class war

Some quotes on the British student protests

Activism, class war
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A pink Star Wars Stormtrooper walks past riot police

Phil, inbetween hawking his book, makes a good point of the background against which the university occupations take place:

One puzzle about this movement is where it came from: nationwide university occupations don’t come out of a blue sky, do they? One answer would be to refer back to poor old Lefebvre and say that sometimes they do just that. I think also there’s a combative mood that’s been building for a while, smouldering just below the surface. Ironically, it’s been fostered – or at least permitted to continue – by the fact that Labour were in office for so long. New Labour were certainly an authoritarian and pro-business government, but the two elements weren’t combined (as they had been under Thatcher) in a war on “militant left-wingers” and “union bully-boys”. New Labour’s authoritarianism mostly took aim at much softer targets – Islamism and “anti-social behaviour” – in a kind of punitive reinforcement of the social exclusion already suffered by marginalised groups. The result was that a generation forgot the lessons that were drummed into us under Thatcher: “pickets” meant “thugs”, “militants” meant “loonies”, “mass meeting” meant “mob rule”. In short, the taboos against collective action quietly faded away.

Over at Blood and Treasure, Charlie reports on the media response tot he protests:

Radio 4’s narrative this morning was fairly depressing: the whole episode was cast as a failure of policing rather than as a failure of policy (i.e. a failure of politicians to come up with a plan that’ll be broadly accepted). There were barely veiled threats from Boris Johnson and some senior police commander: there might have been plenty of broken student heads, according to Johnson, had the police not been so restrained. The police guy, for his part, said we should all remember that the royal protection officers had guns, and that their mission, when on duty, was to protect ‘the principals’. By the time the end of the interview came around, they’d remembered that the police aren’t supposed to be just the go-to people when you’re looking for some violence against the person, but I sensed it was grudging, especially on Johnson’s part.

And finally, Paul Mason at the BBC reports on who the demonstrators are:

The man in charge of the sound system was from an eco-farm, he told me, and had been trying to play “politically right on reggae”; however a crowd in which the oldest person was maybe seventeen took over the crucial jack plug, inserted it into aBlackberry, (iPhones are out for this demographic) and pumped out the dubstep.

Young men, mainly black, grabbed each other around the head and formed a surging dance to the digital beat lit, as the light failed, by the distinctly analog light of a bench they had set on fire.

Any idea that you are dealing with Lacan-reading hipsters from Spitalfields on this demo is mistaken.

Vox pop segments on the main six oçlock BBC news and the local Londonversion yesterday also showcased some self identified kids from the hoods, or at least the estates; Ben Goldacred might’ve thought them inarticulate, but to me they made perfect sense. It’s not just the jacking up of tuition fees that worries them, but also the scrapping of the EMA. It shows that contrary to mainstream spin, this is not a middleclass issue.

German millionaires not impressed with Gates

class war, Life under Capitalism
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It seems I’m not the only one unimpressed with Bill Gates’ robber barons for a better tomorrow initiative. Der Spiegel gauges the reaction of various German millionaires, interviewing Hamburg-based shipping magnate and multimillionaire Peter Krämer, who echoes my criticism:

Krämer: I find the US initiative highly problematic. You can write donations off in your taxes to a large degree in the USA. So the rich make a choice: Would I rather donate or pay taxes? The donors are taking the place of the state. That’s unacceptable.

SPIEGEL: But doesn’t the money that is donated serve the common good?

Krämer: It is all just a bad transfer of power from the state to billionaires. So it’s not the state that determines what is good for the people, but rather the rich want to decide. That’s a development that I find really bad. What legitimacy do these people have to decide where massive sums of money will flow?

SPIEGEL: It is their money at the end of the day.

Krämer: In this case, 40 superwealthy people want to decide what their money will be used for. That runs counter to the democratically legitimate state. In the end the billionaires are indulging in hobbies that might be in the common good, but are very personal.

