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Post by dodger on Jul 30, 2013 11:25:43 GMT
Back to Front - A sovereign state
WORKERS, OCT 2012 ISSUE
Sovereignty has become a vital issue for Britain, one that requires informed and urgent consideration by the British working class – the great majority of the British people who must work to earn the means of their livelihood.
Italy provides a template for what happens to a state that loses its sovereignty. Patently, the power to order Italian affairs no longer resides with anything resembling an elected administration. Adherence to the euro trumps national integrity, so power can be assumed by so-called technocrats without any reference to even the pretence of democracy.
For Britain the lesson is clear: national sovereignty will be eroded or even nullified by the EU. Consider the recent bid by Germany to virtually take over Greece by economic fiat in the name of euro, and EU, stability. Essentially, Greeks are being ordered to implement EU-determined policy or face the prospect of external imposition.
Britain, not being in the euro, is not threatened to such an extent at the moment, though there are constant moves to enlarge the EU’s authority – witness the German-led “Future of Europe” report (see news p3). But a home-grown sovereignty issue threatens the integrity of the nation – Scottish independence.
In pursuing its own narrow ends the SNP seeks to persuade the Scots their best interests would be served by sham independence. Sham because parting company with the rest of Britain would deliver Scotland to the EU as a minor region unable to withstand the machinations of the big players.
The working class is not shackled to arbitrary notions of right wing or left wing. It exerts its sovereignty when it acts on its own behalf irrespective of definitions and labels others might wish to impose.
The sovereignty of the working class, above all a sovereignty and independence of thought, is the progressive force in Britain today. No matter the issue – the euro, Scottish petty nationalism or whatever – true democracy, the voice of the people, is the forceful expression of that sovereignty.
Labour under Tony Blair, with support from inside the Trades Union Congress, undoubtedly wanted Britain to join the euro at its inception. But the British working class, even without anything as formal as a ballot, was so obviously opposed that Labour was unable to impose its wishes.
It does not matter to the working class whether the present prime minister’s posturing on Europe is sceptical or not. Nor that the issue might drive the Coalition partners apart. The only concern for the working class is the complete repatriation of powers to Britain, the full restoration of sovereignty.
If Britain is to be rebuilt as an independent nation then, in its abounding diversity, the working class must recognise itself as being sovereign and take whatever action is required to secure its sovereign status.
www.workers.org.uk/opinion/opinion_1012/sovereign.html
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Post by dodger on Aug 8, 2013 15:29:20 GMT
Sovereignty for Britain -Workers’ Independence
www.theworker.org.uk/br-sovereignty.htm
Workers’ Independence Socialism and the nation cannot be separated. The greatest patriots are the greatest socialists. Capitalists have no allegiance to any country. Their self-seeking knows no boundaries or democratic form. The working class and the nation should be as one. Each working class must have power in its own nation in order to remove capitalism and weaken capitalists in every other country.
Global solidarity should replace globalization. This can only be achieved by each working class in every country winning the battle for democracy in its own land. Capitalism requires the break up of individual nations and the destruction of national independence in order to allow the free movement of capital, labour, goods and services.A free independent nation on the other hand controls its own destiny, its government is elected by its own people.
The working class has to build a new nation in Britain. This will mean freedom from foreign control whether exercised through NATO, the EU, or the US, or the unrestrained import and export of capital. The various international trading organizations and world banks of capitalism serve no purpose for our country, or any other. Our wealth must be distributed for the benefit of all those who live and work here.
