End the racist NT intervention now!

Saturday June 21 National Day of Action Against the Racist Intervention into Northern Territory Indigenous Communities. The Sydney rally is at

Sydney: 11am, The Block, Redfern
contact Monique Wiseman 0415410558 or Paddy Gibson 0415800586

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Sam Watson says End the racist NT intervention now!

“You don’t deal with issues of alcoholism and drug addiction with police. It’s a health issue, not a law and order issue. You need properly funded drug and alcohol services in Aboriginal communities, not more police and bureaucrats”.

The Socialist Alliance spokesperson concluded by pointing out that a properly funded program of positive discrimination for Indigenous people in education and training and a real Indigenous job creation campaign could have started to solve the problems of Aboriginal communities’ hopelessness years ago.

As Malcolm X once said, "You cannot have Capitalism without racism."

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Status Quo-oh

Jim Kunstler examines the current Status Quo-oh as the perfect storm of climate change, financial instability, and peak oil combine to make life interesting for the planet.

The real tragedy of industrial agriculture is the subsitution of energy for knowledge.

Behind that magic is an agribusiness model of farming cranked up on the steroids of cheap oil and cheap natural-gas-based fertilizer. Both of these "inputs" have recently entered the realm of the non-cheap. Oil-and-gas-based farming had already reached a crisis stage before the flood of Iowa. Diesel fuel is a dollar-a-gallon higher than gasoline. Natural gas prices have doubled over the past year, sending fertilizer prices way up. American farmers are poorly positioned to reform their practices. All that cheap fossil fuel masks a tremendous decay of skill in husbandry. The farming of the decades ahead will be a lot more complicated than just buying x-amount of "inputs" (on credit) to be dumped on a sterile soil growth medium and spread around with giant diesel-powered machines.

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The farmer has become another worker drone that follows a set of instructions. Ten thousand years of agricultural knowledge wiped out over the span of three generations.

Capitalism requires more and more of the workforce to become members of the proletariat in order to drive wages down and profits up. Standardised ways of working reduce training time and the bargaining power of workers. If they could give a set of instructions to monkeys, Capitalists would have no compunction about doing it as they would only have to pay peanuts.

In my own profession of computing, we complain about the skill levels of the new people but they do a good enough job for the Capitalists at a cheap price. So what if a computer system crashes and kills people? Tort Law Reform caps the liabilities anyway.

Preventable deaths are just another business cost. Profit is the only thing that matters.

How will anyone react to this looming crisis?

Perhaps more ominous is the discontent on the trucking scene. Truckers are going broke in droves, unable to carry on their business while getting paid $2000 for loads that cost them $3000 to deliver. In Europe last week, enraged truckers paralyzed the food distribution networks of Spain and Portugal. The passivity of US truckers so far has been a striking feature of the general zombification of American life. They might continue to just crawl off one-by-one and die. But it's also possible that, at some point, they'll mount a Night-of-the-Living-Dead offensive and take their vengeance out on "the system" that has brought them to ruin. America has only about a three-day supply of food in any of its supermarkets.

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It has been a similar situation in Australia. The last real rumble about fuel prices was back in 2005 when Trucker Blockades were mooted and Trucker Blockades - One Day On, they folded.

The demoralisation of the proletariat is so complete that people could well lay down and die.

The problem with revenge against the system is that there is no obvious target. There are rumours of secret societies running things.

At least with the French Revolution, there were the obvious symbols of Feudalism to be destroyed: the Bastille; the Monarchy; the Church; and the Aristocracy. What are the equivalents for Capitalism? The Stock Exchange? Maybe, but so what? It is just a building.

The Capitalist system is a way of thinking about social relations between people. It is expressed in laws, customs, and expectations. These cannot be changed by force only by patient reasoning.

Unfortunately, patience requires time and time is running out.

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Tomgram: John Feffer, Are We All North Koreans Now?

