The Long Con posted by lenin

Aram Roston's recently published biography of Ahmed Chalabi, The Man Who Pushed America to War, tells a strange tale about one aspect of the 'other war' against Iraq, the one that was pursued relentlessly throughout the 1990s in the form of sanctions, regular bombardment and covert action. In part, it is a character portrait of a crooked upper class Iraqi who, following what the Jordanian authorities consider a massive global heist by the Chalabi family which funnelled millions of dollars to secret accounts in the Cayman Islands, is able to reinvent himself as an authority on the newly troublesome Iraqi dictatorship and eventually as the best possible replacement for it. Chalabi emerges as a man with an immense capacity to make others believe in him, even when he is manifestly on the take and manipulating all to his own advantage. It is also a story of Washington's attempt to manage a 'safe' overthrow of the Iraqi government. Drawing on testimony from Chalabi's associates, friends and co-conspirators, it is meticulous in detailing dates, times and places, and richly descriptive. As for the man himself, some consistent themes emerge. For a start, he was always politically engaged, especially from his time as a bright young thing studying mathematics in MIT, where he was a sophomore during the bloody Ba'athist coup in 1963. Secondly, he has always been absolutely stinking rich. This is the reason why the Chalabi family considered the overthrow of the pro-British monarch by the Free Officers in 1958 such a grave crisis that they fled their Baghdad mansion in a convoy of American sedans and fled to the cramped home of an ally in their traditional base in Khadimiya, a largely Shi'ite area then as now. The fact is that Iraq was, under British tutelage, cultivating an extremely opulent ruling class while slums expanded and infant mortality soared. So, the Free Officer coup contained revolutionary elements that could easily lead to a rich family being expropriated and slaughtered. Chalabi would go on to recall the pre-revolutionary utopia - a time of elections, a relatively free press, cross-sectarian solidarity in his father's boardroom, expanding public schools... He declared: "This is how we were, this is how we will be again!" Later: "The bastards set us back 700 years!" And indeed, the revolt had destroyed the Chalabi family's status in Iraq. Thirdly, and relatedly, though Chalabi didn't appear to be particularly concerned about democracy, and displayed an innate distrust of mass politics, his loathing of the Ba'ath Party appears to have been lifelong. Undoubtedly, he saw its accession to power as a continuation and radicalisation of the revolt that had overthrown the old colonial caste. And it was therefore very probably the 'popular' element of Baathist doctrine that he despised: "left-fascists" was the jarring phrase he used to characterise them in 1963.

At any rate, whatever the problems faced by Chalabi's family in the immediate aftermath of the revolution, it restored its position outside Iraq - in Jordan, Lebanon, and England - and retained its wealth. It ran the Middle East Banking Corporation (MEBCO) with interests both in the UK and across the Arab world. And young Chalabi was carted around in a limousine, both at MIT (where he claims, apparently falsely, to have been responsible for creating a revolutionary new type of unbreakable code) and at the American University of Beirut, where he began to work as an assistant professor in 1971. Though apparently a gifted mathematician, his real passion was to utilise his immense resources and connections to help overthrow the Iraqi regime. To that end, he was smuggling guns to Mustafa Barzani's Kurdish forces throughout the period of revolt in the early 1970s (during which time they also had the backing of SAVAK) and formed early contacts with journalists such as Peter Jennings and David Hirst to ensure that the struggle was conveyed adequately in the Western press. He was obliged to terminate these activities when civil war broke out in Lebanon in 1975. The Chalabi elders fled to England, and left MEBCO in young Ahmed's hands. He had to quit teaching to run the bank and said au revoir to mathematics for good.

And, as we know, it was in the business of banking that Chalabi first attained notoriety. Petra Bank, which he built and controlled from 1977, was astonishingly successful, increasing its assets from $40 million to $400 million between 1978 and 1982. Chalabi used his success to form connections not only with the Arab bourgeoisie but also with people like Judith Kipper of the American Enterprise Institute and Peter Galbraith of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He cultivated journalists with varying success and seems to have first made a tenuous connection with Judith Miller of the New York Times in this period. Supposedly, the CIA even considered recruiting him in the early 1980s, but gave up on the idea. However nice Chalabi was to his American friends, though, he was openly backing the Iranian side in the Persian Gulf War, and held the US - particularly the CIA - responsible for the Ba'athists even being in power in Iraq. Incidentally, it wasn't exclusively for instrumental reasons that he wanted Iran to defeat Iraq. Though he had been loyal to the Shah, he seems to have switched sides very quickly, and expressed excitement at the idea of Shi'ite self-assertion. On the other hand, there was a banking empire to tend to, and - practicalities being what they were - Chalabi decided to do business with the Iraqi government, a decision which was apparently being formalised in the days before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

The collapse of the Chalabi family's banking interests began in 1989, and Chalabi could well have been brought down by the scandal if it weren't for his discovery of the uses of American power after 1990. The Swiss Federal Banking Commission revoked his banking license on 27 April 1989, a month and a half after the death of the Chalabi patriarch, Abdul Hadi Chalabi. MEBCO Geneva was finished. In August, Petra Bank went down, and was taken over by the state. And then Socofi in Geneva, and then MEBCO in Beirut. And following this, a series of criminal investigations was launched. It seems that Ahmed had a penchant for risky, aggressive banking schemes. That had certainly been the case in Jordan, where he obtained far more leverage over the economy than his capital base would permit. One of his schemes was in league with an American brothel-owner and felon named Wayne Drizin, with whom he set up a financing mechanism for a proposed 300-foot ship called the Nissilios, which raised about $15m from various donors. Petra Bank promised to pay back the donors in the event that Drizin defaulted. Well, trouble is, the money never went to the ship. It seems it never went to Drizin either: in fact, the preponderance of known facts suggests that the Chalabis simply appropriated the cash. Similarly improbable deals with similar crooks such as Taj Hajjar, a Jordanian businessman and Greek financier Spyridon Aspiotis, led to arrests and sometimes charges. Chalabi himself ended up being a fugitive from Jordan as the economy tumbled and the state tried to shore up the banking system. As all banks were ordered to deposit some of their foreign currencies in the depleted Central Bank, only Petra Bank refused, and Chalabi was not able to give a satisfactory explanation. The reason soon became obvious: the books were cooked. Chalabi absconded, leaving others to cop the arrests, even while calling journalists to tell them it was all a misunderstanding or - as he still claims - the result of a political conspiracy by Iraq and Jordan to ruin his family. He set up a banking security company with an office in Knightsbridge known as Card Tech (incorporated in the Cayman Islands), financing the business with profits from Petra Bank.

While in London, Chalabi was once more at liberty to pursue his political goals, forming alliances with Iraqi exiles such as the Shi'ite cleric Muhammad Bahr al-Ulum. The invasion of Kuwait was a gift for him in so many ways. He became a regular feature of the op-ed pages: "A Democratic Future For Iraq", his 1991 Wall Street Journal piece proclaimed, urging that the US could and should overthrow Saddam Hussein. While he had never been known to care particularly about democracy, he now found that the rubric of 'democratic reform' was a useful way to galvanise support. With other opposition groups, he formed the Joint Action Committee, which prevailed on the West to allow them to enter Iraq and overthrow Saddam. Chalabi himself had no grassroots base, but he had networks of contact and influence with circles of power, and had media savvy. He became coordinator of the International Committee for a Free Iraq, which drew in various supporters including the recently shamed Senator John McCain. Also involved was then antiwar left-winger Ann Clwyd MP, who would later form a tight bond with Chalabi, and also Bernard Lewis, Albert Wohlstetter, and Richard Perle. Whatever Chalabi's protestations when the US left Saddam in power and facilitated its crushing of the Kurdish and Shi'ite rebellions, he was to prove that he didn't bear a grudge for long. Unknown to him, the CIA had been tasked to devise a plan for a managed overthrow of Saddam, and in the Spring of 1991, Bush signed a 'finding' authorising covert action against Saddam. They were given a budget of $38 million. In May that year, the CIA moved to recruit Chalabi, sending their agent Whitley Bruner to visit him at his swish residence overlooking Mount Street Gardens. Having sealed the deal, Chalabi was then contacted by Linda Flohr, a veteran of the Counter Terrorism Centre (which acquitted itself so beautifully in Reagan's own 'war on terror', particularly in Nicaragua). He haggled over funding and insisted that he would not sign a single receipt for any of the funds he was given. He also persuaded the CIA to nix a threat of interdiction by Interpol, who had been asked by the Jordanian authorities to nick him in the absence of any interest on the part of the British state in doing so. It was while visiting the State Department to co-ordinate with Iraqi exiles that he first caught the eye of Paul Wolfowitz.

Chalabi was as yet not the Americans' preferred leader of any future Iraqi regime, and resented the fact that he had been employed more as a facilitator for the other exiles. According to diplomat David Mack who dealt with Chalabi, "he bided his time until he could improve his position as an Iraqi national leader". He had become convinced, it seemed, that it was a particular entitlement of his to lead Iraq. Soon, he convinced plenty of others, including the doggedly loyal Kanan Makiya. In the meantime, he set up a front company - IBC Communications - to channel CIA funding, and warded off alarmed queries from some of the more serious exiles by pretending that he was being funded by wealthy Iraqi businessmen. They knew it to be a lie, because no Iraqi businessman would hand Chalabi a dime at that point. Nonetheless, he was gradually able to fix it so that he was the indispensable point man for the US. The front organisation, which received $4m a year, was run by Chalabi and this meant that he had direct and unaccountable control over the money and therefore direct control over the new opposition front, the Iraqi National Congress (the name taken from the African National Congress and the Indian National Congress). In alliance with the John Rendon group (about whom, you really should read this), Chalabi set about building up a hardcore of supporters who would help sell the organisation as a genuine, independent movement of dissenting democrats, while negotiating with Kurdish groups and some Iraqi tribes, to whom he delivered the dollars in person (thus giving himself even more leverage). He knew that he had been effectively promoted when in 1993 he received a personal letter from the new Vice-President Al Gore who conveyed his dedication to the INC cause.

The Clinton administration had some interventions of its own to take care of, however, and it didn't feel like immediately rushing to manage the remainder of Bush Sr.'s war. Chalabi relentlessly proselytised for a 'Three Cities' strategy in which his group would incite rebellions in three major cities north and south, and thus stimulate a mass defection by the Iraqi army. The army would keep order in the conquered cities, while Chalabi's men moved ever forward, ready to strangle the regime's base in Baghdad. Certainly, it was a preposterous idea, but it seems that the ultimate plan was to force the US government's hand, and drive them to invade. By 1995, he was working with Bob Baer, the now ex-CIA agent who is generally given far too much praise in the media. He urged Baer to help him get Washington to approve his plans for inciting a rebellion, although he claims that in fact the plan was all Baer's idea. After a long delay, a response emerged from Anthony Lake, Clinton's National Security Adviser, telling Chalabi in barely veiled terms where to get off. Chalabi's sails were only temporarily punctured, and he planned to launch the insurgency anyway. It didn't work. Barzani didn't go along with it, Talabani's forces melted on the border, and the Iraqi army did not engage in mass defections. This hopeless muddle, combined with revelations that Chalabi was doing business with Iranian intelligence, inclined the CIA to look into Chalabi's books: what was he doing with all this money? It turned out, he wasn't spending much of it on the operations he was supposed to be spending it on, and it also seemed he had been spinning his paymasters a series of lies.