The desire of British workers to support national independence in other countries, whether Cuba and Venezuela today, or many others in the past, from Ireland to Vietnam, has to be matched urgently now by a concern to create a free Britain
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Post by dodger on Aug 9, 2013 14:40:50 GMT
'Development' policies developed by the IMF and other financial institutions are just another weapon to attack the peoples of the world. But there are alternatives for countries that choose to exercise their sovereignty…
Locking countries into capitalist dependency:
the EU’s Free Trade Agreements
WORKERS, OCT 2010 ISSUEThere are conspiracies to prevent developing countries from climbing out of their poverty. The unelected, US-run international financial institutions – the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization (WTO) – conspire to ensure the world’s workers and peasants pay debts incurred by their rulers to US and EU banks.Likewise the European Union, by imposing Free Trade Agreements (FTAs), forces open markets for European goods, thereby preventing development. However, there are alternative models for those developing countries that choose to exercise their sovereignty and pull themselves up independently.Some 360 million people have died from hunger and remediable diseases in peacetime in the past 20 years, more than died in all the wars of the 20th century. 1,020 million people are chronically undernourished, 884 million lack access to safe water and 2,500 million lack access to basic sanitation. 2,000 million lack access to essential drugs, 924 million lack decent shelter and 1,600 million lack electricity. 774 million adults are illiterate and 218 million children are child labourers.Roughly a third of all human deaths, 18 million a year, are due to poverty-related causes, easily preventable through better nutrition, clean water, cheap rehydration packs, vaccines, antibiotics and other medicines.Between 1980 and 2005, the peoples of the South paid $4.6 trillion (equal to 50 Marshall Plans) to the banks of the North. Trade liberalisation has cost sub-Saharan Africa $272 billion in the last 20 years. Poor countries illicitly transfer $1 trillion a year to rich people in the developed countries as well as huge sums to their own corrupt elites. The financial crisis cut the revenues of 56 surveyed low-income countries by $52 billion in 2008 and $12 billion in 2009.Some 7 million African, Asian and Latin American children die every year due to the burden of debt repayment.The capitalist states and their international financial institutions promote these avoidable evils of massive poverty: they selfishly push policies that they know harm the poor, robbing the poor while claiming to aid them, to make profits.In 1985 the World Bank said that in its standard “development” strategy, domestic consumption should be “markedly restrained”, support for education “minimized” and “less emphasis should be placed on social objectives”. Back in 2000, the US National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends 2015 said globalisation would lead to “a widening economic divide” and “deepening economic stagnation, political instability, and cultural alienation”. In law, predictable consequences are evidence of intent.EU’s Free Trade AgreementsThe EU has the largest number of Free Trade Agreements of any major power, with Euromed (9 countries), South Africa, Mexico and Chile. It is negotiating FTAs with India, South Korea, the Andean Community (4 countries), ASEAN (10 countries) and Central America (6 countries).The EU demands “far-reaching liberalisation of trade in services, covering all modes of supply”. It says other countries’ domestic regulation “must be done in a manner with the least restriction on trade, consistent with achieving other legitimate policy objectives”. The four modes of supply are: 1. the service itself can cross the border; 2. the customer can do the travelling; 3. the firm can set up a branch in the country; and 4. the person providing the service can cross the border to do so.EU FTAs include matters that developing countries want left out – services, investment, intellectual property, public procurement and competition. The FTAs require developing countries to give access to EU providers of goods and services. But the FTAs never require EU members to cut or end their huge agricultural subsidies – depriving developing countries of access to EU markets for agricultural produce.These FTAs are just as bad for workers in EU countries, forcing the “free” movement of labour between countries and undermining wages and conditions.FTAs are even worse for developing countries than the WTO’s General Agreement on Trade in Services. They ban developing countries from attaching conditions to trade like price controls, entry controls, service targets and performance requirements (e.g. using and training local labour, ensuring technology transfer).The EU has also pressed countries to allow full foreign ownership and board membership of their banks and to put no limits on foreign participation. Increased foreign participation increases capital flows, causing instability and capital flight. It also cuts access to credit for the country’s private sector, especially its farmers, driving domestic firms out of business.Acting as a bully, the EU threatens to bar market access to Europe unless developing countries sign the proposed agreements. It targets any protection against EU export interests, despite recognising that tariff cuts cause bankruptcies and loss of jobs and revenues in developing countries. By tying developing countries into dependent relations with the EU, the FTAs cut across the development of regional trade blocs based on fairer principles and mutual benefit.The international financial institutions are bad for us all. Countries do better when they ignore them. In September 2003, Argentina announced a temporary default to the IMF, until the Fund backed down. The result was rapid economic recovery: Argentina’s economy grew at least 8.5 per cent annually from 2003 to 2007.Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia and Cuba are building alternative and better economic models. Cuba has a life expectancy at birth of 78 years, a 97 per cent literacy rate, and an infant mortality rate of 5 per 1,000 live births (the USA’s is 7 per 1,000). These achievements result from Cubans’ access to free healthcare for everyone and from Cuba having the highest ratio of doctors to people (591) per 100,000 in the world.Ecuador has protected itself against imports from neighbouring countries with devalued currencies, cutting its trade gap from $7.5 billion to $0.5 billion, boosting production and employment. It provides free universal education and health care and guarantees minimum incomes.Venezuela and Cuba have created ALBA, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America. With an initial $1 billion, the Bank of ALBA will fund economic integration, infrastructural development and social, educational, cultural, and health programmes in member countries. Unlike the World Bank and the IMF, ALBA’s Bank will not impose loan conditions and will function on the consensus of all members.Sovereignty, the ability to control one’s own affairs, is vital to economic development. Economic sovereignty, backed by exchange controls and managed currencies, did better than the decades of Thatcherism under Tories, Labour and now the Coalition. Protectionism brings growth; imposed liberalisation harms growth.If we had planning, not gambling, as the organiser of the economy, we could end poverty. $296 billion, just 0.66 per cent of global GDP, would take everybody out of poverty. Instead, bank bailouts totalled $20 trillion in 2009 and 2010.Across the world, most low-income countries are cutting spending. Private banks have failed to respond to public funding by increasing their lending. But in Brazil, public bank lending provides 35 per cent of total credit.Countries need to increase public spending, especially on infrastructure investment; they need to cut taxes and to subsidise production and consumption (food, fuel, transport, electricity). These measures are forbidden to them by international financial institutions.www.workers.org.uk/features/feat_1010/development.html
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Post by dodger on Aug 20, 2013 15:36:01 GMT
The chaos being wrought by this government – the latest in a line of destructive governments – has its roots in centuries of bitter hatred against the working class. Survival will require workers to develop their own strategy for Britain…
What Britain needs to survive: a new, second industrial revolution
WORKERS, FEB 2011 ISSUE
What is happening in Britain today is not some aberration or accidental combination of circumstances having an unfortunate conclusion – the deficit.
It is the culmination of a ruling class and employers’ offensive against workers – organised and disorganised – over nearly 40 years, though obviously with its roots in British history dating back through centuries of class struggle.
This is the historic context: in 1970 Edward Heath, Tory Prime Minister, free marketeer, collaborator, quisling and pro-European Union yes-man, was promoting industrial reform, welfare reform, and social reform, to all aspects of British society. The word “reform” means its opposite. Not reform but reaction, not progress but an attempt to turn the clock backwards, epitomised by Heath’s concept of the “corporate state” – which was the fascist Mussolini model. Heath was the man who boasted that Britain’s “lame duck” industries – effectively all nationalised industry, including rail, steel, coal, utilities, communications etc – had to stand or fall according to the rules of the market. No more state support but to live and die by the sword of the market.
Resistance
Organised industrial workers rose to resist, primarily the engineering union but with factory occupations (e.g. Upper Clyde Shipbuilders) across the country. The miners struck over wages. It had taken them nearly 50 years to recover from the 1926 General Strike defeat. The Industrial Relations Act was destroyed; immense battles were fought around wages and the right to work. We met their challenge head on and scattered them. There is much more in that period 1970-74 but you need to read the history books.
Capitalism’s response to such a stunning defeat – though don’t forget our total failure as a class to then capitalise on that victory – gave us a Labour government from 1974 to 79. The prime role of that government was essentially to give capitalism a respite, a chance to recover and plan its next offensive.
