Earthworker Cooperative buys first factory in Dandenong

Earthworker Cooperative buys first factory in Dandenong.

Earthworker Cooperative was formed to respond to the challenges of climate change and the need for local job creation, by establishing worker-owned cooperatives throughout Australia in sustainability-focused industries.

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The first Eureka’s Future worker-owned factory has now been established through the mutualisation of the Everlast Hydro Systems factory in Dandenong in Melbourne’s south-east.B/p>

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China's slowdown foreshadows global slowdown

Martin Hart-Landsberg writes that China's slowdown foreshadows global slowdown.

China’s recent decision to allow its currency to devalue is one measure of government concern. The government no doubt hopes that the devaluation will jump-start exports and growth but this is unlikely given the general weakness in demand in most markets.

In fact, China’s economic slowdown will itself translate into a deepening global slowdown. As the country’s growth slows so does its demand for parts and components produced in other Asian countries and primary commodities purchased from Latin American and sub-Saharan countries. And as growth in all three regions declines this can be expected to put downward pressure on growth in core countries, especially Japan and Germany, both of whom also rely on an export-led growth strategy.

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China still has several ambitous infrastructure projects in the works: trans-continental railways, highways, and pipelines. It definitely has the capital to do these things. The Keynesian pump-priming is still going on.

However, the impending crises in the Chinese economy lie in the housing and stock market bubbles. These are all private investments. Instead of investing in socially sustainable assets, the Capitalists in China chased asset inflation instead.

So, we have a government investment boom in useful infrastructure, while the private boom was frittered away on dreams of wealth.

China is going to learn the hard way that Capitalism is a shriveled ideology bereft of innovation.

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Adam Goodes case reveals bad case of historical amnesia

Nisha Thapliyal writes that the Adam Goodes case reveals bad case of historical amnesia.

In short, booing Goodes becomes possible when we separate the football player from his family, community, culture and history. What this debate underlines is a form of historical amnesia that marks societies where nation-building has occurred on the foundations of colonisation, exploitation and outright destruction of indigenous peoples.

It strikes me that part of what is revealed by the Goodes saga is a fierce and enduring struggle over remembering and forgetting. In this debate about sportsmanship and invisible spears, whose histories are being remembered and whose are we distancing ourselves from? Whose histories are we avoiding taking responsibility for?

The subtext in the Goodes debate is about acknowledging or denying Aboriginal accounts of what it means to be Australian today — and what it has meant since 1770. If we recognise this, then, to paraphrase historian Chris Healey, Goodes’ actions are simply and steadfastly a refusal to allow himself and his people to be “erased” yet again from Australian history and contemporary culture.

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Remembering is resistance.

Remembering that we are humans first, Australians second, challenges the Capitalist dogma that we live under.

Remembering that we are workers united in toil is the basis of a new society.

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What It Means When You Kill People On the Other Side of the Planet and No One Notices

Tom Engelhardt asks What It Means When You Kill People On the Other Side of the Planet and No One Notices?

And this just scratches the surface of Washington's long “global war on terror.”  Yet without an antiwar movement, the spectacle of mayhem and slaughter that has been at the heart of that war has passed largely unnoticed here.  Unlike in the Vietnam years, it’s never really come home.  In an era in which successes have been in short supply for two administrations, consider this a major one.  War without an antiwar movement turns out to mean war without pause, war without end.

Admittedly, American children can no longer catch the twenty-first-century equivalents of the movies of my childhood.  Such films couldn’t be made.  After all, few are the movies that are likely to end with the Marines advancing amid a pile of nonwhite bodies, the wagon train heading for the horizon, or the cowboy galloping off on his horse with his girl.  Think of this as onscreen evidence of American imperial decline.

In the badlands and backlands of the planet, however, the spectacle of slaughter never ends, even if the only Americans watching are sometimes unnerved drone video analysts.  Could there be a sadder tale of a demobilized citizenry than that?

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The ghost of the Vietnam War haunts the anti-war movement as well. All we hear about are the sucesses. We have forgotten the long, dark years of obscurity and irrelevence.

The confidence of the working-class in a better world has also gone. We are weighed down by the unresolved GFC, the weakening of unions, the rapid advance of automation, the insecurity of life and work.

