Apostate Windbag

More Enlightenmentmonging from Romana’s hubby

2007-08-17T04:08:00.000+02:00

An analogy [one you’ll probably not find on this year’s SATs]:

The Enlightenment is to Richard Dawkins and his transatlantic conceited coterie of atheo-fundamentalist cocks [I do mean that in the sense of ‘being proud as a’ and not in the sense of ‘as rigid as a’ – although now that I think about it, that could just about work too], Hitchens, Harris, Amis and McEwan, as a plunger handle is to a racist frat-boy marine at Abu Ghraib: used the wrong way round and up the bums of Muslims. In other words, for a purpose entirely in opposition to that for which it was originally intended.

[Furthering the phallic allusion here for just one tendentious and possibly thoroughly supererogatory second longer – It is remarkable is it not, that once upon a time, middle-aged left-wing men with diminishing little-general capacities just bought lavishly redundantly fast Italian roadsters and a mistress younger than their daughter, but these days, it’s always the luckless Enlightenment that seems to get the blood coursing through the old soixant-huitard schlong. I say, a shot of that Robespierre must work monstrously better than those diamond-shaped blue pills.]

In the unwitting or witting service of imperialism and Islamophobia normally is the ill-fitting purpose for which he and others wield the Enlightenment. But he’s at it again, and this time that smug, expensively coiffed salt-and-pepper bouffant of an evolutionary biologist is using his Manichean ill-read caricature of the Enlightenment and reason for more – oh and I do hate this word, but there’s nothing else for it – classist motivations.

In his new two-part series, Enemies of Reason, in perhaps what is a correction to an oversight from his last series, The Root of All Evil, he is attacking new-age flim-flammery, not merely established religion. He aims to show how silly, silly, silly people are who believe in dowsing, alternative medicine, spiritualism, mediums, crystal balls, tarot cards, astrology and the rest of the panorama of such ‘free-thinking’ applesauce.

I say correction, as his last series had only aimed at converting everyone to atheism, while it is, sadly, more than entirely plausible, if irrational, to be both an atheist, or, more precisely, someone who puts down ‘secular’ or ‘no religion’ on census forms, and simultaneously believe that the planet Mercury has some passing influence on whether you’ll finally get that promotion to second-assistant fartcatcher to your department’s under-manager of company stationary monitoring, or that an ascending Venus means that you and everyone else born in the same month as you will find true, ineffably soul-nourishing love before week’s end. There is not a small number of people who don’t go to church these days, but an unhappily large percentage of them still believe in palm reading, Echinacea and homeopathy, hang tacky first-nations dreamcatchers off their porches, and would rather step out into a street full of traffic than walk under a ladder that mid-pavement was leant against a building. One might here repetitively reflect that it is not, as G.K. Chesterton apparently never did say, that when people leave the church they will believe in nothing, it is that they will believe in anything.

I have little quarrel with Dawkins’ understandable impatience with people’s belief in this bricolage of infantillist nonsense per se. I have no time for any of this bullshit myself when I encounter it amongst people I know. On Free Tibet marches I used to attend years ago, whatever the injustice of the Maoist occupation, I always cringed when the crowd launched into chants of ‘Long live the Dalai Lama’. Rather, the concern I have is the class frame that this inheritor of the Earldom of Lincoln uses to scaffold his prosecution.

It is quite striking how the accent of almost every single one of the objects of his scorn in the documentary, including even the rather bumbling astrologer for the Observer (I know! It passed me by too. I’d never even noticed that the Observer had an astrology column. That and the constipated Nick Cohen! That’s it, I’m switching to, er, wait, the Indy has one too, I’ll bet, doesn’t it?), are so very far from Dawkie’s studiously deathless yet chipmunkish RP. From the scouse aura-photographer and the pink-cardiganed psychic energy tutor to poor swishy Simon the mancunian tarot hustler who, to be honest, got rather rumbled by Dick, to Craig the spiritualist minister, to Ken the dousing Cornishman who refuses to admit his dousing skill doesn’t work when it’s disproven before his eyes. Isn’t he simple? Poor, deluded, unsophisticated Ken.

Yet the sceptic magician, Derren Brown, who, like Houdini once did, debunks spiritualists and is on Dawkins’ side, has only the lightest hint of regulation-meeja-personality Estuary, and only by his forward-mouthed U’s can you tell that Dawkins' other fellow rationalist in the film, the psychologist dousing-demystifier, Chris French, must have spent some time oop north before university. It’s been a long time since one could definitively tell a person’s class from her accent, but yet, there’s something there. Dawkins is schoolmaster, not academic here.

Dawkins, far from even having any empathy for these people, holds them in the utmost dersision. Worse still, he offers no explanation for this latter-day growth in superstition and belief in the supernatural. It simply is. ‘Reason has a battle on its hands.’ ‘Science is under attack.’ ‘[There is] an epidemic of irrational superstitious thinking.’

Rather than recognising the foolishness of their thinking but understanding and explaining where it might have come from, he all but calls them fools to their faces with his own sneering, taunting visage.

The closest he comes to a reason for this contagion of the cockamamie is his unsupported assertion that there is ‘a prejudice against science in schools’ and that university science departments are closing around the country. He also gives ‘postmodern relativism’ a bit of a short and ungratifying poking. However lamentable the state of science education may be, and however much postmodernism in its sundry flavours deserves a good, sharp wedgie, I’d like to offer a more quotidian explanation.

Karl Marx, perhaps the most noted of all noted atheists, gave a generation of American anti-communists a gift with which to beat domestic left-wingers – with his epigram describing ‘religion [a]s the opiate of the masses’. Throughout the cold war, this, from his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, was considered the most arrogant of phrases and perhaps more of a reason to condemn socialism than any conclusions or prescriptions in the rest of his egalitarian philosophy. The emphasis was always on the ‘godless’ part of the ‘godless commie bastard’ felicitation. But in fact, the rarely printed complete quotation, far from arrogant, is full of empathy and at the same time offers a clear, obvious explanation as to why people believe in religion, or in this case, new-age mumbo-jumbo:

Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusion about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions.

It is the wretched condition of the world that gives rise to these uninflatable spiritual life-preservers that people cling to.

People have believed and continue to believe in superstition, whether of the established religious or new-age category not simply as Dawkins imagines because it offers an (incorrect) explanation of where the universe comes from and gives hope that we live on after we die, but also because life as a peasant, or industrial worker in earlier times, and in latter days a shelf-stacker at Wal-Mart or an at-any-moment-outsourced call-centre worker, is so fraught with hardness, with precarity, with loss, unfairness and poverty, that religion offers a meaning, a structure, a reassurance that things will be better after we die, that no matter what, someone loves me. However lonely I may be, there’s always somebody on my side. That if I believe hard enough, and pray enough, maybe I will get that job promotion. The false hope that comes from today’s Mystic Megs is no different.

I don’t know if anyone’s done any studies of this sort of thing, but it would be interesting to find out how many prayers or questions of tarot readers, ask not about healing or romance, but about personal economic matters – jobs, bills, credit cards, debt, mortgage payments, car loans, will there be enough money to pay for the kids’ Christmas presents? When despairing people go to these charlatans, it is more in search for hope in a world that offers none than anything.

Richard Dawkins’ father was a colonial officer in Malawi, at the time Nyasaland. The family is listed in Burke’s Landed Gentry as the ‘Dawkins of Over Norton’. He is married to the Honourable Sarah Ward, daughter of the Seventh Viscount Bangor, George Plantagenet, descendant of the 1st Duke of Clarence, brother of King Edward IV [and, yes, spods, also the second Romana on Doctor Who]. How very clever he was to have been born into and married into such families who could deliver the likes of him unto Oxford, and not some undereducated line of Cornish tin miners.

I should say here that it is not I who is saying that superstition is the province of the working classes, and atheism the realm of the well-off and educated, but Dawkins himself.

In 2002, Dawkins gave a talk, ‘An Atheist’s Call to Arms’ at the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference, which describes itself onanistically as ‘an invitation-only event where the world's leading thinkers and doers gather to find inspiration’. Another World Economic Forum-style circle jerk, in non-PR-speak, in other words. Some of the sort of people who attend TED may well be galacticos of the academy (who won’t be so poorly compensated in any case), but for the most part they are the unforgivably rich.

The talk was much of the usual, unobjectionable bigging up of atheism Dawkins is good at, although unknowingly, his shirt collar was caught underneath his blazer lapel the whole time. Oh the shame of such a boner in such august company. At one point, he asked:

Is there any correlation positive or negative between intelligence and tendency to be religious? … A recent article by Paul G. Bell in the Mensa magazine…[shows that from] 43 studies carried out since 1927 on the relationship between religious belief and one’s intelligence or educational level, all but four found an inverse connection. That is, the higher one’s intelligence or educational level, the less one is likely to be religious…There are people in this audience easily capable of financing a massive research survey to settle the question.

A couple of times he hinted to his bloatedly moneyed audience that the battle against religion would be financially costly, and then he came out and just said it. He begged for money from them:

This is an elite audience…I suspect a fair number of [you] despise religion as much as I do… And if you’re one of them, I’m asking you to stop being polite and come out and say so. And if you happen to be rich, give some thought about ways in which you might make a difference. The religious lobby in this country is massively financed by foundations such as the Templeton Foundation and the Discovery Institute. We need an anti-Templeton.

In a world in which there was less imperialism, less poverty, less competition, more social solidarity – in a more just world – there would be less need for religious fundamentalism and new age mumbo-jumbo.

Yet ironically, it is these captains of industry to whom Dawkins attends, fellates, cap in hand, begging them to fund his ‘militant atheism’ movement, the very commanding heights whose capitalist methods are responsible for the poverty, social dislocation, and imperial drive for war that incubate the despair that produces the wounds to which religion and new-age obscurantism are salve and balm.

In a further irony, as literary critic Terry Eagleton noted in the London Review of Books, that when Dawkins in his writing is not thoroughly ignorant of moderate theologians who see no conflict between faith and reason, is so baffled by them that he simply dismisses them, unable to fathom what he could utter to gainsay a word of their perspectives. For Dawkins, there is only athieism on the one hand and theism that is by definition fundamentalism on the other. There is no middle ground.

Yet it is these very non-fundamentalist religionists, those liberation theologians, liberal Anglicans, Catholic Workers, the architects of Jubilee 2000, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, Tariq Ramadan, the Unitarians, the Quakers, the United Church of Canada, the Jesuit Sandinista ministers who chose the revolution over the church whose faith inspires or inspired them to fight poverty, oppression, war and colonialism, whose work actually helps build the world without injustice, without despair that builds the hope in the hearts of men and women that actually diminishes the need for superstition.

Indeed, if we follow this logic, then the Sermon on the Mount, of all things, or rather an adherence to its prescriptions of solidarity, is more likely to deliver the rationalist culture that Dawkins hopes for than a legion of Dawkinses.

Dawkins’ explanation for superstition is all opiate of the masses and no heart in a heartless world.

The exploding package of EU Postal Privatisation

2007-02-27T21:27:00.000+01:00

Article I did on spec for a publication. They didn't want it in the end, but here you go (I warn you - it's a little dull).

When I was a little boy, every month I would go to the local Canada Post office and get a special envelope with the new commemorative stamps that had recently been issued. My grandparents in England too would send me British commemorative stamps at Christmas, sometimes at other times, falsely saluting Alexander Graham Bell as the inventor of the telephone or raising the ire of the anti-secularists for printing lickable, perforated squares of snowmen instead of magi or mangers.

As I grew older, philately diminished considerably in my estimation. However, when I was in Madrid recently, I wandered down an alley just off the Plaza Mayor, where there is a minor gaggle of stamp shops. I wandered past and saw in a couple of windows not a few stamps and brittle old envelopes with stamps from the era of the Spanish Republic. Though 2006 is the 70^th anniversary of the start of the Spanish Civil War, this was one of the only remembrances I could find in the city of the period. Stamp-collecting has more or less gone the way of the dodo (the extinction of which was, I should note, had been commemorated on one of the stamps I had had as a child) in this age of Playstations and Nickelodeon, and I thought what a shame it was. The socialist thirty-one-year old I am momentarily was a stamp-fanatic eleven-year-old and thought what beautiful little bits of history are held within and taught by these funny sticky squares.

Technology and the proposed new EU postal services directive will soon put paid to stamps and stamp-collecting entirely. The EU FAQ on the directive on the Commission website mentions that after full liberalization it is unlikely that new service providers will retain the anachronism that is the stamp. One can’t mourn the passing of out-dated technologies, I suppose. But the directive will kill off more than the soppy philatelic memories of this nostalgic author. The full privatization of post across Europe will produce services that are deeply uneven and unequal. It will produce a grossly unfair two-tiered postal system, with one set of quality services for the large corporations and urban middle class, and another set of poorly provisioned services for rural areas, the urban poor, small businesses and the outermost territories of member states – if they even have access to such services at all. Though the Commission portrays postal privatization as one more aspect of the grand drive to bring Europeans together, it will in fact diminish the economic, social and territorial cohesion of the Union. The death of public postal services after more than three hundred years of their existence is indeed something to mourn. Or rather, as Wobbly Joe Hill reminded his fellow trade unionists as he was dying: not to mourn, but to organize – against.

The EU internal market Commissioner, Irishman Charlie McGreevy, recently confirmed that all European postal services are to be opened to competition by 2009, in keeping with the last postal directive of 2002. Full, or near-full marketisation of post has already occurred in Germany, Finland, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK. With the new directive, the commissioner wants to fast-track liberalization in the remaining 22 member states.

Postal services in the Union are covered by a 1997 directive that opened up the sector to competition for mail weighing more than 350 grams – essentially large packages – easily the most profitable sector of the postal market. Items under 350 grams were designated ‘reserved areas’. In 2002, the reserved area was amended down to 100 grams, and as of January, 2006, no mail delivery of items over 50 grams could be monopolized by a national provider. The Commission has this month confirmed that by no later than 2009 are all member states to eliminate this last reserved area.

McGreevy is quick to counter opponents of the measure by saying that we are not to worry, universal service provision – comprising the ‘affordable’ provision of at least one delivery and collection five days a week to all citizens - is ‘copper-fastened’ into the directive.

In fact, upon the briefest of investigations, one finds that universal service provision is not so much ‘copper-fastened’ into the directive as it is lathered in soap and butter ready to slip through its hands and bounce right out the door into a jungle of free-market rapaciousness.

The language used by the commissioner gives the game away immediately. On the liberalizing side, actions ‘should’ and ‘must’ happen. Member states are ‘required’ to take them. But on the consumer side, language ‘provides for the retention of uniform tariffs’ (i.e., the same price for a similar item, regardless of address); it ‘allow[s] a flexible choice of means to finance universal service provision or the possibility to share out the universal service obligation between operators.

But we need not look to the weasel legal language of the directive to see what will happen. We can see the effects of postal privatization in those member states where liberalization has already been completely or nearly completely realized. Closure of rural post offices, mass lay-offs and a flexibilisation of the workforce is the norm in every jurisdiction.

In January this year, Austria’s conservative coalition government agreed to sell of 49 per cent of its shares in Österreichische Post, but the process of privatization has been underway for about a decade. In 1996, the state-owned Austrian Postal Authorities (Österreichische Post- und Telegraphenverwaltung) was refigured as Post und Telekom Austria AGan enterprise based on private company law. It sold off its telecoms and post bus transport services, while simultaneously acquiring a majority stake in Feibra AG, a private distributor of adverts, and has expanded into Slovenia and Slovakia. Over this ten-year pre-privatisation period, thousands of workers have been laid off. Between 2001 and 2005, the workforce was cut by 22 per cent, or 6600 employees. The share of part-time hires has doubled and the number of workers coming from temp agencies has skyrocketed. Whereas previously, the company used temp agency workers only at peak times such as Christmas, such practices have been institutionalized. Finally, more than 1000 local post offices (out of a total of 2300) have been closed across Austria.

In Ireland, An Post sold off its SDS Courier service – its most profitable department – as part of a government-directed opening of the market favouring the big courier services such as DHL and Federal Express. The management is softening up the workforce for privatization by withholding pay-rises and understaffing sorting offices. An Post workers feel that this is part of a strategy of weakening employee morale so that there is less internal resistance to the inevitable full privatization.

In the UK, where postal privatization is quite advanced, there has been thousands of post office closures, almost entirely in rural areas. Only some 1,500 of 8000 rural post offices are profitable, but the principle behind postal services in the UK for some 350 years has been that the profitable regions subsidise outlying and naturally unprofitable areas, ensuring equal access to services across the country. With the liberalization of the Post Office’s most profitable division, is it any wonder that rural post offices are scheduled for market demolition? As of 1999, the UK had some 18000 post offices. It now has 14000, and this week is set to announce an expected further 2500-3000.

In Sweden the postal workforce declined by ten per cent over the period 1995 to 1999 – from 46,000 to 42,000. In Germany, it dropped a whopping 37 per cent – from 380,000 to 240,000 – over the period 1990 to 1999.

The privateers argue that technological change is behind most of this, and this is at least partially true. Some 80 per cent of mail worldwide is now sent via computer. In the UK that figure is 90 per cent. However, at the same time, parcel post has grown by leaps and bounds. Federal Express is the second largest airline in the world, if measured by size of the fleet. The closure of thousands of rural post offices across the Union is a political decision. A neo-liberal fundamentalist decision. It is not driven by technological change.

In the Commission’s own FAQ on what will happen after full liberalization, it states that ‘as a matter of principle, competition creates jobs’. This is true only in a perverse way. In the wake of telecoms liberalization – which is the model to which postal privatization is regularly compared - cost savings to consumers was achieved on the backs of mass lay-offs and outsourcing to temp agencies and developing world call centres. Jobs were created, but poorly paid, ununionised, temporary and part-time ones. Similarly, the private telcos are incredibly reluctant to introduce new technologies to rural and poor areas where they feel the cost of an upgrade of the lines is not worth the revenues they expect from such regions. The cost of a line rental may have dropped across the board, but broadband remains beyond the reach of many in rural areas. Even in urban areas, some telcos have been taken to court for refusing to upgrade lines in apartment complexes that mostly house the elderly or poor, for the same reason. With public service provision, the cost is spread across all regions and levels of income.

The Commission believes that liberalization will result in cost-savings for the consumer. However, the area where money is to be made is in the high-population-density areas where post can be moved in bulk easily. Further, again, in the Commission’s own FAQ, it states that while it is likely that more postal operators will offer services in an open postal market, ‘most operators will be found in the area of business originated mail, which represents close to 90 per cent of total mail volumes. Private consumers are less likely to be able to choose between different postal operators, at least in the short to medium term.’ Elsewhere, in the same document, it states that while the universal service obligation guarantees the affordability of postal services (so it’s gonna be about the same price, but don’t expect any reductions, honey). At the same time, huzzah, ‘prices for business mail are likely to fall very soon after market opening, as most postal companies will focus on this area to begin with.’ Here, they are all but admitting that consumers will not benefit from postal privatization. If postal companies are making their money from business mail, what incentive is there for private service providers to subsidise consumer mail? Any cost-savings they find they will pass on to their most valued customers, not some grandmother in a village in Lapland.

Indeed, the most likely scenario is that private providers will focus on the business and urban mail sectors and leave the rest to the rump incumbent providers.

So if the directive supposedly guarantees universal service provision, how exactly will the market provide?

The answer is it won’t, as, again, the Commission admits. In order to ensure universal service provision member states ‘may choose’ from a range of different options: state aid (subsidizing private businesses), public procurement, compensation funds or cost-sharing. In other words, recognizing that private providers will be extremely reluctant to provide loss-making services, the Commission has concluded that to continue to ensure universal service provision, governments will still have to pay for it.

Essentially, we are selling the goose that lays the golden egg. While still having to fund universal provision of service, governments will no longer have the subsidy for this service that business-originated and parcel post previously provided.

One might as well ask why move forward with privatization at all, if it is not just a big gift to business, wrapped up in string…

…but of course without stamps, and don’t even try to send it from your village post office.

'Murder on an unimaginable scale'

2006-08-10T17:07:00.000+02:00

'The deputy commissioner at Scotland Yard, Paul Stephenson, went even further, saying that the plans amounted to "mass murder on an unimaginable scale."'

Murder on an unimaginable scale? Let's assume for a moment that there was in fact a dastardly terror plot here (I know, I know - that's Tooth Fairy, Father Christmas talk) and not another grand production from Number 10's Acme Distract-O-Matic , is the number of deaths really so unimaginable?

The average number of passengers on an aircraft leaving Stansted is 124; the average number of passengers on an aircraft leaving Gatwick is 129; the average number of passengers on an aircraft leaving Heathrow is around 150. The average of these three averages is 134 (.333333333...., etc., but there's no such thing as a third of a person - other than under rubble in Qana - ha! Ba-dum-cha!). 134 x 9 - the number of planes supposed to be explodeded - and we get 1206 (please excuse the ropey math here, but you get the point) .

As of an hour ago, the body count in (the) Lebanon was 1002. Okay, so it's a smidge under 1206, but it's still on a perfectly imaginable scale. In fact it's so imaginable it's actually real. Really real live dead people! Can you imagine that?!

You know, I imagine we'll get to a number pretty close to 1206 in a day or three, and I imagine it'll probably go above that too.

What an imagination I have.

Amsterdam

2006-02-12T18:18:00.000+01:00

Am in the middle of moving to Amsterdam for a new job that for once is actually interesting and pay a salary that is above the minimum wage. Will be sans internet for about a month while I look for an apartment, so still nothing to report, really, other than more apologies for my continued radio silence.

But just quickly and retroactively:

a) Yah boo sucks to the Tories for winning the Canadian election, but remember, kids, the left also advanced, despite Layton’s pathetic rightward frolics (strategically stupid as well – retreat back to the Anglophone left’s traditional anti-Quebec chauvinism and you wreck any chances of advancing in that province, which must be engaged if one is to ever win a federal election. Doug has more along these lines.);

b) Obviously I’m not in favour of burning down Danish embassies over some ropily executed cartoon blasphemy (although burning down American embassies over their various imperial exertions is an entirely different kettle of fisken, and, heck, while we’re at it, Haitians: fill your boots ransacking the local Canadian chancellery), but has any one actually had a look at these drawings? Whatever we may say about freedom of speech and blasphemy, the cartoons are manifestly racist, with caricatures of Muslims not radically distinct from the doodles of buck-toothed, thick-specs-wearing Japs or hook-nosed Shylocks of yore (Lenny, as always, has been note-perfect on this one);

c) My friend Justin of Different Day has decided to have a go at this whole podcasting lark, with ‘The Thousand Beer Show – Pop, politics and pintage’, (so titled for the renowned abundance of the substance in Belgium) and your correspondent was the first invited guest. You can have a listen to my wretched, stumbling pretensions at rock knowledge and an atrociously over-simplified account of the recent Canadian general election here;

and

d) Husky Rescue, Two Gallants [which I saw opening for the Decemberists long before the NME got their inky little paws on the duo], and The Kooks.

Ten items or less

2006-01-24T18:57:00.000+01:00

Sorry for the writer's block, comrades. Will be back in form soonish, hopefully. In the meantime, here's something I did today instead of doing other things I should have been doing. (Click on image for larger version)

Visit here for info on the NUJ's Low Pay Campaign.

White Stripes plot with Coca-Cola execs to murder Colombian trade unionists

2005-12-09T16:44:00.000+01:00

(Well, apart from the libellous hyperbole, that post-heading's essentially true)

Now, it may be nigh on a decade since I held Oasis in any esteem whatever, but I'm afraid I have to tip my hat to Noel this week, who in an interview in the latest NME has quite aptly described Jack White, of the well-overrated White Stripes, as looking 'like Zorro on doughnuts' and criticised him for writing a song for a Coca-Cola commercial:

'He's supposed to be the poster boy for the alternative way of thinking. Coca-Cola man, fucking hell! And all right, you wanna spread your message of peace and love, but do us all a favour. I'm not having that, that's wrong. Particularly Coca-Cola, it's like doing a gig for McDonalds.'

Zorro on doughnuts

According the (very smelly*) NME, Jack White did it for luuurve:

'White Stripes singer Jack White has finally confirmed he's done a coke ad - and said he's done it to get a message of love out to the world…"I've been offered the opportunity to write a song in a way which interests me as a songwriter. I certainly wouldn't want a song that I'd already written to be used on a commercial. That seems strange. But to be asked to write something particular along one theme of love in a worldwide form that I'm not really used to appealed to me. I've written a song and I wrote it really quickly and it's an interesting commercial that's been made. I was inspired by the commercial."'

Yes, that's right. Coca-cola, always teaching the world to sing, in per-fect har-mon-ieeee (The updated 'Teach the world to sing' ad for Coca-Cola Zero now includes a 'rap' bit and Hootie-and-the-Blowfish-style non-threateningly dressed minorities who look like they go to a good university). What a promoter of peace and love. And isn't what the world needs now, love, sweet love? What a paragon of compassionate capitalism. A very model of corporate responsibility. Except in Colombia, where union leaders and organisers are regularly assassinated at Coke bottling plants while the anti-union parent company turns a blind eye to collusion between paramilitaries and the plant managers. But still, you know, apart from that, they're a regular bunch of hippie peace-freaks, Coke.

In fact, Colombia happens to be the most dangerous country in the world to be a trade unionist. In the last ten years, 1,535 trade unionists have been murdered for their activities - more than the rest of the world combined. For more info on Coke's crimes in Colombia and how you can kick Coke off your campus (if you're a student, natch), visit the homepage of the Campaign to Boycott Killer Coke, or the Colombia Action Network. The latter link also has a broad range of information on Colombia, as do the UK-based Colombia Solidarity Campaign and War on Want.

So stop drinking that Coke. Tastes like gouch sweat anyway. And White Stripes fans - get your ever-lovin' motor-city asses in gear and contact Zorro, c/o manager Ian Montone, at 323 308 1818, and tell him How Wrong He Is.

* Has anyone else noticed this, how much the NME smells? I'm serious here - maybe it's just the batch that gets sent to the Brussels Waterstone's - but the NME just reeks. I mean literally pongy, I'm not just talking about the uncritical UK-scene boosterism, shit writing and sticking Gwen Stefani on the cover.

PS. Apparently Blur are heading back to the studio this month to record a new album sans the sexiest man alive, Graham Coxon. I guess this means his sacking is permanent. This is a crime almost on the level of writing songs for Coke commercials.

The blanching panic of the eunuch poltroons in the Democratic Party, and other bagatelles

2005-12-06T17:00:00.000+01:00

Right. Am out of bed and have drained throat of a lemon-curd-jar's worth of phlegm. Enough with the chicken soup and dubbed-into-French re-runs of Beverly Hills 90210: There are hypocrisies of social democrats and liberals to expose! Still have a bit of a sticky cough, mind, but think that's more to do with half-choking on a be-pestoed tortellini (tortellino?) last night than any remnants of bird flu or tuberculosis. (Lower lip protruberating, head cocked, sympathetic brows a-tilt, The Reader says 'Awww. Didums.')

Quick tour of the interweb before I stick the knife into the SPD once more:

First off, if you haven’t read it yet: Sy Hersh's latest New Yorker piece, on where the war is headed next: 'Up In The Air' (republished here at Truthout). Absolutely vital.

The veteran New Yorker journo predicts that under ever-increasing domestic pressure over the war (not least coming from within a Republican party on course to be decimated in next year's congressional elections), but unable to end it without embolding his enemies, Bush will deliver a sizeable and genuine return of troops some time next year while the war continues by other, more destructive means. The on-the-ground troops will be replaced with a massively expanded bombing campaign, such as has not been seen since Vietnam.

Bush is to have his cake and eat it too. As the US public is unable to stomach many more deaths of their doughty, skookum tumtum boys and girls (although as ever remain fairly sanguine about a limitless number of Iraqi deaths), Junior will mount another 'Mission Accomplished' style pronouncement, declaring that the war is over (chintzy, garlanded ceremonies have already been scripted of the lowering of Old Glory and the raising of the Iraqi standard over military bases [Whatever did happen to that variation on the Israeli flag some clever State Department graphic design intern dreamt up as a new Iraqi drapeau last year, by the way?]), aiming to bequiet the more squishy sympathisers of the anti-war movement and the fretters in his own party, all the while in fact escalating the war by using almost exclusively air power to crush the resistance.

The generals, however, are worried this might just make things worse, given that even the most crackerjack sagacious of smart bombs tend to kill many more civilians than trigger-happy, raised-on-X-Box-and-Eminem 17-year-old ground troops, and, like the worm that turned into three worms when you cut it up with your plastic-but-sharp Lion-O Thundercat sword as a cruel pre-pubescent, for every dead civilian at least three new insurgents seem to be created. (Did you catch the subtle 'my-1980's-adolescent-pop-cultural-experience-was-superior-to-your-
-overly-kinetic-1990's-version' disdain embedded there within the commentary? Sigh. What happy days they were when Lego came in six colours and Transformers came in metal.)

Nota bene: Bush's 'Victory Through Air Power' plans look an awful lot like the humble 'we-can't-just-cut-and-run-so-let's-turn-it-over-to-the-bombardiers' suggestion of the otherwise very good Juan Cole, doesn't it? (The good professor responds that he 'argued that the US should only make this airstrike capability available for defensive operations.' Okay, but isn't the point of the disingenuous 'Pottery Barn' position that the States can't pull out its forces lest civil war break out? How does one defensively prevent civil war? It seems a pretty offensive, or at least pro-active process. Sy's got you here, Cole-y. [The other point that Cole misses, as he idealises the Afghan campaign's air power strategy he recommends returning to, is that the decisive stratagem in that theatre there was not the air power support of local forces, but the winning over of warlords and sections of the Taliban with wadges of cash. There's nobody on the ground to bribe in Mesopotamia. Oh, and dude, what's with the forgetting about, like, the minimum 3,000 - 4,000 civilian deaths from aerial bombardment in Afghanistan anyway?])

***

A good bookend piece to Hersh's feature is Alexander Cockburn's 'Revolt of the Generals', over at Counterpunch, which details the rapidly declining fortunes of Bush and the Republicans ('One has to go back to the early 1970's when a scandal-stained Nixon was on the verge of resignation, to find numbers lower than Bush's,' says he), but also the blanching panic of those eunuch poltroons in the Democratic Party (including that skinny, empty-vessel darling of the 'Democratic wing of the Democratic Party', Barak Obama, and even the anti-war-esque former boy-mayor of Cleveland, Dennis Kucinich) in the wake of John Murtha's call for immediate withdrawal from Iraq. However grim the Republicans' fortunes, the jellyfish Dems are entirely incapable of capitalising on the situation.

***

Hitchens fans, and God knows I'm one, ha ha, will adore my internautical comrade Lenin's superb exegesis of the 'genocidal imagination' of dear Chris H. over at MRZine, writing under his slightly more pedestrian real name.

