Challenging the globalisation of indifference: Pope Francis meets with popular movements

Judith Marshall, from Steelworkers Humanity Fund reflects on Challenging the globalisation of indifference: Pope Francis meets with popular movements

After the three days in Rome with the popular movements, the Pope, then has continued to take the church into the centre of the ideological battle grounds of neoliberalism, firm in his determination to make the contemporary church walk with the poor and excluded and discarded. The popular movement participants have returned to their organisations and the day to day struggles for land, housing and work. The moments of dialogue in Rome have served to strengthen the convictions of both the church and the popular movements that these are the right battles to be fighting.

The problem with the Catholic Church's stance is that Communism and Socialism are still anathema. Membership of a Communist party is grounds for excommunication.

So the Church wants the luxury of criticising Capitalism without proposing an economic and political alternative.

Read more!

Ted Rall: They Shoot White People Too, Don't They?

Ted Rall reminds people that They Shoot White People Too, Don’'t They?

There is considerable evidence that white privilege won’t protect you from being beaten or otherwise abused when you fall into the clutches of white (or black) cops. In 2000 I was roughed up by an LAPD motorcycle cop for no apparent reason, other than the fact that he didn’t like the cut of my jib. (He charged me with jaywalking, which as a New Yorker I do often, but wasn’t doing then.)

In the United States, local law enforcement has a license to kill — and if they use it, the odds are, nothing will happen to them. Black or white, the smartest course of action when you fall into their clutches is with deference and courtesy, including when declining to answer questions, which is your right.

Although white people are less likely to be killed by the police without good reason, we are not immune. We should shed this stupid idea that we are safe because we are white.

The pain and suffering of non-whites is our pain and suffering because we are all human beings.

Read more!

Who Will Wind Up Holding the Bag in the Shale Gas Bubble?

Yves Smith asks Who Will Wind Up Holding the Bag in the Shale Gas Bubble?

Even though OilPrice reported that US rig count had indeed fallen as oil prices plunged, John Dizard at the Financial Times (hat tip Scott) gives a more intriguing piece of the puzzle: the degree to which production is still chugging along despite it being uneconomical. The oil majors have been criticized for levering up to continue developing when it is cash-flow negative; they are presumably betting that prices will be much higher in short order.

Emphasis Mine

Anyone who thinks that Capitalism is inherently rational should ponder the fact that the investors are pouring money into businesses that are losing money and will lose money for the foreseeable future.
Yet the laws of motion for Capitalism compels them to behave in this manner. Capital must be invested in order to be reproduced. Since Capitalists compete against each other, they must join in the frenzy lest someone succeeds more than they do. Thus, bubbles are born.
The individual Capitalist is no longer a maven of industry or an originator but rather a financial investor. The era when the former was king has long past as noted by Lenin back in 1917.
The extremely low interest rates encourage very large leverage on investments. That is, an investment has very small percentage that is actually the investor's own money while the rest is borrowed. So the investor stands to lose a small amount of money with the possibility of very large returns because of the low interest rates.
It is 2007/08 all over again.

Read more!

Reynolds punctures the 'great Australian silence'

John Rainford argues that Reynolds punctures the 'great Australian silence'.

Reynolds is one of a pioneering group of historians, anthropologists and others who have transformed our understandings of traditional Aboriginal society and the relationship between Indigenous and settler Australians.

In his latest book, he provides evidence that supports his contention that it was the war of conquest fought against Aboriginal people that made the nation, not the 1915 ill-fated invasion of Turkey.

Conflict came within weeks of the foundation of Sydney and was apparent on every frontier for the next 140 years.

Yet while the large-scale killing of Warlpiri people by police at Coniston in Central Australia in 1928 can be used as a convenient date to mark the end of officially endorsed killing, the brutality has never ended.

This is the brutal reality of a settler society such as Australia, USA, or Israel. The indigenous population is subjected through genocide and their land is expropriated by the settler elite. Yet all settlers bears the guilt of this atrocity because we have benefited from the crime.

It is at an unconscious level that most white Australians condone this ongoing violence against Aborigines. They do not have to do themselves, just merely accept the system that does it for their benefit.

We cannot be truly free of the guilt of the past until we overthrow this racist system and reform ourselves so that we become human beings rather than black-fellow and white-fellow.

Read more!

