Celebrating the Tet Offensive posted by lenin

It started forty years ago today:



Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh! He's the one that filled you in!

Labels: tet offensive, viet minh, vietnam

The other Cairo Conference posted by lenin

Western television viewers and newspaper readers would be hard-pressed to know too much about the Cairo process. Have you even heard of it? Well, for a while now, US negotiators, the Iraqi puppet government, and representatives of the Iraqi resistance, have been meeting in Cairo for talks. The blog missing links, which usefully translates stories in Arabic for English-speakers, has been covering this for a while.

Although many resistance groups are opposed to the process, and many of the same Baathists whom the US has been courting are not engaging, it does look like a serious diplomatic 'surge' (odd, is it not, how addictive these propaganda cliches are). Several groups are involved, including the Sadrists (whose strategy has always been somewhat opportunistic, a syncopated enterprise of resistance and collaboration, of nationalism and occasional sectarianism). Ibrahim Jafaari is now talking to the resistance. Jafaari, of course, was deposed as leader of the Dawa Party and as Prime Minister of Iraq last year when Bush pulled the plug on the old geezer, despite the fact that he was approved by the Assembly. There are rumours that this is because he admits to being partial to Noam Chomsky. That can get you into a lot of trouble. Anyway, he is now the front man for a US-led negotiation process.

Now, it seems to me that one obvious conclusion is that for all the talk of success in the last few months of 2007, there is absolutely no confidence on the US side that this is likely to be enduring. In fact, a recent increase in attacks suggests that the temporary lull in attacks on US troops, won through a combination of bribery in some areas, escalation in others, and decisively redirecting Sunni fire onto 'Al Qaeda' (which is the name any gang of petty ultra-sectarian thugs gives itself these days in order to look well-hard), is coming to an end.

Labels: iraq, iraqi resistance, occupation, us troops

"Gaza is quite a dynamic place now" posted by lenin

Eyad Sarraj:

Labels: blockade, gaza, hamas, Israel, palestine

Israel blocks aid to Gaza posted by lenin

Of course, in this case, they're more worried about the public appearance of solidarity than the aid itself.

Labels: gaza, gush shalom, Israel, palestinians, zionism

Confirmed: over 1 million violent deaths in Iraq posted by lenin

ORB has produced more research on deaths in Iraq:

Following responses to ORB’s earlier work, which was based on survey work undertaken in primarily urban locations, we have conducted almost 600 additional interviews in rural communities. By and large the results are in line with the ‘urban results’ and we now estimate that the death toll between March 2003 and August 2007 is likely to have been of the order of 1,033,000. If one takes into account the margin of error associated with survey data of this nature then the estimated range is between 946,000 and 1,120,000.

This is only an imprecise register of overall deaths, in no way as rigorous as the two Johns Hopkins studies (Lancet 1 & Lancet 2 for short). Until a further epidemiological survey is carried out, it's probably the best figure available. I would point out that the data provided [pdf] breaks down the sources of death in a fashion approximately similar to Lancet 2 [pdf]. Intriguingly, it has a separate category for "sectarian violence" to which it attributes only 4% of violent deaths. Perhaps this reflects the fact that much of what is reported as 'sectarian' violence is in fact the body count from paramilitary probes into communities by coalition appendages such as the police commandos. On the other hand, how is a 'sectarian' death by gunshot separable from an 'ordinary' death by gunshot? To put it a different way, gun-fire is a means of killing and sectarian violence is a mode of killing. The category doesn't belong in the same list and would probably invite confusion.

Aside from gunfire (40%), the biggest category of deaths is attributed to car bombings (21%). As I understand it, the more you break these figures down, the less accurate they become. If the overall figure is accurate to a 95% confidence level, that doesn't mean the figure for car bombings is accurate to the same level. However, all surveys register a high proportion of deaths from car bombings. If the trends in this survey hold, you are talking about 200,000 deaths from this tactic alone. If the trend in Lancet 2 holds, it would be closer to 130,000. Either way, it is spectacularly large and points to an intense war on various fronts that - even though car bombs draw more attention than other forms of death - is still airbrushed from general view. Both a weapon of state terror and the poor man's airforce, the weapon is effective, but also deadly. As Mike Davis put it, the car bomb is a weapon whose use is "guaranteed to leave its perpetrators awash in the blood of innocents", a "categorical censure" that applies "even more forcefully to the mass terror against civilian populations routinely inflicted by the air forces and armies of so-called 'democracies'". Not least because those air forces and armies are the instigators, originators and pioneers of the destruction of Iraq.

Labels: car bombs, death squads, iraq, iraqi resistance, lancet study, occupation

George Habash 1925-2008 posted by lenin

Labels: anticolonialism, george habash, marxism, palestine, pflp

Torture Fashion posted by lenin

Labels: fashion, torture

Benazir Bhutto, the Fairytale Princess. posted by lenin

Labels: bhutto, colonialism, india, pakistan

The Gazan "Shopping Spree" posted by lenin

Guest post by EasyWind:

Labels: gaza, Israel, lebanon, palestinians

Up in Flames posted by lenin

Labels: federal reserve, interest rates, recession, unemployment, us economy

Respect and the GLA Elections posted by lenin

Guest post by EastIsRed.

Last Saturday, around fifty activists crammed into one of the University of London Union's third-floor rooms to discuss the Respect campaign for the Greater London Assembly elections. The size of the meeting, and the geographical breadth it represented, came as a very pleasant surprise to many. Branches had sent on or two delegates each, which meant that the meeting represented a large and geographically diverse range of branches. Even areas where we are relatively weak, like south-east London, had some representation. Despite the internal arguments of the last few months, Respect activists across London were prepared to throw themselves into the campaign.

Because the possibilities remain: from the incipient recession, to the continuing occupation of Iraq , the space for a non-Labour left has expanded as perhaps never before. One important indicator is that those representing Old Labour values and significant social forces, previously tied exclusively to Labour, have seen where Brown is taking the Party, and have started to look elsewhere – not necessarily to Respect, naturally, but outside of Labour's thinning ranks.

So the large turnout was important. This was pretty much the first chance for Respect activists to meet up since "Respect Renewal" split from the organisation, and the first that provided the opportunity for a serious discussion of our strategy. George Galloway's exit from Respect had proved a distraction from real political work.

Discussion centred on two main points: first, a broad look at our strategy in the campaign; second, getting down to the hard slog of building an organisation and campaigning on the ground. The London elections are complex, by British standards: there's a mayor and a GLA to vote for. Each uses a somewhat different electoral system: you cast a first preference and a second preference for mayor, but you vote for a constituency candidate and then a party list for the GLA.

The party list vote is used to ensure the proportion of seats on the GLA matches parties' proportions of the citywide vote, and so smaller parties can manage to get a seat with a good poll across London. And – importantly – the preference system in the mayoral vote means you can vote for the candidate you actually like, followed by the candidate that will keep the Tories out – current mayor, Ken Livingstone. As he said, back in 2004, calling for a second preference Livingstone vote allowed Lindsey German and Respect to "campaign for her political position without risking a Tory victory."

This matters, because Livingstone's posse have been putting the word out that a left-wing challenge to the incumbent mayor will let the Conservatives take power in London. Either they don't understand the voting system or, more likely, they are being totally disingenuous: standing in the mayoral contest provides a brilliant platform for a candidate, with invites to hustings, media interviews, and so on, as well as London-wide mailshot of the candidate's manifesto. You don't get any of this if you just stand for the Greater London Assembly – a credible campaign for the GLA, in other words, absolutely demands that you also stand a candidate for mayor.

If you're pessimistic about building a non-Labour left, or simply wedded to the Labour Party, a credible campaign by the non-Labour left is the last thing you want to see. But Livingstone needs a left-wing challenge. His combination of nice noises about the war with appeasement for the City of London deserves to meet some opposition from the Left. It's absurd that Livingstone's (correct and necessary) opposition to Islamophobia should be taken as the only test he needs to pass; actually, this is the minimum we should be expecting from the "socialist" mayor of one of the most unequal cities in Europe. We simply have to raise our sights, and start to challenge the revolting concentrations of wealth, power and privilege that exist in London and across the UK.

Respect is unique in being the only electable organisation standing in these elections with anything worthwhile to say about the economy and, in particular, the City. No-one else will touch the bankers and the speculators: Livingstone has bent over backwards to accomodate them for the last eight years; Johnson doubtless fagged for a few at Eton; and the Lib Dems are firmly committed to the City's agenda, proposing (amongst other things) to ban strikes for public sector workers. Even the Green Party in London , as far as can be told, has said nothing on the issue.

So on what is fast becoming the most decisive political question – and the economy is a political question, whatever our neoliberal friends say – the main parties are in consensus: no challenge to the City, no change to the status quo.

This is hugely to Respect's advantage. There's a crying need for someone to stand up to the sort of free-market vanishing-point lunacy that has just seen the Government desperately bribing fat cats with our money to take Northern Rock off its hands. Livingstone and the London Labour Party aren't going to.

Of course, the recent attacks on Livingstone have been unfair: in many ways, I can't think of a better Mayor for the City, one better able to soft-soap his left-leaning constituents into accepting a London Plan written fundamentally entirely around the City's needs, or into tolerating a chief economic advisor (John Ross) who sings the praises of hedge funds. Former Tory candidate Stephen Norris couldn't do it: much of London would be up in arms if this king of PFI tried anything similar. Likewise for Johnson. That Livingstone's vision for the capital has effectively collapsed into City boosterism is a terrible shame – it's not particularly surprising since he's pulled, especially, by his ties to New Labour - but it is still a shame.

As such, there's an air of unreality about the politically unhinged Martin Bright laying into Livingstone for being too left-wing. It goes without saying that Livingstone needs defending from the red-baiting filth Bright and his new Tory friends are hawking about: Bright, this professional Islam-basher and habitual friend of the hard Right, should be treated with the contempt he richly deserves. It should go without saying, too, that Livingstone deserves any left-winger's second preference – better a London mayor who opposes the Iraq war and racism, than a racist who militantly supported the invasion of Iraq. It's perfectly obvious which one is closer to ordinary Londoners.

There's an argument out there that the Left shouldn't even stand against Livingstone for precisely those reasons. It was kind of "Respect Renewal" to confirm everything we said about their split from Respect by having their leadership come out in wholehearted support of Labour's candidate for Mayor. It's perfectly clear, now, that what took place was a left-right split: one side wanted an independent, non-Labour organisation of the Left; the other side was quite prepared to compromise with New Labour, even to the point of ducking key political questions. And the outbreaks of bafflement and consternation amongst the waifs and strays on what we must suppose is Renewal's left-wing show exactly why a new formation of the Left needs a leadership accountable to its members – which was, of course, precisely the point.

Although I strongly suspect those elements of Renewal's leadership now trooping off rightwards to a happy marriage with New Labour would dearly love to really trash Respect on the way, they're not in a good position to do so: they've ruled out a mayoral candidate and they're only standing one constituency candidate in the GLA. However, they've put the word out that George Galloway will be heading up an anti-Respect GLA slate.

This may just be an attempt to put the frighteners on Respect, because it looks distinctly cack-handed otherwise: aside from the lopsidedness of supporting Livingstone, but then opposing his party, I will be amazed if they can mobilise the sort of London-wide political resources they need to run a convincing campaign across the city – especially without the added publicity of a mayoral candidate. One of the perils of relying too heavily on local opportunism is that you end up with the bulk of your membership scarcely bothered by what happens on the other side of Whitechapel High Street, let alone Norwood or Uxbridge.

Last April, when Lindsey German was selected unanimously by a meeting of more than 300 Respect members, the arguments were very different. Responding to a Morning Star editorial, which opposed a Respect mayoral bid, George Galloway MP and Lindsey German wrote a 900 word reply, which the Morning Star reprinted. They expressed surprise that the Star would urge a "free run" for Livingstone. "The Respect candidate came fifth in the last election, beating both the British National Party and the Greens. Yet you do not direct your appeal to the Green Party, which could also be accused of splitting the vote." Further:

The electoral system for London mayor actually makes it very hard for the vote to be split, since it operates on the basis of transfers - all candidates bar the top two have their second preference vote distributed to eventually determine the winner. Respect's candidate was the only one to call clearly for transfers to Ken in 2004 and more than a quarter of those voters responded - a relatively high proportion. And there is no reason to suppose that, if Respect does not stand, its voters will turn out in a greater proportion than our transfers and vote for Ken.

They stressed the importance of a "strong left voice" being expressed on "the issues facing Londoners - the acute housing crisis, which is not being dealt with, the transport system, which is both the most expensive and one of the worst in the world, the privatisation of the East London Line and the business agenda, which is making London a worse place for many of the poor to live". And they added:

Many Londoners are dissatisfied with the record of new Labour in government and will not turn out to vote Labour in the numbers that they once did. A vote for Respect by these people will help the left and can help Ken by lifting the left vote overall from people who might otherwise abstain.

A good vote for Respect will also help to keep the fascist BNP off the assembly. More votes for new Labour will not keep the BNP off the assembly, because the proportional representation system favours the election of smaller parties. So, the only way of keeping the BNP off is to vote for a left-wing, smaller party.

Respect is the obvious candidate for this vote - but its chances will be undermined without the publicity that comes from standing a mayoral candidate.

