Friday, February 28, 2014

Deterring humanity and charity

 An anti-migrant  deterrence campaign is the idea that "pull factors" can be diminished by making destination states look extremely uninviting, through a combination of marketing, or "deterrence propaganda" and policies such as indefinite detention and offshore processing. This deterrence philosophy is becoming an integral part of global migration management, and Australia is leading the way.

Department for Immigration and Border Protection has released a graphic novel aimed at people from Afghanistan convincing them not to travel to Australia by boat to seek asylum. This piece of "deterrence propaganda" depicts a young man in Afghanistan becoming fed up with his gruelling  - but essentially -  safe life as a car mechanic. With thoughts of greener pastures, he decides to make the dangerous journey towards Australia, overland and over sea, only to be intercepted by the intimidating Australian navy and herded to a camp on the small island nation of Nauru. It ends with images of the weeping man thinking wistfully of home, depressed and trapped in detention. The moral of the story is, don't come to Australia, especially by boat.  But what would the moral of the story be if the protagonist was not a slightly overworked mechanic, but a person fleeing torture or death?

Or to quote the slogan that accompanies Australia's wider deterrence campaign: "No way: They will not make Australia home". This add features a crossed out picture of Australia and an image of a boat on a rough sea. Australia's previous Labor government ran similar adds with the slogan "Australia by boat? No advantage".

Just as the graphic novel conveniently ignores potential persecution and violence in Afghanistan, the very logic of deterrence fails to acknowledge that many people attempting to reach Australia by boat are refugees fleeing real and serious human rights violations and endemic insecurity. In circumstances where people are fleeing the threat of torture or death, deterrence is a policy of coaxing people to stay put and face these risks. If we accept this, then the prospect of managing "pull factors" becomes ethically and practically untenable. As noted by Australian human rights lawyer Julian Burnside:
"The problem with a deterrent theory is that a deterrent only works if we make ourselves look nastier than the Taliban or the Rajapaksa government, and I'm not sure that that's something that most Australians want. … The major deterrent for people seeking asylum here by boat is that it's very dangerous. The fact that people can and do die on their way here is one of the reasons that most of the people that get here by boat turn out to be, on assessment, actual refugees."

The need to deter people from travelling to Australia by boat is publicly justified on four key grounds. Firstly, to protect national security: Here, so-called "illegal boats" and the people on them are breaching Australia's borders. The various activities implemented to prevent asylum seekers reaching Australia by boat are combined under the official name Operation Sovereign Borders for example, and are led by the navy.

Secondly, as a matter of fairness: The rationale being that people coming by boat may take the place of someone waiting patiently in a refugee camp, thus qualifying their characterisation as "queue jumpers". This perception has receded from official discourse in recent years, but still plays a role in shaping popular sentiment.

Thirdly, deterrence is presented as a necessary means to undermine the criminal network of people smugglers working in Indonesia and Malaysia who capitalise off desperation by organising unsafe passage to Australia by boat.

And finally, it is justified on humanitarian grounds, whereby the very real tragedy of people dying at sea is invoked to justify any policy that might prevent this from happening.

The first two grounds are clearly dubious. The Australian government merged its onshore and offshore protection visa quotas in 1996, meaning that every onshore protection visa does take the spot of one offshore protection visa: If there is a queue, it has been constructed on a technicality.Even so, the resettlement of refugees from camps overseas is not based on how long an individual has been waiting, but rather an array of factors such as vulnerability and suitability. As for national security, asylum seekers are subjected to rigorous security checks, and the boats themselves are fairly harmless.

The issue of people smugglers and people dying at sea are real however. People smugglers do capitalise off desperation and organise dangerous passage to Australia, in a journey where many lives are put at risk. However, policies that include towing people in life boats to Indonesia, processing and resettling people in Papua New Guinea, and indefinite detention in conditions criticised by Amnesty International as amounting to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, and the UNHCR as arbitrary under international law, are at odds with the publicly stated goal of saving lives and fighting crime.

Australia's brash and deterrence-based response to deaths at sea is not unique. After the Lampedusa boat sinking, the EU rapidly responded with deterrence and prevention strategies, leading Human Rights Watch to lament "the overall focus is on preventing people from reaching Europe, rather than on saving lives".

As countless experts have pointed out, the best way to prevent people taking dangerous journeys by sea is to provide viable alternative options for people to seek asylum.

From Al Jazeera

Myanmar's Anti-Rohingya Campaign Continues

Myanmar's president has asked parliament to consider an intermarriage law, spearheaded by an extremist monk that is aimed at "protecting" Buddhists. The proposals include a law "to give protection and rights for ethnic Buddhists when marrying with other religions", as well as a ban on polygamy and legislation to "balance the increasing population".

An anti-Rohingya monk called Wirathu has campaigned for a law to force non-Buddhist men wishing to marry a Buddhist woman to convert and gain permission to wed from her parents, or risk 10 years in jail.
"We have tried continually to have a national protection bill. Now it has started to come true with the president's message. We are so glad," Wirathu told AFP.

In the West we have a  one sided view of Buddhist monks as being entirely peaceful and enlightened, but they have a history of authoritarian dictatorship and repression just like most religions.

