Unions on Death Row

The Capitalist's wet dream continues in Unions on death row, says minister.

Unions face extinction unless they bend to the new workplace regime and accept individual work contracts, the Federal Government has warned.

The article concludes with:

Mr Andrews [Federal Employment Minister] said unions "definitely" served a useful purpose, provided they acted lawfully.

The translation is "do as we ask, and we might let you play in the game." The workers determine the relevance of the unions not the government nor the bosses. As long as the workers are prepared to fight, the unions prosper. When the dead hand of union bureauracy descends, then does the union start to die.

This idea of being nice is really surrendering to the bosses. The bosses are ruthless and cunning. They know that they are few. Their only hope is to divide us in order to keep us subjugated.

Read more!

Mongoli

On February 2, 2005, Paul McGeough wrote, in Handicapped boy who was made into a bomb,

Amar Ahmed Mohammed was 19 years old. But the fact that he had the mind of a four-year-old did not stop the insurgency's hard men as they strapped explosives to his chest and guided him to a voting centre in suburban Al-Askan.

I have several different thoughts on this:

• Amar may have been glad to have been considered for this role. Instead of being treated as a child, he was given an adult role (that of suicide bomber). He may have tried to remove the vest when the game became boring.
• The comtempt in which those of us who are below normal could well have been the motivating factor. His killers would have been normal people who think that keeping people like Amar alive is a waste of time and effort. Those people are very forward in expressing these sorts of opinions. Some of them did something about it.

Read more!

Don't Believe the Liberal Media

Don't believe the Liberal Media! The so-called liberal newspaper in Australia, Sydney Morning Herald, heads its editorial, The Challenge for Beazley, with:

Kim Beazley's recognition that Labor must focus on the creation of economic wealth, ahead of questions of how it is redistributed, is a welcome statement of intentions.

This is why the ALP is known as Another Liberal Party.

As Michael Moore says, "The rich have two political parties, the poor should have a political party as well."

Read more!

No Tomorrow

The lunacy of the Rapture crowd is explored by Bill Moyers in No Tomorrow

Because these people believe that until Christ does return, the Lord will provide. One of their texts is a high school history book, "America's Providential History." You'll find there these words: "The secular or socialist has a limited-resource mentality and views the world as a pie ... that needs to be cut up so everyone can get a piece." However, "[t]he Christian knows that the potential in God is unlimited and that there is no shortage of resources in God's earth ... while many secularists view the world as overpopulated, Christians know that God has made the earth sufficiently large with plenty of resources to accommodate all of the people."

No wonder Karl Rove goes around the White House whistling that militant hymn, "Onward Christian Soldiers." He turned out millions of the foot soldiers on Nov. 2, including many who have made the apocalypse a powerful driving force in modern American politics.

These Christians are to be condemned because they failed to be good stewards of the earth.

Read more!

Now to bury the Latham obsession with class warfare

Peter Hartcher writes, in Now to bury the Latham obsession with class warfare, that:

Kim Beazley has set out three new approaches in Labor's strategy. All three seek to move Labor from the cutting edge of Latham Labor and into the safe centre of Australian politics.

First, he has taken the ideology out of the contest for national government. Like John Howard, he stresses the egalitarian nature of the Australian spirit and disavowed any hint of class warfare, stepping away from some of the divisiveness of Mark Latham's Labor.

Class warfare is a fact of life under Capitalism. The rich are still oppressing the poor. What Peter Hartcher is saying that the poor should give up fighting back and let the rich win.

Peter Hartcher may have taken his thirty pieces of silver and is urging us 'dead-enders' to submit to the inevitability of imperial control but I have not nor have billions of others. We are all fighting back in our own way at present. One day we may join together in larger and larger numbers to really start class warfare on our terms not the ruling class's terms.

Read more!