The great anti-war demonstrations of 2003 were deflated by the deafness of the governments around the world. They knew they were in no danger of being overthrown.

We have forgotten that the movements of the 1960s were about overthrowing the existing system. That was the real danger of those movements.

Today, what are people are going to do? Vote the bastards out. Our electoral system offers a choice between two groups of warmongers. This is no different in the UK or USA.

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Chavez gone, but Chavismo here to stay

Federico Fuentes writes that although Chavez gone, but Chavismo here to stay.

The explanation for this ongoing support is that Chavismo was never simply one man’s project based on one man — as important a figure as Chavez was. Rather, Chavez served as a catalyst for Venezuela’s excluded poor majority to directly intervene into politics.

Chavez’s election represented a spilling over of peoples’ social struggle into a political arena previously restricted to Venezuela’s elite.

The opposition has repeatedly tried to overthrow Chavez — via coups and economic sabotage as well as at the ballot box. But this political force, rooted in Venezuela’s poor majority, mobilised within the state and on the street to defend the Bolivarian revolution and advance its aims.

Chavez’s death in 2013 was a big blow to this project. It may very well suffer future setbacks as well, including the loss of governmental power.

However, there is little evidence to indicate that Venezuela’s poor majority is planning to retreat from the political arena or wind down their revolutionary struggle.

No matter what political force is in government, they will have to contend with a politicised and organised poor who do not want to go back to the Venezuela of yesteryear.

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The political consciousness of the Venezuelans is much higher than that of Australians. They have seen the benefits of Socialism and lived the horrors of Capitalism.

The Capitalists cannot conceive the people having a consciousness outside of following the leader.

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Drivers, Beware: The Costly, Deadly Dangers of Traffic Stops in the American Police State

Barry Ritholtz reposts Drivers, Beware: The Costly, Deadly Dangers of Traffic Stops in the American Police State from Washington's Blog.

In other words, in the American police state, “we the people” are at the mercy of law enforcement officers who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to “serve and protect.”

As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, this mindset that any challenge to police authority is a threat that needs to be “neutralized” is a dangerous one that is part of a greater nationwide trend that sets the police beyond the reach of the Fourth Amendment. Moreover, when police officers are allowed to operate under the assumption that their word is law and that there is no room for any form of disagreement or even question, that serves to chill the First Amendment’s assurances of free speech, free assembly and the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Frankly, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a casual “show your ID” request on a boardwalk, a stop-and-frisk search on a city street, or a traffic stop for speeding or just to check your insurance. If you feel like you can’t walk away from a police encounter of your own volition—and more often than not you can’t, especially when you’re being confronted by someone armed to the hilt with all manner of militarized weaponry and gear—then for all intents and purposes, you’re under arrest from the moment a cop stops you.

Sad, isn’t it, how quickly we have gone from a nation of laws—where the least among us had just as much right to be treated with dignity and respect as the next person (in principle, at least)—to a nation of law enforcers (revenue collectors with weapons) who treat us all like suspects and criminals?

Clearly, the language of freedom is no longer the common tongue spoken by the citizenry and their government. With the government having shifted into a language of force, “we the people” have been reduced to suspects in a surveillance state, criminals in a police state, and enemy combatants in a military empire.

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This has always been the case for people of colour. Now that white people are getting the same treatment, they are complaining about it.

Whiteness is now being means-tested—if you cannot show the means of a rich bank account, you are no longer white.

The white privilege is being withdrawn from those at the bottom and middle of the socio-economic ladder.

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Is radical leftism a trap for minorities?

Noah Smith asks Is radical leftism a trap for minorities? .

But ultimately, hopping on the radical leftist boat will hurt minorities. And I suspect that leftists in the humanities are doing minorities no favors by trying to convince them that radical leftism is their only hope, when in fact it is a self-defeating strategy.

So what will work? If history is any guide, the only option is to increase tolerance. I don't pretend to know how to increase tolerance. For immigrant groups, it seems to naturally fade over time, especially if those groups 1) organize to fight discriminatory policy, and 2) make a bunch of money. For African-Americans, intolerance seems much more entrenched. I don't pretend to know how to get rid of it, but I am pretty sure that a militant overthrow of capitalism would make things much, much worse.

