Capitalism

Why Tomatoes Are Better Than Politics

Anti-war, Capitalism, Cheney, Europe, Life under Capitalism, Madness of King George
Published on

I had to walk away from the radio and tv altogether yesterday; Bush’s ideliberately inept stirring up of a hornet’s nest with Russia made me want to gio and put my fist through a window. I had to go and pot up some seedlings instead. There’s nothing gives you more perspective than potting up seedlings, unless it’s cats.

To see him tromping around in his monogrammed cowboy boots all over china-brittle alliances that are only barely glued together, it just…argh. the stupidity of it. But why? Why do something so apparently dumb?

Patrick Buchanan in The San Jose Mercury gets it:

When the Red Army went home from Eastern Europe, the United States, in violation of an understanding with Moscow, began to move NATO east. We have since brought into our military alliance six former members of the Warsaw Pact and three former provinces of the Soviet Union: Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.

Anti-Russia hawks are now pushing to bring Ukraine and Georgia into NATO. If they succeed, we could be dragged into future confrontations with a nuclear-armed Russia about who has sovereignty over the Crimea and whether South Ossetia should be part of Georgia.

Are these vital U.S. interests worth risking a war? Why are we moving a U.S.-led military alliance into the front yard and onto the side porch of a country with thousands of nuclear weapons? Would we accept any commensurate Chinese or Russian move in the Caribbean?

After Moscow gave us a green light to use the former Soviet republics of Central Asia to base U.S. forces for the Afghan war, the United States has sought permanent bases there. Russia and China have now united to throw us out of their back yard.

America colluded with Azerbaijan and Georgia to build a Baku-Tiblisi-Ceyhan pipeline to transmit Caspian Sea oil across the Caucasus to the Black Sea and Turkey, cutting Russia out of the action.

In 1999, the United States bombed Serbia 78 days to punish it for fighting to hold its cradle province of Kosovo, which Muslim Albanians were tearing away. Orthodox Russia had long seen itself as protectress of the Balkan Slavs. That Clinton ignored Russia in launching this unprovoked war on Serbia was seen in Moscow as proof that Russian concerns had become irrelevant in Washington.

After helping dump over the government in Belgrade, our Neocomintern – the National Endowment for Democracy, Freedom House and other fronts – interfered in Ukraine and Georgia, helping oust pro-Moscow regimes and install pro-American ones. Since then, NED has been run out of Belarus and its subsidiaries are about to get the boot from Moscow.

Can we blame the Russians for being angry? How would we react to left-wing NGOs in Washington, flush with Moscow oil money, aiding elements hostile to the Bush administration?

Oh yeah and fuck the EU too. Cheese-eating surrender monkeys. They deserve it.

Bush and the current generation of US politicians are very fond of using WWII and ‘the greatest generation’ to buttress their chickenhawkery and although they know in theory that a big war happened in Europe, because they”ve seen the movies and played the games, they don’t know that a war happened in Europe – and it wasn’t so long ago either, and it was as vicious at what’s happening in the Middle East if not more so. We can’t forget it, we’re still getting reminders every day.

A mass grave holding the remains of thousands of Jews executed by the Nazis during the second world war has been discovered in southern Ukraine by workers digging pipelines.

The workers stumbled upon the remains by chance last month in the village of Gvozdavka-1, near the Black Sea port of Odessa, Jewish leaders said yesterday.

[..]

According to Roman Shvartsman, spokesman for the regional Jewish community, the Nazis established a ghetto near the village. In November 1941 the ghetto was transformed into a concentration camp and at least 4,000 Jews were killed at or near the site between the end of 1941 and the beginning of 1942.

“The workmen were laying gas pipes near the centre of the village. They discovered hair, children’s toys, skulls and pieces of clothing,” Mr Shvartsman told the Guardian last night.

54 years later the voices of those destroyed by war come back to haunt us.

A teenage Jewish girl living under the Nazis in Poland during 1943 feared she was “turning into an animal waiting to die”, according to her diary, which documents the final months before her death in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Rutka Laskier, 14, the same age as the Dutch girl Anne Frank, wrote the 60-page diary over a four-month period in Bedzin, Poland. The diary, published by Israel’s Holocaust museum, documents the steady collapse of the ghetto under the weight of the Nazi occupation and deportations, as well as the first loves, friendships and jealousies of an adolescent girl growing up during the war.