How Not to Build Bridges

Zeynep Toufe writes in How Not to Build Bridges that:

...a man got up and identified himself as a post office worker from France and said that outsourcing was a real problem for them, and that jobs were being sent off to the mostly Arab and African French-speaking countries. And then, without even seeming to take note of the irony that those countries spoke French because of France's past colonial practices, pretty brutal ones at that, he said that wanted to draw attention to how call center workers in Morocco were being told to adopt French pseudonyms at the workplace, and how this was depriving them of their identity.

Yes, the postal worker was insensitive, but he do show up at the WSF instead of joining the National Front. Baby steps! Baby steps! Not all of us are born sensitive and progressive. Some of our journeys take many twists and turns. The direct path is only seen after we have arrived.

Read more!

The blame game has gone too far

Caspar Conde writes in The blame game has gone too far when governments become guardians that:

When a population is encouraged to depend on government to protect it from risks, personal dignity is threatened and the principle of limited government disappears. Before World War I, the federal government passed an average of 23 new pieces of legislation each year. Today, that has risen to average 178. As time goes by we become increasingly regulated and monitored, which means we lose the habit of self-reliance.

The clearest example of this is the growth of the welfare state, the ultimate government risk-minimisation strategy.

In 1965, only 3 per cent of working-age adults relied on welfare payments as their primary source of income. Today, that figure is 16 per cent, or one in six people.

The less we are required to look after ourselves, the more government assumes the task for us.

Emphasis Mine

In other words, the dreaded NANNY STATE.

Welfare state is insurance for all of us in case things go wrong. With insurance, we can take greater, not lesser, risks. What Caspar Conde is describing is the crushing effect of the Capitalist system on ordinary people.

When people lose control over their lives, they become crushed and alienated from each other. What we need to do is take control of our lives back from the corporations and the monied politicians by taking control of the factories and the work places. Democracy, not Autocracy, in the work place!

Read more!

U.S. Encouraged by Vietnam Vote

At U.S. Encouraged by Vietnam Vote, Rahul Mahajan reproduces an article from the New York Times about the high turn-out (80%+) for elections in 1967 (eight (8) months before the Tet Offensive). This article is appearing all over the blogosphere (the progressive ones at least). So why not here?

The hubris by this vote made the shock of the Tet Offensive so much greater. In Walter Cronkite's famous quote:

I thought we were winning this war!

In other news (picked up via Eschaton), a British aircraft is brought down either by a missile or a bomb. Either way, it is more bad news for the supply lines between the bases in Iraq. The roads are almost impassable due to the threat of ambush. Now the air and/or airfields are unsafe. If the resistance can plant a bomb aboard a military aircraft without being noticed, then the security at these airfields is worse than at O'Hare Airport on 11 September 2001.

Read more!

Iraq's real resistance fights back

Gerard Henderson, of the Sydney Institute, writes, in Iraq's real resistance fights back that:

In Australia the leading barracker for the Iraqi resistance is the Green Left Weekly. On January 28 last year the GLW published an interview between Pip Hinman and the Australian-born left-wing journalist John Pilger. GLW asked: "Do you think the anti-war movement should be supporting Iraq's anti-occupation resistance?" Pilger replied: "Yes, I do. You cannot afford to be choosy. While we abhor and condemn the continuing loss of innocent life in Iraq, we have no choice now but to support the resistance." No ambiguity there.

Then, on November 3 last year, GLW ran a feature story on the Indian writer and leftist activist Arundhati Roy headlined, "Why we should support Iraqi resistance". This followed Roy's appearance on Andrew Denton's ABC TV Enough Rope program, where she argued that we have to "understand that Iraq is engaging on the front lines of empire" and maintained that, consequently, "we have to throw our weight behind the resistance".

The main complaint is that critics of the war (like me) have no constructive suggestions. This is the standard ploy of the ruling class: T.I.N.A. (There Is No Alternative).