The aid agency Medecins Sans Frontieres has been ordered to cease operations in Myanmar by the Myanmar regime. MSF said it was deeply concerned about the tens of thousands of people it was treating, particularly for HIV/AIDS, malaria and TB. MSF is one of the biggest providers of healthcare in Rakhine. Since 2004, MSF has treated over 1,240,000 malaria patients in Rakhine state alone. It provides emergency assistance to tens of thousands of Rohingya people displaced by recent violence.

A presidential spokesman alleged to the BBC that Medecins Sans Frontieres was biased in favour of Rakhine's Muslim Rohingya minority. The government says that MSF has prioritised the treatment of the Rohingya community over local Buddhists. MSF said no other medical organisation in the country operated on a similar scale, and that its actions were always "guided by medical ethics and the principles of neutrality and impartiality". The BBC says MSF is one of the few agencies providing treatment for Rohingya who would otherwise be turned away from clinics and hospitals.

 A massacre is alleged to have taken place of Rohingya Muslims near the border with Bangladesh. The UN claimed that as many as 48 people may have died, but the Burmese authorities said there had been no casualties. Then much to the annoyance of the government, MSF confirmed that their medics had treated 22 patients near the site of the alleged attack. It suggested something serious had happened and may have been the final straw for MSF. Presidential spokesman Ye Htut  asserted their actions had clearly demonstrated the MSF bias.

Myanmar has  faced criticism from rights groups over a controversial "two-child policy" in parts of the western state of Rakhine. Minority Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine face a slew of restrictions that have led the United Nations to consider them as one of the world's most persecuted peoples. Two waves of deadly communal violence between Buddhists and Muslims in Rakhine in 2012 left more than 200 mainly Rohingya people dead and around 140,000 displaced.

Yangon (Rangoon) Myanmar's biggest city has become more attractive to investors but the poor are squeezed by rising cost of living. It is the commercial capital of Asia's second-poorest country and the sixth-most expensive city in southeast Asia. Affordable housing is being torn down, replaced by high-rise condominiums and office buildings. Rents have quadrupled in recent years, while local wages remain depressingly low for many. About one-third of children under five are malnourished. Many spend at least half their salary putting food on the table. Forty percent of Yangon's five million people are "poor or extremely poor", according to the United Nations. With such social problems the Myanmar ruling class do what all elites try to do - divert attention by seeking scapegoats to blame. 

Teaching - The Longer School Days

Primary state school teachers in England are working almost 60 hours a week, according to a survey by the Department for Education. Their secondary school counterparts worked almost 56 hours.  Headteachers in secondary schools recorded an average of 63 hours and 20 minutes a week.

Martin Freedman, director of economic strategy at the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, said teachers were now fitting in the equivalent of an extra full day a week by working during evenings and weekends. He added: "These figures expose [education secretary] Michael Gove's claim that this country's educational achievements would be improved if only teachers worked longer as utter rubbish. Exhausted teachers and tired pupils will not help children to achieve the best education outcomes and, at least as far as this survey is concerned, might actually make things worse."

"This survey shows an astonishing increase in the hours that teachers are working on Michael Gove's watch. No one enters the profession expecting a nine to five job, but working in excess of 55 hours a week and during holidays is entirely unacceptable," said Christine Blower, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers. "Many teachers feel totally overwhelmed and it is hardly surprising that two in five leave the profession after their first five years in the job, and morale is at an all-time low.”

The union case was strengthened by data obtained by the TUC from the nationwide Labour Force Survey, showing that teachers carried out more unpaid overtime in 2013 than any other profession. The average of 12 hours extra a week was higher than financial directors (11 hours) or lawyers (nine hours).

Taken from here

Migrant Servants Organise

"Women united will never be divided! Migrants united will never be divided!" chant women at a Hong Kong public park.





"I didn't know where the consulate was; I didn't know the immigration department; my passport was kept by the agency. I ran away and an NGO helped me to find shelter," she said and she credits Filipino women – who came to Hong Kong earlier – for helping teach later arrivals how to organise. First she learned about her rights; and now she shares her new knowledge with others. Social media ensures that information spreads fast, particularly since domestic workers are dependent on their mobile phones for communication with the outside world. Improved awareness of their rights enables them to challenge unfair treatment.

But "our problem is not simply bad employers, but bad policies", Lestari said. When workers speak out, officials in home and host countries turn a blind eye to problems because of migration's economic benefits. Domestic workers are specifically excluded from legislation allowing foreign nationals to gain permanent residency after living in Hong Kong for seven years. A legal challenge to their exclusion was rejected by the special autonomous region's highest court last year.

Domestic workers' organisations such as the new HK Helpers campaign are seeking to end abuses by agencies who charge fees of as much as HKD$21,000 (£1,620) and confiscate workers' documents. The legal maximum is around HKD$400. They also want maximum working hours legislation and an end to the "two-week rule" – giving workers just a fortnight to leave Hong Kong when their employment ends – and the insistence they live with their employer. Those regulations, say activists, make it harder to leave an abusive situation – especially if helpers have large debts to repay to the agency that placed them.