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Smith does not see Capitalism, in itself, as oppressive. It is merely intolerance that is the problem. He sees intolerance as something to be done away with while preserving Capitalism.

Indeed, he does not see class analysis as useful for analysing anything useful under Capitalism.

I think Smith understands Marx's critique of Capitalism, but does not see himself as involved in any form of class war. He is a disinterested observer of the political economy. For him, Socialism has proven to be a failure and is not an alternative to Capitalism.

He believes himself to be on the right side of history. Yet, history is being made daily in the streets of Athens, Caracas, Havana, Bogata, and Rojava. There the oppression of Capitalism is most keenly felt, and most vigorously resisted as alternatives are built.

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Michael Lebowitz on SYRIZA and us: Social democracy or revolutionary democracy

Michael Lebowitz on SYRIZA and us: Social democracy or revolutionary democracy.

Certainly, there is a lesson here for future governments (and perhaps even the current SYRIZA government) — the absolute necessity to learn to walk upon two legs. But there is also a lesson for us — those of us without the present luxury of government. A socialist party must also walk upon two legs. Of course, it must struggle to capture the existing state from capital so that state can serve the needs of the working class rather than capital. However, it also must “promote by all means possible new democratic institutions, new spaces in which people can develop their powers through their protagonism”. Through the development of communal councils and workers’ councils (essential cells of the new socialist state), the working class develops its capacities and the strength to challenge capital and the old state.

The lesson of SYRIZA should be to never forget the concept of revolutionary practice — the simultaneous changing of circumstances and human activity or self-change. It is never too late to remember and apply this… and never too soon.

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We must cease the reproduction of capitalist thinking and habits within ourselves, and struggle with the creation of socialist thinking and habits.

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Ten years of BDS in solidarity with Palestine

Lisa Gleeson reflects on Ten years of BDS in solidarity with Palestine.

The standard Israeli response — that even the mildest statement of support for the Palestinian people is by definition anti-Semitic — gets trotted out at every opportunity. However, accusations of extremism from Israel and its supporters begin to sound incredibly hollow when examined against what its own officials say about Palestinians.

Recently appointed Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked is on record as calling for a genocide against the Palestinian people. Like many Israeli politicians she argues that all land in the West Bank and Gaza as well as pre-1967 Israel belongs to Israel and should never be ceded.

To the Western “referees” of the Oslo peace process this does not disqualify her as a negotiating partner in the process that allegedly has a “two state solution” as its goal. Instead, the Western arbiters, comically portraying themselves as “honest brokers”, demand that the Palestinian side prove to the Israelis that they are worthy partners in the peace process.

In this atmosphere there are few strategies left for Palestinians and their supporters, which makes BDS all the more important. A vigorous and dynamic BDS movement is needed now more than ever. The development of a global mass movement that puts irresistible pressure on Israel and its allies is a vital bulwark against ongoing attempts at destroying the entire Palestinian people.

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Now wonder Israeli settlers feel justified in burning alive children with such political support from their leaders.

The importance of the BDS campaign is to see the humanity of the outcasts in society, such as the Palestinians. That is the subjective aim of the campaign. The objective aim is to relieve the suffering of the Palestinian people.

When we see the humanity of the outcasts, we can empathise with them and see others, like Aborigines and refugees, as human beings. Then, we can see their suffering as unjustified.

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Britain: Jeremy Corbyn campaign gives voice to austerity anger

Britain: Jeremy Corbyn campaign gives voice to austerity anger.

A hollowed-out Labour Party may prove unwilling to tolerate a figure like Corbyn, who will attract full hostility from political, economic and media elites. But the movement to get him elected as leader is clearly giving voice to deep-seated anger at the pro-rich policies of both Britain's major parties — and a desire for Labour to provide an alternative from the ruling Conservative Party.

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Even if Corbyn wins and survives a coup, this will detract from building a mass movement because such a win reinforces the lie that the right leader can things back on track.

Workers need to really understand that the whole system is rigged against them—it is not that the wrong people are running the system.

However, this requires a huge leap in the development of the working class consciousness.