Here are my suggestions:

• All foreign troops out of Iraq;
• USD 60,000,000,000 in compensation to the Iraqi people from the invaders: USA, UK, and Australia;
• Immediate and unconditional recognition of whatever government the Iraqi people decide on;
• Immediate voiding of all orders made by the Coalition Provisional Authority without compensation to the affected parties;
• The investigation by the International War Crimes Tribunal of the following among others:
• Sadaam Hussien;
• Tariq Aziz;
• George Herbert Bush;
• Danforth Quayle;
• Richard Cheney;
• William Jefferson Clinton;
• Al Gore;
• Madelaine Albright;
• George Walker Bush;
• Colin Powell;
• John Winston Howard;
• Tony Blair
• Cancellation of Iraq's debts;
• Iraq is able to nominate the currency it receives for its oil exports;
• Removal of all foreign bases from Iraq;
• Control of Iraq's airspace to return to the Iraqi government;
• All mercenaries (aka military contractors) to be handed to the Iraqi police for interrogation in respect to crimes the mercenaries may have committed while in Iraq;
• All foreign governments to accede to requests for extradition of said mercenaries to Iraq;
• Possible adjustment of Iraq's boundaries:
• Integration of Kuwait into Iraq;
• Seccession of Kurdistan;

Read more!

Bagging Fundies

The bagging of fundamentalists continue at SpongeBob Update: Focus On The Family targets Keith Olbermann with the quote:

I showed respect even though I disagreed with you and yet you have the audacity to call me intelligent.

This blog quotes another blog post that lists even more mistakes.

On a personal note, I have met fundamentalists who are quite learned in ancient languages like Aramaic, Greek, and Latin. They have done their own translations and are very erudite in their exigesis. Also, there is the rent-a-mob who know what slogans to chant and when to show up.

In fact, the Christian Fundamentalists are like every other political movement with their intellectuals and their thugs and everyone else in between. They have their true believers and their opportunists.

Read more!

No job no excuse for turning down sex work

In No job no excuse for turning down sex work, it is revealed that:

A 25-year-old waitress who turned down a job providing "sexual services" at a brothel in Berlin faces cuts to her unemployment benefit under laws introduced this year.

This is because

Under Germany's welfare reforms, any woman under 55 who has been out of work for more than a year can be forced to take an available job or lose her unemployment benefit. ...

So much for human dignity. Workfare is just punishment for being cast as a failure. Don't punish the oppressors, punish the oppressed! Since the system is run by the oppressors, how can you expect anything else?

Read more!

Beyond Tomorrow in Iraq

Jim Hoagland writes, in Beyond Tomorrow in Iraq: Elections Are the Start of What Was Once Deemed Unachievable,

For nearly two years, they have followed the patient "quietist" leadership of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and defied the predictions that they would do unto the Sunni Arab minority as they were done unto, by launching pogroms and a civil war of vengeance. They have instead stoically tolerated the religious war directed at them by the intermingled forces of Salafi extremists and Baathist remnants.

and

The election serves to define and limit the reach of the dead hand of the past, which must be understood and remembered so it will not be repeated. But the election also opens a future in which Iraqis and Americans should move rapidly to end a misbegotten military occupation that has become a liability for nearly everyone.

What is unsaid in this opinion piece is that, if Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani cannot get the Americans to withdraw, then he is finished politically in Iraq. The Ayatollah has invested considerable prestige in getting the Americans to agree to these elections, and has, for the time, being sidelined his main rival, Moqtada al-Sadr.

For the US administration, any meaningful withdrawal is an admission of defeat. They went into Iraq to prove that US military might is unbeatable. Retreat from Iraq will be seen in the same light as the Israeli retreat from Lebanon. With the collapse of the myth of US invincibility (again) will come the collapse of the US economy.

The best thing Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani to hope for is to lose this election so that the blame for the failure to secure the withdrawal of the US forces will not fall upon his head (possibly literally!). He will have to concede political power to Moqtada al-Sadr in order to survive. This would entail supporting the Iraqi Shiite military and political resistance to the occupation.

All the Americans have brought with these elections is a postponement of the spread of the Iraqi resistance to after the US presidental elections. This is good enough for the current administration. The mid-term congressional elections are still 21 months away.

Read more!