That came in 1979 with Thatcher. Back to the original agenda of Heath – free market economics rampant. There was the Ridley plan, written in 1977, designed to break the industrial organisation of trade unionism in Britain by systematically fragmenting industry, permitting massive imports to undermine our manufacturing base, more integration with the EU, mass unemployment, back to the 1930s with a vengeance, introduce the most draconian anti-union legislation in Europe.
Electronics
Electronic share transactions move wealth around the globe at the flick of a switch. But even there most of the equipment is made outside Britain.
That government aimed to divide, weaken and undermine the trade union base, and from 12 million+ strong we have plummeted to the 6.5 million of today. Throughout the Thatcher-Major years we saw ever-growing surveillance and the police state.
Again, that period 1979 to 1997 saw immense industrial battles, but by the end of it whole industries had been destroyed, truncated, emasculated into a mere shadow of themselves – coal shut, steel closed, textiles devastated, engineering gutted, printing almost non-existent, the Port of London docks closed. Over 1 million skilled industrial jobs were destroyed forever; privatisation became the watchword for the disposing of the nation’s family silver; destruction of social housing, greed and corruption unfettered, the list is endless.
The traditional industrial communities were destroyed, to be replaced with a ghetto-mentality, drugs and worklessness – a snide term meaning hopelessness.
Then the Blair–Brown years of 1997 to 2010, a government more committed to finance capital than any previous. The belief that wealth can be created not by making commodities for exchange and trade but on moving electronic share transactions and banking transfers around the globe is epitomised in that aberration of Canary Wharf in London. Having engineered the banking crisis, they still keep the bonuses of bankers in tens of billions.
Remember the first act of the Thatcher government was to abolish foreign exchange controls allowing capital to flood out of the country? Well, the first act of the Brown-Blair government was to separate the Bank of England from state control, ensuring that the banks were released to commit whatever havoc, wherever and whenever they liked anywhere in the world, finance capitalism effectively rampant without any nation-state root.
The result was that the government oversaw the greatest destruction of manufacturing jobs and industry since and including the Thatcher years. And during this period trade union density in the private sector plummeted to 15 per cent; trade union aspirations or ideas of social progress evaporated in supposed equalities agendas wrapped in litigation and do-gooding, in rubbing shoulders with government lobbyists and sponsoring endless think tanks delivering nothing.
Indistinguishable
In 2009 the CPBML held a meeting in London entitled “Stopping the Parliamentary Road to Fascism”. We were quite clear that the threat to Britain’s labour movement arose simply from the commonality of politics of all parliamentary parties, the indistinguishable policies, the deep institutionalised corruption. As Lenin described it, “a widely ramified, systematically managed, well-equipped system of flattery, lies, fraud, juggling with fashionable and popular catchwords…the more highly democracy is developed the more bourgeois parliaments are subjected to the stock exchange and the bankers“.
We warned that the assault on the working class would come through parliamentarian parties perverting and misusing power and language: they all speak of freedom; they all speak of democracy; they all speak of reform. This is the language and actions of thieves, murderers, charlatans and criminals.
And so we arrive at the Coalition, the Tory Party and the Liberal Democrats. And back we go to 1970 and the free market again. What are the rules of the game? They are quite simple: the market without any restriction or hindrance must be allowed full freedom of operation. Hence all these freedoms: freedom of choice, freedom of movement of capital, freedom of movement of labour, freedom of trade, etc – all really freedom to crucify workers.
We as a working class grew out of the first industrial revolution the world has seen. What we have taken for granted over several hundred years – our industries, our skills, our inventiveness, our creativity, our common language, territory, culture and unique character all face obliteration unless we stop these ideologues of the market.
How can we survive? What weapons do we have in this struggle?
We have over 250 years of organising and ingenuity in how we organise in the place of work. The guerrilla maxim: strategically one against ten but tactically 10 against one was never truer. We bring unity, organisation, self-discipline and clarity of understanding. But we have to understand the changed industrial landscape of Britain – see the article in the November 2010 issue of Workers on the need for a national plan. Start to plan accordingly.