Mark Latham's fantasies of a middle-class 'utopia'

Phil Shannon reviews Mark Latham's fantasies of a middle-class 'utopia'.

The centrepiece of Latham’s alternative, “minimalist” politics is government by experts. Expert bodies would take charge of fiscal policy, climate change policy and other areas of government dereliction.

Such old-hat technocratic solutions, however, would only further blow out what Latham justly deplores as Australia’s “democratic deficit”. Experts are not ideology-free and would themselves be elite members of the Bubble — only minus any democratic accountability.

Latham is right to say the current system is broken but it is the capitalist form of democracy — economic rule by the rich, political rule by their class buddies — that is the problem.

The ideologues of Capitalism are facing a crisis of legitimacy. They are smart enough to realise that people seeing that Capitalism is not working for them. The ideologues want us to believe that this is not real Capitalism, the political system is corrupted by money, etc.

But no Capitalist will go as far to admit that Capitalism has run its historic course and must be replaced by something better.

Read more!

Filmmaker: Israel's ethnic cleansing must stop

Filmmaker: Israel's ethnic cleansing must stop.

In a move that surprised many — and symbolises Israel's growing isolation and global opposition to its crimes — former Australian foreign minister Bob Carr has publicly declared his opposition to Israeli policies of apartheid and ethnic cleansing.

…

And is not just high-profile former politicans like Carr who are discovering the truth about Israeli apartheid and history of ethnic cleansing. Many Israelis are not taught the history of genocide and dispossession through which the Israeli state was created.

Like many people who grow up in colonial-settler societies — such as Australia — learning the truth can be a shock.

Similar to the Israeli film-maker, Lia Tarachansky, I have been on a long journey from being a pro-Zionist, racist, white Australian. It has involved study, meeting Palestinians and Aborigines, learning about the hidden history, and a lot of self-reflection.

I used to write letters of support to the Israeli embassy, hand out pro-Israeli flyers at University, speak in support of Israel when I could.

But then there was the case of the cold-blooded murder of a twelve year-old boy in the arms of his father. I could not understand how the Israelis could so blatantly lie about what happened: how it was the father's fault. Probably, I would have believed that it was a mistake, and the IDF would be profoundly sorry that it had happened.

The arrogance of the IDF spokes-people was such that they could sell any lie to the people.

I wrote a letter to the Israeli embassy expressing my disgust at what had happened, and to say that I could no support Israel. Their reply repeated the same lies and they said that they were sorry to lose my support.

This is a journey that all workers have to make. It is not easy. It is hard on one's ego to find out that one has been lied to so blatantly over a long time. And all of those authority figures that one trusted are all part of this sordid economy of lies and omission.

Read more!

How professionals think

Dan Little looks at How professionals think.

Little posits three (3) models about how actors arrive at their choices and behavior:

1. Rational Choice
2. Pragmatist Action
3. Character

Little examines a paper

…that appears to show that a certain segment of white-collar professionals (bankers) make very different decisions about their actions depending on the “frame” within which they deliberate (link). If they are thinking within the everyday frame of personal life and leisure, their actions are as honest as anyone else’s. But if they are prompted to think within the frame of their professional environment, their actions become substantially less honest. That professional environment is the large international bank.

Emphasis Mine

Littke concludes that:

These findings suggest that we should explore further the notion that actors possess distinct mental frames that they can take up or put aside readily, and that lead to very different kinds of behavior when confronting the same kinds of problems. Further, we should consider the possibility that these frames are highly portable and contingent: the actor can be led to choose one frame or the other, with important behavioral consequences. This finding seems to point in the same direction as ideas advanced by Kahneman and Tversky in much of their work together, including Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases.

Emphasis Mine

My own take on Little's reading this paper is that it is a refutation of the Capitalist lie that all people are naturally greedy and that Capitalism is the best system that harnesses this so-called 'innate greed'.

This paper gives me hope that we can truly build a Communist society because people will tend to adapt their behaviour and expectations of norms to fit that society. This also means that a Communist society has to be built through continual agitation and propaganda until the people accept that acting in these new ways a better society can be built.

Read more!

Protests against closure of 150 Aboriginal communities

Alex Salmon reports on Protests against closure of 150 Aboriginal communities in Western Australia.

