demonstrators had got wise to their kettling tactics.
Stephenson and his ilk are still smarting from being caught off their guard by protesters at Tory party headquarters in Millbank Tower during the protest organised by the National Union of Students last month. In revenge attacks for November, last Thursday’s operations saw massed ranks of police deployed around Parliament Square.
A police cavalry charge was used as a terror tactic. Police used truncheons indiscriminately on defenceless students such as 20-year-old Alfie Meadows, who is recovering from a three-hour brain operation. Officers pulled Jody McIntyre, who suffers from cerebral palsy, from his wheelchair. So far around 180 people have been arrested and the Met is preparing criminal prosecutions against them.
So now Home Secretary Theresa May says she does not exclude the possibility of the police deploying water cannon to curb further student protests. Recent citizen protests in Stuttgart saw serious injuries as a result of their use. That won’t bother the Coalition and no doubt tear gas and para-military riot units won’t be far behind.
Behind the continuing protest movement there is a deeper current of disaffection.
Today’s publication of the British Social Attitudes Survey shows that trust in politicians has reached an all-time low.
This groundswell of distrust indicates that there is a breakdown in the relationship between the state and the mass of the population, especially young people. This is fuelling their evident desire to go beyond and outside the worn-out parliamentary channels of protest and pressure politics.
In doing so they are moving politically ahead the mass of workers who are being held back by the Labour Party and trade union bureaucrats. Young people are not as trapped the those who seek to place a safe cap on things and keep the status quo. They are not hanging around for the feeble stroll around the park being organised by the Trades Union Congress in over three months time.
But today local councils up and down the country are being told how much to cut - how many jobs and services are to disappear, leaving a trail of devastation and misery. Most councillors – whatever their political affiliation – will be voting through the cuts. Ordinary people, not only public service workers, will now be drawn into a wider movement.
So the urgent issue is to continue to explore and develop new political forms outside and beyond local government, the conservative trade union leadership and parliament.
Last Friday a student meeting at the London School of Economics, called to discuss the way forward in the battle against education cuts, proposed that assemblies should embrace not only the national student movement, but also those fighting against the cuts more widely.
And the momentum for building People's Asssemblies took a step forward at the “Liberation beyond resistance” meeting in London on Saturday. There was a wide-ranging discussion on the nature and purpose of People's Assemblies and many proposals made for concrete actions in 2011. Assemblies have the potential to challenge the state for power itself in order to create a truly democratic society, in terms of politics and the control of resources. They are the way to go in 2011.
Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary
Plans for more demonstrations, including today’s against the abolition of the education maintenance allowance, show the real concern not only of students but also parents and teachers about how education is increasingly run along business lines.
It has emerged that Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson almost quit over the incident last Thursday when Prince Charles and Camilla’s vehicle came under attack from protesters. The episode made it evident that 3,000 officers failed to seal off streets in central London, once demonstrators had got wise to their kettling tactics.
Stephenson and his ilk are still smarting from being caught off their guard by protesters at Tory party headquarters in Millbank Tower during the protest organised by the National Union of Students last month. In revenge attacks for November, last Thursday’s operations saw massed ranks of police deployed around Parliament Square.
A police cavalry charge was used as a terror tactic. Police used truncheons indiscriminately on defenceless students such as 20-year-old Alfie Meadows, who is recovering from a three-hour brain operation. Officers pulled Jody McIntyre, who suffers from cerebral palsy, from his wheelchair. So far around 180 people have been arrested and the Met is preparing criminal prosecutions against them.
So now Home Secretary Theresa May says she does not exclude the possibility of the police deploying water cannon to curb further student protests. Recent citizen protests in Stuttgart saw serious injuries as a result of their use. That won’t bother the Coalition and no doubt tear gas and para-military riot units won’t be far behind.
Behind the continuing protest movement there is a deeper current of disaffection.
Today’s publication of the British Social Attitudes Survey shows that trust in politicians has reached an all-time low.
This groundswell of distrust indicates that there is a breakdown in the relationship between the state and the mass of the population, especially young people. This is fuelling their evident desire to go beyond and outside the worn-out parliamentary channels of protest and pressure politics.