We need to update and modernise our thinking about industry, about manufacturing, about real wealth creation, about what we want that wealth creation to provide and for whom. We have to set a different agenda from all that is around us.
The enemy
We are dealing with a rapacious ruling class, an enemy with a road map and clear intent; Cameron and Clegg’s boast of changing Britain forever cannot be ignored. This is the part of the counter-revolution and is about destroying us as the working class in our entirety, about destroying us as an organised force of resistance.
We therefore need to identify what our strategic industries are and what we want. And what control we have over them. A nation which doesn’t own its own ports, or airports, or shipping, or steel industry etc, has no sovereignty and no future.
Everything the Coalition, International Monetary Fund, World Bank, World Trade Organisation, European Union etc, clamours for, we should oppose.
We want, we need a new industrial revolution –
make it in Britain,
grow it in Britain,
educate in Britain,
re-skill in Britain,
rebuild Britain,
invent it in Britain,
plan it in Britain,
plan it for Britain
– because these are all the things that make us strong, and the things they must therefore destroy, fragment, obliterate.
We are for the accumulation of surplus value; profit in their terms, but not for them but us for the people of Britain.
We are for every control that takes surplus value away from the capitalist and stops exploitation.
We are for absolute control of all industry and public sector provision as we, the working class, see fit.
We are a nation of workers not benefit recipients, a socialist Britain has to be a working Britain not welfare Britain.
We are for import controls and sovereignty over these islands.
We are for redefining the word freedom to mean freedom for workers.
We are for a planned economy to build Britain and the future – we are not for anarchy. Freedom for workers creates respect, wellbeing, education, housing, employment, health, sovereignty and peace.
Debate
So a new, second, industrial revolution and the debate on these plans has to commence, for a new Britain, our Britain:
Define what we are, what we want, what we need.
Reappraise our strategic industries.
Reappraise our social and civil society requirements – health, education, housing, employment, national identity etc.
Reappraise the European Union and work with all the peoples of Europe to shatter it.
Survival – batten down the hatches to survive – for the class and for Britain in the face of the latest tidal wave of reaction.
Recognise and capture the hopes and aspirations of workers that only through a new industrial revolution can workers in Britain survive.
Recognise that survival means power.
Remember the employers’ agenda: greed, exploitation, low wages, long hours, no regulation, degradation, no taxation, no employment rights, no trade unions, maximising of profit – anytime, anywhere, at every opportunity: nothing new then!
We need a different agenda. Industry provides the mechanism to deliver a future for workers and for Britain.
This article is a shortened version of a speech delivered at a public meeting in Conway Hall on 16 November 2010, organised by the CPBML
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Post by dodger on Aug 21, 2013 5:24:42 GMT
THE PHILIPPINES BETWEEN TWO GREEDY GIANTS
www.josemariasison.org/?p=11954Interview with Prof. Jose Maria Sison
Founding Chairman, Communist Party of the Philippines
By John Toledo
Features Editor
Philippine Collegian
22 January 2013
I am John Toledo, features writer of the Philippine Collegian. I am again writing another article on geopolitcs and its implications in the Philippines specifically on the West Philippine Sea conflict. The article will be published on January 22, 2012 next week Tuesday in the Philippine Collegian. Here are the following questions:
1. Historically, who are the original claimants of the West Philippine Sea? Where did this dispute come from? Who are the claimants today?
Let us first put into context what you refer to as the West Philippine Sea. The Spratlys are a group of 250 islets plus the shoals and reefs spread over 265,542 square kilometers. They are claimed entirely by China, Taiwan and Vietnam and in part by Malaysia, Brunei and the Philippines. The part of the Spratlys claimed by the Phiippines is what it calls the Kalayaan group of islets located in the West Philippine Sea.