From here

The Working Class Majority Should Change The World

Education in the Name of Social Transformation - Teaching Workers by MICHAEL D. YATES










































From here




United States - Student Indebtedness Passes $1 Trillion Mark

The total student debt in the United States recently passed the $1 trillion mark, so it’s little surprise that it has become one of the chief financial and even political issues for young people. A recent survey found that 79% of 18- to 29-year-olds considered student debt to be a “major or minor problem” and that the concern was consistent across party lines.
A new study authored by New America Foundation senior analyst Ben Miller shows that the average debt load for graduating students has been growing — and quickly. Using data collected from the Department of Education, Miller found a “predictably dire picture” for students who graduated in 2012, the last year that the DOE’s study covered. Here are some of the most important details:

1.There are 800,000 more indebted college graduates than there were eight years ago.
As the number of college graduates has increased, so has the number who are graduating carrying at least some debt. Miller estimates that there were 800,000 more indebted college graduates in 2011–2012 than there were in 2003–2004. The number, he estimates, went from 1.6 million to 2.4 million.

2.The average tab for an indebted college graduate is $29,400. The average annual income for a working adult between 25 and 34 is $37,524.
That figure is the highest ever. And it has increased 20% over four years. Nearly 70% of bachelor’s degree recipients in 2012 had some student debt, also the highest ever.

3.More college students are borrowing, no matter what type of degree they’re getting.
For all types of undergraduate degrees — bachelor’s, associate, and certificates — the percentage of degree recipients borrowing has gone up over the last four and eight years. The biggest jump has been in associate degrees, from only 36.4% of graduates borrowing in 2004 to almost half in 2012.

4.Students who complete degrees at for-profit colleges are way more likely to graduate with more debt than their public school counterparts.
“There is still significant variation depending on the type of school a graduate attended,” Miller writes. The biggest difference is between students going to public institutions and for-profit private ones: “42 percent of students earning an associate degree at a… public college borrow. This is less than half the rate of students seeking similar degrees at private for-profit colleges, where nearly nine in ten students graduate with debt.”
While the average amount of debt is going up for borrowers regardless of what type of college they attend, the average debt for students who get a degree at private or for-profit institutions is growing faster.

5.The most indebted students are more indebted than ever.
While the median borrower’s debt has more than doubled from eight years ago, borrowers in the 90th percentile — those who borrowed more than 90% of graduates that year — have had a $12,000 increase in total debt.
These disparities are even more pronounced among graduates of different types of schools: the 75th percentile debt level for associate degree recipients at public colleges is $8,500. Meanwhile, at for-profit institutions, the median debt level is $20,000. The median debt level for those who have completed associate degree at public schools is $0.

from here, plus links and graphics

Female Students As Commodities

Excess wealth, widespread poverty and inequality are all poisonous to our nation (US). These poisons threaten our economy, our democratic process, academic integrity, our justice system and our culture.

(The full article can be read here but below is the snippet relevant to 'our culture.')



Banking is the Life!

The Occupy movement brought a new saliency to the issue of income inequality. Their key  slogan – “we are the 99%” – dramatically highlighted the sense that a small elite have been  the main winners in the decades leading up to the crisis . Top percentile  workers have substantially increased their share of the income pie - in the 1970s they took  around 6% of total UK income but by the end of the 2000s, this had risen to 15%.

1. A lot of rich people in the UK are bankers.
In 2008 (seemingly the most recent figures), 28% of all top percentile earners in the UK were London bankers. Since then, bankers’ share of the top percentile pay has almost certainly risen.

2. These rich bankers are very rich. They are richer than other rich people. And they are becoming even richer fast.
The average wage of workers in the top percentile of Britons rose from £278k in 2008 to £284k in 2011, an increase of 2.3%,
By comparison, the average wage of bankers in the top percentile rose from £325k in 2008 to £353k in 2011, an increase of 8.6%. Over 75% (1.4 out of 1.8 percentage points) of the increase in the top percentile’s share of the UK wage bill between 2008 and 2011 went just to bankers. This is in spite of them only accounting for one-third of top percentile earners

3. Bonuses are integral to banking riches
Much as the EU has been attempting to curtail bonuses, they remain the source of bankers’ financial supremacy. The entirety of the pay gain for top percentile workers between 2008 and 2011 was due to bonuses, the study found. On average, top percentile workers in finance received 44% of their total compensation in the form of a bonus. Rising bonuses paid to bankers accounted for around  two-thirds of the increase in the national wage bill (“earnings pie”) taken by the top one  percent of workers since 1999. Surprisingly, even after the crisis bankers took at least as large  a share of the earnings pie in 2011 as they did at the peak of the boom in 2007 and saw no  worsening in their employment outcomes relative to other similar workers.

4. You’re no more likely to find yourself unemployed if you work in the financial sector in London than elsewhere
Being a banker is often seen as like being a footballer or rock star: you have a few good years and then you lose your job. However, the LSE study suggests this is not so. It actually found that a finance worker in London was 2.2% more likely to have a job than an employee in any other industry in the UK. Therefore, not only do you earn more in banking, but your pay is rising faster than in other industries and your job is more secure than in other sectors. Maybe it’s not such a bad career after all.

From here

Thai Lies


Chulalongkorn University economist Pasuk Phongpaichit revealed figures that about 100,000 bank accounts, each with more than US$300,000, account for nearly half the value of all bank deposits in the country. Yet these accounted for just 0.5 per cent of the total number of bank accounts. The top 10 per cent of landowners own 61 per cent of total title land, she noted.

Prime Minister Yingluck is worth Bt603 million ($18 million), while Democrat Party leader Abhisit Vejjajiva has assets worth Bt54 million. Protest spokesman Akanat Promphan, a former Democrat legislator, has net assets of Bt101 million and drives a 4.4-million-baht car.  Another protest leader, Suthep Thaugsuban, a former Democrat and from a wealthy land-owning family in Surat Thani province, is tainted by graft allegations.