In doing so they are moving politically ahead the mass of workers who are being held back by the Labour Party and trade union bureaucrats. Young people are not as trapped the those who seek to place a safe cap on things and keep the status quo. They are not hanging around for the feeble stroll around the park being organised by the Trades Union Congress in over three months time.
But today local councils up and down the country are being told how much to cut - how many jobs and services are to disappear, leaving a trail of devastation and misery. Most councillors – whatever their political affiliation – will be voting through the cuts. Ordinary people, not only public service workers, will now be drawn into a wider movement.
So the urgent issue is to continue to explore and develop new political forms outside and beyond local government, the conservative trade union leadership and parliament.
Last Friday a student meeting at the London School of Economics, called to discuss the way forward in the battle against education cuts, proposed that assemblies should embrace not only the national student movement, but also those fighting against the cuts more widely.
And the momentum for building People's Asssemblies took a step forward at the “Liberation beyond resistance” meeting in London on Saturday. There was a wide-ranging discussion on the nature and purpose of People's Assemblies and many proposals made for concrete actions in 2011. Assemblies have the potential to challenge the state for power itself in order to create a truly democratic society, in terms of politics and the control of resources. They are the way to go in 2011.
Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary
Friday, December 10, 2010
Parliament as a dead parrot
The events in and around Parliament yesterday represent a watershed – not just for university students but for society at large. Higher education officially became a business and the present political process was shown to have less life in it than a dead parrot.
Years of emphasis on education as the way to success and overcoming accidents of birth are now associated with heavy debts which are impossible for many to contemplate. The hopes of a new generation are being dashed in front of their eyes.
The Tories, building on New Labour’s introduction of tuition fees, used the Lib Dems to impose a market model on universities, turning students into “customers” at a stroke. Ed Miliband, apparently the new leader of Labour, refused to commit himself to overturning the vote which transforms education into something for the wealthy.
No wonder students were driven to confront the state in the shape of the Coalition, the police and the monarchy. And the cracks are showing. Not only were the Lib Dems hopelessly split (leaving Nick Clegg’s position vulnerable), but the police were barely able to cope.
The use of intimidation by police – truncheons, riot gear, cameras, horses, kettling, etc –probably spurred on protests as students became angrier and saw it as a challenge. The hundreds who attacked the Treasury and the Supreme Court could not have sustained this without the thousands who came to demonstrate and felt frustrated when the vote went through.
Outwitted by a spontaneous movement independent of the official “leaders” of the
National Union of Students – who never opposed the original introduction of fees – the police lost control and landed the heir to the throne in the middle of it all. “Off with their heads” hadn’t been heard on London’s streets for some time – until last night.
Furthermore, the students have shamed the leaders of the trade union movement, apart from a minority like Bob Crow of the transport RMT who mobilised his members to join yesterday’s demonstrations. Leading bureaucrats from Unite and other unions are actually going round cities like Leeds telling Labour councillors they have to implement the cuts.
Their refusal to call members into actions against the cuts – and £9,000 tuition fees are a direct consequence of the savage reduction in state support for universities – left students vulnerable to police attacks on London’s streets.
Students, by contrast, are united by the sweeping nature of cuts which affect them all. Not just those already at university but those at colleges (who face the end of maintenance allowances) and schools. They are aware of what their parents had and are enjoying their support in opposing tuition fees.
A spirit of altruism prevails, embracing common interests between poorer and better off students and wider interests of society. Students around the world, from Pakistan to France, are following the struggle in Britain because education is under attack in every country.
Global capitalism is in crisis, as we have tried to explain in our booklet Beyond Resistance (which you can download for free). The state, which props up the system, is transferring the cost of formerly public services like education entirely on to the backs of those who use and need them.
The social system – the government, the state, the corporations and the banks – has lost any moral authority to rule. Its mandate from the ruling elites is to restore capitalism, whatever the cost. Creating a sustainable alternative now becomes a practical necessity. Students have seized the initiative. They are in the best position of all too inspire the wider population to create People’s Assemblies (see tomorrow’s event) to challenge and defeat a state that is heading towards outright suppression of all dissent.