***

I emerged from my sweaty bed the other day to discover to my surprise that my native land (that would be Canada, comrades, despite the regularity with which I am partially mistakenly categorised as a Britischer in various nationally dichotomised blogrolls) is having another election. I was so off the ball that I missed the entire first week's campaign. See, this is what happens when the Globe and Mail starts charging for content. De toute façon, it seems the pro-war, pro-imperialism-lite Michael 'I-say-"we"-when-I-talk-about-Americans-but-am-actually-Canadian' Ignatieff has been parachuted into a Toronto riding (trans: 'constituency') with the aim of stirring up such a wave of Trudeaumaniacal sentimentalist desire for an intellectual leader of the Liberal Party that he will be able to surf straight into the PMO. Unluckily for him, the sizeable local Ukrainian community is a little humpty about the riding association's semi-non-democratic shenanigans that produced the candidacy of the former Harvard academic and (continuing) apologist for war crimes, somewhat diminishing his prime ministerial and possibly even MP prospects. Rick Salutin has a piquant little biography of the man at Rabble.ca. Michael Neumann's 2003 piece on Iggy in Counterpunch is also worth a butcher's.

***

For my Canadian readers, let me just mention briefly for the record that I never did like Buzz Hargrove.

***

Meanwhile, my pathetically perpetually approval-seeking homeland is also very excited that Jon Stewart mentioned the country briefly on the Daily Show.

I am occasionally homesick, but not at times like this.

***

Oh, and Backword Dave has Doctor Who filming by his house. Dude. How awesome is that?!

Extenuation

2005-11-22T11:30:00.000+01:00

Am feeling as rough as an old badger, hence little in the way of posting. Do not expect any for a couple of days.

A young badger. Couldn't find a picture of an old one.

Peretz a 'Breakthrough' for the Israeli left?

2005-11-18T21:40:00.000+01:00

In the struggle for justice for Palestine, the left outside Israel so rarely pays attention to economic or political dynamics within Israel proper, outside of how such things might affect the occupied territories. Why concern oneself, too many ask, with the internal processes of the occupier-oppressor when helicopter gunships set elementary schools ablaze and extra-judicial targeted assassinations slaughter bystanders, while the settlements continue to expand on the West Bank and the serpentine Separation Wall meanders through Palestinian land, carving out yet more acreage for Eretz Israel?

But this is a wilfully purblind ignorance, and a perspective as absurd as suggesting that because there is little difference between Democrats and Republicans, there is nothing of interest to the global left in American electoral contests. It is not enough to simply say that there is no genuine electoral left in the United States and dismissively leave it at that. One must ask why this is so. Equally, it is not enough to ask 'What has the Israeli left ever done for the Palestinians?' One must ask why they have done nothing.

In the last week, there has been a political earthquake within the ranks of the Israeli Labor Party: A giant has been felled. How this development may or may not affect the occupation is reason enough to pay attention to internal Israeli phenomena.

New Israeli Labor Party leader Tom Selleck.

Whenever one visits an Israeli newspaper website such as Ha'aretz, one is struck by the number of ads for anti-poverty charities. This is no mere shilling for money for the settlements - or at least some of it isn't. While the world's attention has been rightly focussed on the war crimes committed in the occupied territories, Benjamin Netanyahu as Prime Minister initiated a programme of structural adjustment within Israel every bit as vicious as those of his models, Thatcher and Reagan in the UK and US. The economic liberalisation, steady reduction in social service provision and diminishment of trade union rights continued under Barak and has rapidly expanded under Sharon, whose finance minister is, of course, Netanyahu. The cutbacks to social services have all gone to the country's massive defence budget and funding the settlements. This liberalisation has not gone without consequence. The number of poor families in the country increased by 20.3 per cent in 2004 alone, with one in three Israeli children now living in poverty. Poverty has flourished to such an extent that the gap between rich and poor in Israel is now actually greater than in any other developed country - hence all the charity ads.

The occupation is not merely ruinous to Palestinians; It is also literally consuming Israeli society itself.

[By the way, I don't think visiting a website counts as breaking the boycott - surely one has to be informed in order to offer solidarity to the Palestinians. That said, this whole boycott business is a bit of a fuzzy thing at the edges. Live herbs and helva have been pretty easy for me to avoid (In any case, I manage to kill basil plants with the ease and impunity that the IDF kills eleven-year-olds, so it's all probably for the best), but when I was in Amsterdam last weekend, I accidentally bought a falafel that turned out to be dripping with Palestinian blood. Scarfing down the yummy thing, my German friend, Jens, and my Palestinian friend, Osama, both said more or less at the same time, 'You realise that's an Israeli falafel?', and I responded, 'Mmo, muh-uh. Ifs noff. Ifs mutch.' To which Jens rebutted, 'No, Maoz Falafel's definitely not Dutch, it's Israeli.' To which I rejoindered, 'Oo fwure? Hmm. Oh weh, ifs wery masty.' The next day I looked Maoz up on the old interweb and it turns out it is a Dutch company, just owned by expat Israelis. So ner, thought I. That doesn't count. But then I read that the actual falafel it uses, on the other hand, is not terribly Netherlandish. It's a complicated business, as I said. It reminds me of my days as a teenage vegetarian, when I was morally torn upon finding out that most beer was filtered using edible gelatines, which is made from animal bones, or isinglass, which is made from fish bladders. I gave up vegetarianism some time shortly thereafter. I was not a terribly good vegetarian anyway, what with the regular 'bacon breaks' I allowed myself from time to time. (NB., vegan readers: Most bottled bitters and lagers are O.K., but Guinness? Not vegan!)]

All this has only exacerbated the plight of Mizrahi, or 'Eastern' Jews (immigrants from other Middle Eastern and north African countries), who since their first arrival in the 1950's have been viewed in much the same way within Israel by the Ashkenazi (those from Europe and their descendents) elite as Muslim immigrants from the Middle East and north Africa are in Europe. Most Easterners are trapped on the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder and many live below the poverty line. According to veteran Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery, the Eastern Jews are overrepresented in Israeli prisons. Of course one shouldn't take the analogy too far, and the poverty that exists in the Mizrahi neighbourhoods doesn't compare to that of the occupied territories and, one hardly need add, there are no helicopter gunships, but Israel has its own Jewish banlieues, if you will.

On the Gush Shalom site this week, Avnery tells of the sort of welcome that greeted the Mizrahi immigrants in the 1950s:

'From generation to generation, a (true) story was passed on about the Moroccan immigrants who were driven to a place in the middle of the desert and told to build a new town for themselves. When they refused to get out of the truck, its tipping mechanism was activated and they were literally "poured" out, as if they were a load of sand.

This racism that divides Israel in two has only intensified since then:

'[T]he Ashkenazi ruling class openly despises the Arab manners, diction and music that the Eastern immigrants brought with them. This overtly racist attitude towards the Arabs became a covert racist attitude towards the Eastern Jews. These reacted defensively by adopting an extreme anti-Arab attitude.'

Labor (and its forerunner, Mapai) dominated Israeli politics from long before the founding of the state of Israel until the 1970s. To this day, while Likud governs, Labor is seen as the party of the establishment. Likud exploited this sense of alienation felt by non-Ashkenazi Israelis to break the lock Labor had in power, by reaching out to the Mizrahim in the late seventies and eighties.

In a pattern we see everywhere else - from the poor American south to those unemployed whites living two doors down from a mosque in a French or German suburb, where those just one step above the lowest of the low often support not the left, but the hard right - Eastern Jews do not vote Labor; they vote Likud. They do not support the peace camp. They do not go to peace rallies. Few of them attended the 200,000 strong rally in Tel Aviv on Saturday in commemoration of assassinated Labor Prime Minister Yitshak Rabin. To the Eastern Israelis, the peace camp is the preserve of the wealthy, Ashkenazi Tel Aviv elite. Why does Labor care so much about the Arabs, they demand, and not the poorest of Israelis?

As Sharon's aide-de-camp, Shimon Peres has not only backed unilateral disengagement, the rapid expansion of the settlements on the West Bank and the Separation Wall's annexation of still more Palestinian land, he has also fully backed Likud's structural adjustment. You couldn't fit a Kleenex between the economic policies of Peres and the right of the Labor Party and Sharon and Netanyahu. So when we ask why there is not much of an Israeli left - or at least one that has done anything for the Palestinians, we must understand that the foundation of any left anywhere - the working class - in Israel for the most part is tied at the hip to Likud.

Which is why the toppling of Peres as leader of the Labor Party by Amir Peretz this week is so profound.

Peretz, which, as Avnery has pointed out, means 'breakthrough' in Hebrew, is a Mizrahi Jew from Morroco and also the head of the Histradrut, the Israeli trade union. Domestically described in similar terms to UK trade unionism's 'Awkward Squad', Peretz's leadership of the union has orchestrated regular general strikes, holding the union's own against Netanyahu both as PM and as finance minister. The first Mizrahi Israeli to head the Labor Party, Peretz won above all because he opposes neo-liberalism in Israel. He wants to push Labor back to the left economically and promises to raise the minimum wage, end the cutbacks, increase spending on social spending and focus on the plight of the huge numbers of Israelis who are living in poverty.

Mizrahi Israelis voted en masse for Peretz in the party's leadership primaries, while Perez won the backing of the wealthier, largely Ashkenazi Labor elite. As a Mizrahi himself, a left-wing trade unionist campaigning on a traditional social democratic platform, he has the potential to knock the Mizrahi pillars of support out from underneath Likud.

Peretz also calls for an end to the occupation and Sharon's unilateralism. He wants to return to negotiations and a final settlement with the Palestinians. Indeed, he has called for a Palestinian state for twenty years - since long before such a call was politically acceptable in Israel. And most importantly, he makes the connection between the occupation and poverty in Israel. If there weren't settlements, if there weren't an occupation, Israel's poor would not be so. The money for the settlements should instead to go to social programmes and poverty reduction, he says.

Opposed to Labor's support for Likud, he is to pull his party out of the coalition government, forcing new elections early next year. Were Labor to win that election, he would be the first non-Ashkenazi Prime Minister of Israel.

Naturally, Israel's bosses have reacted in horror to Peretz's unexpected victory. On the weekend, the Manufacturers Association of Israel and the Federation of Israeli Chambers of Commerce attacked Peretz's economic proposals, in particular his call for a raise in the minimum wage.

Voters, however are much more receptive to his ideas. According to a Ha'aretz poll, if Knesset elections were held today, the Labor Party headed by Peretz would have increase its power significantly, winning 28 mandates - up from its current 21 - to Likud's 39. Also, a majority of the Israeli public believes Peretz's victory in the Labor primaries increased the party's chances to regain power, and for the first time in a long time, 82 per cent of traditional Labor voters say they will consider voting for their party again. Nonetheless, as interesting as this for all represents in terms of movement within the Israeli polity, we must analyse this event realistically, and not with through the rose-coloured gas mask goggles the Zionist left is.

Although the party's chances will only increase from the predicted 28 now that he has won the Labor leadership, 28 is still quite far from being able to form government. Sharon, having been able to associate the country's economic reforms more with his finance minister, and remaining enormously popular for disengagement, would still win, whether as head of Likud or heading up his own party he would almost certainly form if Netanyahu manages to successfully challenge him for the leadership. This party is all but certain to win, and, having lost the next election, Peretz will be disposed of just as quickly as its last leader, Amram Mitzna, who upon his election was also hailed as the peace candidate.

Secondly, the rest of the Labor establishment remain in power and are working to undermine their new leader. All the Labor Party government ministers and most of the party's MKs did not vote for Peretz. They have described his victory as 'traumatic', as shocking as losing to Netanyahu in 1996, that he has stolen 'their' party from them in a hostile takeover, and some people somewhere have already begun to whisper about problems with Peretz's voter registration.

If Sharon leaves Likud to form his own party, Peres will almost certainly join him there, splitting the Labor party. (Ha'aretz jokes, what then would Peretz's rump Labor party be called? 'New Labor'?)

Furthermore, for all the noise about Peretz's commitment to social democracy, his candidacy was a well-oiled machine, co-ordinated by industrialist Benny Gaon, high-tech millionaire Ofer Kornfeld and Guy Spiegelman, another high-tech businessman and the head of the Labor Party academic forum. Futhermore, while described as a firebrand union leader, in recent years he has moderated his stance, presumably with his parliamentary career in mind.

In 1999, he resigned from the Labor Party to form his own party, Am Ehad ('One Nation'). Though he was as much of a social democrat then as he is now, the party won just two mandates in the Knesset that year and three in 2003, and ultimately merged back with Labor last year (ironically following a courtship by Peres, who thought Peretz would protect him against Barak). However popular he is with the Israeli working class, in the two parliamentary tests of this popularity so far, he has been unable to translate it into power.

But, above all, it was not Likud that initiated the occupation, but Labor.

The occupation is Labor's occupation.

In 1974, Labour established the first settlement in the West Bank.

Peres and assassinated soi-disant peacenik Yitzhak Rabin supported Menachim Begin and Sharon's 1982 invasion of Lebanon.

Rabin and Peres never established the safe passages between the West Bank and Gaza promised as part of Oslo, and continued the settlement programme.

Contrary to popular myth, at Camp David, it was not Arafat who walked away from Barak's 'generous' offer of a Palestinian Bantustan, but Barak who walked away from the idea of honourable negotiations that would give Arafat something he could take back to his people.

Even those to further left equivocate: the Meretz Party (now Yachad), the democratic socialists to the left of both Labor and Am Ehad, who hold six seats in the Knesset and are supposedly the party of a just peace with the Palestinians, participated in the 92-96 Rabin (Peres) and later Barak coalition governments - all the while settlements were expanding. Meretz itself is split over the Separation Wall, with half the party approving of its unilateral annexation of Palestinian land. The party is also split over the IDF's actions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with the so-called 'Securitist Zionist' faction regarding them as legitimate counter-terror operations, while the radicals in the party oppose the actions as 'illegal and immoral. The party also officially denounces the Refuseniks' refusal to serve in the Israeli military (although, to be fair - the party really is divided over this. While it denounces refusal to serve, the party's US affiliate website links to Courage to Refuse ['Ometz Lesarev'], the Refusenik organisation, and the radicals organise support for them and a number of Refuseniks are active at a number of levels in Meretz).

Only the far left, anti-Zionist Hadash party, which currently has three seats in the Knesset, is consistent in its support for Palestinian rights.

But ultimately, the Palestinians do not need to wait for the Israeli left to join their struggle, any more than South Africa's blacks had to wait for the Afrikaaner working class to join theirs. However much it can't hurt to have an Israeli left on side, the Palestinians will struggle on and one day win, with or without one.

Sarko steals Le Pen's thunder - to some extent

2005-11-16T20:49:00.000+01:00

Great news! The Front National rally the other night was shit!

According to the BBC, 'only a few hundred die-hard supporters braved the cold to wave their flags and listen as [Jean-Marie Le Pen] blamed "mad and criminal" mass immigration for the unrest.'

Sadly, at the same time, his popularity has jumped by five per cent, according to a poll for Paris Match.

Things fall apart.

2005-11-14T17:00:00.000+01:00

It really is Bizarro World. John Simpson has written another very astute analysis.

Writing on how the curfews have only created the illusion of containing the violence, with in any case the unrest continuing beyond the capital city, Simpson notes that the very measures being used to contain the violence is itself exacerbating the situation and creating yet more reasons for the young people to fight:

'A woman of 24, heavily pregnant, came to the courtroom to find journalists who would be interested in watching a video she had made of the police coming to her flat to arrest her husband.
'In fact he had been on night-shift, and not out in the streets at all - but the video showed how aggressive the police were, and there are dozens of accounts going the rounds of the police shouting at the demonstrators that they are "sales arabes", dirty Arabs.

'The mother of one prisoner told me that the policeman who arrested her son had shouted that the boy ought to be sent home. "What home does he have but France?" she asked, tearfully.'

I quit my tech news job last month to go freelance. In order to help make the transition, I've been teaching English at a local community college for students learning to be fine-dining waiters and waitresses. They are all immigrants ranging in age from 19 to mid-forties from north and west Africa, apart from one pupil from Ecuador and another who is a rather louche middle-aged Cuban defector. Today, I used a simplified news report about the riots from the BBC World Service's Learning English site to spark off some conversation practice. Without offering up my own opinion, they all suddenly came alive, attentive as I've never seen them before - especially the younger ones - responding that the French youths 'ont raison' - they are right. The anti-immigrant racism, the police harassment, the unemployment - it's not much better here, they said. One older man from Morocco said that if he were younger and living in France, he too would be rioting.

Separately, I also teach advanced English to a pair of white, middle-aged businesswomen - one a Fleming, the other a Walloon. I somehow think they would respond differently to the exercise.

Indeed, according to Le Journal du Dimanche, sadly, some 53 per cent of the French people support the actions of Nicolas Sarkozy, the interior minister. Here in Belgium, the far-right Vlaams Belang (formerly the Vlaams Blok) has managed to climb to the top of the electoral heap in Flanders in particular by exploiting similar fears over immigrants.

Most of my friends here in Belgium are actually from France. The other night I asked my friends Camille and Nico (who in some respects actually resembles the French interior minister, and so is regularly taunted as 'Nicolas Sarkozy' by his media-sponge of an eight-year-old little sister), both of whom are quite exemplary of the anti-neo-liberal mood of much of young France, what they thought of the émeutes. Both of them were quite clear that Sarkozy is a pompier pyromane, a 'pyromaniac fireman': he knew exactly what he was saying and what would happen when he described the rioting youth as 'racailles', and promising to 'karcherise' the suburbs. This is all part of his grand strategy for the 2007 Presidential Election, say my friends, making a play both for working class whites with a soft sort of racism and who are most concerned about 'l'insecurité', and in particular that fifth of the population that votes for the Front National. Nico believes that because Sarkozy is so admired by the far right for his zero-tolerance approach to crime and immigrants, that there need not be any far right participation in the upcoming presidential elections. If Sarkozy is the right's candidate, you already have your fascist to vote for, says he.

I think he exaggerates somewhat. Sarkozy is no fascist; he just is being very savvy about courting the far right vote. As Doug Ireland has written, for Sarkozy to apply the term Karcherise 'to young human beings and proffer it as a strategy is a verbally fascist insult and, as a policy proposed by an Interior Minister, is about as close as one can get to hollering "ethnic cleansing" without actually saying so.' Nonetheless, his popularity will be read by other right-wing pols throughout Europe and further afield as a practicable strategy for electoral success.

Furthermore, Le Pen knows Sarkozy is off poaching FN supporters, and isn't about to let all the political dividends from the riots accrue solely to the UMP's right wing. The old fascist has organised a rally against immigration and the riots this evening.

The LCR held a march two nights ago in Paris between Saint-Michel and Saint-Germain-des-Près. The group called the some 1,000 to 1,500 who demonstrated against the declaration of the state of emergency, 'a success for a rally called at such short notice'.

Sadly, Le Pen's rally tonight will likely be much larger, though it too has been called at short notice.

The centre cannot hold, etc., etc.

***

V. good interview with Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the Franco-German 'indésirable' soixante-huitard street-fighter turned Green MEP in Der Spiegel. He may have been in favour of the European Constitution, but he hits all the right notes when it comes to the French riots.

Covering riots, Economist magazine reporter somehow accidentally transported to Bizarro World, not France

2005-11-13T18:58:00.000+01:00

Sensibly deciding to steer clear of the maniacal Islamofascism-obsessive explanation for the French riots of Steyn, Pipes and Hitchens, the Economist nevertheless once more hasn't missed an opportunity to argue for greater labour market deregulation and attack the free and democratic association of workers, otherwise known as trade unions. For the libertarian pointy-heads at the magazine, the rebellion is obviously the natural result of France's thirty-five hour working week, job protection laws, high minimum wage and bolshy unions.

Er...Whatchutalkinboutwillis?

Arnold finds the Economist's reasoning somewhat specious.

I swear, if the Economist did an investigation into why my roommate always leaves a consumated roll of toilet paper in the toilet without changing it, they would conclude that it all boils down to the continued existence of a public monopoly on meat inspection in Wales. Got athlete's foot from the gym changing room? Its due to over-regulation of the Danish toy industry. Egg with no yolk? Well, if Catalonia didn't subsidise access to museums for students and seniors… An asteroid headed for Earth to destroy life as we know it? Plainly it's the fault of Corsican pay-roll taxes. Invasion of lizard-men from one of Saturn's moons? Public funding of New Zealand's national opera company. The Rapture and the subsequent thousand-year reign of Satan? Swiss air traffic control unions.

The magazine - sorry - 'newspaper' - does recognise that in the suburbs there is a 'toxic mix of poor housing, bad schools, inadequate transport, social exclusion, [and] disaffection among Muslims who are discriminated against,' and the main problem is, 'above all, mass unemployment'. And this is indeed absolutely correct - the country's official youth unemployment rate is 23 per cent and in the suburbs climbs to 40 per cent, and 70 per cent of all new contracts are only temporary, according to Prime Minister de Villepin himself, with 80 per cent of new contracts for young people being temporary.

However, for the Economist's journalists, this mass un- and underemployment is not a product of economic sabotage on the part of very profitable French capital, which is, like its German cousin, attempting to discipline both government and electorate into a still-further deregulated business environment. No, for them, the problem is that 'the French labour market is throttled by restrictions such as the 35-hour week, a high minimum wage, and tough hiring and firing rules,' or, 'what economists call an "insider-outsider" labour market: full-time permanent jobs are so protected by law that employers try not to create many, preferring instead temporary workers or interns whom they can shed more easily when times get tough.'

'This suits the insiders,' continues the article, ' particularly those on sheltered public-sector contracts. But this leaves a whole swathe of youngsters with the very sensation of insecurity that the social system is designed to prevent.'

Thus in the Economist's Bizarro World (the upside-down backwards world from the pages of Superman where everything is the opposite of what it is on Earth, where up is down, ugliness is beautiful and alarm clocks dictate when to go to sleep), it's not the beatific corporations' fault for preferring short-term, part-time, ill-paying contracts and interns, but the avaricious full-time permanent employees and powerful unions, selfishly fearful that they too will be thrown on the scrap heap, who are to blame.

There has been much vilification of the country's 35-hour-working-week law, when in fact, between 1995 and 2003, France actually increased its work hours, if only marginally, according to the OECD, despite the existence of the law. Furthermore, French workers are some of the most productive in the world, ahead of Britain, Germany, the United States and Japan, according to the European statistics agency, Eurostat.

The danger here in all this is that the Economist's conclusion will also be that of France and, more broadly, of the European Union, when it comes to any post-riot consensus. Already, prior to the riots, the UK Presidency of the Union was pushing the Anglo-Saxon model hard, given its 'record levels of employment'. In the wake of the violence, such a model will look even more attractive.

However, the low unemployment rates in the UK and US have not resulted in riotless Shangri-Las of social peace. They are the product of an explosion in McJobs, well exposed by American journalist Barbara Ehrenreich in her bestseller, Nickle and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, and exactly the sort of short-term, low-pay, part-time positions the Economist pretends to be so concerned about in France. America's middle class is fast disappearing as the McJob dynamic colonises even traditional middle-class white collar jobs, a phenomenon that Ehrenreich has also now written about, in her latest book, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream. Precarity is the order of the day even for well-educated citizens. It is this very deregulation which causes the creation of McJobs, as it has been in France. Other countries are as much of a tinderbox as France is.

The republic needs more job protection, not less.

***

Oh, and one quick note on the riots that seems to have been underreported: The rioting has involved poor whites as well, though admittedly not in the same numbers as those from north or west Africa.

Hitchens' Kurdish Jeep Revisionism

2005-11-12T14:55:00.000+01:00

Correction: In the last piece, I mentioned that everyone, both critics and admirers of Hitchens, have accepted at face value Christopher's Kurdish Jeep Revisionism. This is not completely true, as Dennis Perrin, a friend of Hitch's and author of American Fan, has written in to say. Dennis has written about the mythical Jeep episode a number of times. From his blog, Red State Son:

'He may have been in a Kurdish jeep, but the [story about his conversion therein] is a complete lie, and Hitchens knows this. I spent time with him in the period he mentions, and he never stopped criticizing Bush's "mad contest" with Saddam, much less opined that "co-existence" with Saddam was "no longer possible." I have a tape of him debating Ken Adelman on C-SPAN in 1993 where he's still critical of the Gulf War, and again no mention of wanting to overthrow Saddam. As late as 2002, when I asked him directly if he did indeed favor a US invasion, he waffled and said that W. would have to convince him on "about a zillion fronts" before he could sign on.

'But that wouldn't make for good drama, nor would it bolster his public image as Stout Warrior. So he tells the above tale, and does so without shame. When I first heard him do this on Don Imus's radio show (Hitchens is no racist but he has no problem using one for exposure), I emailed him and reminded him of his history. He didn't deny it, said that perhaps his memory wasn't as sharp as he would like, but in the end it didn't matter. Who cares what he said in 1993 or 2002 -- this is what he's saying now and if I didn't like it, tough.'

Also worth reading, if you haven't yet, Dennis' 2003 obituary for Hitchens, which appeared in the Minneapolis/St. Paul City Pages, which is far better than Alexander Cockburns' sometimes-bordering-on-homophobic attacks on Hitchens, and expresses very well the disappointment rather than the anger many of us feel who once were fans of Hitchens . As another of Hitchens' former friends and Buffy the Vampire Slayer analyst, Roz Kaveney, puts it,

'There is that exchange in Buffy 6.6 where Dawn says "This is going to be one of those things where you are not angry, just very disappointed" and Giles says "Yes, except for the not being angry part."

I was never a Buffy fan, but that about sums up my feelings towards the once great writer.

Oh, and do go have a read of Roz's captivating remembrance of her days with Hitch at Oxford. He may these days prefer the company of those campaigning against the militant homosexualist agenda, but as a young buck he had a rather different prediliction.

***

Update: It seems it's just a right-old salmagundi of hypocrisy and double-standards for Hitchens these days, le pauvre.

Jonathan at A Tiny Revolution apparently did a comedy double-take when watching that somewhat oldish Hitch documentary of his book, The Trial of Henry Kissenger, saying, 'Hold on a sec, lemme just rewind that bit...That's not...why, why, yes it is the International Action Center Christopher is chatting quite, quite friendlily with at an anti-Kissinger protest. But, but I thought he didn't like them very much...'

Hitchens: Reactionary, sine macula

2005-11-11T18:18:00.000+01:00

One supposes that if Hitch was willing to prostitute himself to wealthy hard-right Republican anglophile weirdoes for a tour of London along with fellow-former-leftist-turned-right-wing-wackjob David Horowitz (in which guests would have accompanied Hitch & Horowitz around the Houses of Parliament, the Tower of London [to see the bleeding crown jewels!] and other Olde Englande landmarks, had the event not been mysteriously cancelled), and is now regularly writing for Bill Kristol's neo-con and Christian right publication, the Weekly Standard, it really shouldn't surprise anyone that if anything remains of his leftist conscience, it certainly isn't needled by an appearance on conservative cougar Laura Ingraham's radio programme.

Laura Ingraham

However, for all his confidence in the anti-fascist, liberatory power of white phosphorus, cluster bombs, torture and anal rape with toilet plungers, one assumes that as a confirmed soixante-huitard, he could never descend so far as turning his back on anti-racism.

Such an assumption would be wrong. While even Marc Cooper and David Aaronovitch (and also, actually, an oddly remarkably lucid John Simpson) are quite clear about the racial and economic 'root causes' of the French émeutes des banlieues, Hitch remains more akin to the Mark Steyn/Daniel Pipes 'this is what you get if you let the darkies in' perspective: Via Lenny and Sonic at Hitch Watch, we find that Johnny Walker Black Label's best customer told Harpee Ingraham two days ago, 'If you think that the Intifada in France is about housing, go and try covering the story wearing a yarmulke.'

Although, frankly, it's not entirely dissimilar to what he said about the Bush administration's response to Hurricane Katrina having had nothing to do with race during the 'Grapple in the Big Apple' with Galloway in NY, to the shocked gasps of even those audience members who'd turned out to support him.

But wait - hold on to your fork, there's more. Sonic is also reporting that ultra-secularist Hitchens gave the Witherspoon Lecture this month at the Christian fundamentalist, pro-theocracy Family Research Council.

Here is a piccy of him looking beardy and surrounded by virgins:

And here is the image used to link to the Family Research Council's current campaign, which appears on the same page as Hitch's snapshot with the happy-clappy interns:

I wonder if his rider for the gig was the same case of scotch and 200-pack of Rothmans he gets at Hay-on-Wye?

And it doesn't stop there. I recently came across what's actually a fairly oldish article by Tawfiq Chawbourne, who managed to snag a quick and dirty thirty-second interview with the great man on the way out of some London to-do with Francis 'Marx would have approved of the invasion of Iraq' Wheen moderating and Ian McEwan in the audience.

Hitch actually offers Tawfiq an endorsement of the Bush policy on Venezuela, which regular readers will remember as having been a policy that encourages rightist coups. Chris then seems to even go so far as to approve of a Bay of Pigs redux. Says Christopher, 'Chavez is a thug. He’ll be gone within two years, as will the Iranian regime. And Bush will be landing in Havana within two years. Then the last two uniformed leaders [in the Americas] will be gone.'

However over-represented they are in the press, however few of them there may be, and however incoherent their arguments, pro-war leftists do in fact exist, but Hitchens is not one of them. An anti-Chavez, pro-invasion-of-Cuba, softly-racist, Sarkozy-sympathising, Weekly-Standard-publishing, Family-Research-Council-Witherspoon-lecture-giving, Laura-Ingraham-show-appearing individual cannot with any gleaning of truth left to the statement be called a leftist, regardless of his position on the war.

Nonetheless, I am at a loss as to an explanation how all this developed. Shock at 9/11 and any subsequent support for the war does not necessitate indifference to New Orleans or Clichy-sous-Bois suffering.

Lenny of the Tomb reckons 'the trauma of losing a good friend of his on 9/11…catalysed a turn to the right that he had been slowly making for years.' However, I'm not entirely convinced by the Paul Berman thesis that the 'muscular liberal' philosophy of Hitchens and other pro-war progressives, had been in gestation since the Balkan Wars or even as far back as the Rushdie-Le Carré brou-ha-ha. Although I was opposed to 1999's Nato bombing of Yugoslavia, I'll readily admit that the Balkan Wars were not easily ideologically navigable, and a good many who have been opposed to the war since the bombing of Afghanistan - such as the late Susan Sontag - were with Hitchens on the question of intervention in Bosnia and later Kosovo. Furthermore, while almost the entirety of the soft left in the US turned away while Clinton introduced his welfare reforms, expanded the death penalty, diminished health care funding (and in so doing restricted abortion access), enforced developing world structural adjustment and constructed the WTO, Hitchens pulled no punches. He was relentless in his assaults on Clintonian triangulation. If Hitchens' current positions are indeed part of a general trend dating back fifteen years, then there is a rather long, eight-year stretch of recalcitrant progressivism that is unaccounted for in the model.

I'd also not heard that Hitch had lost anyone, and am of the opinion that if he had, as he is more than shameless enough to exploit the person's memory, he would have mentioned it repeatedly. So I dragged out my copy of Love, Poverty & War from underneath the kitchen table's uneven leg, and re-read what Hitch had written immediately after 11 September.

Hitch's very first piece after 9/11, 'We're Still Standing', for the Evening Standard on 12 September, begins with, 'Well, I won't see Barbara Olson again.'

However, one doesn't get a sense from the article that she was his friend, merely that he knew her. Furthermore, in the days immediately after the towers fell, there was much talk of Olson's last minutes, as she had used her phone to alert her husband, the solicitor-general, of the hijacking. It may be more that Hitch was just mentioning that he happened to know a personnage that was in the headlines.

