Gangsters' hold on Sydney is safe

Following the recent riots along Sydney's beaches, Ms Miranda Devine says that the Gangsters' hold on Sydney is safe. She writes that:

FORGET Clover Moore as the Grinch of Sydney's Christmas. The "Lions of Lebanon" with their Glock pistols and Molotov cocktails have put her to shame this holy season. While the NSW police lock down entire beachfront suburbs, instruct stores to stop selling baseball bats, and apply the full force of the law to pasty-faced nerds with a taste for Nazi literature, they continue to cower from the real hardmen, the Lebanese-Australian criminal gangs of Sydney's south-west who have ruled the roost in this city for at least a decade and now number in their thousands.

And she concludes that:

That Iemma's electorate is at war with former premier Bob Carr's former electorate of Maroubra is a handy synchronicity. It highlights the ALP's long-term culpability in creating the monster that is plaguing the city, its history of ethnic branch-stacking and "whatever it takes" tactics to shore up support in the heartland electorates of the south-west, its policy of spin and cover-up which is at last coming undone.

As one passenger last week told taxi driver Adrian Neylan, who has chronicled the violence on his weblog, "the gangs have won".

Indeed they have, but the recent display of official cowardice in the face of the criminal gangs of Sydney's south-west is just a taste of the way Sydney has been run for a decade.

Emphasis Mine

O how the past is quickly forgotten:

• The Vietnamese crime gangs of Cabramatta who were the problem in the 1980's.
• The Bikies since the 1960's
• The Mafia from around Griffith during the 1970's
• The Irish gangs since 1788
• The Chinese Triads since the 1850's
• And there are probably some that I have overlooked

One thing you can say about crime is that it is multicultural. At the same time, it is a recurring theme throughout Capitalist and other societies.

What intrigued me about Ms Devine's comments were the similarity to the idea put forward in Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum's study of the use of the criminals to maintain power:

Nevertheless, it was relatively rare for the thieves to aim their 'justice' at those running the camps. By and large they were, if not exactly loyal Soviet citizens, then at least happy to co-operate in the one task that Soviet authorities set for them: they were perfectly happy, that is, to lord it over the politicals - that group to quote [Evgeniya] Ginzburg again, 'even more despised and outcast than themselves'.

Applebaum, Anne (2004), Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps, Penguin Books:Australia, pp.270.

This was to last until about 1947, when the wave of arrests after the end of the Second World War sent more political prisoners into the Gulag. Now the power relationship changed:

Almost as soon as they started appearing in the camps towards the end of the war, this new sort of prisoner began creating trouble for the authorities. By 1947, the professional crimminals no longer found it so easy to dominate them. Among the various national and criminal tribes who dominated camp life, a new clan appeared: the krasnye shapochki or 'red hats'. These were usually ex-soldiers or ex-partisans who had banded together to fight against the dominance of the thieves - and, by extension, against the administration that tolerated them. Such groups operated well into the next decade, despite efforts to break them apart. In the winter of 1954-5, Viktor Bulgakov, then a prisoner in Inta, a far northern mining camp in the Vorkuta region, witnessed an administrative attempt to 'break' a group of politicals by importing a contigent of sixty thieves into their camp. The thieves armed themselves, and prepared to start attacking the politicals:

They suddenly got hold of 'cold weapons' [knives], just as one would expect in that sort of situation...we learned that they had stolen the money and possessions of older man. We asked them to give the things back, but they weren't accustomed to giving things back. So at about two o'clock in the morning, just as it was turning light, we surrounded the barracks from all sides, and began attacking it. We started to beat them, and we beat them until they couldn't get up. One jumped through the window...ran to the vakhta, and collapsed on the threshold. But by the time the guards arrived, no one was there...They took the thieves out of the zone.

...

But the authorities took note. If political prisoners could band together to fight thieves, they could also band together to fight the camp administration. ....

pp. 418-9 ibid

Emphasis Mine

In Marxist theory, these criminal elements are part of the lumpenproletariat.

Roughly translated as slum workers or the mob, this term identifies the class of outcast, degenerated and submerged elements that make up a section of the population of industrial centers. It includes beggars, prostitutes, gangsters, racketeers, swindlers, petty criminals, tramps, chronic unemployed or unemployables, persons who have been cast out by industry, and all sorts of declassed, degraded or degenerated elements. In times of prolonged crisis (depression), innumerable young people also, who cannot find an opportunity to enter into the social organism as producers, are pushed into this limbo of the outcast. Here demagogues and fascists of various stripes find some area of the mass base in time of struggle and social breakdown, when the ranks of the Lumpenproletariat are enormously swelled by ruined and declassed elements from all layers of a society in decay.

Emphasis Mine

In any oppressive regime, the criminal elements are used to keep the majority of people down through fear. Witness the hysteria over crime figures. Even though we are told that the rates of crimes are decreasing, we are conditioned to become more fearful of crime.

The reason is that any oppressive system needs to keep people frightened (either of it or of external enemies). And when we are frightened, we are conditioned to run to the nanny state for safety and comfort.

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French Riots

Prof Juan Cole comments on The Problem with Frenchness in discussing the on-going French riots:

The French have determinedly avoided multiculturalism or affirmative action. They have insisted that everyone is French together and on a "color-blind" set of policies. "Color-blind" policies based on "merit" always seem to benefit some groups more than others, despite a rhetoric of equality and achievement. In order to resolve the problems they face, the French will have to come to terms with the multi-cultural character of contemporary society. And they will have to find ways of actively sharing jobs with minority populations, who often suffer from an unemployment rate as high as 40 percent (i.e. Iraq).

...

A lot of the persons living in the urban outer cities (a better translation of cite than "suburb") are from subsaharan Africa. And there are lots of Eastern European immigrants. The riots were sparked by the deaths of African youths, not Muslims. Singling out the persons of Muslim heritage is just a form of bigotry. Moreover, French youth of European heritage rioted quite extensively in 1968. As they had in 1789. Rioting in the streets is not a foreign custom. It has a French genealogy and context.

Emphasis Mine

Roger Stevenson comments on Prof. Cole's analysis:

I agree for the most part with your analysis of the historical factors and the neglect that French society in general has shown for the problems of minority ethnic groups. The housing problems and discrimination they face in everyday life are truly tragic. France was forced in the 50's and 60's to embark on large scale housing projects to house the increasing numbers of immigrant labor families that the economy needed, with the result that these large high rise apartment buildings are now ghetto-like neighborhoods that are often poorly maintained and very overcrowded.

The remnants of France's colonial empire are now stacked, often 12 stories high, in what the French call "rabbit cages." It is easy to understand how the youth of these underprivileged projects feel totally disenfranchised from the mainstream of French society. Many have dropped out of a very rigid education system, and the prospects for any kind of meaningful future in terms of a job, career, decent housing, a feeling of self-worth, etc., are very bleak.

Emphasis Mine

Al Jazeera posts Paris riots: Those are not Muslims:

The raging violence which has spread to 300 French cities and towns, and which the police hasn’t been able to extinguish yet, is reflecting the social, not religious, grievance, reports James Button in Paris.

Numerous media outlets and politicians made the assumption that unrest raised worrying concerns of a rise of “Islamic extremism” in France.

Those gangs are not Muslims, their heroes are American rappers like 50 Cent, and they harbour special hatred towards police- When they go to fight them they say they're "dancing with wolves", according to an editorial published on The Age.

Linking the unrest that has reached the heart of the French capital to “radical Islam” is misleading and irrelevant. France’s civil unrest should be compared to the riots that burnt down African-American ghettos across the United States in the 1960s.

Emphasis Mine

What is happening in France is similar to what happened in Macquarie Fields in 2005 and in Redfern in 2004:

• Youth riots in Sydney: the real story
• Car thieves, not police, to blame for chase deaths

Murray Smith writes, FRANCE: State of emergency called in face of widespread revolt

The term “riot” is in fact misleading. The revolt is the work of gangs of youth who know each other and who consciously turn their anger into acts of destruction of property — burning cars, schools, shops, buses — and attacks on the hated police. As one young man put it to the Madrid daily El Pais: “We don’t have words to explain what we feel. We only know how to speak with fire.” Beyond their immediate targets, their anger is directed against interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy, the hard-right hopeful for the 2007 presidential election, who has described them as “rabble” and “gangrene” and threatened to “hose down” their neighbourhoods. The only political demand that the rioters have put forward is for Sarkozy’s resignation.

Of course, there is a negative side to this revolt. It is easy enough to see that wreaking havoc in their own neighbourhoods causes damage to their neighbours and families. This can and is being exploited by the government to divide their communities between generations and between immigrants and non-immigrants. But when the despair of those to whom society offers no future explodes in revolt, it rarely does so in a neat, tidy and “politically correct” way. What is happening in France today recalls the explosions in the ghettoes of North America in the 1960s and the 1981 riots in England.