At any rate, Chalabi was far less useful to the American state at this time than Ayad Allawi, and his Iraqi National Accord. Allawi was a longtime asset of MI6 and the CIA. He was a Ba'athist and could recruit among Ba'athists. He was quite prepared to execute a coup that conserved the basic power structure. And, as far as I know, he wasn't a habitual thief. Chalabi, by contrast, was opposed to any future for the Ba'ath Party whatsoever, which is why had to rely on the idea of stimulating a rebellion that would then draw in American troops. The CIA chose to transfer its support to the INA and sponsor a coup that actually turned out to flounder as badly as most of Chalabi's initiatives. Meanwhile, the INC base in northern Iraq was shut down during the civil war between Talabani and Barzani's factions and, when they realised the extent to which Chalabi had been playing one off against the other, the Kurdish leaders said they didn't want him back. By 1996, the CIA had cut him and his organisation off, and he had no base. But he did have his supporters in Washington, including some figures from his earlier operation such as Francis Brooke, a Democratic politico and beer industry lobbyist, Warren Marik, a CIA agent who resigned one year after Chalabi was cut off, and Linda Flohr who introduced him to a man who ought to need no introduction, one Duayne Clarridge, who was then rebounding from his Iran-Contra difficulties. Chalabi and Clarridge were soon as thick as thieves, and Clarridge recruited retired US Army Gen. Wayne Downing to devise a more sophisticated version of Chalabi's 'Three Cities' plan to sell to the administration or its Republican opponents. It revived the old model supplied by Reaganite interventions into Angola and Central America, in which local guerilla movements were created, trained, armed and funded by the US. In this case, the plan was that the US would use its air power to provide 'armour exclusion zones' that Saddam had to keep his tanks out of or risk being devastated. Another part of the revival strategy was to win the news agenda. Thus, Chalabi got ABC News to broadcast his narrative of American betrayal of an authentic national revolution, in a documentary presented by his old acquaintance Peter Jennings. Also featuring in the documentary was a man named 'Ahmed Allawi', the alter ego of an old Chalabi loyalist from the early days of the INC, Aras Habib Kareem, who told viewers that they could easily have defeated the Hussein regime, but the Americans let them down. And finally, there was the business of finding a new political constituency - this was supplied by the neoconservative right, including Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith and Richard Perle. He knew how to say the right things to persuade Mey Wurmser, co-founder of MEMRI and wife of David Wurmser, that he wasn't some dreadful antisemite. He was supportive of Israel, and said nice things about democracy too. This was an Arab the neocons could like, even if he could never be fully one of them. He got good play from institutions like JINSA as well, and all of this helped make up for the fact that Mossad wouldn't touch him with a stolen bargepole. Chalabi also had the backing of a number of Democrats at this point, including Joe Lieberman and Bob Kerrey, which suggests that too narrow a focus on the neocons is unsustainable. And then he got back with his old friend Ann Clwyd MP and persuaded her to launch group called INDICT, which was supposedly designed to expose Saddam Hussein's various atrocities. This was an enormously successful move: US Congress devoted "not less than $3,000,000" to the organisation, and the Clinton administration considered it a relatively low-risk way to support the exiles without putting money directly in Chalabi's hands. However, the registered office of the organisation was Chalabi's Mayfair residence, and he himself was registered as corporate secretary and co-director of the organisation. Two old-time Chalabi supporters, Zaab Sethna and Nabeel Musawi, were appointed to senior positions in the organisation. It was championed by GOP Congressmen, especially when the Clinton administration appeared to delay funds. The Senate provided him with a platform to outline his plans for a future Iraq, and to declare himself "an elected representative of the Iraqi people". And when Congress passed the Iraqi Liberation Act in 1998, it was literally designed to help Chalabi's cause, though in fact the money earmarked to help the INC - $2 million - was slow to come, due to State Department reticence. In order to overcome this, the Iraqi National Congress Support Foundation was set up as an incorporated group to channel money to the INC. But the US government insisted that rivals such as Allawi and representatives of the Kurdish parties be included on the board. Chalabi was able to get PR lobbyists BKSH, owned by Burston-Marsteller, to work for his campaign, and the company assigned one of Jonas Savimbi's former PR agents, Riva Levinson, to work with him.

As the 'war on terror' kick-started, the INC's propaganda operations began in earnest. They recruited assets such as Adnan al-Haideri, a man in need of asylum who was prepared to spin appealling fictions for the CIA on behalf of the Congress (though the CIA were not in fact taken in by him). Chalabi himself worked several journalists, most notably David Rose of The Observer, who began to ventriloquise INC propaganda. Among the falsehoods he relayed in this role was the story of mobile laboratories, set up in 1996 to develop biological weapons. The source was Mohammad Harith al-Assef, another INC asset, and the claims were repeated in a DIA report. But Chalabi's main role, as he saw it, was to try to unite the Bushites with the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, currently the main occupation partner of the US. Cheney met with a representative of the outfit, facilitated by Chalabi, much to the alarm of liberal exiles - if SCIRI were essential to a post-war state, surely Chalabi would at least insist on fundamentals such as womens' rights, democracy etc? No such luck. Chalabi was also supposedly instrumental in getting the INC's Information Collection Programme to be transferred from the State Department to the Pentagon, who looked upon the information with more welcoming eyes. But the decision was taken by the National Security Council and would presumably not have been had the administration not already opted for war (here, as with much else in Roston's book, too much weight is given to Chalabi's particular input).

When, in 2002, the White House decided to set up the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, it appointed Bruce Jackson, a former Lockheed Martin lobbyist to assemble the right people to run it. Jackson enquired as to what he might say the reasons for war would be, and was told that the President had not yet decided. Nonetheless, he signed up and contrived his own rationale: Saddam's regime was responsible for grave atrocities and should be replaced by a democratic government. This organisation was able to gain the support not only of politicians of both main parties, but also of Washington intellectuals such as Bob Kagan and Christopher Hitchens. This outfit came to orbit the INC directly. During the years 2000-2, Chalabi's group had been given $33m by the State Department. But the INC wanted more - precisely, $97m which they said had been allotted by the Iraqi Liberation Act. What the Bush administration offered in reply was to build up a trained militia for the INC, to be known as the Free Iraqi Forces, and the Pentagon recruited Vietnam war criminal Senator Bob Kerrey to oversee the process, which was run out of the US Army Training Centre at Fort Jackson. While the Bush administration's plan was to integrate these with the US invasion force, Chalabi had plans to make them an independent "Iraqi military force". It was also during this period that the INC elaborated its plans for de-Baathification, which would help moralise the invasion by assuring liberal opponents that it wasn't just going to result in the same dictatorship with a new pro-American figurehead on top. Further, Chalabi insisted to anyone who would listen that there would be no occupation, that he would oppose such a status as a matter of principle - even so, the INC was clearly recommending an occupation, modelled on the postwar occupation of Japan, in its internal documents. It is perfectly natural, therefore, that Chalabi's front should have been chosen by the administration to help devise its occupation plans. For what the INC wanted was more or less what was intended by the administration, and Chalabi was himself highly adaptible when it came to any matter of principle involved.

And so, Chalabi arrived in Iraq alongside his feckless 'Free Iraqi Forces' militia, and tried to stage a march into Baghdad modelled on De Gaulle's 1944 liberation of Paris. Well, the trouble was that the FIF weren't real killers but poorly trained, undisciplined and desperate men who would have been crushed by the Iraqi army. The US army was the only real killer in this territory. Still, he tried to find some way to obtain more of a role for himself in the occupation, and successfully lobbied his supporters in the administration to discipline General Jay Garner, who was seen as undercutting the INC. The FIF, hopeless as it was, was eventually terminated: it was not the "nucleus" of a new Iraqi army after all. But Chalabi himself ended up on the Interim Governing Council as well as the Higher National Committee for De-Baathification, where it is alleged he tried to shake down Iraqi businessmen under the rubric of 'economic de-Baathification'. (Chalabi's name comes up a lot when missing money in Iraq is mentioned). He got his nephew installed as the head of the multibillion dollar Trade Bank of Iraq, and his cronies made a great deal of money from reconstruction. Even when he didn't fare too well in his 2005 bid to be the candidate for Prime Minister of Iraq as part of the United Iraqi Alliance, he was given the post of Deputy Prime Minister and acting oil minister. Soon, his company Card Tech was given a big contract by the Trade Bank of Iraq, and subsequently sold off for a plum bonus of $54 million. He has manouevred constantly, tilting toward the Americans and away from it, siding with the UIA and then the Sadrists, tacitly accepting occupation and then opposing it.

But what comes through most clearly in Roston's account is precisely the extent to which the underlying heuristic is wrong. Chalabi did not push anyone into war. He has been a useful asset, a clever manipulator, and a world-class fraud. And, being of an old comprador elite, he makes a natural ally for imperial power. But he used the systems of corruption, coercion and blandishments that were available to him because of the way Washington politics works, because of the agendas that are current in the US political elite, because of the gullibility of corporate journalists and of politicians, and because of the endless opportunities that exist for a wealthy, intelligent operator in this system. When it comes to crookedness, lying, and bilking money from taxpayers, I am certain there is a whole class of people who make him look pretty average. What is far more interesting is to see how certain interests gelled, how millions were duped, and how people were directly coopted over prolonged periods of time, sometimes without their knowledge, for a policy that they didn't understand.

Labels: ahmed chalabi, bush administration, clinton, indict, iraq, iraqi national congress, US imperialism

The Fix Is [Not] In [Yet] posted by lenin

They got the $700bn bailout, with one or two 'provisions' that, in fact, don't really deviate that much from the Paulson plan, contrary to some of the analysis. A few things to note when looking at the summary: they still get their $700bn, phased and with a bit more oversight than was planned (ie, more than zero) - but remember that the $700bn figure was just pulled out of thin air, a large enough number to allow maximum latitude to the Goldman Sachs wonderboy in helping out Wall Street; they won't cap executive remuneration, but they will tax it a bit more if it's above $500,000, so the inevitable bragging about zero tolerance for executive pay is unwarranted; there will be some taxes on golden parachutes, but the "era of golden parachutes" is far from "over", as Nancy Pelosi has been bragging. Finally, the government supposedly expects to make a small profit on the enterprise once it's returned to the private sector, which is how previous bailouts have worked. This will be the selling point. They will say that they have no intention of draining the public purse, and that every penny will be restored in due course. But this assumes that the bailout will have the effect of restoring these institutions as profit-making enterprises. There is no guarantee whatsoever that any of this money will be seen again. In fact, the markets are plummeting, supposedly because of doubts about the efficacy of the bailout. And it also raises the question of why the public shouldn't just own it, and keep all the profit. After all, private ownership and markets don't seem to have been particularly advantageous in the past.

This is not about economic competence, moral hazard, perverse incentive, or any of the other cynosures of neoliberal policy wonkery. And preserve us from the absurd claim that this is some kind of socialism. It is about class power. If they wanted to resuscitate the economy, here are some possibile uses for that $700bn. Think of households and public sector institutions that are failing largely because the system is failing them: they couldn't put $700bn to better use? How about just nationalising the healthcare system? All of that would certainly stimulate the economy, provide jobs and help people who really are in need, but it would also risk revivifying the exiguous social democratic constraints on the operations of capital. You give people the idea that the tax base should be used in their interests, to give them secure jobs with decent pay, public services, well-funded inner city schools, any of that, they might never be away from the till with their hands out. Greedy taxpayers have to learn that this money is earmarked for conscientious wealth creators and their warriors, not for sloths with their heads stuck in the bargain bucket.

Meanwhile, the Brown administration didn't waste any time this time in nationalising most of Bradford and Bingley, much to the chagrin of the Tories, who are just frantic - frantic, don't you know? - about the costs to lower income taxpayers. The Conservatives want the Bank of England to take over the company and run it down. The trouble is, of course, that the government are not nationalising to protect jobs, and therefore probably will run it down in muchy the same way as they have run down Northern Rock. The Tories know this. It's being done to protect liquidity, to keep the banks lending to one another. This is why even right-wingers like Vince Cable approve of the nationalisation. But the Tories, aside from once more positioning themselves to the left of the government, are being disinguous: this particular nationalisation cost millions rather than billions, and it isn't going to drain the public purse. It is almost as if the three main parties are playing a game of 'chicken', each urging the other to do least to ward off the crisis. What I suspect is actually happening is that the rules of the game are changing far too rapidly for them to assimilate it. The language of economic liberalism will survive the practise for a long while, for what is emerging is an increasingly interventionist state. Even the Tories, while talking about the virtues open markets, are pleding tough regulatory regimes. This is by no means a reversion to a less predatory form of capitalism, although resistance by workers can make it so in the short term, but it does open up the argument somewhat: put briefly, if the state can protect profits and stock exchanges, it can protect jobs and public services.

Labels: democrats, federal bail-out, gop, neoliberalism, new labour, ruling class, tories

Facts, myths and media posted by Roobin

7/7 could have been a turning point in British political history, more important than the abolition of the 10p tax band. It was a chance for the British ruling class to start again.

The Republican regime used 9/11 to push changes in American political life: denature democracy, rig the odds even more heavily in favour of the neo-liberal consensus, strengthen the military/industrial complex and so on. The British ruling class, in the form of the Labour government, tried to hop onto this movement to push similar changes: from various anti-terrorism acts, to new narratives about “extremism”, right down to denouncing striking fire-fighters as “fascists” and “Saddam’s little helpers”.

They failed in one crucial respect: they did not take the people with them. They alienated millions of people from official power structures and sowed seeds that are now being reaped as the current crisis: wipeout in 2010.

The government counted on a passive population readily receiving and absorbing the official line about the war. Labour banked on Blair’s broad (but shallow) authority and charisma, backed by their undefeated media machine, winning people over (as happened in 1999 with the Balkan conflict). They underestimated the number of people who would take an active interest in the War on Terror. Why did 9/11 happen? What is al qaeda, who is Osama Bin Laden and what did they have to do with Iraq?

But if 7/7 was a chance to start again the Labour government (and the ruling class more generally) being graded on building a ruling class movement, would have a comment next to their mark: “must try harder”. In the past few years the population has built up immunity to the word on high.

Even in the most authoritarian societies ruling class power is built on a mixture of force and consent. In a democratic society there is an expectation that ordinary citizens can contribute to the political process. Ruling class movements have to take this fact into account

Ruling class movements have to be built from the ground up. Capitalist ideology has to be shaped around people's everyday experience, often phrased in everyday language, delivered and explained by trusted people and institutions. Ideas and themes generated from below have to be incorporated into consensus (the illusion of meaningful participation often helps draw potential opposition groups into upholding the system).