These arguments are as incisive today as they were in April. The difference is that George Galloway and his supporters are no longer making them. No matter. Respect, as the GLA meeting showed, has activists in place from Newham to Neasden. Reports across the city are promising: Respect members are involved in campaigns to defend victimised trade unionists, against council house stock transfer, and against city academies. In Waltham Forest, north-east London, we face an immediate electoral challenge with a local council by-election. There are very good reason to think we can get a credible vote. There's no guarantee about this, especially with Labour and the Lib Dems throwing themselves into the contest, but if our candidate, Carole Vincent, can get the sort of vote Respect has been achieving up and down the country, we'll be on target for the GLA. (Anybody wanting to help with the campaign can find details here.)

Lindsey German was, after all, just 4,000 votes short of election last time round – and that was when Respect was just a few months old. We beat the BNP and even the Greens into 6th and 7th places on the mayoral vote. Just 0.43% more of the vote would've lifted Lindsey over the magic 5% hurdle, and onto the GLA.

Around 23% of our vote came from the City and East constituency, where Galloway currently has his only activist base. Even if half of that vote disappears as a result of the split, a good campaign across the rest of London still puts the GLA well within our grasp. There is not only a need but a real thirst for a left-wing challenge to the neoliberal consensus. It can be seen all over: from the sold-out film-showing we held last Sunday, to the excellent recent attendances for Respect meetings across the country.

We've also had vastly more experience running elections now, and have a hugely higher brand recognition, and a significantly larger membership and activist base. The split has damaged us, of course, but not as much as might be supposed: and, remember, we elected our first councillor a long time before we elected George Galloway. It was impossible to come away from the GLA planning meeting without thinking that we were in with a shout, giving a voice to the hundreds of thousands of ordinary, working-class Londoners excluded by all the main parties.

The Respect GLA campaign launch is a week today, Thursday, 31 January, at Conway Hall, Red Lion Square WC1, from 7.30pm. If you want an alternative in London to the parties of neoliberalism and war, you need to be there.

Labels: gla elections, london, mayor, new labour, respect, socialism

Lebanon Strike posted by lenin

Via 3arabawy and Sursock, I hear that there's a general strike in Lebanon. Apparently, the army are being sent in to, er, keep order. Though I've seen no indication that Hezbollah are backing the strikes themselves, pro-American commentators are blaming Hezbollah for the general sense of disorder. The truth is that Hezbollah have been extraordinarily tentative about the effective collapse of the government, and are rather too reluctant to rock the boat.

Check out Sursock and 3arabawy for updates.

Labels: hezbollah, lebanon, strike, trade unions

Beyond the Ken posted by lenin

Look, if anyone asks, I wasn't here. I'm busy. I have things to do. But as it's my coffee-break, allow me to expatiate a bit on this nasty little witch-hunt against London mayor Ken Livingstone. He is, according to creeps like Martin Bright and the Evening Standard crowd, a drunk, a brawler, a cronyist, a confederate of "Trotskyists" (Socialist Action, a tiny group that operates within the Labour Party), and a collaborator with evil (the Muslim kind). As Seumas Milne points out, where it isn't irrelevant, it's largely reactionary whinging. It isn't the first time there's been a media frenzy over Livingstone's alleged failings. There were the allegations of anti-Semitism from the Evening Standard a while ago when Ken Livingstone compared an Evening Standard reporter to a concentration camp guard and the guy happened to be Jewish. The Sun routinely attacks Livingstone, especially over his "shocking anti-US rants". Labour Friends of Israel once tried to undermine Livingstone's mayoral campaign with a dossier accusing him of an "anti-Zionist bias". But the recent spiral of attacks is designed to ensure he is replaced as London mayor by Boris Johnson. There's a section of New Labour opinion that would rather have four years of the tweedy twit from Henley and then get a proper pro-war Blairite figure selected as the Labour candidate next time round. Nick Cohen is such a one. Amazingly, Johnson was just 1% behind Livingstone in a recent poll.

The mayor of London has one or two things going for him. He has resisted, by and large, the Islamophobic agenda of his opponents. He has opposed the war on Iraq. He cut a nice little oil deal with Hugo Chavez which cut bus fares for low income earners. And even though the congestion charge is unfairly applied it did succeed in reducing traffic in Central London, and he is successfully reducing emissions. He also didn't allow himself to be bullied by the pro-pigeon lobby. These things count. On the other hand, he has largely been a pal to New Labour, ditched his efforts to block tube privatisation, pushed neoliberal fiscal policies, and promoted the interests of the City. He has attacked striking tube workers and called on people to cross picket lines. He smeared the tube driver Chris Barrett who was unfairly sacked by London Underground as a "parasite". He has attacked anticapitalist protesters. He has defended the police who shot Jean Charles De Menezes and particularly the Met Commissioner. While he has promoted the idea of a limited amount of affordable housing - a good idea, but drastically short of what's needed - he has decided to allow the market to determine what counts as "affordable". In fact, he usually gives in to pressure from the Home Builders' Federation, as when he abandoned minimum space requirements that were designed to prevent Londoners being cramped into smaller and smaller homes - this matters a lot when, especially in places like Tower Hamlets, few family-sized homes are built by the private sector, and overcrowding is endemic. I might mention that before he became mayor, Livingstone was one of the most disgusting cheerleaders of the war on Yugoslavia. Livingstone doesn't recognise the category of a principle, and is notorious for flopping left or right depending on the circumstances. As he is a creature of the Labour Party electoral machine, he usually flops to the right. Like I say, his strengths do count - they just don't count for much.

However. Livingstone is much better than his bigoted neoconservative opponent, Boris Johnson. Johnson is not merely an old reactionary racist twit, he is aggressively pro-imperialist, aligned with the Ed Vaizeys and Michael Goves of the Tory party, the Henry Jackson wing. When it comes to a contest with the Tories, there is no contest. The Tomb should have something about the upcoming GLA and mayoral elections shortly. I don't know about you, but I will be voting for Respect candidates where I can. That will include putting my cross beside Stop the War convenor Lindsey German for London mayor. However, I will put Ken Livingstone for my second preference, as I did in 2004. My understanding is that the Respect candidate is urging people who vote for her to put Livingstone as the second preference. Interestingly, when Lindsey German stood in the last mayoral election, Livingstone took the trouble to praise her, noting that the non-sectarian way in which she mobilised "allows her to campaign for her political position without risking a Tory victory". He was right. Lindsey was able to beat both the BNP and the Greens and come out fifth, but at the same time the Tories lost by a decent margin. Backing Livingstone for a second preference, in order to properly campaign on the issues that matter while doing nothing to assist a Johnson victory, is obviously the best way to proceed. But right at this moment, and whatever criticisms are justly levelled at the mayor, I think it obvious that everyone on the Left ought to defend Livingstone against this tetra-tsunami of reactionary twaddle. As you were.

Labels: ken livingstone, london, mayor, new labour, respect, socialism

Left Party rattles the German mainstream parties posted by lenin

As the Left Party looks to make a historical breakthrough in the Western German state of Hesse, the mainstream parties - particularly the SPD, are looking to exclude them at all costs. This, one of four states being contested this year, is significant because it would be the first time the Left Party has broken through in the West of Germany. The party polls in double digits nationally, with up to 30% in the East and between 6-10% in the West, and may well be able to carry this through into the Bundestag elections next year. In the last elections in 2005, it won 8.7% of the vote and 54 seats, polling particularly strongly in Berlin, Saxony, Brandenburg and Saxony-Anhalt, all in the East. Making it in the West would make it plain that they're here to stay. The SPD, currently in a national coalition with the CDU, says it would rather ally with the right-wing Free Democrats than form any coalition with the Left Party, which is the main national opponent of the 'Agenda 2010' reforms introduced by Schroeder and backed by Merkel. That's what happens when you challenge neoliberalism - the mainstream parties know that they share far more than they let on, and will do anything to avoid a serious challenge to that consensus.

Labels: germany, left party, neoliberalism, socialism

Score one for Hamas posted by lenin

The Times reckons it has an exclusive:

...a Hamas border guard interviewed by The Times at the border today admitted that the Islamist group was responsible and had been involved for months in slicing through the heavy metal wall using oxy-acetylene cutting torches.

That meant that when the explosive charges were set off in 17 different locations after midnight last night the 40ft wall came tumbling down, leaving it lying like a broken concertina down the middle of no-man's land as an estimated 350,000 Gazans flooded into Egypt.

If that's true, then Hamas have just blown Annapolis out of the water, flipped off the corrupt Fatah leadership, and probably undone several months of vilification. At any rate, many seem eager to credit Hamas:

"I’m Fatah, but today, I wish I could see (Hamas prime minister Ismail) Haniyeh and kiss his forehead, because without the gunmen doing this, we would have been stuck in the Gaza Strip"

But, already, Israel is preparing its own narrative: Palestinians buying diesel is, apparently, a "first class security threat". Yeah, just like tall those children Israel guns down in the streets, often as a sport. Big security risk.

Labels: gaza, hamas, Israel, palestine

"Britain's Muslims too Extreme": a mountebank whines. posted by lenin

Dr Barham Salih of the PUK, deputy prime minister of Iraq, has said that he is "shocked" by the level of extremism among British Muslims:

After visiting mosques in Lancashire, Dr Salih said: "I am not surprised that you British are facing so many problems with extremists after what I saw in those mosques in Blackburn. What I saw would not be allowed in Iraq – it would be illegal."

Very well, then. What sort of things would be allowed in Iraq?






Torture, rape with chemical lights, death by drill, Palestinian hanging, electrocution, burning, tearing off strips of skin, beating, etc etc. No, they don't allow any of that in Blackburn. Perhaps that's what's ailing us. We need a bit of torture in public life to control the restive populace.

Labels: death squads, iraq, islam, islamophobia, torture

Palestinians break the blockade! posted by lenin

Tens of thousands of Palestinians, led by women, have broken through the border wall at the Rafah crossing. Hossam el-Hamalawy has some footage here. Yesterday there were some clashes with Mubarak's thugs, but today they forced their way through and are now purchasing desperately needed supplies. They risked attack by Egypt's security forces, which have effectively acted as paid retainers for Washington and Tel Aviv in supporting the blockade. Mubarak has declared a state of emergency, but his thugs haven't dared attack the Palestinians yet. The rebellious Egyptian working class (also with women taking the lead) are sympathetic to the Palestinians, and they may have something to say about their government supporting the Israeli seige.

فلسطين الحرة!!

Labels: blockade, free free palestine, gaza, Israel, palestine

Back to Basics posted by lenin

Guest post by EasyWind:



Israel's weapons engineers have struck another coup in their long-term quest to produced the biggest and most phallic piece of anti-Palestinian ballistic equipment. Dashing the dreams of satire writers and comedians the world over, the Israeli weapons engineers have obtained one of the more suggestive poses in the history of rocketry.

The screen shot above was clipped of Israeli news portal YNET. The text says:

Exposed[1]: An Israeli Missile Against Hizbullah. First publication: this evening the Stunner missile being developed by the Defense System [2] against the Zilzal and Fajr - the Hizbulla's long-distance rockets - was revealed for the first time. The RAFAEL scientists today showed the Prime Minister the missile, as well as the Kipat Habarzel [3] [which is supposed to work] against the Qassem [missiles]. Olmert: Speed up the development.

Later versions of the story used this picture with the dignitaries clipped from the chest up ... Tomb-goers have the privilege of seeing the original version.

Linguistic note: one of the many Hebrew words for weapons is "kley zayin" or "phallic implements".

[1] OK, that *should* be translated "revealed". But the Hebrew word is the same for both, and I think what they're doing is more "exposing"...

[2] [sic]. This implies "government-financed corporations that were privatized and are now under the control of formerly-Russian arms dealers and American Neocons.

[3] This is both the Iron Dome and the Iron Yarmulka (ritual head covering identifying the Zionist-nationalist orthodox Jewish men from the ultra-orthodox men, who wear harder hats, and secular Jewish men, who wear no head covering, even if they are nationalist.)

EasyWind is a Hebrew translator, who watches the Israeli press and blogosphere for Lenin's Tomb.

Labels: arms industry, Israel, weapons system

How bad can it be? posted by lenin

According to Soros, it's the worst financial crisis since World War II. Michael Metz of Oppenheimer Funds says it's "the worst post-war recession" so far. Despite the Fed's sharp rate cut, it looks like "the most serious recession since World War II". The Bank of America's Quarter 4 profit was 95% down on last year, and Wachovia - the fourth largest bank in the US - lost 98% of its profits. The US stock exchange and the FTSE fluctuated wildly today in reaction to the interest rate cut, but such sharp movements almost always happens before a big crash. China is taking a huge knock from the US decline, and Asian stocks were particularly badly hit yesterday. The current problems could be the tip of the proverbial iceberg and, to stretch the metaphor a bit further, the global economy is looking increasingly like the Titanic.