Corinna Lotz, AWTW secretary
Paul Feldman, communications editor
Years of emphasis on education as the way to success and overcoming accidents of birth are now associated with heavy debts which are impossible for many to contemplate. The hopes of a new generation are being dashed in front of their eyes.
The Tories, building on New Labour’s introduction of tuition fees, used the Lib Dems to impose a market model on universities, turning students into “customers” at a stroke. Ed Miliband, apparently the new leader of Labour, refused to commit himself to overturning the vote which transforms education into something for the wealthy.
No wonder students were driven to confront the state in the shape of the Coalition, the police and the monarchy. And the cracks are showing. Not only were the Lib Dems hopelessly split (leaving Nick Clegg’s position vulnerable), but the police were barely able to cope.
The use of intimidation by police – truncheons, riot gear, cameras, horses, kettling, etc –probably spurred on protests as students became angrier and saw it as a challenge. The hundreds who attacked the Treasury and the Supreme Court could not have sustained this without the thousands who came to demonstrate and felt frustrated when the vote went through.
Outwitted by a spontaneous movement independent of the official “leaders” of the
National Union of Students – who never opposed the original introduction of fees – the police lost control and landed the heir to the throne in the middle of it all. “Off with their heads” hadn’t been heard on London’s streets for some time – until last night.
Furthermore, the students have shamed the leaders of the trade union movement, apart from a minority like Bob Crow of the transport RMT who mobilised his members to join yesterday’s demonstrations. Leading bureaucrats from Unite and other unions are actually going round cities like Leeds telling Labour councillors they have to implement the cuts.
Their refusal to call members into actions against the cuts – and £9,000 tuition fees are a direct consequence of the savage reduction in state support for universities – left students vulnerable to police attacks on London’s streets.
Students, by contrast, are united by the sweeping nature of cuts which affect them all. Not just those already at university but those at colleges (who face the end of maintenance allowances) and schools. They are aware of what their parents had and are enjoying their support in opposing tuition fees.
A spirit of altruism prevails, embracing common interests between poorer and better off students and wider interests of society. Students around the world, from Pakistan to France, are following the struggle in Britain because education is under attack in every country.
Global capitalism is in crisis, as we have tried to explain in our booklet Beyond Resistance (which you can download for free). The state, which props up the system, is transferring the cost of formerly public services like education entirely on to the backs of those who use and need them.
The social system – the government, the state, the corporations and the banks – has lost any moral authority to rule. Its mandate from the ruling elites is to restore capitalism, whatever the cost. Creating a sustainable alternative now becomes a practical necessity. Students have seized the initiative. They are in the best position of all too inspire the wider population to create People’s Assemblies (see tomorrow’s event) to challenge and defeat a state that is heading towards outright suppression of all dissent.
Corinna Lotz, AWTW secretary
Paul Feldman, communications editor
Thursday, December 09, 2010
Boosting carbon markets top priority at Cancún
As the Cancún climate talks stumble along, it should be no surprise to anyone to learn from Wikileaks that the United States and the European Union used pressure and bribery to bully smaller nations into signing up to the Copenhagen Accords.
As long ago as 2007, A World to Win denounced the UN climate change process as a forum for the prevention of action on climate change. And nothing has happened since to alter that view.
Even the agreement that were expected to be signed in Cancún – the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) agreement, the proposal for free sharing of green technologies between advanced industrial and poorer nations, and the mitigation fund – are now foundering.
Of course, it would be good news if REDD collapsed. It proposes to draw forest protection into the corrupt and ineffective carbon market, with rich countries paying poor countries to protect forest, then claiming carbon offsets to carry on polluting.
It is simply another route towards “business as usual” and it would not, by the way, protect forests, as illegal logging would doubtless continue. It is not surprising that major corporations sent delegates to a meeting in Cancún in support of REDD, including Walmart CEO Robson Walton.