Of course said themes used won't be be solidarity, internationalism or such like (although Make Poverty History was an attempt to divert latent anti-capitalism into paternalistic concern for the less fortunate, i.e. people not blessed with working neo-liberal regimes). In terms of ideological struggle “On Your Side”, the by-election campaign for Liam Byrne in Birmingham in 2004, was a key moment. Labour has increasingly tried to appeal to all that’s hateful and afraid in the working class, positing the average voter as a little Alf Garnett or Self-Righteous Brother.

Byrne’s campaign was themed around crime and immigration (he was going to be tough on both). But in case you didn’t get the point the leaflets were decked in the St George’s Cross.

This is called Dog Whistle politics, where symbols and code are used to say things to a specific audience without actually saying them out loud. When you stick the St George’s Cross on a leaflet and use the language of “them and us” it is easy to infer who ‘we’ are.

The next question is, if the ruling class message relies on trusted and capable media, what are those media, and how do they work?

Hot and Cold Media

The philosopher Marshall McLuhan is most well known for his aphorisms “the medium is the message” and “we live in a global village”. His analysis of media is often brilliant, certainly materialist and at times neck and neck with the great Marxists who looked at communication and ideology (Gramsci, Lukacs, Benjamin and so on).

One of his key concepts is that of hot and cool media. A hot medium is one that imparts large amounts of information where meaning and form is mostly predetermined. A cool medium is one where the audience participates much more in the creation of meaning.

One interesting example he gave was the medium of dance. The Waltz is a hot medium, where things like movement and etiquette were strictly determined. McLuhan compares this to the Twist, which is mostly improvised.

An interesting diversion: at the time of writing McLuhan compared the popularity of the Twist in America with the Charleston in the USSR. The USSR had been through a tremendous period of industrialisation and modernisation. Conformity and precision were regarded as positive qualities, improvisation and individualism were discouraged. The twist was apparently considered taboo in Soviet Russia.

The significance of hot and cold media is in their general effect on social and individual consciousness. Hot media, loaded with information, over-stimulate the senses. The mind (social or individual) is thrown into imbalance. In order to cope it has to numb itself to the assault until it can recover. There are a number of illustrations that spring to mind, voter apathy, compassion fatigue, insensitivity to violence, channel hopping, internet surfing…

McLuhan develops this idea to the point where he suggests the content of a medium is socially almost irrelevant (the medium is the message).

Here comes the science part… ish

We touched a little on the significance this has for politics (voter apathy etc…). Another great twentieth century writer, Aldous Huxley, actually saw over-stimulation, a flood of information as a source of oppression.

The people who control our information-saturated media are able to do two things. The first is bury bad news, facts, opinions and stories detrimental to the consensus, in a welter of (often trivial) information. Second is use almost pure sensation to create meaning.

This second tactic is the most incredible as it can transform lies into facts and madness into reason in the public mind. To go back to the start, the pro-war government movement was a particularly egregious example.

The Axis of Evil was generated out of thin air, along with weapons of mass destruction and the connection between Iraq and al qaeda. Lies, guesses, half-truths and suspicions were worked up into facts, magnified and repeated endlessly. ‘We’ were 45 minutes from destruction. By ‘we’ it was meant British bases in Cyprus (no one asks why there are British military bases in Cyprus), and by destruction it was meant possibly, if Iraq had chemical and biological weapons and if the delivery system could carry them that far and that accurately.

Another short diversion: the social implications of sensationalism are clear. Each new dose of sensationalism, added to cut through the numbing mix, leaves a longer and deeper hangover. Porn becomes ever more graphic, horror ever more gory, comedy becomes an imperial adventure into the realm of taboo.

There are those who know how to use the media…

One of them is Karl Rove. He is supposedly “Bush’s Brain”, certainly the mastermind behind his career and the current Republican domination.

John McCain has revived him in a rather soviet-like way. McCain was firstly cut out of power rather brutally by the Bush election machine in 1999-2000. Now that George Bush is a deadly liability and the Republicans tainted by his years of misrule McCain had no choice but to… bring Rove back.

He first made his mark in direct mail appeals (cool medium). He would apply a deep interest in voting groups and sub-groups to hone his message precisely to their prejudices and fears. Telephone campaigns (also cool) were variation on this. According to legend, at the climax of one election campaign in Texas he had his staff phone people to earnestly tell them the Democratic candidate was a closet lesbian.

It doesn’t matter whether lesbians run the Democratic Party or not. Most people cold-called to be told this ‘fact’ would laugh or hang up. The calls were targeted, narrowcast to people likely to believe such a statement and find it significant. The suggestion has been made, but it’s up to them what they find significant.

Remember, Republican activists have a bee in their bonnet about the “liberal media”. There is no such thing of course, but that’s not the point. 80s and 90s saw the rise of media that bypassed the supposed liberal stranglehold, talk-radio and the internet. Conservative activists and advocates developed media where they could specifically control the message. The success of these new media had an immediate effect on the old, supposedly liberal media outlets (see the Bush 'election' in 2000 or the build up to the Iraq war).

Well, what’s the old skuldugger up to today? Evil genius though he may be, he’s not above playing on the name of Barack Hussein Obama. Go out and look for Americans, before long you will find some who honestly believe Barack Obama is a Muslim and that that’s a baaaad thing.

A quick dip into the news finds this:

DVDs of an anti-Muslim documentary film are being distributed to 28 million voters in swing states like Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Colorado and Wisconsin…

The 2005 film, called Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West, warns that Islamic jihadists aim to take over the US government and destroy our way of life and urges voters to consider which candidate will best protect the nation. Among other subtleties, the film attempts to equate Islam with Nazism, juxtaposing scenes of children being encouraged to become suicide bombers with shots of Nazi rallies…
The film's production and promotional campaign were bankrolled by the Clarion Fund, an obscure non-profit that has not filed the required IRS form that would allow the public to see who its officers and major funders are. The group was founded, however, by Raphael Shore, an Israeli-Canadian citizen and supporter of John McCain. Shore's website, Radical Islam, featured an editorial endorsing McCain for president. That's a big no-no: 501c3s aren't legally allowed to endorse candidates.

Also:

Jewish voters in swing states have also been the targets of push polling from Republican-affiliated marketing outfits. Joelna Marcus of Key West, Florida received a telemarketing call asking if she is Jewish. After replying "yes", she was asked whether she was religious. Then the push poller then asked her if her opinion of Barack Obama would change if she knew that Obama had given lots and lots of money to the PLO. In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Debbie Minden received a call asking whether her support for Obama would be swayed if she knew "his church was anti-Israel" or that Hamas endorsed him and that its leaders had met with him. The caller also asked if she would change her mind if she learned he was Muslim.

The New Republic's Jonathan Cohn also received a call in Michigan and took notes of the smears: According to the caller, some of Obama's best friends in Chicago were "pro-Palestinian leaders"; Jimmy Carter's anti-Israel national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski is an Obama foreign policy adviser; Obama sat on a board which funded a "pro-Palestinian charity"; Obama said that if elected he would call for a summit of Muslim nations and exclude Israel.

Minden reported that her call came from a firm called Research Strategies, which is none other than Wilson Research Strategies, whose founder is Chris Wilson. Wilson is a top Republican consultant and friend of, you guessed it, Karl Rove. Cohn said his call came from a company called Central Marketing, which has done push polls on behalf of the campaigns of Republicans John Thune and Michael Bloomberg.

The nice touch here is Rove (let alone McCain) is never directly involved. Nonetheless are “obvious Republican scare-tactic[s], right out of the Rovian playbook”. They are examples of cold media being used. How is the Republican campaign dealing with hot media? An example:

So I was abed this morning listening to NPR and on comes Mara Liasson with a report about the women's vote. Typical silly evenhandedness, and then she plays a snippet from a McCain-Palin radio commercial that sums up the whole problem, really.

The commercial is about the "sexist" attacks on Palin. The script is read of course in a woman's voice, and she conveys just the right tone of anger and contempt for the sneering hypocritical liberal elite misogynists. They tried A, and B, and C, the woman says. And then, when that didn't work, "they called her a liar." She brands this "despicable."

Okay. I spent yesterday afternoon fretting that Obama's message was too muddled, not pointed enough. Almost everyone I know thinks this. Maybe we're right. Or maybe we're just compulsive fretters, because that's what liberals tend to be based on experience.

So maybe the Obama team is flailing. But now I hear this ad and I think, how do you fight an opponent that not only lies, but then tells lies about the lies?

Palin is a liar. Of this there's no question. She supported the bridge to nowhere. She asked for earmarks as governor – and not just one or two, but $453 million worth. She still goes around the country saying the exact opposite of both of these things.

Having already created a new audience through naturally cool, narrowcast media, the Republicans are better placed to fight for control of the hot, broadcast media.

The line about ‘sexist’ attacks on Sarah Palin is to create a foolproof defence for a weak candidate. If it’s sexist to attack your opponent for lying then its sexist to attack your opponent for anything. The idea hangs on the well-developed meme of the hypocritical liberal elitist. If you subscribe to that meme in any way the case is all but won. The hypocritical liberal elitist is put on the backfoot, they have to defend themselves when they should be attacking their opponent.

Hot media are pumped full of sensational (mis)information, in the style of cold media, in the knowledge there is an audience segment that will pick up and absorb the misinformation: dog whistle politics. It doesn’t matter if said information is eventually proved wrong or misleading, as it will quickly swamped.

In this case a temporary advantage has been won for the Republicans. However, the advantage has been won thanks to years of preparation. The audience was created by Rovian strategy, by a movement from the ground up.

Closer to home

I think we’re still a long way from the lunatic culture wars of America. We’re going through a similar warping process, one that, I believe, is starting to be applied consciously.

An example to begin with: in the 2005 general election campaign, seemly out of nowhere, the Labour party campaign in Bethnal Green and Bow put out stories of how Oona King was subject to anti-Semitic abuse. Two particular incidents were mentioned. One where a group of Bengali lads insulted her as a “Jewish bitch”, another where unknown youths egged a World War Two veterans event. There was a general insinuation put round that “Respect supporters” were encouraging local Muslims not to vote for her because she had Jewish ancestry.

Not once did the campaign say that Respect had been doing such things, or that Respect had an anti-Semitic programme or membership. Despite the dubious nature of the accusations (someone directly involved in or touched by the campaign could know or prove them to be wrong or right), they were carefully placed to cause damage. They tried to establish guilt by association and, even if they failed, they would put the Respect campaign on the back foot, deflecting attention from King’s record as a New Labour stooge (the other tactic was to remind everyone she was only one of two black, female MPs in London: so much for the system).

Labour’s dirty tricks failed. They were unleashed too late. The Respect campaign had too much momentum; too many people were doing too good a job overturning the King’s majority.

The Bethnal Green and Bow Labour Party picked on the theme of anti-Semitism developed by a small group of ex-leftists based in the media and academia as part of a programme for entering the right via the War on Terror. The anti-war movement of course supports justice for the Palestinian people. With the same kind of logic (put your opponent on the back foot, deflect from the flaws in your argument) the ex-leftists insinuated consistently this solidarity was anti-Semitic.

They developed and magnified their arguments through the conventional and electronic press, in particular through the web log and discussion forum. These are cooling media, with a veneer of popular participation (the final say always goes to the proprietor). To a greater or lesser extent the readership is drawn into the idea they are contributing to meaning, in this case the shape of the news agenda (comment is free, have your say, Speak you’RE Brane).

The vox pop and poll have been parts of the news media for a long time. As media divide and combine the idea of audience participation has blossomed. Each newspaper now has its own blog with comment section. Newsreaders now ask for your comment via email. On TV you can vote for just about anything (except of course a change in government policy). If you’re bored with TV go to Youtube and you can make your own films.

The content, however, near universally poor: often bigoted and illiterate. The significance of audience participation is now when right-wing newspapers churn over legends about hated minorities (such as the Swan Bake legend) online Alf Garnetts’ can vent together, adding to the meaning of the story.

This process is almost certainly being cultivated for political ends. When the government pushes out islamophobic propaganda it is increasingly taken up and developed from below. Pro-war racists may have seen the anti-war demonstrations, the mass meetings, the stalls, they may have felt the general anti-war consensus pointed against them and concluded they were alone. Now they can go to BBC online, listen to LBC or pick up a London Lite and feel validated and confident.

Round-up...

The ruling class has always used its dominance to control information, manipulate consciousness, divide and rule, hegemony. They don’t get everything their own way, however. Personal experience often contradicts official theory and can potentially generalised into counter hegemony. Ruling class ideology has to be shaped to fit ordinary experience and expressed by trusted people.