China, Taiwan and Vietnam claim ownership of all the Spratlys supposedly since ancient times on the basis of historical references, seasonal visits by their fishermen and assertions of claims against colonizers as well as yielding of the Spratlys by the Japanese to the French and thus to Vietnam in the San Francisco peace treaty after World War II. Malaysia, Brunei and the Philippines claim parts of the Spratlys that are geographically closest to them and within the 200-mile exclusive economic zone under the UN Convention on Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) plus prehistorical and historical claims that the islets concerned have long been the fishing grounds of their respective fishermen.
2. Why is the West Philippine Sea being claimed by China and Philippines? Is it economically and politically useful? Why or why not?
China arrogantly claims not only the entire Spratlys but also the entire sea south and east of Chna as its property and by making military shows of strength to assert its claims. But the Kalayaan group of islets, the Recto (Reed ) and Panatag Shoal (Scarborough) are all within the exclusive economic zone of the Philippines under the UNCLOS. It is wrong for China to claim these.
In economic terms, the contested islets and shoals and the waters around them are at least rich fishing grounds and sources of corals but they also have a high potential as sources of gas and oil. The Recto Bank is well known for having rich gas and oil deposts as a result of explorations. In political and military terms, the contested islets and shoals can serve as outposts for military vessels and for controlling navigation and commerce or evoking power and influence.
3. Why is US joining in the conflict? Why is it strategic for US to support the Philippines with many armed forces and materials?
The US is fishing in troubled waters. As a matter of fact, it is responsible for stirring up trouble in the first place. It has undertaken controlled trouble-making just to make the Philippine reactionary puppet government run to it for support, to have the reason for entrenching US military forces in the Philippines and to have the Philippines as a base for influencing policies and development within China. The US has strategic objectives in using the Philippines as a strategic base in the US encirclement of China.
4. Is it logically possible that China will wage war on the Philippines because of this West Philippine Sea dispute? Or is it just a ploy for US to wage war with China? Why or why not?
China will not wage war on the Philippines but it will continue to take calculated actions, including shows of force, to discourage and prevent Philippine attempts to control and occupy the contested islets and develop the gas and oil resources there. Neither will the US wage war with China to support the Philippines in the territorial dispute. It has far more economic and political interests in good relations with China than in those with the Philippines.
The US has repeatedly proclaimed that it is neutral in the territorial dispute between China and Philippines. The most it can say is that it is militarily entrenching itself in the Philippines in order to discourage China from attacking the Philippines. However, it will not act militarily against the calculated military moves of China to prevent Philippine attempts to explore and develop the gas and oil resources in the contested islets and shoals.
But China and the US might even make a deal to exploit the gas and oil resources for the benefit of US and Chinese corporations and some big comprador Filipino-Chinese firms or the Indonesian-Chinese firm (Salim group) being managed by Manuel V. Pangilinan. The whole world knows that the mineral ores of the Philippines are being wantonly excavated by US, Japanese, Canadian, Australian, Swiss, Chinese and other foreign firms, together with their big comprador allies. And China has been a major destination of the mineral ores.
In an attempt to look nationalist, the US-Aquino regime is obviously play-acting against China over the well-hyped territorial disputes It is well within the bounds of the collaboration between the US and China. The US is steering the Philippine government towards the attainment of the narrow self-interest and strategic objectives of the US.
One more reason why the US is entrenching itself militarily in the Philippines and using this as part of the US encirclement of China is not to wage war soon but to influence policies and developments in China. The US is trying to realize the complete privatization of the most strategic state-owned enterprises in China and to promote the liberalization of Chinese politics to the point of doing away with the authoritarian rule and causing the weakening or even disintegration of the bureaucrat monopoly capitalism.
5. What are the implications of the Sino-Philippine territorial dispute in relation to the sovereignty of the Philippines?
What is tragic about the Philiñippine ruling system of big compradors and landlords is that it is weak and servile to imperialist powers and that both the US and China take advantage of the Philippines. The US pretends to protect the Phillppines but it is a bantay salakay. Having long become a capitalist country, China cannot be expected to be a gentle and generous giant.