Even if done without ulterior motives, philantropism on such a massive scale is troublesome when it’s a small elite deciding which cause is worthy enough to support. It remains just another way in which somebody like Buffet or Gates can exercise their power. Far better for society as a whole if it was made impossible to garner such huge wealth in the first place. A large part of the fortunes of these billionaires is after all build on the very backs of the people they are now wanting to help.

Carnegie was no saint either

class war
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Good news everybody! Forty modern day robber barons have decided they can miss fifty percent of their vast wealth:

The world of philanthropy got a huge financial boost today as more than 30 American billionaires pledged to give away at least half of their fortunes to charitable causes, signing up to a campaign launched by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates.

In an unprecedented mass commitment, top figures including New York’s mayor Michael Bloomberg, the hotel heir Barron Hilton, CNN media mogul Ted Turner, and the Star Wars director George Lucas lent their names to the “giving pledge”, an initiative founded last month to encourage America’s richest families to commit money to “society’s most pressing problems”.

The pledge is not a legally binding contract but is described as a moral commitment. Buffett, the legendary Nebraska-based financier known as the “sage of Omaha”, welcomed the influx of support: “At its core, the giving pledge is about asking wealthy families to have important conversations about their wealth and how it will be used. We’re delighted that so many people are doing that.”

He added that many of those involved were committing sums far greater than the 50% minimum. Buffett himself is handing the vast bulk of his $47bn fortune to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which is largely orientated towards tackling disease in developing countries.

Nick Mamatas, talking about something else entirely:

So when I hear of an organization that’s very unsavory, but that certainly hands out some money to nice very savory people, and sends out limos for them to ride in just like successful people supposedly do, and really only recruits a teeeensy bit, and didn’t didn’t the association just a few years ago rejig its corporate holdings to separate its limo-riding parties and legitimate business from that less savory stuff…call me unmoved. It’s still a mob sausage and pepper sandwich in your hand, even if the guy who handed it to you didn’t say, “If you take a bite, that means you love the Bonnano crime family!” You’re still chilling with mobsters even if you’re not there with your fist in the air, chanting, “Lou! Lou! Lou!” as some of your neighbors are when the guy you knew as the pizzeria man takes the stage, says a few lines in a dialect you don’t understand, and is suddenly and inexplicably very popular.

That some billionaires and multimillionaires decided to play philantrope does not excuse their wealth, nor the way they amassed it. That some lucky causes will get millions showered on them is great, but it’s still fundamentally undemocratic and wrong that a small group of people can decide which problems are sexy enough to deserve their support. Their charity does not change the system under which most people live lives of quiet desperation so a few lucky people can grandstand. Of course, had their wealth been taxed appropriately we wouldn’t have this problem, but on the other hand I don’t trust the US government not to buy more wartoys for that money….

G20 does Toronto

class war, Policing
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Civil liberties suffered, yet Black Block weenies could still riot. Two stories that caught my eye from Toronto, that show how ridiculous police repression and misrepresentation has become. Before the G20 meeting it had been announced that not just the places the great and good would meet would out of bounds, not just the security fence supposed to protect it, but that anywhere within a radius of five metres from the fence would be verboten. Walk close to the fence and you could be arrested without course, based on an old World War II era law supposed to deal with enemy sabotage. Funny thing is, this widely announced five metre rule did not exist:

The rule seemed straightforward when the news broke last Friday that the Ontario government made a regulatory change to a little-known act in secret.

Come within five metres of the summit security fence and you’d better have some identification or risk arrest.

The temporary regulation, which was passed in secret June 2, did decree that all streets and sidewalks inside the fence were a public work until 11:59 p.m. Monday. Under the Ontario Public Works Protection Act, that allowed police to search people trying to enter that area.

But there was no power to search people coming within five metres of the fence, said ministry spokeswoman Laura Blondeau.

“The area designated by the regulation as a public work does not extend outside the boundary of the fence,” Ms. Blondeau said.

Asked Tuesday if there actually was a five-metre rule given the ministry’s clarification, Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair smiled and said, “No, but I was trying to keep the criminals out.”