The draft text still includes plantations – for example palm oil plantations – in the definition of forests. So Indonesia could turn a blind eye to illegal clearing of a forest, and then claim funding for the protection of the resulting palm oil plantation. This is turning logic on its head – or rather it is basing the whole process on the logic of the market.
As the ETC Group says in its report “The New Biomassters – Synthetic Biology and the Next assault on biodiversity and livelihoods”:
And at the same time, Silvia Ribeiro of the ETC Group warns:
So what is taking place in Cancún is not a negotiation on climate change, but a further development in the globalisation process, where the penetration of the market into new areas is facilitated and subsidised by governments through carbon off-sets.
Bolivia is accused of putting forests at risk by holding out against the inclusion of carbon trades in any treaty. But as ambassador Pablo Solon said, his government is motivated by the desire to prevent the kind of disastrous rise in global temperatures that would condemn humanity to death.
“We have come to seek an accord for humanity and nature in its totality. The most current research indicates that 300,000 people die each year due to natural disasters. You’re playing with human lives,” Solon said.
But that is precisely what capitalism does – it commodifies everything on the planet, including the labour of human beings, and puts it all to work for the creation of profit. At Saturday’s meeting, “Liberation Beyond Resistance – Towards a Peoples Assemblies Movement” – it will be important to include emergency actions on climate change in discussions about what the priorities for the future must be.
Penny Cole
Environment editor
As long ago as 2007, A World to Win denounced the UN climate change process as a forum for the prevention of action on climate change. And nothing has happened since to alter that view.
Even the agreement that were expected to be signed in Cancún – the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) agreement, the proposal for free sharing of green technologies between advanced industrial and poorer nations, and the mitigation fund – are now foundering.
Of course, it would be good news if REDD collapsed. It proposes to draw forest protection into the corrupt and ineffective carbon market, with rich countries paying poor countries to protect forest, then claiming carbon offsets to carry on polluting.
It is simply another route towards “business as usual” and it would not, by the way, protect forests, as illegal logging would doubtless continue. It is not surprising that major corporations sent delegates to a meeting in Cancún in support of REDD, including Walmart CEO Robson Walton.
The draft text still includes plantations – for example palm oil plantations – in the definition of forests. So Indonesia could turn a blind eye to illegal clearing of a forest, and then claim funding for the protection of the resulting palm oil plantation. This is turning logic on its head – or rather it is basing the whole process on the logic of the market.
As the ETC Group says in its report “The New Biomassters – Synthetic Biology and the Next assault on biodiversity and livelihoods”:
New carbon markets are turning plant-life into carbon stocks for trading (in lieu of reducing emissions). But the companies that say ‘trust us’ are the same energy, chemical companies, agribusinesses and forestry giants that created the climate and food crises in the first place.
And at the same time, Silvia Ribeiro of the ETC Group warns:
The Gene Giants are stockpiling patents that threaten to put a choke-hold on the world’s biomass and our future food. The breadth of many patent claims on climate ready crop genes is staggering. In many cases, a single patent or patent application claims ownership of engineered gene sequences that could be deployed in virtually all major crops – as well as the processed food and feed products derived from them.
So what is taking place in Cancún is not a negotiation on climate change, but a further development in the globalisation process, where the penetration of the market into new areas is facilitated and subsidised by governments through carbon off-sets.
Bolivia is accused of putting forests at risk by holding out against the inclusion of carbon trades in any treaty. But as ambassador Pablo Solon said, his government is motivated by the desire to prevent the kind of disastrous rise in global temperatures that would condemn humanity to death.
“We have come to seek an accord for humanity and nature in its totality. The most current research indicates that 300,000 people die each year due to natural disasters. You’re playing with human lives,” Solon said.
But that is precisely what capitalism does – it commodifies everything on the planet, including the labour of human beings, and puts it all to work for the creation of profit. At Saturday’s meeting, “Liberation Beyond Resistance – Towards a Peoples Assemblies Movement” – it will be important to include emergency actions on climate change in discussions about what the priorities for the future must be.
Penny Cole
Environment editor
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