You can imagine the goodwill and sheer effort required to have reached a kind of modus vivendi after a history like that, Unsatisfactory as this arrangement is, it’s nevertheless relatively peaceful and prosperous on the whole, a few genocides and regional wars notwithstanding. Peace in Europe has been fragile but holding, even with Putin’s increasingly restrictive and totalitarian grip on power in Russia.

But Bush is flailing badly at home: there’s a power struggle with Cheney in the White House, he’s poison in the polls, his own party’s against him, Iraq’s a bloodbath and the US military’s at low ebb as a result, a whole swathe of experienced officers gone or planning to go, either retired or pushed out…. I could go on. suffice it to say he’s very, very weak.

But he’s also a sociopathic, bullying dry drunk – and when he feels weak he wants to hurt something or start a fight. He also desperately needs to divert attention from his continuing military failures and his illlegalities at home: what better way to thumb your nose at everybody, to start a fight for fun, to hurt people and to get attention, than to wind up Vladimir Putin?

I really want to put what he’s doing down to pure stupidity and psychopathy, but I’m also sure there’s a game plan here. Attempt to encircle and destabilise Russia, poke iit with a stick, go to the G8 spoling for a fight, win concessions. All about the oil, always and forever about the oil.

But Bush also wants a showdown with someone, anyone, to rescue his wounded pride; and he just doesn’t give a shit who gets hurt in the process. His advisers are just using his childish need to provoke to further their country’s economic interests.

Though the San Jose Mercury gets it, I wonder if Americans in general grasp the seriousness of the political situation their President is deliberately provoking. From a brief scan of news and the blogs, no, not really. To the mainstream US media it’s mostly harmless rhetoric, Bush being Bush for tv and a chance to roll out all the old Cold war cliches. Ooh, a new cold war, when the secret agents wore trenchcoats and made glamorous dashes across Checkpoint Charlie….

Shorter US mainstream media: “What, me worry?” Oh well, it’s not them the missiles are aiimed at, is it?

It’s not like there’s a surfeit of statesmen and women with the capability or stature to defuse the situation either. To the question “Can saner heads prevail? ” I can only answer “Who?” Really, who is there? Tony Blair perhaps?

He says he can, but then he would, wouldn’t he. He wants a Legacy. But Tony Blair is a completely busted flush, a nothing, yesterday’s man just waiting for the indictment to come – unless, miracles of miracles, he’s had a resignation conversion and for once tells it like it is. As if.

So it’s down to German Chancellor Angela Merkel to talk down these two roosters from their posturing. If anyone has the weight of history on her shoulders in matters of war and peace, it’s her. Is she up to it? Given her antidemocratic record, I’m not hopeful. Now, I have some clematis to tie in.

US Democrats: Venal, Stupid… Or Both?

Capitalism, Democratic (in)action, Life under Capitalism, Sensible Liberals
Published on

At Working Assets, David Sirota points to secret negotiations on trade between the Democratic party and Bushco, that prove the Dems are either utterly dim or totally compromised, one of the two:

DEAL MAKES SURE TO PREVENT UNIONS FROM HAVING SAME RIGHTS AS CORPORATIONS: Reuters reports that the deal includes “a provision that would only allow national governments” – not unions – “to file a labor complaint under the pact,” meaning Democrats complicit in the deal are effectively proposing that America rely on the Bush administration to make sure workers and the environment are protected. This provision in the deal creates a clear double standard that prioritizes corporate rights over worker rights. Specifically, the provision stands in contrast to provisions already in America’s current trade pacts that allow domestic and foreign corporations to file complaints against sovereign governments (including U.S. local, state and federal governments) when those governments pass environmental/consumer protection laws. These complaints have resulted in U.S. taxpayers alone being forced to pay roughly $1.8 billion in “damages” in international courts because of its own laws.

Actually the provisions don’t contrast at all; I expect the Democrats are perfectly aware that Bushco has declared that the US can’t be sued by anyone at all and so they’ree just accepting the status quo. Democrat multimillionaire corporatists no more want workers’ rights than the Republicans do.