In any case, both this piece, and his second, on 13 September, for the Guardian, 'The Morning After', are actually of a radically different political perspective to everything he has written since, beginning with the now well-known 'Against Rationalisation,' on 20 September, for the Nation, where he would begin to stake out his liberal hawk position. Indeed, in the Guardian piece, Hitchens is quite critical of Bush, writing:

'The United States as a country has no fixed position on Islamic fundamentalism. It has used it as an ally, as well as discovered it as an enemy. It could not bomb Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates, even if it found conclusive proof that the hijackers and assassins had actually trained there. So what does the president mean when he says so portentously that "we shall make no distinction between the terrorists and those who harbour them"? It looks like a distinction without a difference, and gives a momentary impression of being decisive, while actually only confusing the issue.'

And what is the issue of which he writes? Interestingly, it's the history of America's foreign policy:

'On the campus where I am writing this, there are a few students and professors willing to venture points about United States foreign policy. But they do so very guardedly, and it would sound like profane apologetics if transmitted live. So the analytical moment, if there is to be one, has been indefinitely postponed.' [Italics added]

Seven days later, he must have decided that the analytical moment was to be permanently postponed, and made a 180 degree turn away from this initial perspective with 'Against Rationalisation', and its follow-up, 'Of Sin, the Left, and Islamic Fascism', in which he attacked the left for saying essentially the same things he had said in his first two post-9/11 articles.

So, even if he had been close friends with Olson - which isn't clear in any case - he was still willing to 'rationalise' (his word) the attacks for at least another two articles after she had died. Thus the mystery is what made him change his mind within this seven-day period. If the shift had coincided with the attacks, his analysis would be fairly explicable, i.e., he was so shocked by the attacks that he reconsidered his perspective, etc., etc. - the similar arguments we heard from a number of liberal hawks - but it didn't.

The only point I've heard that attempts to explain this seven-day turnaround was that a close friend of his tore into him about the 'The Morning After' piece in the Guardian for much the same reason that he has since torn into Chomsky. However, I've only ever read this hypothesis once, and I can't remember where I read it or who this critic-friend was.

What I find curious is that none of his opponents has mentioned this. He's regularly asked by interviewers sympathetic and hostile why and when did he change his opinions, and he always responds that he didn't change, the Left did, and then produces this quaint story about being in a jeep during the first Gulf War with some Kurds who had a photo of George Bush Sr. attached to the vehicle which made him re-think his opinions, but this is an ex post facto reorganisation of his political trajectory accepted both by admirers and critics. The truth is that he changed quite abruptly some time between the 13th and 20th of September, 2001.

In the end, however, whatever it was that shifted him on the question of 11 September - as well as the battles this shift engendered between him and the left - have so comprehensively transformed his ideas that he is now, from belligerent, triple-chinned tip to lewdly blotto stern, not merely or even a liberal hawk, but a reactionary, sine macula.

Profitting from the riots

2005-11-08T17:39:00.000+01:00

Most people when they see Paris and, as of last night, 300 other cities, burning on the news, they see a riot. The UMP, the France's conservative party and the party of Sarkozy, de Villepin and Chirac, however, see a marketing opportunity.

If you type in the word 'émeute' (French for 'riot') into the Google.fr search engine, the first link that appears is entitled 'Violences en Banlieues' ('Violence in the suburbs') and is a sponsored link to http://www.u-m-p.org/. Underneath, the tag reads: 'Soutenez la politique de N. Sarkozy pour rétablir l'ordre républicain' ('Support the policies of N. Sarkozy to re-establish the republican order'). Refresh the page, and the tag changes to 'Soutenez la politique de N. Sarkozy pour faire respecter la loi' ('Support the policies of N. Sarkozy to ensure respect for the law').

Reuters is reporting that Franck Louvrier, Sarkozy's spokesman, said the company hired by the UMP to run the website paid for the link as a way to respond to the 'thousands' of voters who were e-mailing messages of support.

Right...take out an ad on Google that is to appear whenever anyone looks up the word 'émeute' to tell the people who have sent a message of support to send another message of support?

***

Meanwhile, elsewhere internautical, three French bloggers have been arrested for allegedly 'inciting violence' by using their blogs to encourage people to join the riots, justice minister Pascal Clement told a media conference yesterday. The bloggers, all aged 16 and from Aix-en-Provence in the south, 'called for riots and an attack on police stations'. Their blogs were hosted by a site owned by a youth radio station, Skyrock, which has since shut them down.

I wonder if Reporters Sans Frontieres will rally to their defence. Hmm. No, they're not funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, so probably not.

***

Wikipedia already has a page up on the rebellion, and the full, unedited version of Naima Bouteldja's piece for the Guardian yesterday is now up on the Radical Activist Network website. If you can read French, Indymedia Paris is doing what the Indymedia network is best at - offering up-to-the-minute coverage of large-scale protests. (Understandably, the loading time takes ages)

The Bethune Audomarois branch of Attac, the France-based altermondialiste network, has issued a communiqué expressing solidarity with the 'poor of the suburbs' (hat tip to Kersplebedeb, a Montréal anarchist who is maintaining a very useful blog, Sketchy Thoughts, translating key articles from the French press into English):

Communiqué de attac Béthune

"attac Béthune Audomarois" exprime clairement et publiquement sa solidarité avec les exclus des banlieues victimes du système de Messieurs Sarkozy et consorts. La logique Ultra-Libérale conduit toujours au mensonge,à la misère, à l'exclusion et à la violence. Nous en voyons aujourd'hui les résultats.

UN AUTRE MONDE EST POSSIBLE

Communiqué from ATTAC Béthune

ATTAC Béthune Audomarois publicly and unambiguously declares its solidarity with the people in the poor suburbs, victims of the system of Mr Sarkozy and his friends. The logic of ultra-liberalism always leads to lies, suffering, marginalization and violence. Today we are seeing the results.

ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE

Lenny at the Tomb has a rather good analysis of the commentary on the French riots by Tech Central Station's resident Hitchens-fartcatcher, Michael J. Totten, an atrocious writer who exemplifies the rarely disguised racism that is at the very belly-button of liberal-hawkdom:

Here, then, is the authentic white supremacist posing as a connoisseur of cosmopolitanism, cross-cultural understanding. The fixtures of Orientalist and outright racist discourse are harnessed to the cause of liberal internationalism.

Talking of little shits who write as well as a toothbrush, anyone else who thought that Emma Brockes 'interview' with Noam Chomsky in the Guardian last week was as vomitous as a banana Gorgonzola milkshake might want to meander over to Counterpunch, where they compare Brockes' glib fabrications about Chomsky with her brownnosing Ariel 'Sabra and Shatila' Sharon in another interview (and have dug out a quote from another interview where the little thickie admits that she finds Chomsky hard to understand).

***
I completely forgot about this, but a couple of months ago, UK radical charity War on Want put up a short video clip of Belle and Sebastian's visit to the occupied territories, with some great Palestinian hip-hop on the soundtrack. Ch-ch-check it out.

***
This one's just for shits and giggles:

That's Republican activist Matthew Glavin, who preached upstanding, God-fearing family values until he was caught masturbating in public and fondling an undercover park ranger. He is just one example in a seemingly boundless list of Republican hypocrisy you can find at the 'Stop Republican Paedophilia' site from the Armchair Subversive.

***
And here is everyone's favourite creative-writing-undergraduates-who-decided-to-start-a-band band, the Decemberists, in a 40-odd-minute live session at KCRW, the campus station of Santa Monica College. Why? Because they're the Decemberists, d'uh.

***
UPDATE: (Via Dead Men Left) The LCR's 2002 presidential candidate and one of France's most popular politicians, Olivier Besancenot, has called for demonstrations defying the curfews. From DML's translation of the announcement:

... the LCR calls for demonstrations against the curfew in communes or quartiers, at night if necessary, where it would be instituted by the prefect. The LCR invites all organisations of the left and of democracy to organise these demonstrations together.

'L'Intifada Française' - Between Ramallah '00 and Paris '68

2005-11-07T17:42:00.000+01:00

The press across Europe are saying the 'immigrant' youth (in quotations for the obvious reason that though they are young Frenchmen of the third or fourth generation, and many may not even speak the Arabic of their fathers or grandfathers, they are eternally immigrants) of the French banlieues, or suburbs, are 'trying their hand at revolution'. The talking heads on the news discussion programmes are calling Clichy-sous-Bois - the suburb in northeastern Paris where the unrest began after two young men died, accidentally electrocuting themselves when they hid from police in an electric substation - 'Ramallah-sous-Bois'. Der Spiegel refers to the youths as 'urban guerillas' and 'generation jihad', while Newsweek feverishly asks whether 'the riots [will] swell the ranks of jihadists in Europe' and calls the events the 'beginning of jihad in Europe'.

This is all more than a bit over the top, and drips with the very undisguised racism that is the cause of the disturbances. As S.O.S. Racisme, the French anti-racist organisation notes and denounces in a press release yesterday, the press 'have presented the events as a civil war, describing the participants as savages, with some even calling the riots the "Intifada of the banlieues".' While the last eleven days and nights have seen France's worst domestic unrest since 1968, with some 4,700 vehicles set on fire - 1,400 last night alone in riots that have now spread to the suburbs of most of the country's large cities - as far north as Lille and to Nice in the southeast, as the always perspicacious Lenin, of the blog Lenin's Tomb, notes, situations such as these tend to go 'up like the rocket, [and] down like the stick'. These days of rage are unlikely to last, much as May 1968 itself lasted but a few days whatever its remembrance in the French popular imagination.

Nonetheless, the commentators, even if they articulate themselves through the orientalist prism, alight on the heart of the matter: Europe, like anywhere else in this deregulated, unemployed, privatised, pulverised, atomised, lobotomised cosmos, where the slavering corybantic market fundamentalists would yet privatise the heavens and lay off Saint Peter and the Archangel Gabriel if they thought it would enable them to compete better with Estonia's flat tax, sits atop a powder keg of righteous anger, the predictable product of gross inequality and racism both within its borders and in its relations with the developing world.

The French suburbs - les cités - are overcrowded ghettoes where the descendents of workers brought to France to alleviate the post-war labour shortage live in a violent, boring poverty not dissimilar to that experienced in other European immigrant quarters and American 'projects' and barrios. The oeuvre of the most popular comedian in France, Jamel Debbouze, whom non-French audiences will know from his appearances in Amélie and Spike Lee's She Hate Me, is entirely based around tales of poverty and police brutality in the banlieues. His recent hit spectacle includes a hilarious running gag on middle class teachers sent to teach in the ZEPs (zones d’éducation prioritaires) who fear their pupils, and, most presciently, being chased by les keufs. American journalist Doug Ireland, who lived in France for ten years, where he worked as a reporter for left-wing daily Libération, describes les cités on his blog in a posting entitled 'Rebellion of a lost generation':

[T]hese high-rise human warehouses in the isolated suburbs are today run-down, dilapidated, sinister places, with broken elevators that remain unrepaired, heating systems left dysfunctional in winter, dirt and dog-shit in the hallways, broken windows, and few commercial amenities - shopping for basic necessities is often quite limited and difficult, while entertainment and recreational facilities for youth are truncated and totally inadequate when they're not non-existent.

Crime follows such economic dislocation like regret follows a kebab, but rather than tackle the economic root of the problem, comme toujours, the French interior ministry's response, under the diminutive-but-martial minister and pretender to Chirac's crown, Nicolas Sarkozy, has been what S.O.S. Racisme calls 'l’extrémisme sécuritaire': violent, 'zero tolerance' crackdowns, that unfortunately are massively popular amongst the usual hang-'em-high suspects.

UK-based campaigner Naima Bouteldja, writing in today's Guardian, recounts how earlier this year the level of police repression and racism resulted in Amnesty International criticising 'the "generalised impunity" with which the French police [have] operated when it came to violent treatment of young men from African backgrounds during identity checks.'

Sarkozy reacted to the initial riots in typical fashion, describing the rioters as vermin and scum, although, as both Bouteldja and Ireland note, something has been lost in translation. Says Ireland:

'"Sarko" made headlines with his declarations that he would "karcherise" the ghettos of "la racaille" - words the U.S. press, with glaring inadequacy, has translated to mean "clean" the ghettos of "scum." But these two words have an infinitely harsher and insulting flavor in French. "Karcher" is the well-known brand name of a system of cleaning surfaces by super-high-pressure sand-blasting or water-blasting that very violently peels away the outer skin of encrusted dirt - like pigeon-shit - even at the risk of damaging what's underneath. To apply this term to young human beings and proffer it as a strategy is a verbally fascist insult and, as a policy proposed by an Interior Minister, is about as close as one can get to hollering "ethnic cleansing" without actually saying so. It implies raw police power and force used very aggressively, with little regard for human rights…"[R]acaille" is infinitely more pejorative than "scum" to French-speakers - it has the flavor of characterising an entire group of people as subhuman, inherently evil and criminal, worthless.'

This, together with the tear-gassing of a mosque, only aggravated the situation.

The paternalist left has abandoned them at best, and at worst actively participates in racist and Islamophobic attacks disguised as a defence of la laïcité républicaine, and the far left is only marginally better. The left must remember, as in New Orleans, globalisation is not merely a question of class, but explicitly one of race (and, one might add, gender).

It is true that this abandonment of the field allows fundamentalists to fill the void, just as a similar attitude by social democrats to their traditional (white) working class constituency opens the door to the far right, but it is not true, as not a few have been reporting, that the riots are a product of Islamist agents provocateurs. First of all, it should be noted that the rioters are not just 'beurs' - French verlan for Arabs - but also black youth. Secondly, to be sure, the riots are anger uncorked, but there is also an explicit political aspect to their actions: "We'll stop when Sarkozy steps down," said a Strasbourg rioter, according to the Guardian. Liberation's interviews with the youth published today show how 'encore et toujours' the anger reduces to Sarkozy. 'C'est nous qui allons passer Sarkozy au Kärcher, c'est l'erreur de sa carrière. [It is us who will Karcherise Sarkozy. He's made the error of his career.]' says one thirteen-year-old. Another pair declare quite perceptively that Sarko's provocation was simply to put 'l'insécurité', or crime, back on the agenda ahead of the 2007 presidential elections.

There is a line that runs through the recent strikes - economic, political and general - of France, Belgium and Italy, the movement against Agenda 2010 and vote for the Linkspartei in Germany, and the vote against the neo-liberal European Constitution in the Netherlands and France, and, yes, even the election of the socially conservative but fiscally semi-Keynesian PiS in Poland - and the French riots. This reaction to neo-liberalism is uneven. It cannot in all regions and at all times be called progressive - no one is celebrating these riots - and in parts (particularly in Poland) is incoherent, and can just as easily swing over to the far right or Islamists if the left does not take a lead, but it is nonetheless the inescapable product of years of rightist economic retrenchment combined with, in the case of the French riots, festering racism and exclusion.

All those who believe in a 'social Europe' must address this unrest. To turn Thatcher's commandment on its head - We have no alternative: we must not merely protect but expand Europe's social provision, or else the fires of Paris' suburbs will spread right across the continent, one day or another.

Above all, the French anti-neo-liberal left must act with urgency within the next few days to attempt to channel this justifiable anger into a constructive direction and connect it to the wider dissatisfaction with neo-liberalism. The LCR and the PCF would do well to organise demonstrations across France against police brutality, for an end to l’extrémisme sécuritaire, for reinvestment and jobs in the banlieues, for the integration of their inhabitants into French society, and, in particular, calling for Sarkozy's resignation.

Nous sommes tous indésirables. Nous sommes tous racailles.

***

Update: The arson has spread (to a quite limited degree) to Brussels, with five cars set on fire near Gare du Midi (à deux pas de chez moi, eek), and Berlin, where another five cars were set alight in the Moabit quarter.

Müntefering leaves in a huff, taking his ball home with him

2005-11-01T11:14:00.000+01:00

Intriguing little giblet out of Germany: top of the fold news this morning is that SPD party leader Franz 'Plague of Locusts' Müntefering, who had been expected to take the positions of vice-chancellor and labour minister in an SPD-CDU coalition government, has said he does not intend to run for re-election next month. The understandable hook for the press is how the resignation deals a fairly heavy blow to the coalition talks - now in their fourth round.

Indeed, Tobias Schwarz at A Fistful of Euros is reporting that there have been a handful of reports in the German press about the CDU leadership's 'silently beginning preparations for yet another round of elections to be held on March 26, when there are also state and/or local elections to be held in Rheinland-Pfalz, Baden-Württemberg, and Sachsen-Anhalt'. And Deutsche Welle is (somewhat wishful-thinkingly, IMO) saying that the so-called Jamaica coalition - CDU, Greens and Free Democrats - is not completely off the table, reporting that FDU leader Guido Westerwelle said 'he was willing to restart discussions about a so-called Jamaica coalition of CDU/CSU, Greens and his party'.

'"Angela Merkel has my number," he said in an interview on German public broadcaster ARD.'

Müntefering's departure frustrates the coalition talks as he was 'viewed as 'key to holding together a potentially fractious coalition,' also according to Deutsche Welle. 'Viewed' by whom is not clear, given the sentence's shady passive construction, but DW probably means 'viewed by the bien-pensants of the SPD's right wing'. And herein is the interesting little nugget: The reason Müntefering left, taking his ball with him, was that former youth wing leader and the unofficial leader of the SPD's left wing, Andrea Nahles, 35, won a vote by the party's executive committee to become the next general secretary, handily beating Müntefering's preferred candidate. As the New York Times is reporting, 'Mr. Müntefering [and] Mr. Schröder, 61, represent an older generation of Social Democrats that is increasingly at odds with younger party members. Some of these up-and-comers are staunchly leftist and opposed Mr. Schröder's efforts to overhaul the German economy.' Nahles - a former protégé of Oscar Lafontaine - recently built a reputation for herself as an outspoken opponent of Schroeder's reforms, organising a movement within the SPD in favour of more socially oriented policies. This development was what ultimately forced the Chancellor to call early elections aiming to stave off an open revolt within the party. Rather than staunching the intra-party disquiet, however, the election has accelerated it.

Andrea Nahles

'I can no longer be party chairman under these conditions,' Müntefering told reporters in response to his candidate's loss.

Despite his electoral gambit earlier this year of describing foreign investors as akin to a plague of locusts, aiming to shore up the SPD's then (and continuing) rapidly atrophying support amongst its traditional voters, Müntefering remains as committed to the neo-liberal reforms of the outgoing government as ever. The party may be looking over its shoulder at the growing support for the Linkspartei and attempting to push the SPD leftwards, and the rank-and-file, never happy with Hartz IV and Agenda 2010 is distinctly uncomfortable with the idea of a grand coalition with the CDU, but Müntefering will have none of this.

In any case, if there is another election, I can't see the conservatives gaining from the situation. Furthermore, the Linke have shown they are not merely a protest vote, but now the fourth party in the country - their support is not going to disappear; it can only grow as SPD voters feel safe in the knowledge that a vote for Lafontaine & co. is not throwing their vote away. An SPD that tacks to the left might actually pick up a few votes as well.

Whatever happens, European social democracy (outside Mr. Magoo-like New Labour) is clearly in crisis as it is caught between the economic imperatives of globalisation and the demands of its supporters and the wider electorate.

Carrying on regardless: European social democrats fumble the post-referendum crisis

2005-10-27T00:18:00.000+02:00

NB. You might want to print this one off if you, like me, prefer a more commodious reading apparatus, such as paper - as it was seven pages in Word when I wrote it.

European social democrats haven't rediscovered their socialist roots at all with this new waffle about protecting 'Social Europe' - they've just rediscovered the language of solidarity and equality following their summer of defeats at the hands of the extra-parliamentary left. They want to woo back their base, but they remain as committed to neo-liberalism as ever.

European social democrats aren't quite running scared yet, but a good number are looking over their shoulders as the various domestic examples of the anti-neo-liberal left - the 'Gauche du Non' - who had quite eclatant successes in the French and Dutch referenda on the European Constitution and have even begun to poach left-wing votes at the fringes, viz. Germany's new Linkspartei. For all the humbuggery about No votes being expressions of nationalistic provincialism and xenophobia, it was quickly conceded by soc-dem strategists after the votes that 'No' voters were not anti-European, so much as fearful of the transplantation of the European social model with an 'Anglo-Saxon', or neo-liberal, one, and so their parties had better 'shore up their base', and quick-like.

Thus at the start of the month, the Party of European Socialists - the centre-left grouping within the European Parliament that gathers together the MEPs from member states' Labour, social democratic and socialist parties - launched 'A New Social Europe', its response to the post-referendum crisis - a half-day conference accompanied by the publication a discussion document, 'PES - Social Europe: First contributions to the debate'. The pamphlet aims to kick off a discussion 'between PES member parties on how to combine Europe's traditional levels of social protection…with international competitiveness'.

In the pamphlet, the traditional brusqueness of the There Is No Alternative (but liberalisation and deregulation) discourse has disappeared, replaced with cozy platitudes about Social Europe. Liberalisation and deregulation are still there, and there remains no alternative, comrades, but now the discourse is peppered throughout with words such as 'solidarity' and 'equality' and 'Horlicks'. Okay, so there's no mention of Horlicks at all, but the booklet's tone remains all warm and fuzzy. However, just like the nourishing malted food drink, this only temporarily masks the bitter aftertaste that comes with the repeated mention of 'flexibility', 'reform' and 'competitiveness'.

Franz Müntefering, the chairperson of Germany's SPD, may have caused the financial press to have kittens when in April he sought to woo left-wing voters abandoning the SPD by describing foreign investors as 'a plague of locusts', and he may have begun his short essay for the PES pamphlet, 'Modernising the Social Market Economy', with a load of waffle about the strong needing to protect the weak, but ultimately he's the same old Neue Mittel partisan he has been for years:

'Preserving the social market economy…requires…courage to implement changes.'

'With the reforms of Agenda 2010 [the social restructuring that produced the massive protest movement that gave birth to the WASG and subsequently the Linkspartei], we…implement[ed] this strategy…with a sense of courage.'

'The SPD…have had the courage to act in spite of having to cope with the resistance of many.'

'If we go on implementing this policy and advance together and with courage…then this will benefit…the social market economy in Germany…[and] in Europe.

He's one courageous man, that Frankie, mentioning the word a full four times in a two-page article.

Similarly, Greek PASOK MP and former European Commissioner Anna Diamantopoulou begins her contribution with a entirely sensible, neo-Keynesian call for financing of large-scale European infrastructure projects as a method of priming the European pump, but she quickly back on-message, repeating the neo-liberal myth that inflexible labour markets are the cause of high unemployment - rather than the inevitable product of overcapacity, capital flight, economic sabotage by investors or all three - and calls for labour market reform and invents a wretchedly disingenuous neologism in the process: 'flexi-curity'.

Meanwhile, UK Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, in addressing the conference, seems to have never received the memo about the new touchy-feely talking points, launching as he did straight into a 'We're so great, us in the UK, and you lot'll stop sucking so hard as soon as you're more like us' lecture on the godlike qualities of the British economy. You'll have heard the laundry list of New Labour's achievements before - 'record levels of employment', 'lifted almost a million children out of poverty,' 'turned water into wine,' 'raised Lazarus from the dead,' etc., etc. What goes without mention, natch, is how many of the jobs created are McJobs, the massive growth in inequality under Blair and that in any case it's all just based on irrationally exuberant consumers buying Stargate: Atlantis DVD box-sets and Philips Men's All-Body Shavers with money they don't have. And it goes without saying that he didn't mention economists' worries that the wheels are about to come off the British economy.

While a number of continental social democrats have noticed that 'the rejection of the proposed EU constitution in the recent referendums [sic] in France and the Netherlands [has] raised difficult questions about the direction the EU should take…[with] Europe's citizens worried about jobs, quality of life and growth,' as Vladimír Špidla, the Commissioner for Employment, Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities and founding member of the Czech Social Democratic Party puts it in his contribution to the PES document, New Labour seems to be carrying on regardless, with the same prescriptions and discourse as ever.

But those who naively believe that there could be a change of course under Gordon Brown would do well to peruse the contribution to the debate of Douglas Alexander, the UK's minister for Europe and ally of Mr. Brown.

The solution to the European crisis remains for both Blair and Brown the Anglicisation of Europe's economies, and Mr. Alexanders' pamphlet, 'Europe in a Global Age', published this month by the Foreign Policy Centre, sets out in some detail the Brownite vision of the future of social Europe.

In response to the crisis, Alexander recommends a prescription of four elements: social and economic restructuring, trade liberalisation, remove agricultural protections and export subsidies, and a rejection of Europe as superstate. He warns against 'overregulation' and introspection, approvingly quoting the New York Times' evangelist of neo-liberal globalisation, Thomas Friedman.

Claiming to concern himself with the welfare of the twenty million Europeans out of work, he says that such high rates of unemployment are due to 'something in European social structures which inhibits work and economic gain' and that the continent must embrace necessary change of an Anglo-Saxon nature: 'It's a sobering and challenging insight that if the EU were an American state, it would be 46th out of 50, at about the same level of wealth as Alabama.'

No fewer thank six times does Alexander attack greater European political integration, saying, 'the EU must confidently assert its own identity as neither a nation state nor a superstate,' and that '[a] superstate…is not where the future lies…The best description and prescription for today's European Union is a close Union of nation states, working together in those many areas where co-operation can add value' Indeed, the entire final chapter is devoted to extinguishing the hopes of those who dream of an ever closer political union. Furthermore, however many peacekeeping or other military missions the EU may be engaged in overseas, 'Nato remains the primary guarantor of Britain's defence,' not any future European force.

Indeed, the document is so critical of Europe, one could be forgiven for thinking the minister for Europe isn't a pro-European, but actually, the rationale for Alexander's Superstate-phobia is that while he recognises that only as part of the EU can little Britain compete with the continent-sized economies of the US, China and India and is thus happy to encourage the completion of a single market, the democracy, or at least closer political integration that must accompany such economic integration has the danger of imposing on the UK continental social protections.

This is why Alexander is at pains to point out that in fact there is no such thing as a single European social model, but rather there are four different paths to social protection in Europe. He cites a report by economist Andre Sapir, of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, for an EU finance ministers' meeting last September (as did, by the way, John Prescott, and The Economist's Charlemagne in a recent column on European social policies tellingly entitled 'Choose your poison'), who divided European welfare systems into four types: the Continental one, typified by French and German generous benefit systems and strong worker protections; the Mediterranean version, seen in Spain, Italy and Greece, in which there are some of the strongest worker protections laws in Europe, but relatively weak benefit systems, as until recently the family in these more strongly Catholic and Orthodox countries was seen as the safety net more so than the state; the Nordic edition, found in Scandinavia and the Netherlands, which has traditionally offered strong benefits and income redistribution, but has seen considerable deregulation of worker protections over the past decade; and finally the Anglo-Saxon (including Ireland) model, in which there is weak social protection and weak job protection.

Sapir concluded that, given the competitive pressures of globalisation and the demographic pressures of an aging population, only the 'Anglo-Saxon and Nordic models are sustainable, while Continental and Mediterranean models are not and must be reformed in the direction of greater efficiency by reducing disincentives to work and to grow.'

Predictably, Alexander spends a great deal of time attacking the Common Agricultural Policy, and he is right. Agricultural protectionism by both Europe and the US has criminally brutal effects on farmers in the developing world. Closer to home, the 40 per cent of Europe's budget that is spent on the CAP could certainly be spent more wisely - a Europe-wide childcare programme, perhaps? Nonetheless, one suspects all this talk of concern for third-world farmers is just a screen for a defence of the UK rebate.

More broadly, Alexander would like to see at the European level and by other member states deregulation that 'eases the burden on business and promotes competitiveness', a recognition of 'the importance of the transatlantic marketplace' and the 'liberalisation of trade in services', by which he means advancement of the GATS.

This last prescription is of particular concern. The EU is currently engaged in negotiations surrounding the progression of a General Agreement on Trade in Services. The GATS is a trade agreement enforced by the WTO, established in 1994 at the conclusion of the Uruguay Round of the GATT.

The negotiations are as transparent as molasses, but under pressure from progressive NGOs such as France's Attac, as well as trade unions and student groups, information surrounding the GATS has to some extent been revealed.

It is the first multi-lateral agreement on services and covers the grand expanse of the service sector. It aims at 'progressively rising the level of liberalisation' of the service sector with the ultimate aim of full liberalisation of trade in services and the elimination of government non-tariff 'barriers' to international competition in the services sector such as regulations, laws, quotas and standards.

As Maude Barlow, of the Canadian altermondialist NGO Council of Canadians describes the process:

'Essentially, the GATS is mandated to restrict government actions in regards to services through a set of legally binding constraints backed up by WTO-enforced trade sanctions. Its most fundamental purpose is to constrain all levels of government in their delivery of services and to facilitate access to government contracts by transnational corporations in a multitude of areas, including public health and education.

'Infrastructure areas like transportation and telecommunication are included alongside financial services, architecture, electronic data processing services and tourism. Basic public services like education, health care and water also fall under the conditions of GATS.'

And what areas of government services are included? In advance of the 2000 GATS talks, the US conferred with the Coalition of Service Industries, the trade association representing the sector, asking what it would like to see included in a comprehensive GATS agreement. The European Commission did the same with the European Services Forum. The priority areas for the two groups, according to Ms. Barlow's research are health care; hospital care; home care; dental care; child care; elder care; education - primary, secondary and post-secondary; museums; libraries; law; social assistance; architecture; energy; water services; environmental protection services; real estate; insurance; tourism; postal services; transportation; publishing; and broadcasting.

In short, Alexander's 'completion of liberalisation of trade in services' would see the entire public sector apart from the police and army pried open.

Maude Barlow again:

'The U.S. has made its position clear. "The mandate of the negotiations is ambitious: to remove restrictions on trade in services and provide effective market access, subject to specified limitations. Our challenge is to accomplish significant removal of these restrictions across all services sectors, addressing measures currently subject to GATS disciplines and potentially measures not currently subject to GATS disciplines." In non-trade jargon, this means that the 137 members of the WTO have agreed to open up all of their service sectors to free trade laws and the same WTO enforcement powers that have struck down health, food safety and environmental laws in dozens of countries.
…

'Simply put, the "commons" - or what's left of it - would be under full assault. What used to be areas of common heritage, like seeds and genes, air and water, culture and heritage, and health care and education, would now be slated to be commodified, privatised and sold to the highest bidder on the open market.'

This is New Labour's response to the challenge from the left? This is the UK Presidency of the European Union's response to the post-referendum crisis and its prescription for the defence of Social Europe?

If Sapir, Prescott, Alexander and Charlemagne are all comfortable in disaggregating Social Europe, let's deconstruct the much vaunted Anglo-Saxon model. First of all, there is no one Anglo-Saxon model. The US and UK may have both significantly weakened job protection, but even Blair's Britain has not seen its social provision stripped to the bone as has happened across the Atlantic. Furthermore, if we look further afield, the other Anglo-Saxon economies are just as varied, with Australia akin to the UK and Canada and New Zealand more akin to the Nordic or Continental models, but Canada's economy is putting along reasonably fortissimo at the mo, with little Franco-German stylee economic grimness.

As a little pamphlet from the late Robin Cook's cupboard, 'A New Deal for Social Europe', points out:

'[O]n any objective analysis, there is no correlation between levels of labour market regulation, taxation and public spending on the one hand, and economic performance on the other. If there were, the Danish Swedish Finnish Dutch and Austrian economies would be amongst the least successful economies instead of being amongst the best performing.'