The Labour Party, the mainstream media and parliamentary democracy took great hits from the anti-war movement. They still haven’t recovered. The ruling class will have to find alternative means, alternative media to secure its hegemony.

Labels: 'war on terror', Marshall McLuhan, media, us elections

Burn the witch. posted by lenin

Labels: ian huntley, russell brand, the sun, voodoo

While you were watching your money disappear... posted by lenin

As the Bush administration taps US taxpayers to keep refilling the vessels of the Danaides, largely with the connivance of congressional Democrats, something on the periphery of mainstream political vision is troubling. A frontier of the war on terror is expanding. Every day, it seems, there is a new report of an attack by US troops inside Pakistan. Then there are increasingly regular reports of engagements between said US troops and the Pakistani army, who are nominally US allies. One reads that Bush has authorised strikes in Pakistan without seeking the consent of the Pakistani government. Then said strikes take place, followed by astonished denunciations from the Pakistani government. Look, the government says, we are your friends: we are killing the evil-doers, and being killed by them. They say they've killed 1,000 'militants' in one operation alone. No matter: the US Secretary of Defense knows that the US can't expect Pakistani support for the strikes, but says they will carry on regardless.

Why, you might ask, would the United States persist in operations that clearly destabilise Pakistan and undermine the effectiveness of its government? Let there be no doubt that this is what is happening. The International Republican Institute (IRI) takes, as you might expect, a great interest in Pakistan. It's a strategically vital zone for preserving US hegemony in southern and central Asia. Their regular polls [pdf] show great dissatisfaction among Pakistanis both about the general direction of the country under administrations that are to a large extent subordinated to US interests, and overwhelming opposition to the 'war on terror'. Only 1% of Pakistanis regard 'Al Qaeda' as a serious threat, though the majority consider religious extremism of various kinds to be problematic. They much prefer negotiations and dialogue to military strategy adopted by the state. And I daresay the bombing of the Marriott hotel reinforced the widespread doubts that military operations can cope with the problem. Some reports suggest that Pakistan's future as a country is being put at risk.

However, one thing that the Bush administration and Obama's campaign agree on is the need for a renewed focus on winning the war in Afghanistan. That is to put it somewhat coyly: there is no immediate prospect of winning the war, and the chances of winning it in the distant future are vanishing. It would be nice to get a better insight into official thinking on this, but the National Intelligence Estimate on Afghanistan, reportedly "grim", is being kept classified. Avery significant report coming out of Afghanistan suggests the US client-state is isolated, and that the 'Taliban' - rather, a constellation of military rebels with limited coherence - is advancing on the capital. NATO forces are reportedly stuck in "stalemate". Taliban leaders boast, probably with some justice, that their success owes itself to being rooted in and supported by much of the civilian population. Previous reports by the pro-war Senlis Council have suggested that the level of support for the insurgency in southern Afghanistan is woefully underestimated by the occupiers. Nonetheless, a consensus in the US political class has clearly emerged: Iraq is less important, strategically, than Afghanistan. A managed 'withdrawal' from Iraq, leaving behind permanent bases protected by a status of forces agreement (in which the comprador elite may well have to pay the US for its 'protection') will enable a greater commitment to Afghanistan. The UK has already committed to sending thousands more troops to Afghanistan, having started the withdrawal from Iraq. Global allies of the US are being pressed to escalate their military role, while the US has engaged in a terrifying amplification of its bombing campaignss. Major General Charles Dunlap Jr. of the US air force has argued that the bombing raids should be intensified further, regardless of the impact on Afghanistan's civilian population, and that probably reflects the mainstream in US military thinking - it certainly reflects the conduct.

And so, expanding the war into areas of Pakistan where the 'Taliban' and sympathetic forces operate in and retreat to, knowing that the widower president could not conceivably approve of such actions if he wanted to avoid being assassinated, is a logical further step. "Logical," that is to say, from within the twisted purview of terror warriors. As Paul Rogers points out, even if Islamabad tacitly acquiesces with Zardari theatrically shaking his fist for public consumption, US military attacks inside Pakistan are likely to raise opposition both among the Pakistani public as a whole, and - crucially - in the army. It is insanity, plainly, and raises the prospect of an escalating engagement that becomes a war to subdue much of Pakistan. Those who want to "stay the course" vaunt the prospect of prolonged 'civil war' in Afghanistan, of rising politico-religious extremism, of regional states moving in to defend their interests, and of the country becoming a "narco-state" which incubates threats to global security. What staying the course actually means is prolonged, intensifying and spreading civil war, probably stimulating what are for the moment quietest, conservative bazaari layers into military insurgency, and a ramping up of the opium trade that at the moment funds US allies in Afghanistan more than it funds the 'Taliban'. As for threats to global security (to the extent that this term is not used as a synonym for the security of US geo-economic interests), one could hardly imagine a worse prospect than the breakdown of a nuclear state and an expanding civil war that interplays with deadly regional dynamics. Nor does one fancy the entirely probable escalation in the conflict in Kashmir with a further radicalisation of India's own 'war on terror', and potentially renewed hostilities between India and Pakistan. And, incidentally, as the recent crisis in Georgia has demonstrated, America's struggle for supremacy in the region produces the danger of major inter-imperial rivalry and a revivified global arms race. One could go on: it's just that while the financial system is tanking, the 'war on terror' is going to strange and dangerous new places that may well cost more than $700bn.

Labels: 'war on drugs', 'war on terror', afghanistan, islamism, pakistan, taliban, US imperialism

$1.7 trillion posted by lenin

The total amount being transferred to the rich according to Senator Byron Dorgan.

Labels: neoliberalism, rich, ruling class, wealth transfer

Two polls: spot the difference. posted by lenin

This one asks: "As you may know, the government is potentially investing billions to try and keep financial institutions and markets secure. Do you think this is the right thing or the wrong thing for the government to be doing?" 57% support the bail-out, 30% oppose it.

And this one asks: "Do you favor or oppose the proposal for the federal government to purchase up to $700 billion in assets from finance companies?" 44% oppose it, 25% support it.

Labels: capitalism, federal bail-out, george w bush, neoliberalism

Gilding the lily posted by lenin

The rich are beautiful people. They never set a foot wrong, and yet everyone is constantly out to get them: the haters, the whiners, the terrorists, the jealous, the hippies, the lefties, the liberals, the protesters, the welfare queens, the quakers, the bakers, the candlestick makers etc. You, hypocrite lecteur, have never actually tried to live their lives, yet you persist in finding them at fault for some putative flaws. You're just jealous of their freedom. The latest challenge faced by the rich is that their mega-welfare-handout might not be processed through the system as rapidly as they had anticipated. The reason is that there might actually be some slight reflex in the state that still demands legislative review and judicial oversight.

Apparently, there are some little flaws to the proposed bail-out that cynics might carp about. For one thing it really does look like a parachute for the empire, in that it will bail out any global financial institution that happens to have what Paulson deems 'significant' investments in the US economy, whether they are in deep trouble already or not. This looks like a move to consolidate America's faltering command of the financial system and to ensure that the global appropriation of labour continues to operate overwhelmingly in the interests of US capital. Secondly, there are no protections for homeowners or taxpayers, no limits on executive remuneration, no plans to stimulate the economy, and no demands for reciprocity (ie, we give you $700bn, you give us...). This is just throwing money at the ruling class. So, as one might have predicted, the crisis is being used to shore up the class power of the rich through a massive act of expropriation. Thirdly, so it seems, the legislation includes a clause ruling out executive or judicial oversight of any part of this wealth transfer. So, the state is taking the opportunity to enhance its ability to act on behalf of capital without accountability.

Obama initially backed the Bush administration, but is offering some opposition to the current plans. A slew of right-wing commentators are also opposed, on the grounds that they thought all this bullshit about the 'free market' and 'moral hazard' and 'accountability' was in some sense meaningful. Only the reactionary statists of the Bush administration could force 'fiscal conservatives' into the same corner as liberals and leftists. No wonder the markets rallied on hearing of the Bush administration's plans: the owners saw a naked attempt to restore profitability by jacking the taxpayer further, thus ensuring a future 'belt-tightening' period of restricted income for Americans workers. And now we have an interesting bit of blackmail to deal with: if the legislation doesn't pass very quickly and without amendment, the markets may tumble again, thus threatening jobs, growth and trade.

Labels: 'free markets', financial sector, george w bush, neoliberalism, us economy

Bloggery is not the world posted by lenin

Labels: bloggery, liberals, narcissism, new labour

What's the matter with Sunderland? posted by lenin

Labels: benefits, gordon brown, neoliberalism, new labour, poverty, sunderland, the guardian, welfare

Convention of the Left posted by lenin

Meanwhile, Red Pepper has reported from the Convention of the Left. It seems to have gone well so far:

A contributor from Permanent Revolution caused even more consternation when he said: ‘the elephant in the room ... [pause for dramatic effect] ... is Respect. It collapsed, that’s the truth of the matter. And before that we had the Socialist Alliance.’

‘Why did they fail? We need to ask the question or we risk repeating their mistakes.’

Then Lindsey German was up, doing a decent job of tranquilising that elephant. ‘We can all put our hands up to what we’ve done wrong,’ she said, ‘but there’s no point in sitting here and saying 20 years ago we fell out over this question or two years ago we fell out over that question. We have to find a method of working that unites us and doesn’t divide us.’

Nick Wrack, from the other wing of Respect, shared the sentiment. ‘I’m prepared to debate and discuss what went wrong,’ he said, ‘but what is far more important is that there is more that unites us than separates us.’

‘The working class out there is facing a terrible situation and it’s going to worsen. We don’t need to make differences over tactical issues a dividing line at this moment.’

Labels: convention of the left, left alternative, manchester, respect, socialism

Manchester special brew posted by lenin

Predictably, yesterday's thousands of antiwar protesters outside the Labour Party conference in Manchester received less coverage than the BNP's pathetic 300 turnout for its totemic rally at Stoke. On the other hand, David Cameron's bicycle helmet got more coverage than the antiwar protesters. Anyway, like the contents of said helmet, this week's festival of New Labourism is likely to be a hollow affair. Anyone expecting a coup is going to be disappointed. The supporters of David Miliband wouldn't be so stupid as to use the conference as their springboard, the Left isn't going to be represented, and the unions will save their blows for block voting on policy desiderata such as higher public sector pay. Jon Cruddas may be staking out territory for a broad left leadership campaign, but for now he is backing Brown's pathetic loyalty campaign, presumably sensing that he hasn't yet the strength to prevail in any sudden leadership election.

Even so, with figures this bad, it has to be an uneasy week for the Brownites. The Independent tries to save Brown's hide with this deceptive headline, showing a big fall in the Tory lead. They attribute this to Brown's pledges to 'clean up' the City. In fact, the rise in Labour's standing is within the margin of error, while the Tory fall is mainly due to a 5% surge in Lib Dem support, which I would imagine is a statistical anomaly rather than a tribute to the former Hitchens intern Nick Clegg and his aristocratic charisma. As the Indy's report demonstrates, voters may not like Miliband or Cameron that much, but they are sick to the back teeth of Brown's leadership. So, the fact remains that Labour is headed for a wipeout in both marginals and 'heartlands' in 2010. They will lose seats they've held since the Great War, and the cabinet will be gutted. Given the logic of defending Brown at all costs, those soft left PLP members who want a modest change of policy - by, for example, imposing a windfall tax on the energy companies - are relenting on any serious campaign to obtain such change. Ironically, though they seem to be worried about the arch-Blairites taking over, this strategy concedes the argument to Charles Clarke et al: Labour can't win with Brown, they will say, and no one else is stepping up to the plate. Everyone else is locked into Brown's electoral suicide-pact.

This week's proceedings, though there will be tussles below the surface, will not be about a leadership challenge, but about re-asserting Labour's claim to government. To that extent, it will in all probability deliver the following sentiments (in no particular order): things are tough, but the main problem is that our message isn't getting out to people (a whinge about the media); British people are rightly concerned about the economy, but don't want to go back to the old ways (rebuke the Left, reassure business); we said we'd do x and we've done x, we said we'd do y and we're doing y, we said we'd do z and plans to fastrack z are already in place (delivery schtick); people have legitimate concerns about immigration, and we are responding to that, but we must also make the argument for a sensible immigration policy (we should be prudently racist); let's have a frank and honest debate about a, b and c (shut up and listen); we must work to strengthen our international commitments, to defend our values - sure to be pronounced 'vawlyews' at some point - not only against extremism but also against poverty and disease (let's hope Obama wins so that we can continue to throw troops at perpetual war zones and impose neoliberal measures without being associated with a bunch of headcases); we must act on the environment using the most technologically efficient solutions for a clean, modern economy (more nuclear power stations for us, less for Iran); so let us show boldness and vision, now more than ever, and let us show that the people of this country - who are intelligent and rational - will do better with a government of 'the many, not the few' than with a party that whatever their promises to the contrary will always represent the few against the many (we have nothing else up our sleeves, but it's either us or the Tories). Unto which, the party faithful will lard praise and exultation in the desperate hope that their enthusiasm will prove cathing enough to prevent the inevitable massacre.