Amnesty International released a statement urging the Western Australian government not to forcibly evict Aboriginal people from the communities, as demolishing houses and denying indigenous people the right to practice their culture is a breach of human rights and international law.

Tammy Solonec, a human rights lawyer working with Amnesty International, slammed the hypocrisy of Western Australian Premier Colin Barnett for admitting that closing the communities will be traumatic for the people involved, while continuing a policy that will force indigenous people to break their connections to land and culture and force them to move to larger towns where they will have greater exposure to drugs, alcohol, violence and crime.

Destruction of a people's culture is considered to be genocide under international law.

But, if Australian Governments followed international law, they would admit refugees, restore Aboriginal land rights, not go to war in Iraq or Afghanistan, recognise the rights of the Palestinians to their own state. Such laws only applies to the official enemies of the US, not to its client states.

So why should workers fight for the right of Aboriginal communities to stay together on their ancestral land? It is about the rights of communities to determine their own future. It is about respecting the culture of others.

It is these things that will make a Communistic society viable.

Read more!

Scott Morrison narrows the meaning of 'refugee'

Jay Fletcher writes that Scott Morrison narrows the meaning of ‘refugee’.

It is these millions of people who suffer while Australia enforces a racist closed-borders policy. “Draining the pool” in Indonesia may force this suffering further from Australia’s shores, but it still exists and it is growing exponentially worse.

However, the fight at home is still urgent. A bill drafted by Morrison would make changes to the Migration Act and the Maritime Powers Act that, former PM Malcolm Fraser said, would “enshrine in law the mistreatment of asylum seekers and refugees who flee to our country to escape persecution, torture and death”.

The ASRC [(Asylum Seeker Resource Centre)] has made one of more than 5000 submissions to the Senate inquiry being held on the bill. The advocacy and support centre said the bill will, “see the Minister give himself an unprecedented level of power to make life or death decisions about individual asylum seeker cases, without court oversight”.

In a briefing explaining the big changes proposed in the bill, the ASRC said: “The Bill narrows the meaning of refugee, ignoring previous court decisions and stacking the odds against refugees.

This xenophobia of the Australian working class against refugees prevents them from developing their political consciousness on internationalism. Unfortunately, this is very entrenched in the psyche.

But this does not mean that the party should give up or minimise its stance on racism and acceptance of refugees. It is vital for a Communist society to be anti-racist and accepting of all who seek help and refuge. A Communist cannot operate otherwise.

What this does mean that each party member has to wage their own internal war against racism and xenophobia. By recognising such a struggle, we can help others on their journey to being ant-racist and anti-xenophobic.

It will be this journey that transforms us into workers ready for a Communist society because we will regain our humanity and practice seeing the long-term. This is in contradistinction to the rabid racism and alienation we are forced to consume to under Capitalism.

Read more!

Masaccio: Piketty Shreds Marginal Productivity as Neoclassical Justification for Supersized Pay

Yves Smith comments on Masaccio: Piketty Shreds Marginal Productivity as Neoclassical Justification for Supersized Pay.

One of the main agendas of neoclassical economics is to give Panglossian defenses of the current order a veneer of intellectual legitimacy. If our system is the result of individuals and businesses behaving in logical ways, at least in the minds of economists, surely the outcome is inevitable, and therefore virtuous, or else those operators would do things differently. The Big Lie in all of this is that neoclassical economics takes power completely out of the equation. While it does assume selfishness, in that everyone is out or himself to maximize his utility, it also assumes atomized actors who lack the power to influence markets. …

…

One widely repeated bit of propaganda in the US is that how much people earn reflects their worth in an economic sense. Given how important business is in American society, maintaining this belief is critical to maintaining legitimacy; otherwise, more and more people would see corporate executives not as captain of enterprise but individuals by luck or connivance, got in a position where they could exploit a system that gives them control over assets and cash flows with perilous little in the way of controls over them (there is a vast literature on principal/agent issues in large corporations).

Emphasis Mine

Masaccio concludes:

Neoliberals have convinced the vast majority of our fellow citizens that they and they alone are responsible for their fates. They took risks and they lost, but it was their choice. I can hear Rick Santelli ranting in the background. At the same time, neoliberals insisted that governments everywhere bail out the filthy rich and their corporations, especially their financial corporations, and governments obliged. So, we screw the productive members of society and reward the slugs, all in line with neoliberal theory.