The Filipino people can best assert their national sovereignty and defend their terriorial integrity by overthrowing the ruling system and establishing a people´s democratic state that is truly independent and democratic, determined to carry out land reform and industrialization, realizes social justice and aims for socialism. Such a state is capable of using effective diplomacy and defending its territory against intruders. ###
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Post by dodger on Sept 6, 2013 8:11:39 GMT
5th Pandayang Lino Brocka festival tackles national sovereignty
The opening ceremony of this year’s film festival was held in time for the 117th anniversary of the Battle of Manila when Philippine hero Andres Bonifacio led Filipino revolutionaries in a battle to take the city from Spanish forces, August 29-30, 1896. The festival is also part of the year-long celebration of the 150th birthday of Bonifacio.
By ANNE MARXZE D. UMIL
Bulatlat.com
MANILA – National sovereignty is the theme of the fifth Pandayang Lino Brocka Political Film and New Media Festival. Touted as “Not your ordinary film festival,” Flor Chantal Eco, Festival Director of this year’s Pandayang Lino Brocka said this year’s festival is dedicated to the father of Philippine revolution Gat Andres Bonifacio.
The film festival has formally opened on August 29 at the UP Film Center in Diliman, Quezon City with a forum and screening of Supremo and the late director Lino Brocka’s film PX. Students from different schools attended the opening.
Eco said the opening ceremony of this year’s film festival was held in time for the 117th anniversary of the Battle of Manila when Philippine hero Andres Bonifacio led Filipino revolutionaries in a battle to take the city from Spanish forces, August 29-30, 1896. The festival is also part of the year-long celebration of the 150th birthday of Bonifacio, she added.
The opening of the film festival, Eco said, also coincided with the visit of the US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel in the Philippines, August 29. The mission visit of Hagel in the country was reportedly meant to push for an increase in US rotational military presence in the country.
Pandayang Lino Brocka is a yearly event of Tudla Productions in cooperation with the National Commission on Culture and the Arts (NCCA), University of the Philippines Film Institute, Rotary Club Manila Kalaw, UP Aperture, INTECH and Liga ng Kabataang Propagandista.
Tudla Productions is an alternative, non-profit group of filmmakers, students and cultural workers who utilize different media in drawing attention to the plight and struggles of marginalized sectors and issues of national significance.
“The Pandayang Lino Brocka Political Film and New Media Festival is a cultural gathering that aims to inspire the creation and popularization of truthful, artistic and relevant audiovisual works to enlighten and cultivate critical consciousness of the mass audience. This maiden launch of this festival in 2009 aims to be an aggregate of efforts in political cinema production and distribution in the first decade of the 21st century, a time of worsening economic crisis aggravating the poor people’s plight,” Tudla said in its press release.
Actor Alfred Vargas as Andres Bonifacio in the film Supremo. (Photo grabbed from http://www.philstar.com)
Far from traditional film festival
Unlike mainstream film festivals, the Pandayang Lino Brocka Film Festival screen movies that have relevance to the country’s present conditions and the struggle of the Filipino people.
Eco said the film festival seeks to awaken the patriotism of Filipino to strengthen the struggling against impositions of the US government in the political, economic, military and cultural affairs of the country.
“Like Bonifacio, our youth and people must defend our national patrimony and sovereignty against foreign rule and dictates,” she said.
The highlight of this year’s political film and new festival is the screening of the Brocka’s PX starring Hilda Koronel and Philip Salvador. “The film is a glimpse of a period in Philippine history when the Filipino people’s lives are tied to the base and its soldiers, when poverty, prostitution and criminality are rampant and justice is out of reach.”
The film festival will also screen public service advertisements or PSAs made by independent and progressive film makers such as ST Exposure, Kilab Multimedia and JL Burgos among others.
The festival also gave special citation to Alfred Vargas for producing “Supremo,” a film about Bonifacio and the Philippine revolution and to scriptwriter of PX, Ricky Lee.