Labels: bnp scum, conference, manchester, neoliberalism, new labour, stop the war coalition, unite against fascism

The Thatcherite Insurgency posted by lenin

And, just for fun:

Labels: advertising, ideology, neoliberalism, thatcherism, the listening bank, yuppy scum

Le Gaffeur posted by lenin

...Bernard-Henri Lévy — universally known in France as BHL — who cuts a commanding figure both in the circles of the Left Bank intelligentsia and in the world of Parisian high fashion and salon society...

Labels: bhl, hitchens, the liberal defense of murder

It ain't racist, cuz Islam ain't a 'race' posted by lenin

A computer game in which players control an American soldier sent to "wipe out the Muslim race" has been condemned as offensive and tasteless by a British Muslim group. The goal of Muslim Massacre, which can be downloaded for free on the internet, is to "ensure that no Muslim man or woman is left alive", according to the game's creator...

A Google search for the phrase "Muslim race" yields over 13,000 results.

Labels: genocide, islam, islamophobia, racism

The Game posted by lenin

Labels: the wire

Class hatred posted by lenin

Labels: 'chav', class politics, new labour, poverty, working class

Breaking News posted by lenin

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Self-Confessed Mastermind of Evil, has just told investigators that Al Qaeda plotted the destruction of the Western financial system and is behind its current difficulties.

Labels: 'al qaeda', capitalist crisis

Time to read Capital posted by lenin

No better time than now, in fact. So let David Harvey take you through it:



That's the introductory lecture. You can follow the rest of the series here.

Labels: capital, crisis, david harvey, marx

Planet of the toppling giants posted by lenin

How fabulous. Everyone is scared, insecure, ready for the brown envelope and the foot in the arse, because of a totally irrational, wasteful and destructive system of production whose beneficiaries and apologists have not ceased to laud as the most efficient and benevolent institution mankind has yet invented. The latest financial giant about to tumble is Morgan Stanley. Say what? Yeah. Morgan Stanley, which last year posted a net income of over $3bn, which manages $779bn of assets worldwide, that services states and corporations the world over, is hitting the fucking bricks. There are potential buyers for Morgan Stanley. Both HSBC and, which is more interesting, the China Investment Corp are making their bids. Actually, there will probably be a few more, since so many banks are heavily exposed to that company. But that just means any suitor will take on Morgan Stanley's weaknesses, and large numbers of jobs will still be shed anyway.

Of course, I don't care about their shareholders or their gold-plated investors, but the simple fact is that we have a struggle to make sure they don't make us pay for their crisis. After all, the capitalist class has a procedure for situations like this: cut your losses, shred papers, fire staff, take the profits, retreat behind some gated communities with armed guards, let everyone else fight over the scraps, and wait patiently for a decent investment opportunity. Didn't these motherfuckers just come for your social security recently? Wasn't it only months ago that the UK government was talking about cutting disability benefits and the entitlements of single mothers? Aren't they pushing for a roll-back of your state pension entitlements? And how many people no longer have a pension to speak of because it has disappeared into a financial black hole? If these people have the monopoly of political initiative, they'll be able to use this crisis to roll back your rights even further. They'll say that trade unions are distorting the market by artificially raising wages and discouraging hiring, and they'll want new laws restricting membership. They'll say that social security distorts the market by disincentivising labour and encouraging widespread abstention from work. They'll say that pension entitlements are unsustainable with an ageing population, that the retirement age needs lifting since people are living so long, and that the taxes paid by corporations and the rich to help fund such bleeding-heart programmes are discouraging investment. If people resist, they'll say that violence is being promoted by political extremists and that for the time being certain rights need to be suspended until such time as people prove themselves mature enough to have them restored. Oh, but, don't worry: they're your friends, and they're there to help you. Just be patient and the wealth will trickle down.

Being equal to this situation is difficult in part because this is a crisis with no real historical precedent. In many ways, it could be worse than the Depression. The urgency of this moment has to result in a strong protest at the Labour conference, a good attendance at the Convention of the Left (Guardian report here), and some serious weight being put into such initiatives as People Before Profit. It has to result in a grassroots push in the trade unions for a massive fightback against the incomes policy, and for a radical new economic programme. The government, another toppling giant, has nothing to offer. It is spent. This, for example, is some lame-ass shit, the latest of a series of embarrassingly puny moves by an administration on its last legs. The best they've got to offer is the head of Gordon Brown, and so what? Whoever takes over will lead the Labour Party to a humiliating defeat, and the most likely successor is some right-wing scumbag like Alan Johnson or John Reid anyway. Or there'll be a 'dream ticket', whatever the fuck that means. There are those who still want to 'reclaim' the party - good luck to them, but they haven't got a choirboy's chance in Winchester. No, it's time to move on, regroup, and urgently get our shit together.

Labels: capitalism, economy, financial sector, great depression, neoliberalism

Think of the victims posted by lenin

Won't somebody please think of the victims?:

And when they do get home, how long can they afford to stay if the rent is high or a mortgage outstanding? What about the builders remodelling the kitchen? The nanny and the cleaner? How will they pay for the private school? The private health insurance? The car, the clubs, the tennis lessons? Dining out, theatre, opera? Christmas presents, holidays, charities? The accumulating pile, which to a banker serves as a report card, means many different things to those who help to spend it and to those on whom it is spent.

For every vanished pile there will be crying children, an angry spouse, unemployed builders and domestic help, goods left on shop shelves, flats and houses available to rent or buy, empty restaurants, and villages in Africa that don't get their new water pump after all.

Labels: economy, financial sector, neoliberalism, spoilt city brats

Incongruity posted by lenin

New Labour values coming at you. There is something vaguely charming and olde worlde about this style of political commentary from New Labour stalwart Jackie Ashley. Currently rated number one in the Comment is Free charts ("Where Supply Meets Demand"), it is the insider's guide to Gordon Brown's woes. I raise it because everything about it strikes the wrong chord, and it must say something about the mental state of the Brownites and their tame journalists. Collectively, they resemble that commonplace cartoon character who dashes off a cliff's edge and only remains aloft so long as he hasn't realised that there's nothing to support him. Here, in Ashley's treatment, we have the heroic Gordon of Richard Curtis' imagination, the brooding idealist of Girl in a Cafe. Or, in more prosaic terms, the "values-rooted" ex-Chancellor who knows and cares so much about the poverty (and associated diseases) in far-off spots that he has in fact contributed to. That latter point is simply not a consideration in the grimy lagoon from which Brown's valets see the world, any more than they hold him co-responsible for the Iraqi democide. He is beseiged, worried, angry with himself, losing weight, fretting himself sick about the unemployed. Anxiety is cutting the lard off him at a prodigious rate. But the contours of the bold visionary who looked at the Tory's PFI schemes and thought "great idea!" is still there somewhere. Can this romantically heroic Brown finally emerge from his shabby, self-imposed chrysalis and save the day? Can he turn his massive negatives into a little plus with a life-saving conference speech? Will Glenrothes be saved? Will the economic news brighten up a little bit? Oh, the joys of fantasy reformism...

Labels: 'values', brownites, gordon brown, neoliberalism, warmongering

Homo Europa posted by lenin

"Eurocentric historians typically view the rise of Europe after 1000 in terms of a self-contained or autonomous regional economy or civilization. Towns in particular were deemed to be 'acephalous' ... In the conventional account the proliferation of the towns is granted almost magic-like qualities. For it is assumed that with the end of the internal disruptions that ravaged Europe between 370 and 1000, the ensuing internal order inevitably ensured the development of towns and commerce. Underlying such a claim is the assumption that 'European man' is inherently economically rational, and that under the right conditions (ie peace and minimalist, laissez-faire governments) so he would naturally get on with what he does best - ie, trade...

"Particularly puzzling within the Eurocentric context is the much used concept of 'long-distance trade': puzzling because while Europe lay at one end of the nexus, it is not always clear what lay at the other end. And what has been generally missed is that it was the East that not only lay at the other end, but played a crucial role in the rise of European trade itself. For European trade was ultimately made possible only by the flow of Eastern goods which entered Europe via Italy. And second, the flow of Eastern 'resource portfolios' - ideas, institutions, and technologies - from the Middle East and China all diffused into Italy and Europe primarily along the commercial arteries of the global economy (though equally some were learned of during the crusades). Nevertheless, this is not to say that Italy was unimportant to the fortunes of European commerce, finance and production. For it was in fact central. But it was only so because Italy was one of the major conduits through which Eastern resources (not just trade) entered and reshaped Europe." (John M Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization, Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp 117-18).

Labels: 'west', economy, eurocentrism, homo economicus, imperialism, trade

The sound of raining bullshit posted by lenin

Hank Paulson tells us that the system is sound. The Daily Telegraph is sure that the chimera known as the "free market" is still "our best hope". Anatole Kaletsky of The Times believes that the fundamentals are sound and that the worst of the crisis is to be spent outside the 'real economy' in the surreal financial sector. And, as a special treat for British workers, the governor of the Bank of England says that his Monetary Policy Committee is now "firmer in its belief that a period of muted economic growth is necessary to dampen pressures on wages and prices and return inflation to target." Yes, you read that correctly! They're keeping interest rates high to beat the shit out of wages and depress the economy, right in the middle of a global downturn, right when deflation is the vogue threat. Ten'll get you five, this is driving a further wedge right into the heart of a government that is already collapsing before our eyes. A few days ago, the good governor directly intervened in policymaking by warning the government not to raise spending on public services for fear that this would reduce the credibility of the government's fiscal rules on borrowing in the eyes of investors. Well, isn't he sweet?

First thing. I hate to remind everyone, but this crisis is rooted in the fundamentals. Take an example. One reason why hedge funds aren't hurting so much today is because the credit default swaps on the Lehman Brothers securities brokers soared in value over the last few days before it declared bankruptcy. Why is that? A credit default swap (CDS) is, essentially, insurance taken out on debt you are owed if you think the borrower might default. You then might insure the CDS by taking out a further, derivative, CDS on that, if you think the institution providing the first CDS might itself default. The CDS will end up on the market like everything else, being bought and sold, generally by hedge funds because of their more secure position. The value of the CDS will increase as the company on whom the original protection was taken out becomes more and more likely to default on its debts. So, those who retained investments in Lehman Brothers despite the warning signs (such as George Soros), got burned, but most hedge funds, adhering to catholic investment doctrine, actually withdrew before the climax anyway, and probably even made something from Lehman's collapse. So far, it just looks like the conventional story: the rich man's betting club collapses on itself, with some winners and losers, and the challenge is to prevent the whole thing from "spilling over into the real economy".

But, of course, what caused Lehman Brothers to default on its debts was its exposure to the subprime market, and this is where we get down to those fundamentals. Lehman Brothers brokered in securities - to a large extent, mortgage-backed securities (MBS). A single MBS might consist of thousands of mortgages bundled together, which can be bought and sold on the market at extraordinary profit for as long as there is a boom. The subprime MBS market was always risky, but when the MBS market was worth trillions, having doubled between 2001 and 2003, it looked much more attractive than it does now. And at any rate, in order to generate more value out of relatively sluggish economic growth, many companies turned to the riskier investments because of the promise of greater rewards. But what caused the massively inflated value of the MBS market in the first place also contributed to the stock market bubbles we have seen before and after the 2000-1 recession. Households with incomes depressed on account of the clobbering of labour unions and of neoliberal policies designed to repress wages, had to rely on relatively inexpensive credit to meet their needs. As house prices went up, they could use their homes as collateral for increasing indebtedness. Without the staggering amount of private debt built up by US households through the 1990s and 2000s, the system would have collapsed much earlier, because there would not have been sufficient demand to sustain it. But that debt also provided the basis for a stupendous stock market bubble, and with it a massively inflated MBS market of the kind that tempted poor old Lehman Brothers to sin. The story of the collapse of Lehman Brothers is a story of weak fundamentals. The weaknesses of the 'real economy', far from originating in the financial sector, were conducted into the financial sector and then amplified.

Second thing. The news can't talk sensibly about this, because they can't talk about class. They implicitly favour the capitalist purview in their focus, but they cannot directly address the issues involved. That is why no one relying on the papers and the television for enlightenment is going to have a clue what is going on. You receive one staccato bulletin after another - it's Black Monday in New York, Oh Shit Tuesday in Tokyo, Nuclear Dawn Wednesday in Moscow... You get human interest, dramatic footae, soft focus interviews, political soundbites, wonkery, etc., and if you put it all together, you still walk away befuddled. In fact, the best explanation you are likely to end up with is that some banks made some horribly bad bets on mortgages for poor people (and, therefore, what? - poor people shouldn't have mortgages?). To talk realistically about this crisis is to talk about what has happened to wages and profits for thirty years, the contours of class struggle and the associated political projects (socialism, social democracy, neoliberalism, etc), as well as the basic mechanism of exploitation behind that. To talk realistically about the issues raised by this crisis is also to talk about class, and particularly the impact on working class people. You can't understand why those who gain most from the system suffer least when it fails, while those who gain least suffer most unless you at least mention the fact that there is such a thing as highly concentrated class power in the society. You certainly can't understand the government and Bank of England's decision to restrict consumption in response to the crisis without seeing a preemptive strike against the bargaining power of labour (this obsession with wage pressures). This conflict of interests, this class struggle, is expressed a little bit more openly in the German media because the unions there are building up for a big fight to seriously enhance take-home pay and have the resources to combat the dominant narrative about the threat of inflation. One could go on, but at every point where an issue like this comes up, the news media tends to become curiously cryptic.