Well, who really knows what could happen? On the one hand, the experts always panic when the economy shows signs of tanking, and the global economy has so far survived. On the other, the reason they panic is that the fundamentals are not sound, and the next recession could always be The Big One. These are the profit rate trends for a selection of the most powerful economies:



This is the root of the problem. Without the return on investment, there is little impetus to invest. As Robert Brenner points out in The Economics of Global Turbulence, the steps taken to curtail wage growth and reduce labour costs are rational from an individual company's perspective, but the aggregate result is a massively reduced utilisation of existing capital and a decreasing willingess to invest. Investment barely rose above its 2000 level even during the recovery, which is acknowledged to have been weak. But the problem expresses itself in this way, because the decline takes place in a context in which manufacturing is already weakened. As Ha-Joon Chang points out, to demote manufacturing in the hope of growth through the services industries can be a bigger mistake than relying on the extraction of raw materials since productivity levels in the services sector are generally very low, and those that have potentially high productivity growth (banking and IT) have manufacturers as their main clients. But it would be wrong to see this as simply a mistake. The financialization of the US economy and the abolition of international restraints on capital flows was a political project. It has made it possible for the US ruling class to restore its power domestically, by breaking up labour and reorganising property forms; and it has enabled it to daringly re-assert its global hegemony on the basis of a realisation made by Wilson's government as it entered World War I - the global scale of US interests does not require direct territorial rule. Rather, the US can extract surplus value from the world as long as advantageous market relations are in place. This state of affairs demands the constant threat and use of force. Capital deterritorializes and reterritorializes very rapidly, so it falls to whoever would rule to guarantee an orderly and pliable system of nation-states based on the most sophisticated information available. The rapid re-organisation of Eastern Europe, the Balkans and the Central Asian states after the collapse of the Soviet Union is a dramatic case in point. It didn't usually require force on the part of the United States, just bribery, threats, cajoling, the steady supply of 'expertise' under the direction of Jeffrey Sachs, and so on. But some recalcitrant cases did require a bit of bludgeoning, and it was necessary to expand the system of bases. At any rate, with the decisive transformation after the Volcker recession, US companies were able to intensify their rate of extraction from the rest of the world, and the IMF and World Bank have always been on hand to assist that project.

As two stories linked by Chabert indicate, the larger part of the cost can and will be passed on to the working class (in this case African American workers) unless there is substantial resistance. The Washington Post reported yesterday that "workers who lost a job in 2001 to 2003 took an average pay cut of 17 percent in their new jobs, more than double the average cut of those displaced in the late 1990s". Recessions destroy capital, and many of the world's richest people and companies are panicking. However, from the point of view of the broader capitalist class, that destruction can be brilliantly creative. It can create opportunities for highly profitable redeployment after the smoke clears, and for the further consolidation of class power as the labour market is successfully disciplined. If the crisis is very deep, it can be system-threatening, but only if there is a movement ready with an alternative. As things stand, the global Left and the working class do not meet this crisis in an optimal condition to ensure that it results even in social-democratic reform, much less fundamental social transformation. And there is always the far right waiting in the wings. How bad can it be? Very bad.

Labels: economy, global economy, recession, US imperialism

Bloggery posted by lenin

A few quick notes. The Lenin's Tomb mailing list has about 160 subscribers, who receive some irregular notice of posts I want to draw attention to. It is not a discussion forum, although people very occasionally use it to pass on information about campaigns or whatever. And it can be quite useful for spreading info. It can easily handle more subscribers, so feel free to sign up using the box in the sidebar to your right if you want.

The second thing is, the Sitemeter at the bottom of this page is inaccurate, and not in the good way (ie, it doesn't inflate the numbers). I've only recently discovered that Sitemeter and other similar services have a reputation for seriously undercounting visitors. It is true that another service that doesn't appear on the site gives me an extra hundred unique visitors a day, Google Analytics ditto, and a system that used to exist but went out of business gave me a couple of hundred more. However, some say that no free service really tells you how many page views, or unique visits, you get. The professional services that you pay for, or get free with certain packages like Wordpress, apparently describe five or six times more unique visits. Now, since I don't have advertisements on the site, I would generate no revenue from having five or six times more visitors - this is entirely an ego issue. As such, I'm not going to change the hosting service or pay for some package or other. But I am going to piss and moan about it. And perhaps find some way to get a proper counting device free.

The third matter is the breakdown of visits that are picked up. Over the last month, according to Google Analytics, the numbers of people visiting the site from from the US and the UK were almost identical. Canada was the third largest supplier of Tombsters, with Australia, Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Italy and Sweden picking up the rest. I am surprised by the ratio of American visitors, since in the past the main readership has been British, but you are all welcome as long as you leave your guns at home. The next step is to conquer China and India, both of which need more and better Leninism. According to sitemeter's continental breakdown, only 6% of my readers are in Asia (3% from Israel, if you can believe that), and only 1% in Africa (almost all Egyptian readers). I am a bit tied up at the moment, but clearly an intercontinental push is called for. Fourth, the comments facilities continue to be moderated, which is a mild pain in the arse, but it does prevent those rapid-fire comment-wars that usually degenerate rather quickly, and it weeds out trolls who make the comments unreadable. For that reason, until I can come up with a better solution, moderation has to stay on. As the amount of recent pro-Israel bile indicates, this doesn't mean that political adversaries are unwelcome. But it does give yours truly a tiny sense of what it's like to be God (a lot more boring than people imagine).

And the final point is on submissions. Yes, it's time you did your fair share, you bastards. Ask not what your blog can do for you, ask what you can do for your blog. If you have something to get off your chest that isn't a sticky residue, then why not send it to the Tomb (e-mail in the sidebar) as a candidate for a guest post. We've had guest posts from 'elpresidente', Guy Taylor, 'Strategist', John Brissenden, Leon Kuhn, K-Punk, Andy Zebrowski, Gareth Dale and others on topics as diverse as the environment, the Cairo Conference, the teachers' strike, mass protests in Mexico, etc etc. They have all been well-received, and often provided info that wouldn't be available through the corporate media, so it's an important part of Tomb culture and I want more of it. Don't make me send out a requisition for it.

Labels: bloggery, comments, guest posts, lenin's tomb

9/11 on the stock exchange posted by lenin

Biggest plunge since 9/11. Bush advocating a stimulus package (tax cuts for business, mainly). Wall Street panicking. Dramatic increase in long-term joblessness among skilled workers. What on earth is going on?

Some sort of crisis, I wager.

Labels: economy, jobs, recession, stock market, wages

Collective Punishment - Olmert Explains posted by lenin

"As far as I'm concerned, all the residents of Gaza can walk and have no fuel for their cars, because they have a murderous terrorist regime that doesn't allow people in the south of Israel to live in peace ... We are trying to attack terrorists, but we also show the population that it cannot shed itself of responsibility for the situation. We won't allow the Palestinians to fire on us and destroy life in Sderot, while in Gaza life is going on as usual."

Life as usual. What does that look like, I wonder? It wouldn't be starvation, fuel shortage, water shortage, disease, regular raids, blockade and occupation, would it? It would? Ah. Alright so.

Labels: collective punishment, gaza, Israel, palestine

"Empires crumble" posted by lenin

Labels: empire, france, jean-luc godard

Every Day Is Ashura, Every Land Is Karbala posted by Yoshie

Listen to "Salam bar Hossein," sung by Sadegh Ahangaran, to commemorate the day of Ashura.

Via Ihsan

Ali Shariati said, "Every day is Ashura, every land is Karbala." It means the same thing as Karl Marx's answer to John Swinton (John Swinton, "Karl Marx," The Sun, 6 September 1880):

"What is?" I had inquired, to which, in deep and solemn tone, he replied: "Struggle!"

PS: Several other songs by Ahangaran are made available at the Web site of Radio Iran.

Labels: class, iran, islam

Getting away with murder in Gaza posted by lenin

It turns out that this is stupendously easy. The magic word is "Sderot". Poor old Sderot. Poor, wretched Sderot. Gaza is a place where "rage" boils and bubbles over, especially since the "Hamas takeover" (the failed Fatah putsch, in other words), and Sderot pays the price. Rockets, empty streets, fleeing mattresses, the dog not getting walked. Poor, miserable Sderot.




Gaza has been under Israeli siege for some time. It is starving. Aid can't get in, because of Israel's blockade. Israel continues to ravage the territory with air strikes. As usual, Israel's imposition of its preferred racial order in the Middle East regionally intersects with its domestic racial order. The daily massacres in Gaza coincide with the the internal campaign against the Bedouin of the Negev, the ongoing theft of Palestinian land and property, the 'Judaising' of annexed territory, the construction of segregated roads, all the usual. In the West Bank, a Fatah fiefdom since June, attacks are frequent. It doesn't matter how much Abbas connives - even his allies are not safe from Israeli assassination.




Gaza, elevated to the happy status of an open air prison since Israel's 2005 redeployment, a move designed to reproduce Israel's "Jewish-democratic character" (Israel can't absorbe too many Arabs, as its political and military leadership is often at pains to point out), is now in full lockdown. Long before Hamas was elected in 2006, Israel was busily establishing "facts on the ground" across Palestine, with repeated attacks to back them up, and with a feckless and increasingly coopted Fatah incapable of doing anything much about it. One notorious attack in Gaza was launched against a refugee camp. From 2000-2006, Israel killed 2,300 Gazans, mainly civilians (whom it deliberately targets). Ever since, it has been using a combination of Quartet-supported blockade and routine attacks to ramp up the terror and suffering. The imposed power cuts and fuel shortages have entailed a shortage of clean water, with predictable effects. The seige launched in mid-2006, with extensive use of human shields, power stations bombed, and hundreds killed, was eclipsed by an all-out war on Lebanon. But the attacks on Gaza didn't stop. A single Israeli bomb killed two families, eighteen Palestinians, in Gaza in November 2006. In the same month, the IDF distinguished itself with a public massacre of female demonstrators outside a mosque. Shells were deliberately fired at Palestinian homes. In 2006 and 2007, Israel killed 816 Palestinians, including 152 children. Almost every child in Gaza has witnessed shootings, attacks, had their homes bombarded. 99.4% of Gazan children suffer trauma. The response from Palestinian groups, even with the determined effort to inflict some damage after the murder of the Ghaliya family, has been pretty low-key. Qassam rockets, smarties-tubes packed with gunpowder and sherbert, pathetically inept devices that rarely hit their intended target, or even any target at all. Since Israel's strategy of promoting civil war culminated in the loss of Gaza, it has been threatening to attack the strip. This attack has now begun in earnest.

Oh, but the luckless Sderot happens to be located nearby, thus copping a few miserable Qassam rockets that leave potholes in the streets and damage the walls. Poor, woebegone Sderot.

Labels: fatah, gaza, hamas, Israel, occupation, palestine, sderot, zionism

Can you tell me how to get to K Street? posted by lenin

Because I need to kick somebody's ass. Have you seen this?

After a series of legislative defeats in 2007 that saw the year end with more U.S. troops in Iraq than when it began, a coalition of anti-war groups is backing away from its multimillion-dollar drive to cut funding for the war and force Congress to pass timelines for bringing U.S. troops home.

...

The groups believe this switch in strategy can draw contrasts with Republicans that will help Democrats gain ground in November and bring the votes to pass more dramatic measures. But it is a long way from the early months of 2007, when Democrats were freshly in power and momentum for a dramatic shift in Iraq policy seemed overpowering.

“There was a consensus that last year was not productive,” John Isaacs, executive director of Council for a Livable World, said of a meeting attended by a coalition of anti-war groups last week. “Our expectations were dashed.”

The meeting, held at an office on K Street, was attended by around 20 representatives of influential anti-war groups, including MoveOn.org and Americans Against Escalation in Iraq, which spent $12 million last year opposing the war.

Isaacs said he thought the meeting would be a difficult one, with an adamant faction pressing for continued focus on timelines and funding. It wasn’t to be.

“We got our heads together and decided to go a different way,” Isaacs said. “The consensus was not to keep beating our heads against the wall trying to block every funding bill — not because we don’t agree with it, but because we don’t have the votes.”

Moira Mack, a spokeswoman for AAEI, was also at the meeting. “There was a lot of agreement that this is really the way that we can best get our message across about endless war versus end-the-war and draw clear distinctions between anti-war Democrats and pro-war Republicans. They really don’t want to end the war. This is the perfect legislative opportunity.”

This sadly reflects one of the weaknesses of the US antiwar movement - its deep fragmentation with much of the leadership composed of supporters of the Democratic Party. Since when were there "clear distinctions" available between "anti-war Democrats and pro-war Republicans"? The only way this fiction can be maintained is if they maintain the pretense, as they do, that funding for the war couldn't be shot down because they "didn't have the votes". The claim from the Democrats was that an executive veto, which can be issued whenever there is less than two-thirds Congressional support for a given bill, prevented them from withholding funding. It's a lie. In order for funding to be issued, Congress has to vote in the affirmative for it, which couldn't have happened without the Democrats who are now in the majority. This is an extremely costly war, and even if there is considerable troop "drawdown", the Congressional Budget Office expects it to cost a total of $2.73 trillion. To fork over this much on behalf of the taxpayer while blithering on about balanced budgets and so on is a serious commitment. The lie can only survive if people ignore the fact that Democrats already had plenty of opportunity to set withdrawal timetables and chose not to pursue it. The first time they bothered to even ask nicely was in November last year - arguably a necessary pitch before the elections - but they quickly caved in and gave Bush an extra $70bn to pursue the ongoing occupation, sans strings. But who am I to question success? The subordination of the priorities of the antiwar movement to the electoral strategy of the Democrats worked well in 2004, did it not? And the conduct of Democrats elected in 2006 has been a real blast, hasn't it? Let's have more of that, why not?