It appears that being less a thief in Thailand makes a person more honourable! The campaign slogans appear to be "Vote for me , i’m not as big a criminal as the other guy"

Fact of the Day (2)

Home ownership rates in Britain have slipped to the lowest percentage levels in 25 years. The overall percentage of homeowners has fallen from 71% in 2003 to 65.2% last year, the lowest level since 1987.

The percentage of people who claim housing benefits and want to live in social housing sectors has risen from 59% to 66%.

Campbell Robb, chief executive of the homeless charity Shelter, urged the British government to “get to grips with our housing shortage,” saying figures confirm that the “dream of a stable home is drifting further out of reach.”

Fact of the Day (1)

The Department for Work and Pensions sent letters to a woman demanding she make an effort to find work even though she was in a coma. She was told to attend "intensive job-focused activity" even though she fell into a coma in December last year and the government and its contractor had been informed.

Heartless and callous benefit "reform"

“The Reddest of the Red”

The military base at Kronstadt was located just outside Petrograd and the soldiers and sailors garrisoned there were thought to be loyal supporters of the Bolshevik revolution. The sailors at the Kronstadt naval base had long been a source of radical dissent. Mutinies had taken place during the 1905 Revolution and played an important role in persuading Nicholas II to issue his October Manifesto. The Kronstadt sailors were also active in the overthrow of Tsar in the February Revolution. It took part in the July Days. During the October Revolution the cruiser, Aurora, sailed it up the River Neva and opened fire on the Winter Palace. By 1921 the Kronstadt sailors had become disillusioned with the Bolsheviks.  The sailors saw themselves as loyal to the Soviet cause, if not to the Communist rulers. That bitter winter saw Kronstadt, like most other cities in Russia, hungry and discontented. Anger at material deprivations was compounded by the authoritarian regime the Bolsheviks were building, which seemed to violate the spirit of the revolution that the sailors had helped win. Popular unrest finally grew into strikes, which led to riots, lockouts, arrests.  On 22 January, the Bolsheviks reduced the bread ration by one-third, and even key workers were given a ration of only 1000 calories a day.  Anyone who was not a fervent Bolshevik was being pushed to the end of their patience.   In Moscow on 23 February, 10,000 went on strike; the metal factories and shipyards joined the strike.   On 27 February a poster appeared saying: ‘the workers and peasants need freedom.  They do not want to live by the decrees of the Bolsheviks’.

In 1921, on February 26, delegates from the Kronstadt sailors visited Petrograd to investigate the situation. On February 28, in response to the delegates' report of heavy-handed Bolshevik repression of strikes in Petrograd the crews of the battleships Petropavlovsk and Sevastopol held an emergency meeting, which approved a resolution raising 15 demands. On March 1, a general meeting of the garrison was held. The general meeting passed a resolution including the fifteen demands.  On 4th March they issued the following statement:
"Comrade workers, red soldiers and sailors. We stand for the power of the Soviets and not that of the parties. We are for free representation of all who toil. Comrades, you are being misled. At Kronstadt all power is in the hands of the revolutionary sailors, of red soldiers and of workers. It is not in the hands of White Guards, allegedly headed by a General Kozlovsky, as Moscow Radio tells you."

During the revolt, Kronstadt started to re-organise itself from the bottom up. The trade union committees were re-elected and a Council of Trade Unions formed. The Conference of Delegates met regularly to discuss issues relating to the interests of Kronstadt and the struggle against the Bolshevik government (specifically on March 2nd, 4th and 11th). Rank and file Communists left the party in droves, expressing support for the revolt and its aim of "all power to the soviets and not to parties."

The Bolsheviks began its attack on Kronstadt on March 7 with some 60,000 troops.  By March 19, the Bolshevik forces had taken full control of Kronstadt. The day after the surrender of Kronstadt, the Bolsheviks celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the Paris Commune.

It was a rude shock to the Bolsheviks when the red sailors of Kronstadt went into open rebellion. Defenders of the Bolshevik policy have claimed that the Kronstadt rebels were not the same sailors as those who had been revolutionary heroes in 1917. In response, Israel Getzler presents detailed evidence that the vast majority of the sailors had been in the Navy since 1917.

Leninist/Trotskyist sympathisers argue that the suppression of the rebellion was essential to defend the "gains of the revolution." What exactly were these gains? Not soviet democracy, freedom of speech, assembly and press, trade union freedom and so on as the Kronstadters were crushed for demanding these. No, apparently the "gains" of the revolution was a Bolshevik government pure and simple. The fact that Lenin and Trotsky were in power is enough for their followers to justify the repression of Kronstadt and subscribe to the notion of a "workers' state" which excludes workers from power. The Bolsheviks supporters argue that the Kronstadt demand for free soviet elections was "counter-revolutionary", "backward", "petty-bourgeois" and so on. How soviet power could mean anything without free elections is never explained. (Trotsky was arguing in the 1930s that the Russian working class was still the ruling class under Stalin -- "So long as the forms of property that have been created by the October Revolution are not overthrown, the proletariat remains the ruling class.") How can the Bolshevik repression be justified in terms of defending workers power when the workers were powerless? How can it be defended in terms of soviet power when the soviets were rubber stamps of the government?