Emphasis Mine

In summary, people are pissed off at being treated as shit. And when the rulers do not listen to reason, unreason is the result. This revolt will be put down because the people do not have the political consciousness to understand why they are in this situation. This is just an angry and violent reaction to oppression. And that condemns this revolt to failure.

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Peter Drucker Dies

Patricia Sullivan writes that Management Visionary Peter Drucker Dies:

"There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer," [Peter Drucker] said 45 years ago. Central to his philosophy was the belief that highly skilled people are an organization's most valuable resource and that a manager's job is to prepare and free people to perform. Good management can bring economic progress and social harmony, he said, adding that "although I believe in the free market, I have serious reservations about capitalism."

It was a typical remark for a man who believed in the empowerment of workers and the futility of big government, which he called "obese, muscle-bound and senile."

Emphasis Mine

This is an interesting quote. A fuller version was posted by Martin Bento

"although I believe in the free market, I have serious reservations about capitalism. Any system that makes one value absolute is wrong." Interview in Inc., 1985 In The Frontiers of Management

Michael Lewis, in his review of The Man Who Invented Management, concluded:

One way of viewing Peter Drucker's career is as a spiritual exercise performed for the spiritually impoverished. ''Faith is not what today is so often called a 'mystical experience,' '' Drucker wrote in his 1949 essay on Kierkegaard, ''something that can apparently be induced by the proper breathing exercises or by prolonged exposure to Bach (not to mention drugs). It can be attained only through despair, through suffering, through painful and ceaseless struggle.'' In Drucker's attempt to bring a kind of faith to business there is a lingering mystery. How did a man with deep skepticism of capitalism, which he gave voice to over the decades, become the sage of the capitalist class? Could it be that somewhere deep in their hearts the men he advised shared his doubts?

Emphasis Mine

Again we have sloppy definitions. How can one consider free markets outside of Capitalism? This is the heart of Capitalism. Take away free markets and you destroy Capitalism. Introduce free markets and you introduce Capitalism. The two are inseparable.

Without a reference to The Frontiers of Management, I cannot find what Peter Drucker meant by free markets as distinct from Capitalism.

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Rize

Rochelle Siemienowicz reviews the movie Rize:

Down in the slums of Los Angeles, there is a new dance movement transforming the lives of underprivileged kids. It's called 'krumping' and it's so fast and athletic that the makers of this film have to tell us that the footage hasn't been sped up. The dancers move as if possessed, both by the spirits of their African ancestors and a furious rage at their powerlessness - Rodney King is often invoked. Instead of joining gangs, they paint their faces like clowns and engage in non-violent competitive dance-offs with rival troupes.

Made by music video director and Vanity Fair photographer David LaChappelle, Rize is sometimes unfocussed and sloppy, seemingly unsure of whether it wants to glorify or objectively observe what it finds. Nevertheless, it's full of pummelling energy and arresting visuals as it traces the roots of krumping back to an ex-jailbird called Tommy the Clown, who first combined hip hop music and dance with children's birthday parties. Today, more than 100 groups practise this 'ghetto-ballet'. Their pride and courage is inspiring (and, honestly, a little scary), and you only hope that they'll find a way to move their politics beyond their beautiful, gyrating bodies.

Siemienowicz, Rochelle (2005), 'Rize', The Big Issue, No. 241, 07-22 Nov 2005, p.36

Emphasis Mine

What Dr. Siemienowicz did not mention was the racism behind the origin of the dance: this was promoted as something that black people could do that white people couldn't. This gave the dancers a sense of false pride. They have fully absorbed the racist propaganda of a Capitalist society. Malcolm X has been forgotten. The only mention of Dr. King was on the closing credits from his I have a dream speech:

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal."

Towards the end of the film, a white youth and an Asian youth are shown participating in the dance, and being accepted by the black dancers.

Thoughout the film, the dancers comment that they are oppressed or discriminated against, but they do not move beyond that. When they do not try to understand the oppression or discrimination, they are accepting it as part of their life. It is just another part of their lives as is drugs and the gangs. Forty years have erased the memories of the marches and the speeches of the Civil Rights era. The dancers are angry without having any way of understanding the source of that anger. They use dance to drain that anger out.

One problem with black liberation (whatever its manifestation - marches, dance, music) is that it attracts poor whites, Asians, and Hispanics. But with this aggregation of non-blacks, the blacks feel overwhelmed. The problems of the blacks are big enough without all these other poor people tagging along. Blacks want to solve the problems of blacks not everyone else's. The blacks then try to exclude the others by saying that they should solve their own problems.

With this exclusion, the politics of blacks do not develop beyond racism. This attitude entrenches racism further by dividing people into races. Instead, the blacks should welcome the others in their struggle and expand their struggle to include all poor people as Malcolm X and Dr. King were starting to do before they were assassinated. The struggle is a class struggle of the poor against the rich. It is not black against white.

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Remembering The Gulag

Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum concluded Gulag: A History with:

Already, we are forgetting what mobilized us, what inspired us, what held the civilization of 'the West' together for so long [during the 'Cold War']: we are forgetting what it was that we were fighting against. If we do not try harder to remember the history of the other half of the European continent, the history of the other twentieth-century totalitarian regime, in the end it is we in the West who will not understand our past, we who will not know how our world came to be the way it is.

And not only our own particular past. For if we go on forgetting half of Europe's history, some of what we know about mankind itself will be distorted. Every one of the twentieth-century's mass tragedies was unique: the Gulag, the Holocaust, the Armenian massacre, the Nanking massacre, the Cultural Revolution, the Cambodian revolution, the Bosnian wars, among many others. Every one of these events had different historical, philosophical and cultural origins, every one arose in particular local circumstances which will never be repeated. Only our ability to debase and destroy and dehumanize our fellow men has been - and will be - repeated again and again our transformation of our neighbours into 'enemies', our reduction of our opponents to lice or vermin or poisonous weeds, our re-invention of our victims as lower, lesser or evil beings, worthy only of incarceration or expulsion or death.

The more we are able to understand how different societies have transformed their neighbours and fellow citizens from people into objects, the more we know of the specific circumstances which led to each episode of mass torture and mass murder, the better we will understand the darker side of our own human nature. This book was not written 'so that it will not happen again', as the cliche would have it. This book was written because it almost certainly happen again. Totalitarian philosophies have had, and will continue to have, a profound appeal to many millions of people. Destruction of the 'objective enemy', as Hannah Arendt once put it, remains a fundamental object of many dictatorships. We need to know why - and each story, each memoir, each document in the history of the Gulag is a piece of the puzzle, a part of the explanation. Without them, we will wake up one day and realize that we do not know who we are.

Applebaum, Anne (2004), Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps, Penguin Books:Australia, pp.513-514.

Emphasis Mine

Our PM, John Howard, refers to parts of Australian history as the black-arm view. Other historians have played down the brutality of the frontier. The Australian ruling class wants people to forget about the ugliness of Australia's past. But as Ms Applebaum wrote in the end it is we in the West who will not understand our past, we who will not know how our world came to be the way it is. To fully understand the current state of Australia, we have to confront those ugly facts. Henry Reynolds

...has researched and explained the high level of violence and conflict involved in the colonisation of Australia, and the aboriginal resistance that resulted in numerous massacres of indigenous people. Reynolds, and other historians, estimates that up to 3,000 Europeans and 20,000 indigenous Australians were killed directly in the frontier violence, and many more aborigines died indirectly through the introduction of European diseases and starvation caused by being forced from their productive tribal lands.

It is this blindness towards the atrocities that have been committed in the past that blinds many Australians to the crimes being committed today by governments (both Liberal and Labour). We now have:

• Indefinite administrative dentention. This has been upheld by the High Court for the case of refugees. Capitalist legal used to hold that only a judge, in open court, could deprive a person of liberty. Now a bureaucrat can now do the same thing subject to appeals to other bureaucrats.
• A crime is now whatever the Executive determines it to be. A ministerial edict can classify an organisation as a terrorist one, and anyone who had any sort of dealings with it are then subject to arrest and trial. Stalin would have understood the logic of that. Specific acts and proveable intent are no longer needed to condemn someone of a crime.

The brutality of the past continues today for the same reason it existed in the past: to protect the interests of the ruling class.

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Wal-Mart and Minimum Wage

Chuck Asay drew a cartoon titled News Item: Wal-Mart Chief Asks Congress To Raise The Minimum Wage in which Mr. Asay writes:

• ...Wal-Mart already pays its workers an average wage of close to $10 an hour!, and
• That Wal-Mart wants to force small stores out of business by doing so.