Labels: 'war on terror', antiwar movement, democrats, george w bush, iraq

The limits of humanitarianism. posted by lenin

About a month after bloggers noticed, the Washington Post has reported on the confirmation of a vast escalation in aerial attacks on Iraq. Of course, they have done so only after carefully filtering the information through Pentagon spokespeople, which means that they have seriously described the attacks as being directed at weapons caches, safe houses and bomb making facilities. Presumably, if they have intelligence that good, it would be a relatively simple matter to go and find the caches and bomb equipment and take them back to base - while also taking snapshots for the media to reproduce as part of the 'success' story. However, leave that aside. Far more problematic is the obligatory 'humanitarian' angle: yes, this aggressive new campaign by General David Petraeus is striking the insurgents hard, but what about the innocent? Thus:

The greater reliance on air power has raised concerns from human rights groups, which say that 500-pound and 2,000-pound munitions threaten civilians, especially when dropped in residential neighborhoods where insurgents mix with the population. The military assures that the precision attacks are designed to minimize civilian casualties -- particularly as Petraeus's counterinsurgency strategy emphasizes moving more troops into local communities and winning over the Iraqi population -- but rights groups say bombings carry an especially high risk.

"The Iraqi population remains at risk of harm during these operations," said Eliane Nabaa, a spokeswoman for the U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq. "The presence of individual combatants among a great number of civilians does not alter the civilian character of an area."

UNAMI estimates that more than 200 civilian deaths resulted from U.S. airstrikes in Iraq from the beginning of April to the end of last year, when U.S. forces began to significantly increase the strikes to coordinate with the expansion of ground troops.

...

Human rights groups estimate that Afghan civilian casualties caused by airstrikes tripled to more than 300 in 2007, fueling fears that such aggressive bombardment could be catastrophic for the innocent.

Marc Garlasco, a military analyst at Human Rights Watch who tracks airstrikes in Iraq and Afghanistan, said the strikes carry unique risks. "My major concern with what's going on in Iraq is massive population density," he said. "You have the potential for very high civilian casualties, so you need really granular intelligence on what you're going to hit. But I don't think they're being careless."

Leave aside the fact that the numbers they give for civilian deaths are utterly risible, an unbelievably low estimate by any standards. Leave aside the fact that it is completely implausible that the strategy of aerial bombardment is only killing large numbers of 'baddies'. We know enough about US military strategy to know that they consistently carry out attacks which deliberately kill large numbers of civilians. Even Mark Garlasco knows this. The only question they see fit to ask is whether some civilians might be "caught in the cross-fire" as it were, and whether the planners are being "careless", (even where they admit half-way through the article that the bombings are partially designed to terrorise). And not only is this the automatic purview of the Washington Post, it happens to be shared by Human Rights Watch. I can think of other problems that might be raised, one of which is that those resisting the US forces militarily are no more in need of swift airborne death than those who are not directly involved in combat. The US, after all, has no business being in Iraq, much less razing the country to the ground in order to kill those who do not assent to them being there. But humanitarian discourse in this context admits no knowledge of the criminality of US-orchestrated mass violence designed to subdue the country.

Human Rights Watch distinguished itself during the attack on Lebanon with a set of spurious attacks on Hezbollah for allegedly deliberately targeting civilians with its rocket-fire. It later emerged that while Israel's claims that Hezbollah hid its rocket launchers among civilians were bogus, Israel had certainly located prime military targets right among its population centres. HRW blithely insisted that this made no difference to its claim that Hezbollah indiscriminately attacked civilians. The point isn't really that HRW and like organisations are inconsistent in their determination of criminality. On the contrary, they are consistently biased toward the purlieus of power when they systematically fail to acknowledge or take account of prior, ongoing aggression. In the almost exclusive emphasis on the civilian-military distinction (which matters, I make no bones about it), they reproduce an ideological formation which holds that the incineration, shredding and dispersing of those designated combatants is perfectly acceptable: even if there are other options; even if the war need never have taken place; even if the murder is being perpetrated by aggressors who have it within their power to terminate hostilities at any point.

It is easy to understand why the reigning ideology sets aside a substantial space for 'human rights' criticism, which can be incorporated provided it doesn't "go too far" or step outside its designated boundaries and offer what is invariably construed as "politicised" commentary (whereas omitting the salient facts is not at all politicised). Humanitarianism in action mandates the most extraordinary barbarism. Impeccable sources of moral jurisdiction, authoritatively coequivalent with the missionaries, the court clerics and the piritual advisors. They bear the ensign of opposition, and a purpose derived from a higher authority (natural rights), and all the while they consistently absolve. Is it any wonder the new imperialists spent the greater part of the 1990s refining the categories of humanitarianism?

Labels: barbarism, humanitarianism, occupation, US imperialism

Is Hip Hop Dead? posted by lenin

A vital debate, I feel. Here's Nas's contribution:



And this is the retort from KRS-One:

Labels: hip hop, krs-one, nas

Nasrallah on the Bush administration. posted by lenin

From Hezbollah TV, an interesting discussion of Nasrallah's impressions of the US:

BEWARE OF RELIGIOUS TREND IN US ADMINISTRATION
Sayyed Nasrallah said that to better understand this visit, one can refer to studies, facts, researches and books issued in the US by reliable think tanks. "From these studies, we can conclude that the current US administration continues to be a coalition of three groups: The first is major oil firms, since key figures in this administration either own oil companies or arms factories. So the second is large arms industries. The third group is a religious trend in the US called Christian Zionists. However I do not want to use this term so that the Divine Christian religion is not offended." His eminence explained that this religious group is a strong constituent of the tripartite coalition. The other two groups are interested in controlling oil resources and marketing weapons, he added.
"However the third religious group has millions of supporters, controls media outlets and enterprises. This group believes that it is paving the way for the return of Jesus Christ to Earth, They believe that one of the conditions for his return is the rise of a Jewish state; a condition that materializes in Israel. It is also required that all the Jews from across the globe live in Palestine.
What they are doing for the Jews is not out of love, not to defend Semitism, not to show regret for massacres, but because they deride Israel for the sake of their own ideological project. Hence, I would like to point to two issues: What this religious trend is undertaking should not give anyone in our Arab and Islamic worlds any reason whatsoever to hold the Christians responsible for it. Whatever they are doing will backlash because Jesus Christ peace be upon him will not advocate Israel, oil firms, weapons industries or any tyrant on this Earth. He will advocate the oppressed."

This is worth mentioning because it amounts to a slightly more sophisticated analysis than some of Nasrallah's previous statements (I mean the ones that can be verified) in which he appeared to subscribe to the sort of "wag the dog" thesis that John Mearsheimer, Stephen Walt and even James Petras have been putting about.

Labels: hezbollah, Israel, lebanon, nasrallah, US imperialism

Weird exchange posted by lenin

The Tory MP Edward Leigh gets up and asks the Prime Minister "what was the point of invading Iraq, and killing 150,000 [sic] Iraqis, only to leave Basra to the Shi'ite militants?" Gordon Brown replies by praising the troops and pointing out that "violence has declined considerably in the last few months". So, Leigh points out that the war has been an absolute disaster, and then wonders why we didn't stick with it. And Brown defends the war by saying that violence declined as soon as we stopped fighting it. Anyone would think their dialogue had been written by Bird and Fortune.

Labels: gordon brown, iraq, occupation, pm questions

Wages, prices and profits posted by lenin

As teachers threaten strike action over public sector pay, Socialist Worker reminds us why. It isn't just the lousy 2.45% pay deal that Ed Balls has offered teachers, which amounts to an effective pay cut. The chart on the left shows projected inflation versus Brown's planned pay rates up until 2011, and as you can see, there's a year on year fall in spending power.

Part of the inflation is driven by rising global energy and commodity prices, while companies appear to be driving their prices up to make up shortfalls in profits or pay off debts. The most recent report suggests that food prices rose 5.9% year on year, and liquid fuels like heating oil rose 32 per cent. Our electricity and gas bills are going to go through the roof this year. Once again, prices are rising on essential goods in a way that will disproportionately hit the poor. (Parenthetically, I note that "stagflation" is the word on the New York streets, largely because of the horrific increase in import prices.)

The government's solution appears to be to stop us greedy bastards consuming so much with a modern day incomes policy. Your pay is apparently what's causing inflation and, well, they'll fix that in a hurry. Aside from pegging incomes for public sector workers, it looks as if the Bank of England will use any increase in inflation to maintain higher interest rates and thus curb consumption further. Interest repayments relative to disposable income are at a very high rate, averaging 19% just over a year ago according to a study by Price Waterhouse Coopers. In December it was revealed that 1 million people in the UK are having difficulty repaying their mortgages, which means borrowing more or extending the mortage. That also represents a reduction in disposable income.

SW points out that while median executive pay is up 7.8%, recent research that finds three quarters of monthly paid workers actually ran out of money in the last week of their pay run and have to subsist on a mixture of borrowing and scraping. No surprises there - practically everyone who isn't on an above-average income goes through this, and there are always nasty little shocks (a bill you forgot about, overdraft charges that the bank has just made up, a rise in minimum repayments on your credit card, a direct debit that bounces because you're fifty pence short, thus incurring another bank fee). And it's going to get tighter and tighter. As Larry Elliott relates, the government seems to be doing everything it can to take us back to the Bad Old Days Of The 1970s. As Elliott also points out, incomes policies have a way of collapsing within a short space of time. Are trade unionists really ready to believe that a country with a net worth of £6.5 trillion, where the Prime Minister has a bottomless pit to pay for war and is always ready to cut taxes for businesses while funding whatever ludicrous white elephant scheme he thinks fit, is unable to afford decent levels of public sector pay?

Labels: incomes policy, new labour, socialism, trade unions, wages

Britain's contribution to Gladio? posted by lenin

Well, Operation Gladio is a neglected component of the Cold War - neglected even though Cold War studies are obsessed with the struggle for Europe. The term itself embraces an array of different anti-communist repressive strategies deployed throughout Europe, using 'stay-behind' armies to thwart leftist upsurge wherever necessary. Revelations, well after the fact, are gradually emerging about the extent of secret operations conducted by European states against the Left, not always under the rubric of NATO. Recently, Paddy Woolworth produced a detailed history of Spanish state terrorism following the overthrow of fascism in that country - essentially a story of key structures of the fascist state persisting under the constitutional monarchy to orchestrate terrorist attacks that were attributed to ETA while at the same time conducting horrendous repression against the Basque revolutionaries. The revelation that Britain considered promoting an anti-communist coup in Italy to help thwart the Left is, as Philip Willan points out, unsurprising in this light. It was, after all, a fairly commonplace idea among the ruling elites that popular participation in political life should be restricted to choosing between an exceptionally narrow range of political forces, especially during the raging years of the 1970s. One small irony, of course, is that it was the same Labour government that elements in the security services and British ruling class had considered a coup against that were considering the overthrow of the centrist government in Italy.

Labels: cold war, communism, operation gladio, socialism, terrorism

Fight the Power posted by lenin

Some things never go out of fashion:



Public Enemy's latest album is their best for years, by the way.

Labels: public enemy

Chavez's retreat. posted by lenin

A while ago, Chavez announced a cabinet reshuffle, with the explanation that he was taking the radical edge off his government. The occasion for this is obviously his defeat by 1.3% of the vote in the recent referendum. The problematic nature of some of the policies, the fact that they were presented on a take it or leave it basis, and the haste with which they were taken to the polls, left many of Chavez's erstwhile supporters alienated. 3 million of his voters stayed home. Gregory Wilpert, the author of the excellent Changing Venezuela By Taking Power, has assessed the problems that dogged the reform attempt:

There appear to be four main reasons why the reform initiative failed: the way the campaign was conducted, the defection of long-time supporters, the mood in the country and the process through which the reform was developed. At first this process took place entirely within a closed circle of Chávez advisors. Then, when the National Assembly debated the proposal, legislators held public meetings to get outside input, but the process was rushed, covering 69 articles in two and a half months, so the discussion was superficial.

Opposition literature was characteristically packed with hyperbole and distortion, and the right-wing cried that dictatorship was afoot. Chavez tried to use his popularity to sell the proposals, but hitherto allies criticised the measures and many supporters were angered by the ineffectual way in which the previous reforms - welcomed as a rule - were delivered. Wilpert hoped that Chavez would find fault in the top-down process through which "socialism in the 21st Century" was being elaborated". Sadly, it looks as if Chavez has drawn the conclusion that the referendum defeat was a defeat for socialism in the immediate term, and therefore he will concentrate on winning over middle class Venezuelans and the national bourgeoisie. Stephanie Blankenburg, writing in The New Statesman, points out that this conclusion is probably not merited. The opposition did not gain votes, but Chavez lost them. One of the main reasons, she suggests, is the pressure exerted on the Chavistas by the state in which they are operating, which has conservatizing and corrupting tendencies. Many of the Chavistas, Blankenburg argues, are now effective opponents of a radical socialist agenda, and have used their position to block reform even where they publicly favour it. The effective boycott by 3 million voters may have been a protest by the "Chavista street" against the "Chavista elite". And the trouble, if this is true, is that Chavez may further alienate his popular base, and boost the confidence of the opposition, for whom Chavez's greatest protection is the willingness of millions of Venezuelans to mobilise in his defense. He was far wiser when he decided in 2002 that moderation and making nice to the opposition only emboldens them further.