God Blessed America

At RaptureReady, there is this cartoon by John Rule, God Blessed America, that has the following captions:

• Our pets eat better than over half of the people in the world
• When there's enough to clothe a small village
• If you are an American and have any assets at all, 92% of the world's population has less than you
• If you know Jesus, you have eternal life
• We have so much to be thankful for!

In general, I find the idea of Rapture distasteful because it is cheap grace. Those who subscribe to this idea are those who are very reluctant to take up their cross and follow Jesus to the death (literally). They think they can talk the talk without walking the walk along the Via Dolorosa.

I wonder how would these Christians would pass the test of Job in the first chapter of the Book of Job.

9. But Satan answered the LORD and said, "Is it for nothing that Job is God-fearing?
10. Have you not surrounded him and his family and all that he has with your protection? You have blessed the work of his hands, and his livestock are spread over the land.
11. But now put forth your hand and touch anything that he has, and surely he will blaspheme you to your face."

Where do these Christians think all that wealth comes from? Does it float down like manna from heaven and lie on the ground waiting to be picked up? They turn a deaf ear to the anguish of the poor, near and far, as the wealth is ground out of the poor.

The sixth chapter of the Book of Jeremiah would have God say

11. Therefore my wrath brims up within me, I am weary of holding it in; I will pour it out upon the child in the street, upon the young men gathered together. Yes, all will be taken, husband and wife, graybeard with ancient.
12. Their houses will fall to strangers, their fields and their wives as well; For I will stretch forth my hand against those who dwell in this land, says the LORD.
13. Small and great alike, all are greedy for gain; prophet and priest, all practice fraud.
14. They would repair, as though it were nought, the injury to my people: "Peace, peace!" they say, though there is no peace.
15. They are odious; they have done abominable things, yet they are not at all ashamed, they know not how to blush. Hence they shall be among those who fall; in their time of punishment they shall go down, says the LORD.

For these verses speak of all who live in the Western world (including me). These was no shame over Ahu Gahrib, no repentance over the Iraq war. The scandals of Enron, WorldCom, Arthur Andersen, Bond Holdings still are there.

Read more!

Iraq and the American Revolution

Let's consider the American Revolution (1775-1783). If the British occupying force had set up elections for a continental congress of its own to counter to the growing insurgency, what legitimacy would a constitution drawn up by such a congress would have? The answer is none. So how can the elections for a constitutional convention in Iraq now be legitimate when it is run by the occupation forces?

Read more!

Iraqi Election Violence in Australia

CBS News carried the story Iraq Exile Voters Fight Protesters

Underscoring security concerns, protesters in Australia, identified by ballot organizers as Wahhabis — followers of an austere brand of Sunni Islam suspected of having influence over militants in Iraq — yelled insults at voters.

The Sunday Telegraph in Australia had the story as Fight breaks out at Sydney polling booths.

Police cordoned-off Queen St, Auburn, after a violent scuffle broke out between supporters of terrorist leader Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi and advocates of democracy.

When, in fact, as the Sydney Morning Herald reported in the story Democracy dawns with a shove in a Sydney queue, they were Communists.

The local election was not unopposed. On the other side of the street, a group called the Workers' Communist Party of Iraq called on people through loudhailers to boycott the vote.

Mazin Nadir said: "You are free here, but back in Iraq your families are voting for the oppression of workers."

The WCPI are described by Andrew Flood in his article Anarchism and the Iraq elections as

The WCPI are an interesting neo-leninist group which broke with orthodox communism out of their experiences in the workers councils thrown up in the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the uprisings that followed the 1991 Iraq war. The conclusions they came to are in some ways similar to that of the Dutch and German Council Communists of the 1920's. Naturally enough this experience also left them with a healthy hostility towards the Islamist program. They warn that "Iraq has become a battlefield for a war between American and Islamic terrorism and the Iraqi masses are constant victims caught amid the fire between both these terrorist forces".

Does this mean that Wahhabis and Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi are all now part of the world-wide Communist conspiracy? No! The above articles show that the Coporate media will smear anyone who stands in the way of the Captialist program.

Read more!