According to Lee Sustar in Taking on Wal Mart (June 25, 2004)

... Wal-Mart’s unwillingness to pay a living wage. According to a study by Forbes magazine, Wal-Mart employees earn an average hourly wage of $7.50. That works out to roughly $15,000 a year--right at the federal poverty line of $15,060 for a family of three. ...

...

Employees aren’t the only people squeezed by the Wal-Mart machine. According to a study by the research group Good Jobs First, Wal-Mart extracted at least $624 million in government subsidies for its big distribution centers--in the form of infrastructure improvements, tax credits, financing, job training and more.

The subsidies are justified in the name of job creation. Yet Wal-Mart typically destroys jobs as well, driving out smaller competitors. "When they go in, they simply redistribute retail revenue," Phillip Mattera, one of the authors of the study, told Socialist Worker.

Emphasis Mine

Mr. Asay's contentionsre echoed in WSJ.com - Wal-Mart Urges Congress to Raise Minimum Wage says:

The proposal to lift minimum wage is particularly likely to raise eyebrows. Though Wal-Mart pays above the current $5.15 an hour minimum wage -- the average hourly wage among its 1.3 million U.S. workers is just under $10 an hour -- some of its smaller competitors don't pay as much. As a result, a boost in the minimum wage could pressure the profitability of Wal-Mart competitors.

"This makes it look like they're doing something for labor, but with little cost to themselves," says Lawrence Katz, professor of economics at Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.

But [Wal-Mart CEO] Mr. Scott, noting that minimum wage hasn't changed in almost a decade, described Wal-Mart's core customer base as finding it increasingly difficult to afford basic necessities between paychecks.

"We simply believe it is time for Congress to take a look at the minimum wage and other legislation that can help working families," he said./p>

Emphasis Mine

Mr. Scott has realised that poor people do not spend much. Increasing the amount of money poor people have will increase the sales of companies like Wal-Mart. So, it must be good for business. But all of the criticisms levelled at Wal-Mart over this concern the cost to business. People like Mr. Asay and Prof. Katz do not think this far. They think that by simply lowering costs, sales will increase and therefore profits without realising that there is less money to spend.

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Why Bother?

A right-winger, out on the street, asked me why I was bothering? Couldn't I see that the vast majority of people didn't care about the current situation in the world. They were too wrapped up in themselves to see the coming catastrophe of economic collapse, disease, and starvation. They were more worried about choosing a new name for the royal baby in Denmark than about the new anti-terror laws.

Here I was trying to hand out leaflets for the rally on 5 November to protest the new anti-terror laws and not being good at it. People would see the two Muslims on the front of the leaflet and look at me in disgust. It would appear that some people think of the new laws as anti-Muslim instead of anti-dissent. And they approve of that.

This right-winger sees people as being hoodwinked by the media and distracted by all the bright lights. The landscape artists (aka the media) were painting a picture that everything is alright with the world. The system is working in spite of a few minor problems. We should listen to our leaders because they know better.

It is easy to be dispirited. I have seen comrades come and go. They were full of hope that once the eyes of the people were opened, the people would rise up. But the grind of campaigning week after week and getting the occasional response caused them to wilt away. They seem to forget that most people are trying just to survive.

For me, the prospect of a collapse of the Capitalist economy in Australia is horrific with the possible death toll in the millions, maybe ten or more. Even if the chance of a socialist revolution in Australia is a million to one, it is a chance that has to be taken.

My reason for hope is the ongoing revolutions in Venezuela and Argentina where the workers are now running some of the factories and businesses. We can see socialism working to make the lives of poor people better.

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Standing up to the War on Terror

FORUM: Standing up to the War on Terror

Wednesday October 26 6pm

Carslaw Building Room 175 Sydney University

Organised by Sydney Uni Peace Group

• Professor Ahmad Shboul - Arab and Islamic Studies Sydney University
• Micheal Thompson - National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU)
• Speakers from National Association of Community Legal Centres and Students Against War

Proposed 'anti-terrorism' legislation is being widely condemned as a further step towards a police state. ASIO would be given coercive powers and the ability to secretly detain people for two weeks without charge; supporting the right to resist military occupation would become and offence punishable by seven years imprisonment; a 'shoot to kill' policy would be introduced for people 'fleeing' police questioning, even if not suspected of a terrorist offence.

At this forum, Ahmad Shboul will discuss the real impact that the 'war on terror' is having on the people of the middle east and on the muslim community in Australia. A speaker from the National Association of Community Legal Centres will outline the extent of the laws and the effect they will have on civil liberties. The National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) have come out against the laws and will speak at this forum about their stand.

If passed, the new anti-terror laws are set to give police more rights to keep anti-war protesters off the streets and intimidate the movement. On campuses the crack down on dissent is being acutely felt - Voluntary Student Unionism is aimed at removing our ability to organise against government policy and police have arrested many activists campaigning against VSU.

Come along and discuss how we can defend our civil liberties, stop the racist scapegoating and re-build a challenge to the ongoing War, which has already killed over 100,000 people in Iraq, starting with the national rally on November 5.

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Blog Rolling 2

Time to roll through the blogs again by clicking the next blog button:

• An advertisement.
• Write On is a progressive blog by Demi Ray. He produces off-broadway plays.
• Liaison Américaine is another progressive blog by Lisap from Boston MA USA. She appears to be a journalism student.
• LOLLIPOP is a blog of cartoons of young adults. Good artwork.

And there ends the blog rolling this week. But then I decided to back up and try one more time.

• Elsinore Magazine 2 is an online newspaper for the City of Lake Elsinore, CA, USA. The editor (John Brooks) could use a few hints in choice of colours and the layout of the blog.
• Desert Photography & Fine Art is a fine collection of stunning photographs by Peggi Meyer from AZ, USA. This is one good reason for just clicking on the next blog button - you end up in places like this.
• Breakfast at the Bookstore is an empty blog by Tia.
• We escape from the USA to Brazil to find just Pictures of THEM* where Kennya Karoline posts pictures of himself and friends. The commentary is in Porteguese.
• Then onto Singapore where a secretive guy posts thoughts from his White Skull. Best not to linger here.
• Onward to where the words are English but the semantics are somewhat cryptic at BINGO ONLINE REAL. Somewhat of a fetish for cow pies, methinks.
• Onwards and upwards to Ontario, Canada where Faye Leung discusses SECRETS THAT TEDDY KNOWS about the life of a teenage girl (especially maths tests).
• Then a cute blog called it's raining...* by Umbrella Girl.
• Back to Singapore only to be attacked by a Jaguar Shark as she pummels the self-righteous.

Once more the chain is broken. Enough wandering for now.

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Stopping a stutter

Some good news for stutterers as researchers at the University of Sydney find an effective way for Stopping a stutter. The basis of the treatment is:

After nine months, children in the treatment group had reduced their stuttering by 77 per cent, compared with 43 per cent of those in the control group.

The program is based on speech pathologists teaching the children's parents to praise them for not stuttering and, from time to time, when they do stutter, to ask them to repeat the sentence again.

Apparently, it is too late for people like me:

"If you finish up as an adolescent or an adult with stuttering, you will probably be affected with it for life.

"But treatment is very effective in the preschool age group."

Prof Onslow said around one in 100 adults stuttered, reducing their amount of verbal communication over a lifetime by up to three-quarters compared with the general population.

They were also at risk of being bullied during their school years, to have limited job opportunities and were highly susceptible to developing social phobia.

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Rethinking the evils of current account deficits

Ross Gittins is Rethinking the evils of current account deficits and concludes that the source of the problem of the USA's growing current account deficit is with the PRC:

So the problem is the Asians have been saving more than they want to invest, leaving a surplus that has to be invested somewhere else in the world. Had the Americans not been willing to take those capital inflows - and use them to make up for their dearth of saving relative to investment - the world economy would have been much weaker than it was. Indeed, it would have been in recession.

So that's the "glut of savings" argument. Now, you may object that it's a terribly convenient argument for the free-spending Yanks to be running.

That's obviously true. But, as Mr Macfarlane has argued, it actually fits all the facts better than the story that blames the global imbalance on the US. In particular, it explains why US and world long-term interest rates are so low at present.

If the Americans are having to attract from a reluctant world all the funds needed to finance their big deficits, how come their currency is still quite strong and their long-term interest rates so low?

If the quantity of loanable funds demanded has been rising, how can the price of those funds (long-term interest rates) have been falling? The obvious answer is that the supply curve must have shifted out to the right.

That is, there must have been an increase in the global supply of loanable funds. And there was. For their own reasons, the Asians decided to cut their investment relative to their (amazingly strong) saving.