Even in Greece after all that has happened, the great majority of people want to stay in the Capitalist system. They just want the system to be less brutal towards them.

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Progression of the Police State Spanish Style: €300 Euro Fine for Calling Police Officer "Mate"; Law of Simmering Social Pots

Mike Shedlock writes that there is a Progression of the Police State Spanish Style: €300 Euro Fine for Calling Police Officer "Mate"; Law of Simmering Social Pots.

The gag law may limit minor protests for a while, but it will also simmer increasing resentment over time.

The law of simmering social pots: Putting a tight lid on a simmering social pot will eventually cause a huge boil-over, and perhaps an explosion, at some point in the future.

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An explosion of this sort releases pent-up frustrations but does not change the underlying causes without a political awareness among the oppressed. This awareness allows the oppressed to understand the situation, and seek appropriate remedies.

In gardening terms, there is a huge difference between trampling everything and weeding. The latter requires knowledge of what is desirable and the willingness to do the hard labour required to remove the weeds.

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United States: Should the left back Bernie Sanders' campaign? [Three] views

United States: Should the left back Bernie Sanders' campaign? [Three] views.

1. Dan La Botz: Sanders' campaign a political phenomenon that challenges preconceptions

Of all the far left groups, the International Socialist Organization had been the most critical of and hostile to the Sanders campaign—and for all the right reasons: his caucusing with Democrats, his foreign policy, and above all the belief that Sanders will be an obstacle to building an independent left movement and political alternative. The issue is whether these principled objections should keep us from working closely with Sanders’ supporters, while at the same time maintaining our own political independence.

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What the Sanders campaign may accomplish is to popularize a program of social democratic reforms, to deepen the discussion about socialism, to bring together labor, black, female, and LGBTQ activists into a movement with enough cohesion, energy, dynamism, and excitement to continue to build something after the election. The Sanders campaign could contribute to the launching of a new period of social movements and upheavals with a higher level of political consciousness and if it does that, it will be a great contribution.

So, while remaining a registered Green and planning to work for Jill Stein in the election, I plan to work with the Sanders campaign in the primary period, hoping—like other Sanders supporters—that out of this experience we can build a new, stronger, left in America.

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2. ISO (USA): The problem with Bernie Sanders

At the same time, the left shouldn't abandon the electoral arena to the two capitalist parties. If we do, we create a vacuum that the Democrats will fill, co-opting movement activists, demobilizing unions and social movements, and redirecting their precious time, money and energy into electing candidates who then betray workers and the oppressed.

We need to win the new left born out of Occupy, public-sector union struggles and the Black Lives Matter movement to breaking with the Democratic Party and building an electoral alternative as a complement to struggle from below. Bernie Sanders' campaign inside the Democratic Party is an obstacle to that project.

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3. US Solidarity: Connecting Sanders' Audience’s Aspirations to Clear Working Class Political Alternatives

Jesse Jackson, despite winning 8 million votes in 1988, chose to demobilize the ostensibly independent Rainbow Coalition organization after losing the Democratic nomination so no ongoing coalition went on to continue working around issues of economic and racial justice after the campaign ended. This time, the left should urge Sanders supporters to keep the fight going through joining anti-austerity struggles, social movements or building local, multi-racial coalitions, including independent electoral infrastructures, that live on well after the presidential campaign.

We agree with Howie Hawkins when he says: “We should talk about why independent politics is the best way to build progressive power, about the Democratic Party as the historic graveyard of progressive movements, and about the need in 2016 for a progressive alternative when Sanders folds and endorses Clinton. I don’t expect many will be persuaded to quit the Sanders campaign before the primaries. But I do expect that many of them will want a Plan B, a progressive alternative to Clinton, after the primaries.”

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Sanders is getting people involved in politics. However, the problem is how to keep activism going after elections. Then, how to get people to raise their consciousness further into radical politics?

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Ted Rall: L.A. Confidential: How The LAPD Conspired To Get Me Fired From The Los Angeles Times — And How I Proved They Lied

Ted Rall writes L.A. Confidential: How The LAPD Conspired To Get Me Fired From The Los Angeles Times — And How I Proved They Lied.

Classic Streisand effect: In their attempt to discredit me and destroy my reputation as a journalist, the LAPD wound up discrediting themselves and further eroding its own reputation. And they’re taking the Times with them.

