Socialism

Eating ‘Umble Pie

Civil liberties, Crisis? What Crisis?, Gordon Brown, Internet, IT is not magic pixie dust, liberalism, Manufacturing consent, New Labour, Socialism, UK elections, UK politics
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uriahheep

Pity Labour’s decent left, poor loves; reduced as a result of Smeargate into trying to Uriah Heep themselves into another glorious 12 years of Labour rule. Frank Field MP:

Darkness at the Heart of the Labour Party

Harold Wilson asserted that the Labour party was a moral crusade or it was nothing. The McBride affair has left Labour members looking at nothing. That is the reality check that McBride has wrought on the party.Labour supporters are left bewildered and wondering what happened to the moral crusading side of our mission.

Poor old Labour party.

So very very ‘umble.

Nothing’s illustrated New Labour’s complete lack of clue about the wired world – and their own legislation – more than the way they still think they can hide things they’ve done online.

But Gordon Brown and his new media minister/guru Tom Watson are learning fast that things a politician or his aide might have done online (or ordered to have done), no matter how anonymous or pseudonymous it was at the time, can come back to bite said politician in the ass:

A bogus applicant using the name “Ollie Cromwell” paid £8.99 to set up The Red Rag as a campaign blog. The buyer had to provide only a name, address, telephone number and e-mail to create the site on November 4 last year. The address given was the House of Commons, The Times has been told. The site was registered for two years, ensuring that it would be in place throughout the general election campaign, which must be called by June next year.?

I’d laugh if it wasn’t so fucking tragic: a discredited PM and a corrupt cabinet are teetering on the edge of implosion, not because of one of the any number of other, more substantive offences they might’ve been convicted for, but for internet cluelessness.

Meanwhile the traditional political media are off with the fairies, self-obsessing (as is their wont) about the way Smeargate illustrates their own imminent demise -“Why wasn’t I in the loop? Why was I scooped by a blog? Oh shit, will I have a job tomorrow? I’d better get a blog…” – rather than using their leverage as the fourth estate to help oust a dangerously incompetent and deceitful government that those of all political persuasions loathe.

No help there then.

And public trust in government, the police and in civic life in general continues to erode almost to invisibility. The authorities are scared shitless of public anger.

Declaring a Civil Contingency event looms. But hey, that’s just civic society falling apart as a result of Chicago School economic policies, as filtered through Brownian endogenous bloody growth theory. Brutality’s a feature not a bug.

Pity the decent left. They’re in a terrible fix – wanting nothing more than to get rid of this shower of incompetents, not least for their own political ambition, but reluctant to let go of a jot or a tittle of power despite recognising their party’s government is a shambles. They surely must recognise that they’re first up against the wall when it all goes to shit. After all, they’re party members too, they enabled these people. But no, they still think they can recover a shred of credibility, hence the mass outbreak of humility this morning.

We see and hear a trio of Blairites making ‘I are serious elder statesman’ expressions at the media and condemning this dreadful, shocking behaviour in outraged and unimpeachably moral chapel elder tones. Frank Field’s spreading oleaginous humility – it’s the best butter- on his blog just to pound home the point that it wasn’t us, guv, it was those nasty Brownites, and Alex Hilton written a condemnation cum mea culpa for The Scotsman:

Politics is the means by which a country is run and good politics means a country is run well.

But politics is also the name of a silly game played by silly boys in the Westminster bubble.

It’s a fun game, I fully admit, and sometimes it just has to be played. But when playing a game is your ambition and your daily motivation, it’s time to grow up.

Mr McBride and Mr Draper suffered from being in the Westminster bubble where all they saw was the game; where a lie here or a smear there are just bishops and rooks on a chessboard.

Somehow they had lost sight of that other politics – that which is concerned only with delivering a secure, fulfilling and sustainable society for its citizens.

Pass me the sick bag, mother.

I know many Labour figures who shun these silly games. There are many more who, like me, enjoy playing a game from time to time but who don’t let it get in the way of more noble, long-term objectives. But this week, until this embarrassment dies down, every single one of us will look like a duplicitous, power-mad fool.

If Labour party members are still able to believe that despite everything they’ve done, every illegal war, every torture, every police murder, every fake enquiry, that Labour has any right or mandate to govern Britain, the ‘decent left’ are duplicitous power mad fools.

No matter how bloody ‘umble.

Worker occupation: essential self defence

Life under Capitalism, Socialism, Unions
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The Socialist Worker reports on the worker occupations of the Visteon car parts factories:

Visteon workers occupying the Belfast factory

Around 80 workers occupied the building on Wednesday morning and remained there throughout the day. They are staying overnight. More workers, locked out by the company, stayed outside the site to show their support.

Workers were told that they would not be paid for last week’s work at the meeting on Tuesday. Many have no savings and no idea of how they are going to make ends meet over the next few weeks.

“They’ve treated us like dogs,” Richard Bruce, who had worked at the site for 17 years, told Socialist Worker. “We’re not even going to get paid for our last week’s work or for our work on Monday and Tuesday. But the workers in Ireland occupied – so we thought, now it’s our turn to do something.”

Many of the workers felt that the attack was preplanned – even though they had no notice of it themselves. Several said that vans from factories supplied by Visteon had taken away their tools from the site last Friday.