So, contrary to conventional thinking, the source of the global imbalance is Asia, not America.

The Economist is more pessimistic about this imbalance when they examine the Rebalancing Act (Subscription or purchase required - see 24 Septemebr 2005 Issue, pp.23-24, 'A Survey of the World Economy'):

IF THE first step towards finding a solution is to agree on the problem, the world's policymakers are still a long way from solving the global imbalances. European politicians blame American profligacy, urging Mr Bush's government to cut its budget deficit. Chinese politicians echo those sentiments.

Yet for American lawmakers on Capitol Hill, there is only one villian: China and its undervalued currency. The analysis in the White House is more sophisticated, but still tends to [former US Reserve Bank governor] Mr. [Ben] Bernanke's view that America's current account deficit is not "made in the USA".

The main problem is that:

More important, America's easy access to cheap money is pushing the economy in the wrong direction. Most of the foreign money is going into consumption and housing rather than boosting investment in productive American assets. Building houses does not raise long-term economic growth in the way that equipping a factory does. And the current rate of consumption, fuelled by housing wealth, leaves many indebted consumers at risk. The world as a whole may have savings to spare, but many Americans do not.

Emphasis Mine

And the article concludes that:

... the present [US] deficit is excessive and dangerous. Left alone, it could end in a global recesion, rampant protectionism, and even a disastrous financial crash. That is why policymakers need to act soon. With his "savings glut" speech, Mr. Bernanke focused attention on the scale of the global thrift shift. Now, as one of Mr. Bush's top economic advisors, he should persuade his boss of the importance of making the thrift shift safe.

And speaking of the US Real Estate market, I picked up the following article via Too much debt and too few brains about I'm Tom Barrack and I'm Getting Out . The world's best real estate investor has made billions in the U.S. market. Now he's cashing out and buying overseas.

Today Barrack sees signs of the tech bubble mentality in the U.S. real estate market. Too much capital is chasing real estate, he complains, with hedge funds, private-equity groups, and rich investors all bidding up the same properties. "They've driven prices to the point where the yields on high-quality properties are like the returns on bonds, around 5% or 6%," says Barrack. "That's too low." And he sees the bubble deflating soon. Barrack thinks the catalyst will be a trend that few others are talking about, a steep rise in the price of building materials and labor. "Construction costs have spiked 30% in the past nine months," he says. The reasons: shortages of labor and materials like lumber because of the building boom, and increases in the price of oil, needed to produce everything from plastic piping to insulation to shingles.

In other words, Ross Gittins is talking through his hat. The US ecoonomy is completely stuffed.

My previous posts on this subject were:

• Another Country
• Usama bin Ladin and USA's Credit Bubble.

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More on Riots in Toledo Ohio USA

Pat comments on my post about Riots in Toledo Ohio USA

"The fears of white people has been stoked by the Nazis when they got the black residents to riot."

Douglas, are you suggesting that the responsibility for rioting by black gangs is with the dozen whites who marched in protest over black gangs?

The simple answer is yes and no. The complexity comes from the existence of the racist society in which this event occurred, and from the responsibility of individuals for their actions. If it was reasonable to expect that a march by Nazis through a black neighbourhood would cause a riot, then responsibility for that riot lies with the organisers of the march. Also the members of that neighbourhood could have chosen other ways to protest or stop the march. The problem is that I do not know what options the African-Americans had available to them. They may have tried other methods before without success.

These actions do not occur in a vacuum: there is a historical and political context here of the miasma of racism. A racist society is not a natural state of affairs. It has to be continually maintained and enhanced to keep control of society. The Nazis are not the prime drivers behind racism: they are merely the supporting cast. The real culprits are all those 'nice' people in business suits, wigs, academic gowns, and tweed jackets as they make decisions about who gets hired, who gets gaoled, who gets educated, and whose point of view gets written.

The article has since been updated and is now called Neighbors defend protest over neo-Nazi march which has the following

Much of the anger boiled over because people were upset that city leaders were willing to allow the [white] supremacists to walk through the [African-American] neighborhood and shout insults, residents and authorities said.

"You can’t allow people to come challenge a whole city and not think they weren’t going to strike back," said Kenneth Allen, 47, who watched the violence begin near his home.

...

[Police Chief Mike] Navarre said the riots escalated because members of the National Socialist Movement took their protest to the neighborhood, which is predominantly black, instead of a neutral place. "If this march had occurred in downtown Toledo, we wouldn’t have had the unrest," he said.

...

Neighbors were divided about the city allowing the march.

"They don’t have the right to bring hate to my front yard," said Terrance Anderson, who lives near a bar that was destroyed.

Other neighbors said the group had a right to have their say. "Too bad the people couldn’t ignore them," said Dee Huntley.

Emphasis Mine

I gather that some of the residents and the police thought that the actions of the Nazis were provocative.

Pat's question also brings out the circularity of racism: non-whites reacting to whites reacting to non-whites .... The real culprits in this case is the 'liberal media' who published the stories about the black gangs in the first place.

The real challenge for us is to break out of this circle of hate.

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Riots in Toledo Ohio USA

About 600 Protesters riot at Ohio neo-Nazi march in the town of Toledo. One bar was burnt down. 60 were arrested. A state of emergency and a curfew were declared on Saturday. The immediate cause was:

At least two dozen members of the National Socialist Movement, which calls itself "America’s Nazi Party," had gathered at a city park to march under police protection. Organizers said they were demonstrating against black gangs they said were harassing white residents.

The fears of white people has been stoked by the Nazis when they got the black residents to riot. Thus the original fears have been confirmed.

They were mostly "gang members who had real or imagined grievances and took it as an opportunity to speak in their own way," [Mayor] Ford said.

"I was chagrined that there were obvious mothers and children in the crowd with them," he said.

The article from NBC does not mention race but other sites do. I have been unable to find what the story is from the point of view of the protestors. The stories I have seen so far are from the POV of the mayor.

Were the Nazis trying to provoke what David Brooks feared from The Storm after the Storm?

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Shelter Skelter

In issue #239 (10-25 Oct 2005) of The Big Issue, Chris Middendorp writes in Shelter Skelter (on pp.13-14) that there are at least 200,000 household applications awaiting allocation of public housing in Australia. This represents those who are willing to wait ten years or more for a home of their own. There are cases of people paying $155 per week for rent out of a pension of $190 pw. The author concludes:

... Public housing works best when it consists of ordinary homes in ordinary streets. It's a question of dignity.

From my conversations with housing workers in several Australian states, it's clear that there's a substainal degree of shared insight. While it's certainly true that some people become homeless because of personal predicaments such as domestic violence, drug addiction or a disability, the recurring theme is that with professional support many personal problems are manageable. Most people are able to live the kinds of lives we all accept as our God-given right. To make this possible, people need a place to call home. A home offers an anchor; it offers peace of mind. Public housing allows people ... the chance for a fresh and promising beginning.

The author traces the decline in public housing to the shift in government ideology towards the private rental market. But the author does not expand on this.

I believe that this shift creates a rentier class whose income depends on the rents and capital growth of residental properties. These are not capitalists who risk money in businesses (services or manufacturing) but people who are really parasites on the Capitalist system. The rentiers do not increase the wealth of the economy but rely on the increase in wealth to increase their rents without any investment whatsoever.

From the perspective of the ruling class, the rentiers are more docile than the petite bourgeious, and more reliable in supporting the status quo. Increasing the number of rentiers makes for more dependent people while discouraging the petite bourgeious.

The captalist economy suffers as more capital is removed from productive investments into the dead zone of property investments. The ruling class maintains control by slowly strangling the capitalist economy.

An expanded public housing programme would force this unproductive capital back into the productive parts of the economy. In this case, a socialist policy invigorates the capitalist economy.

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Science Abuse

Boyce Rensberger considers the question of science abuse in his review of The Republican War on Science by Chris Mooney. The online review is at

Scientific American: Science Abuse
Subverting scientific knowledge for short-term gain

The reviewer sees the US Republican Party's attack on unfavourable scientific research as a means of increasing profits for the large corporations in the short term. This is done through encouraging the general public's ignorance of the scientific process by playing up on the lack of consensus by exaggerating disputes within the scientific community.

I think that the problem is more of wilful ignorance by the US public. Jim Kunstler expresses this as a Land of Make Believe where he concludes that:

Another unpleasant truth about the situation is that the US public wants to pretend that everything is okay as much as its leaders do. The public is not so much being misled as demanding that its leaders in government, business, and the news media continue a game of make-believe -- that we can still run a cheap oil economy without cheap oil.