But just because the media doesn't recognise the very distinct working class interests that arise at this juncture doesn't mean that they aren't going to make themselves felt in a very serious way. The co-ordinated pay revolt planned by unions, provided it is pushed for in a big way by union members, could potentially be massive. And this is not just an 'economic' struggle. This menacing climacteric, with a global economic downturn dovetailing with intensified inter-imperial competition and looming climate chaos, raises all sorts of political questions. In the short term, it demands a clear formulation of what kind of programme we would actually need from the government in contrast to what we're actually getting; in the medium-term, it raises the question of how we are to express our interests politically when the official party of organised labour is busily waging the class war on behalf of capital; and, in the long term, it adds grave importt to the much more fundamental questions raised by the anticapitalist movement. Can we continue to live with this system, given its obvious perils and injustices, or do we have the means to build an alternative kind of society? But who would ask such a question when the system is sound and the free market remains the one and best hope?

Labels: capitalism, economy, financial sector, imperialism, neoliberalism, socialism, subprime

Left Party breathing down SPD's neck posted by lenin

They have the politicians, the media, and the ruling class scared, with good reason. In a recent poll, the Left Party in Germany had 14% of the vote, compared to the SDP's 25%. In another, it had 15% of the vote compared to the SPD's 20%. That trend persists. In Oskar Lafontaine's home state, the Linke is ahead of the SPD. In response to the rise of the Left Party, the SPD has tried to meet the challenge half-way before recoiling to the right again. Kurt Beck, the right-wing technocrat put in charge to keep the party ticking over, moved faintly the left last year. However, he has now been ousted by those ubiquitously referred to as "Schroeder's men", such as Franz Müntefering, the employment minister, who hated the shift from its inception. They have put the right-wing foreign minister in the "grand coalition" government, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in charge.

In a preposterous inversion of the facts, most Anglophone news sources are pretending that it was his very mild shift to the left that made Beck unpopular, despite the fact that he wasn't exactly riding high in the polls beforehand. They are giving the impression that the policies of Agenda 2010 and its successors are actually spiffingly popular, which is precisely the opposite of the truth. What actually happened was that the business of government within the "grand coalition" became more difficult, as the larger CDU component had to reckon with an SPD trying to coopt popular Linke demands. The rightists in the SPD were evidently infuriated by this, bided their time, and struck hard this September in an internal coup. As Victor Grossman records, the right-wing leadership of the SPD is now hammering the party's left-wing and flatly ruling out any deals with the Left Party. This will certainly reassure the SPD's business allies, who can only be astonished by the rapid emergence of an aggressively leftist party. As the establishment has sought to contain the Linke, the anticommunist language of the Cold War has been taken out of cryogenic storage. The CDU, which is on 37% and which may still require the SPD's support for a future government, is embarking on a nasty campaign to defame the Left Party as a Stalinist relic. This has been a theme of both the CDU and the SPD right for some time, and it has yet to be effective. It will be less convincing as the party makes further incursions into the Western states, as it has been doing.

At the moment, there is nothing else in Europe to match the Linke, although the new Anticapitalist Party in France might actually deliver the goods. A poll last month showed that the party's figurehead Olivier Besancenot, not the Socialist Party's leadership, is seen as Sarkozy's main opponent. Thought it is a pity that the LCR itself will cease to exist as a part, something has to give. The PS is in meltdown, and it is extremely important that the radical Left is moving in to fill the vacated space. Wherever this doesn't happen, the far right in its various guises has a demonstrated ability to win over a sizeable layer of the working class vote. And, I ought to mention, the recent experience of the Italian left, not to mention the crisis in the Portugese Left Bloc, stands as a direct warning to the Linke - get too close to the SPD at any level, and their right-wing policies may drag you down. And there lies the rub: as strong as the Left Party's performance is, there will surely be a divide between those who want to move to the right to make some sort of compromise with the SPD leadership, and those who do not. There will be those who want to concede something to the red-baiting hysteria and purge the party, and those who want to resist it. Success will bring its own dilemmas. But which dilemmas would you rather have? Those of marginality, or those of success?

Labels: cdu, germany, left party, linke, spd

Creak, grind, groan, croak. posted by lenin

Well, this is fucking picturesque, isn't it? The world's biggest finance capital institutions and the US government circle round the mortally wounded humpy dumpty that is Lehman Brothers, take one look, and decide not to touch that shit with a twenty foot pole. Bankruptcy Actually, it seems that the head of the Federal Reserve, told those involved in trying to broker a deal that there was no political will for a government bail-out. Merril Lynch was bought out by the Bank of America, just as Bear Stearns was bailed out a few months ago by JP Morgan, but this one didn't have federal backing. Arguably, with the massive nationalizations last week, the US government is already massively exposed and doesn't have the chutzpah to shoulder yet more debt. Some bankers have expressed worries that the nationalizations would actually precipitate a further collapse into a full-blown depression. That sentiment wasn't reflected in the stock market rallies following the nationalizations, however, and one suspects it isn't widely shared. But it does indicate that there are limits to what the US government can actually do. It can make the landing softer for its rich friends, certainly, and invest heavily in the main infrastructure to prevent the whole global system that functions overwhelmingly in US interests from collapsing overnight. And that, a 'New Deal' for the ruling class, is certainly more pragmatic than blustering intransigently about "moral hazard", the equivalent of pissing into an on-rushing tsunami. But ultimately, the US government can't turn back the tide. If the world economy slides into depression, the only way it will be able to raise money will be through war bonds. And who knows - another jumbo round of accumulation-by-dispossession, though risky, could destroy enough capital to help restart the whole shaky enterprise, and secure another American century.

In the meantime, just so that US voters don't lose track of what is really important, guess what they're getting delivered with their morning papers?

Labels: capitalism, depression, financial sector, neoliberalism, US imperialism

The Ides of September posted by lenin

The assassins strike their first blow.... Brown won't be PM come 2010.

Labels: blairites, gordon brown, new labour, socialism

Syndrome posted by lenin

In light of the revelations by people like Aidan Delgado and Specialist Jody Casey about officially sponsored racism in the military, the use of the dehumanising proper noun 'haji' to facilitate murder, and the spree of free and easy killings that ensues, I found the following testimony, quoted in Michael Krenn's account of racism in US foreign policy, resonant:

"On August 8th our company executed a 10-year-old boy. We shot him in the back with a full magazine M-16. Approximately August 16th to August 20th - I'm not sure of the date - a man was taken out of his hootch sleeping, was put into a cave, and he was used for target practice by a lieutenant, the same lieutenant who had ordered the boy killed. Now they used him for target practice with an M-60, an M-16, and a 45.

...

"I don't want to go into the details of these executions because the executions are the direct result of a policy. It's the policy that is important. The executions are secondary because the executions are created by the policy that is, I believe, a conscious policy within the military. Number one, the racism in the military is so rampant. Now you have all heard of the military racism. It's institutionalized; it is policy; it is SOP; you are trained to be a racist. When you go into basic training, you are taught they are gooks and all you hear is, "gook, gook, gook, gook." And once you take the Vietnamese people or any of the Asian people, because the Asian serviceman in Vietnam is the brunt of the same racism, because the GIs over there do not distinguish one Asian from another.

"They are trained so thoroughly that all Asians become the brunt of this racism. You are trained, "gook, gook, gook," and once the military has got the idea implanted in your mind that these people are not humans, they are subhuman, it makes it a little bit easier to kill 'em. One barrier is removed and this is intentional, because obviously, the purpose of the military is to kill people. And if you're not an effective killer, they don't want you. The military doesn't distinguish between North Vietnamese, South Vietnamese, Viet Cong, civilian--all of them are gooks, all of them are considered to be subhuman. None of them are any good, etc. And all of them can be killed and most of them are killed." (Testimony of Sgt Jamie Henry, 4th Infantry Division, to The Winter Soldier Investigation, organised by Vietname Veterans Against the War, 1971.)

Of course racism in the US military is a matter of policy. The pitch from the military itself is that it regards racist stereotyping as detrimental to discipline and performance, and does all it can to stamp it out. This is utter bullshit. It is not, of course, the 'Vietnam Syndrome'. That was a pseudo-medical coinage to explain the popular aversion to the necessary slaughter of brown people. Rather, it is the Philippines Syndrome, the Haiti Syndrome, the Hiroshima Syndrome, the Navaho Syndrome etc. It is the race, empire and genocide syndrome.

Labels: empire, genocide, iraq, racism, US imperialism, vietnam

Various. posted by lenin

Usual shit, different Friday.

Labels: various artists

Savage Mules: interview with Dennis Perrin posted by lenin

Labels: barack obama, democratic party, the liberal defense of murder, US imperialism, us politics

Afghanistan: civilian deaths tripled posted by lenin

Human Rights Watch, though hardly adorable, can provide useful data from time to time. According to their latest report on Afghanistan, civilian deaths tripled between 2006 and 2007. We're nine months into 2008, and the use of air strikes has soared dramatically in recent months, and the stats presented suggest that civilian deaths are once more rising dramatically. Now, let's just get one thing straight: the totals they provide are complete fucking bollocks. A total of 321 civilian deaths from air strikes in 2007? This must be based on Admiral Fallon's definition of a civilian. The trends may be accurately reflected, but anyone who thinks you can drop up to three times the tonnage of bombs on Afghanistan as are dropped on Iraq, and end up with less than 0.0001% of the deaths, must be in the military. Meanwhile...

Labels: afghanistan, air strikes, deaths

Bolivia - a different kind of rising. posted by lenin

The recent victory of Evo Morales in the national referendum, with a much stronger mandate (67%) than he had achieved in 2005 (53.7%), was a tribute to the depth and breadth of ongoing social struggles in Bolivia. That referendum also put eight of nine governmental regions (departments) to a recall vote, and a particularly delicious result saw the shady right-wing local governor (prefect) of Cochabamba, Manfred Reyes Villa, ejected by the local population. That scumbag actually tried to insist that he would stay on and refuse to recognise the result, but he was forced to resign in a matter of days. The referendum was perhaps the inevitable result of conservative ruling class blocs seeking to frustrate government reforms by first blocking reforms within the national assembly, and then carrying out sabotage from without. Morales had to find a way to shore up his authority. But the victory was not inevitable, and it is really due to sustained grassroots mobilisation, labour militancy, and mass democracy with popular assemblies regularly filling the streets.

Anyway, after a recent US threat to interfere in Bolivia's affairs in support of right-wing 'autonomists' (rich fucks who don't want to be governed by socialists), there has been a bit of old-fashioned rightist putschism in Santa Cruz, supported by the right-wing Podemos party, which is itself part of a larger opposition coalition including provincial governors and business interests. A conservative ruling class descended from European colonists might well put up with a very adulterated version of the indigeous rights project of the Morales government, but not the attempt to assert national sovereignty over the country's energy and land resources. As this paper by Mark Weisbrot and Luis Sandoval shows, it is the secessionist areas that have the highest concentrations of land ownership and receive a disproportionate share of energy revenues. Any attempt at social justice in terms of resources and land has to involve extensive expropriations from rpecisely those areas, either by the elected government operating effectively and legitimately, or by the Bolivian workers themselves.

Since the conservative opposition stormed out of the assembly in 2006, they've been trying to push for a version of 'autonomy' that would give the Santa Cruz elite control of the main resources, such as oil, gas, soya, and precious woods. Having staged an illegal referendum, the Santa Cruz elite says it has a mandate to assert control over the resources that it has so successfully plundered. This Tuesday, it seems, neo-fascist youths were unleashed by local elites determined to accelerate their attempts to effectively secede from La Paz, and attacked government departments, human rights organisations, and media outlets that aren't aligned to the ruling class. They've done this before, but it reached such a level this week that the government called it a coup. Morales has quite rightly instructed the US ambassador to leave the country.

US subventions are being successfully resisted in other ways too. Recently, USAID has been kicked out of Chapare by the coca growers, because it was aggressively trying to drive the coca growers out of business as part of the "Dignity Plan" (reminding one of Noriega's old Dignity Battalions) which the US worked out with the neoliberal Bolivian leadership in 1998. The growers noted that Venezuela was prepared to supply no-strings aid, so they didn't have to rely on an American agency which they accused of trying to undermine the Morales government. Still, if the US is reduced to sponsoring only regional rightist coups, there may be some cause for hope in that.