Neoclassical economics undergirds the neoliberal project. Piketty slashes at a piece of that foundation with his attack on marginal productivity. What now is the justification for the absurd compensation of the filthy rich? Tort law failed to deal with the sins of the bankers. Why aren’t they in jail? One more block pulled from the Jenga pile of vicious ideas so beloved of the rich and their government agents.

Emphasis Mine

This was all explained by Marx over 160 years ago. The ruling class creates a superstructure to maintain control. And part of that superstructure lies in the sphere of ideas.

One of those ideas is neo-liberalism. It is not the only one maintaining control. There are also ideas about religion, gender, sexuality, the need for a hierarchical society, etc.

And let's not forget that naked force is also part of the superstructure. When ideas fail, the guns come out. Arguments are then won with bullets, not words.

We must tread carefully when confronting the Capitalists. They got where they are by being utterly ruthless. Each bomb dropped in Gaza, Syria, Iraq, Sudan, Somalis, Iran, Afghanistan is a warning to all the subject peoples of the world that they mean to stay in business for as long as possible.

Read more!

Aboriginal disadvantage worsens

Peter Boyle writes that Aboriginal disadvantage worsens.

The PM insulted the indigenous people by repeating the lie that Australia was just bush before invasion:

Abbott's insults can be understood as part of a disgusting attempt to justify this deepening racial oppression. It perpetuates the racist idea that Aboriginal people are inconsequential, sub-human and their conditions a result of their supposed inferiority.

Green Left Weekly has explained in some detail how the worsening conditions in Aboriginal communities can be traced back to racist cuts to essential services and the funding of Aboriginal-run community organisations by the Coalition government and its ALP predecessors.

That and the fact that Australian governments have refused to deliver real land rights and impose a strong regime of job quotas on private and public employers to address more than two centuries of racial oppression. That's the truth about the shamefully growing gap.

Emphasis Mine

Ordinary workers most likely work and travel with indigenous people everyday. Yet the white-fellows still subscribe to the subjective lies about black-fellow inferiority despite on the objective reality they see daily.

It is very hard to break this stranglehold of Capitalist subjectivity. It is being reinforced daily through our culture: portrayals in the media, opinions of the bosses and overseers.

Standing up to this endemic racism can be economically devastating through loss of job and home. It can also be fatal if one confronts a violent racist.

Maybe the solution for the time-being is to be a guerilla anti-racist.

Read more!

An Israeli-Arab Spring? 1.6 mn Palestinian-Israelis are Marginalized, Angry and Defiant

Emile Nakhleh ponders An Israeli-Arab Spring? 1.6 mn Palestinian-Israelis are Marginalized, Angry and Defiant.

As Israel moves to exclude Palestinian parties from parliament,

As Israeli politics moves to the right and the state becomes more Jewish and less pluralistic and inclusive, the Palestinian community, which constitutes over one-fifth of the population, feels more marginalised and alienated.

In response to endemic budgetary, economic, political, and social discrimination, the Arab community is becoming assertive, more Palestinian, and more confrontational. Calls for equality, justice, and an end to systemic discrimination by “Israeli Arab” civil society activists are now more vocal and confrontational.

Emphasis Mine

The Arabs within Israel are now increasingly viewing themselves as an indigenous population rather “Israeli Arab”:

Recent events clearly demonstrate that the Arabs in Israel are no longer a quiescent, cultural minority but an “indigenous national” minority deserving full citizenship rights regarding resources, collective rights, and representation on formal state bodies.

Nakhleh is pessimistic about a peaceful solution:

If violence and continued discrimination are part of Israel’s long-term strategy against its Arab minority to force Arab emigration, it is unlikely that the government would implement tangible initiatives to improve the condition of the Arab minority.

Accordingly, communal violence in Israel would increase, creating negative ramifications for regional peace and stability and for U.S. interests in the eastern Mediterranean.

Emphasis Mine

Let's call Israel's policies for what they are: genocide. The State of Israel aims for the removal of all indigenous populations from its illegally acquired territories.

That people could think that either Israel or the US would be embarrassed by such a description are sorely mistaken. The US was built through genocide as was any settler society (including Australia). One does not reject the foundations without severely affecting the stability of the whole structure.