What we are witnessing the death throes of Capitalism in the USA. (Capitalism looks likely to survive in EU and PRC). Science was the rationale for Capitalism. It was not a coincidence that the rise of Science coincided with the rise of Capitalism. Both of these ideologies are materialistic and humanist in their outlook. Both believe that humans could understand and control their environment. This revolutionary idea blew away millenia of religious ignorance to give us the society and associated freedoms that we have today (for the time being at least).

The fight against the rise of religious intolerance under the guise of so-called Christian Fundamentalism is the fight for the very existence of Capitalism. Capitalism requires the intellectual ferment of Science to advance. When Capitalism stagnates or stalls, it dies. It is a dynamic system for dynamic people not for those who want an unchanging world.

Should then Communists cheer on the destruction of Capitalism by this means? NO! We should remember that Socialism evolves from Capitalism under the conscious direction of the Proletariat. We need to defend Capitalism against those who would tear the living heart of Capitalism out and replace it with the cold, dead stone of religious bigotry.

We must throughly understand the nature of Capitalism and see that the next logical step is Socialism where the enthusiasm and drive of the capitalists infuses the Proletartiat and the solidarity of the Proletariat infuses the capitalists so that these two classes merge into one. Workers become owners, and owners become workers.

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Rachel has role to play

Rachel Corrie's parents (Cindy and Craig) write how Rachel has role to play after seeing a play based on the e-mails Rachel received and sent. The play is called My Name is Rachel Corrie and is playing at the Royal Court Theatre in London until 29 October 2005. Her parents conclude the article with:

The month before she was killed, Rachel wrote the following in an email to us: "I look forward to seeing more and more people willing to resist the direction the world is moving in, a direction where our personal experiences are irrelevant, that we are defective, that our communities are not important, that we are powerless, that our future is determined, and that the highest level of humanity is expressed through what we choose to buy at the mall." Action has already flowed from her words.

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Who'd be a suicide bomber?

Kim Bullimore concludes her review of Paradise Now by asking Who’d be a suicide bomber?:

With the "war on terror" in full swing, Paradise Now brings into context a historical and material understanding of why suicide bombings happen. The mainstream corporate media, which rarely mentions the word "occupation" in relation to Palestine, Iraq or Afghanistan, all too often presents suicide bombings in a vacuum and as the irrational act of a deranged Islamic fundamentalist. However, as University of Chicago academic Robert Pape notes, what 95% of suicide bombers have in common is not religion but their opposition to imperialism and occupation.

According to Pape’s study Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, of the 462 suicide bombings carried out since 1980, half were by secular bombers and there is little evidence that they "hate Western values or hate being immersed in Western society". Instead, what they have in common, says Pape, is that "they are deeply angered by military policies, especially combat troops on territory they prize and that they believe they have no other means to change those policies".

It is this anger and resignation that Abu-Assad brings to the screen through Kahled and Said, but he also brings hope for justice and a way to change the dynamics of resistance and occupation through the character of Suha. Paradise Now is a film that should not be missed by anyone interested in understanding the realities of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Italics in original; bold emphasis mine

In other words, suicide bombings are seen by their supporters as patriotic acts of resistence. Communists see them as futile acts because they misunderstand the nature of power in a capitalist society. These acts of terror drive the proletariat into the hands of the capitalists seeking safety. The correct course is to appeal to the solidarity of the international proletariat against their common oppressors.

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LENIN, TROTSKY, AND FREEDOM FROM THE TYRANNY OF KNOWLEDGE AND REASON

Fabian Pascal writes in LENIN, TROTSKY, AND FREEDOM FROM THE TYRANNY OF KNOWLEDGE AND REASON

... I actually lived in a communist state, and studied politics, I have a better understanding of social systems in general, and of the difference between the Soviet and US systems in particular, than US/western armchair ideologues who have neither my experience, nor my education; who pummel their chests in defense of freedom, without a clue as to what that means; who understand neither capitalism, nor communism; and who, my guess is, never bothered to read Lenin and Trotsky, but nevertheless are quick to throw their books at those with whom they cannot sustain any meaningful intellectual argument.

What struck me after living in the US for a while, was the similarity, at a very fundamental level, between the US and Soviet systems: while the means by which they attain their objectives differ, the objectives themselves are, for all practical purposes, the same: control and exploitation of the public. Both systems indoctrinate with propaganda from childhood. But because the Soviet system had coercion at its disposal, the propaganda did not need to be convincing: if you stepped out of line, the government came hard after you. That’s why propaganda could be blatant and absurd, and the public was fully aware of it and did not believe it, only pretended to. That is also one reason why the Soviet system collapsed.

The US system cannot use coercion (well, not at the Soviet level, at any rate, but the way things are going, give it time), so it must rely solely on propaganda, which must be believed. This means it’s got to be very subtle and psychologically simple and attractive, rather than blatant and absurd, to be at once unobtrusive and effective. It’s no coincidence that the mother of marketing and advertising originates here. If you step out of line, the government does not need to come after you: business, the media, and even the public itself will. They cannot jail, torture, or disappear you (the system is testing the waters, though), but they will try to marginalize you, and make it very difficult to function professionally and socially. And at least insofar as members of the public are concerned, they are enforcers without realizing it. Quite elegant.

Otherwise put, under Soviet "communism", everybody must believe without questioning in the party, which almost nobody did; under US "capitalism", everybody must believe without questioning in "the market", which almost everybody does (I use quotes, because neither system is the true thing, as they pretend).

Emphasis Mine

Dr. Pascal is confusing form with function.

Let's clear up a few definitions. The former USSR was a Socialist state not a Communist one. The ruling class in the USSR was the workers (Proletariat). The oppressed classes were the capitalists (mainly small business people and the rich farmers - Kulaks). The lack of democracy in the USSR consolidated the power and privileges of the bureaucratic caste within the Proletariat. This caste monopolised the positions of power within the Communist Party and within the bureaucracy that ran the Soviet economy. To consolidate their power, the bureaucrats needed an external enemy (the Capitalist world) and a series of threats to erode the rights under the Soviet constitution. This mainly happened under Stalin. When Socialism collapsed, the bureaucratic elite became the new Capitalist class with relative ease.

In the case of the USA, there are two (2) major classes: Capitalists and Proletariat. The vast majority of production facilities and businesses are owned by private individuals either directly or through share-holding. From a Marxist point of view, the USA is a Capitalist country. The government regulation exists to stabilise the Capitalist economy by moderating the effects of the boom and bust cycle.

The form of both of these political and economic systems is to maintain the ruling class. In the Soviet Socialist system, it was the bureaucratic caste who usurped the role of the Proletariat. Whereas in the US Capitalist system, the financiers (esp. the international bankers) have usurped the role of the Capitalists. Even though the ruling class in both systems has been usurped, the structure of the economic system remain unchanged and different. The majority of ownership of the factories and businesses was in the hands of the government in the Soviet system, and the majority of the same is in the hands of individuals or family trusts in the US system.

What Dr. Pascal calls propaganda, Marxists would call spiritual production. This is the output of the economic system that does not add to the economic, but, rather, help to justify its existence. For example, all major newspapers and television shows in the Capitalist West do not question the validity of the Capitalist system - they may criticise aspects of the operation of the system in order to get the system working better for some group of people. Any reference to alternate systems are dismissed as dated or out of touch with reality. Failings of the system are presented as the system working to correct itself. Indeed, the market is always correcting itself. This was no different to the spiritual production under teh Soviet system.

As Engels once wrote, the State is ... a body of armed men. All economic systems other than primitive Communism and scientific Communism have a State to enforce the rule of the ruling class whenever the spiritual production proves to be inadequate. Feudalism had its knights and bishops to keep the rule of the lords safe. Barbarism has its warriors and shamans to keep the great unwashed in line. Slavery had its militia and priests to keep the slaves working away for the benefit of decent people. Socialism has its KGB and agitprops to keep the capitalists and large landowners in their place. Capitalism has its police and intellectuals to keep the workers down.

Here Dr. Pascal is mistaken. The US system does use coercion all the time and they are quite blatant about it. The recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are glaring examples of what the USA does to states that do not toe the line with regards to US policy. On the domestic front, the massacres at Waco and Ruby Ridge along with the Rodney King beating among others serves to remind the US poor of their place in the US Capitalist system. It is only when the State starts getting too close for comfort, that people like Dr. Pascal start to get worried.

But this does not detract from the main point that Dr. Pascal makes: that people are wilfully ignorant of the true state of affairs. They get very angry when anyone tries to reveal the underlying reality of the system that they live in. They would prefer to live in the fantasy world created by the spiritual production.

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The Bali bombings: How can such acts be stopped?