The apologists for the Bolsheviks claim that the country was too exhausted and the working class was decimated. In such circumstances, it is argued, objective conditions meant that soviet democracy was impossible and so the Bolsheviks had to maintain their dictatorship at all costs to defend what was left of the revolution. However,  the Kronstadt rebels fully knew that construction would take time and were arguing that the only means of rebuilding the country was via the participation of what of left of the working class and peasantry in free class organisations like freely elected soviets and unions.  Surely the first step to re-build the economy would have to be the re-introduction of workers' democracy and power for only this would give allow expression to the creative powers of the masses and interest them in the reconstruction of the country. Continuing party dictatorship would never do it. The pro-Bolsheviks fail to mention the power and privileges of the bureaucracy at the time. Officials got the best food, housing and so on. The lack of effective control or influence from below ensured that corruption was widespread.

The Kronstadt raised economic and political demands in 1921 just as they had four years earlier when they overthrew the Tsar. Kronstadt became the symbol of the bankruptcy of the Revolution. Many socialists all over the world lost faith in the Bolshevik revolution, which they now saw as a repressive regime. Lenin  introduced the New Economic Policy.  How should the New Economic Policy be evaluated except in the same fashion if one uses the the Bolshevik logic but to denounce the NEP as “counterrevolutionary” as well.

Kronstadt was a popular uprising from below by the same sailors, soldiers and workers that made the 1917 October revolution. The Bolshevik repression of the revolt can be justified in terms of defending the state power of the Bolsheviks but it cannot be defended in terms of socialist theory. Indeed, it indicates that Bolshevism is a flawed political theory which cannot create a socialist society but only a state capitalist regime based on party dictatorship. The Bolsheviks insist it was necessary to crush Kronstadt to "save” the revolution and preserve the “revolutionary” regime but we feel entitled to ask what was there left to save and preserve?

The Kronstadt called for the revolution to be placed back into the hands of the workers who it had originally claimed to represent. The Kronstadt Rebellion destroyed the myth that in the Bolshevik state, power lay in the hands of the workers. The rebellion threatened Bolshevik rule - a threat that was even stronger than any that of armies of Denikin or Wrangel. For this reason the Bolshevik leaders were forced to destroy the Kronstadt Rebellion without hesitation.

 Despite the existence of the Putilov Works, the oil facilities in the Caucasus, the coal mines in the Donetz region, and the textile factories in Moscow, agriculture was the essential economic base of Russian society. The remnants of serfdom had by no means disappeared. The relations of production were feudal and the political superstructure corresponded: nobles and clergy were the ruling classes that - with the help of the army, the police, and the bureaucracy - exercised their power in the gigantic empire of large landholdings. The Russian Revolution of the twentieth century confronted the economic task of abolishing feudalism. In Western Europe the capitalist class was the bearer of social progress but in Russia they were weak and allied with tsarism so the bourgeois revolution had to be accomplished without the bourgeoisie. Lenin recognized  this peculiarity of the Russian Revolution.  He wrote:
In another passage he wrote:
 “The victory of the bourgeois revolution in Russia is impossible as a bourgeois victory. That seems paradoxical. But so it is. The majority peasant population, the strength and consciousness of the proletariat that is already organized in the Socialist Party - all these circumstances lend a unique character to our bourgeois revolution. This uniqueness however does not eliminate the bourgeois character of the revolution”.

What happened was the following: capitalism (which had hardly developed) was not toppled. Wage labour remained, which Marx, as it is well known, insisted is predicated on capital, as conversely capital is predicated on wage labour. The Russian workers did not obtain control over the means of production; that control fell rather to the Party (or the state). The Russian workers accordingly remained producers of surplus value  that was expropriated not by a class of private capitalists, but by the state, or by the Party elements in control of the state. Nothing changed  the position of the Russian worker who remained an object of exploitation, a wage slave. The workers councils ((soviets)  that were formed by Russian workers were stripped of their power as quickly as possible by the Bolshevik government and already in the early summer of 1918 were a complete insignificance. The factory committees had been liquidated in January 1918. The workers expropriated the means of production on their own initiative, until, that is, the decree of workers' control that was issued on the 14th of November 1917, only one week after the Bolshevik seizure of power, put the brakes on these activities. After May 1918, “nationalizations” could only be undertaken by the central economic council. Shortly before, in April 1918, the individual responsibility of company managers had been reintroduced; they no longer had to justify their decisions to the workers. Bolshevik political rule developed not into an instrument of emancipation, but into an instrument of suppression. Marx commented on the French 1848 revolution as follows:
In Russia, this obligation continued to be proclaimed. However, with the Kronstadt uprising, the revolutionary process had come to an end. Kronstadt was the revolutionary moment where the pendulum swings of the revolution swung the furthest to the left.  Kronstadt forced the Bolshevik Party to show its true colours as an institution that was openly hostile to workers and whose single purpose was the establishment of state capitalism. With the defeat of the rebellion, the path to that purpose had been cleared.

Adapted from here and from here

Some Trotskyists online have been countering criticism by citing an anthology of archive sources introduced by Yuri Shchetinov called the Kronstadt Tragedy. They claim this supports the argument that the Kronstadt was indeed a counter-revolutionary plot. This extremely hard to find book has had a very limited print run  and is available only in Russian but the anarchist history researcher Alexander Skirda has had access and finds nothing of merit to call for an re-evaluation of the events. Some of of the archive "revelations" are simply Cheka confessions (most likely extracted through torture). Lets apply some commonsense. If there existed a smoking-gun implicating the Kronstadt with the Whites and the Bolsheviks possessed this evidence,  isn't it a strange that it wasn't until the fall of the Soviet Union such information became known and they withheld the details in all their earlier denunciations.