You couldn't fit a Kleenex between Blair and Brown's perspectives on Europe, but there are others in the Labour party who to some extent recognise the political terrain they have lost to the anti-neo-liberal left. Published a few weeks before Alexander's 'Global Age', 'New Deal' was written by a handful of the soft-left wonks, including David Clark, a special advisor to Robin Cook; and Stephen Twigg, the director of the Foreign Policy Centre and parliamentary secretary to Robin Cook when he was Leader of the Commons; as well as ETUC general-secretary John Monks; London mayor Ken Livingstone and former transport commissioner Neil Kinnock. But in reality, the New Deal document, a lively, fighting piece of work, is entirely Robin Cook's. Cook is doing battle with Brown over Europe from the grave.

'The New Deal for Social Europe was really the brainchild of the late Robin Cook,' says Sarah Schaefer, the director of the Europe Programme at the Foreign Policy Centre, 'as he had considerable credibility with the trade unions and the left, but was strongly pro-Europe. The failure of the Yes side in the French and Dutch referenda had inspired him to formulate a progressive argument in favour of Europe.'

Apart from a sprinkling of items, there is little in the way of policy prescription in the document that the anti-neo-liberal left would find disagreeable. In the introduction, the authors say, 'Europe must be more than a marketplace for the free movement of goods, services, labour and capital. It must be an instrument for regulating markets in the public interest.'

'It is bound to be criticised by sections of the press as pro-European and because it rejects the Brownite point of view,' says Schaefer, 'but it was warmly received at the recent Labour Conference - largely because it was seen as Robin Cook's legacy.'

In contrast to Alexander's work, the New Deal document argues straight away for further political integration, and explicitly takes on Alexander's preference for the nation-state:
'Those who are happy for the fate of humanity to be determined by the invisible hand of market forces or the aggregate of private choices believe they have nothing to fear from a world in which politics remains purely national. Indeed, they prefer conditions in which the decisions that matter are beyond the sovereign reach of elected governments.'

In contrast, the authors believe that the European Union is a powerful enough actor that through it, citizens can once again direct their governments to do their bidding, more resistant as it is than the nation-state to the Banshee mistrals of global markets.

As diplomatically as a document whose authorship includes Neil Kinnock can do so, it takes the Labour government to task for its emphasis on market liberalisation in its relations with Europe: 'Tony Blair said that he wanted a political and social Europe, not just a free trade zone…But words are no substitute for action and the positions taken by the British Labour government on, for instance, working time and information and consultation rights for employees have too often appeared to conflict with that aspiration.'

The document also debunks the myth that Britons are less 'social' than those on the continent, pointing out through a series of surveys that in fact, 'in a number of key issues, British opinion often emerges as more egalitarian and socially progressive than several other European countries,' and so we can indeed talk about a commonality of social beliefs across the union, regardless of Andre Sapir's models.

Futhermore, the document notes that those countries that have 'benefited most from glbalisation have done son by ignoring key tenets of neo-liberal ideology'. The governments of China and India remain heavily interventionist and employ capital controls, and the US uses its dollar reserve status to run external deficits that would otherwise force a country to deflate its economy. One might add that the US too, under Bush has engaged in an expansive programme of military Keynesianism, priming the pump in a much more destructive fashion than a Europe-wide childcare programme, and series of large-scale infrastructure projects would.

The document calls for 'a new international economic order', with a global system of managed exchange rates and capital controls. The single currency makes Europe such a force in the global economy as to be able to press for such reforms. Parallel to this, argue the authors, could be an international clearing union, as a mechanism for managing global trade imbalances, and the integration of labour and environmental standards into world trade rules. Indeed, the authors go so far as to call for avenues of 'redistribution that replicate the European Union's social and regional policies on a global scale.'

However, the report's solution to the economic malaise of France and Germany is where it runs aground, arguing wetly that increased investments in R&D, skills and lifelong learning will, erm, do something.

This, of course, does nothing to deal with the much more fundamental problem facing the two countries: that investment decisions remain in the hands of investors, who in times of crisis remain too timid to make the correct investments that will pull the economy out of the slump, or, in the current case of France and especially Germany, who engage in acts of economic sabotage aiming at disciplining the workforce and broader nation into accepting massive structural change.

Nonetheless, the report offers a pair of robust policy recommendations as practical options for counter-cyclical economic management with which the hard left would find it difficult to disagree: a European childcare guarantee, the establishment of a European Recovery Fund (originally advocated by the Labour Party ten years ago) or using the European Investment Bank's lending facility to fund new infrastructure projects.

The report is however dead wrong in its concluding paragraphs on 'Strengthening European Democracy', in which it declares in some genre of act of willing suspension of disbelief, that there is no lack of democracy at the heart of the Union. As Susan George, the vice-president of Attac France, says in an article explaining the reasons for the No's victory in her country in the inaugural edition of Europe's World - a sort of Foreign Affairs journal just for Europe - the proposed constitution 'perpetuated a Commission that is independent of the will of the people, and a Parliament that cannot even initiate legislation, much less levy taxes.'

However, the report does at least recommend the Union proceed with the creation of a position of President of the European Council as was proposed in the Constitution, but have the position be subjected to a direct Europe-wide election. Such a thought must strike fear into the heart of an Alexander, a Brown or a Blair - an elected President of the European Council? B-b-b-but that would mean that a social democrat or worse could theoretically be elected to the position, and no matter how impotent the office may be, could you imagine the horrible effect that would have on UK markets?

For all this, is the document anything more than a propaganda exercise aimed at winning over left-wing eurosceptics in the UK?

Alas, probably not. The FPC's Sarah Shaefer, which published both documents, admits that 'the difference is more in tone and emphasis than in content' despite all the markedly different policy prescriptions. After all, she points out, Neil Kinnock may have co-written A New Deal for Social Europe, but he also wrote the preface to Europe in a Global Age.

'The two perspectives are not as opposed to each other as many would like them to be,' says Schaefer.

'They're really aimed at different audiences: the Global Age document is targeted at a foreign audience, part of an attempt to persuade the continent to adopt the British model, while the New Deal document is targeted at a domestic audience, aimed at building a progressive case for Europe and in particular at persuading the trade unions.'

The authors of the piece, or at least Cook, Twigg, Clark and Livingstone, may genuinely (have) believe(d) in what they have written, but then they aren't minister for Europe in the Foreign Office as Douglas Alexander is.

Thus, in response to the post-referendum crisis, British social democracy where it counts is carrying on as if nothing has happened. But continental social democrats, who in the leadership, to a greater or lesser degree are really just as neo-liberal as Blair and Brown, have acted no differently. In response to the victory of the No, deaf to the votes of a clear majority of his own party's members, Francois Hollande, the leader of France's Socialists, a week after the referendum purged the party leadership of all those who supported the No campaign. 'Clearly we've rather pissed off voters and our supporters. The solution? More of the same.'

In fact, there are about five different ways Europe's social democrats and socialists have reacted to the crisis:

1) There is the Blair/Hollande steady-as-she-goes reaction. The Titanic of neo-liberal social democracy is heading for the iceberg of popular opinion.

2) The Laurent Fabius/Franz Müntefering reaction. They know the ship's headed in the wrong direction but are only pretending to do but not actually going to do something about it. Fabius was a leading No campaigner in France, but everyone remembers his tenure as Prime Minister in the early eighties under Francois Mitterand and the austerity measures he introduced, and knows that his championing the No side was a simply a path to challenging Hollande for the 2007 presidential nomination. Frankie 'Locusts' Müntefering can call foreign investors whatever phylum, genus or species of pest, plague or vermin he wants, but he'll still support the Hartz IV and Agenda 2010 reforms German capital demands.

3) The Cook/Livingstone reaction. They know the ship's headed in the wrong direction and don't believe the ship should be headed in that direction anyway, but in the end remain part of the crew - ship officers even - and are loyally going down with the ship. Their job is to convince everybody to stay calm even though they know that Attac France and the Linkspartei have torn a gaping hole in hull.

4) The Oscar Lafontaine reaction. The ship's headed in the wrong direction and he knew it from the start. He loves the old boat, but he's grabbed a lift in a life-raft that's turned out to be a sturdy little dinghy in the end.

5) The Marie-George Buffet reaction. We thought she had grabbed the same life-raft as Lafontaine, having somewhat revived the previously moribund French Communist Party by taking a leading role in the No campaign, but it seems like she's trying to row back to the Good Ship PS because while it may be sinking, it's, um, bigger than Bescancenot's catamaran.

To torture the metaphor just a little further, then - all the reports and conferences on a new social Europe are thus, ahem, just rearranging the deckchairs.

Europe's social democrats have abandoned the Old-Labour/traditional-SPD, Keynesian, democratic socialist political terrain that had delivered them to power not a few times over the past century. It should not surprise them if forces to their left retake that terrain, and meet with similar success.

DEMOCRACY COMES TO CHINA! (Well, actually just for Mongolian Cow Yogurt Super Girl)

2005-10-12T20:40:00.000+02:00

Cranky aussie queen Paul Kidd, author of Buggery.org, recently published a brief, windy-haunted-cave of a despondent posting, writing, 'Every day I think of George Orwell. Every fucking day.'

He certainly has reason to.

Within the television and mobile industry itself, those louche, tranquilising emissions that involve audience participation popularly but counterfactually known as reality TV programmes, such as Big Brother, Pop Idols, et al, are called 'participation TV'. Indeed, there is an industry conference dedicated to the topic coming up in Amsterdam in November whose programme I've been editing.

Television channels, particularly private broadcasters, love the formats as they are very cheap to produce but massively popular, and in an era where advertising dollars are increasingly spread between thousands of media channels and publications/productions, it makes much more sense to produce a Big Brother than an hour-long drama such as the Sopranos, when the former brings in just as many viewers, if not more, for a fraction of the production costs. The latter are increasingly being produced by subscription-based channels such as HBO or the Sci-Fi Channel (and, of course, public broadcasters, who do not depend, or do not depend as much, on advertising sponsorship). The rest of the multi-channel universe is being steadily Who-Wants-To-Be-A-Millionaire-ified.

Mobile operators and telcos also think that the formats are better than ice cream. As in most western European countries, mobile penetration has reached almost complete market saturation (in other words, everyone, including your technophobic gran and your six-year-old sandbox-contaminating niece has one), the operators increasingly have to find other ways of parting you from your centimes, and participation TV is crackerjack adept at convincing all you rubes to spend silly amounts of money on voting for some Turkish, off-key, Xena-the-Warrior-Princess-obsessed vampiress to win the Eurovision Song Contest.

Sadly for both the operators, the channels, the format producers and the mobile aggregators (the companies that arrange the 'in-between' technology and content bits between the operators, TV channels and viewers, tallying votes and so on), the novelty of participation TV is wearing off. New formats, new ways of 'building communities' and new technology permitting more advanced forms of participation and content control are to some extent mitigating this tendency, but the real money is in expansion of the concept to other, much larger markets.

Participation TV took an unusually long time to take off in North America, but this was largely due to the fact that until such shows as American Idols came along, short message service text messaging was all but non-existent, as local calling in most jurisdictions is essentially free. Indeed, in reverse fashion, it was the advent of participation TV that drove up-take of SMS, rather than the prevalence of SMS that drove the expansion of participation TV, as was the case in Europe. However, the format is now well established there, and participation TV sector stakeholders are in any case more interested in Asia and the Middle East, which offer massive and almost entirely unjaded audiences.

India currently has over 50 million mobile users, but it is China which is most attractive, which has a barely untapped market of 200 million mobile subscribers, and participation TV formats are mammoths of the TV schedule. In August, the final episode of Super Girl, a Chinese, Pop Idols-style 'talent' contest for girls, drew 400 million viewers. Around 8 million paid RMB 0.10 (€0.01) to vote via SMS for one of the three finalists, or rather, not 'vote', but offer 'a text message of support'. Throughout the series, the word 'vote' is avoided for obvious reasons. Nonetheless, Li Yuchun, a 21-year-old girl from Sichuan whose repertoire includes the Cranberries' execrable and contractually-obligatory Irish Troubles record, 'Zombie', won with 3.5 million such 'text messages of support'. So popular has the show proved, that the Mengniu Milk Group has paid Hunan TV RMB 14 million (€1.4 million) for the naming rights to the show, which is now officially called Mongolian Cow Sour Yogurt Super Girls.

Similarly, a Chinese internet portal, Tom Online, has seen its revenues expand through the import of elements of participation TV - ring-tones and ring-back-tones, WAP, MMS and premium SMS voting-that-we-won't-call-voting. The growth was largely a result of the introduction of participation elements to certain sporting events, in particular the broadcast of the NBA finals on channel CCTV-5.

Elsewhere, in pseudo-democracy Malaysia, where opposition candidates do occasionally win seats in the federal Parliament and state assemblies, so long as they or their parties' members have not been detained by the police, there are some 26 different locally produced reality shows. The final episode of the most popular, Akademi Fantasia, a participation TV format in its third season in which contestants stay in a house and take voice and dancing lessons, recently attracted 12 million SMS votes in a country with a population of 25 million.

UK-based Fremantle Media, one of the largest producers of participation TV formats in the world, produces some 260 programmes across 43 territories, and owns the rights to the Idols and The Apprentice formats. Its latest programme, SuperStar, the pan-Arab version of Pop Idols, is the most popular programme ever shown in the Middle East. Each of the finals for the 2003 and 2004 series received over 3 million votes from viewers. The next edition, SuperStar 2005, will be transmitted via Lebanese satellite channel Future TV to the Middle East and North Africa, with audiences in 17 countries able to participate.

Despite the dearth of democracy in the region, regimes are happy to allow citizens to exercise this particular franchise that encroaches on no elite interests. Indeed, the show has even become a battleground for national prestige, no different from major sporting events. Tunisian dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali has taken to SuperStar like a North Korean dictator takes to South Korean movie stars, with the government taking out ads in local newspapers encouraging citizens to vote for the Tunisian candidate, seeing the contest as vital to the nation's regional standing.

Meanwhile, in Tunisia, the sweeping privatisation of the public sector and a free-trade accord with the European Union has resulted in massive internal economic dislocation, with as much as a third of the country's manufacturing industry disappearing, according to some estimates. In response, a small Tunisian branch of the Tobin Tax and anti-neo-liberal pressure group Attac (Rassemblement pour une alternative internationale de developpement [Raid-Attac Tunisie]) was formed to in order to critique the free-trade accord and its local consequences. Its spokesperson, Fathi Chamki is one of the most harassed civil society dissidents in the country. He has been ill-treated, tortured and jailed, and, despite the organisation numbering only around a hundred, its members are routinely harassed and are under constant police surveillance. Their freedom of movement is severely curtailed and their phone and mail communications are intercepted. In September, the Tunisian authorities' prohibited the independent Tunisian Journalists' Syndicate (SJT) from holding its first congress. The country's severely overcrowded jails house some 2,000 prisoners of conscience in wretched, inhumane conditions. Arrests, torture, and beatings of dissidents in broad daylight are daily occurrences and freedom of expression is non-existent. Philippe Squarzoni, a French comic book journalist on the model of Joe Sacco and one of the first members of the original, French Attac, says Ben Ali has transformed Tunisia into 'a barracks with the air of a Club Med'.

Nonetheless, Tunisia is regularly described by the IMF as a model of liberalisation that the rest of the region must emulate. Jacques Chirac never misses an opportunity to praise the 'Tunisian Miracle' and Ben Ali himself, who has been in power since 1987.

In this world turned upside down, citizens may vote, indeed in some instances are urged to vote but only in this MTV-style-edited, Disneyfied, parody of democracy, for Pop Idols and, most apropos, Big Brother, but not in anything that resembles a free election.

Foreign Affairs magazine devoted its last issue to China, and one article [you have to pay for access, but the International Herald Tribune also published a free-to-access précis of the same piece under the title, 'An open economy, a closed society'] explored how a number of countries, China in particular, have actualised more or less what the authors approve of in the way of free markets and achieved quite remarkable rates of growth - but without any regard for western parliamentary democratic norms, in contrast to the long-articulated liberal discourse that economic liberalisation undermines repressive regimes.

This is more than instructive: Why subject ourselves, might ask the great captains of industry, the masters of the universe, to the messy, frequently social democratic products of democracy any more, when we can achieve what we want just as easily if not more so without such excesses? What utility any more has democracy? Indeed, the major institutions that currently govern us already do not pretend to have even a facade of democracy: the WTO, the IMF, the World Bank, the UN Security Council, the European Commission.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is the future, Tunisia is the future: democracy as naught but reality TV bon bon.

The NED and the supremacy of human rights discourse

2005-10-10T19:21:00.000+02:00

Last week, I published a rather long-winded piece, 'Imperialists in NGO drag', on the dodgy arriere-cuisine of Reporters Sans Frontieres, which receives some of its funding from the U.S. State Department quasi-NGO, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

Over at Politics of Dissent, a blog by an Arizona attorney, Ken Sanders, with an interest in home-brewing and wine-making and a similar predilection to your correspondent for long-form blogging, has written a decent piece, 'Imperialists in democratic clothing' [Honest, we don't know each other, and I only came across his piece from an e-mail blast from Z Magazine, and we certainly didn't co-ordinate our headlines. Omigod. I swear. This is worse than the senior prom, when Nicole Gusenbauer and I both wore the same mauve dress and she, like, totally deliberately spilled non-alcoholic punch on it just out of spite…] essentially extending the thesis - that hegemons are exploiting human rights groups' organisational forms to hide imperialist activity - but exploring in greater depth the activities of the NED in particular, noting that the group is: 'a darling of the neo-conservatives and shares membership with the Project for a New American Century.'

'[And i]n the 1980s, the NED funded militaristic and dictatorial candidates in Panama, as well as opposition candidates in such stable democracies as Costa Rica (the opposition candidate in Costa Rica also had the endorsement of that champion of democracy, Manuel Noriega).

'In the 1990 elections in Haiti, the NED provided significant funding to former World Bank official Marc Bazin in a failed attempt to oust the leftist Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

'In the 1990s, the NED supported Skender Gjinushi, speaker of the Albanian parliament and former member of the Stalinist Politburo in Albania. Gjinushi was a principle organiser of the unrest that led to the 1997 fall of the democratic government in Albania, not to mention the death of over 2,000 people.

'In Slovakia, the NED funded several initiatives that ultimately resulted in the defeat of Slovakia's freely-elected government. The NED-backed "reformers" who took over in Slovakia were largely leading officials in the Communist regime of then-Czechoslovakia.'

One must suppose, however, that at a minimum we can say that the discourse of human rights and democracy is so pervasive that imperialism has no choice but to disguise itself in such language.

The supremacy of human rights discourse, whatever its exploitation by the U.S. State Department, is thus at least something to celebrate.

***
Update: Talos, of the solid English-language Greek blog Histologion, has written in, noting a rather glaring inaccuracy in Sanders' argument:

Gjinushi is a rather minor political figure, head of the Social Democratic Party, which got something around 4% in the last elections, and speaker of the Parliament for a long time. I'm not sure whether he was "a member of the Stalinist politburo", but I doubt it - anyway what is described as the "democratic government", was headed by Berisha, who also started his political career as a member of the Communist Party - as indeed the vast majority of Albanian politicians of any stripe and above a certain age.

Gjinushi was most certainly not a principle organiser of the unrest that led to the 1997 fall of the "democratic government" in Albania - a cleptocracy in fact, the likes of which would make Boris Yeltsin blush, whose fall was due to what was most certainly a popular armed insurection after a pyramid scheme in the country's deregulated banks cost most Albanians the sum total of their savings. Savings it must be said, amassed slowly and with great difficulty by the country's slaving one million immigrants since 1990. Berisha was in fact a darling of the West up to the collapse of the pyramid schemes.

Nonetheless, the NED remains a wolf of an NGO.

Grand Coalition accelerates SPD's demise

2005-10-10T16:54:00.000+02:00

So the SPD has traded the Chancellorship for eight cabinet portfolios and a moderation to the CDU's plans for labour market reforms. Even accepting the new Linkspartei's (correct) rejection of joining a neo-liberal coalition with the SPD and Greens, Schroeder's hara-kiri, as I pointed out before, was unnecessary.

That the SPD would rather eat their own and join with the CDU when the left actually won the election, than contemplate entering into a coalition with a party whose programme is little different from that of the pre-Neue-Mittel SPD, shows how strategically and ideologically bankrupt the party is.

Well, it's their funeral. The Grand Coalition will further alienate SPD supporters, introduce reforms extending economic dislocation in the country and thus expand the audience for the Linkspartei's ideas. Far from saving the SPD, the Grand Coalition accelerates the party's demise.

By the way, the Linkspartei scored a handsome 19.23 per cent in the Dresden election, pushing the Free Democrats and Greens into a distant fourth and fifth place.

Imperialists in NGO drag - US State Department lickspittles Reporters Sans Frontieres produce blogger handbook? Humbug!

2005-10-04T18:27:00.000+02:00

Christopher Hitchens, many years before he developed his gasconade, cock-rocketish oeuvre of liberalism-for-frat-boys, wrote a smart little leaflet about how beatific old Mother Theresa was in reality a condom-banning, abstinence-preaching, dictator-ass-kissing harpee of a thing. Everyone quite loved the saintly little midget, so Hitch received not a few sackfuls of hate-mail from affronted Catholic Girl Guides and the like. Who but the hardest-hearted of cynics could find something for which to criticise the beloved Saint of Calcutta's good deeds amongst the poorest of the poor?

Although they don't quite have the public relations machine of the late Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, Reporters Sans Frontieres, the France-based NGO that fights for press freedoms around the world, has as benign a reputation, and is widely thought of as an unimpeachably righteous do-gooder non-profit on the model of Amnesty International. And they have this last week published a pamphlet of their own that will only burnish such regard.

RSF has put out a guidebook for bloggers, aiming in particular at those who live under regimes with a less than humanist attitude towards press freedoms. The Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-dissidents is, according to the Guardian's bloggers, 'a cross between a motivational business guide and the internet's answer to the Anarchist Cookbook', and, with the acute blogophobia of governments such as that of China, which only last Sunday announced a new crackdown on internet-based writers and activists, increasingly resulting in the suppression and imprisonment of bloggers, there is no better time than now to issue such a pamphlet.

So it seems to be farting in church a little to point out that RSF is actively engaged in the advancement of US and French foreign policy interests to the detriment of reporters' rights; that it white-washed of the murder of journalists in Iraq by occupation forces; supports the right-wing Venezuelan opposition, the invasion of Iraq, and the overthrow of Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Bertrand Aristide; and receives funding from not merely the State Department but also hard-right Miami-based hard-right Cuban exile groups that support anti-Castro terrorism.

Nonetheless, all of this is true. Reporters Sans Frontieres, founded by Frenchman Robert Menard, is nothing more than imperialists in NGO drag, on the model of the AFL-CIO's notoriously Latin-America-meddling American Center for International Labor Solidarity (which replaces its forerunner, the American Institute of Free Labor Development - the American House of Labor's participation in the overthrow of Chile's Salvador Allende*).

Plainly, in Stalinist Cuba, press freedom does not exist in the way it does in, say, northern European countries, and is thus a legitimate target of criticism from an organisation that monitors violations of press freedom around the globe. However, in its criticisms of Cuba, RSF goes beyond legitimate criticisms of the attacks on journalistic liberties into active anti-regime propagandising barely distinguishable from the biased press releases of the State Department, or even the froth-mouthed hyperbole of the Miami Cuban-exile mafia.

Every year, RSF publishes an annual ranking of countries based on their press freedom, the Worldwide Press Freedom Index. Near the top of the most recent index, not unexpectedly, are such nations as Denmark, Finland, Iceland, the Netherlands, Canada and New Zealand, while at the bottom are such oppobrious freedom-allergics as China, Burma, Iran, Saudi Arabia and North Korea. No surprise really. What is surprising is that Cuba comes in dead last, apart from the aforementioned Stalinist Disneyland of Kim Jong-il.

Now, Castro's regime has a lot to answer for, but is the level of press freedom there really almost as bad as that of North Korea? Let's have a closer look at that index, shall we? Out of 167 rankings, Cuba comes 166th, lower than China, which comes 162nd; lower than Nepal - 160th; Iraq - 148th - where, as of the end of September, according to RSF's own figures, 70 journalists had been killed by both sides; dissident-boiling Uzbekistan - 142nd; Russia - 140th; trade-union-friendly Colombia - 134th; Turkey - 114th; and - and this is quite telling - Israel, which comes in at 37th.

But what has happened in Cuba to so frighten these defenders of press freedom? What wicked act could the Cuban authorities have performed against reporters and the media that convinces them that Cuba is the second-least-free state on Earth in terms of freedom of the press? How many journalists have they tortured and killed?

None, actually. No boil-in-a-bag repression Uzbek-stylee; no gay Iranian bloggers hung; no cameramen sentenced to thirty years for speaking Kurdish on air and no Chinese labour activists sent to the funny farm indefinitely for printing posters denouncing poor working conditions.

This is not to say that Cuba is without fault. As RSF says, everything from internet use to possession of a fax machine or computer requires permission and, apart from a handful of Catholic Church newsletters, there are virtually no independent publications. Indeed, one cannot really criticise the specific reason RSF finds a problem with Cuba - the arrest, trial and imprisonment of 21 dissident journalists for receiving funding from the U.S. The reporters remain in jail.

Now, it is true that the journalists met regularly at the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, receiving advice and funding and are committed to the overthrow of the Castro regime, and one may justifiably ask whether in the States journalists who had received funding and training from a foreign government committed to the destruction of the U.S. and who met regularly at the embassy of an enemy nation would be treated any differently than these Cuban reporters have, but they would certainly not have been arrested and imprisoned in most of the cuddly Scandicanadazealandian democracies - and they, surely, are the better measure of press freedom, not the United States.

The problem is not that RSF criticises Cuba - although some Castrophiles refuse to hear anything but that Cuba is some libertarian Shangri-la and RSF rightly takes such blinkered romantics on - it is that the criticism of Cuba is out of all proportion to the level of pressures on press freedom that exist there.

But back to that list. Israel, by the way, comes in ahead of Italy (39th), and perhaps understandably, but also ahead of Australia (41st), Japan (43rd) and South Korea (48th). Actually, in truth, Israel, like only one other country on the list, has its ranking split in two. In its Worldwide Press Freedom Index, RSF allows Israel to have two kicks at the can - Israel (Israeli territory), which wins 37th place, and Israel (Occupied Territories), which wins 116th place - which is awfully sporting of them. I wonder where Israel would fall in the listing if the two rankings were combined. Still, as bad as things are at level 116, they're still better, according to the noble RSF witnesses, than at level 127 - the Palestinian Authority.

The other country that gets a double-ranking free kick is - shall we say it together, kids? - the United States. There is that bastion of press freedom and home of Fox News, United States of America (American territory), which comes in at a respectable 23rd place, just behind Belgium but ahead of Portugal (25th), South Africa (26th) and the U.K. (30th); and then there is United States of America (in Iraq) [note here how while conceding Israel is occupying something, the U.S. is just 'in' Iraq, like 'I just popped in for a visit', or 'I was over at Mrs. Gilbert's, and what did she put in her strudel, why candied ginger, donchaknow!'], which comes in at a woeful 108th place, sandwiched between Kyrgyzstan and Cambodia, and in the neighbourhood of the Central African Republic (104th) and Rwanda (113th) and Turkey (114th) - still better, mind you than the aforementioned Cuba, of course. Turkey, unfortunately, was unable to convince the judges to allow it both a Turkey (Kurdish-journo-torturing) and a Turkey (non-Kurdish-journo-torturing), which I think is just rotten favouritism on the part of the refs.

Indeed, in the press release announcing the latest index, RSF seems to forget entirely how poorly America's 'evil twin' performed in its league table, as under a headline that reads, 'The two North American giants score well', the group reports that:

'A police raid in Canada on the home of journalist Juliet O'Neil and the national regulatory authority’s stand against the pan-Arab radio station Al-Jazeera and the local station CHOI FM downgraded the country to 18th place. Violations of the privacy of sources, persistent problems in granting press visas and the arrest of several journalists during anti-Bush demonstrations kept the United States (22nd) away from the top of the list.'

The decision of Canada's national regulatory authority, the CRTC, was actually to approve the broadcast of Al-Jazeera - the Qatar based channel known for being the sand in the thong of Arab regimes almost as much for the calumny it attracts from the U.S., and which has just managed to sign Sir David Frost, the veteran BBC interviewer - thus RSF, the defender of press freedom, is here actually criticising the Canadian communications regulator for expanding such freedom.

The release doesn't even mention the U.S. Army's 8 April 2003 shelling of the Palestine Hotel in Iraq, where almost all foreign journalists had been based, killing Spanish cameraman José Couso of Telecinco and Ukrainian Reuters cameraman Taras Protsyuk and wounding three others. In fact, on the very same day, the Iraqi offices of United Arab Emirates satellite channel Abu Dhabi TV were hit by air strikes as well, and two American air-to-surface missiles also hit Al Jazeera's office in Baghdad and killed Tariq Ayoub, a Jordanian reporter, and wounded Zouhair al-Iraqi, an Iraqi cameraman. Three missile attacks on the media in one day - oh, and add to that Nato's bombing of Radio Televizija Srbija during the air campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999, and, well, I'm not saying there's a pattern here - I'm no tin-foil-hat-wearing moonbat that thinks that just because one country's armed forces has systematically targeted television stations over and over, that there might be some conspiracy here, but you know - it bears looking into.

But no, according to RSF's release, 'persistent problems in granting press visas' was America's gravest sin against press freedoms.

RSF itself did actually denounce the attack on the Palestine Hotel initially, but when it came to its own investigation of the shelling, RSF's report ultimately exonerated the U.S. of all blame, resulting in the family of José Couso to attack the RSF report as a white-wash. The Couso family responded to the RSF report press release, saying:

'The conclusions of this report exculpate the acknowledged perpetrators of the shelling of the Palestine Hotel on the basis of the dubious impartiality of embedded reporters and the testimony of those responsible for the shelling, transferring responsibility to unidentified individuals.

'The report was signed by a journalist, Jean Paul Mari, who has a known relationship with Col. Phillip de Camp, who acknowledged his involvement in the attack and the deaths of the journalists at the Palestine Hotel. Furthermore, the report is supported by the testimony of three journalists embedded with U.S. troops, all of them U.S. citizens; one of them, Chris Tomlinson, having worked for U.S. Army intelligence for more than seven years. None of the Spanish journalists in the hotel has been consulted for the writing of this report.

'The report contains numerous errors, contradictions and irregularities in reference to important facts such as the location of the rooms at the hotel, the site of impact of the shell, the location of witnesses, etc…Reporters without Borders (Spanish Section) requested to join the complaint filed by the family on May 27, 2003, against those responsible for the death of José Couso. After the release of this report which, according to its version, excuses them from responsibility in the murder of the journalists at the Palestine Hotel, it is absolutely illogical and contradictory that their organization continues to be a party to the public action in the open proceedings of the National Tribunal.