In the latest Tomgram: John Feffer, Are We All North Koreans Now? John Feffer argues that the recurring crises in North Korea are not just problems with Communism but with industrial agriculture.

In the 1990s, North Korea was the world's canary. The famine that killed as much as 10% of the North Korean population in those years was, it turns out, a harbinger of the crisis that now grips the globe -- though few saw it that way at the time.

That small Northeast Asian land, one of the last putatively communist countries on the planet, faced the same three converging factors as we do now -- escalating energy prices, a reduction in food supplies, and impending environmental catastrophe. At the time, of course, all the knowing analysts and pundits dismissed what was happening in that country as the inevitable breakdown of an archaic economic system presided over by a crackpot dictator.

They were wrong. The collapse of North Korean agriculture in the 1990s was not the result of backwardness. In fact, North Korea boasted one of the most mechanized agricultures in Asia. Despite claims of self-sufficiency, the North Koreans were actually heavily dependent on cheap fuel imports. (Does that already ring a bell?) In their case, the heavily subsidized energy came from Russia and China, and it helped keep North Korea's battalion of tractors operating. It also meant that North Korea was able to go through fertilizer, a petroleum product, at one of the world's highest rates. When the Soviets and Chinese stopped subsidizing those energy imports in the late 1980s and international energy rates became the norm for them, too, the North Koreans had a rude awakening.

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We all literally eat oil. Oil for fertilizer. Oil for tractors. Oil for trucks to take the produce to the factories. No oil, no food!

The article also points out that we are running out of arable land and water as well. And global warming is exacerbating the problem.

The core problem is seen to be:

The quest for perfect markets usually conceals a global shell game in which wealth is redistributed from the many to the few. To even the playing field that markets constantly tilt in favor of the powerful, and to direct funds toward environmental sustainability, governments need to intervene in the economy.

Yet another liberal is wishing upon the star of a benevolent government! The state exists to sustain the power of the ruling class. That power can be sustained either by force or by bribery.

The interest of the rulers is to stay in charge in order to increase their wealth. If people have to starve in order for the rulers to profit, so be it. No money, no food! This is the marketplace speaking. No soppy sentimentality there!

Feffer's solution is:

Certainly organic farming will play a role here. Although Green Revolution guru Norman Borlaug has dismissed organic agriculture as incapable of feeding the world, an important new study published by Cambridge University Press shows that organic systems in developing countries can produce 80% more than conventional farms.

Integrated farming systems that rely on sustainable energy -- solar, wind, tidal -- will also be critical. No-till agriculture can cut down on energy use and soil erosion.

While properly wary of snake-oil salesmen, neither can we afford to be Luddites. New technologies will play a role as well, as long as they reduce fertilizer and pesticide use, don't shackle debt-ridden farmers to major seed companies, and meet strict consumer safety requirements.

All we need are some kind-heart Capitalists! Hah! These do not last long enough in the face of their ruthless competitors to do permanent good.

This is just one crisis in which private property (capital) confronts public good (food and water).

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Superheroes

Seth Godin describes some important attitudes of Superheroes.

He offers some basic thoughts about how to handle the paradox. This is especially important for members of Communist Parties.

Superheroes don't have a look, but they definitely have an attitude. They're restless and impatient, but, here's the cool paradox, they're also calm and patient. Patient because they realize that change takes a while. Patient because they understand that if it's worth doing, it's worth getting through the Dip. Impatient and restless, though, because they refuse to accept the status quo. Most of the time, of course, these can't co-exist. Most of the time, the impatient flit. They don't stick it out. Acumen just celebrated their seventh anniversary and this is the year traction is really kicking in.

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Far too often, we have party comrades who want to man the barricades from day one instead of the slow grind of building the Party through agitation, propaganda, recruitment, and education. This takes a lot of patience but requires the fuel of impatience to keep going.

It has been 160 years since the publication of The Communist Manifesto, and we only have national Communist governments in Vietnam, Laos, Korea (part), Cuba, Nepal and Venezuela. Communist governments exist at the provincial and municipal level in India and Italy. And there is Communist management of workplaces in Argentina and Spain. China is in a long transition from Communism to Capitalism.