It is up to workers to educate themselves on these matters and confront the horrific origins of the current Capitalist society and their place in it. It also means that workers will have to confront their own compliance with and benefiting from this state of affairs.

Guilt and shame can be major road-blocks to reconciliation and redemption.

Read more!

Why the big four banks should be nationalised

John Rainford argues Why the big four banks should be nationalised.

Australia managed its way through the GFC in better shape than most countries thanks to the Keynesian counter-cyclical economic policies that were implemented here and in China.

In Australia these included unlimited guarantees of bank deposits and wholesale funding. This led to the big four banks that were too big to fail getting bigger.

One result of the GFC has been that banks around the world have been required to lift their capital adequacy requirements so as to ameliorate the effects of any future economic downturn.

The big four in Australia have resisted this because it takes capital away from their dodgy investments and reserves it as part-insurance against future losses. They have threatened to claw back any increase in money reserves they will be required to hold by raising interest rates.

Several countries are debating the issue of breaking up large banks. A better idea would be to nationalise them.

I am rather embarassed to say that, despite Rainbird's article, the party's policies on Nationalisation are completely lacking. This is worrying because the Socialist Alliance are campaigning, in part. in the Victorian State Elections on Why the car industry should be nationalised.

The tenor of Rainford's article seems to be that the banks are treating the regulators with contempt. Although this is true, I do not see how we can appeal to workers by taking this approach.

Regulation, to most workers (especially in the non-privileged strata), are continually oppressed by regulation. They are hassled by ticket inspectors, parking inspectors, police, HR people, Real Estate agents, local councils, etc. They spend the whole day avoiding breaking some regulation or impost.

Treating regulators with contempt is not a crime with most workers. It is an attitude born of long and frustrating experience.

That people are actively trying to avoid regulations and paying fines is also not seen as a crime. It may unjust that the bigger fish can do this more easily, but the principle is not in question.

I think the question of nationalisation should be approached in a similar way to that made in Why the car industry should be nationalised by emphasising the benefits to workers.

I do not mean just economic benefits but the political and societal benefits of workers controlling their own lives rather than living at the whim of others.

Read more!

What It Would Really Take to Reverse Climate Change

What It Would Really Take to Reverse Climate Change.

Two (2) of the engineers who worked on Google's RE<C project write that:

As we reflected on the project, we came to the conclusion that even if Google and others had led the way toward a wholesale adoption of renewable energy, that switch would not have resulted in significant reductions of carbon dioxide emissions. Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach. So we’re issuing a call to action. There’s hope to avert disaster if our society takes a hard look at the true scale of the problem and uses that reckoning to shape its priorities.

Emphasis Mine

They had realised that even if the project had succeeded, it would not be enough to stop global warming as we have already passed the safety limit of 350ppm of CO₂. The amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere means that the Earth will keep warming for the next 100 years.

That realization prompted us to reconsider the economics of energy. What’s needed, we concluded, are reliable zero-carbon energy sources so cheap that the operators of power plants and industrial facilities alike have an economic rationale for switching over soon—say, within the next 40 years. Let’s face it, businesses won’t make sacrifices and pay more for clean energy based on altruism alone. Instead, we need solutions that appeal to their profit motives. RE<C’s stated goal was to make renewable energy cheaper than coal, but clearly that wouldn’t have been sufficient to spur a complete infrastructure changeover. So what price should we be aiming for?

Emphasis Mine

What a damming indictment of Capitalism? The survival of the human race is not profitable!

The real problem is how to convince workers that Capitalism needs to be overthrown. Even if workers could understand all of the scientific and engineering papers, they would still be reluctant to take action because they feel safer in what they know than with what might be. This is only natural.

It does not help that these pleas for action are coming from the privileged stratum of society. The workers are right to mistrust these collaborators. Past experience in various struggles has shown where the interests of these collaborators lie.

Read more!

Mike Treen: A critique of crisis theory

Mike Treen has A critique of crisis theory.

There is no natural end to Capitalism:

But there is no final crisis in this system — other than a descent into nuclear war, or barbarism arising from the sort of ecological winter or runaway ecological collapse that capitalism appears to be preparing for us. Short of such a disastrous outcome, the system will continue to carry on with its booms and busts until it is overthrown and replaced.