'For this reason we express the wish of the family that they withdraw their request for standing as a party to the public action in the open proceedings of the National Tribunal.'*

In fact, RSF actually praised the invasion of Iraq and celebrated the bombing campaign, saying: 'the overthrow of the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein ended 30 years of official propaganda and has opened a new era of freedom, full of hope and uncertainty, for Iraqi journalists,' and that, 'for the Iraqi media, decades of zero press freedom ended with the bombing of the Ministry of Information on 9 April in Baghdad.'

Apart from the organisation's contemptable white-washing of America's targeting of war correspondents, thus directly endangering the lives of journalists, and its explicit support for American imperialism, on a more prosaic level, RSF takes Turkmenistan to task, and rightly so, for having no privately-owned media, but the organisation says nothing, absolutely nothing about the undermining of public broadcasters in the United States (the Republican Congress' assaults on the funding of the Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio), in the U.K. (the attacks on BBC surrounding Andrew Gilligan), in Canada (the governing Liberal's slashing of the CBC's budget by $400m, around 33 per cent of its funding) or the European Commission's allergy to German public broadcasters' spending money on new forms of diffusion of information such as the internet or via mobile. There is a concerted international attempt by the privatisation fundamentalists to undermine public broadcasting and a growing corporate concentration of the mass media and RSF says nothing about either's effect on press freedom.

Lately, the organisation has taken to criticising Hugo Chavez's Venezuela, specifically for three items: physical attacks on journalists by government supporters, public protests against corporate media bias, and a new law that requires the media adhere to norms of 'social responsibility'.

It is a twisted logic, however, as what are in fact popular and government attempts to free the media from hard-right, corporate control are portrayed as their inverse: attacks on the media. The very attempts to expand the freedom of the press in Venezuela for RSF are crimes against liberty and sufficient to warrant awarding Venezuela 90th place in its Press Freedom Index.

The country's five largest television channels - Venevisión, Radio Caracas Televisión (RCTV), Globovisión and CMT - are privately owned and so vituperatively hostile to the Chavez government that they make even Fox News look, well, fair and balanced, and moreover, nine of the ten largest newspapers are opposed to the government.

Impartiality is a foreign concept to the television stations, who, according to Nation journalist Naomi Klein, during the 2003 failed 'strike' by the managers and owners of the state petrol company, broadcast an average of 700 pro-strike commercials a day. Further, found Klein:

'[I]n the days leading up to the [failed] April coup, Venevisión, RCTV, Globovisión and Televen replaced regular programming with relentless anti-Chávez speeches, interrupted only for commercials calling on viewers to take to the streets: "Not one step backward. Out! Leave now!" The ads were sponsored by the oil industry, but the stations carried them free, as "public service announcements."'

During the strike, the country's communications regulator and a local council for the rights of children and youth in the town of Tachira attempted to use the courts to force the TV stations to break their 24-hour coverage of the lock-out for at least a few hours a day in order to show children's programming - broadcasts which are mandated by the stations' licences. Nonetheless, in RSF's cuckoo, inverted world, this is yet another example of state intimidation of the media.

According to the makers of The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, an award-winning documentary on the Venezuelan media's role in the abortive coup, insults, false allegations and even calls for the overthrow of Chavez were and continue to be common in the press and on TV. As the filmmakers note, a month before the coup, the El Nacional newspaper falsely and wackily reported that the Chavez government had entered into a secret deal with Hizbollah and the Iranian government, allowing Iran to build a military base in Venezuela, while the channels routinely refer to government supporters as 'Taliban' and compare Chavez to Hitler, Mussolini and Idi Amin.

In an era when Islamist militants who publish or preach 'enticement to violence' in the UK can be deported from the country or imprisoned, it is glisteningly remarkable that in Venezuela not a single journalist has been jailed, and the TV stations have continued to broadcast their rabid anti-government propaganda.

On a recent visit to Caracas, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero told Chavez that he had heard many criticisms in Spain of the lack of press freedom in Venezuela, but after watching just a morning's worth of the rivers of maniacal disinformation that passes for television programming and having read the day's papers, he declared that he had no doubt in his mind that there was 'full and total freedom of speech' in Venezuela.

A former editor with CNN en Español, Andrés Izarra, interviewed by Naomi Klein believes that because the four TV stations have undermined press freedom to such an extent, they have forfeited their right to broadcast and should have their licences revoked.

According to both Le Monde Diplomatique and Klein's Nation article, on the night of the coup, the owner of Venevisión, Gustavo Cisneros, hosted the meetings of the coup plotters at the station. The president of Venezuela's broadcasting chamber was one of the signatories to the decree dissolving the elected National Assembly - the negligee of legality in which the plotters dressed their coup d'etat. The TV networks celebrated the coup on air, but when the coup went awry, and the poor of Caracas and sections of the military rose up returning Chavez to power, the stations responded with a complete media black-out, programming only light entertainment as if nothing had changed.

Truly, the coup was a media-military putsch, where the major media players were not merely sympathetic to the coup, or even just propagandised in its favour, but actively participated in and helped co-ordinate the event.

It is in such a climate that reporters from these stations have come under physical assault from the poor and working classes of Venezuela, defending their president who has massively expanded the provision of social services in the country. RSF's 2004 Venezuela report cites 62 physical assaults on such journalists. However, when one examines the report, one finds that of the 62 attacks only one was by agents of the state. The rest were by 'government supporters' or in one case, merely 'apparently Chavez supporters' (RSF is thus happy to take it on hearsay that attacks are performed by certain actors without corroboration). Furthermore, when one parses the list of attacks, one is struck by the number of 'attacks' that are in fact merely journalists being 'insulted and jostled'.

Indeed, in the most Orwellian of manoeuvres, when Venezuelans have taken to the street to protest the media bias, RSF finds such actions sufficient to include them in its list of assaults on media freedom. As RSF itself admits, most of the assaults came from government supporters during the strike, angry at the bias of the major media outlets, which, says the RSF report, 'actively backed the opposition movement, sometimes violating journalistic principles.' To be sure, many of the demonstrators attacked the right-wing journalists with stones, and this - or any form of violence towards journalists - is completely unacceptable, no matter how biased the reporters, but it must be noted that government supporters are not the same as the government, and that as problematic as such a climate is, it pales in comparison to the regular murder and imprisonment of journalists that occurs on a sadly increasing basis in many other countries.

Since the coup, the stations have continued to operate, with no action having been taken against their directors. What the government has done, is introduce legislation that requires the stations adhere to norms of 'social responsibility', under which, media outlets that 'excus[e] or advocat[e] disrespect for lawful institutions and authorities' are to be penalised.'

However, this tame measure aimed at reining in the corporate-putschist media barons is transformed by RSF into government harassment of the 'free' press.

This burlesque, where a reporters' defence organisation defends instead coup-plotters, was repeated last February, on the occasion of the U.S.-French overthrow of Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. RSF hailed the coup, calling the popular social-democratic leader a 'predator of press freedom', and, according to local independent documentary film-maker Kevin Pina, carefully documented attacks by Aristide supporters on opposition radio stations while paying no attention to violence on reporters from government opponents, thus helping craft the international media's 'framing' of the conflict in Haiti as one of state and state-supported violence against the media and opposition.

Following the coup and subsequent kidnapping of Aristide, which RSF describes as a 'resignation', the organisation issued a statement declaring that press freedom had returned: 'A new wind of freedom is blowing for the capital’s radio stations.'

According to Amnesty International, after Aristide was overthrown, paramilitaries entered Port-au-Prince and massacred thousands of poor peasants and slum dwellers perceived to be sympathetic to Aristide's Lavalas party.

Following the coup, Canada's RCMP reorganised and trained the Haitian National Police (HNP), who, according to the Canada-Haiti Action Network (CHAN), have continued this wave of killing. An International Crisis Group assessment reports that the HNP have continued the practices of the former Haitian army, which had been abolished by Aristide, including military operations against the capital's poorer quarters. Journalists too have come under assault, alongside Port-au-Prince's poor, with one radio reporter killed in January, but RSF says nothing at all about this.

If we follow the money, the bricolage of dodgy imperial sugar-daddies that populate the arriere-cuisine of Robert Menard's soi-disant human rights organisation, we can perhaps understand a little more why it is that RSF has such a throbbing hard-on for Cuba and Venezuela and is deaf to the screams from Port-au-Prince's slums and radio stations.

To begin with, for an NGO, the group is remarkably close to France's haute bourgeoisie. RSF receives the bulk of its funding from FNAC, the giant French music, electronics and book retailer; CFAO, the French-African automobile and pharmaceuticals distributor; the Hewlett Packard Foundation; French publishing house Hachette; the Electricité de France Foundation; George Soros' Open Society Institute; and France's Sanofi-Aventis, the world's third-largest pharmaceutical firm, amongst others.

Vivendi Universal Publishing Services, a division of Vivendi, the French water-giant-cum-media-conglomerate, offers RSF promotional material, and via Saatchi & Saatchi in New York, Publicis, the Paris-based advertising behemoth, delivers marketing services to RSF gratis.

The group has also received donations from Menard's personal friends, the late arms dealer Jean-Guy Lagardère, and French UMP senator Serge Dassault, the owner of the Dassault Group, a manufacturer of fighter jets. The Dassault Group also owns 82 per cent of Socpresse, which controls leading French conservative newspapers Le Figaro, Valeurs Actuelles and L'Express.

RSF also obtains 11 per cent of its budget in direct funding from the French government, and also receives indirect funding from the U.S. via grants from the Center for a Free Cuba, an organisation that is committed to the overthrow of the Cuban government and which is financed by USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy. Amongst other activities, the NED finances the right-wing Venezuelan opposition - to the tune of some $20 million so far - and is headed by Frank Calzón, who has connections to the Miami anti-Castro exile community and was the former leader of an anti-Castro terrorist group, Abdala, which performed a number of admittedly not terribly successful actions in the U.S. in the 1970's against the Cuban football team. Subsequently, he was director of the Cuban American National Foundation, the principal Cuban-American lobby in Washington. Luis Posada Carriles, the Cuban-Venezuelan CIA-trained terrorist mastermind behind a series of hotel bombings and the 1976 bombing of a Cuban jetliner in which seventy-three people were killed, claimed in a 1998 interview in the New York Times that he had received financial backing from CANF for a 1997 bombing campaign in Cuba.

So this is the crowd Menard and his RSF runs with: a Shanghai of anti-Castro zealots with links to CIA-trained terrorists; the sultans of the French publishing, pharmaceutical, advertising and arms industries and France's conservative press; and the various tentacles of the U.S. State Department and the French government. With RSF's benefactors coming from such noble quarters as these, one really shouldn't be surprised at all at RSF's Cuban, Venezuelan and Haitian perfidies.

For years, large corporations vacillated between attempting to marginalise environmental campaigners and being petrified that their campaigns were costing them market share amongst beardy Volvo drivers. Today, even the most flagrant eco-scofflaw enterprise has rebranded itself as environmentally right-on, regardless of their continued production of, say, mercury-infused lollipops. Campaigners have found this manoeuvre, of using environmentalists' own campaign strategies and language against them - a sort-of public relations jujitsu that they call 'greenwashing' - intractably difficult to counter, as the Volvo drivers return from the barricades, convinced by the corporations' reassuring words and satisfied that they have saved the world in time for tea.

Like Shell, BP and Unilever before them, imperialists too have now developed their own form of human rights 'greenwashing': impersonating an NGO.

As with Human Rights Watch and Freedom House (which both have similar conservative political and corporate ties to those of RSF), individuals with long histories in or connections to the foreign affairs departments, diplomatic corps and even military or secret services of hegemonic states have formed organisations modeled on such civil society groups as Amnesty International or Friends of the Earth, employing the same discourse of democracy, freedom and justice as that of human rights campaigners.

These groups perform just enough good in the world - such as publishing pamphlets for bloggers and cyber-dissidents - that no one notices when they act in keeping with their original purpose: to further the interests of empire.

* For a comprehensive overview of the history of the AFL-CIO's participation in the U.S. State Department's plans for Latin America, see Labor Educator's series, The AFL-CIO's Dark Past.

** From the Spanish. From a Z Magazine article by Salim Lamrani, translated by Diana Barahona.

B.U.I.

2005-09-22T14:22:00.000+02:00

There was a rather bad short post posted here until recently, if you're wondering where it went. I decided to remove it and hereby swear to never again blog while under the influence.

The 'dolchstosslegende' of the neo-liberal 'left'

2005-09-21T19:17:00.000+02:00

Across the Rhine, neo-liberal nabobs of the right and left, are twisting themselves into Rubik's Cubes of re-interpretation attempting to explain away Sunday's election result in Germany, like the relics of the eighties that they are.

France's presumptive future Yankophile king, Nicolas Sarkozy, and his supporters seem to feel the result is of a piece with the recent European Consitution referendum, but not in the same way la vrai gauche does, according to the Guardian's France correspondent, the soggy moderate Jon Henley:

'Patrick Devidjian, a loyal and influential Sarkozy supporter, told Libération that Ms Merkel's problem had been one of method rather than principle. "The tax reforms she proposed were totally deformed by someone (the 'professor from Heidelberg' Paul Kirchhof) who did not have the political and pedagogical qualities needed in a politician," he said. "For us, that is the real lesson - radical reforms have to be properly explained."'

Just as with the referendum, it is not that voters made a rational decision, rejecting neo-liberalism, but it is merely that the subject has not been properly explained. The arrogant sense of superiority of Thatcher's children is perhaps neo-liberalism's most insufferable attribute. We are just too stupid to understand the benefits of markets, plainly.

Meanwhile, across the floor, the Socialists haven't wasted time blaming the far left for their own defeat, just as they did in the wake of the 2002 presidential election where Socialist Lionel Jospin was locked out of the second round between Jacques Chirac and Jean-Marie Le Pen (Henley again):

'The moderate French left, including most of the Socialist party's current hierarchy, were not slow to blame the rise of Oskar Lafontaine's Linkspartei - made up of ex-Communists from the east and former SPD members disappointed with the party's perceived liberal drift - for Mr Schröder's discomfiture.

"It bears direct and complete responsibility for the failure of the left," Pierre Moscovici, a former Socialist European affairs minister, said. "Its populist rhetoric prevented the SPD from scoring as it should have done."'

Horseshit. First of all, the left won. There is theoretically no reason why Schroeder cannot continue to govern (as a minority government, following the Linkspartei's vote for him as Chancellor [who are they going to vote for, Merkel?]), with or without passive support from the Linke. Secondly, if it weren't for the hemorrhage of CDU votes to the Linkspartei, the CDU would have a clear majority. Thirdly, the Linkspartei's very existence forced the SPD to tack left, pretending that it was the defender of the social model, which, together with Merkel's flat tax fubar, resulted in the enormous surge in support for the SPD in the last fortnight.

In the years following the First World War, a political fairy story developed in Germany that it was not the German army that lost the war, but in fact left-wing politicians - the so-called dolchstosslegende (stab-in-the-back-legend). It is as untrue today as it was then. The viability of such attacks on the real left from its social democratic Judases has long since passed. If social democrats insist on capitulation, they have no one to blame but themselves.

Bertinotti encourages Linke to join SPD coalition?

2005-09-20T17:07:00.000+02:00

Just got a couple of press releases on our friends in Germany from Fausto Bertinotti's pan-European Party of the European Left. Thought y'all might like a gander.

'The German elections give a new and big outburst [Ed. - 'Outburst'? Odd choice. Ah, Euronglish*] to the party of the European Left. The Linke successfully accomplishes an unprecedented undertaking in the history of the after war Germany: that of a mass consensus given to a party which places itself to the left of the biggest social democratic party on the continent.

'The Linke adherence to the Party of the European Left underlines the possibility and historical necessity of the growing of radical and alternative left in all European countries.'

He also notes that the first congress of the European Left Party will take place in Athens at the end of October and that Lafontaine, Bisky and Gisy will take part.

Interestingly, Bertinotti critcises the SPD's consideration of a Grand Coalition with the CDU when the broad left won the election and seems to suggest that they consider a left coalition instead:

'The German Social Democrats face a choice of great responsibility: the clamorous defeat of the most convinced supporter of the neo-liberalist policies, the CDU of Merkel, would make the choice of a wide coalition more a dangerous social adventure, rather than a choice of stability.

'The great success of the Linke asks the SPD to have the courage to break with the moderate and anti-social policies. After all, in different shapes, this is the problem that reformists will be facing in the whole of Europe.'

What exactly is he trying to say here? Could it be that Bertinotti is encouraging the Linkspartei to do what his own comrades in the Partito della Rifondazione Comunista have done vis-à-vis L'Unione? Or am I just reading too much into what is probably just a dig at the SPD?

Nonetheless, a release from the Linke I received at the same time all but explicitly (and quite rightly) rules out the possibility:

'The question of the future German government is open. There are three main variants: so-called street-light-coalitions of SPD, the Greens and FDP or CDU/CSU, FDP and the Greens as well as a grand coalition of SPD and CDU/CSU. The postponed voting in one Dresden constituency on 2 October with three seats can bring no principal change to the general picture. Be it that as it may, the Left Party.PDS will get a good chance to win a higher profile as the only consistent opposition force to the neo-liberal orientation of the German political class.'

'As Gregor Gysi stated at a press conference after the vote, the party will support neither the neo-liberal politics of Schröder, nor of Merkel.'

The release, from Helmut Ettinger and Helmut Scholz of the party's international department, also offers a more fleshed-out geographic breakdown of the party's support:

'Under difficult conditions, with a new partner, being fought by all the other parties and large parts of the media, it reached its main goal to enter parliament with its own group. The party could more than double its result of four per cent in 2002. The 8.7 per cent of the vote and 54 seats it received are an increase of 4.7 per cent and 52 seats.

'The best news is that the co-operation with the WASG worked fully, bringing about a result of a new quality, going far beyond the sum of the two organisations’ expected individual scores. Highly important is the overcoming of the five percent hurdle in most of the country, also in six of the ten lander of western Germany. In the western lander the party scored altogether 4.9 per cent of the vote Top results have been achieved in the Saarland (Oskar Lafontaine’s homeland) with 18.5 per cent, Bremen with 8.3 per cent or Hamburg with 6.3 per cent. In the East the Left Party.PDS received 25.4 per cent.

'Even in the lander with government participation, highly disputed among its followers, the Left Party.PDS got large increases: in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania 7.3 per cent (23.7 per cent altogether) and in Berlin five per cent (16.4 per cent altogether). The only two PDS deputies in 2002-2005, Petra Pau and Gesine Lötzsch, won their constituencies in Berlin again. The third direct mandate was taken by Gregor Gysi also in Berlin. [A total of] 30 deputies have been elected in the East, 24 in the west of the country.'

'This election has changed political life in Germany. For the first time since the 1950s there is a nation wide political force to the left of the SPD. The Left Party.PDS will continue fighting the dismantling of the German welfare state, the redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich, the sending of German troops into military action abroad.'

* Euronglish: adj. 1. Of or relating to Euronglish. 2. Mechanical dialect of English spoken by fluent but non-native English speakers to other fluent but non-native English speakers, esp. in Europe. As more individuals speak Euronglish than its parent language, persistent differences between it and English 'proper' cannot said to be 'wrong', e.g., the word 'touristic'. See Europanto.

Linkspartei 'clear winner' of German election - Jonathan Steele

2005-09-20T12:13:00.000+02:00

Superb, absolutely superb commentary on the German election by Jonathan Steele in today's shrinky-dink Guardian. Do I say it's superb because he says essentially the same thing that I do? Not at all. Well maybe a little bit.

' In all the confusion over Germany's election result, one winner is clear. The newly founded Linkspartei - Left party - has taken 54 seats, leapfrogging Joschka Fischer's Greens, who have been part of the governing coalition for the past seven years. It is an extraordinary achievement and means that for the first time since the second world war the Social Democrats are faced with a rival party to their left.

'The SPD's losses almost exactly equal the surge in support for the Left party. It is often dubbed "far left" or "extreme left", but this description is no more justified than it is to call Germany's Free Democrats - who were the other big winners on Sunday - "extreme right".'

'... Sunday's central message was a protest against neoliberalism. It had much in common with this summer's votes in France and the Netherlands against the EU constitution... Confused, bitter and bereft of leaders with a convincing programme, many are joining a growing trend in saying that there must be another course.'

Well, quite.

He also, intriguingly, suggests that the CDU's lost votes that went FDP way may have been something to do with recalcitrant sexism on the right.

SPD has upper hand

2005-09-19T18:58:00.000+02:00

Some more quick thoughts.

Schroeder plainly has the upper hand in negotiations with the CDU over any Grand Coalition, and could quite easily remain Chancellor. Although the SPD and Greens have repeatedly said they refuse to enter into any coalition with them, the current SPD-Green government can continue without change with support from the Linkspartei. Alternately, there is the SPD-Green-FDP 'traffic light' coalition possibility. Now, there is no love lost between the FDP and the Greens, and the leader of the FDP has repeatedly said he refuses to work with Fischer's gang, but the party itself is champing at the bit for a chance at government after seven years in the wilderness.

In any case, Schroeder theoretically has three options, while the CDU has only one - a Grand Coalition with the SPD.

Now, plainly, Schroeder's preferred option is coalition with the CDU, so it may well be the chancellorship that the conservatives have to sacrifice in order to join the government.

(Hmm. I suppose the CDU actually has a second, if far-fetched option: CDU-FDP-Greens - the 'Jamaica' option. Theoretically possible, but I just don't see it.)

***

Interesting (wholely unscientific) poll at Fistful of Euros on the most likely coalition grouping voted on by readers. Now, Fistful's readers stretch across the political spectrum; nonetheless, they feel the most likely possibility is a continuance of the current government - SPD-Green - with the Linkspartei supporting.

Also - that promised Galloway-Hitch commentary? Coming up, if y'all're still interested.

German election results: Reasons to be cheerful

2005-09-19T14:02:00.000+02:00

It's 'the worst of all worlds', according to a pantywaist BBC analysis of the deadlock between the SPD and the CDU in the German election: Christian Democrats won 35.3 per cent of the vote; the Social Democrats 34.2 per cent; the Free Democrats 9.8 per cent, the Linkspartei 8.6 per cent and the Greens 8.1 per cent. Now 'nothing will change'. 'Four more years of empty pockets, that's what it'll mean. Mark my words,' says a Russian émigré CDU supporter, quoted by the BBC's Clare Murphy.

And indeed, the markets seem to agree with him: The Dax index lost two per cent in early trading, and the euro fell to a month low against the US dollar.

Even the 'liberal' media are offering up a pre-packaged consensus for the populace to swallow: No matter where you stand politically, we had to move forward, and this is a recipe for further paralysis and even instability, thus it would have been better for one or party or the other to have won outright. Of course, the only party they're actually thinking should have won outright is the CDU. Similar chicken-little bleatings would be heard had the SPD won outright.

Reasons to be cheerful

Well, enough with these blinkered neo-liberal Cassandras. For Christ's sake, the left won this election! The left won clean and clear - a remarkable achievement given that Merkel's CDU and the CDU's Bavarian sister part, the CSU, began the election with a 21 per cent lead on the SPD. Together, the broad (in the broadest of definitions of the word broad) left - between the SPD, Linkspartei and the Greens - won 50.9 per cent of the vote, while the right won 45.1 per cent.

Although more than a third of the population either supports the CDU's proposed structural adjustment or has been suckered into voting for them simply for the sake of change, we can see that when the electorate is told exactly what this change means - a flat tax, in particular - that support dissolves like rat turds in a vat of chocolate. The CDU actually won three percentage points fewer than they did in 2002 - one of the party's worst results ever. The election shows an utter rejection of the flat tax and an embrace of the continental social model. (It also exposes the idiocy of the CDU's honesty in the electoral campaign. They forgot the golden rule of campaigning: social democrats must mutter something about social justice and then rule from the right once in office, and conservatives must just shut up lest anyone figure out what they're actually going to do and then rule from the right once in office)

Apart from any other reasons to be cheerful, the main one is that that grim fatty giblet of a gift to the rich, the flat tax, now cannot be implemented in this parliament, as now readily concede investors who had earlier been as rigid with excitement as pubescent thirteen-year-old boys at the prospect.

Furthermore, the Linkspartei did as well or better than hoped, and came from nowhere to become fourth biggest party in country. They would have been third biggest, but CDU seems to have lost ground to the Free Democrats from centrist voters possibly scared about the flat tax and who were under the mistaken impression that the FDP are closer to the centre. The far left can no longer be dismissed as a fringe concern that only attracts middle class university students and 1968 nostalgics with poor personal hygiene: Across Europe (the Linkspartei in Germany, the LCR and the rest of the Gauche du Non in France, the Left Bloc in Portugal, the Scottish Socialists and Respect in the UK, the PRC in Italy, the Socialist Party and Groen Links in the Netherlands, and, to some extent, Izquierda Unida in Spain), some fifteen years after the welcome demise of Stalinism, a new, liberatory socialism has become a legitimate electoral alternative and inconstant, faithless social democracy is in its death throes.

The CDU will most likely form a coalition with the SPD. For the left, this is in fact the best of all possible results (given that the Linkspartei did not have a chance of winning the election this time around), as the 'reforms' will not be as harsh as expected because SPD will want to burnish its left credentials and distinguish itself from CDU. However, the SPD leadership remains committed to structural adjustment, and so will continue to support unpopular reforms (which will bring nothing but further misery - as neo-liberal adjustment has done in Latin America). This will continue to result in disillusion with the SPD amongst traditional and union supporters who are already sympathetic towards the Linkspartei. There is even a good possibility that the SPD will split over the reforms.

A similar effect will happen if Schroeder manages to form a so-called traffic-light coalition (red, yellow, green) with the FDP and Greens. Schroeder will still march ahead with his reforms, even if they are not as thoroughgoing as they would be under a straight SPD-CDU coalition, and the SPD will still be racked by an internal turmoil from which the Linkspartei can only benefit.

Finally, even the Greens should be happy with the result. They may have lost some prestige and dropped into fifth place, but their end result is not markedly different from previous years and they didn't lose as many votes to the Linkspartei as some had predicted. This is perhaps somewhat predictable, as Green supporters are a largely middle-class bunch for whom structural adjustment and labour reforms are not as much of a concern as baby seals and fair trade deodorant anyway.

The CDU cannot form a government on its own (or with the FDP) and either of the coalitions that are possible - CDU-SPD or SDP-FDP-Greens - will benefit the left.

I really don't see how it could have gone any better.

** Update: Meaders makes a what should be the rather obvious point that the likes of the BBC seem to have missed:

'[that] the biggest single story emerging from the German poll is that the radical left have not only established a firm base across both east and west Germany, but have forced the German political establishment into its gravest crisis at least since reunification.'

He also calls the Greens 'little more than the FDP with windfarms', a turn of phrase I quite like.

And Dear Kitty has some slightly different figures (with slightly more for the FDP). I suppose there will be some movement a bit here and there over the coming days as the all the votes are counted, and, of course the delayed votes in Dresden. DK also has a class breakdown of Linke voters. Fun fact: a full quarter of unemployed workers voted Linkspartei.

There-is-no-alternative-ism and the German election

2005-09-16T20:59:00.000+02:00

It is disappointing that so often otherwise intelligent people regularly serve up as commentary such a floppy salmagundi of received ideas, bounded logic and economic platitudes. James Meek, long-time Guardian foreign correspondent and resident Mr. Clever-Trousers whose The People's Act of Love was long-listed but not short-listed for this year's Booker, and which by all accounts is supposed to be v. good, has written in the aforementioned Berliner about, well, Berlin, as it happens, or, rather, the entirety of Germany for which the capital metonymises, and the inevitability of 'reform' in the wake of the upcoming elections there.

Margaret Thatcher's fiat, 'There is no alternative', has become so inarguable to the array of mainstream commentators who set the boundaries of debate that even the manifest economic destruction neo-liberalism has wrought in the heart of Europe becomes not an argument against the project but, irrationally, one for a tightening of the reins. The rational prescriptions of the Naomi Kleins and George Monbiots that find their way into such liberal publications remain decidedly beyond the pale; They are permitted to be published, of course, but no one should ever be so impolite as actually to vote in an election for those parties that actually propose the implementation of such measures (such as the Linkspartei in Germany, the LCR in France, or Respect in the UK) however - frankly - softly Keynesian they in fact are. No, no. They are 'Extremists', no matter that the manifestoes of any post-war Labour or Tory, Social Democrat or Christian Democrat party proposed at a minimum a bouquet of nationalisations and that this New New Left, though opposing any further privatisation, does not dare to imagine an expanded economic role for the state. And heaven forbid that anyone might even strike to defend their class's social patrimony.

Meek tours pre-election Germany, interviewing managers, executives and publishers soliciting their prescriptions for the country's afflicted economy. You'll be as shocked as a professional magician at a five-year-old's neighbourhood magic show to learn that such a strata of society uniformly calls for tough love, a period of what will certainly be quite painful reforms - cutbacks to the social contract and a loosening of labour regulations - similar to that which the UK and US went through in the eighties, but one which will have similar, copacetic results.

'The spirit of Margaret Thatcher is abroad in Germany, wafting in from the sink-or-swim business cauldron of neighbouring Poland as much as from Britain. Dirk Grosse-Leege, the corporate voice of Volkswagen, told me about the book he had on his desk: Margaret Thatcher's Shock Cure - A Recipe for Germany, by the German writer Dominik Geppert. It makes a comparison of the former British prime minister and Angela Merkel, leader of the centre-right CDU, who faces Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of the SPD in Sunday's election. "As an individual, I just love this book, because it's totally right," said Grosse-Leege.'

Not that any of these gilded ninnies will ever have to swallow so much as a spoonful of the medicine they prescribe.

Meek does visit the wretched towns of Wolfsburg and Weisswasser to speak to The Poor, but not to remark on what results neo-liberal globalisation and the concomitant structural adjustment have had on their regions, but to argue that the 'reforms' go further lest such economic dislocation continue. To be fair, Meek does not himself make the arguments; the weasel lets the words of others, fellow members of his class, to make them for him.

You will have heard it all before, but let's run through the argument briefly, shall we everyone? Repeat in sing-song voice like rote times tables: In a global economy we simply cannot afford such luxurious public provision, high wages and strong worker protection. We will not attract any investment so long as it is so expensive to do business here. We have to cut back in order to compete with eleven-year-old, productive-as-bunnies-on-Viagra Surinamese seamstresses. Blah, blah, blah...

All of which is true in its way, but once we have cut back, as prescribed, if we follow the original logic of competitiveness, then there will be some other country that cuts back still further with whom we must compete. Then we undercut them again in turn. Then they undercut us again, making the same arguments Meek's managers make but to their own populations, and it is a vicious, nay, animalistic, race to the bottom.

The Big Idea sweeping in from the East already law in the Balkans and the centre-piece of the CDU's platform is the flat tax - a gross fatty dinner of philanthropy from the poor to the rich. Bush is probably now too mired in the swamps of Iraq and New Orleans to dare attempt its introduction in his final term, despite the plans of his anti-New-Deal libertarian fundamentalist puppetmasters, but a Cheney government, or a reinvigorated post-9/11-Mark-II Bush, or even a future severe-recession-mired Democrat administration would certainly be able to find the political capital to do so, and the current conservatives ruling Greece have said they intend to introduce a flat tax, and Britain's Tories are also toying with the idea. Indeed, it is the flat tax that the right believes will go some distance toward righting the crisis of the rate of profit the West across-the-board has experienced since the early 1970's.