Chimpy declared his government immune from prosecution in 2006:

Citing an “unpublished opinion of the [Attorney General’s] Office of Legal Counsel,” the Secretary of Labor’s Administrative Review Board has ruled federal employees may no longer pursue whistleblower claims under the Clean Water Act. The opinion invoked the ancient doctrine of sovereign immunity which is based on the old English legal maxim that “The King Can Do No Wrong.” It is an absolute defense to any legal action unless the “sovereign” consents to be sued.

The opinion and the ruling reverse nearly two decades of precedent.

Or maybe the Democrats didn’t know about that ( which makes them thick), but think it just fine and dandy either way that corporate might makes right.

REUTERS – BIG BUSINESS OVERJOYED: Reuters reports that most of the corporate lobbying community in Washington, D.C. is praising the deal.

DLC APPLAUDS DEAL AS FIRST STEP TO GIVING BUSH FAST TRACK: The Democratic Leadership Council – the corporate-funded group that has long supported NAFTA and other similar pacts – issued a statement praising the deal, and saying it is “good news” that the agreement is a step towards Democrats passing President Bush’s request for reauthorization of “fast track” trade authority.

SENATE DEM POLICY COMMITTEE PASSES OUT K STREET PRESS RELEASES: The U.S. Senate Democratic Policy Committee blasted out a triumphant email alert to Capitol Hill staff touting press releases praising the secret Democratic-Bush trade deal from the National Association of Manufacturers, the Financial Services Forum, Microsoft and the Emergency Committee on Trade – the corporate front group pushing this deal.

Either way, the workers lose. Meet the new bosses …

A Very Expensive Fumble In The Stationery Cupboard

Capitalism, Corruption, Economy, Life under Capitalism, Poverty
Published on 1 Comment on A Very Expensive Fumble In The Stationery Cupboard

Phwarr, what a hunk of spunk. NOT.

I must say I’m enjoying seeing loyal Bushie and PNAC zealot Paul Wolfowitz left twisting in the wind at the World Bank over giving a job and pay rises to his mistress.

So far so typically corrupt, or at least that’s how this is being framed by the major media.

But it’s not as though his relationship with Shaha Riza wasn’t known about when he took the job and she’s hardly some brainless bit of arm candy. World bank employees complained at the time of his appointment in 2005:

From Inside the WB: Discontent over Riza We hear from Bank insiders that Shaha Ali Riza, whom Paul Wolfowitz has been dating for a couple of years, is not popular with her colleagues. As acting manager for External Relations and Outreach in the Middle East/North Africa region of the World Bank, she is to some degree the institution’s public face on that region.

Her personnel file at the Bank reportedly contains several complaints about her job performance as well as about a certain “lack of people skills.” This, we are told, is part of what is behind the World Bank Staff Association’s relatively more open disagreement with the U.S.’s choice.

The WBSA raised loud complaints a few years ago when Wolfensohn named Nick Stern as Chief Economist. Several staffers pointed out the Bank’s strict anti-nepotism laws should have prevented that move, since Stern’s brother was on staff at the Bank. Their complaints were never addressed seriously.

It should be noted that at least one civil society organization believes that Riza is one of the most effective gender experts working at the Bank.

But what’s not being reported is just how closely his Riza is connected in neocon and Bush/Cheney circles – she’s held some very powerful positions in the White House working alongside Liz Cheney on mid-east polcy and is closely connected to the total fuckup that is the Iraq invasion and occupation. No wonder she’s been called the most powerful Moslem in Washington.

A perfect match for Wolfowitz, himself instrumental in the Iraq debacle – truly these two are a poisonous pair.

2005:

Shaha Ali Riza, lately in the news as World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz’s Saudi-born girlfriend, has been assigned to the U.S. State Department. The move, which has not been announced by either huge agency controlled by the Bush regime, means that she’ll be working with Dick Cheney’s daughter Liz Cheney, a top official in the key Near East Affairs bureau.

That’s the word from one of my moles in the World Bank. This significant assignment — a hardened link between the money of the World Bank, which is supposed to focus on poverty, and the neocons’ aims of trying to salvage their privatization plans for Iraq — has not be reported anywhere else, to my knowledge, and I see no word of it on the World Bank website either.