It's also important to understand the context in which the two collections of documents relating to the Kronstadt Revolt have been published. The debate about Kronstadt in post-Soviet Russia in the 1990's was not between Lenininists and anarchists. It was between Leninists and liberals. This plays into the hands of the Leninists because both sides agree that the revolt had to do with restoration of capitalism.

During the late Soviet period, the official expert on the Kronstadt Revolt was the historian Sergei Semanov, who published several books on the subject. Typically, the title of his 1973 book was The liquidation of the anti-Soviet Kronstadt mutiny of 1921. But in his last book on the subject, published in 2003, Semanov apologized for calling the revolt a "mutiny". He wrote that now "the time has arrived to be objective" and he advised the reader that his "judgments on the events of Kronstadt are very different from those of the 1970s" because "times have changed and the author as well". The villain in this book is no longer White generals, but Lenin. That there may have been contact between White emigre groups and people involved in the Kronstadt revolt would hardly be surprising nor necessarily damning. The strikes and unrest in Petrograd at the time - which inspired Kronstadt to rise - had the same roots and surely needed no White influence. It's unsurprising that Leninists should think that if they can discredit one or two leaders then they have discredited a whole social movement.
From here

Thursday, February 27, 2014


Inequality in the News

Germany’s 1%  own an average 800,000 euros ($1.1 million) per person, while roughly a fifth of the German population had not amassed any private capital at all. All in all, the average German adult owned 29,000 euros.
Data collected in 2007 and  figures from 2012 show the gap between the rich and the poor had widened further.

Meanwhile in Africa  high economic growth rates usually expressed in GDP in a number of African countries mask widening inequality between a wealthy minority that is growing richer and the poor who, in many cases, are becoming poorer, a new report said.  Between 1986 and 2010, the share of total income earned by the richest 10 percent increased by 75 percent in Nigeria and 50 percent in Ghana, and income inequality in Zambia hit its highest level since records began. Much of the wealth produced by the elite in the countries studied escapes offshore to tax havens where it cannot be taxed, the report said. Countries that are rich in natural resources are particularly vulnerable because the natural resource sector is “known to be rife with tax-dodging techniques,” it added. In Kenya only 100 HNWI (high net worth individuals) are registered with the tax authority even though the country has 142 Kenyan shilling billionaires, whose net worth exceeds $30 million each

Jake Rosenfeld, associate professor of sociology at the University of Washington, recently published a book addressing wage inequality in the working class. The declining number of organized labor unions is leading to growing inequality among America’s workers, says Jake Rosenfeld, in “What Unions No Longer Do.”

“Average American workers who are trying to gain a foothold in a fast changing economy are really struggling,” Rosenfeld said. “Part of that struggle is that there’s no organized presence to help them as there once was in the form of a labor union.”
According to Rosenfeld, during the 1970s, one out of every three private sector workers was part of a labor union. Today, about one in every 20 workers is part of a labor union. Rosenfeld said he believes the lack of organization and unification among the working class that used to occur through labor unions is increasing racial inequality, lowering wages, and making integration more difficult for immigrants.

“Labor unions were an integral part of the working community,” Rosenfeld said. “They raised wages for millions of workers who might have only had a high school degree and delivered key benefits in terms of retirement packages.”

George Lovell, professor of political science at the University of Washington said there’s a dramatic concentration of wealth at the top of the economic scale that is connected to the lack of union political presence lobbying against this concentration of wealth. Unions used to be a powerful economic force that helped maintain wages for union workers and many other workers. With a lesser union presence, there is a growing inequality of wages among the working class.

China's Rising Workers

China’s workers have emerged over the last few years as a strong, unified and increasingly active collective force. Workers have time and again demonstrated the will and the ability to stand up to abusive and arrogant managements and to demand better pay and working conditions. However, workers are still hampered by the lack of an effective trade union that can maintain solidarity, bargain directly with managements and protect labour leaders from reprisals.  As a result, workers are turning to labour rights groups that can advise and support their collective actions while, at the same time, demanding more of the official trade union and putting pressure on it to change.

 China Labour Bulletin recorded 1,171 strikes and worker protests from mid-2011 until the end of 2013. The police intervened in about 20 percent of the protests recorded by CLB and occasionally conflicts erupted, leading to beatings and arrests.  About 40 percent of the industril action were in manufacturing industries particularly hard hit by the global economic downturn and the decline in China’s economic growth during this period. Factory workers staged protests when they were cheated out of their wages and overtime payments, when their bonuses and benefits were cut back and when the boss refused to pay the social insurance premiums mandated by law. Workers also went out strike to demand higher pay, equal pay for equal work, and proper employment contracts.

Transport workers staged strikes over high costs, cumbersome regulations and unfair competition; teachers protested at wage arrears, low pay and attempts by the government to introduce a performance-based salary system in schools, and sanitation workers, some of the poorest-paid in China, staged numerous strikes and protests in Guangzhou and eventually won a long-overdue raise.