One worker, Terry, said, “Even the vending machines were emptied yesterday morning. Everyone knew we were going to be sacked.

“There are parts piled up inside our factory. They’ve made sure that the car plants can still be supplied – everything’s been prepared for this.”

In a crisis like this factory occupations are essential for worker self defence. It’s the only weapon left to workers whose labour is no longer valuable to their bosses anymore, to take physical control of plant space, and as important, the valuable tools, reserves and machinery they contain. It’s a desperate, short term measure, but one that can work and on which more permanent solutions can be build, as we saw in Argentine in the early noughties.

Morning Star now free online

Socialism, UK politics
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The Morning Star, the only daily old school communist English language newspaper still in existence, has finally made its online presence free. As to why this is important, a few excerpts from the paper’s history will make clear

Founded on January 1, 1930, it is still the only English-language socialist daily newspaper published in the world.

[…]

Over the next 15 years it fought its way into the consciousness of trade unionists and progressives throughout the land, always fighting for the cause of working people and battling against an Establishment which moved heaven and earth to extinguish it

It survived crippling court cases and the imprisonment of staff, harassment and even censorship by the police.

It survived a 12-year boycott (1930-1942) by wholesalers, during which the paper’s readers delivered the paper to newsagents.

It outlived an 18-month ban (1940-41) by a vindictive Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison, which was only called off after a grass-roots protest movement involving millions of people.

And it rose above the bombing of its offices in 1941, which destroyed both the building and the new presses which had been bought with cash raised by readers’ collections.

[…]

In 1966 the honourable name of the Daily Worker was replaced and the paper relaunched as the Morning Star – a change of name that was hotly debated throughout the trade union and labour movement.

[…]

A continuous ban on advertising by commercial firms has left the finances of the paper permanently on a knife-edge and the ban’s effects have only been offset by the commitment of the trade union movement to advertising in the Morning Star and the efforts of thousands of readers in raising and pledging money to the paper’s Fighting Fund – another unique part of the Morning Star, which ties it to its readers in a way that no other daily newspaper would dare to attempt to emulate.

[…]

It has been a long, rough, road that the Morning Star has been forced to travel, but the paper of the working class is still fighting and still campaigning. It has matured and has even grown through this difficult period.

And it still carries proudly the claim on its masthead.

For peace and socialism.

Sins of The Times

Life under Capitalism, Media, Socialism
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You know the world’s gone a bit kerflooey when The Times devotes a couple of pages – complete with a big quote from Eric Hobsbawm – to an analysis of whether or not Karl Marx was right.

Of course it being a Murdoch paper the other quotes are from careerists from Living Marxism and Spiked, and the former comic, now smug bourgeois author Alexei Sayle.

That said, Sayle puts his finger on one consequence of this rediscovery of Marx – the secret glee many leftists surely indulge in when we think no-one is looking:

From out of the dusty corners and fetid holes where they have been hiding for so many long decades of pain, his true disciples are emerging blinking into the light. At last they are being asked to write small pieces in newspapers and appear on late-night political TV shows hosted by men with strange hair, and with one voice these true disciples of Karl Marx are saying: “I told you so! I bloody told you so! I’ve been going on about this stuff for years but you didn’t listen, did you? Instead you just stopped inviting me to your dinner parties and didn’t answer my increasingly desperate text messages. Now you’re sorry, aren’t you? But it’s too late. Ha ha ha ha ha.”

Yes. Well. I’d never do such a thing. Mwahahah… oops.

Take a hundred lines. “I will not indulge in schadenfreude… I will not indulge in schadenfreude…”

Halliburton thanks you, LockheedMartin thanks you…

Economy, Life under Capitalism, Socialism, US politics
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Dave Johnson spells out what the US national debt means:

As I write this, the US national debt is about $9.17 TRILLION dollars. This debt is the amount we have borrowed to pay for our government since the Reagan tax cuts – compounded by the Bush tax cuts. This is because of a choice we made – yes I say WE, because this government is US – to borrow and pay later instead of pay now.

Don’t for a minute think that you do not owe that money. It comes to about $30,000 for each American, including infants. If you are a family of four you now owe about $120,000 thanks to those tax cuts. YOU owe this money, even though the tax cuts have primarily gone to the very rich. You WILL be paying it, one way or another. Don’t think that debt like that just goes away.

So where did it all go? Much disappeared into the gaping maw of Iraq of course, where some of it simply disappeared but most of it was scooped up by entities like the ones in the title for dodgy reconstruction projects. Quite a lot also went on other military boondoggles: aircraft carriers, attack submarines, three different fighter projects, missile defence, over engineered combat vehicles, etc. And of course anti-terrorism funding was expended hugely as well: got to keep all those public swimming pools in Buttfuck, Texas well protected!

And thanks to the tax cuts, much of the money needed to pay for these toys now has to be borrowed and borrowing costs money. A lot therefore is spent paying the interest on those loans. No wonder there’s no money left over to rebuild New Orleans.

So what will you, mr and mrs average taxpayer notice of all this? More indirect taxes, less government services, more decaying infrastructure, that’s your future. The US is the richest country in the world, but not for you. You’re not rich, so you don’t count. The best you can hope for is spending the next few decades paying off the Bush spending splurge while your betters count the profits they made of you.

Of course, there’s always the Russian solution.