This new loan by the World Bank is strictly from hunger, and it’s sure to do nothing to help us in the Arab world. Wolfowitz’s girlfriend and Cheney’s daughter, in charge together of the U.S. State Department’s Near East bureau? [My emphasis] W.B. Staffer One, as I’ve referred to this particular source, copied me on a September 16 internal memo from Christiaan J. Poortman, the W.B.’s vice president for Middle East and North Africa (MENA, in bank parlance), that says in part:

The Bank has received a request from the US State Department for the secondment of Shaha Riza — on external service — to the Near East Affairs Office of Partnership Initiative. In accepting this assignment Shaha will be responsible for setting up and managing an International Multilateral Foundation that will support reform in the MENA region.

I have agreed to this request which will allow Shaha to continue her work with civil society, complementing our own work on the reform agenda of our partners in the region. Shaha’s assignment will be effective September 19, 2005. Please join me in wishing Shaha the best in her new assignment.

Yeah, Poortman “agreed to this request.” At least it gets Riza out of the office. Wolfowitz got a grand sendoff by the Pentagon in late April, when he left to take over the World Bank. Maybe co-workers had cake for Riza, but maybe not. A similar public pronouncement of a new post didn’t happen for Riza, whose job at the World Bank — basically, head flack for the MENA office — caused plenty of grumbling about nepotism by other W.B. staffers.

More…

It’s not the nepotism that’s most important here, or the minor scandal of venality in office. That’s hardly anything new for Republicans.

What is important is the way all this corrupt manoeuvring has tied World Bank lending policy to White House foreign policy like a horse to a buggy. Where the neocons drive, Wolfowitz and the bank follow – Bushco, by using Wolfowitz’ besottedness with his girlfriend, has managed to subvert the bank’s putative independence and to the great consternation of international development NGOs and governments worldwide the World Bank (not that the it was exactly a fair insitution to begin with) from being previously just US-inclined, has now become the de facto banking arm of Bushco neoconnery and imperial expansion.

This is a lot more important than than just a quick bit of illicit nookie over the desk.

Let’s Talk About Drugs For A Bit.

Capitalism, Corruption, Culture, New Labour, Poverty, Race, UK politics
Published on

All this past week there has been a great wailing and gnashing of teeth in the media and leftish politics over a number of possibly drug-related shootings of young black men in South London and other working class areas around the country.

There’s been reams of analysis trying to work out the reasons why those dreadful kids act the way they do, as though these young people were some isolated tribe, completely disconnected from some mythical, largely white, largely comfortable middle England – an innercity, urban abberation, the scary Other, a phenomenon to be examined in the mode of a colonial administrator reporting the discovery of a band of previously unknown New Guinean headhunters.

The Daily Mail:

The fact is that no one in the police wants to talk about gang warfare in South London, because the last thing senior officers want is to give credibility to this breed of savage young men who are capable of horrific violence unfettered by the most basic concepts of morality.

Not once have I seen anyone in the mainstream media or politics make any connection between these murders and theirs and their friends’ own recreational drug use. No, it’s just another youthful indiscretion, if indeed if it ever stopped.

As the Telegraph’s Sam Leith pointed out, “drugs have lost their toxicity as a political issue” because the generation for whom their use is normal now fills the corridors of power. A simple test is to ask what you’d like to know about your boss. Told that prostitutes visited his home, as the News of the World alleged against the Duke of Westminster, you would be all ears. Would you be interested to learn he had taken a couple of spliffs at school? Not very, I should think.

Drug use is the big tacit unspoken in British politics and the Labour Party and its hangers-on are the biggest hypocrites of all on the subject. So Cuddly Cameron smoked a spliff at Eton aged 15? Well, woop-de-doo-bloody-doo.

Of more concern to me is how the spliff got to him, and who was hurt or banged up as collateral damage for his teenage half hour of posh herbal euphoria.

The same goes for New Labour: you should’ve seen some of the Labour party notables I’ve seen toking up in the eighties and nineties, thinking they were in safe company, or the local councillors loved up on ecstasy and lemon Hooch on a girls’ night out. That’s not to mention drink, cocaine and legally prescribed medication; I strongly suspect that at least half the government, national and local, is chemically affected in some way or another at any given time.

And what about those nice, middle-class journos and civil servants and bank workers with their weekend hits of charlie or whizz, or the poppers that spice up their nice middle-class sex lives? My own son has been approached at clubs (because he is black, duh) by a probation officer (and now former friend of mine) and several criminal lawyers of my acquaintance looking to buy dope. That tells you what you need to know about the integrity of the justice system.