But the LAPD’s reputation has, of course, already been destroyed by decades of police brutality, systematic corruption and fatal police shootings of one unarmed black man after another.

Will the Times do the right thing: apologize, issue a retraction, and return my cartoons and blogs to the pages of the newspaper? I hope so.

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We need Rall's incisive journalism as well as his intregity.

The police and mass media are colluding to silence that voice as the support for Capitalism is rotting away under the daily exposure of corruption in the system.

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Israeli squatter-terrorists kill Palestinian toddler, injure 4 after setting their Home Ablaze

Juan Cole re-posts that Israeli squatter-terrorists kill Palestinian toddler, injure 4 after setting their Home Ablaze.

Israeli settlers killed a Palestinian toddler and injured four others early Friday morning after settling their home ablaze in the village of Doma near Nablus in the occupied West Bank, local sources said.

Ali Saad Dawabsha, one-and-a-half years old, died shortly after sustaining serious burns, said Ghassan Daghlas, an official who monitors settlement activity in the northern West Bank.

His mother and father, Riham and Saad, and their son Ahmad, 4, also sustained injuries and were evacuated to a nearby hospital, Daghlas said, adding that their home was left completely burned.

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ISIS burn a Jordanian pilot alive and are justly condemned throughout the world.

Israelis burn a Palestinian child alive and there is silence.

As John Pilger says, Palestinians are unworthy victims. Indeed, they are even blamed for all the violence done to them.

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Did Turkish Pres. Erdogan Make a Historic mistake in dumping Peace Process with Kurds?

JULIE POUCHER HARBIN asks Did Turkish Pres. Erdogan Make a Historic mistake in dumping Peace Process with Kurds?.

Turkey has become increasingly concerned that gains made by Kurds in Iraq and in Syria could encourage its own Kurdish minority to seek independence. Kurdish rebels released a statement on July 25, 2015 following the airstrikes that the conditions for observing the truce had been “eliminated”. The PKK’s military wing, the HPG, denounced this “aggression of war” by Turkey and vowed “resistance”. It described the bombings in northern Iraq as the “most serious military and political error” by Erdogan and his ruling Justice and Development Party.

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What is missed in this analysis is that the Kurds are exploring an alternative political and economic system to Capitalism. This makes them more dangerous than ISIS.

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SYRIZA's dilemma

Sam Gindin and Leo Panitch discuss SYRIZA's dilemma.

The central problem is that even the most detailed plans now being advanced are presented as a set of alternative policies, but in fact amount to demands for an immediate political revolution. They fail to confront whether this is possible given the balance of forces inside Greece, as reflected in mostly unreconstructed institutions of the state itself, as well as by the continuing public preference for staying with the euro. Concrete political analysis, rather than a technical response to a political problem, is what is needed in the present moment.

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A politcal revolution is extremely unlikely, at this time, in Greece, or, indeed, elsewhere in the West. The troika knew this when they punished the Greek government for having the utter gall to even think of opposing austerity.

Workers have to understand what is happening in Greece will soon be happening in Portugal, Italy, Spain, and elsewhere.

A true political revolution is our salvation, not a negotiating ploy.

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On centrist utopianism

Chris Dillow writes On centrist utopianism.

I say all this as a counterweight to a longstanding prejudice — that centrists and moderates are realistic and hard-headed whilst we leftists are utopian dreamers. Of course, this accusation applies to some on the left — anything is true of someone — but for me the opposite is the case. I'm a Marxist because I'm a pessimist. It is those who think that (actually-existing) capitalism is easily reformable so that inefficiencies and injustices can be eliminated who seem to me to be the dreamers.

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Capitalism is all about increasing inequality, speculative bubbles, and recurring crises of over-production. One cannot reform the essential nature of a thing—one can only mollify its effects.

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Socialism, American-Style

Mark Thoma comments on Socialism, American-Style, by Gar Alperovitz and Thomas M. Hanna, Commentary, NY Times.