Labels: chavez, socialism, venezuela

Holocaust survivor speaks on Palestine posted by lenin

Via Angry Arab, the story of Hedy Epstein:

Hedy Epstein, is a German Jewish Holocaust survivor, born in 1924, whose parents were sent to Auschwitz in 1942, where they perished. In 1948, Hedy Epstein went to live in United States. In 2003, she decided to make a trip to Palestine. Shocked by the oppression that the Israeli government is imposing on the Palestinians, she is, since then, devoting herself to make it known to the world. In the interview she gave to the Swiss journalist Silvia Cattori, Hedy Epstein speaks, with her gentle and mild voice, about her last travel to Palestine after a moving visit to one of several concentration camps to which her parents were deported. And she said: "I would like to dedicate this interview to the children of Gaza, whose parents cannot protect them or send them away to safety as my parents did when they sent me to England in May 1939 on a Kindertransport”

More

Labels: holocaust, Israel, palestine, zionism

John Singer Sargent at War posted by Yoshie

John Singer Sargent was born on 12 January 1856. He was an official war artist in 1918, commissioned to paint a work symbolizing cooperation between Britain and America during World War 1. A leading portraitist of high society, he was not known for his interest in politics, and yet his paintings of war allow the viewer to glimpse the Janus-faced brotherhood of warriors in class society and its political implications.

Take his "Gassed" and "Tommies Bathing."

Gassed, 1918


Tommies Bathing, 1918

It is solidarity with comrades, much more than loyalty to an abstract idea of nation or obedience to their superiors, that keeps men at war.

"He didn't have to go to Iraq. He chose to go. He wanted to be with his brothers." These are the words of the clearly distraught and heartbroken mother of Thomas, a marine recently killed in Iraq, describing her son's fatal decision to extend his enlistment in order to deploy with his unit. Of course, his family tried to convince him otherwise, but Thomas was adamant that "abandoning" his comrades as they headed into harm's way was not an option. . . . We fight, then, neither to achieve victory nor to kill an "enemy." We fight and, like Thomas, we die, because we love and could not live with the guilt and the shame of abandoning our brothers. (Camillo Mac Bica, "The Brotherhood of Warriors: The Love That Binds Us" MRZine, 19 March 2007)

In other words, the ruling class grasp what is best and noblest in men, their love for one another; mutilate it by excluding the Other -- enemy soldiers and civilians and homosexuals in their own ranks, for instance -- from men's love; and exploit it for their profit. "Gassed" reveals the physical and spiritual consequences of mutilated and exploited love; "Tommies Bathing" shows what love can be in a world without war.

Labels: iraq, war

Can the World Afford 'The Independent'? posted by lenin

So, The Independent is deeply worried about the effect of the Tato Nano, a new car available to India's "developing middle class" for a mere 100,000 rupees (or just over a thousand pounds). Their worry, of course, is about pollution - they imagine, with horror, hundreds of millions of Indian adults sending a pulse of billions of tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere each year. This is surely the sort of hypocrisy that earns Western liberals so much scorn throughout the world. Leave aside the pressing moral issue of whether an Indian family are as entitled to drive a car as Simon Kelner or his staff are. Environmental justice is a more complex issue than even Monbiot's per capita calculations would suggest (his approach is too individualistic in this respect), and I'm not delving into it here. It's just that The Independent is constantly encouraging people to buy expensive cars, make lots of cheap flights, and so on. MediaLens does a good job of keeping tabs on this. I do understand that India's per capita pollution is not ideal, and that it kills hundreds of thousands of Indians each year. And I agree that a proper public transport system is a better solution than highly unsafe cars being purchased. But a newspaper that regularly gives rave reviews to the latest Renault or whatever, accepts advertisements for the most polluting forms of behaviour, publishes hit pieces denouncing the environmental movement as quasi-Stalinist, is surely not well-placed to launch a moral panic on this question.

Labels: disaster politics, environment, independent, pollution

Alasdair Macintyre and the moralists. posted by lenin

Why did so much anti-Stalinist criticism descend into mysticism, platitudes, heroic ‘stands’ and dogma? Why was it so easily co-opted? There were principled socialist critics of the system, and there were charlatans and reactionaries. And then there were the moral critics who sometimes evolved from New Left positions, or avoided that business entirely, but often – in their role as moral critics – took pains to distance themselves from general theorising, which they saw as part of the problem, part of the totalising gesture by which the Stalinist machine assumed the right to arrogantly despoil millions of lives. Unless you take the position that anti-Stalinism is inherently petit-bourgeois anti-materialism, inherently counter-revolutionary, and inherently anti-socialist, the above questions demand answers. The philosopher Alisdair Macintyre tried, in the milieu of dissident Marxism, and in the afterglow of Hungary and Berlin, to provide them. In a two-part article for the New Reasoner, entitled ‘Notes from the Moral Wilderness’, he argued:

The ex-Communist turned moral critic of Communism is often a figure of genuine pathos. He confronts the Stalinist with attitudes that in many ways deserve our respect - and yet there is something acutely disquieting about him. I am not speaking now, of course, of those who exchange the doctrines of Stalinism for those of the Labour Party leadership, the Congress for Cultural Freedom or the Catholic Herald. They have their reward. I mean those whose self-written epitaph runs shortly, ' I could remain no longer in the Party without forfeiting my moral and intellectual self-respect; so I got out.' (A. H. Hanson, An Open Letter to Edward Thompson, N.R. No. 2, p.79.) They repudiate Stalinist crimes in the name of moral principle; but the fragility of their appeal to moral principle lies in the apparently arbitrary nature of that appeal.

The ex-communist had, by acquiescing in liberal morality, exchanged “one dominant pattern of thought for another; but the new pattern gives them the illusion of moral independence.” For the Stalinist, objective laws were to be found in the historical process, into which morality could be conveniently deliquesced. For the liberal, no such laws existed. Morality could be no more grounded in history than football could be grounded in astrophysics. Only the individual voice mattered, and from there all moral claims radiated, acquiring greater or lesser consensus. “Here I stand. I can do no other.” The critic in this way authorises herself to criticise, but at the cost of reducing the moral claim to arbitrariness. Thus:

The individual confronting the facts with his values condemns. But he can only condemn in the name of his own choice. The isolation which his mode of moral thinking imposes on the critic can tempt him in two directions. There is the pressure, usually much exaggerated by those who write about it, to exchange the participation in a Stalinist party for some other equally intense form of group membership. But there is also the pressure, far less often noticed, to accept the role of the isolated moral hero, who utters in the name of no one but himself. Ex-Stalinists who pride themselves on having become hard-headed realists seem to be peculiarly prone to this form of romanticism. They are the moral Quixotes of the age.

Not only that, but although they may as ex-communists continue to belabour non-communist governments in a display of impartiality, their ground has already been bought and reserved by the ruling classes. The “Western social pattern has a role all ready for the radical moral critic to play. It is accepted that there should be minorities of protest on particular issues.” And if one insists that one’s values are private matters, if morality is an autonomous sphere, all the better – if there is no shared public standard by which one’s claims can be judged, one’s opponents can also claim to be motivated by personally significant values. The only beguiling political question then becomes one of sincerity versus hypocrisy. The former Prime Minister can say “I honestly did what I believed was right”, and that becomes the last word on his probity until such time as we can crack his head open and apply some technological wizardry to discover whether he ‘really’ believed it was right to invade Iraq or not. Macintyre thus accuses the moral critic of “imagining that moral knight errantry is compatible with being morally effective in our form of society.”

Now, Macintyre associates this problem with the Reformation and the reconstruction of morality as a series of “divine fiats”, “totally arbitrary”, entirely unconnected with people’s lives. I don’t know how to assess that (although my inner Orange bigot says it’s the fenian in him), but I like the way he associates morality with desire. For Macintyre, morality represents “the more permanent and long-run of human desires”. Moral codes prohibiting imperialist murder, for example, express a long-term, public desire about how we should live. I can see the logic. As a good liberal moralist, you might simply start by taking the Decalogue and so on, removing God from the equation and stripping out all those crazy commandments that are incompatible with late capitalist life, (whether that means removing the misogynistic stuff, or the genocidal material, or merely those commandments that conflict with good commercial sense, such as the rule against coveting). So, instead of “Do this because you will benefit from it, it serves your desires etc”, or “Do this because God commands it”, which is arbitrary enough, you get “Do this”. Morality is thus totally divorced from desire, which is totally ineffectual. It mirrors the Stalinist gesture in which the sole effective basis for morality is the historical process which, at best, one might give a nudge in its predetermined direction (a consolatory doctrine). Not only that, but in its focus on the ‘I’ of the norm, it is logocentric.

Problematically, Macintyre seeks to close the gap between morality and desire by appealing to a Marxian version of ‘human nature’ in which people overcome the anarchic individualistic desires convoked by capitalism and ‘rediscover’ some ancient socialistic desire through collective solidarity. It seems at first blush to repeat the mistake of the historical determinist, with the idea that there could be a foundation for morality in something ‘objective’ about human beings. On closer examination, however, it is apparent that his ‘human nature’ is not really human nature as it is ordinarily understood. ‘Human nature’ would appear to be a set of capacities that are constantly under negotiation, constantly being reconstructed through historical processes. In that way, socialist morality would be historicist without being determinist. The socialist would justify moral claims both in terms of the historical processes and in terms of the desire that is convoked by them.

Labels: 'human nature', liberal moralism, stalinism

Iraq mortality studies posted by lenin

The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) has published an article and study [pdf] indicating that, as of June 2006, 151,000 Iraqis had suffered violent deaths since March 2003. The figures come from the Iraq Family Health Survey (IFHS), a body composed by employees of the Iraqi health ministry. It is the same team that carried out the UNDP's 2004 Iraq Living Conditions Survey. No one can fail to miss the way in which the response to this survey differs from that to the Lancet study. In the latter case, universal scorn from the British and American political classes, despite the MoD's top scientist endorsing its scientific rigour. In this case, the hallelujahs could not be louder, not because the media actually give a fuck whether it is true or not, but because they can - well, they can defend the murder of 151,000 people more easily than they can defend the murder of 600,000 or 1.2 million.

Les Roberts, a co-author of the two Lancet surveys, has offered his response here. Aside from pointing out where the surveys converge or at least bear similarities, Roberts suggests that the same body has previously drastically underestimated deaths with the result that on interviewing the same batch of households for the second time, the total child mortality rate was double their reported deaths in the previous visit. Their reported death rate for immediately before and after the invasion is much lower than that for 2002 (this is not a survey of excess deaths, so the implication is that underreporting in 2003 would lead one to expect further underreporting in 2004, 2005 and 2006). So, "the past record suggests people do not want to report deaths to these government employees."

One point of serious divergence with the 2006 Lancet survey is that this study attributes over 50% of the deaths to Baghdad and only around 30% to "High-Mortality Provinces". The Lancet survey attributed about 20% of the violent deaths to Baghdad and over 60% to those "High-Mortality Provinces". One reason for this appears to be that of the clusters they could not visit due to "security" problems (bombing and shit), 61.7% were in Anbar. Thus, to make up for it, they calibrated the figures according to the Iraq Body Count database - the database that, as we all know, is compiled from media reports, which of course are themselves blind to huge parts of the country due in part to "security" risks. Further, it is not even based on all media reports of deaths: about one in four stories in the major US press alone have been missed by the IBC's survey according to one review (cited by Roberts and Burnham). Thus, their distribution of 'reported' deaths is very much like IBC's. This distribution is counterintuitive since the largest US military operations have been conducted in towns and cities in the 'Sunni Triangle' such as Fallujah, Ramadi, Haditha and al-Qaim - all in the Anbar province. The biggest operations, such as Operation Phantom Fury, were focused in Anbar. The fiercest resistnace to the US has been based in Anbar, with the province accounting for the largest portion of attacks of all kinds in each of the three years covered.

Still, those are issues that would theoretically be resolved through debate and the input of others in the know. That isn't going to happen. Whatever the intentions of the ministry of health workers who carried out this study, its findings are now out of their hands. It is now a weapon for neutralising the findings of the Lancet survey, as per this. After all, even the real terms of the survey itself hardly matter. As Eli points out, the total mortality noted by this survey, whatever its flaws, would actually mean there were about four times as many deaths as are now being to be reported, because of the emphasis on strictly violent deaths. Back in the day, they didn't do body counts. Now, they do it perforce by way of exonerating themselves.

Labels: iraq, lancet study, stop the war

What does Sibel Edmonds know? posted by lenin

It's a fair question. No one will let her tell us in any detail. State Secrets laws don't permit her to talk to a judge about it, much less a television reporter, and much of the media has avoided looking too intensely at the matter. Apparently, she knows that several high-placed American officials put US nuclear materials on the black market, some of which were going to Pakistani secret police individuals with connections to 'Al Qaeda'. She has put some faces out in the public - people like Doug Feith, the huckster Richard Perle, Congressman Dennis Hastert and, well, check them out for yourself - without explaining the specific allegations. She claims that several arms of the state are protecting individuals who have participated in the sale of such secrets and aided foreign intelligence moles who helped transmit such materials, frustrating FBI efforts at investigation.