Do these people ever give a thought as to where their little indulgences come from as they buy their teenth or a tab from their friendly local hipster round the corner? I doubt that very much. In fact the very next day they’ll be in committee or on telly or in the House or in the columns of the Grauniad or The Times, pontificating about the dreadful moral laxity of the young.

Being such hypocrites on the subject of their own drug use it ill behoves them to be so draconian on youth, drugs and crime policy.

In partaking of American War On Drugs and Zero Tolerance rhetoric and practice the Blair government, with typically blustering incompetence, has driven the youth prison population up, criminalised a generation, and pushed drug criminality and violence down the age scale, as what were tweenie runners trying to supplement their (often addicted themselves)parents’ measly unemployment benefit with the crumbs from the only local growth industry now find the field clear for the expression of their wildest, pubescent, PS2 and MTV-fuelled fantasies of gangsterdom and Respect.

All the government current policy has done is to temporarily take out a layer of competition in dealers : it’s done nothing about the growing demand for recreational drugs. Those hooked on crack or heroin (or now, crystal meth) are hardly going to say “Oh damn, you took the big boys out of circulation, I’d better give up drugs then”. Where the demand is comes the supply.

The teenagers shooting each other in South London for market share are just, as they’ve been taught by ten years of neoliberal economics and music videos, practicing capitalism in its purest form. But they are being framed by the media and government as savage, feral, a race apart.

The profit from trade in drugs, like that in arms or torture equipment is a major driver of the UK’s intangible economy. Wherever the money comes from and no matter how tainted, one whizz around the City of London carousel or a churn in the property market and it’s squeaky clean again and ready to be invested elsewhere. But at the bottom, no matter how squeaky clean the money is, no matter how smart the suits or politically connected the players at the top are, are violence and greed and poverty and despair and mothers mourning dead children.

With the obsolescence and collapse of its manufacturing base Britain is increasingly reliant on crucial invisible earnings, the skim off the top of that immense money market in the City of London. Gordon Brown’s economic plans are dependent on it; ever larger swathes of the country’s population make their livings servicing the financial machinery that keeps those earnings flowing, and those who are not so fortunate as to have their livelihoods dependent on the whim of an overpaid, overbonused city whizzkid are, of course, just lazy ingrates who should show a little entrepreneurial spirit. So they do, emulating their ‘betters’ in the most immediate and most lucrative way possible.

You’d think a government that admires the naked aggression of invading Iraq to cut out the middleman supplying their own addiction would admire the naked opportunism and entrepreneurship that the teenagers of South London demonstrate, wouldn’t you? New Labour has been in power for ten years now and they’re just doing it the New Labour way, See a market – take it, with guns if necessary.

I doubt there’s a family in the country that hasn’t been affected in some way by drugs and the toxic criminality and poverty that accompanies it. Young people from a working-class background, especially young black people, who manage to escape that life seem to be in a dwindling minority. It’s like watching a whole generation slide down the drain and no-one giving a damn.

Figures released by the charity today, based on statistics compiled by the Council of Europe, show that England and Wales has the highest number of young adults in prison in western Europe.

They’re just chavs, after all. Who cares? The reductionist conservative view would be that it is Darwinism in action. But every drug casualty, every life nipped in the bud, has a parents, siblings, friends, – all are affected and the ripples spread far and wide.

Having had close experience with the horrible effects of addiction and drug violence in my own close family I’m no naive idealist, but I seriously believe that the only possible way to stop this poisonous stew of hypocrisy, class and race prejudice cascading even further down the generations is to decriminalise and regulate the supply of drugs entirely. Human history has shown that if there’s a mind-altering substance available to them mammals will try it. Even cats and elephants enjoy getting high so why not just acknowledge that?

The Blair government’s is a hypocritical, evangelical Christian-driven drugs policy that emphasises punishing individual ‘sin’ whilst at the same time practicing that very ‘sin’ in private and encouraging profiteering from it.

It and the British media fail to acknowledge the central role that they themselves play in the drugs trade. Every time you smoke a spliff in Britain, if it’s not home-griown then you have contributed to the degradation of a generation too. Hyperbolic yes, but until we all acknowledge that its our own personal roles in the international movement of drugs and capital that’s fueling these teenage bedroom executions we can’t have any hope of a sensible treatment-based drugs and crime policy that could pull this generation back from the brink. It’s way past time for a bit of honesty from everyone involved.