In the grand scheme of things this may sound like only a little fib, compared to all the other security measures in place for the G20, the ones that were legal. However, it does show how easy it is for any police force to go beyond the already over broad powers handed to them by a compliant government and parliament. It’s not just Canada either, as this story of a young photographer being arrested for taking pictures of an army cadet parade in Romford shows. Again it shows police officers making up laws to attack behaviour they disagree with or find suspicious without it being actually illegal.

Back to the G20. Despite the intense security measures and the hordes of police on the streets, the socalled Black Bloc “activists” still managed to rampage through the city without consequences, as the eyewitness account in the video below shows.



While violent wankers got no hindrance from the police, unrelated proper peaceful demonstrators were attacked and afterwards the “threat” they presented was monstrously inflated:

Chief Bill Blair, who told reporters the items were evidence of the protesters’ intent, singled out arrows covered in sports socks, which he said were designed to be dipped in a flammable liquid and set ablaze.

LARP weapons show as evidence of terrorism at the Toronto G20

However, the arrows belong to Brian Barrett, a 25-year-old landscaper who was heading to a role-playing fantasy game when he was stopped at Union Station on Saturday morning. Police took his jousting gear but let Mr. Barrett go, saying it was a case of bad timing.

In addition to the arrows – which Mr. Barrett made safe for live-action role playing by cutting off the pointy ends and attaching a bit of pool noodle covered in socks – police displayed his metal body armour, foam shields and several clubs made of plastic tubing covered with foam and fabric.

That’s right, the “weapons” above where from some poor LARPer, Live Action Role Player caught up in the G20 circus! Ridiculous but evidence again for how much police forces will lie to justify their actions. As said, this is something that’s ingrained in many if not most police officers, but it also serves a higher, more political goal. The story about the G20 protests thanks to this strategy of stringent security, threat inflation and police repression has never been about the merits of the protests, but only about whether all these precautions were needed and if the police didn’t go too far. It has become a law and order story, rather than a political one.

1.3 million people out of work to pay for the banker crisis

class war
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The Guardian has gotten its hands on some unpublished, official estimates at what will happen when the UK government’s proposed budget cuts get enacted: 1.3 million jobs lost in public and private sector both:

Unpublished estimates of the impact of the biggest squeeze on public spending since the second world war show that the government is expecting between 500,000 and 600,000 jobs to go in the public sector and between 600,000 and 700,000 to disappear in the private sector by 2015.

The chancellor gave no hint last week about the likely effect of his emergency measures on the labour market, although he would have had access to the forecasts traditionally prepared for ministers and senior civil servants in the days leading up to a budget or pre-budget report.

A slide from the final version of a presentation for last week’s budget, seen by the Guardian, says: “100-120,000 public sector jobs and 120-140,000 private sector jobs assumed to be lost per annum for five years through cuts.”

Supposedly the private sector will jump to the rescue by creating more jobs than are being lost this way. This while the markets are flat and businesses are barely surviving rather than growing. Any fule can see that if the government, the one remaining source of investment also throws in the towel, there’s nowhere new jobs can come from…

Paul Krugman meanwhile warns for a third depression that won;t go away quickly, thanks to:

So I don’t think this is really about Greece, or indeed about any realistic appreciation of the tradeoffs between deficits and jobs. It is, instead, the victory of an orthodoxy that has little to do with rational analysis, whose main tenet is that imposing suffering on other people is how you show leadership in tough times.

And who will pay the price for this triumph of orthodoxy? The answer is, tens of millions of unemployed workers, many of whom will go jobless for years, and some of whom will never work again.

As I said before, that’s what happens after thirty years of indoctrination about the power of the markets, the need for small government & balanced budgets and the inability and illegitimacy of government intervention in the economy. There’s a learned helplessness amongst our political elites, who not just are incapable of thinking of alternatives, but are now unaware that neoliberal capitalism isn’t a law of nature.