Max Lane asks after The Bali bombings: How can such acts be stopped? He gives the main driving force for the bombings as being caused by despair and humiliation:

When Indonesia won its independence in 1945, the country was propelled forward by a sense of hope, a sense that once freed from colonial rule, from the dictatorship of Dutch and other Western commercial interests, the economy could be developed and society would prosper.

Sixty years later, this hope is gone. In 1945, Western colonialism left Indonesia with no education system of any worth, no industry, no scientific or technological capacity. While Europe, North America, Japan and Australia industrialised and modernised during the 19th century and continued to prosper through most of the 20th, Indonesia, like all the Western colonies, was used as a source of cheap raw materials and of coolie labour.

Sixty years later little has changed. The policies of the developed capitalist nations, backed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, have kept Indonesia non-industrialised, poverty stricken and technologically dependent.

Emphasis Mine

His solution is:

Such actions should be condemned as murderous, cruel and wanton and also as ineffective in achieving any change to the lives of Third World peoples. But they will continue as long as the huge gulf of power and wealth between the imperialist West and the underdeveloped, exploited Third World continues.

How to end these attacks? In the end, they will only stop when the movements to end this gulf grow, both in Indonesia and in the developed countries, and become forces that lead people to throw off the humiliation, national oppression and exploitation that the underdeveloped world now suffers.

Here in Australia, the movement against the US-led occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan must grow and force the US, Australia, Britain and other foreign armies out of Iraq and Afghanistan. The movement to "make poverty history" must go beyond an advertising campaign by celebrities and return to the streets, demanding the complete cancellation of the Third World's debt. That is what we can do to stop the continuation of terrorist attacks like those that took place in Bali.

Emphasis Mine

In other words, people with hope are less likely to kill. People with nothing to lose may want to kill as many of their tormentors as possible.

It is very hard to accept that one's lifestyle is based on the brutal exploitation of others. We are all guilty of the oppression of the Indonesians because we have not found a way to stop the exploitation. The guilt for the killings lies with the bombers and their associates. The guilt for their despair and anger lies with us.

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Another Country

Picked this up via Database Debunkings: Jim Kunstler says in Another Country:

Take a good look at America around you now, because when we emerge from the winter of 2005 - 6, we're going to be another country. The reality-oblivious nation of mall hounds, bargain shoppers, happy motorists, Nascar fans, Red State war hawks, and born-again Krispy Kremers is headed into a werewolf-like transformation that will reveal to all the tragic monster we have become.

What we will leave behind is the certainty that we have made the right choices. Was it a good thing to buy a 3,600 square foot house 32 miles outside Minneapolis with an interest-only adjustable rate mortgage -- with natural gas for home heating running at $12 a unit and gasoline over $3 a gallon? Was it the right choice to run three credit cards up to their $5000 limit? Was I chump to think my pension from Acme Airlines would really be there for me? Do I really owe the Middletown Hospital $17,678 for a gall bladder operation that took forty-five minutes? And why did they charge me $238 for a plastic catheter?

Emphasis Mine

He follows up in The Vicious Pincer with:

The political allegiance of the American public will be fully in play. Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum, and we are likely to see the emergence of something new, perhaps something like the British National Party (BNP) which combines a very aggressive agenda on energy policy with overt fascism. The American people will be starved for action, too, and will be waiting for a man of action to embody their desperation. Let's hope that the characters who percolate out of this mess are not maniacs. The outrageously wealthy had better duck-and-cover -- the half-billion-dollar-CEOs, the $20-million-a-picture movie stars, perhaps even the relatively humble drivers of Hummers and Beemers. The sinking middle class will want to eat them.

Emphasis in Original

In other words, FASCISM. Looks like 2006 or 2007 could see the rise of fascism as the petite bourgeious take their revenge on the system. We are living in interesting times. Hope we have the courage to face the challenges of the times.

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Willy Wonka

I got the latest issue of Annals Australasia (August 2005) yesterday and found a review of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by James Murray on p.41. I had recently seen the movie so I was interested to see Mr. Murray had to say:

Not so much a remake, more a re-melt of Roald Dahl's classic tale. Johnny Depp takes on the Willy Wonka role. If Depp - too many teeth and smiles - does not have the inward weirdness of Gene Wilder in the original, he does have a back story to explain his chocaholicism.

This is one of the fresh elements introduced by director Tim Burton and writer John August. Special effects are deployed as generously as fruit and nuts in a Cadbury's bar. Deep Roy creates some kind of history with his multiple roles as Oompa Loompa (courtesy Digital Domain).

Freddie Highmore, allies ingenuousness to shrewdness as Charlie Bucket, winner of the last of five gold tickets to the Wonka factory. He is shaded by Annasophia Robb as Violet Beauregarde. The veteran, but exuberant, David Kelly is Grandpa Joe who accompanies Charlie on his factory outing. Noah Taylor makes an appearance as Mr Bucket with Helena Bonham Carter as his wife. Not a single bad performance. And never a dull moment

Nothing controversial there. Mr. Murray had also written a review (ibid.) about Kung Fu Hustle, which ends with:

... [Director Stephen Chow] sends up the hyper-violence of the kung fu genre and, despite his movie's ostensible setting in pre-revolutionary China, he gets in digs at the pretensions of China's current regime.

Emphasis Mine

James Murray can see political implications for criticisms of Communism but not of Capitalism nor Racism. In contrast, Jonathan McIntosh wrote about Willy Wonka and the Racism Factory

Moreover, the Oompa-Loompas all look exactly alike, as they are played by one actor using composite visual effects. This is a new invention by the current film's creators. The visual effect is ironic as it displays the problems at the very core of global labor issues: white populations perceive individuals of non-white populations as identical and all looking alike, lacking individual dignity. In this view, factory and sweatshop workers are ascribed no individual worth outside of the product they produce for consumers at low pay and in poor working conditions, unable to organize, form unions and improve conditions.

Many will no doubt respond to this critique disparagingly. They will say that the movie is just that, a movie. They will state that it has no social connection or cultural implications to the present western mindset. However, it is important to consider that Roald Dahl himself eventually made revisions of his story to meet the racial concerns that accompanied the changing social ethics in 1973. The fact that, in 2005, Tim Burton chose to revert back to the original description of the Oompa-Loompas as primitive "pygmies" is troubling at best. Burton has said in interviews that one of the things that attracts him to Dalh's work is the "politically incorrect" subject matter. Audiences all over the country seem to feel the same attraction.

Emphasis Mine

One reviewer sees nothing innocuous while the other sees blatant racism. This is akin to what Tim Wise wrote about White Whine: Reflections on the Brain-Rotting Properties of Privilege when whites cannot see the privileges that racism gives them.

Now for my review. The movie is propaganda for monopoly paternal Capitalism similar to that I wrote about in Robots except that the petite bourgeious are not a major player. The Capitalist is the hero - everyone else is a bit player. The Capitalist is the benevolent leader.

Willy Wonka's story begins with a youth devoted to discovering the perfect chocolate confectionery. He is seen to be following a scientific process of analysing confectioneries to discover their secrets. (Genius is 1% inspiration, and 99% perspiration, Thomas Alva Edison) He starts as a small businessman who suceeds magnificiently by providing a superior product to his customers. He then builds the world's largest factory. He has obtained a monopoly position through his superior product. This is one of the contradictions in Capitalism: competition produces monopolies. The standard solution to this problem is government intervention: either through regulation or destruction of the monopoly. In this movie, the government does not exist!

In the movie, it was the treacherous workers who pass on the secret recipes to others who become Wonka's competitors and thereby destroy Wonka's monopoly. (In the real world, I understand that the Coke-Cola Company has managed to hold onto its secrets for more than a century!) In revenge, he sacks all of his workers and shuts the factory. The workers are dispensible in true Capitalist fashion. However, it was the workers who restored competition to the confectionery industry with multiple small businesses emerging to service niche markets.

Willy Wonka is a bad capitalist for his primary concern is not the accumulation of capital but the quest for better confectionery. Indeed, the other capitalist in the movie (Mr. Salt - owner of the nut shelling factory) can disrupt the production of his factory for three days without any thought for lost profits. It is as if the mega-rich do not have to worry about business cycles. The attitude of Willy Wonka and Mr. Salt is that business is a dalliance. They do not have to worry about competitors making more money than them. Their capital is secure.

The toothpaste factory owners, on the other hand, are involved in the investment cycle. The increase profits allow for investment in machinery which allows for greater profits by reducing costs (read Mr. Bucket).

There is another difference between the three factories shown in the movie: the happy workers are shown in Mr. Wonka's factory while the mind-numbing drudgery is shown in the nut-shelling and toothpaste factories. Could this be a sublimial message that happy workers make more profits?