Labels: bolivia, coup, evo morales, right-wing, socialism, venezuela

Gordon Brown triangulates. posted by lenin

Brown and Harman are talking about class. Harriet Harman has conceded that social class is by far the biggest determinant of one's life prospects, and has been allowed to put together a committee to investigate the matter. Kindly contain your excitement. And this is what Gordon Brown has written: "We need to be honest with ourselves: while poverty has been reduced [false] and the rise in inequality halted [false], social mobility has not improved in Britain as we would have wanted [half-truth - it has remained stagnant and, in some areas, has got worse]". This feckless drivel is intended, presumably, to placate the trade union bureaucracy in advance of a difficult speech to the TUC conference. If it signals a substantial change in rhetoric, it does not signal a serious change in policy.

Alistair Darling yesterday told the TUC that workers would just have to lump it, while assuring delegates - in contrast to his recent claim that the crisis would be the worst for sixty years - that Britain was 'well-placed' to ride out the credit crunch (the precise opposite of the truth). Though he accepted that inflation was not being driven by workers wages, he insisted that workers would nevertheless have to bear the burden. He and Gordon Brown have, meanwhile, utterly refused to apply any restrictions to the consumption of the rich - no profit tax, no income tax, no windfall tax. The TUC conference has voted to support a windfall tax, but it's not going to happen unless someone places a metaphorical pistol to Gordon Brown's temple (a real pistol would just get you arrested). As Alex Callinicos writes, not only is Brown's ideological commitment to the market preventing him from taking even this modest step, his weakness is such that the ruling class is just not going to help him out of this bind with some half-way measures. Darling's speech took a swipe at the excessive pay awards of City executives, but it is as meaningless and hypocritical as the government's admission that there remains a huge class divide - an admission that, as Polly Toynbee pointed out yesterday, sits uneasily alongside its record (although she will undoubtedly be calling for a Labour vote come 2010).

But there is a chance to make something meaningful of this rhetoric. The TUC has voted unanimously for coordinated strike action and protests, to defend our living standards. There isn't a person in the country who isn't affected by the surging cost of fuel and food, by the credit crunch, and by the government's timid obeisance to the business class in responding to the crisis. Not all of us can join in the strikes when they happen, but we can certainly support them. And when the national demonstration takes place in central London this Autumn, we need it to be massive. We have yet to see what this co-ordinated action will mean in practise, but it certainly constitutes an escalation beyond the disjointed one day strikes we have been seeing. These have highly successful in terms of achieving maximum solidarity and demonstrating the ability of the workers to shut down key infrastructure, but it has not been enough to force the government to back down. So let's be realistic: if the organised working class of this country takes on the government in a serious way, the government will lose. This is a pathetically weak and uninspired administration, weaker than ever before. As ideologically rigid as it is, it does not have the horses for a big fight with the trade union movement, especially as it depends increasingly on the union bureaucracy for funding. If trade unionists are wise to this, they will throw out any half-hearted shambolic face-saving deal for Brown and reject any attempt to turn this coordinated action into a symbolic, demonstrative affair designed to 'send a message'.

Labels: alistair darling, class, gordon brown, neoliberalism, new labour, trade unions

Career Advice posted by lenin

This is both hilarious and sinister. The article, by someone from 'Careerbuilder.co.uk', advises us - distraught - that "office gossip and banter is costing the UK £43 billion a year". By which is meant, the time spent working could be making companies that amount of profit, assuming the absence of ordinary human interaction didn't reduce productivity. On the basis of this spurious factoid, it offers seven conversational topics to avoid at work. You must never talk about politics, sex, religion, your home life, illness, money, or love. So, basically, 99% of human existence is verboten. But most important of all:

And finally, there will always be people in your job who seem to enjoy stirring things up, complaining about management and trying to draw others into it. If you can't tell people how you feel about discussing these subjects, walk away. Say you have to get back to work or pop out. If that isn't possible, don't pay any attention to what is being said. The best that you can do is to keep out of it.

That's right. If some commie starts riling things up, just smile, nod politely, and back slowly out of the room. Don't, at all costs, get involved.

Labels: dead labour, obedience, work-life balance, zombie labour

No, I didn't. posted by lenin

"...Seymour argued that Serb shelling of Sarajevo civilians and hospitals during the war in Bosnia was all deliberately provoked by the Muslims in the first place...". No, I didn't. I didn't say anything like that. My sole piece of advice for you, Marko Atilla Hoare, is to get a fucking life, you demented stalker. Either that or sue me.

Labels: bomber 'left', the liberal defense of murder, yugoslavia

Vigilant reporting posted by lenin

"The US military said that its findings were corroborated by an independent journalist embedded with the US force. He was named as the Fox News correspondent Oliver North, who came to prominence in the 1980s Iran-Contra affair, when he was an army colonel."

Labels: 'war on terror', afghanistan, media, oliver north, US imperialism

Salem's heirs. posted by lenin

Moral panic can be a cosy affair. It brings us together on the side of right, and excludes those who are, not to put too fine a point upon it, arseholes. You know the sort I mean: gyppos, druggies, 'chavs', fat bald men with tattoos, asylum seekers, the unemployed, beggars, 'feral' youths, alcholics, the mentally ill. And the number one topic of such moral panic over recent years: paedophiles. Whatever the subject is, whether there is a creditable fear or grievance behind it or not, the point about moral panic is to identify oneself as virtuous by mere contrast with some example of untermenschen who is responsible for our decline. This heart-warming sensation can shade into a sort of genocidal sentiment, as in: "I think we should round em up and shoot em all." But most people don't want to do that, or even say it. Even the occasional mob frenzies are only briefly violent, as when a group of people firebombed a home in the West Midlands in the belief that paedophile was living there, but only succeeded in murdering a fourteen-year-old girl in her bed. No, moral panic is mostly passive, and generally a form of infotainment. It is contrived to keep people pissing and moaning in isolation, to drive them crazy with inaccurate claims and give them something to talk about that keeps them tuned in, or buying the paper. Page 3 gives you lovely Sarah, only just legal, exposing her breasts, while pages 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 & 9, plus the editorial, gives you torrents of wind and fury about stranger danger. Your ire goes up, your defenses go down, and - bam! - the ads for unsecured personal loans, debt management schemes, cheap holidays, medium-priced technology and gambling scramble into your subconscious.

Well, The Jeremy Kyle show is just this kind of deal. By manipulating desperate, depressed, mentally unstable people into appearing on their shows to discuss their moral failings and have the former salesman-cum-presenter Mr Kyle pile scorn and abuse on them, ITV Productions has hit the mother lode. Many of the topics of traditional moral panic are combined in an intoxicating daily hit of hatred and sanctimony: unemployment, fecklessness, alcoholism, child neglect, spouse abuse. Kyle vocalises your bigoted, dumb-ass reactions for you too. You think it, he says it. You're screaming in your mind, at some poorly dressed geezer on-stage: "Get off your arse and get a fucking job, you wanker!" He's saying: "Get a job! Get off your backside and get a job!" Every day, they put some heretics and lowlives on the scaffolds, and every day the witchfinder fucking general conducts a thoroughly sadistic attack on some one who was conned into appearing on the show. Here's the testimonial from a former producer:

"They're very careful with the legal stuff - you can't mention who hit who if it's going to court - but if they truly screened for mental health issues, there would be no one on that show. Almost everyone who goes on it has some sort of issue. Normally they're at the very least depressed.

"The really heart-breaking thing is that these people, with massive real problems in their lives, honestly think that Jeremy Kyle is going to help them. I really I can't stress enough how callously I feel these people are treated. They don't care about the guests. They are absolutely the lowest priority."

And yet, and yet... because the show is so addictive, and because it sometimes finds the 'right' kind of arseholes to abuse and berate, it has its fans:

He found a champion in Johann Hari, the Independent columnist, for example. Hari wrote: 'Who are the villains of these shows, the people the audience find abhorrent? Men who treat women badly. Homophobes. Misogynists. Neglectful parents. Exactly the people who deserve to have an audience booing them.'

That's nice. As long as they're manipulating and abusing the right kinds of people. As long as she really is a witch. As long as the trial is aimed at real commies and not just nice liberals. As long as the firebombing is aimed at a real paedophile and not some poor girl lying in her bed. That's okay then.

Labels: jeremy kyle show, liberal moralism, moral panic, witch trials

Interventionism of a different kind. posted by lenin

After the big market melt-down on Friday, oweing to massive job losses in the US, the American government has just formally nationalised the two biggest mortgage firms in the US. Yes, Freddie and Fannie are owned by nanny. In light of this kind of drastic intervention, Gordon Brown's miniature bribe to would-be home-buyers is pretty pathetic. But, of course, that reflects the different magnitudes of the problem as perceived by policymakers. Apart from American homeowners, who were drawn into unprecedented debt by a Federal Reserve policy of driving down interest rates and allowing house prices to soar (thus decreasing the cost of debt and increasing the collateral available to homeowners), much of the world's financial system depends on these two companies staying afloat. Almost half of America's deficit is contained in those two firms. Much of its banking system is heavily exposed to the housing market. In other words, the stability of the empire is at risk. It has nothing to do with protecting vulnerable homeowners, since the government is quite ready to see them expropriated both legally and - as in New Orleans - illegally. But it just goes to illustrate one of the profound paradoxes of American politics, namely the coexistence ultra-free-market ideologies among the political and economic elites with a constant orientation toward heavy state intervention to protect corporate interests.

Britain's housing market slump doesn't have anything like the same significance. While it is clearly a problem for mainly City-based firms, the government prefers to manage bail-outs in a protracted, piecemeal fashion that satisfies no one, so as not to produce a ruling class panic about the crypto-socialism of the administration. The UK housing market is a peculiarity, in that the stimulation of mass home ownership was intended by its authors in the Thatcher administration in part to create a big declassed layer among workers, and hopefully retain their loyalty at elections. It was to create a "homeowners' democracy", much as the liberalisation of the stock exchange was to create a "shareholders' democracy". In fact, what it did was to create a perpetual housing crisis, as high prices and the lack of affordable council houses meant that the mere business of having somewhere to live consumed more and more of people's income. It also contributed to the creation of a chronic homelessness problem, with approximately 79,000 households officially acknowledged to be homeless and about 400,000 people estimated to be 'hidden homeless'. In addition, the shortfall has been exacerbated because high prices encourage property speculators to buy up homes in the hope of making a huge fuck-off fortune. And, as we learned at the beginning of the year, a big part of the housing boom of late has been sustained by rank fraudulence. Now that house prices are plummeting, would-be homeowners don't stand to benefit, because it comes with contracting credit and falling incomes, and is itself the result of a slump in effective demand. The only realistic policy, if the concern is to ensure that people can have affordable housing, is to reverse the marketisation of housing, stop the 'right-to-buy' schemes which are contributing to the shortage, and introduce a big campaign of home-building. Some of this happens to be official government policy north of the border. However, New Labour is committed to making a market-driven housing system work while avoiding scaring business with big public expenditure commitments, which is why we're being offered peanuts. And business opinion would seem to approve. The Economist, just before the latest bad news struck, expressed some relief about the fact that Brown's measures were so piddling, and assured readers that this whole 'crisis' business was being massively inflated, and that America was already bouncing back.

Amid all this economic grimness, the only possible good news is when working people organise to stop the government and business from making them pay for the crisis. In light of which, this is excellent news. Mark Serwotka of the PCS is pledging a far more sustained and intensive battery of strikes than the one-day actions that we've seen to date. It should be pointed out that the CWU has already voted unanimously for further strike action at its conference, although I'm pretty sure the bulk of the union leadership doesn't want to confront Gordon Brown at this point. After all, it's an item of faith among the TUC's best and brightest that the argument is close to being won, the Labour Party is going to be reclaimed, that Brown is basically sympathetic, that if we can only somehow shore up the government enough to keep the Tories out, all will be well...

Labels: empire, gordon brown, housing, recession, trade unions, uk, us economy

Guess who's against antisemitism? posted by lenin

Labels: 'antisemitism', antisemitism, hp scum, jenna delich, tudjman, ucu, yugoslavia

No, we can't. posted by lenin

Contrary to what you may have read or heard, Sarah Palin is not remotely interesting. Let me give you a sample of her political wit: "In politics, there are some candidates who use change to promote their careers. And then there are those, like John McCain, who use their careers to promote change." Forget that it involves a fairly typical speechwriter's combination of symmetry, pun and piety, and that there is nothing witty about it. Political pundits develop a taste for this kind of thing over the years, rather as a sociologist researching coprophilia might acquire a passion for the Guinness pebbledash. They should be pitied rather than despised. But their lack of intellectual hygeine should not prevent us from noticing that it is a marketing slogan based on a pun based on another marketing slogan that is itself almost entirely devoid of meaning. The reason why Sarah Palin is suddenly the object of ceaseless irrelevant droning is that the Republican party's campaign team carefully directed attention to her, and to various qualities they expected her to exhibit, and the assorted hacks did exactly as they were told and duly noted the sparkling wit, the 'off-the-cuff' remark about the 'home-made' placard about hockey moms, and the ebullient attacks on Obama. In the same way, when it was the DNC, the reporters were informed that Biden would bring passion and humanity to the campaign and, what do you know, they duly detected these qualities in Biden's vainglorious acceptance speech.