Despite China's seemingly miraculous economic boom, in many ways, its emergent labor struggles are strikingly similar to those experienced by workers in more developed economies: weak-to-zero collective bargaining rights, a lack of social and health protections, the poverty and instability facing interregional migrant labor, global economic volatility and consequent job insecurity. And of course, that’s all in a fractious atmosphere of breakneck national growth rates, greater economic ambitions among the working class and soaring inequality. The rising militancy (and even class consciousness) across the industrial workforce is being facilitated by the expansion of digital communications networks—as more workers begin to enjoy the tech gadgets they’ve been producing for rich countries all these years

Without a free media or independent unions, it’s hard to tell how unified China’s workers are or can be, but CLB describes bread-and-butter struggles at various multinational factories, as well as public sector workforces such as teachers battling wage arrears and sanitation workers denied social insurance.  Workers are lacking direct channels for airing grievances. Although China is technically home to the world’s largest union organization, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), the many spontaneous strikes and protests of recent years reveal that the state-run labor bureaucracy, while not completely an arm of the government, has largely been ineffective in responding to workers' intensifying needs and demands.
CLB found that in their pursuit of “better pay and conditions,” workers are bypassing traditional trade union organizing entirely in favor of organizing actions themselves. One worker told the local press, “We don’t want a union chairman who is partial towards the employer. We want to elect a chairman who can speak up for us.”

The report notes, “One of the most intractable obstacles to the development of the workers’ movement in China thus far has been the inability of workers to maintain the solidarity and momentum created by isolated victories in the workplace.” Ultimately, the reclaiming of the union from state and corporate power depends on how workers’ raised consciousness evolves into more systemic mass action and internal union reforms. But it looks like China’s capitalist miracle has opened the potential for its working masses to create the century’s labor miracle as well.

Taken from here

A 50-page report by the CLB is available for download here

New Zealand Child Poverty Under-counted


Fact of the Day

Pakistanis have come to depend on drugs made in India and smuggled into Pakistan. Patients as well as doctors say these are cheap and effective. The two countries do not have a trade agreement on drugs. Doctors in rural areas prescribe them to people who cannot afford the pharmaceutical products of western multinational companies or do not find local brands effective.

 Local medicines are extremely expensive compared to Indian ones. For instance, famotidine, a locally made drug used for stomach-related illnesses, is available for 200 to 500 Pakistani rupees (1.90 to 4.70 dollars) while the same preparation from India is sold at 30 to 50 rupees (30 to 45 cents)

Wednesday, February 26, 2014

Canada's rich get richer


Statistics Canada’s survey of financial security, conducted between September and November 2012, revealed the poorest 20 per cent of Canadians have seen their median net worth remain unchanged since 2005, and decline since 1999. In 2012, the poorest one-fifth of Canadian families had a median net worth of just $1,100, the same as in 2005, and down 15.4 per cent from $1,300 in 1999.

The richest 20 per cent of Canadians have seen their median net worth increase to $1,380,000. That wealthiest 20 per cent also held 67.4 per cent of the national net worth, the report showed, down slightly from 68.6 per cent in 1999. Houses remain the largest asset for Canadian families, accounting for one-third of the total value of assets, the report said, followed by pensions.

Canadians in the top three wealthiest brackets saw median net worth gains of over 40 per cent since 2005, and a whopping 80 per cent since 1999. Family units with a median net worth of $245,000 and over in 2012 are part of that group.

US Tax Avoidance

Eighteen American multinationals — companies such as Nike, Microsoft and Apple — have used tax havens abroad to avoid what Citizens for Tax Justice estimates as $92 billion in federal taxes. CTJ also found 235 companies reported last year over $1.3 trillion stashed abroad to avoid paying the taxes that domestic companies must pay. This  is not illegal. It is known as “deferral,” the tax laws allow companies to forego paying taxes on money earned (or reported as earned abroad) until the company brings the money back to the United States.

Through transfer pricing, multinationals can easily game the system to report their profits in low tax countries abroad, even while the bulk of their sales are in the U.S. This, in part, is how General Electric can make millions in profits and pay nothing in taxes. A Senate hearing showed how Apple used Ireland as its favorite tax haven, developing what Sen. Carl Levin called “the Holy Grail of tax avoidance,” creating “offshore tax entities … while claiming to be a tax resident nowhere.”

As companies park more and more cash abroad, they then pay lobbying and campaign contributions to persuade Congress to give them a tax break if they bring the money home in what they call “a tax repatriation holiday.” The companies argue that they’ll invest in jobs here in the U.S., but can’t afford to pay the taxes due (the same taxes that domestic small businesses can’t avoid). So let them bring the dough back at a nominal tax rate and they’ll reinvest millions in America.  Each time the Congress provides this kind of tax holiday or amnesty, it gives the corporations an even greater incentive to stash their cash abroad. And more and more corporations hire accountants to figure out how to report their profits abroad, even if earned in the U.S.

The last time the Congress did  this, even the jobs argument turned out to be false, as General Electric’s CEO Jeff Immelt admits. The companies bringing the dough back actually laid off workers in the ensuing years. They used the money to buy back stock (raising the value of their stock options), or to buy other companies, often merging and purging workers or just to pay down debt.