That can only be carried out by a conscious social and political force, by a class that is not bound to the system by material interest. That is why the working class is the only class that can overthrow this system. It is the only class not bound by property and profit to its perpetuation. It is the only class with the numbers and social power, if organised, if conscious enough, to effect this outcome and bring about real majority rule.

Feudalism had to end because the Capitalists needed the Serfs to become Workers. Otherwise Capitalist expansion could not take place.

The ruling class of a Socialist society already exists: the Proletariat. There is no need to transform the workers into something else. They only need to seize power.

As for crises, Treen remarks that:

Marx had identified the essence of the periodic crises of capitalism as crises of overproduction very early on, even in the Communist Manifesto in 1848.

Treen contrasts this idea of Marx with two (2) competing theories of Capitalist crises: tendency of the rate of profit to fall (TROPF); and the Keynesian idea of under-consumption.

I have fallen into the trap of treating over-production and under-consumption as being synonomous.

Treen rejects the idea of a fiat currency:

I think that is a big mistake. Ultimately, all non-commodity money — that is, token money and credit money — must have a relationship to a real money commodity like gold. This is true whether a formal gold standard exists or not. This lawful economic relationship still exists and therefore continues to be the underlying cause of crises of overproduction.

This is because the exchange of commodities is the basis of all Capitalist economic activity. When the exchange happens, the commodities have equal value. Because real money commodity can be exchanged for all other commodities, it because the basis of universal valuation.

Treen encourages all of us to study Marxist Crisis Theory:

I think we all should pay respect to the founders of scientific socialism and give this issue of crisis theory the attention and importance it deserves. We cannot leave it to others, to so-called experts.

I am not an “expert” on this stuff. It has been a continuing interest of mine, because it is important that we understand it and because it is important we understand who we are, what our role is, what we expect will happen to this system, who the agent of social change is going to be, and what the prospects are for making that happen in the world today. Those are all issues we can begin to address.

Read more!

Longest Continuous Period of War In American History

Barry Ritholtz writes about the Longest Continuous Period of War In American History.

Ritholtz writes that this endless war and unceasing alarms is weakening the US Republic through the corrosion of the legal and political system. He writes that it is a cynical attempt to garner power and to distract the populace from the real problems:

But — underneath the ever-changing marketing and branding campaign — it’s really just the good ‘ole military-industrial-and-banking complex consolidating their power and making money hand over fist.

It is in the interests of the Capitalists to preserve their power: both in the objective realm of physical force, and in the subjective realm of ideas. Since they are a minority, they must delude or subject the majority to their whims. They do not rule by consent—but by force and delusion.

The inherent danger of continuous wars, as the Spartans found out, is that your enemies learn how to fight you. Sparta was able to dominate their part of Greece for hundreds of years due to their reputation and mystique—they actually did very little fighting.

It was only with the conquest of Athens that the Spartans entered upon a period of continuous warfare. After a period of time, Sparta's enemies began to lose their fear of her and began to work out how to defeat her.

With defeat came the revolt of the subject peoples and slaves. This further undermined the Spartan war economy. Then Macedonia swept in to conquer all of Greece. Despite attempts to free herself, Sparta became a subject state of Macedonia, then Rome, then Byzantium, then Istanbul.

The three (3) Russian revolutions (1905, February 1917, and November 1917) came on the back of great military defeats. The German revolution of 1919 came with defeat in WWI. Military defeat is sometimes a catalyst for social revolution as the ruling class has lost its mystique of superiority and invincibility.

With this latest Capitalist crisis, war is probably seen as the only way to maintain power. But it is a dangerous one as it can hasten the demise of the ruling class.

Read more!

Israel moves to exclude Palestinian parties from parliament

Jonathan Cook reports that Israel moves to exclude Palestinian parties from parliament.

The Israeli parliament has voted overwhelmingly to suspend Haneen Zoabi, a legislator representing the state’s large Palestinian minority, for six months as a campaign to silence political dissent intensified.

Zoabi has not endeared herself to the Hebraic-speaking Israelis. She has criticised the latest assault on Gaza, has called the Israeli Air Force pilots terrorists, and the Israeli Army the equivalent of the violent Islamic State group.

There are other measures being considered to expel Zoabi from parliament and from Israel, as well as excluding Palestinians altogether from parliament. The rabid racism of the Israeli state cannot contemplate the existence and therefore the opinions and feelings of the oppressed Palestinians.