Much as people may decry the 'dumbing down' of politics, it was ever thus. A US election campaign is, if successful, invariably a mystifying charade of 'personalities' without personality, depoliticised politics, humourless wit, value-free values... And all of this histrionic display, all of this theatre, all of these gladiatorial trappings, can only sustain a slender pretense that something other than a gentleman's duel between different sectors of capital is taking place. A pretense that is rendered ever more slender by the habitual carping for 'bipartisanship'. It is like a professional wrestling promotion in which the two sides that supposedly hate one other are always calling for more cooperation in the squared circle, and a bit more sharing with the title belts please. This is not to say that Election Idol 2008 has nothing to distinguish it. It is supposedly a contest about 'hope' (as well as 'change'), mainly because it offers the important symbolic watershed of getting a black man into the White House, and that is hardly to be dismissed This isn't like the phoney 'buzz' over Howard Dean or that yuppy asshole Ned Lamont, either. Nor is it equivalent to the soul-destroying, craven liberal support for the uninspiring centre-right warmonger John Kerry. The Obama campaign has channelled a dynamic that one can only hope it will be unable to fully control before the inevitable post-November cull.

But honestly. The real source of urgency in this campaign has nothing to do with Obama's lacklustre policies, or the (Small) Change You Can Believe In. It is the threat of another four years of elephantine extremists and pachydermic psychos in the White House. On that index, the election is fundamentally, structurally about despair, and panic. The least worst option in the choice between Obama and McCain is a return to 'normal' after years of giddy ruling class plunder. A plunder which was accomplished largely by terrorising the public with one crisis after another, by megaphoning selected portions of bin Laden's cavebound ramblings, by persuading a majority of the American public that a threat from Saddam was imminent and that he had something to do with 9/11, by arresting tupperware terrorists on spurious charges of conspiracy, and so on. Obama, with his modest reform package and his soothing bromides, personifies that desired sense of normality, and I suspect he understands this perfectly well. To be sure, he is conventional and conformist, and he is more socially conservative than most liberals would like. He is aligned to the interests of Wall Street, whose luminaries are bankrolling his campaign, and he will almost certainly be on the case of privatising social security in part or whole at some point. He is an American imperialist, and will be up to his knees in blood in no time at all if elected.

But Obama is not shrill, his rhetoric isn't completely irrational, he doesn't seem to be an overgrown child, and he isn't forever trying to alarm people with the 3am phone call chatter. By contrast, McCain's campaign is blithering endlessly about the need to be even more bellicose, to 'win' the war in Iraq, to remember 9/11, etc. Their campaign slogan, 'Country First', recalls the basic message that America is threatened by these brown terrorists and the liberals might be about to elect one as president. US columnists have picked up, approvingly, on Obama's efforts at cultivating paternal projection, as if this whole political style wasn't dubious in itself. But there are lots of different ways to be the Daddy, and Obama is opting to play the responsible daddy who reads to the kiddies at bedtime, maintains discipline, and keeps away burglars. Forget his actual policies for a second. Set aside the sabre-rattling over Iran and Pakistan. The most consistent impression that his campaign generates is one of near serenity, of gently gliding away from the Bush era's permanent state of emergency. And after eight nerve-racking years, people aren't going to the polling booths to vote for the best possible programme, any more than they're going to vote for the candidate with the best speechwriter. They, those who vote for BHO, are going to vote for the candidate most likely to beat McCain, and thwart another term of grand theft auto from the Grand Old Party. This is crime prevention.

One encouraging sign that the election campaign can be about something more than that is that, while Obama leads McCain by 7 percentage points, Nader is getting up to 6% in the polls. This is despite the fact that the left-wing vote is split several ways between various candidates, and despite the fact that his campaign is rarely mentioned in the reporting. His surprisingly strong poll standing is hardly ever discussed, and nor is the fact that campaign is drawing out big crowds, with 4,000 attending a rally in Denver, right in the middle of the Democratic national conference. Nader has his flaws, but I should think that sustaining a serious radical campaign, that is miles away from the main candidates in terms of tone and substance, and attracting this level of support is a remarkable achivement, given that in 2004 his support was at a miserable 0.38%. It says a lot about how the times are changing. I think it unlikely that Nader's 6 percentage points in the polls will translate into 6% of the votes come November. And the polls vary, with some putting his support closer to 3%. But a respectable vote that surpasses his previous high of 2.7% will at least leave a space open for those inevitable refugees from the Obama campaign.

Labels: barack obama, joe biden, john mccain, ralph nader, sarah palin, us elections

Plans, great and small. posted by lenin

You will be forgiven for yawning at the government's 'shock and awe' policy announcements. An interest free loan for 30% of a home's value for up to five years? Golly. Suspended stamp duty for properties under £175,000 (is there such a thing in London?) for one year? Turn off the charm, already. My thighs are quivering. On the other hand, get back to me when you have a beautiful bunch of emergency council house building programmes for me. These are supposedly Gordon Brown's big guns, the first of a series of stunning policy initiatives that will reverse ten years of decay, unpopularity over the war and the economy, and a series of unworldly blunders over the last year. Altogether too little, way too late. With average household debt at £23,000 and 1.6m people queuing for social housing, the government is tinkering at the margins of a problem built up over approximately twenty years, in order to provide scant protection against a crisis that it assured us for months would be light and brief in its impact.

I am willing to bet that among Brown's upcoming feats there will be no job creation package, no relenting on public sector pay, no serious expansion in public expenditure to sustain growth, no substantial relief for those kicked out of work, no reversal on planned cuts to benefits, no improvement in what the ECJ has described as our "inadequate" pension protection systems (because a whole a bunch of pension schemes are having to be rescued at the moment), no substantial debt relief for millions of people who have been driven to borrow just in order to keep spending enough even during the period of growth, and are now faced with the prospect of unemployment and big arrears hanging round their necks - nothing, in short, that will seriously alleviate the burdens being placed on ordinary people by the economic crisis. What could compel the government to act differently. Last night on Channel 4 News, Derek Simpson, head of the Unite trade union, was urging the government to adopt a whole range of measures to combat poverty pay, improve workers' rights, raise public sector living standards and so on. All perfectly modest and reasonable demands. Then at the end of the segment, the reporter stated that because Simpson had been given a "fair hearing" by the Prime Minister at a meeting some weeks ago, the unions are still shoring up Downing Street. Say what? Gordon nodded for an hour or so and then shuffled him out the back door, and he takes that as some form of encouragement? We need the unions to act, and act far more decisively than they have done to date. In fact, this is part of Brown's strategy for keeping the unions on-side, especially as the party risks going bankrupt without union donations. Last year, Brown wrote to Brendan Barber, head of the TUC, to promise regular meetings of the kind that Simpson attended. And since, as Mark Serwotka has pointed out, some union leaders are more interested in defending 'their' government than in defending the interests of their members, the invite has been welcomed and the money duly stumped up without any change in policy. So much for the bragging that "We own Labour". No, I'm afraid the relationship is quite the reverse.

Meanwhile, the latest Tory plan to help people through these difficult times is to raise the inheritance tax threshold to £2 million. Apparently, raising it to £1m (which the Telegraph preposterously claims would save "nine million families" from the tax), was not enough. This, in addition to planned cuts in business taxes, is 'compassionate conservatism' for you. After all, they can't see their rich friends and their offspring lose money in a recession. How the hell else do you think they're going to afford all those ivory back-scratchers with profits tumbling like they are? Still others have different plans, older plans. For, although the Home Office is apparently worried that the recession will increase the appeal of Islamist parties among those who experience racism and economic deprivation, I personally am more concerned about terrorist training camps.

Labels: debt, economy, gordon brown, housing, new labour, recession, tuc

What happens if you embarrass the IDF? (Part II) posted by lenin

This:

The window through which Salam Amira, 16, filmed the moment when an Israeli soldier shot from close range a handcuffed and blindfolded Palestinian detainee has a large hole at its centre with cracks running in every direction.

“Since my video was shown, the soldiers shoot at our house all the time,” she said. The shattered and cracked windows at the front of the building confirm her story. “When we leave the windows open, they fire tear gas inside too.”

Her home looks out over the Israeli road block guarding the only entrance to the village of Nilin, located just inside the West Bank midway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. It was here that a bound Ashraf Abu Rahma, 27, was shot in the foot in July with a rubber bullet under orders from an Israeli regiment commander.

The treatment of the family stands in stark contrast to the leniency shown to the soldier and his commander involved in that incident.

B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, has accused the Israeli army of seeking “revenge” for the girl’s role in exposing the actions of its armed forces in the West Bank.

It may also be hoping to dissuade other families from airing similar evidence of army brutality, particularly since B’Tselem began distributing dozens of video cameras to Palestinians across the West Bank.

Scenes captured on film of hooded settlers attacking Palestinian farmers near Hebron came as a shock to many early this summer.

Labels: idf, Israel, occupation, palestine

Islamophobia and the think-tanks posted by lenin

Arun Kundnani reviews the drive by rightist think-tanks to set the agenda on Islam, amid relative silence from the leftist ones.

Labels: islam, islamophobia, policy exchange, right-wing

Louisiana posted by lenin

Labels: gustav, katrina, louisiana, randy newman

Racially aggravated criminology posted by lenin

Let me summarise the facts as follows. A farmer wieghed down with guns, and with a history of shooting them at people, shoots a 16 year old boy in the back as he runs away from the house, which the boy had been trying to burgle. All evidence indicates that the killing was deliberate, and not self-defense. The man was first jailed for life, having expressed no remorse, and then had his conviction reduced to manslaughter on account of diminished responsibility. The response: overwhelming sympathy, even among liberals, for the murderer. In fact, quite a few people who did not suffer - as Tony Martin, said murderer, apparently did - from paranoid personality disorder were full-throated in declaring that they would do the same. Whether some of this guff was motivated by the consideration that Fred Barras, the murder victim, was from a gypsy community, I leave to you to decide. In the case of Tony Martin, the murder was almost certainly influenced by his racist views. He had previously expressed a deep hatred of gypsies, and "had talked of putting Gypsies in the middle of a field, surrounding it with barbed wire and machine gunning them". He has since appeared on the platform of UKIP and has endorsed the BNP, calling for a "benign" dictatorship. But, whatever attitude people took to that aspect of the story, there was an extroardinarily noisy campaign of support for a man's right to carry out an extra-judicial death sentence against a petty thief.

Recently, another case of murder went down. The salient facts are as follows. Habib Khan stabbed his neighbour, Keith Brown, to death with a kitchen knife outside his home. This was the culmination of a violent row, the latest of several altercations, during which Keith Brown, a member of the British National Party, had grabbed hold of Habib Khan's son, Khazir Habib Saddique, by the throat. Saddique had confronted Brown when he saw him standing outside the house with a brick (more on that in a minute), and a fight broke out during which Brown was able to grab the young man's throat. Though Khan is ubiquitously described as a "mild and calm-mannered family man", he did have a sufficient fear that his son would be throttled that he attacked Keith Brown with the knife. The court accepted that he had not intended to kill and was genuinely attempting to protect his son, but nonetheless imposed a sentence of manslaughter for the unlawful death of Keith Brown. The altercations between the two families had begun some years before, when Khan had obtained planning permission to build on his property. Keith Brown began a campaign of racist harrassment, and aggression. The Khans' windows were smashed almost every day, they received regular death threats and were called "Pakis". Brown's son, also a member of the British National Party, had been convicted of assaulting Habib Khan the previous year.

Well, in this case, the energetic justifications for murder are in short supply. Strange to relate, those who slabber that it is appropriate to kill in defence of the VCR don't get similarly outraged on behalf of a man who kills protecting his son. If anything, there is a less-than-muted resentment that Habib Khan 'got off lightly', with the implication being that he is a beneficiary of a decadent multicultural liberal conspiracy against whitey. In fact, there is even a tendency in the media to give a respectful hearing to fascist councillors blithering about 'liberal politics'. This raises another issue. When it comes to crime, the first thing any reactionary is likely to do is get anecdotal on your ass. You're one of these PC liberal bleeding-hearts I keep hearing about. So what would you do if it was your house being robbed? What would you do if your wife was being raped? Well, now they have their answer: a normal person who, say, is watching his son being throttled by a long-time fascist tormenter might well be driven to bloody violence. But that's no basis for a criminal justice system.

Labels: bnp scum, crime, fred barras, racism, tony martin