With the trillions of dollars sitting abroad, the game is afoot again. “Bipartisan” bills have been introduced in the House and the Senate to let corporations bring bucks back home at a zero percent tax rate, if they agree to use some of the money to purchase bonds issued by a newly created federal infrastructure bank. They get to bring $6 back tax-free for every $1 they invest in infrastructure bonds. Instead of taxing multinationals as it does small businesses, the federal government will borrow money from them and pay them interest on it.
From here 


“Yet after years of investigations, negotiations and jawboning, the United States has names for just 238 of those 22,000 Credit Suisse customers,” said Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

Credit Suisse employees took dozens of trips to the U.S. to meet customers and personally recruit new ones at golf tournaments and other bank-sponsored events, avoiding paper trails while telling U.S. officials the visits were simply for tourism. The Justice Department said  it is investigating 14 Swiss financial institutions for activities related to offshore tax evasion.

Like forefather, like son

According to a new book, The Son Also Rises, by academic Gregory Clark there is a myth about social mobility.  Contrary to brighter estimates, which suggest that past prosperity or poverty can be erased in three to four generations, Clark reckons it takes 10 to 15.  Our chances of getting on in life are largely down to what our family did 300 years ago.

Our parents' salary accounts for a mere 10 per cent variation in a person's status, whereas our long-term lineage accounts for a variance of between 50 and 60 per cent. What that means, in effect, is that if your family were shopkeepers 200 years ago, the likelihood is you may be, too.

Clark suggests that mobility in feudal England was not vastly different to today. Upwardly mobile artisans working in the 12th century took eight generations to be absorbed into the educated elite of the 16th century. Despite the introduction of inheritance tax and rapid industrialisation, the 21st-century descendant of the 1 per centers of mid-Victorian England are likely to be three times as wealthy as the average man or woman on the bus.

"Social mobility rates are similar across societies that vary dramatically in their institutions and income levels. Cradle-to-grave socialist Sweden and dog-eat-dog, free-to-lose America have similar rates. Communist China and capitalist Taiwan have similar rates. Homogenous Japan and the ethnically fractured US also have similar rates," he says. "Only extreme, drastic and unacceptable state interventions have any hope of increasing social mobility." Not even the Communist Revolution in China in 1949 managed to have a lasting, pervasive effect on mobility, according to his study.

From here

Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Floodgate Part 1 - Poem

Part 1 of 3. The Farage Barrage!

(UKIP have expelled Councillor David  
Silvester of Henley-on-Thames for claiming
that recent flooding was caused by the
Government’s Marriage (Same Sex) Act!)

It’s clear that fire and brimstone’s out,
And flooding is now in;
To chastise our unchastity,
And all unnatural sin!
God’s wrath has smitten Cameron,
And his limp-wristed law;
And caused much inundation on,
The countryside and shore!

Thus in His Arc-like punishment,
God breached the water dykes;
So gays and wicked dykes were smote,
Throughout His flooding strikes!
Although it’s a queer justice, that,
Allows gays on high ground; 
Avoid the flooding whilst some straights,
On lower ground were drowned!

Silvester’s God moves in strange ways, (1)
His wonders to perform;
Such miracles thus tend to lie,
Outside the social norm.
This God-forsaken twisted love,
Is clearly Henley sent;
And seems a kind of justice, that
In retrospect seems bent.

If Cameron et al have sinned,
Would it not be more fair;
To punish them but leave alone,
The innocents out there?
But simple-minded thinking tends,
To stem from the more dense;
And most religious oddities,
Aren’t known for common sense!

(1) David Silvester claimed that Cameron
had acted “arrogantly against the Gospel”.

© Richard Layton

Science for Sale

 SOYMB has on occasion revealed that science is often corrupted by commercial concerns. This interview on Democracy Now offers an example where profitability of a product over-rode the safety issue.

Syngenta is one of the largest agri-businesses in the world which is based in Basel, sells more than fourteen billion dollars’ worth of seeds and pesticides a year and funds research at some four hundred academic institutions around the world. There is now real concern that biotech companies were “buying up universities” and that industry funding compromises the objectivity of their research.




The company’s public relations team drafted a list of four goals. Reporter Rachel Aviv writes, quote, "The first was 'discredit Hayes.'  Syngenta’s communications manager, Sherry Ford, who referred to Hayes by his initials, wrote that the company could 'prevent citing of TH data by revealing him as noncredible.' He was a frequent topic of conversation at company meetings. Syngenta looked for ways to 'exploit Hayes' faults/problems.’ 'If TH involved in scandal, enviros will drop him,' Ford wrote." In 2005, Ford made a long list of methods for discrediting him: “have his work audited by 3rd party,” “ask journals to retract,” “set trap to entice him to sue,” “investigate funding,” “investigate wife.” The P.R. team suggested that the company “purchase ‘Tyrone Hayes’ as a search word on the internet, so that any time someone searches for Tyrone’s material, the first thing they see is our material.” The proposal was later expanded to include the phrases “amphibian hayes,” “atrazine frogs,” and “frog feminization.”


Don Coursey, an economist at the Harris School of Public Policy, at the University of Chicago, five hundred dollars an hour to study how a ban on the herbicide would affect the economy. Coursey  announced that there was one “basic takeaway point: a ban on atrazine at the national level will have a devastating, devastating effect upon the U.S. corn economy.”



Syngenta use a company called Innovative Science Solutions, a consulting firm that specializes in “product defense” and strategies that “give you the power to put your best data forward.”

















In 2012,  Syngenta agreed to pay a $105 million to reimburse more than a thousand water systems for the cost of filtering atrazine from drinking water, but the company denies all wrongdoing.