It's hardly unknown for the state to become a conduit for entrepreneurial criminal activity, particularly the secret state. Drug smuggling, money laundering, arms transfers, all the usual business of empire can - because of its necessarily illicit nature - become the basis for making a lot of money individually, corrupting departments, and so on. And the illicit tracking of nuclear materials, particularly low grade radioactive materials, probably involves state actors from a variety of countries. Why, you might think, should the US be different? It is one of the many excellent arguments against nuclear weapons that, like all weapons, the technology is by no means guaranteed to remain the preserve of states (which is life-threatening enough already). But knowingly transferring nuclear materials in such a way that they could end up in the hands of 'Al Qaeda' would ordinarily be considered 'treasonous'. After all, thousands of inviduals often with no proven record of posing any threat are being locked up in America's global gulag on the putative off-chance that they might be. Is it too much to wonder whether the faces put out by Edmonds should be in orange jumpsuits? Of course it is. No one is going to go around embarrassing American officials, much less the intelligence agencies of two key US allies in the Middle East. The ISI is totally off-limits. Edmonds is never going to be legally permitted to say whatever she has to say. Oh, but you're gonna get an investigation. Right.

Justin Raimondo and Dave Lindorff have some additional commentary.

Labels: 'al qaeda', deep state, moles, nuclear megadeath

It is A-li-i-i-i-ive! posted by lenin

Labels: clinton, elections, us politics

Pakistan: US presence is the biggest threat. posted by lenin

84% of Pakistani people think that the US presence in Asia is a danger to the country; 83% think the presence in Afghanistan is a threat; 78% say it's goal is to control oil; 86% believe the US has a strategic goal of dividing and weakening the Muslim world; more Pakistanis think the presence of US troops is a critical threat than believe Al Qaeda is a critical threat.

Labels: afghanistan, musharraf, pakistan, US imperialism

The Other White Meat posted by lenin

What else to call a post about the Democratic primaries? 'The Taming of the Shrew' would be misleading - she's not a 'shrew', she's a complete asshole. 'The Man Who Wasn't There' would be unfair to Dennis Kucinich, who is the best candidate, but isn't running a serious campaign. 'Futurbama' is trite, and sounds like I'm seconding his campaign. 'The Mancunian Candidate' is obscure, and probably wouldn't work. And I never seriously considered 'The Three Stooges'. 'The Other White Meat' refers to that layer of white voters who would ordinarily never touch a black candidate with a stolen vote, but are now moistening at the ducts and crevices for the gangly African American who insists he was never a Muslim. Obama-mania has apparently taken hold of some slightly loopy American voters after his surprisingly strong finish in Iowa. The commentariat is effusive - Obama doesn't inspire, they say, he elevates. What does Obama offer? Not a great deal, but he does it with aplomb. His foreign policies include gradual withdrawal from Iraq, redeployment to Afghanistan and Pakistan, discussions with Iran, and strongly pro-Israel policies. (Among his foreign policy advisors is Zbigniew Brzezinski, whose ideas look like they have made some impact.) Despite his position on Iraq, neocon Bob Kagan likes him a great deal. Domestically, he offers a few meliorative reforms in healthcare, neoliberal fiscal policies which potentially contradict his package of tax cuts for the poor and pay increases for teachers - if he sticks to PAYGO, any drop in the income of the Treasury due to recession will have to be made up for with spending cuts. He appears to have acquired a progressive aura simply by exuding some nebulous quality of hope and optimism and - the buzzword of the election - 'change'. He looks elegant and dignified, sounds like he knows what he's talking about, and he has performed that Clinton routine of triangulation and glittering generalities much more convincingly than Hillary. Obama's main charm for white conservatives is that he assures them that race doesn't matter in America - classy guy, they say, not like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. No hysterics. Kind of guy you could have round for dinner and he wouldn't embarrass anyone.

In second place in Iowa was John Edwards. Edwards isn't showing well in New Hampshire polls, but he is by far the most interesting of the three main Democratic candidates. Essentially, the role he has crafted for himself is that of a John Grisham hero, a ferocious lawyer from a rural background taking on corporate America. Conservatives try to play on the pretty-boy image he has, but the hot-shot with the North Carolina accent is pure Hollywood. He plays his role well anough to get the approbation of left-wing figures such as Ralph Nader and Tim Robbins. The unions are strongly backing him. His campaign messages consistently bash corporate greed and Washington lobbyists, and he urges a fight with the insurance lobby to secure a single-payer healthcare system. He promises a 'New Deal' for rural America, and talks up the 'underdog' quite a bit. He has tried to escape from the pall of his lasting support for the invasion of Iraq by repudiating his vote and lambasting the 'war on terror', but he remains essentially very hawkish and makes no guarantee that he will end the occupation of Iraq by the end of his term, should he win. He has always been an ardent supporter of Israel and - like Obama and Hillary - voiced his support for the attack on Lebanon in 2006. (And if you want to know how slavishly most of the candidates are backing Israel, check out Haaretz's ranking system). Edwards is socially conservative on some issues too - doesn't support gay marriage, approves of the death penalty, has supported the Patriot Act (complainly only of 'abuse' of those laws), wants to keep the 'war on drugs' ticking over and so on. There appears to be a natural position for him as Obama's Vice-President, and I suspect he'll happily occupy it.

Now, Hillary. Oh dear. I don't know who likes her, or why, but she seems to have a reputation for liberal politics simply because the right-wing characterises her that way and subjects her to sexist attacks. A recent poll of voters found that 54% of them consider her a liberal. More hawkish than the other Democratic candidates (she seems to be competing with John McCain for the "nuts and proud of it" vote), more stridently pro-Israel than Ariel Sharon, an advocate of 'humanitarian intervention' who claims to have stiffened her husband's spine over Kosovo, fiercely hostile to Iran, Clinton has nothing to recommend her as 'liberal'. She has consistently defended her vote for the invasion of Iraq, and shows no sign of being willing to end the occupation. Her domestic policies include some rollback of the tax-breaks for the rich, a few reforms in healthcare (but not single-payer, an option she has always hated), support for the giant 700km fence construction on the US border, and support for the Patriot Act (twice). She also supports the death penalty, and has led the charge to make flag-burning punishable by a year in jail and a $100,000 fine in 2005. On education, she supports Bush's policy of 'No Child Left Behind'. If she is reputed as some kind of "feminist" (a "shit-kicking" one at that, according to Michael Moore), she also upholds the Genghis Khan principle, and knows when to rally round family values - no gay marriage under a Hillary Clinton imperium. They say she is disliked by Republican voters and conservative men because of her relentless liberal assault on the American way of life. The trouble is, she is disliked by almost everyone else as well. The only people who really like her are those poor, sad people who think that she and they alike are meaningfully on the liberal-left. (You should see the nauseating video on Youtube where 'Code Pink' antiwar women explain to a stern Hillary that 'we know you really agree with us...', as if). Quite how she was the 'default' Democrat for so long is utterly mysterious to me, because she has neither charm nor policies to offer anyone, and doesn't even appear to have sufficient flexibility to back off the themes that most repel potential voters. Once a Goldwater Republican, her instincts always seem to take her back to that luminous era. And, poor thing, she cannot really rely on happy memories of the 1990s, since anyone who has been fucked over by Enron capitalism will recall a bit that it was fully nurtured by the same Clinton regime that was busily torturing Iraq with a genocidal sanctions campaign.

All of these candidates are pompous frauds, but the impact of the antiwar vote and the desire for radical change is nevertheless obvious. Ask young Americans why they so vigorously support Obama and, while drenching you with saliva, the poor saps will explain that they expect him to tackle the 'special interests' and lobbyists, to end the war on Iraq and also symbolically end hundreds of years of Anglo-Saxon hegemony in the White House. Those are laudible goals. (And also he, like, toooootally blew them away). Ask them why they support Edwards, and they'll say they're sick of the corporate duopoly, the destruction of good industries, the job flight, the attacks on wages and working conditions, and the way companies get away with murder. And he's really, really sorry about the whole Iraq thing - really. Even Hillary promises to begin to reduce troop levels in Iraq and was smart enough to oppose the 'surge'. There are two excellent ways to piss the energy and enthusiasm of politically-minded Americans up the wall. One is to abandon them to the Democratic Party, and the other is to tell them to vote for Ron Paul, who is simply a thinking man's Pat Buchanan. Here's to Cynthia McKinney (or Ralph Nader) in 2008.

Labels: clinton, edwards, elections, obama, us politics

Another Gulf Incident posted by lenin

Apparently, Iranian boats "threatened" American ships. In other news, a passing whale was threatened by a sardine.

Labels: gulf incident, iran, US imperialism

Tories and New Labour go after the disabled. posted by lenin

The Tories claim they could get 200,000 people off incapacity benefits by requiring recipients to prove they can't work and reducing entitlements. In light of New Labour's goal of getting a million people off incapacity benefits by 2015, this seems small pickings. No wonder Labour accuses them of stealing their ideas (in reality, Labour has simply taken over old Tory policy nostrums). But, setting aside the rank authoritarianism and vindictiveness of such crackdowns, how achievable are such aims? The November edition of the Cambridge Journal of Economics, which is focused exclusively on New Labour's economic management, deals with this question. Since the claim is that this number of people can be moved into work, the obvious answer would appear to be 'no'. That New Labour has reduced the claimant count is without doubt, and while some of it is due to macroeconomic trends, it seems likely that much of it is due to reduction in access to benefits ('welfare reform') given the massive gap between the official unemployment rate and that registered by the ILO.

Cuts, interrogations, 'support'
In this context, incapacity benefits refers to a wide range of receipts. Incapacity Benefits proper are received by 1.4m people; national insurance credits for incapacity by 1m; and Severe Disablement allowance by 0.3m. There are a further 0.3m on Disability Living Allowance who are not included in the overall count. The IB claimant counts are highest in the older industrialised areas of the north, and two areas in Wales have IB claimant counts higher than their working age population. This is associated historically with mass redundancies in the former mammoth industries of coal and steel. Claimants tend to be older, and male - perhaps in part because women receive pension at 60, while men don't receive it until the age of 65. There has already been a reduction in claimants registered in 2004, for the first time in a generation, and if this were to hold, then the reduction by 2015 would amount to 200,000. On the other hand, population dynamics could see trends in the opposite direction - if IB claimants over fifty increase by the same rate as the over-fifty population, then the overall count will have 115,000 added to it. Overall, regardless of policy, the current flows extrapolated to 2015 would add 67,000 to the count. And, since women will have their pension age revised upward to 65 by 2020, the claimant count would be increased further.

In theory, there are enough 'hidden unemployed' in the IB claimant figures to reduce them by one million. The government's proposed measures for dealing with this include precisely those recommended by the Tories - introduce compulsory work-focused interviews with the intention of sorting out those who can work from those who cannot. The benefit will be phased out for all but the most sick or incapacitated and replaced by Employment and Support Allowance, with a strong element of conditionality - recipients must accept forms of training and education designed to get them into work, for face financial penalties. And until they receive their Personal Capability Assessment, claimants will receive exactly what they would on the Job Seekers Allowance (presently £59.15 per week for a single person over 25), thus removing a financial incentive to claim incapacity benefit (£61.35 for short-term incapacitated; £72.55 from weeks 29 to 52; £81.35 for long-term incapacitated) - actually, as you can see here, the financial incentive is initially tiny. Only those expecting to be on IB for a long time would expect a financial benefit from it. That is why one of the government's other proposed measures is to remove the escalation after six and twelve months. They also intend to 'support' GPs in 'helping' people return to work - I suspect this will amount to target-based pressure to force people into accepting work. The journal's research suggests that even these stern measures will not reach the government's target - at best, they might remove half a million from the count by 2015, which means that they would have to find a way to double the impact of their existing measures. Most of the reduction would have to be in those areas mentioned earlier - old industrialised parts of the north with high unemployment.

Neoliberal justification
The dogma underlying the government's approach, which justifies it in its conviction that it is assisting the poor, is the view that "supply creates its own demand" - an extra labour supply will produce higher employment. The market will, on this view, bring demand and supply into balance through wage adjustments (reductions). For this to work, there needs to be maximum flexibility in the labour market (hence, diminished bargaining power for labour, the curtailment of rules protecting job security and so on). As the authors of the journal article point out, it is just not the case that markets automatically balance supply and demand. The effect of these policies will be to increase the official rate of unemployment - only in regions where there is close to full employment already and labour shortages in specific segments to boot will there be the effect the government imagines. That is, in precisely those areas where the IB claimant count is lowest. Given the emerging economic difficulties, the period of sustained employment growth looks like it is coming to an end, and even after recovery it may be difficult to repeat. Further, while the government claims to target those who are not severely disabled and can theoretically do some forms of work, those with enduring health problems are not well-placed to thrive in even a tight labour market.