The workers cease to exist once pass outside the factory gates. The visibility of the poor is limited to one family (the Buckets). There is no social security. They have enough land to grow cabbages for making soup. Charlie shines shoes. The solution to their poverty is for them to get a better job. Mr. Bucket shows up at the toothpaste factory from where he was fired and gets a job as a robot technician. For a person without having showed any mechanical aptitude nor having undertaken any training to do this seems to be incredible. A more realistic scenario would have been for him to become a computer programmer. (This is me being snarky). They are suddenly seen to be having roast turkey for dinner. The message is that the poor are poor because they are lazy.

However, the workers are unable to look after themselves. They need the capitalist to guide them and provide them with the means of sustenance. This is the crisis that confronts Willy Wonka when he discovers a grey hair reminding him of his mortality. Who will look after his workers when he is gone? He needs a successor to carry on the running of the factory. Willy Wonka is who he is because he struggled to master the art of confectionery making whereas Charlie struggled to survive. This transfer of experience always seems to be difficult. Witness James Packer in PBL. Lachlan Murdoch probably made a better decision to strike out on his own.

All in all, the message of the movie is that the Capitalist is benevolent. Except for the preemptory treatment of the workers and the insulting lack of hospitality of Willy Wonka towards his guests when he publicly humilates them. The mega-rich are obviously beyond caring about others. Could the real message be that the mega-rich are all bastards?

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Revolution in Venezuela

An eyewitness account

IN July and August, 58 mostly young people participated in the first Australia-Venezuela Solidarity Brigade. Their mission: to experience firsthand the inspiration of the first people’s power revolution of the 21st century, and to bring home its message of hope, solidarity and humanity. Don’t miss this eyewitness reportback! A short film on the Venezuelan revolution, Enter the Oil Workers, will also be shown.

Penrith Old School of Arts Bldg
Castleraegh St, Penrith (near Penrith RSL)
Cost $10/6 conc.
Includes finger food & one drink- no alcohol
Sat October 15, 6.30pm
BOOKINGS
ph 4721 5045 or 0425 249 996

Australia-Venezuela Solidarity Network

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Attitude Mama

Pat describes a waitress as an Attitude mama. From what Pat describes, I see an example of alienation:

Marx went on to show that the specific form of labour characteristic of bourgeois society, wage labour, corresponds to the most profound form of alienation. Since wage workers sell their labour power to earn a living, and the capitalist owns the labour process, the product of the workers’ labour is in a very real sense alien to the worker. It is not her product but the product of the capitalist. The worker makes a rod for her own back.

Once a product enters the market, no-one has any control of it, and it sets off on a course which appears to be governed by supra-human laws.

Emphasis Mine

In other words, the waitress has sold her time to the cafe owner for a certain amount of money. All she has to do is the minimum in order to keep the cafe owner employing her. If she does fantastic service and brings more customers into the cafe, the cafe owner reaps most of the benefit. She may get some of that benefit in a future pay rise. Even the cafe owner does not get all of the benefit: some of the extra income will go in taxes, and some will go in a rent increase because the booming cafe business makes the shop more valuable. The cafe owner's labour is therefore less alienated than his staff.

Alienation happens in other ways as well. The cafe owner makes all of the decisions. The staff have little, if any, say in what decisions are made. Even their opinions may not be welcomed. Indeed, the wrong opinion could get the worker fired from the job. When you get employed, you leave your democratic rights at the door. But how can it be otherwise when you have private ownership of businesses? The owner is taking all the risks of the business. If the business goes bankrupt, he will lose everything: his house, superannuation, any savings, his family to divorce, and, sometimes, his life by suicide.

A better way would be to share the risks. In sharing the risks, the decison-making has to be shared as well as the benefits.

... Alienation can be overcome by restoring the truly human relationship to the labour process, by people working in order to meet people's needs, working as an expression of their own human nature, not just to earn a living.

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Muhammed Ali Says

Mickey Z. has the following quote from Muhammad Ali:

Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality…If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail, so what? We’ve been in jail for 400 years.

Emphasis Mine

I post this in response to those pro-war types who say that the battle for freedom is in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. However, the real enemy of freedom is right at home when Terror law clauses seal the deal

"We have agreed today on unusual laws for Australia, we have done that because we live in unusual circumstances," [PM John Howard] told reporters.

"In other circumstances I would never have sought these additional powers, I would never have asked the premiers of the Australian states to support me in enacting these laws.

"But we do live in very dangerous and different and threatening circumstances and a strong and comprehensive response is needed."

Emphasis Mine

I agree with the PM on the last paragraph even though we disagree on who the enemy of freedom is.

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More Iraq War

Time Magazine poses the unthinkable question to the US ruling class: Is It Too Late To Win the War?. The magazine leads with a story about the US Army Chasing the Ghosts (Subscription Required) and details Saddam's Revenge in The secret history of U.S. mistakes, misjudgments and intelligence failures that let the Iraqi dictator and his allies launch an insurgency now ripping Iraq apart. Their answer is Yes

James Wolcott (Vanity Fair contributing editor) is of the opinion that the USA is headed for severe Systems Failures. He quotes William S. Lind makes some Important Distinctions between the Iraq War and the Vietnam War:

"The primum mobile of Fourth Generation war is a crisis of legitimacy of the state. If the absence of a loyal opposition and alternative courses of action further delegitimizes the American state in the eye of the public, the forces of the Fourth Generation will have won a victory of far greater proportions than anything that could happen on the ground in Iraq. The Soviet Union's defeat in Afghanistan played a central role in the collapse of the Soviet state. Could the American defeat in Iraq have similar consequences here? The chance is far greater than Washington elites can imagine."

Emphasis Mine

The US ruling class is facing a crisis of legitimacy which is being exacerbated by:

• Stalemate in Iraq
• Enormous damage caused by hurricanes and government ineptitude
• Two million displaced persons within the USA due to the hurricanes
• Energy crisis caused by the hurricanes, war in Iraq, limited refining capacity, and possibly 'peak oil'
• The Housing Bubble
• The growing US national debt
• PRC's economic growth
• Survival of the Cuban Revolution
• Success of the Venezulean Revolution

And yet, approx. 40% of Americans think it is in their best interest to support the current regime. They may be enough to keep the current regime safe for it is better to have one person supports you and does something about it, than ten people who are against you and are not going to do anything about it. The trick to ruling is to keep those ten sitting on the couch.

James Wolcott also bemoans the mixed messages and staleness of the slogans of the anti-war demonstrators. My answer is that democracy is messy while fascism can get everybody marching in straight lines with nice uniforms and a unified message. I would much rather have the messiness of democracy than the singlemindedness of fascism. Getting disparate groups of people to agree on anything is almost impossible. That's tolerance in democracy is so important. Those slogans are the results of protracted negotiations and compromises - which is why everyone falls back to the tried and true ones.

My opinion about the future of the USA is the rise of fascism after the severe economic shock of debt and the coming defeat in Iraq. There is a sufficient number of people who believe that all of their problems stem from moral laxity and backstabbing by the liberal elites. The white puritanical Christians (Protestant and Catholic) will form the backbone of this movement.

Prof Juan Cole explains Why we Have to get the Troops Out of Iraq now:

The first reason to get the ground troops out now is that they are being fatally brutalized by their own treatment of Iraqi prisoners. Abu Ghraib was horrific, and we who are not in Congress or the Department of Defense have still only seen a fraction of the photographs of it that exist. Sy Hersh learned of rapes, some of them documented. ...

The second reason is that the ground troops are not accomplishing the mission given them, and are making things worse rather than better.

...

Let's get them out, now, before they destroy any more cities, create any more hundreds of thousands of internally displaced persons, provoke any more ethnic hatreds by installing Shiite police in Fallujah or Kurdish troops in Turkmen Tal Afar. They are sowing a vast whirlwind, a desert sandstorm of Martian proportions, which future generations of Americans and Iraqis will reap.

The ground troops must come out. Now. For the good of Iraq. For the good of America.

Emphasis Mine

I don't think the US ruling class is too worried abou the brutalisation of the US troops. They would rather it kept growing. Brutalised US troops could come in useful when quelling domestic uprisings. Then the US troops would not be squeamish about pulling the trigger on fellow US citizens - even whites!

The mission in Iraq is to be brutal. The USA can no longer rule by guile and through proxies. It has to demonstrate unflinching brutality to the rest of the world. They have to prove that they are meaner than a junkyard dog. The message is Don't Mess with the USA!. The problem is that this conflicts the US's self-image as a nice guy (for most of them anyway).

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More Nonviolence

Gerry is Still troubled... by contradictions within the nonviolence movement.