But do not believe that it will end there. The bourgeoisie demands, requires, has no choice but to force the post-war social contract be torn up. The uneven social provision of the welfare state was only ever introduced to begin with so that the bolshy post-war working classes of Europe not overthrow capitalism. Believing themselves now safe from the threat of communism, and greedy for a return to 1950's/1960's profit rates, there is no need any longer to 'offer social reforms, lest the working classes offer social revolution', as there acutely was in the immediate post-war period.

West Germany in particular, the advanced industrial society on the frontier of both Stalinist state capitalism and European capitalism needed to be the very model of a social democracy in order to show that capitalism could offer at least the illusion of social advancement. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, capitalism's show room could be safely packed away.

Do not believe that the neo-liberals do not have a plan. The introduction of the flat tax, far from flooding government accounts with new revenues as the economy expands (Reaganite economist Arthur Laffer's humbug economic theory that lower tax rates produce increased tax revenues), will instead produce a crisis of funding so severe it would require the wholesale dismantling of the welfare state and the remnants of labour protections and union rights. This is in fact is their aim. They are not merely anti-New-Dealers: They are Victorians.

But what of the virtues of the robust 'Anglo-Saxon' economies? Their full employment and free-spending? There is an old saying - or maybe it's not old and some Keynesian prof whose name I can't remember told it me once: 'You only know who's not wearing their swimming trunks when the tide goes out.' Any decrease in taxation on elites or diminution of the social provision will certainly attract investment in the short term. Like the hypothermic man knocking back a jigger of brandy who has the illusion of being warmed while the hooch actually hastens his death of cold, when the tide of investment dries up with the inevitable turning of the 'business cycle', the cities of England and America will look even more threadbare than they do today.

At one point, one of Meek's interviewees, Gabor Steingart, the Berlin bureau chief of Der Spiegel, does come close to pointing this out:

'I asked [Steingart] about something that confused me. If Germany was doing so badly, and Britain was doing so well, how come Britain still looked so scruffy and run-down, while Germany looked so smart and prosperous?

'"I think the performance of the British economy is better than Germany's, but you can't see it on the streets," he said. "What you see here in Germany is the accumulated capital not of the past year but of our economic miracle. It's a snapshot of the miracle in the 50s, the 60s and the beginning of the 70s."'

In the depths of recession, this is what Germany looks like - unemployed, not wealthy - but at least not like New Orleans.

The Asian Tigers were held up as diligent disciples of the Anglo-Saxon model until the bottom of their economies fell out, as was neo-liberalised Argentina. Indeed for all the Americans' demands for others to liberalise their economies, the Bush administration has been a paragon of protectionism and militarist Keynesianism - vastly expanding government expenditure, easing the money supply, cutting taxes and racking up vertiginous debt. In terms of the economy, if not in any other area, Bush has been doing exactly what he should be doing. However, he only gets away with his profligacy because his is the largest economy in the world. The global economy would have foreclosed on the USA long ago were the country named El Salvador or Turkey or, heck, even France.

And this is where the neo-Keynesnian arguments of the New New Left distend and where the neo-liberals make a very good point. They are quite right: there simply is no room for the welfare state and worker protection any more. Companies cannot afford them, and they're not lying when they say this. In a global economy, though capital is nowhere near as mobile as its champions say it is, it remains master of any national parliament. Through investment flight and economic sabotage - as is happening in Germany today - capital commands all. It is not merely that German workers are saving too much, worried that they are about to lose their jobs and thus not spending and keeping the economy afloat, it is that German capital is consciously sitting on its hands, refusing to invest, when it could. It aims to discipline the SPD and the electorate.

Thus even if the Linkspartei were to form a government (which they cannot this election, but, as the third biggest party in the country now, it certainly is within their grasp within a handful of electoral cycles), as their plan is entirely dependent on 'priming the pump' - boosting demand as Bush has done, Germany would be the subject of the most ruinous economic sabotage on the part of both domestic and international capital that they would be tumbled out of office within one term.

It is worth remembering that the perfidious PT, the Brazilian Workers' Party, was not formed as a social democratic party, but a centrist (in the Marxian sense) coalition of both unreconstructed socialists and left social democrats, along with extra-parliamentary activists set up in contradistinction to the existing Brazilian social democrats who had proven to be model neo-liberals. The PT was a formation not unidentical to the Linkspartei, Respect and even the LCR (which may be named the League Communiste Revolutionaire but internally is a kaleidoscope of Marxists, anarcho-reformist altermondialiste youth, republicans and liberal NGOniks). Now the PT too bows down before the IMF, cuts pensions, attacks landless peasants and rounds on its left flank. It is not that when the party was founded, its leaders intended to betray their principles; it is that they have the simple choice of staying in power or being hounded out by capital. So long as the New New Left remains beholden to a national Keynesianism, it will only repeat the errors of the PT.

The solution is lies outside the domestic realm. Capital may be able to chasten even an economy as large as Germany, but it cannot abandon an entire continent. At the European level, theoretically, democracy could once again be at least an equal match for capital. Priming the German pump is no solution, but priming the European pump may yet be. A European Keysianism is both saleable to the electorate and achievable, and, conveniently, dovetails with the need to offer an alternative vision of Europe by the Gauche du Non in the wake of the defeat of the European Constitution.

For this to happen, the German and indeed European left needs to reorganise itself on international lines. A common party-political identity throughout Europe, at a minimum, is necessary. The weakest of baby steps towards this have been taken in the form of the European United Left/Nordic Green Left (GUE/NGL) in the European Parliament and its successor, the European Left Party, although this is largely top-down and currently far too oriented around the former Stalinist parties.

More importantly, the parties need to advance a common programme throughout Europe (tailored to local concerns and conditions, naturally).

A similar, cross-border project is happening in some form through the European Social Fora, although this too is far too ad hoc and its tyranny of structurelessness simply allows authoritarian tendencies to accrete power. Still, the instinctual internationalism of activists on the ground born in the hot summer of 2001's various European anti-globalisation protests is a good foundation from which to build.

And finally, most importantly, and, as always, most difficult, the trade unions need to begin to co-ordinate political strikes on a pan-European basis. Demonstrations are always enjoyable, and resolutions passed are important, but nothing has the power to stop capital in its be-white-spatted tracks but labour.

A continent-wide union is not desirable. The unwieldy bureaucracy would actually inhibit transnational actions rather than encourage them. But networks of rank and file trade unionists - that Holy Grail of the far left - have the ability to build industrial movements as strong or stronger than those we have seen in France and Italy, but on the level that is capable of winning permanent gains.

The Linkspartei is doing many of the right things, but it, together with the rest of the New New Left, must put into practical application the internationalism that is no longer a socialist platitude, a lyric sung once a year on 1 May, but in fact the last remaining tool in the left's tool box.

Maggie and the neo-liberals have repeatedly said there is no alternative to globalisation. The alternative is internationalism.

There is an alternative to Maggie, Meek.

Bush short and curly - Chavez

2005-09-15T00:43:00.000+02:00

When one learns a language, there are often words that do not really have a translation, and one has to just learn such a sui generis word as the thing itself. The French 'sympa' could be one example. The same language's ubiquitous flippant grunt, 'bof', could be another. Naturally, such words will often be slang, which is the case with the glorious Spanish profanity, 'pendejo'. Equally naturally, such words - any slang really - are often amongst the first words one learns. In my case, I learnt the latter word from the be-baseball-capped chuckle-head in my university Spanish class who went on unendingly about his Mexican girlfriend and getting trousered in Tijuana, and who, Christ alone knows why, thought I was his 'buddy'. I never really learnt any translation, but I knew what it meant.

A few weeks ago, when that squinty, happy-clappy fatwa-monger Pat Robertson called for the U.S. to 'take out' Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, Paddy's defenders huffed, 'Well, but, but Chavez once called George Bush an asshole, donchaknow!'

But he didn't, muchachitos and muchachitas; He called him a pendejo, but 'asshole' is what the Miami Herald et al translated his comment as. Well, this afternoon, I was having a bit of a time-wasting ménage à moi on the old Wikipedia and I came across the actual, literal meaning of pendejo. It turns out a pendejo is 'a strand of pubic hair', which, I reckon, is sooo much better than the pedestrian 'asshole'.

There doesn't, however, seem to be a word in Spanish for 'a strand of pubic hair caught in one's foreskin', which would be a more apt description of Bush, given all the pain he is causing.

***

Yes, I'm back from my hols, comrades, although the posting will still be a little spotty until the end of September, when I officially finish at the sausage factory.

I'm hoping to get up a blow-by-blow of the Popinjay vs. the Indefatigable One some time termorrer, along with a bit on Hitchens' turdish 'dossier' on Galloway he or some fart-catcher intern has posted on the Hitchens Web.

***

On the stereo - The Cardigans' latest (Wha? He's recommending the Cardigans? Pff. He's gone soft), 'I need some fine wine, and you, you need to be nicer', is quite catchy, and 'Wenn es Passiert', by Wir sind Helden is equally bubble-bath-and-candles-worthy. While back in the Great White North, I came across Toronto Manu-Chao-sound-alikes Bedouin Soundclash in the pages of Exclaim magazine. You can watch their clip, 'When the night feels my song' - the very model of a band-pretending-to-busk video promo - here. Lastly, and I'm a bit late to the cotillion with this one, but isn't 'Munich' by the Joy-Division-worshipping Editors rather rather-good?

Anon.

US calls on IRA to now discontinue contact with foreign terrorists

2005-07-29T11:48:00.000+02:00

From the BBC:

'The IRA pledge was welcomed by the United States administration as "an important and potentially historic statement".
…

'"They will want to be certain that this terrorism and criminality are indeed things of the past," the statement said.

'The statement added that it understood from the IRA communiqué that "the IRA and its members will no longer have any contact with any foreign paramilitary and terrorist organisations". '

Well, cutting off contact with the British government would create some difficulties, surely?

Days of love and rage

2005-07-27T21:54:00.000+02:00

Saturday night I was exuberantly sozzled. I was up until almost Sunday afternoon putting the world to rights with a friend of mine and I had another one of those experiences: It's usually a girl, and it's always after she's had a Bridget-Jones-load of ropey chardonnay. And it's happening increasingly often these days. No, sadly, I'm not talking about that. That's rather rare, unsatisfactorily, whichever side of the street I'm shopping on. I'm talking about the number of lachrymose people I've had to drunkenly comfort lately about 'the state of the world'.

We've all had the 'chardonnay + girl + tale-of-horrid-ex-boyfriend = torrent of blubbing' sessions with somebody. The morning after the evening of illimitable there-there-ing on your part, she always calls up (or, more latterly, text messages - minimising the now acute embarrassment) and says, 'I was just being over-sensitive. I'm a bit embarrassed to have used all your Kleenexes. Just forget what I said about him, all right?'

However, this commonplace maudlin state (and lest anyone think I am making fun of these episodes, let me say I firmly prefer maudlin to lairy, and I myself tend toward the argumentative after a few beverages, which I think many people like least of all), lately seems to me to be increasingly kicked off no longer by thoughts of boyfriend but of thoughts of war, by what seem to be quite heartfelt laments at how wretchedly fucking horrible the world is 'these days'.

One is tempted, especially if one studied history at uni, as I did, to fall back on the old 'It was ever thus.'

But then there are things that you read from time to time - and sometimes it doesn't have to be Srebrenica-sized for it to get to you - and despair grabs you by your scalp and throws you down and, you think, yes, it's true: it really is a world of shit.

On 19 July, the Iranian Student News Agency (ISNA) reported that two gay Iranian teenagers - one 18, the other 16 or 17 - were hanged this week for the 'crime' of homosexuality.

The two young men were hanged in Edalat (Justice) Square in the city of Mashhad in north-eastern Iran, on the orders of Court No. 19.

Indymedia Beirut has photos of their last few minutes.

If you've been an activist for a long time you'll know that you become numb after a while to so much, even when you read, say, that we've killed over a hundred thousand people in Iraq. 'Of course,' you think. Of course we've killed a hundred thousand. Of course. How would it be any different to anything else the bosses have done in the Middle East, or Africa, or Latin America? We expect it. And we in our justified cynicism lose a bit of that feeling of that anger or that shock or that pity that made us socialists in the first place at the age of fifteen or sixteen.

It is useful to be angry. This incandescent rage you are now feeling is good. Remember what you are feeling now as you look at these photos - especially the one where the boys are sitting there, knowing what is about to happen - that's the one that gets me - and use that rage. Use it like you're now a battery recharged. Take it with you when next you go out on 'another bloody' march, or are called to come down to 'another damn picket'. Remember: This is why you became a socialist in the first place. To fight this kind of barbarism.

I've not felt so angry or despairing in a while.

***

Please call the Iranian embassy wherever you are to protest this wickedness. Something better than a call would be better, of course.

I don't expect Condoleeza Rice, however much the White House would like to nuke Iran, to use this to denounce Tehran, as it's something most members of her own party privately or publicly will approve of.

UK

Ambassador Seyed Hossein Adeli, 16 Princes Gate, London SW7 (0044 207 2253000, Fax: 5894440) info@iran-embassy.org.uk

Canada

Ambassador Seyed Mouhammad Ali Moosavi, Embassy of Iran, 245 Metcalfe St., Ottawa, Ontario K2P 2K2 (001-613- 235-4726, 233-4726; Fax, 233-5712)

Belgium

Ambassador Ali Ahani, 415 Avenue De Tervuren, 1150 Bruxelles, P.O.Box 34 (0032 27623745, Fax: 7623915) embassy.iran.bxl@skynet.be

***

Update: My friend James, of the Radical Activist Network, who first alerted me to these events, has posted more details on the RAN site, as well as providing a model letter to be sent to your country's Iranian embassy. Outrage has also issued a press release, noting that a further three young men accused of the same 'crime' are in hiding and being hunted by the police. Amnesty International was built on the idea, long since proven, that letter-writing does, on rare occasion, work. Write that letter, make a call.

No Borders

2005-07-27T00:36:00.000+02:00

Useful tip: Do not buy fake Gillette razor blades from down the market, no matter how cheap the dude is selling them for. It's just not worth it.

***

So I'm listening to the Indefatigable One the other day on Any Questions on Radio Four, and he's quite competently outlining the link between the London bombings and UK/US foreign policy while simultaneously expertly ripping Oliver Letwin a new arsehole and giving what-for to that nasty harpee chairwoman of Republicans Abroad the BBC keeps inviting to speak on all things American, Colleen Graffy, (Comme d'habitude, neither was able to distinguish between explanation and endorsement. I mean really - If I explain to you how your bathroom is going to smell the morning after you've had a marathon bran muffin and refried beans eating contest, it does not follow that I am endorsing the resultant, um, catharsis. I am merely predicting the likely effect of a particular action. [Yes, that's right - it seems I've just described the last hundred years of Western foreign policy in the Middle East as being not unlike fibre-heavy cupcakes or burrito-filling and terrorist atrocities in New York, Madrid and London essentially as runny poo]), but anyway, dude is hot. Dude is on fire.

But then he's all like, 'One of the things that’s always struck me as extraordinary is how few customs officers we have at the ports...Actually, we probably need ten, 20, 30,000 more customs officers.'

And then, buddy's like, 'everyone [who comes to Britain] should be searched.'

And then, buddy's all, 'we need more police,' and then he goes off on one about tighter border controls. Add to this his position, expounded some time ago in an opinion piece in the Morning Star, about controlled immigration, with a 'points system' for immigrants - which the Tories have also called for.- and it all seems rather unexceptional .

And I have to say that I am comprehensively not down with this line of thinking. Oskar Lafontaine - the leader of the new far-left electoral formation, the Linkspartei, in Germany that has already overtaken the Greens and the Free Democrats according to the latest polls and is even running on 30 per cent in the East - has recently, when mixing it up a bit with the populist tubthumping on the hustings, taken to not just defending the welfare state and jobs from an old, social-democratic/left Keynesian perspective, but also to warn of the dangers of Fremdarbeiter, or 'foreign worker' - a term that tends to echo some of the language used in the country some 60, 70 years ago by the Nazis, and which has opened up the new party to - in this case legitimate - accusations from the Greens of right-wing populism on the model of Pim Fortuyn or Jorg Haider.

Apart from the electoral idiocy of such a rhetorical strategy (opening oneself up to attacks from the party's closest ideological rival, the Greens; alienating students and middle class lefties; and chasing those workers who, if they are xenophobic enough to agree with Lafontaine's chauvinism, will pick far-right parties or the CDU first anyway to impose such policy as would target the Fremdarbeiter), the position is just wrong. Any left party worth the name must - especially these days, put immigrant defence at the forefront of its policies and extra-parliamentary activities. We defend, before all others, the weakest amongst us. It is shameful that Lafontaine and Galloway dress themselves in such cheap and brutal rhetoric.

It was a mistake for Respect, when the discussion of what position to take on immigration came up originally, to have pulled back from socialists' traditional demand for an end to all immigration controls, which are, by definition, racist. Unsurprisingly, Oliver Letwin found himself more than surprised to be whole-heartedly agreeing with Galloway on this issue.

Today, when Brazilians are being summarily executed on underground platforms, running from the police afraid of being found out to have had overstayed their student visas, we must say as unshakeably as we ever have: No borders; No deportations; No one is illegal.

At least the crusties have still got this one right.

***
N.B, An earlier version of this piece suggested George Galloway supported tighter immigration controls, when in fact he had spoken in favour of tighter border controls. There is more than a distinction without a difference there, and I apologise for perhaps overstating the case.

Rummy reminds ungrateful Kyrgyz who bought them their revolution

2005-07-27T00:30:00.000+02:00

Earlier this month, the four Central Asian republics, Kyrgystan, Kazakhstan, Uzekistan and Tajikistan, along with China, called on the US to issue a schedule for the withdrawal of US forces in the region. It seems that they, seeing that the emperor has no clothes - despite all its technology and spending on arms, the US is losing in Iraq - and the republics are tilting back toward Russia and China.

While the US certainly spent heavily on the opposition in Kyrgystan - as it did in Georgia, the Ukraine, Yugoslavia and elsewhere in Eastern Europe - that ultimately overthrew the government - it seems the new government is not as pliant as the Yanks would have liked.

Right on cue, rapid deployment of Rum-tum-bum on a short-notice trip to the region.

A few hours later today, Kyrgystan tilts back, saying, ' The [US] base at Manas will stay as long as the situation in Afghanistan requires,' said Kyrgyz defence minister Ismail Isakov.

What was offered - or threatened - to make Kyrgystan back off?

Where'd Vic go?

2005-07-19T22:08:00.000+02:00

I know, I know - I've been dreadful lately. But my excuse is that I've recently come down with a rather severe case of grandparentvisititis.

Regularly scheduled programming shall resume shortly.

First thoughts

2005-07-07T15:23:00.000+02:00

Random dude witness on BBC radio started going off the reservation a bit and began to call on Tony Blair to begin 'reconcilation' with whomever we are at war as what we have done so far isn't working. Needless to say he was hurried off the air.

Attacks on Muslims, Arabs and anyone slightly darker than my soapy white Caucasian self will undoubtedly spike over the next few weeks. We need to be vigilant in our defence of these communities.

Watch for politicians to, without haste, link the altermondialist movement to the attackers, as they did after the 11^th of September. We must not be caught like a deer in the headlights after that date, but go on the offensive, as they did in Spain after the Madrid bombings.

No to terror, to the murder of ordinary, working class men and women anywhere, whether from bombers on Tube trains or from on high from the bomb bay doors of an F-16! Do the people of London feel any different today than the people of Baghdad under the boot of Operation Lightning?

If there is any difference between Blair and whoever perpetrated this today, it is only that Blair has killed more.

A demo, on the model of Madrid - and admittedly the dynamic is not identical - against ALL terror - from Bush and Blair not just from al Qaeda, would not be out of place, and explicitly links this terrorist government to this morning's terror.

It was bound to happen, and will continue to happen, until we stop killing them.

Make Poverty History, Inc.

2005-06-30T00:00:00.000+02:00

If you haven't picked them up already, both the New Statesman and Red Pepper this last week have had great exposes of the luvvy-frotting, Brownite goings-on in the upper echelons of Oxfam and the Make Poverty History campaign. The RP article, by Stuart Hodkinson, is really quite, quite good, with not a few scoops about MPH, Richard Curtis, et al, that beat even the Telegraph's juicy discovery that the MPH campaign's white wristbands were produced in a Chinese sweatshop with Oxfam's knowledge. In fact, the whole of Red Pepper this month is indispensable.

Hodkinson uncovers the revolving door separating Oxfam's leadership and New Labour and even the World Bank and the creepy empressario role played by key organiser and sectarian Brownite Richard Curtis in bringing on board capitalist leeches like Scottish business tycoon Sir Tom Hunter and fashion house and sweatshop doyen Tommy Hilfiger.

He also highlights how Blair and Brown's new 'Marshall Plan' for Africa is, surprise, surprise, just the same-old, same-old neo-liberal anal rape without lube of Africa that has been going on for years, with front-loaded aid that, as Meaders and the World Development Movement point out, will actually result in a net loss in aid of $108bn.

Hodkinson also shows how, so in hock to New Labour is MPH, that any other voices, most especially anti-war campaigners, are not merely being marginalised ahead of Gleneagles by organisers, but their work is being actively undermined and sabotaged.

'MPH’s website fails to even acknowledge the other protests and events that are being planned by Trident Ploughshares, CND and G8Alternatives, and through the Dissent! network. The MPH coordinating team, which includes Oxfam, Comic Relief and the TUC, has also twice unanimously
vetoed the Stop the War Coalition’s (STWC) application to join MPH on the grounds that the issues of economic justice are separate from those of war, and STWC participation in Edinburgh on 2 July would confuse the message.'

…

'STWC has been banned from even having a stall at the MPH rally. A leaked e-mail in late May to MPH from Milipedia, the ‘ethical’ events management company helping to organise the MPH rally, asks the coalition to "consider the desirability/ strategy for removing people from our event who are setting up unwanted stalls, ad hoc events, facilities, etc" and to draw up a list ‘of the likely infiltrators and decide what we’re prepared to tolerate and at what point we draw the line and what action we want to take’. This followed a tip-off that the Socialist Party (formerly Militant Tendency) is planning to sell its newspaper on the Edinburgh rally and wear red MakeCapitalismHistory T-shirts.

'The email contains a giveaway reference to retaining ‘our ownership of the event and our key messaging’. To preserve its monopoly MPH has bought a market trader’s licence for 2 July that empowers the coalition to move illegal traders, including political activists, off the site. Comic Relief has also registered the MakePovertyHistory slogan as a trademark with the EU and is threatening to take action against "any misuse or alleged misuse of the trademark".'

Last night meanwhile, development charity War on Want and Red Pepper organised a 'Make the G8 History' rally in London, with Victoria Brittain, Tariq Ali and George Monbiot. The Red Pepper blog has a report from the rally, highlighting Monbiot's decision to march against not merely the G8, but that giant tit, Bono, and Bob Geldof too, as well as journo Paul Kingsnorth's snowballingly popular 'Make Richard Curtis History' campaign.

On the Socialist Unity Network website, Hodkinson and Kingsnorth also have a review of what looks to have been a gurningly awful piece of Curtis-ite New Labour propaganda, the The Girl In The Cafe, also known as a tenderly funny and poignant love story for BBC One shown over the weekend in advance of the whole Make Poverty History sham-a-lama-ding-dong.

And just in case after having read all those links, you're still some wet well-at-least-they're-doing-something liberal daisy, Patrick Bond, Dennis Brutus and Virginia Setshedi - all South Africa-based activists (What, actually involve the oppressed in their own emancipation? Nah. That's crazy talk.) - at Counterpunch bring together all the criticisms from a perspective from the Global South.

I'll not be hiking up to Gleneagles next week, I'm afraid. I've got work and can't get the time off this time. Say 'hi' to all the G8 for me, though.

Remember Carlo to them for me as well.

Mugs of hot water be-teabagged in the kitchen left to go cold

2005-06-29T22:42:00.000+02:00

I often leave mugs of hot water be-teabagged in the kitchen to go cold; eggs boiling away on the stove until all the water is gone; 'live' basil plants on my balcony dying a slow, companionless, unwatered death - all while something else otherwise engrossing has caught my promiscuous attention.

I have now, it seems, delivered a perfectly eclatant and v. Twenty-first Century addition to this pantheon of acts of expert pre-senile forgettery: I posted a picture of Don Rumsfeld on the blog [Given Blogger's tempermentality, I find it easiest to post a picture, then write around it afterward], then ran off to, oh, I can't remember now, possibly have a wank or iron a patch on my new shorts or something, and then promptly forgot what I had intended to write about Rum-tum-bum. Worse, I forgot I'd even posted the bleeding picture of the septuagenarian war criminal, and now y'all've had a cryptically unbecommented mugshot of him to gaze on for the last forty-eight hours.

I cannot for the life of me remember what sparkling epistle I had in mind that was to accompany the shot of the Secretary of Defense [sic].

Well, you can return from behind the sofa, I've removed the piccy now, along with the comments it attracted in the comment box, including the one where Lenin tells me I have 'pinchable little cheeks'.

Froot Loops and other weapons of mass destruction

2005-06-22T17:34:00.000+02:00

Dude, I am so with Saddam Hussein on this whole Froot Loops business. They are fucking gross. They stick to your teeth like Cap'n Crunch, which is also positively noxious and I swear cancerous, or at least perilously cavity-expediting, and taste so not like fruit in any way - or rather they do, but in the same way that that banana-flavoured childhood-ear-infection-retarding gelatinous goop tastes like bananas.

I do think he goes too far in his endorsement of Raisin Bran, Doritos and Cheetos, mind. The latter two leave your fingers coated in this radioactive orange powder shit - and who wants that? - and, if we're honest here, just taste like corn-coated nothing anyway. And two scoops of raisins? Yeah, so what? That's two scoops too many for me, buddy.

But really, who cares? The Froot Loop aspect - sure it makes for a quirky hook for a lazy sub-editor or journo plagiarising the famous GQ interview with former guards of the Butcher of Baghdad, but dig a little deeper comrades. Did no one else find it curious that Saddo also said to the guards that he hated the two Bush presidents, thought Clinton was 'Okay', but pined for good ol' Gipper? Could it quite possibly be that the reason he looks fondly on the Reagan years, just as the neo-cons do, is because it was on Ronnie's watch that the Yanks supplied him with high-tech equipment, chemical and biological weapons and millions of dollars' worth of their conventional cousins that he used against the Iranians and Kurds, backed him diplomatically and passed on high-value military intelligence to help him target the aforementioned Iranians and Kurds, including information from US satellites?

Ritter: 'War on Iran already begun'

2005-06-21T22:47:00.000+02:00

Former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter had an opinion piece on al-Jazeera yesterday, suggesting that, just as we now know that the war against Iraq actually began with bombing as early as Autumn 2002, so the U.S. is already effectively in Iran via its clients, the Mujahadeen el-Khalq, or MEK, who are, as Ritter says, 'an Iranian opposition group, once run by Saddam Hussein's dreaded intelligence services, but now working exclusively for the CIA's Directorate of Operations.' Some Iran commentators have suggested the MEK might be responsible for the recent pre-election bombings in the country. The MEK itself has denied any role in the bombings, however.

'[T]he CIA is using a group still labelled as a terrorist organisation, a group trained in the art of explosive assassination by the same intelligence units of the former regime of Saddam Hussein, who are slaughtering American soldiers in Iraq today, to carry out remote bombings in Iran of the sort that the Bush administration condemns on a daily basis inside Iraq.'

He also highlights developments in Azerbaijan, Iran's northern neighbour, where the U.S. 'is preparing a base of operations for a massive military presence that will foretell a major land-based campaign designed to capture Tehran.'

'The ethnic links between the Azeri of northern Iran and Azerbaijan were long exploited by the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and this vehicle for internal manipulation has been seized upon by CIA paramilitary operatives and US Special Operations units who are training with Azerbaijan forces to form special units capable of operating inside Iran for the purpose of intelligence gathering, direct action, and mobilising indigenous opposition to the Mullahs in Tehran.

'But this is only one use the US has planned for Azerbaijan. American military aircraft, operating from forward bases in Azerbaijan, will have a much shorter distance to fly when striking targets in and around Tehran. 'In fact, US air power should be able to maintain a nearly 24-hour a day presence over Tehran airspace once military hostilities commence.'

Worryingly, comments made by Seymour Hersh, the New Yorker hack who broke the Abu Ghraib story (and My Lai, a generation ago) and who has extensive contacts in the U.S. government, at a recent speaking engagement seem to corroborate Ritter's allegations. Paraphrasing Hersh's talk, someone who spoke to someone who attended his talk [admittedly this is not the most impressive of sources] recounted his words, later posted on the Marxmail listserve:

'[T]hey're [the U.S. gov] going to bomb the shit out of Iran, but there aren't enough free ground troops to mount an invasion.'

Nudists for Public Broadcasting

2005-06-20T21:08:00.000+02:00

Too...hot...to...blog. Must reach...cheesy Portuguese bar...across road...before...die of...thirst...

If where you're reading this from isn't as stickily humid as BXL and you still want to faff about on the computer, you might want to have a gander over at Lenin's Tomb, where Lenny's taken note of the return of fragging to the U.S. armed forces. Len's also done a tidy little bit of investigative blogging (well, if the newspapers aren't going to do it, someone has to, even if it's a long dead revolutionary socialist) on a fraudulent piece of black propaganda that appeared in Scotland on Sunday. It appears the Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service was asking for 20,000 extra pints of blood on account of the expected mass slaughter at the upcoming anti-G8 protests when the Jubilee 2000 nuns and Nudists for Public Broadcasting get out their Samurai swords and get all combative-like (no, wait, it was Samurai swords we were supposed to be bringing to May Day 2001, wasn't it? I get confused so easily in this sort of weather) - or rather, as Vlad's found out, they weren't asking anything of the sort.

Meanwhile, back in Metropolis, the Bionic Octopus has posted a stout defence of rudeness:

Recently I tried to short-circuit this hideous cycle by responding first to one of these idiots, and suggesting that instead of wasting everyone's time spouting unexamined shite based on no information at all, she do some reading and inform herself as to the barest characteristics of the systems in question. I wasn't terribly polite. I didn't call her a fatheaded ignorant fuckpig as I would have liked, but my tone was both stern and dismissive; she in fact merited dismissal.

You can imagine the result. Offended, reprimanding posts from all corners, earnestly invoking the Need To Hear All Sides, Need To Respect Each Other, Need To Maintain Civil Debate, &c. And on they plunged heedless, headlong into a completely fucking useless rondo with this necrotic tart, which has been raging full-on for four days and shows no sign of abating.

The bellowing termagant mollusc is quite right. Sometimes there's no thrill of the chase, no cut and thrust that one sometimes, sometimes enjoys when sparring with conservatives. Sometimes they just have to be jabbed in their fat-cat pudding belly and told to shut their dribbling cock holster.

And with that, comrades and friends, I'll shut mine.