This is all part of the genocidal mind-set that the Zionists now operate under. Since their recent defeats in Gaza and Lebanon, the Zionists must plunge ahead into this madness. There is no way they can admit that they are wrong.

Aeyal Gross, a constitutional law professor at Tel Aviv University, warned that the Knesset’s treatment of Zoabi was “paving the way towards fascism and tyranny”.

The Hebraic-speaking Israelis should remember the Nuremburg Laws that gradually stripped the German Jews of their rights, livelihoods, political representation, among other things. Gross is right to be terrified of what is happening.

Read more!

Mumia: Real threat not Ebola, but capitalist health care

Mumia Abu-Jamal argues that the Real threat not Ebola, but capitalist health care.

This is not about the Ebola crisis, it is about the US health care crisis, made possible by a flawed business model that prioritises profit above all other things: even life itself.

Consider this: when [Thomas Eric] Duncan first entered Texas Presbyterian Hospital, he was interviewed by a screener, prescribed antibiotics, and sent home.

The screener was, more likely than not, not a medically-trained health care professional but a receptionist, perhaps armed with a checklist to cover. Chances are, she was perhaps the lowest-paid staff, until one considers the janitorial workers.

This business model, one followed by most institutions in the US, is now exposed as ineffective, dangerous and the least health-conscious.

That was a business decision, driven by the bottom line, of money — not life.

Emphasis Mine

The US has been lucky so far in that Ebola does not seem to have entered the population at large. As Mumia points out, this luck will not last given that the US health system is driven by profit alone.

Even this scare will not change the stance of the US health providers. Nor can the government force them to change. The bitter resistance to Obamacare is testament to the political power of the US health system.

But an Ebola outbreak is a disaster waiting to happen in the US. The lack of free, universal health-care means that the poor and undocumented will become the most affected because they are effectively denied access to health-care. Thus, Ebola will probably become established in the under-class.

This will lead to more discrimination and harassment of the poor and undocumented as Xenophobia runs amok in the ensuring panic. There will be little challenge to the US health care system despite its obvious failings.

Read more!

Opening the way to modernization

Cuba plans to focus on renewable energy sources (RES) as Opening the way to modernization.

Cuba currently produces 96% of its electricity through the use of fossil fuels. This statistic reveals that this is an economy highly dependent on imports with expensive production costs. For this reason, the Council of Ministers approved the Future Development of Renewable Energy Sources and the Efficient Use of Energy Policy on June 21, drawn up by the Governmental Commission charged with this task and responsible for exploiting the full potential of the country’s renewable energy sources.

The gist of the policy is to use alternative sources, such as:

• Sugar Cane biomass
• Wind
• Solar
• Hydropower

Coupled with the development of these alternative sources, there is also a drive to energy efficiency:

The increased use of the RES and the efficient use of energy are as comprehensive and transversal as the main aims of the country’s long term development plans, which are all directly linked.

The aim of this policy is:

The magnitude of this policy can be appreciated in the table of information below, but this is only one element in understanding the scope of the policy. Cuba is planning to generate 24% of its electrical energy, through RES, by 2030, which will result in a saving of more than 1.3 million tones of fossil fuel or approximately 780 million dollars per year.

This also shows the under-development of the Cuban in comparison with an advanced economy such as Germany. The figures quoted in If Germany Drops Coal, can the Industry Survive? are that …about 45% of Germany’s electricity comes from burning coal and for RES to account for around two thirds of supply within two decades.

This disparity will probably mean that Cuban industrial development will be impeded by having a greater reliance on fossil fuels when more advanced economies have substantially lessen theirs. And this will make it more difficult to catch up.

Read more!

Why the car industry should be nationalised

The Socialist Alliance gives its reasons on Why the car industry should be nationalised.

The Socialist Alliance calls for the nationalisation of the vehicle industry under worker and community control, to save jobs and to begin the process of converting the industry to make public transport vehicles or other products.

Nationalisations are not likely to happen without significant industrial action and other forms of action from workers and their organisations.

Unions in the manufacturing sector and the union movement generally should take up the nationalisation demand — as a response to economic crises and a step towards a different form of economy — as some unions did in the past.

Here, the Party is using the economic crisis to advance the political consciousness of the workers. The workers need to understand that they can control their own destiny. And, they have the power to do so.

Read more!