The policies proposed by both parties are in effect detrimental not only to those claiming IB benefits, but also to the working population as a whole, who are expected to accept reduced wages and security in the government's model. By no means likely to increase employment and tending to reduce the dignity and conditions of those currently on disability benefits, the government's policies will - if they are permitted to get away with it - be able to reduce the size of the welfare state. And that, of course, is what it is all about. The global roll-back of the rights and protections secured by past generations of working people is not passing without resistance. The government's policies on welfare, including cutbacks of pensions, are deeply unpopular. Privatisation of provision is hated. And the congruent process of effective wage cuts and diminishing conditions and entitlements is producing industrial resistance. The barrier such resistance repeatedly hits, as Mark Serwotka recently pointed out, is the commitment of union leaders to the Labour Party. That loyalty is coextensive with profound resignation in the face of the neoliberal assault, a willingness to negotiate away even the most basic forms of protection, and an unwillingness to risk sustained confrontation with the government. Even if the Tories get in and implement the same policies more aggressively (that may be hard to imagine, but they almost certainly would), the union leaders will say "we can't afford to embarrass our party, we must ensure they get elected next time round". The only way out of this is for union members to: a) build up rank and file organisation to resist union leaders when they call for acquiescence, as in the recent postal strike; and b) make a sharp break with New Labour, forcing through an independent political fund as the basis for political realignment.

Labels: new labour, tories, welfare

Left in Crisis posted by Yoshie

Responses to the Robert Brenner-Sam Gindin debate (7 December 2007), as well as the debate itself, make me think, yet again, that it would be better for leftists to drop the oft-asked question -- "Is capitalism in crisis?" -- and ask different questions.

Capitalism as a mode of production will never be in crisis on the global scale. There are always global economic trends, some of which negatively impact profit rates sometimes, but their impacts differ dramatically from one nation to another, depending on their political economies, social structures, and (most importantly) cultural conditions (which alone are subject to leftists' interventions at least to a certain extent even before leftists find themselves in a position to change political economy and social structure on the national level).

Capitalism is always changing, but more profound changes happen during some periods than others, changes that amount to transition from one regime of accumulation to another regime, shifting from old national and inter-national political structures functional to the old regime to new national and inter-national ones that better fit the new regime. The emergence of US hegemony, made possible by the Second World War whose outcome ended the age of inter-imperialist wars, was one such shift; the end of the post-WW2 boom was another such shift; the possibility of the end of the dollar hegemony on the horizon today may be yet another shift.

Each transition presents popular classes with political openings. The question is whether popular classes are so organized and motivated to take advantage of them. It is on this crucial question that Brenner and Gindin agree: whether or not capitalism is in crisis, it is certain that leftists, especially leftists in the North, are, in large part due to the undeniable problem of increasing atomization of working people in the North, working people in the USA above all, and in no small part due to the absence of a systemic alternative¹ to capitalism that inspires people and commands their allegiance.

When people are neither organized nor motivated to take advantage of the openings, the ruling classes will, establishing a new regime of accumulation.

Even when and where people are organized and motivated, they are not necessarily organized and motivated by forces and ideas that come from the Marxist tradition.² "Indeed, for the moment at least, Marx has yielded the historical stage to Mohammed and the Holy Ghost. If God died in the cities of the industrial revolution, he has risen again in the postindustrial cities of the developing world," declares Mike Davis ("Planet of Slums," New Left Review 26, March-April 2004).

Recognizing the same phenomenon, Aijaz Ahmad says:

The secular world has to be just twice over: in terms of what it has defined for itself, and also to ward off the claim that God would have given better justice. That is to say, the secular world has to have enough justice in it for one not to have to constantly invoke God’s justice against the injustices of the profane. ("Islam, Islamism and the West," Socialist Register 2008)

But how? In more practical terms than Davis and Ahmad, Randhir Singh clarifies what is to be done: "better negotiate the necessary trade-offs between economic development and social justice, between requirements of productivity or efficiency and environmental sustainability or quality life which is not entirely a matter of material progress or economic growth" ("Future of Socialism," MRZine, 29 December 2007). And yet it is far from self-evident to all, the least of all to the religious, that secular leftists are better at negotiating the aforementioned trade-offs -- as well as another trade-off, that between liberty and security -- than those who "invoke God’s justice against the injustices of the profane," given the experience of state socialism of the 20th century and still existing governments led by self-identified socialists or other secular leftists.

The crisis of the secular Left will thus continue. Recognizing that as the more urgent problem than whether capitalism today is dynamic or stagnant is the first step toward overcoming it.

1 The idea of socialism of the 21st century, struggled over in Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia, is still in its infancy, at present more an alternative to US hegemony and the neoliberal regime of accumulation than an alternative to capitalism as such, and forces that pushed and have kept Hugo Chávez, Rafael Correa, and Evo Morales in power are composed of contradictory classes and political currents.

2 At least consciously. The Marxist tradition, however, has left indelible marks upon all forces of popular classes, even those that have expressly rejected it:

[D]espite the fashion for comparing it with political movements of the far right, Islamism could more accurately be described as "Islamo-Leninism." If Leninism is a secular movement that denies its origins in religion, Islamism is an avowed religious movement that suppresses its debts to secular thinking; eschatological thinking is equally central to both. (John Gray, "Faith in Reason: Secular Fantasies of a Godless Age," Harper's Magazine, January 2008, p. 88)

I'd qualify Gray's remark: those who may be properly called "Islamo-Leninists" are those Islamists, such as the Islamists of Iran, Hizballah, and Hamas, who have the capacity to build mass organizations of popular classes for their own national projects inflected with populism and anti-imperialism, not to be confused, for instance, with terrorist cells of Al-Qaeda-type Islamism.

Update
Read it in Spanish: Yoshie Furuhashi, "La izquierda en crisis," Traducción Néstor Gorojovsky, Critical Montages, 6 de enero de 2008.

Labels: capital, capitalism, class, imperialism

Disaster Capitalism enthuses investors. posted by lenin

The New York Times recently claimed that "Carbon will be the world's biggest commodity market, and it could become the world biggest market overall". This nugget from January's edition of The Banker explains to corporate and investment bankers that there is an upside to global catastrophe, particularly in market-led mechanisms supposedly designed to cope with it:

Corporate/institutional banking and asset management will see the strongest upsides, with new carbon markets, growing demand for hedging innovation and clean technology financing and advisory revenues potentially attracting $225bn of new investment per year by 2016.

The International Financial Review's end of year 2007 edition is much more enthusiastic. "Carbon's future burns bright," it exclaims, with an accompanying visual aid showing money bags billowing from factory chimneys. Noting that the market has been "thriving", it is concerned above all that the Kyoto Protocols, so lucrative to date (yet so ineffectual at doing anything about the stated problem), run out in 2012 - where will the money come from then? Someone has to extend it! And why, if Bush won't ratify the damned protocol, then corporations are going to find a way to make money out of it anyway - hence he introduction of a Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) market in the US. Corporations can take relatively inexpensive measures to curb their carbon outputs slightly and sell the credits they earn on the global market.

In 2007, the carbon markets reached an historical peak of $117bn in value, and can only go up from here. The great thing about for investors is that it doesn't rely on the opportunities that markets can independently provide. Rather, governments and inter-governmental institutions can through subsidy and regulation utterly re-order the balance of risks and advantages, create a new set of winners and losers. For this reason, the carbon market has, er, 'weathered' the credit crunch and expanded beyond expectations.

Labels: capitalism, disaster politics, environment

Line of the day. posted by lenin

"Benazir Bhutto has never looked so good."

Labels: bhutto, pakistan, US imperialism

Or does it implode? Neoliberalism, empire, and the global crisis posted by lenin

There's an intriguing discussion on MRZine, between Sam Gindin and Robert Brenner, about the potential implosion of neoliberalism in the context of the brewing crisis of the global economy. Prefacing the discussion, Vivek Chibber remarks that socialists have been a bit too good at predicting global meltdown given the slightest sign of a problem. I have to say that this while this is true, it is also true of the business press (see The Economist's hysteria throughout the South-East Asian crisis, for example). Still, let's take the cue and re-examine our assumptions. Because the media are conveying doom and gloom doesn't mean that the economy is necessarily in big trouble. As Larry Elliot points out, this could indeed by the big one, the perfect, the global alluvion that changes all equations, but there are many analysts who, with some good grounds for saying so, maintain that there will be a technical recession but no more than that. Let's have a look at the UK stats. Unemployment doesn't seem to be rising - in fact it fell a little bit in the last quarter of the economic cycle to 1.64 million (on the ILO measurement). Indeed, year on year results show that employment grew faster than unemployment fell, suggesting a boost in many quarters of the economy from immigrant labour. As Stumbling and Mumbling suggests, consumer spending also looked reasonably healthy in November. Profit rates look very healthy:



One might at this point be inclined to think that Sam Gindin has half a point when he maintains that capitalism has never looked healthier or more dynamic, despite its cyclical slumps and increasingly frequent financial crises. There have been a few of those big stock market crises, and each one has led to a powerful rebound (usually involving a welfare package from the state). But that is only the UK, and those figures are misleading. Here's the catch - those profit figures exclude the financial sector and are based on the state of affairs before the crisis started to bite. Consumer spending is expected to slump in 2008 particularly as banks start reining in credit, and high street stores are already reporting a fall over the Christmas period. Insolvencies are expected to increase, and it is estimated that 9 million individuals in the UK are going to have difficulty repaying their existing debts. Everyone from Gordon Brown to the CBI, and the Financial Times survey of top economists, is sounding the alarm - and you can be damned sure it's a crisis for capital, because they aren't in the least worried about us.

Globally, the IMF expects a downturn, and this will surely be driven in the main by the US slide. The subprime crisis means that "millions of American households will lose their homes and as much as $164 billion due to foreclosures". The manufacturing sector has contracted even worse than in recent years, and a slump in demand means imports are falling, a fact that will hurt China which has until now been one of the major motors of global expansion. Global oil prices hit an unprecedented peak yesterday, due to low stocks - a fact which will result in higher inflation even while jobs and incomes disappear. The mere whiff of stagflation will tempt central bankers to raise interest rates ruthlessly to curb wage demands and consumption, but businesses are already hurting from deflationary policies. It doesn't do to second-guess the global economy. Capitalism is intelligible, but not so predictable that its short-term future yields to even the most subtle marxist analysis. Yet, while a big crisis may be averted once again, the structural imbalances continue to accrue. In particular, the neoliberal measures implemented to control wage demands and reduce the bargaining power of labour may enhance capitalist class power, but it doesn't do away with the problem of the long-term tendency of the rate of profit to fall. These are the US profit figures supplied in Dumenil and Levy:



The overall share of economic output going to profit has increased in most advanced capitalist countries. That means that the capitalist class partially overcame its crises by transferring the costs to us, so that our relative or absolute income has declined - average wages being lower in the US today than in 1970. This brings us back to Sam Gindin's argument. Notably, he and Leo Panitch have argued that the neoliberal solution to capitalist crisis has decisively reinvigorated capitalism under an American hegemony that is now unchallenged. The US empire, they maintain, is rather like the British 'Free Trade Empire' of the 19th Century, with its emphasis on informal relations of domination as opposed to the costly and burdensome colonial relations. The main difference is that while Britain could not successfully rope the emerging capitalist powers such as Germany and France into its hegemony, the US has successfully neutralised all serious competitors. Wherever its influence is felt, it bankrolls and enforces a blueprint of property rights. (Perry Anderson would seem to agree with the analysis of Panitch and Gindin, since in his jottings on the conjuncture, he maintains that the current global order more closely resembles the Concert of Europe after 1815 than the world in the first half of the twentieth century.)

The problems with this argument are various. In the first instance, it makes no sense for Sam Gindin to say, as he does, that the capitalist class doesn't need a healthy rate of return. The sole basis for future health and wealth is the current income from previous investments. The successful reproduction of the system depends on it. Secondly, the comparison with the British Empire of the 19th Century fails on several counts. The 'Free Trade Empire' is a myth. In the first half of the 19th Century, the UK acquired among other territories Singapore, Hong Kong and Burma. It also expanded its Canadian and Australian possessions. In 1838, its Indian subordinates were placed in charge of Aden. In 1857, well before the Scramble for Africa, Britain assumed direct rule of India, and even the occupation of Egypt in 1882 preceded (and perhaps precipitated) the era of 'formal' or 'late' imperialism. In short, the British Empire in the 19th Century was a mixed affair, with flexible arrangements for rule (albeit organised along racial lines), depending on the circumstances. That is a flexibility that the US lacks, precisely due to the success of anticolonial struggles. It cannot hold down long-term large-scale troop commitments, and the costs of the current overreach are staggering. Usually, a quick success pays for itself many times over, but the US has not had a quick success in either Iraq or Afghanistan. It is true that the US enjoys unprecedented hegemony despite a small cluster of states that do not specifically seek a breach, but don't wholly accept American tutelage either: Russia, Iran and Venezuela in different ways fit into this category. And even in those states, there are substantial segments of the elite that would very much like to adopt the neoliberal programme and get under the star-spangled marquee. In this respect, the only real counterpower to the empire is that constituency identified by the New York Times in the build-up to the Iraq war: world public opinion. Only popular constituencies can be relied upon to challenge the regnant property paradigm, and that requires a lasting reconstitution of left-wing political culture and labour organisation: a process that is germinally underway in the advanced capitalist countries. However, it is not true that American capitalism in securing that hegemony has overcome its internal imbalances. On the contrary, the financialisation of the empire has made it more unstable, and has internationalised its weaknesses to an unprecedented degree. Further, even close allies may be reluctant to help out with the bills or the head count when it comes to risky imperial adventures. And states are increasingly demonstrating the ability to assert their own interests and form regional alliances against US domination, whether in Latin America or between China and South Asian partners. Finally, Gindin and Panitch underestimate the ad interim nature of the neoliberal transformations and overstate its coherence. While it now has the character of a fully developed growth formula, in real time it has often been a post hoc response to crisis rather than a carefully elaborated solution to it.