Moreover, contrary to conventional opinion, studies of the comparative efficiency of modern public enterprise show rough equivalency to private firms in many cases. …

With skepticism about capitalism growing among minorities and young voters, will we see more such endeavors in the future? Pendulums have a way of swinging, sometimes very sharply, when big economic tsunamis hit. It is possible that in the next big crisis, both sides might see the wisdom and practical benefits of public ownership, and embrace Joseph Schumpeter’s point even more boldly than they do today.

I think this would benefit from separating natural monopolies — where it is not surprising in the least that costs/prices are lower with public ownership (or strict regulation of prices if privately owned) — from the other examples. When *significant* market failures justify it, I fully support public ownership. But in most cases I'd prefer private sector ownership with regulatory oversight.

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The propaganda machine of Capitalism would never publicly admit the inherent deficiencies of markets. However, failures are sometimes too great to cover over as in the case of the GFC.

Public ownership and regulatory oversight are tacit admissions that economic forces should be subject to the popular will not to private whims. Yet, these are still far from the actuality of worker-controlled and directed enterprises under Communism.

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How Wealthy Is Everyone Who Isn't Rich?

Barry Ritholtz ponders How Wealthy Is Everyone Who Isn't Rich?.

Consider the 71 percent of the world's population that falls into the poor and low-income categories. TThis group devotes a very large share of its income to food, medicine, clothing, housing, education and energy. It therefore represents a huge market for basic goods and consumer staples.

Think of it another way. More than fourth-fifths of world's population live on less than $20 a day. TIn other words, how well this vast swath of humanity is doing will have important implications for industry, from health care and finance to agriculture and energy.

Income growth in these groups in both the developing and developed world will alter the economic and political landscape. The U.S. National Intelligence Council has called it a global megatrend.

Not to be too optimistic, but the economic state of world is getting better. As more people move into the global middle class, they are able to buy more consumer goods, save and invest. That creates a long-term self-interest in political stability and, one can hope, democratic institutions.

How well we adapt to these changes will determine how successful we in the U.S. are as investors, and as a nation.

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Of course, the implied argument of this article is that Capitalism is making the world a better place.

The efforts of governments in China, Laos, Venezuela, Vietnam, Ecuador, Cuba, and elsewhere in devoting large resources to food security, housing, literacy, medical programs to the poor is undoubtably a major part in this trend towards a better world.

Yet, we have seen in recent years the callous disregard of Capitalism towards the poor through austerity programs in Europe (especially in Greece), the destruction of nations with successful social programs such as Iraq and Libya, and the brutal supression of refugees fleeing the terror of war and poverty.

Ritholtz is naieve to believe the rising middle class is blind to what Capitalism really means. The US's role in enforcing the brutality of Capitalism will not be easily forgotten.

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The Eurasian Big Bang

Tom Engelhardt posts Pepe Escobar's report on The Eurasian Big Bang in which China and Russia Are Running Rings Around Washington.

In the end, whatever Washington may do, it will certainly reflect a fear of the increasing strategic depth Russia and China are developing economically, a reality now becoming visible across Eurasia. At Ufa, Putin told Xi on the record: "Combining efforts, no doubt we [Russia and China] will overcome all the problems before us."

Read “efforts” as new Silk Roads, that Eurasian Economic Union, the growing BRICS block, the expanding Shanghai Cooperation Organization, those China-based banks, and all the rest of what adds up to the beginning of a new integration of significant parts of the Eurasian land mass. As for Washington, fly like an eagle? Try instead: scream like a banshee.

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Strangely enough, America's victory in the Cold War has allowed all of this to happen—the dismantling of Socialism in a Single State in the former USSR; and the rise of Deng in the PRC. Instead of mutual hostility through ideological conflict over Marxist-Leninism and Maosim, there is a mutual recognization of a common enemy in the USA and its naval hegemony.

It is this naval hegemony that forced Russia, China, India, and Iran to realize that it can be made irrelevant through development of land transportation routes through the Eurasian land-mass.

Since US-dominated institutions are reluctant to fund such infrastructure development, Russia and China have led the development of alternative financial institutions thereby lessening somewhat the political and financial leveraeg of the USA.

For Australia, this means we will probably keep putting the choice between following China or USA for as long as possible. For the USA, we remain a positive strategic asset in South-East Asia. For China, our value would only exist in the negative sense.

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