I think there are people in the nonviolence movement who condone provocation, sabotage, vandalism, and violent retaliation as acceptable methods, either because for them the end justifies the means, or that if they receive violence that they are are entitled to return it. This bothers me hugely. And I don't think the nonviolence movement, as a movement, does enough to clearly distance and disassociate itself from protestors and activists who do advocate and employ these methods. I think there are double standards and it makes me want to withdraw from the movement. ...

From the Wikipedia article on Nonviolence, I think Gerry's concerns can be best expressed as

Also of primary significance is the notion that just means are the most likely to lead to just ends. When Gandhi said that, "the means may be likened to the seed, the end to a tree," he expressed the philosophical kernel of what some refer to as prefigurative politics. Proponents of nonviolence reason that the actions we take in the present inevitably re-shape the social order in like form. They would argue, for instance, that it is fundamentally irrational to use violence to achieve a peaceful society.

Emphasis Mine

In other words, if you see violence as a tool to achieve your ends, then you will use violence to attain and maintain those ends. Nonviolence urges you to think of creative ways of achieving your ends without the use of violence.

In the same Wikipedia article, among the selected criticisms of nonviolence,

Malcolm X also clashed with civil rights leaders over the issue of nonviolence, arguing that violence should not be ruled out where no other option remained:

Concerning nonviolence, it is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks.

I think Gerry is looking for what we Communists call the perfect party programme. There are people who search for the party that has the exact same ideas as themselves. However, the nonviolence movement has no such party programme: it is a collection of groups. There is no central committee deciding policy. As the nonviolence movement is unstructured, one can only influence it by being engaged with it.

Instead of seeking ideological purity, I think a better approach is to know what areas of agreement are and what the areas of disagreement are. The question is then can you live with those areas of disagreement? Earlier in the same Wikipedia article, there is this:

Finally, the notion of Satya, or truth, is central to the Gandhian conception of nonviolence. Gandhi saw truth as something that is multifaceted and unable to be grasped in its entirety by any one individual. We all carry pieces of the truth, he believed, but we need the pieces of others’ truths in order to pursue the greater truth. This led him to a belief in the inherent worth of dialogue with opponents, and a sincere wish to understand their drives and motivations. On a practical level, willingness to listen to another's point of view is largely dependent on reciprocity. In order to be heard by one's opponents, one must also be prepared to listen.

Emphasis Mine

In other words, by going to meetings, attending protests, practising nonviolence, engaging others who disagree with you, can one make some changes in others and in one's self. Change happens through engagement not through withdrawal.

For the record, I restate my position on nonviolence: all political actions should be planned with nonviolence as the guiding principle but I reserve the right to defend myself and innocent people against violent attack.

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Blogrolling 1

One of the good things about eBlogger is the next blog button. You can end up in unexpected places. Today's journey has been to:

1. Ken Foster as he describes life as a refugee from New Orleans.
2. Hey from Haebangchon! is where Bryan Hughes describes life as an English teacher in Seoul, Korea.
3. I skipped an advertisement blog
4. I Have I(rritable)B(owel)S(yndrome) says Andrew James Price in his more personal blog.
5. Alien Life is where Rob Bignell posts links to interesting science news stories about space.
6. just muttering has an interesting post about how The world is two blocks big in which the blogger discovers a neighbour through blogs.
7. Post-Darwinist blog by Denyse O'Leary defending Intelligent Design.
8. Ben Dakhlia's bLoG appears to be from Brussels and he is fascinated by photographs from Google Earth
9. A Crafty Mom's Blog describes the life of her young son and the various crafts that she and her husband produce.
10. I skipped yet another advertisement blog
11. USC Trojans Blog - Personals is a place for personal advertisements from anyone!
12. Watermark Student Ministries Experience contains videos, tunes, and notices for upcoming events for Christian evangelists.

And the chain ended there.

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Troops Out of Iraq

There is an important debate going on between Michael Schwartz who is arguing for an immediate withdrawal of the occupation troops in Tomgram: Michael Schwartz on Immediate Withdrawal. He argues that

...it is far more reasonable, based on what we now know, to assume that if the U.S. were to leave Iraq quickly, the level of violence would be reduced, possibly drastically, not heightened. Here are the four key reasons:

1. The U.S. military is already killing more civilian Iraqis than would likely die in any threatened civil war;

2. The U.S. presence is actually aggravating terrorist (Iraqi-on-Iraqi) violence, not suppressing it;

3. Much of the current terrorist violence would be likely to subside if the U.S. left;

4. The longer the U.S. stays, the more likely that scenarios involving an authentic civil war will prove accurate.

Prof Juan Cole rejoins with Schwartz: US out Now

I'd get most of the US ground troops out, and just cede Tal Afar to whoever is in Tal Afar. But I think the US [or somebody, and unfortunately that means the US] has a duty to maintain a couple of air bases in the area along with some Special Ops forces to forestall a Himalayan tragedy in the near to medium term. Over time the US will be able (and will be forced) to leave altogether.

Of course, I'd be much happier if we could get US ground troops out on a short timetable and have the peace-enforcing done by the United Nations or even NATO. But that isn't going to happen, so the use of air power to stop a full-fledged civil war falls to the US.

So I can associate myself with a call for US ground troops out now. But frankly I think it would be selfish to just bust into Iraq (which 75 percent of Americans supported), turn it upside down, set it on a course toward civil war, and then abruptly pick up our marbles and go home altogether. We did that in Afghanistan after 1989, and it did not turn out well for us.

Gilbert Achcar reponds to Prof. Cole's arguments and Prof. Cole responds to that response at Achcar Responds. Gilbert Achcar concludes

... At no point did you refer to the will of the main people concerned: the Iraqis themselves. On this score, if we assume that the overwhelming majorities of the Kurds and the Arab Sunnis have symmetrically opposed positions on the presence of occupation troops, this would leave us with the Arab Shiites who are clearly divided on the matter, between those who agree on the temporary presence of foreign troops and those who want them out immediately.

I won’t try to assert that an increasing majority of the Shiites are for the latter position, not due to a lack of arguments, but because it amounts again to a vain guessing game. It should be sufficient that there is definitely no consensus on the occupation among Iraqis, and that a very substantial portion of the Iraqi population, at the very least, wants occupation forces out – including the overwhelming majority of those in whose territory occupation forces are most active militarily – to induce every democratic-minded person to join the marchers in demanding that occupation troops be brought home now.

And Prof. Cole concludes his response with

As for the Iraqis' desires with regard to a continued US military presence, they clearly have mixed opinions, as you say. But the elected leaders have not called for a precipitate withdrawal. I have no reason to believe that Massoud Barzani, Jalal Talabani, Ibrahim Jaafari, and Abdul Aziz al-Hakim came to power through fraud in the January 30 elections. The Iraqi political elite more surely represents is public than any other government in the Arab world. Talabani speaks of a two-year timetable for US presence in the country. Jaafari has repeatedly said that it is not time for the US to leave, but one of his advisers has proposed a gradual withdrawal of Coalition forces from the cities. If Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani wanted the US out, he would give a fatwa, and I believe that the US would not be able to stay if that happened. So far, the Sunni Arabs (15? percent of the population) and the Sadrists (hard to know what percentage they represent) want the US out immediately and completely. As you yourself have kindly pointed out, about 120 parliamentarians have called for it out of 275 last I heard.

So my position, that it would be irresponsible of the US to simply abandon Iraq altogether and immediately, is actually fairly similar to the consensus of the elected Iraqi leadership. If anything, I am more eager to see US ground troops out on a short timetable than they seem to be.

These posts encompass a great deal of reading and breadth of discussion. I think I understand about 50% of it. Prof. Cole's position is that the US has a responsibility to stop the civil war in Iraq. Mr. Schwartz and Mr. Archar contend that the US is killing far more than in any civil war. My own opinion is that this whole argument is academic: the only way the US is going to leave Iraq is in a coffin. The current Iraq war is of such vital importance to US ruling class interests that withdrawal cannot be contemplated. This war is a desperate gamble for continued global supermacy by a declining imperial power.

In a historical parallel, Emperor Julian invaded Mesopotamia (Iraq) in order to shore up declining Roman power against the rising Sassanian (Iranian) power and got beaten. See Reader's Companion to Military History - - Julian

...Julian invaded Mesopotamia (March 363); his goal was to reassert Roman power against an ascendant Sassanian Persia. Julian's strategy—which depended on deception, speed, coordination of two armies and a large river fleet, and the execution of a complex pincers movement—proved overly complex. He failed to capture the Persian capital of Ctesiphon, lost momentum during a hungry retreat up the Tigris, and was killed (June 363) during a skirmish. Julian's failure led to long-term Persian gains in the East ...

The parallel is about strategic necessarity of invasion not of outcome. You are not going to see GWB dying in battle.

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