Dual power in Bolivia

2005-06-17T23:55:00.000+02:00

In Bolivia last week, we saw a much more thoroughgoing revolutionary upheaval than we have seen in Eastern Europe over the last few years. The country's poor indigenous, peasant and working class majority had managed to bring all Bolivia to a halt with an open-ended general strike and a total of 120 road blockades at strategic points in the national roads and highways system. Workers had seized 13 per cent of the country's oil and gas fields, including three fields belonging to BP, four belonging to Spain's Repsol, and a pipeline station on the border with Chile. Battles between protestors and police saw massive tear gassing and repression, and miners responding by hurling dynamite. At one point the masses came within 60 feet of the Congress building before snipers were installed on the surrounding buildings. Congress was forced to meet in Sucre, the old colonial capital, for the first time in over a century, instead of La Paz. Legislators were flown by military airplanes to Sucre and security forces attempted to seal of the city from the protestors, but broke through nonetheless, battling police in the town centre. The conservative senator, Hernando Vaca Diez, constitutionally next in succession following President Carlos Mesa's resignation, had begun the day with the full support of the American embassy and every intention of assuming the presidency. Jim Schulz, of the Bolivia-based Democracy Center, and the author of Blog from Bolivia, said in an interview on Democracy Now that on the evening of the eighth, that people were preparing for where they were going to sleep away from their homes in fear of the coup they were sure was to occur at any minute. Vaca Diez had in the previous months repeatedly called for Mesa 'to govern', which was widely taken as a call for a military crackdown on the rebellion. Everyone knew that if Vaca Diez took power, he would be a twenty-first century and Bolivian Augusto Pinochet.

However, reportedly, Vaca Diez had lost the support of all sections of the armed forces barring the air force. According to Tom Kruse,

'with this round, [the Santa Cruz bourgeois elites] have learned the limits to their power today; will respond with a kinder, gentler and less regional politics; another that they will (also?) try to get a clearer hold on some part of the armed forces. On this point: one source tells me the armed forces told the Santa Cruz elite that if they sent out their shock troops (the Juventud Crucenista, et al.), the army would respond with fire. According to this version, today the military is not interested in the emergence of Colombian style paramilitaries.'

Luis Gomez, of Narco News, reported:

'The Bolivian military leaders, though they defended the Constitution and said they would accept any constitutional successor to the presidency, also left this very clear: “the demands of the demonstrations,” which have occurred every day for nearly four weeks, “should be heard.”'

Meanwhile, the Bolivian working class were taking over factories and other workplaces, their consciousness rapidly advancing, overtaking that of their leaders. Jorge Martin reported:

'At the demonstration in La Paz there is strong presence of factory workers. Max Tola, workers leader at Cervecería brewery, one of the largest factories in La Paz said: "There is no political way out between themselves, amongst the bourgeois. What we are talking about here is nationalisation and the taking of power by the workers. Our slogan is workers and peasants to power.

'Francisco Quispe, leader of the La Paz Factory Workers Federation said: "if there is no nationalisation we will continue with the mobilisation. Nationalisation is the only way forward to create more sources of employment, to end the hunger and misery that is killing us. The only solution is for us workers to take power."'

'By the time the session was supposed to start there was a huge mass of people in the streets (including miners, peasants, teachers, workers, etc). After a while the masses blockaded the airport as well, so that members of parliament (who had had to fly in, as all main roads are blockaded) would not be able to leave Sucre without permission from the masses. The session was suspended.'

Vaca Diez was stranded, quite literally. He renounced his right to succession, and, the presidency passed to Eduardo Rodríguez, the head of the Supreme Court, skipping over the next in line, who had already said he too would not accept the presidency. Rodriquez is a caretaker president, required to call elections within five months.

Most of the blockades were subsequently lifted, workers returned to work, and the gas and oil refineries were returned to their owners. Although the two key demands that had originally prompted the uprising - nationalisation of the gas industry and the convening of a constituent assembly representative of the people - remain unmet, the leader of the largest force amongst the social movements, the Movement towards Socialism political party (MAS), Evo Morales, has offered the government an indefinite truce. At the same time, other sections, particularly those in El Alto and the Altiplano - the plateau above La Paz - the radical, deeply impoverished heart of the rebellion - have said their demands have not gone away and are currently in the midst of internal discussions on how to proceed. In the last 48 hours, a few sizeable protests seemed to have reappeared, but it remains to be seen whether this is a tailing off of the protests or a return to battle.

There is a widespread feeling amongst the now physically exhausted protestors that while their goals have yet to be achieved, the strikes and blockades had so crippled the country that they were running out of food and other supplies. The commitment remains, but there is an acknowledgement that the popular forces need to recover their strength. Perfectly logical lessons have also been learnt: the strikes - as all successful general strikes will do - starved not only their opponents but themselves as well. Next time, the protestors say, they will strike, but they have to make the various enterprises work for popular benefit, co-ordinating the distribution of food and transportation and so on. At the same, some social movements have said they will not be demobilised. Edgar Patana of the Bolivian Workers’ Federation has said the demonstrations and blockades will continue.

Nonetheless, a half-time break for recuperation makes sense whatever Evo Morales' electoralist aims in calling a truce.

However, it is clear that Morales sees further mobilisations as a threat to his presidential ambitions in the 2007 elections. As Jean Friedsky notes at Narco News: 'The MAS will most likely accept this compromise because nationalization was never their true agenda and because new elections gives them an opportunity to increase their party's political power.'

Tom Lewis, the co-author with Bolivian social movement leader Oscar Oliviera of a history of the successful water anti-privatisation struggles of a few years ago ¡Cochabamba! Water War in Bolivia, interviewed in Counterpunch, concurs:

'Many people outside of Bolivia think that the Evo Morales's MAS represents the country's salvation from capitalism's chokehold. But a glance at the MAS's actions during and after the Gas War shows this is not the case.

'The MAS could have led or formed part of a new anti-neoliberal government in the wake of October 2003. Instead, it lobbied for Mesa's succession, knowing full well that Mesa differed not one whit from Sánchez de Lozada on economic policy. During the Mesa administration, the MAS has, in fact, acted as a pillar of support for the Mesa government at key moments.

'Unlike the rest of the left, for example, Morales campaigned in favor of the July 2004 gas referendum, telling people that voting "yes" on the two key questions would mean imposing 50 percent royalties on transnational oil companies. Of course, Morales was wrong, and it is hard to believe that he didn't know this beforehand.

'The only thing that explains the behaviour of Morales and the MAS is their slide into electoralism. Ever since Morales garnered second place and 22 percent of the vote in the 2002 presidential elections, the MAS has directed almost all of its energies into Morales's upcoming bid for the presidency in 2007.

'This means that the MAS has repeatedly sought to contain Bolivia's social rebellion. If the MAS were thrust into power on the wave of popular revolt, it would risk a dangerous confrontation with U.S. imperialism. The MAS wants to be voted into office instead.'

However, this electoralist slide has cost the party considerably. There is no guarantee that the MAS would even win the 2007 elections. In recent municipal elections, the party won just eleven per cent of the vote, half its 2002 levels of support. Thus as the popular forces began to mobilise again, Morales has attempted to jump to the head of the movement. Even so, he still refuses to support the call for gas nationalisation. As with Lula in Brazil, the essentially social democratic Morales - whatever Hugo Chavez' pronouncements that he is his protégé - is acting as a break on the struggle.

The problem is that social democracy is simply not viable any longer. The ease with which capital can punish a single country should it choose the social democratic road is precisely what has pushed Schöder, Lula, provincial NDP governments in Canada - take your pick from the pantheon of social democratic betrayal of the last decade - to adopt neo-liberal measures. It is not that the parties are led by weak characters - certainly this is not the case in Brazil - but social democracy cannot be built in one country. The only hope is to go still further. If the bosses attempt to move their capital, their equipment, their factories elsewhere, they must be seized.

And, crucially, there was, on the eighth of June, the launch of a People's Assembly, representing 60 different organisations throughout the country, which resolved the following:

1) That the city of El Alto be the General Headquarters of the Bolivian Revolution in the XXI century.

2) To create a United Leadership of the Indigenous National Peoples' Assembly as an INSTRUMENT OF POWER, at the head of the Federation of Neighbourhood Juntas of El Alto (FEJUVE), the Regional Workers Union of El Alto (COR), the Bolivian Workers Union (COB), the United Trade Union Confederation of Peasant Workers of Bolivia (CSUTCB), the Trade Union Confederation of Artisan Workers, Small Traders of Bolivia, the Trade Union Federation of Mine Workers of Bolivia, the Interprovincial Transport Federation of La Paz and the other mobilised social organisations in the interior of the country.

3) To create SUPPLY, SELF DEFENCE, PRESS AND POLITICAL Committees whose aim is to guarantee the success of the organised peoples' organisations.

4) We reiterate that our struggle for the NATIONALISATION AND INDUSTRIALISATION OF HYDROCARBONS is non-negotiable.

5) To organise the formation of Peoples' Assemblies in every department under the leadership of the COB [the main trade union central], the Departmental Workers Federation, and the delegates elected from the rank and file in mass meetings and cabildos [local mass assemblies].

6) To reject all manoeuvres of the ruling class either through a constitutional succession or elections involving the same old politicians.

[Translation from here]

In the course of the development of a revolutionary or pre-revolutionary situation, throughout history, it has been common for there to appear on the national stage a parallel 'government' or counter-power. The frequent expression of this is the workers' council, or soviet, but there are other forms more geographically based as well. And what are these Popular Assemblies, these Calbidos, but an embryonic dual power? But the counter-power is not merely expressed in terms of a popular representation of the masses parallel to that of the discredited or partially discredited parliament, but through the insurgant masses themselves, when they become historical actors, rather than observers of history. The check on power by the masses that we have seen in Bolivia - the inability of Carlos Mesa to continue to rule, and especially the inability of Vaca Diez to assume power - due to the immoveable rock that has been the poor of Bolivia is this counter-power. Even the international oil and gas companies are adjusting their projections, believing some form of nationalisation is inevitable.

First described by Lenin as 'dual power', such as situation cannot last for long. Either there is a re-establishment of bourgeois power, or a seizure of power by the masses. When the situation gets so extremely acute, the masses really have no choice but to aim for the seizure of power, for if they do not, there is certain to follow the most dolorous of bloody repressions.

There is a history of such things and one that is largely hidden from view, but there is a cycle to it all nonetheless that every popular movement that has ever existed has not failed to repeat*, to its sorrow.

The cycle can be broken if there is a group of individuals who know this history, who have studied the victories and defeats of the sad history of the left, and are able to lead the movement away from paths that have been proven not to work in the past - the living embodiment of the memory of the working class.

This all sounds eminently logical. One needs to learn to cook from someone who has cooked before. One cannot expect to enter a kitchen for the very first time and know how to bake a souflee.

However, the history of such 'Red Teachers' - the self-appointed vanguard parties, and in particular the last 60 years of Trotskyism - would be unintentionally comedic if the stakes were not so high.

All the same, to cut against the equivocations and tergiversations of the MAS and the attempts by Evo Morales to keep a lid on the rebellion, to provide the correct way forward, there does need to be people on the ground to come together and constructively strategise and offer such leadership within the struggle. There are organisations in Bolivia to the left of the MAS, but they are small revolutionary parties, which, according to Tom Lewis:

'…have made important contributions to the ideas and debates that have emerged in the course of struggle. Most still have difficulty communicating effectively within the social movements, however, because of decades of working in isolation.

'The main weakness of Bolivia's "anti-capitalist" forces has been the lack of clarity about the need to fight for and win state power outside the electoral arena. This seems to be changing rapidly at present. The electoral road is clearly seen as a dead end by large numbers of the rank and file of the social movements today, as well as by movement leaders such as Abel Mamani, Jaime Solares, Roberto de la Cruz and Oscar Olivera.'

Lewis also points out that:

'…unlike [i] most other Latin American countries, the unions and large sections of the organized working class are deeply involved with the struggles of the social movements. The COB and de la Cruz's wing of the COR are among the most revolutionary sectors in Bolivia. This is a relatively recent development, arising from the ouster back in April 2003 of a corrupt union leadership in bed with the government.'

Above all, the movement must aim for state power, but outside the traditional, compromising electoral road. There is a great danger that the secondary power, this wonderful popular energy - that of the streets and in the mines and gas and oil refineries - will be channelled into potentially distractionary electoral forms, and a quick end to the dual power situation will result, a restoration of the bourgeois order, even if some gains are won.

There is at least some recognition that this is what needs to be done, as Oscar Oliviera said in his latest communiqué:

'It is important, also, to reflect upon the following. In this May-June mobilisation we have seen two things. On one hand, the great force that we are capable of deploying: we, the diverse social movements, are capable of paralyzing the entire country, and of avoiding the maneuvers of the businessmen and bad politicians. On the other hand, we have not been capable of imposing our own decisions and objectives on these same politicians, who today are in the worst crisis they could possibly confront. Based on these two considerations, we have opened a wide debate in all the neighbourhoods and communities of Cochabamba and the country, about the need to build, little by little, our own capacity for SELF GOVERNMENT, to push for that in the next mobilisation'

There must also be clarity on what is meant by 'nationalisation'. Oil and gas companies have been nationalised in the past in various countries around the world, but have only served a clientelist domestic elite. Nationalisation must be under workers' control, and not a reimplantation of the state capitalism common to Latin America in the forties and fifties.

This, unavoidably, is socialism.

But even socialism, at least in one country, is not enough. No one country has all the resources to supply its population with all its needs. Venezuela has managed to ignore the slings and arrows of international approbation and capital flight by having the luck to be sitting atop lakes and lakes of the devil's excrement. But this is not sustainable - financially or ecologically. Any sharp drop in oil prices would immediately force a retreat from Chavez' impressive portfolio of social spending. And while Bolivia also has extensive gas reserves, they are only estimated to be worth a total of $50bn. Enough for a few years of new social provision, but not much more than that.

There is also the question of how much longer the regional hegemon will suffer these challenges to its dominance gladly. A fortnight ago, the Congress of neighbouring Paraguay, convened in secret, after midnight, and rushed through a law 'that will permit United States troops to enter this South American country for 18 months, with immunity for all personnel that participate in activities of training and advising, including civilian personnel.'

Last week, the chief U.S. diplomat, for Latin America, Roger Noriega, had a bit of a diplomatic hissy fit, screaming that the turmoil in Bolivia was the result of infiltration by Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. The U.S. is trying to paint the rebellion as a terrorist movement, or one led by narco-traffickers. The head of the U.S. Southern Command recently testified before the U.S. Congress that it Bolivia could become a narco state. The media, as ever, is doing their part, hysterically issuing horror stories of Indian socialist terrorist narco-traffickers chucking dynamite at police. The Economist, cheerleader of the McRevolutions of Eastern Europe, has reverted to cliché, describing the result in Bolivia as 'mob rule'.

One country alone cannot withstand the pressure of international capital and the American military juggernaut. The only hope is an expansion of a revolutionary socialism throughout South America. Something which, again, requires organisational co-ordination throughout the region. The term 'vanguard party' has acquired a very bad reputation over the years, and rightfully so, but no matter the numerous faults of far left parties these last decades, there is nonetheless a fundamental need for revolutionary organisation.

Goonies never say die

2005-06-15T19:10:00.000+02:00

I was going to write another windy piece about Bolivia, the waffling moderation of Evo Morales, dual power, and the unhealthy absence of revolutionary organisations on the ground, but I'm having a bad case of the I-Can't-Be-Arsed's today, so here's a little pop culture round-up instead.

Radio 1's celebrating thirty years of punk [I'm not pellucidly clear hear - help me out Justin, Darren, Kara - thirty years since Patti Smith's Horses is the anniversary we're talking about, yes?] (Interesting trivia: Hip-Hop is also thirty years old, as will I be this September) with a list of the top thirty punk tracks evah. Enragingly, but predictably, the muppets with the attention spans of tsetse flies that voted for this list have anointed Green Day's admittedly not entirely dreadful but hardly classic Basket Case as the number one. Indeed, the SoCal originators of wretched, Bambi-fied punk-pop even manage to capture this list's eighth and tenth chart positions with the M.O.R. hits American Idiot and LongView [sic] respectively as well. Even more vulgarly, The Prodigy's Firestarter (NB. Not punk) grabbed number four, and Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit (Also not punk, however great the song is) won the number five position. Some track by emo onanists Jimmy Eat World is, criminally, ahead of Stiff Little Fingers' Alternative Ulster, and the chart is absent of Siouxie and the Banshees, Sham 69, X-Ray Spex, and (!) The Jam. I could go on, but suffice it to say the whole exercise is thoroughly, sadly, typical of the output of cringeworthy pop-star felchers Zane Low and Mike Davies. Kill Zane Low Now.

Elsewhere on Radio 1, mind, Huw Stephens - one of the triptych of bright young things with which Radio 1 has replaced the late John Peel - recently did a cracking little radio documentary subtlely undermining the idea that there is any such thing as British pop, or that any one should be proud of it. A nice bit of guerilla radiophonic anti-nationalism, and there's an interesting little tidbit he has about the adoption of that semi-Jamaican patois amongst British rappers too. It's a few months old now, but I only came across it last night and you can stream it from Radio 1 right here.

Also celebrating a birthday - and I can't believe I missed this - is The Goonies, which, disturbingly, turned twenty at the beginning of the month. I remember going to see it with my mum and little brother at the Oshawa Centre Famous Players cinema when I was nine and coming out wishing there were a hidden pirate ship I could discover across the creek or under the construction site at the end of our street. It was one of my favourite films growing up, but it seems some spods have taken their fandom a little further, having organised a 20^th Anniversary jamboree in Astoria, Oregon, where it was originally filmed. TheGoonies.org has snaps of the anoraks' expedition to the Pacific Northwest and a fairly uncomfortable-looking Sean Astin. Jeff Cohen, A.K.A. Chunk - who, by the way, has lost his chunkiness (only to be rediscovered, abandoned-pirate-ship-like, by Sean Astin) and is working as a lawyer in Hollywood - however, seems to be loving it.

Across the world, considerably out-Geldoffing Chris Martin and Bono, Scottish twee merchants Belle and Sebastian have gone and visited the occupied territories in Palestine, and my friend Nick, the jammy git, went along with them. You can read all about it at Counterpunch.

I'll get to

Bolivia

tomorrow. I should think. In the meantime, check out the Run The Road grime compilation if you can. Best comp I've picked up in ages.

***

Apropos only of the Goonies comment - there aren't anywhere near enough pirate or pirate-related films, yes?

Authentic journalists

2005-06-09T00:55:00.000+02:00

I should apologise: in linking to Narco News, I failed to mention the names of a couple of the great journalists in Bolivia writing amidst these days of love and rage. Make sure you check out the superb work these brave hacks are doing: Luis Gomez and Jean Friedsky .

From Jean Friedsky's latest report:

'Here, "the revolution" is anything but a party. Dancing hippies, drum circles and four-story high puppets are notably absent from the recent mass mobilizations that have rocked Bolivia for the past two weeks. There are no breaks for concerts, no hemp clothing for sale. You are not an individual, but a part of your contingent, and from them you do not stray. In stark contrast to the large-scale demonstrations in the US that have characterized the burgeoning anti-globalization movement, marches here in Bolivia are supreme examples of discipline and seriousness. Rigidity replaces fluidity; unity replaces individualism; rash actions are rare. The marchers have anger and determination in their hearts but reign that in for the sake of the long-term struggle. Their intensity is in their expressions, chants and willpower - not in violent behavior. Sure, some bring their whips, dynamite is abundant, and I saw one man yesterday wielding a cactus. But most of the time these are symbols of strength, rather than weapons for destruction.

'It is this type of controlled persistence that enables me to write to you again today about the complete takeover of La Paz by campesinos, miners, workers and students. It was another day with over 100,000 people on the streets, demonstrating a solidarity and discipline that amazes me daily...'

A quick and dirty alternative primer on events in Bolivia

2005-06-08T19:24:00.000+02:00

'Ahhh! Riots! Blockades! Chaos! Darkies throwing dynamite! The sky is falling! The sky is falling!'

Such is, in an abbreviated fashion, more or less the narrative of the indigenous uprising in Bolivia over the past month that one reads in the New York Times or Washington Post, and even the BBC and Guardian.

The situation is indeed acute, but this world turned upside down, in which the natives, oppressed for nigh on 500 years, rise up against the IMF and their comprador gangsters in the domestic bourgeoisie to take their just share in the country's natural gas wealth, is an event to be welcomed as devoutly as I as an eight-year-old welcomed Christmas morning and the box that hopefully contained Optimus Prime or Megatron.

Beyond the expected mendacity of the newspapers of record, we should also be wary of the NGO-style analysis that seeks to distance itself from such eclatant grassroots direct action: The analysis that takes on the IMF by saying, 'Look, see, the IMF is part of a global economic system that instigates this sort of violence.'

It may be true that the depredations of structural adjustment instituted by IMF blackmail are the catalyst for this resistance, but it is only this sort of resistance that will overthrow such an economic system, and when the resistance is met with the repression of tear gas, beatings and bullets, we have the right to defend ourselves, violently if necessary. Bolivia is the poorest country in South America, with around thirty per cent of the population living on incomes of less than $1 a day. I'll not shed any tears for the hurlers of tear gas hurt by the miners hurling dynamite to defend themselves.

Timorous, middle class Nervous Nellies talk of 'restoring order' and 'preserving democracy', but it is the very protests on the street who are by their actions restoring an order, but one that is just and not exploitative, and are fighting for genuine, participatory, economic democracy, not the chimera of democracy we see in bourgeois parliaments the world over.

***

The short version of events is that the poor, working class and indigenous of Bolivia - the country's majority - angered with their natural-resource-rich country having been plundered for hundreds of years refused to see their patrimony plundered one more time. Incensed at the minimal royalties and taxes foreign companies would return to Bolivia in return for the theft of the country's considerable natural gas reserves and inspired by the transformation that Venezuela's Hugo Chavez has shown is possible if resource revenues are invested in social programmes and development, protestors have essentially shut the country down.

The social movements from across the country at first demanded companies involved in gas extraction be taxed fifty per cent. Emboldened by the experience of their own power in the streets of La Paz, and weeks of blockades and protests throughout the country (61 peasant blockades have halted the transportation of commodities throughout the country, with an estimated $5,000,000 in exports lost per day), the protestors now say taxation is not enough, and demand full nationalisation of the gas industry, with some protestors saying the government must go entirely. '¡Afuera todos!' 'Out with the lot of them!' they shout, demanding the convening of a constitutional assembly, free of neo-liberal pocketliners, to resolve these issues.

Meanwhile, there are many different organisations involved in the protests. The largest, the Movement towards Socialism (MAS), led by coca-grower and bête noire of the United States, Evo Morales, is uncomfortable with much of the extra-parliamentary activity, as he came within a whisker of winning the last presidential elections, and is sure to win those scheduled for 2007. Legalistically oriented, he does not want anything to threaten his electoral ambitions. Nonetheless, he is trapped by the rapidly advancing consciousness in the streets and cannot lose his position at the head of the movement.

Elsewhere, worried that the government will capitulate to the protestors, the wealthy, right-wing inhabitants of Santa Cruz, the region that contains many of the gas reserves, are demanding autonomy from the country.

In the last 24 hours, President Carlos Mesa, who took over from Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada after he was ousted by the same protestors in the fall of 2003, has himself resigned. According to the constitution, the President of the Senate, Hormando Vaca Diez, now assumes power. However, Vaca Diez, a Santa Cruz politician, has in recent months repeatedly demanded that Mesa 'start governing', which, as Jim Schulz, of the local Democracy Center and who maintains a very good blog of the events ongoing in Bolivia, says: 'is shorthand here for sending out the military to deal with protesters.' Forrest Hylton, writing in Counterpunch, says that there are rumours (at such times, rumours simultaneously cannot be trusted and must be trusted) of a coming 'State of Siege', and an 'attempt at a Pinochet-like beheading of the social movements'.

Alternately, there is the possibility that the government will resign en masse, prompting early elections. The Catholic Church was attempting to broker just such a deal over the weekend, according to Schulz. If this happens, although the demand for full nationalisation will not yet have been met, there is a good likelihood that this will channel resistance into electoral activity. At the same time, as Schulz says:

'The issue in the streets is not who is President; it is who controls the nation’s oil and gas, along with calls for rewriting the Constitution through a national constituent assembly. A snap election in October will be run through the same political rules that people are in the streets protesting against. I don’t see how new elections satisfies anyone.'If the voices in the street spoke to the country’s national leaders in the language of my homestate of California, the message might be, “What part of we want to take back the oil and rewrite the constitution didn’t you understand?”
'There is a saying here in Bolivia, ¡Hasta las ultimas consequencias! Literally translated it means, until the final consequences. Politically translated it means, once the people have mobilized past a certain point there is no turning back. The people who are in the streets in La Paz, who are piling up rocks by the kilometer to block roads in and out of Cochabamba, poor farmers who took over a Shell/Enron pumping station earlier today – I don’t see them backing down. Not a Presidential resignation, not a promise of new elections, not even a state of martial law will send them quietly home.'

The United States however is not abounding with jouissance at the way the tide is turning in Latin America, according to campaigning journo Al Giordano of Narco News (the very best source on the web for news on Latin America, even if Al was a bit of a Kerry-loving Democrat 'pragmatist' last summer), and, following the rebuke the gringos received at the Organization of American States meeting on the weekend attempting to impose mechanisms that would allow the O.A.S. (read: the U.S.) interfere in the affairs of other states (read: Venezuela), the Yanks are now accusing Chavez of fomenting the rebellion in Bolivia. The proof? Evo Morales had invited Chavez to Bolivia last May.

On the other hand, Julio Mamani Conde, also of Narco News has found some proof of American interference:

'Leaders of remote neighborhoods of the city of El Alto have complained that representatives of the government agency Democratic Initiatives, who work with resources from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), offered much needed equipment for their neighborhood committees’ social centers, on the condition that their committee presidents lift the general civic strike now in its 15th day.'

'According to the leaders, people working for the current administration offered some of the leaders between 200 and 500 bolivianos ($25 to $65 dollars, several weeks’ income for many El Alto families) if they would propose the suspension of the indefinite civic/labor strike.' Jim Schulz today reported that 'A very reliable source told me this afternoon that the Embassy here is in talks with Vaca Diez, helping pave the way for his succession.'

Giordano himself has his own gaggle of Bolivian Deep Throats who have let him in on what the White House would like to see happen in La Paz:

'According to well placed sources in La Paz, yesterday, prior to the resignation of Bolivia's president, heir apparent to the Bolivian throne, Congressional leader Hormando Vaca Diez, had gone to Bolivia's military brass with a plan already written for how the military will declare martial law and ruthlessly stamp out the social movements when Vaca Diez becomes president. (Who wrote that plan, Mr. Noriega?).

'But the Bolivian generals told Vaca Diez to pound sand: They said, according to our sources, that they were tired of being the villains of history, causing coup after coup, massacring their own people. (This - and perhaps copious amounts of alcohol - explains Vaca Diez's crestfallen voice during his Monday night press conference, heard around the world via Radio Erbol.)

'US Ambassador [to the O.A.S.] Roger Noriega is red-faced angry that the Bolivian military won't get to work assassinating Evo Morales, Felipe Quispe, Oscar Olivera, the entire city of El Alto, and Authentic Journalists [Giordano's crew] who are covering the story. And Noriega blames Chavez!

'Noriega blames Chavez because Chavez - a military soldier admired by many just like him across the hemisphere - has set the gold standard of how to put an Armed Forces to work on behalf of the people instead of against them.'

I think Giordano is perhaps a little too sunny about the benign impulses of the Bolivian military, but if his sources are accurate, what is more probable is that sections of the military, as has historically been common at times of peaked civil unrest, are unsure as to which side to support. This is both good news and bad news. It means that come a successful push, and the military, or proportions of it, will side with the people. However, it also means that the only thing that is holding back a Pinochet-style crushing of the revolt is indecision within the army.

Even so, the poor on the streets of La Paz and indeed across Latin America are tearing down the economic and political consensus of the last thirty years - something the United States cannot permit. Bolivia, and the rest of the continent, have not only their domestic armed forces to fear: The dreadnoughts of American Manifest Destiny have surely already set sail for the Southern Hemisphere.

***

Events will undoubtedly have unfolded subsequent to my writing this by the time you have read it. The best English-language sources on the net you'll find on the rebellion are:

- Narco News
- The Narcosphere (related to Narco News)
- Blog From Bolivia
- Indymedia Bolivia (Spanish)
- Forrest Hylton writing in Counterpunch; in particular these two articles
- Democracy Now, in particular these downloadable interviews with Jim Schulz of Blog From Bolivia and the Democracy Center

Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird, it's a plane, no...it's a blasted blogging meme.

2005-06-06T23:01:00.000+02:00

Despite my best efforts with this blog to be contemplative and sober (well, scratch that last one if you feel that the two Jamesons I've recently poured myself counterveils such a comportment), I have just been tagged in the way that bloggers are from time to time. The Bionic Octopus is attempting to proliferate a 'meme', as I believe these things are depicted, and I have been caught in her six-million-dollar tentacles.

The theme is comic books, something that were once dear to my heart, but then were not for a long time, but which have now once more found themselves to be of some assistance to me as I exploit them to (attempt to) advance my French, here in Brussels, the global capital of comics (Didn't know that? It's true).

Suped Up: The Post-Human Quiz

If you could have one superpower, what would it be and why? (Assume you also get baseline superhero enhancements like moderately increased strength, endurance and agility.)

As much as flight or invisibility or being able to fart nuclear fireballs would be pretty neat-o, I reckon mind control has to be the sweetest superpower. I would with my supersonic mentalism instantly wash away all the timidity, disillusionment and apathy within the working class.

Which, if any, 'existing' superhero(es) do you fancy, and why?

I haven't read the X-men for years, so I don't know if she's still 'existing', but when I was around eleven or twelve I remember being decidedly stirred, in the way that twelve-year-old boys tend to be stirred, by the way that John Byrne drew Rogue in the eighties. Make that Storm and her Tina-Turner-out-of-Mad-Max-Beyond-Thunderdome haircut as well. Oh, and now that I think about it, Havoc, too.

Which, if any, 'existing' superhero(es) do you hate?

All of them. They're superheroes, right? So powerful they could battle Galactus, the Swallower of Worlds, yeah? But they couldn't take on pantywaist slapheads John Negroponte and Otto Reich, Swallowers of Central American Countries That Dared to Elect Progressive Governments? (I'm still stuck in this eighties time-warp, here) Well, what use are they, then?

The conception of or need for superheroes thus can only be an expression of the fascist impulse: A pessimistic rejection of the possibility our own collective power as an international working class to 'put things right'. Ahem.

OK, here's the tough one. What would your superhero name be? (No prefab porn-name formulas here, you have to make up the name you think you'd be proud to mask under.)

Okay, you're all gonna kill me for the fromage factor here, but, how about The Worker!

For extra credit: Is there an 'existing' superhero with whom you identify/whom you would like to be?

Well, that's easy. I always wanted to be Tintin, also of Brussels. You say he is not a superhero? Pshaw. He has the plainly superhuman ability to be employed by a broadsheet as a foreign correspondent before the age of thirty.

I guess in a way I am living the Tintin life I wanted: I'm overseas and attempting to make a living as a journalist. It's not a bad life, really, although I do wish I could afford a place with plumbing that worked. A talking dog would come in handy too.

Oh, and by the way, I'm totally down with Magneto, who's supposedly a supervillain. But he's like the Malcolm X or Stokely Carmichael of mutants, to dripping daisy Professor X's Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Bit of a pussy. If the humans are oppressing the mutants, surely they have the right to fight back - By Any Means Necessary.