None of this guarantees that the kind of agency that is capable of providing an alternative to neoliberalism will emerge, and the fact is that neoliberalism is fully capable of integrating some orthodox Keynesian solutions (renationalising Northern Rock for a while, cutting interest rates etc) while coming back even stronger for it. But there is a reason why the anticapitalist movement has been subsumed into the urgent antiwar response to the 'war on terror', and why the antiwar movement contains an implicit, radical critique of neoliberalism. It is precisely that the success of neoliberalism cannot be understood without an understanding of the successful wielding of imperial power on behalf of the American capitalist class - a point David Harvey and, recently, Naomi Klein have been at pains to make. Whether it takes the IMF or the USAF, America will get the job done. The 'war on terror' has taken this doctrine to its most grotesque extremes in Iraq. The Iowa caucus results suggest that the next battle for the executive may be between a hawkish neoconservative Republican and a hawkish neoliberal Democrat. Huckabee wants to stay the course with some minor alterations; Obama wants to gradually turn Iraq over to America's allies, focus the military on Afghanistan and Pakistan, canvas the pro-American wing of the Iranian elite, and return to Clinton-style neoliberalism. These are choices with real consequences, but they are choices within the very narrow spectrum permitted by America's political elite, and they both seek different ways of conserving the existing order. This underlines the importance of building an independent radical force capable of challenging that consensus in the US both in and beyond presidential elections. The Democrats have already proven how craven they are in office since the 2006 mid-terms, so nothing is to be gained by allowing them to believe they are automatically entitled to the anti-Bush vote. Resistance movements in countries under direct attack, as well as those under American-funded lockdown such as Egypt, can undermine the empire but not without radical movements in the imperial countries that aren't afraid to raise the social cost and aren't prepared to be coopted by the pro-war parties.

Labels: capitalism, disaster politics, global economy, neoliberalism, recession

The old work-life balance. posted by lenin

Five million workers in the UK do an average of almost two months worth of unpaid overtime each year. That's worth £25bn to the rich, and five grand to each individual employee. It is probably mainly effected through unofficial pressure from the boss and the adoption of minute linguistic operations such as 'core hours', 'flexibility' and so on. Now, some people don't have much choice but to acquiesce if they want to keep their jobs. But see if you're one of these hard-working, committed team players reaching for the sky, adding value, pushing the envelope, reinventing the wheel, thinking outside the box and all of that? You're a fucking tool! Cut it out and stop making shit difficult for the rest of us.

Labels: capitalism, dead labour, exploitation, work, work-life balance

Narcissus in the Looking Glass posted by lenin

Humanitarian intervention is no longer where it's at. For the time being, it has subsided into the background, merely part of a constant stream of noise that affirms and reaffirms the claim that imperialist states have ever been, or could ever be, the armed wing of Amnesty International. Now, it's about the 'clash of civilizations' and how cool the West allegedly is about women's rights and so on. Thus, the belligerati - Paul Berman, Ian Buruma - are now construing the murder of Benazir Bhutto as an occidentalist assault on the freedom of the female. And it's hard to avoid the stream of commentaries and news items hailing the "feminist hero" that was Bhutto. While it may be that her assassins were right-wing misogynists - highly likely, I should think - that was probably rather low down on their list of motives. The sole purpose of so construing the matter is to remind one of one's moral superiority - apparently, it is a matter of some importance to the liberal bombers that 'we' assert, repeatedly, that 'we' are not as bad as people who behead other people, or those who detonate suicide belts and so on. And this gradually shades into 'our' superiority over 'Islam', or over the bulk of actually existing Muslims. In fact, because whatever is being discussed is constantly construed through a culturalist prism, it is constantly liable to shade into the sort of cultural (as opposed to biological) racism that distinguished liberal imperialism in the 19th Century.

Back in the day (the 1990s), it was much easier. The Soviet Union was dead, and its sattelites didn't look like they had much life in them. All that remained was liberal capitalism preparing to sweep up the remaining people's republics, stop the nationalist demagogues from taking hold of the post-communist situation, and also dispense with the few remaining colonial scraps. Perfect for that era was Michael Ignatieff. Ignatieff's saleability in media circles was then probably in large part due to his conscientious and effusive praise for the media, usually offered as 'nuanced' critique. In The Warrior's Code - itself an accompaniment to a television series - he averred that "Television’s good conscience" refuses "to make a distinction between good corpses and bad ones", and distrusts left and right. High praise indeed, for Ignatieff's central claim about 'humanitarian' morality ("species politics" as he called it) was that it disregarded all distinctions other than victimhood, that of "the pure victim stripped of social identity". Similar ruminations, interspersed with occasional bewailing of this or that "failure", appear in Virtual War. Oh sure, the media's attention is short-lived, but without it there would be no one to feed those victims and save them from catastrophe. It is fair to say that Ignatieff looked into the cathode tube and saw his own splendid self. However, even in his day, he was only the exemplar of a self-satisfied Anglo-American media class.

As Alex De Waal wrote in Famine Crimes, "Journalists have congratulated themselves that they provide the missing trigger in the international relief network's response to disasters. The congratulation is not warranted." Not only because the media is simply not set up to "trigger" the kinds of responses that would be required in a disaster situation. And not only because, as David Rieff has recently acknowledged, that era of sicking self-congratulation was the basis for a wholesale refurbishment of imperial ideology. And not only because where they did interact with relief agencies, even in situations that didn't involve war, they often contributed to making the situation worse. The main reason is that the consequences didn't make any difference whatsoever. It took a catastrophe like Iraq to shake, briefly, the insuperable confidence of the media class, and then it was for the wrong reasons. But like I said, that no longer matters - because they have some new, highly potent, shit to hawk now. Today, they're standing up against a new 'totalitarianism', defending feminism, or secularism, or (even more cheekily) democracy, against movements about whom they can only speak in bowdlerised psychiatric cliches (see Cohen's What's Left for plenty of this).

Labels: feminism, imperialism, islam, islamophobia, orientalism

The Glass Cage posted by lenin

Apropos an earlier post:

Labels: evil paradises, neoliberalism, the geography of capitalism

Whatever happened to the Special Police Commandos? posted by lenin

On 29 May 2007, a convoy of forty men, some in Special Police Commando (SPC) uniforms, drove through the gate of the Iraqi finance ministry and kidnapped five British contractors, whose names are being withheld on the instructions of the Foreign Office. The next that was heard about it was a video message from a purported Shi'ite group, featuring a British man who said: "My name is Jason. Today is November 18 ... I have been here now for 173 days and I feel we have been forgotten."^[1] This was merely the latest of the exploits implicating the SPC, which Lt Gen David Petraeus built up before he was placed in charge of the occupation^[2]. Dr John Pace, the former human rights director for the UN mission in Iraq, wrote in a 2005 report of how the Special Police Commandos had carried out death squad killings^[3]. In early 2006, an attack on the al-Askari shrine was carried out by individuals in Special Police Commando uniforms.^[4] The ensuing communal violence has now resulted in de facto segregation, and residents say that the completion of this project (rather than the bloody 'surge') is responsible for a recent decline in violence.^[5]

By now it is reasonably well known that the SPC have been trained by the US army, and have carried out numerous death squad attacks. In one notorious incident, having murdered someone and dumped the body, they contacted the Baghdad morgue where the corpse ended up, demanding the metal handcuffs back on the grounds that they are too expensive to replace^[6]. Among elements said to be incorporated into the SPC were the Badr Brigades of the occupiers' allies, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (now renamed the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council), and former Republican Guards^[7]. These are the shock troops chosen for the elite counter-insurgency unit whose purpose was "special operations" - a term that turns out to mean applying cordless drills to living human beings. (Quite why this part needs to be outsourced is not entirely clear: if soldiers can handle electrocuting, drowning, raping, ripping the skin off prisoners' bodies, 'Palestinian hangings' and so on, drilling holes in the body is surely not that much of a step up).

However, the management of these death squads has been partially privatised since their initiation in 2005. In a Department of Defense 'Bloggers Roundtable' back in September, Brigadier General David Phillips boasted that the Special Police Commandos are presently being expertly trained by a Virginia-based outfit called USIS under the direction of the US army^[8]. To an already shadowy world of unaccountable militias and illicit cashflows is added a further layer of mystery - governments lie and conceal, but are less efficient at it, and are the subject of considerably more scrutiny, than private companies. The role of USIS was briefly mentioned when Colonel Ted Westhusing died from an apparently self-inflicted wound, some time after receiving an anonymous letter alleging corruption, the murder of Iraqis by the commandos, and the direct involvement of USIS contractors in killings. One investigation by the LA Times suggested that the gun shot that killed Westhusing actually may have come from fellow contractors frightened that he would spill the beans^[9]. But the military has closed its case, and USIS is still employed.

Pace's revelations led to a number of commandos being fired, but the outfit continues to be responsible for atrocities and crimes. In September this year, robbers wearing police commando uniforms stole $550,000 from an armoured truck - one week after a US Committee led by retired Marine Gen. James Jones called for the disbanding of the commandos.^[10] Disbandment is unlikely, since the SPC is entrusted with relieving much of the burden from the US army. Checkpoints in parts of Iraq with a strong resistance presence are manned by this outfit. In Sammara earlier this year, one such checkpoint was targeted by a suicide attack, and five commandos were killed^[11]. Earlier, another SPC checkpoint in Diwaniyah was attacked, with two commandos killed.^[12]

The early advertising of a 'Salvador Option', drawn from the example of death squads in El Salvador, was an indication that the SPC's deadly operations would not exactly be shrouded in secrecy. Mainstream news reporters were quickly admitted to SPC buildings and were able to report on blood-spattered rooms and tortured screams. True, the media reliably showed little interest, and much of what was reported came through a few independent journalists, but I suspect that the information could have been much more tightly controlled than it was. More important was the element of 'plausible denial' (speaking in the broadest possible terms here), so that now it looks as if the US will put the SPC's behaviour down to its capture by entrepreneurial and sectional interests. Yet, it isn't as if this is an independent Iraqi body. It is funded, managed and trained by the US, populated by its closest allies and clients, driven by its agenda, operates where it is allowed with the means it is given. It takes its orders from the US army, and the Ministry of Interior that it operates from is riddled with US diplomatic and military advisors. In the circumstances of an increasingly occult occupation, with powers and funds devolved to all sorts of unaccountable and private bodies, it provides an excellent conduit for terror and black ops in Iraq. It is usually futile trying to second guess the way such bodies will operate in real time, but the main answer to the question in the title appears to be that they have achieved an extraordinary level of success on behalf of the occupiers; are now locking down the main arteries in and out of city centres on their behalf; and are probably therefore permitted a wide leeway for criminal activity and the pursuit of their own turf wars.

Footnotes
^[1] Raymond Whittaker, 'Forgotten hostages back in spotlight'; Iraq kidnap, The Independent on Sunday, 9 December 2007
^[2]Peter Maass, 'The Way of the Commandos', New York Times Magazine, 1 May 2005; 'Gangs of Iraq: Interview with General Petraeus', PBS Frontline, 11 October 2006
^[3]Andrew Buncombe and Patrick Cockburn, 'Iraq's Death Squads: On the Brink of Civil War', The Independent, 26 February 2006
^[4] Michael Howard, 'Iraq slips towards civil war after attack on Shia shrine', The Guardian, 23 February 2006
^[5]Ali al-Fadhily, 'IRAQ: RESIDENTS SAY SEGREGATION, NOT SURGE, DECREASED KILLINGS', Interpress Service, 13 November 2007
^[6]Kim Sengupta, ‘Operation Enduring Chaos’, The Independent on Sunday, 29 October 2006
^[7]See the testimony of Gerald F. Burke, Former Major, Massachusetts State Police and former Senior Advisor to the Iraqi Police, reproduced in full in ‘Veterans, Expert Testify About the Bush Administration's Conduct in War in Iraq’, US Newswire, 12 October 2006
^[8]'DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE BLOGGERS ROUNDTABLE WITH BRIGADIER GENERAL DAVID PHILLIPS, DEPUTY COMMANDING GENERAL, CIVILAN POLICE ASSISTANCE TRAINING TEAM', Federal News Service, 21 September 2007
^[9]T Christian Miller, 'Soldier's journey ends in anguish', Los Angeles Times, 4 December 2005
^[10] Lauren Frayer, 'Bandits in police uniforms steal US$550,000 from armored truck in east Baghdad', Associated Press, 13 September 2007
^[11]Amit R Paley, '2007 Toll A Record For U.S. In Iraq', Washington Post, 7 November 2007
^[12] 'Suicide bomber attacks Sunni office in Iraq', Agence France Press, 26 October 2007

Labels: iraq, occupation, special police commandos, US imperialism