As Capitalism enters yet another crisis, there may be some upsurge in interest in Communism although Fascism has been the preferred option for advanced ecoonomies in dire peril.

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Tent City, USA

Mike Shedlock uncovers the hidden shame of Tent City, USA.

Here is the cost of converting a social good (housing) into a commodity.

The Capitalist illusion of providing social goods through production of commodities has been exposed as a fraud. Here these people are thrown into a refugee camp as the property rights of the banks are enforced.

Commodities are only produced for people that can afford them. If one cannot afford the cost of food, water, or housing, then one does not eat, drink or find shelter.

The people here would defend the right of property owners when they had houses to live in. But now, they have been sacrificed to preserve the Capitalist system of property rights.

The right of property trumps human rights to food, water, and shelter. So much for the right to life!

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Cut fuel price, say voters

Cut fuel price, say voters. This is an idiotic idea that raises problems for me in that how can I defend democracy when such attitudes are self-defeating?

If we had a direct democracy, then the fuel excise tax would be reduced to zero and people would go using their cars as usual. And the peak oilers would be pissing into the wind.

And it does not help when:

Last week in Japan, Mr Rudd put pressure on oil-producing nations to lift production and accused them of distorting the market by refusing to do so.

The Finance Minister, Lindsay Tanner, criticised petrol subsidies and caps on prices in Asian countries, saying they distorted the market and delayed the development of new technology.

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The Opposition agreed fuel subsidies were unsustainable but said Australia had no right to lecture neighbours.

The government is once again misleading people into believing that things can go as normal. The price signals from the market can be ignored.

The cut in excise tax amounts to a subsidy because the tax is supposed to align the price of Australian produced oil with the world market. The idea was that when the Australian oil ran out, there would be no shock to the economy when we brought oil from overseas, and the depletion was slowed down because of the cost.

Yet, the government is right to say that the price signals is supposed to foster the development of new technologies. But only for other people, not us. And the opposition is right to say that subsidies are wrong. Again for other people, not us.

Ross Gittins is right when he says that our leaders are Too gutless to give us the bad oil:

I think I've stumbled on a new law of politics: the harder life becomes in this capitalist economy, the more our supposed leaders soft-soap us. The harsher it gets, the harder they try to persuade us we're living in a Sunday school where no one plays for keeps.

Take the carry-on about petrol prices. Neither side of politics is prepared to speak the obvious truth about them.

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The trouble with all this soft-soaping is that it encourages the ignorant notion it's the government's job to solve all our problems. It hurts - fix it!

People don't get on with facing up to their problems because they imagine it just a matter of waiting for governments to act. And then the pollies wonder why the punters increasingly regard them as liars and cheats. Why their cynical behaviour breeds cynicism.

Despite the politicians' obfuscation, the plain truth is obvious: one way or another, petrol prices have got nowhere to go but up.

This would lead to believe that we need strong leaders to force us to act in our best interests when we obviously don't know what they are. This leads towards a form of Totalitarianism as we surrender more and more of our decisions to those who know better.

For democrats, this leaves us in a quandry. How can we defend Democracy when people want to do stupid things?

We can hide behind the idea that the people are ignorant and easily led. I find the opposite case to be true. People believe that they can survive the coming crisis. The real nutters believe Jesus will rescue them in the nick of time.

On an individual basis, they all believe that they can survive. They just haven't considered what 20 million other people doing the same things would actually entail. There is not enough arable farmland for 20 million people to set up their own little enclaves. We could accomodate 10 million as we did back in the 1930's.

Yet, I believe that direct Democracy is the best way forward because it would force us to take responsibility for own decisions. At present, we can blame others for bad decisions because we do not have to make them. As long as we do not accept responsility for our actions, we cannot grow as adults. We are just children pretending to be adults.

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