Up the Brotherhood of Mutants!

Pass it on. Three people please, and why they're the wind beneath your wings.

Erm, Darren of Inveresk Street Ingrate - because while he may be an impossiblist member of the SPGB, he's got cracking taste in music; Doug, of If There Is Hope - because most Canadian leftie bloggers are NDP wets, but he ain't; and John of Counago & Spaves - because there are almost no anarchist bloggers, and, dammit, there should be.

Update: It seems somebody else is hot for Rogue.

Emergency action to stop Vlaams Belang broadcast from Dorset

2005-06-04T14:51:00.000+02:00

My friend Justin has alerted me to the rather disconcerting news that the Vlaams Belang - the renamed Vlaams Blok - the far-right Flemish nationalists and, sadly, the most popular party in Flanders - are due to transmit the first broadcast of their radio programme, ZwartofVit (Black or White) tomorrow. Domestic broadcasters have been sensibly wary of offering these fascist scum airtime, as have their German counterparts when the Vlaams Belang tried to broadcast from Germany instead. U.K. broadcasters have not been so squeamish, reports my amigo:

'According to the Media Network Weblog, the Vlaams Belang broadcast is set to be transmitted this Sunday from Rampisham, Dorset, a site owned by the VT Group's VT Communications division.'

First of all, if you're reading this from the U.K., while there isn't much time to stop these vermin from going ahead with the distribution of their propaganda, as the show is set to go out tomorrow, please call, fax and e-mail the VT Group to demand they halt the broadcast:

Tel: (023) 8083 9001
Fax: (023) 8083 9002
E-mail: vtgroup@vtplc.com

Or, call the VT Communications subsidiary directly:

Tel: (0)20 7969 0000
Fax: (0)20 7396 6223

Also, please make sure you complain to Ofcom, the communications regulator:

contact@ofcom.org.uk

Ofcom contact centre numbers: 020 7981 3040 or 0845 456 3000

Fax: 0845 456 3333

Main Ofcom switchboard: 020 7981 3000

Main Ofcom Fax: 020 7981 3333

And, of course, if you're in or near Rampisham, you might actually want to pay them a visit, anti-Nazi placards in hand, should you have any lying around: The transmitter site itself is owned by a VT Communications division, Merlin Communications and is located alongside the A356.

Update: Obviously, most of the numbers above will only offer you voicemail, as it's the weekend. Still, leave a message. Even if nobody reacts to them in time, at least if there is a number of complaints, perhaps the company will be more reluctant in the future to broadcast Vlaams Belang programmes.

Luxembourg PM a big girl's blouse

2005-06-03T12:37:00.000+02:00

From the Guardian:

'Jean-Claude Juncker, the Luxembourg prime minister who holds the rotating EU presidency and who was said to have been on the verge of tears when he heard news of the Dutch vote, summoned Gerhard Schröder for emergency talks.'

Oh boo fucking hoo.

Are you on the verge of tears when you hear of a profitable company closed down, its assets stripped and thousands of workers thrown on the scrap heap so some rich vampiric little sociopath can now afford to make another ultimately failed attempt to circumnavigate Neptune in a caviar-encrusted hot-air balloon designed by the Japanese Space Agency? When you hear of hospitals and schools being shut down or privatised, do you well up like a maudlin singleton listening to Dido after a bottle and a half of ropey chardonnay? When you heard that French (and Canadian) troops have presided over a U.S.-backed coup in Haiti, throwing the country into fucked-up chaos, with dozens massacred, did you sob quietly at your desk like you did after the other boys pulled your pants down in the changing room in some Luxembourgeois lycée forty years ago? Each time you hear the youth unemployment figures in eastern Germany, can you taste the salty tears on your lips as you make your nose red wiping it with a rough Kleenex? When you gaze at the crowded, washing-line-entwined tower blocks that line the road from the Barcelona airport or smell urine in the corner as you walk past a London council estate, or read the neo-Nazi graffiti daubed on the door of a Rostok refugee apartment complex, do you weep, do you lament, do you howl?

No? Well fuck you. Fuck you.

Nee! to the 'capitalist locusts'

2005-06-02T01:08:00.000+02:00

Dutch voters have rejected the ECT even more emphatically than the French - 63 per cent against on a 62 per cent turnout, according to an exit poll projection broadcast by NOS television.

Anyone got a fork? This turkey is done.

***

Salvaging what they can from the French referendum, the blinkered inhabitants of Planet Mandelson - where they breathe not oxygen but unfiltered, vanilla-scented and compressed neo-liberalism sponsored by Evian - are trumpeting the fact that while it may be true that all but nine départements in the country voted Non, urbaine, cosmopolitaine, educated Paris voted Oui! Ah hah!

Demographic maps have appeared in Libération shading the various regions according to the strength of the Oui or Non votes that, I think, are intended to echo those fearsomely-red-with-a-few-tiny-blue-speckly-bits maps that appeared shortly after the U.S. presidential election last November showing the progressive metropolitan archipelago amid the sea of red-state Bush voters.

This is an oversimplification (as indeed was the U.S. Democrat hipster-vs-bumpkin analysis, but for different reasons) that only elites consciously untethered to reality can produce. It may be true that (wealthy) centre/centre-west Paris strongly voted Oui - 66 per cent in favour. But Paris has not been the city of starving artists and budding Hemingways for decades. It is increasingly a city of the haute bourgeoisie. Nonetheless, Paris' impoverished banlieue - suburbs - emphatically voted against the ECT. In the north-east, in Seine-Saint-Denis, a traditionally working class region, the Non gained a clear 61.52 per cent. Further, in the rest of France - and let's just remind ourselves quickly that while it may be the capital of the world, Paris is not France - two thirds of salaried workers voted Non and three quarters of waged workers voted Non. Low-wage workers overwhelmingly voted Non. Young people overwhelmingly voted Non. Single parents overwhelmingly voted Non. The unemployed overwhelmingly voted Non. Unemployed women overwhelmingly voted Non. The majority of Socialist Party members and supporters voted Non. In fact, the sole sector of society where there was a majority in favour of this door-stopper of a constitution was the elderly, and even this can be rapidly dispatched in any case: They are, of course, the war generation, and their commitment to peace in Europe - between France and Germany - displaces all other considerations; whatever a constitution's problems, nothing can be as bad as war. Understandable, I reckon. Still, even amongst the blue rinse brigade it was close.

It is these elites - both main parties, all the major newspapers, business and trade union leaders all called for a Oui vote - in France and abroad, who are the ones who are living on another planet. Where the discontent comes from is manifest. It is as plain as kedgeree (Ever had kedgeree? Very plain. Very bland. I would eat it despite the peas because I was the good child. My little brother, nose be-wrinkled, steadfastly refused the Scottish breakfast our family would on sadistic occasion have for supper) But they cannot see it. They dismiss it as reactionary nonsense. The response of uneducated hicks.

Across Europe, neo-liberal ideology is in crisis. The west of the continent - in particular France and Italy - are wracked with militant strikes that often go on to victory while large-scale demonstrations quotidiennement fill the piazzas and boulevards. Berlusconi's right-wing coalition collapsed following the victory of the left (and considerable advances by the PRC [admittedly in coalition with the neo-liberal left]) in the recent regional elections. No one doubts he will lose next year's general election. It is only a question of by how much.

The struggle has not reached such a fever pitch in the UK, but New Labour is uniformly reviled. Those who do vote Labour, for the most part, do not do so out of strong conviction, as they have no love of PFI or war either, but out of the belief that there is no viable alternative. Meanwhile, the left of the left - Respect, the Scottish Socialists and the Greens to some extent - are on the move.

Spain has calmed down, but only after a leftish social democrat - who was only ever intended by Partido Socialista grandees to be a place holder while they got their act together to find a suitable candidate for the following elections they thought they could win - was swept into office by a volcanic eruption of anger at Aznar's exploitation of the Atocha Station bombing in which 191 people were killed.

The German elite too, are shaken. Three years ago, the unpopular SPD Chancellor and Teutonic proponent of the Third Way, Gerhard Schröder, pulled an electoral rabbit out of the hat by opposing Bush's war on Iraq. As unemployment bites and a entire generation wonders aloud if they will ever achieve the middle class life of their parents, all that Herr Schröder offers is more structural adjustment. Desperate to at least win the regional elections in the country's most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia, traditionally an SPD stronghold, the party attempts three weeks ago a repeat performance of this trick: The chairman of the SPD, Franz Müntefering, accuses international investors of being 'capitalist locusts' who chew up companies and spit them out again.

'I am criticising all those who think they can pick whatever they need out of any company,' Müntefering said. 'And they do it without thinking about the employees and all the people who are affected by their decisions.'

What is notable here is that, while there was never any question that the SPD is not committed to neo-liberalism, and that they too, like their brethren in the Commission and amongst French elites, dismiss the left of the left as economic luddites, they KNOW that anti-capitalist rhetoric is popular. As indeed it proved. Müntefering's words opened up a grand debate throughout the country on not merely neo-liberalism or labour market 'reform' or globalisation, but capitalism itself, by God. The antikapitalismus debate exploded across the German media, with the usual suspects foreign and domestic - the Economist, the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal - as aghast as a pursed-lipped spinster at Müntefering's fart in church.

Some fifteen years after the pronounced 'End of History', anti-capitalism is not merely not dismissed out of hand but is used as a ploy of a decadent social democratic party desperate to cling onto power. Socialism, red in tooth and claw - as Tommy Sheridan didn't say first - is back, baby.

Although Müntefering's gambit did shore up some of their traditional supporters, the Social Democrats went down to defeat in the state for the first time in 39 years.

Now, voters are sometimes not a terribly rational lot. They regularly vote for conservatives because they are fed up with social democrats who sell them out - as if conservatives would be any better. And indeed, Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats are certain to win the general election, brought forward to this autumn by the despondent Schröder in a bit of a last-ditch gamble. Not five years ago, remember, 12 out of the then 15 European governments were headed by social democratic parties, in what was comprehensively viewed as a reaction to the monetarist governments of the eighties and nineties. Electorates were disappointed, but they have not all uniformly moved further leftward. And elsewhere, the far right is as capable as the left of making hay of the current economic malaise.

However, interestingly, just as when liberals talk about getting tough on immigration it is Tories who benefit, and when Tories talk tough on immigration, it is the BNP that benefits - why vote for the imitation, when you can vote for the Real Thing? - similarly, why vote for Social Democrats playing at anti-capitalism when you can vote for genuine anti-capitalists? And so it proved in North Rhine-Westphalia. Die Wahlalternative - Arbeit & Soziale Gerechtigkeit (WASG) - the new German far left regroupment project, bringing together the far left and left-wing ('Old Labour'-type) social democrats on the model of the SSP, the Left Bloc and the (remaining) Socialist Alliances around the world - had not formed but weeks before the election. They campaigned, but only as much as any political party that is a only handful of fortnights old can campaign, but yet, with neither time nor money on their side, they won an average of 2.2 per cent of the vote.

Further, in the wake of the state elections, Oskar Lafontaine, the popular SPD left-winger who resigned as finance minister and quit Schröder's government in 1999, disappointed at the rightward trajectory of his party, has called on the new WASG to run on a joint ticket with the PDS, the former communists, refounded as left-ish social democrats (who, nonetheless, when in coalition with the SPD on the Berlin city council, are as committed as any Blairite to privatisation and cutbacks), and said if such a pact were achieved, he would join them to run against Schröder.

The key for us within the next ten years is to link up across the nations of Europe on the electoral level. A common party or alliance for European Parliament elections, is of course necessary - and we have this already to a very, very limited extent in the European United Left/Nordic Green Left (GUE/NGL) - but a common electoral formation that fights elections as the same party across borders, with the same platform - tailored to local conditions, natch - should be the ultimate goal.

Capital is mobile, so should we be.

***

Meanwhile, across the world, in the landlocked little country of Bolivia, the locals are having what, and I my eyes may yet be deceiving me, looks remarkably like a socialist revolution. But more on that mañana…

N.B. I've been following the French referendum for some time in the French press, and, of course, it's unavoidable in the conversation here in Brussels, but I'm afraid I can only just about order a beer and ask for directions to the toilets in Dutch, so if people have details on the nature of the Nee vote in the Netherlands, I would appreciate the analysis or links (Martin? Any ideas? Also - why did Groen Links back the constitution?)

On to the Netherlands

2005-05-30T01:23:00.000+02:00

On a gagné! On a gagné! 56% against, according to interior ministry figures.

Tremendous result, but, as I'm sure you're all hearing, the cretins of the Oui side are already saying that this is not the end of the Constitution, but that we must wait for others in Europe to make their pronouncements and that so long as 20 out of the 25 countries pass it, the Constitution is still viable. The bloody liars. These same chicken littles not 24 hours ago said that it was the end of Europe if France voted no.

The sun will still rise tomorrow, and well they know it.

Pour l'Europe, votez Non à leur constitution!

2005-05-28T20:54:00.000+02:00

There is an insufferable smugness with which the liberal (in the Anglophone sense of the word) encouragers of a Oui vote in France's referendum on the European Constitutional Treaty tomorrow present their argument.

In almost every Guardian article on the subject from the last month, the requisite description of what is being put to the vote includes the words 'designed to make the European Union more efficient and democratic' - presented within news articles as fact, not within editorials as the (gullible) opinion these words are. How could anyone, they reckon, other than facho Lepenistes and dippy Neanderthal Euro-refuseniks vote anything other than Oui? Jon Henley, the Guardian's gauchephobic France correspondent (or, more accurately, the Grauniad's sentimentalist in-house purveyor of Year-in-Provence-esque cliché) wrote last week that 'half the French population is living on another planet.' (Actually, as of yesterday, the polls suggest le Non, il s'insurge: 55 per cent against)

However, I wonder whether these liberal Ouistes have actually themselves read the very document they champion. Today's leader on the referendum in the same paper calling for a Yes, contains this howler:

'[T]he constitution does not warrant the opposition it has generated. For all the anger about liberal Anglo-Saxon economics, the text does not include economic prescriptions that are any different from those in the Treaty of Rome in 1957'

Just quickly, here are a handful of the key examples (which I already discussed in an earlier post) of how the ECT remains not merely neo-liberal through and through, but is additionally aggressively militarist, (incidentally undermining the traditions of neutrality of Ireland and Austria):

1. Articles 111-69, 70, 77, 144 and 180 all identically repeat that the Union will act 'in conformity with the respect for the principles of an open economic market where competition is free.'
2. There are numerous clauses that specifically correspond to demands made by certain employer organisations.
3. The ECT demands unanimous voting for any measures that might go against corporate interests. This is the certainly case for measures against tax fraud, or taxation of companies. Such legislative movement in this regard requires a unanimous vote as, above all, "[it is] necessary for the functioning of the internal market and to avoid distortion of competition." (111-63). Thus, any future proposed duty imposed on corporations would be subject to unanimous voting - something the Ouistes regularly trot out as being reduced under the ECT.
4. Shockingly, the ECT demands all states' subservience to NATO: '[M]ember states shall undertake progressively to improve their military capacities.' (1-40-3). Article 1-40-2 says that European defence policy shall be compatible with members' NATO obligations, a direct recognition of the superior judicial status of that military organisation. Furthermore, the article continues with even greater precision that "participating member states shall work in close collaboration with NATO". Even in situations of "internal serious disturbances affecting public order, in cases of war or of [...] the threat of war", member states are obliged to work together in order to avoid "affecting" the functioning of the "internal market"! (III-16)'
5. Perhaps most disturbing in the ECT is clause 17 of the third section, regarding the question of the break-up of public services: It is permitted that a member state can be in favour of maintaining a public service. But public services have: "the effect of distorting the conditions of competition in the internal market, [and] the Commission shall, together with the state concerned, examine how these steps can be adjusted to the rules laid dawn in the Constitution. By derogation of common law procedure, the Commission or any member state can apply directly to the Court of Justice which will sit in secret..." (III-17)' Thus the constitution from the start commits member states to the ultimate elimination of public services.

I find it remarkable that the Guardian leader writers are not aware that the ECT explicitly codifies the dismantling of social services and expansion of European military capablilities.

But let's take the latter two elements and invert them leftwards, just to expose how retrograde this project truly is: Imagine if instead there were a document - a constitution no less, the founding document of a (in this case quasi-)state - that included words something along the following lines:

'Markets have the effect of ever greater inequality, impoverishment and environmental destruction, and so the Commission shall, together with the state concerned, examine how steps can be taken to minimize the impact of markets on society, steadily taking into public ownership under workers' control initially the commanding heights of industry, but in the shorter or longer term every aspect of the economy, in accordance with the rules laid dawn in the Constitution. By derogation of the inalienable rights of humanity, the Commission or any member state can apply directly in this regard to the Court of Justice, which will be directly elected and instantly recallable and which will sit openly...'

or how about:

'Member states shall undertake progressively to eliminate their military capacities. European peace policy shall aim at ending the use of the force of arms between nations or within nations for evermore, and will work in conscious opposition to all forms of imperialism, colonialism and state terror, with particular emphasis and close collaboration by member states on undermining the American hegemon.'

Now, I'd happily vote for something like that, but I'd hardly be capable of convincing anyone that such a document was politically neutral. The above is merely the progressive inverse of what is written in the proposed ECT. Would anyone be under any illusion whatever that such a document was anything but a socialist programme? It is a mystery to me why anyone remains under the illusion that the ECT as it stands is anything but a neo-liberal programme.

At least in France, the Oui de gauche forces readily and defensively admit that the document is flawed. Even Chirac has recently been admitting its flaws, and regularly. The sole remaining card supporters of the ECT in France can play is that 'at least it's a start, and after a Yes vote, we can fix it.' This is the pitiable defence the Oui side has been reduced to, the Non forces have been so effective.

But even this is false. To change this constitution after it is approved will be even more difficult to change than the U.S. Constitution, which, for thirty-odd years has been unable to be amended to include even the simple provision that women are equal to men (the failed E.R.A.).

Let's also dispel the myth that the Non vote is a xenophobic vote against Turkey joining the Union or is rooted in some Gallic chauvinism - or even that the referendum will be decided by Front National voters. All of the Non campaigners, barring the Front National, have been explicitly clear that they are pro-European and for this very reason they must vote no.

According to Pascal Perrineau, a political scientist and the director of the Centre d'etudes de la vie politique française (Cevipof), interviewed in Thursday's Libération,

'Front National electors will contribute decisively to the Non side's victory [behind the traditional supporters of the Parti Socialiste(PS)]…the Lepeniste electorate is, of all the various parties' supporters, situated the most in the Non camp, with some 90 per cent of them against, according to a TNS-Sofres poll. Their vote will be massive, as it was in 1992 against the Maastricht Treaty…The electorate of the far right is the second biggest section of the Non voters, after those who traditionally vote Socialist, but ahead of Communist Party supporters and of the far left. No majority for the Non is possible without the FN.'

Tout d'abord, to counter M. Perrineau's Ouiste thesis, the PS electorate is much, much larger than that of the FN. It is the left of the PS that has won this one (assuming the Non is successful) - overwhelmingly so. What sort of math attributes primary importance to the secondary contributing factor? Secondly, the FN has been running a very low-key Non campaign, as the party itself admits, with the Great Leader having been recovering from hip surgery since March. Thirdly, to the extent that the FN vote is voting Non, we have to recognise that, as with much of the rest of the support for the far right throughout Europe, FN supporters for the most part come from economically depressed regions. The largest support for the FN outside traditionally conservative Alsace is the deindustrialised north, which historically voted not merely Socialist, but Communist. There is no reason to assume that the FN electorate's vote is a xenophobic vote and not a vote against factory closures, precarity, unemployment, delocalisation and the rest of the nasty secondary diseases that one contracts after a major infection of neo-liberalism.

Admittedly, we shouldn't be Pollyanna-ish about this - it may well be a mixture of the two amongst FN voters in many cases - but the sort of aggressive, genuinely anti-neo-liberal campaign that the Non team have been carrying out, and hasn't been seen on the national stage in France outside the far left since 1981, is exactly the sort of work that needs to be done (across the board, not just in France) to wean these working class voters from the far right. It is in the absence of credible left alternatives to neo-liberalism that far right politics flourish.

It is heartening to hear reports that the various forces (left Socialists, left Greens, SUD, the CGT, the LCR, and other far left groups) have been so galvanised by the success of their campaign and, recognising that they represent a majority of the French, but a majority that regularly goes unrepresented by the gauche plurielle, that there are discussions currently taking place about continuing to work together after the referndum to fight neo-liberalism in its other forms.

Already, Chirac has said that job number one after the referendum is a major initiative to combat youth unemployment. Now, whether anything of any substance results from such words or they turn out to be, comme d'habitude, just words is immaterial. Chirac, along with the rest of the forces of neo-liberalism in Europe - including the full spectrum of establishment left parties, union bureaucracies, and centre-left media outlets - have been put on the back foot, however France votes tomorrow. Oui ou Non, nous avons deja gagné.

Votez Non.

What do you do with a scab?

2005-05-23T16:55:00.000+02:00

Picket, picket, picket.

The French referendum, Uzbekistan and David Cross on Pitchfork

2005-05-20T13:52:00.000+02:00

I am increasingly impressed with Jonathan Steele, the Guardian's senior foreign correspondent and former SNCC activist. Last weekend at this 'Wave of Resistance' meeting in Amsterdam, he saw off a roomful of potentially hostile Slavic Yankophiles and managed, I think, to win over a good number of them. His analysis is consistently acute, with, again, today, a sober, Europhile, deconstruction of the supposed 'catastrophe' that is scheduled to befall Europe should the Frenchies listen to their heart and their brain and vote 'No' to the Banker's Charter that is elsewhere described as the European Constitutional Treaty.

'A cross-section of leftwingers were on display, from dissident Socialist party activists (a majority of members voted yes in an internal party referendum last year) to communists, Trotskyists and Attac, the anti-globalisation youth movement. The National Front is also voting no, but the left is keen to show it has nothing in common with the Front's xenophobic nationalism.'

Given that the almost the entire spectrum of the French establishment, barring the Socialist Party's Laurent Fabius, who has his own leadership ambitions that more reliably explain his opposition to the ECT, it warms the soles of my cockles to see how much influence a few commie rabble-rousers can have when they get their act together.

'"A no vote will be a thunderclap around Europe, provoking a real debate among people instead of discussions among heads of government." Tony Blair was the bogeyman, getting far more mentions than George Bush. "Look what's happened in the UK," said a shop steward [concerned that the ECT will turn Europe into Britain]. "There's a centre, a centre right, an extreme right, and no left at all."'

Ahem. I get your point, mate, but steady on.

Steele concludes: '[A] pause for reflection on how to produce a short, clear and eloquent constitution, not dominated by a particular economic ideology, will do no harm.'

Quite. Perhaps we might even be able to have a crack at the anti-democratic structures (appointed Commission with absolute power; elected Parliament, like a latter-day, be-Blackberried Estates-General, with nowt but a begrudgingly conceded advisory function) at the heart of the E.U.

Ahmed Rashid, whose book on the Taliban was required reading three years ago, has an article in Transitions Online, reprinted from Eurasianet, fleshing out some of the details of what is going on in Uzbekistan. It doesn't make for pleasant reading, as no matter what happens, there are no democrats waiting in the wings to take over, should Karimov fall (or die - according to Rashid, Karimov is seriously ill).

'Western policies have ensured that even if Karimov were toppled in an internal power struggle, his replacement would only be another dictator. The chances of a democratic movement emerging in Uzbekistan are highly unlikely. Armed struggle, even if waged by democrats in the Ferghana Valley, is unlikely to stay democratic very long.'

The extreme repression against democrats and progressives has, in an identical pattern to what happened across the Middle East, resulted in the growth of Islamic resistance - the only viable outlet through which discontent can manifest itself.

Interestingly, Rashid also notes that when Karimov, petrified of a domestic people power revolution on the Georgian model, cracked down on N.G.O.s, in particular George Soros' Open Society Institute, the U.S. and U.K. said nothing. This suggests that, far from being any co-ordinated effort on the part of the American government, its 'democracy promotion' is as haphazard an affair as any other government programme. (Remember, of course, that one of the reasons the U.S.-backed coup against Hugo Chavez fell apart so quickly was that the State Department and C.I.A. were backing two separate groups of coup-plotters, who never thought to call each other ahead of everything kicking off) Furthermore, the Open Society Institute is more of a freelance democracy promotion outfit, with only tenuous links to the U.S. government, whose patron is also engaged in promoting regime change in the U.S. itself, so I'm sure the Spooks-in-chief aren't terribly bothered if George Soros' employees get a couple of fingernails ripped out or electrified alligator clips attached to their gonads.

Elsewhere, Meaders puts all the American Gallowaymania on the Democratic Underground discussion boards, on Air America and elsewhere in perspective, while Ellis, at the Sharp Side, has a great piece on what sounds like a rather dreadful potboiler of a flick set in the occupied territories:

'What would we think of Alfred Hitchcock if he’d gone off to the Third Reich and made a thriller in which the bad guys were Jews, the Gestapo were represented as a neutral law and order organisation and Hitler’s Germany was presented as a pleasant everyday sort of place? Or if Michael Caine had starred in a thriller made in apartheid South Africa, where the bad guys were vicious, evil members of the African National Congress and the good guys were brave white cops?

'Questions like this obviously don’t trouble some members of the acting profession or some professional musicians. The fact that they don’t is perhaps in part a tribute to the effectiveness with which the Israeli state has muffled awareness of its origins and history, its victims, and its fundamental sectarianism.'

And then, over in Indieland, David Cross, everyone's favourite commie comic, has ripped the pretentiously overwrought writers at Pitchforkmedia a new asshole, and K-Punk simultaneously bitch-slaps the Amys and Jemimas of the C86 Forever brigade (or, rather, knitting circle) and homes in on the Bryan-Ferryite anomie at the navel of hip-hop:

'It strikes me that what is wrong with pop culture now is the poverty of its concepts of what success can be. Whereas this lo-fi culture has no concept of failure (middle-class kids who had piano lessons from the age of 4 pretending that they can only just about manage to blow into a kazoo just about covers it, I reckon), hip-hop's Darwinian brutality is conditioned by a model of success that comes ready-made by Kapital. (It occurs to me that what hip-hop needs is an immanent critique of those aspirations, which would function in the same way that punk operated in relation to glam. Mooching about in the existential desolation of their mansions on MTV cribs, who do today's hip-hoppers resemble if not the Ferry of the 70s, trapped by the trappings of a success that, achieved too quickly, became a prison of conspicuous consumption?)'

Um, and A.C. Newman, Patrick Wolf, Dungen and Mattafix are in heavy rotation on the Apostate Windbag stereo.

A tout à l'heure.

Laughland is on crack.

2005-05-19T22:54:00.000+02:00

To me it is self-evident that one did not have to support Saddam Hussein in order to oppose the war - however much the pro-slaughter left likes to confuse the two positions. Similarly, one does not have to be a supporter of the congregation of Eastern European despots and their 'managed democracies' in order to raise concerns about the Americans' activities behind the scenes of the resistance groups.

However, intermittent Guardian contributor and Putin-cheerleader John Laughland seems to believe the contrary.

His latest exercise in false logic sees him warming up to Uzbekistan's Islam 'Boil-in-a-bag' Karimov and reminding us all that the 'alleged massacre' in Andijan is yet to be proved. His reasoning for this? That there have in the past been examples of massacres that turned out not to have been quite so bad.

'Other alleged massacres in the recent past have also turned out not to have been what had been claimed… [T]here has been too little scepticism about reports from Uzbekistan, which seem to be following a well-worn propaganda formula.'

While the UK canned its ambassador to the country for speaking out against the Uzbek president's various abuses, Laughland seems to think this was all some sort of slick ruse to hide the fact that the US and UK are actually the puppet-masters controlling the Uzbek opposition.

If Laughland thinks the Western media has been too quick to take the word of the opposition, he himself certainly hasn't delayed much in taking Karimov at his word and repeating the accusation that the opposition are violent Islamists.

At the same time, because there is the same network of U.S.-backed N.G.O.s operating in Uzbekistan as have been operating in Ukraine, Georgia, Belarus and Yugoslavia, he deduces that they must be orchestrating the opposition manoeuvres.

However, the only two examples of these N.G.O.s he can find in Uzbeistan are Freedom House and the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, which he says is 'is overwhelmingly funded by western governments and private foundations close to them'.

And how is it that the States, ostensibly in a war against Islamists, in Uzbekistan back them against the man who has provided them with a handy-dandy air base from which to attack Afghanistan? Ah - see, the U.S. has backed Islamists before, in Afghanistan against the Soviets, and Osama bin Laden was on the C.I.A. payroll once upon a time. All of which is true, but Laughland offers no proof that the U.S. in fact is supporting the Uzbek Islamists - or even that they are Islamists.

The man has it comprehensively bass-ackwards. Craig Murray, the former ambassador to the country was rendered jobless for his discommodious mentions of the allergic reaction Karimov has to democracy and human rights. It is Karimov's very abuses that puts the lie to Bush and Blair's commitment to the 'untamed flame of democracy alight in people's hearts around the world' and other associated codswallop.

Further, if one has in fact been reading the American press, one would see that the Yanks have decidedly taken Karimov's side in all this, calling for 'calm on both sides' - as if 700 dead people could be any calmer - and repeating the accusation that the opposition are Islamists. White House press secretary Scott McLellan warned that there were 'Islamic terrorists' among the Andijan dead and scolded that the opposition should seek peaceful means to achieve change in the country and renounce violence.

Laughably, Laughland's position is nearly identical to that offered by the U.S. he supposedly opposes.

Murray himself, writing in the Guardian, encourages us to read a U.N. report and a Human Rights Watch report that detail the systemic nature of torture in Uzbekistan.

'One of the uses of Uzbek torture is to provide the CIA and MI6 with "intelligence" material linking the Uzbek opposition with Islamist terrorism and al-Qaida. The information is almost entirely bogus, and it was my efforts to stop MI6 using it that led ultimately to my effective dismissal from the Foreign Office.'

Then we have Jonathan Freedland, writing in the same publication, noting that Karimov may be a sonofabitch, but he is at least our 'sonofabitch':

'Shortly after 9/11, he allowed the US to locate an airbase at Khanabad - a helpful contribution to the upcoming war against Afghanistan. Since then he has been happy to act as a reliable protector of central Asian oil and gas supplies, much coveted by a US eager to reduce its reliance on the Gulf states. And he has gladly let Uzbekistan be used for what is euphemistically known as "rendition", the practice of exporting terror suspects to countries less squeamish about torture than Britain or the US.'

Karimov is a vital American interest in the region, and that is why, despite the presence of Freedom House in Tashkent, there will be no people power revolution on the Georgian or Ukrainian model - or not if the Yanks can help it.

Laughland is on crack. He seems to genuinely and unapologetically take the side of Stalinoid and proto-fascist despots. What his background is, I don't know, but it is a mystery to me why the Guardian publishes his odd, odd, unhelpful essays.

Galloway vs. Hitchens, U.S. Senate

2005-05-19T00:43:00.000+02:00

Y'all know I'm not a fan of Galloway nor of bourgeois parliaments, but you know, I have to say, there really is something to be said for the rhetorical training to be gleaned from parliamentary cut and thrust that just doesn't exist in the American political system.

Go on, my son. Go ooooon!