Lee is a multi-awarded scriptwriter who wrote more than 100 films since 1973 and earned 50 awards in the process. Lee wrote scripts for classic movies such as Himala, Salome and Karnal among others.
Supremo was directed by Richard Somes with Vargas playing Bonifacio. “Supremo exemplifies Bonifacio’s passion, courage and humanity as the founder of the KKK or Katipunan, their Supremo, and the leader of Philippine Revolution—that movement which finally brought down three centuries of Spanish colonial rule,” Eco said.
“There is a battleground in the field of filmmaking and artistic production—the struggle for the hearts and minds of the people. This festival engages itself in this battle, as it campaigns for artists and audience to revert from the dominant practice of local mainstream and Hollywood entertainment production and consumption to film as a platform for social and political commentary,” Tudla said.- See more at: bulatlat.com/main/2013/09/05/5th-pandayang-lino-brocka-festival-tackles-national-sovereignty/#sthash.aALlLlNG.dpuf
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Post by dodger on Sept 19, 2013 6:58:40 GMT
Pompous counterfeit Marxism,
26 Jun 2012
By William Podmore
This review is from: Empire (Paperback)
Hardt and Negri assert that the new Empire of globalisation is essentially a process of emancipation. But it is superficial to see globalisation as basically a political process. It is also a ridiculous prettification of the political processes actually occurring in the world. Is the partition of Iraq part of a process of emancipation? The coups in Honduras and Paraguay? The destruction of Yugoslavia? The `ever closer union' of the EU?
According to Mark Thwaite's review, Negri and Hardt's new Empire "is the result of the transformation of modern capitalism into a set of power relationships we endlessly replicate that transcend the nation state (so anti-imperialism is out as a progressive politics)." Thwaite claims this book is `a key post-Marxist text'. All it shows is that post-Marxism is really just anti-Marxism.
So anti-imperialism is `out' - very comforting for the empire's owners. This is to fetishise empire and to make it impossible to transcend. Hardt and Negri's ultra-leftism comes full circle. Full of revolutionary rhetoric, they end up worshipping the empire they claim to oppose.
Hardt and Negri use the work of French post-structuralist theorists such as Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Jacques Derrida. A reviewer from France wrote, "There is no 'inside' of metropolitan Capital and an 'outside' of its expansion. It has become territorially unhooked, supervenient, engulfing global social life in its entirety. The gut feeling - "the telos we can feel pulsing" - is that the modulation of imperialism into 'empire' is however just the condition of its vulnerability." This proves all too well the uselessness of the French post-structuralist theorists.
In reality, globalisation is just the liberals' word for imperialism. Countries are right to assert their sovereignty against imperialism.
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Post by dodger on Sept 26, 2013 14:45:15 GMT
The Filipino people's struggle for national and social liberation
Opening speech at the Conference on Democracy, Self-Determination and Liberation of Peoples
European Parliament, Brussels, Belgium
Luis G. Jalandoni
Chief International Representative, NDFP
23 September 2013
The Filipino people, like all other oppressed and exploited peoples, aspire for genuine democracy, self-determination, and liberation. This profound aspiration has expressed itself in a long tradition of struggle against foreign and local oppressors and exploiters.
During the 333 year colonial rule of Spain over the Philippines, from 1565 to 1898, more than 200 revolts were launched by the Filipino people. They rose up against the grabbing of their lands, the imposition of tribute, forced labor and conscription into the Spanish armed forces. The revolts were of varying scope and length. The longest was the 85-year revolt of the people of Bohol from 1744-1829.
This accumulated revolutionary tradition culminated in the armed struggle for independence launched by the proletarian leader, Andres Bonifacio in 1896. Victories over the declining Spanish colonial power resulted in the proclamation of the Philippine Republic in 1898, the first in the whole of Asia.
This victory was however cruelly squashed by US imperialism which launched a war of aggression from 1899 to 1913, causing the death of over a million Filipinos, some 1/5 of the total population. This genocide became the basis for 48 years of US colonial rule followed by more than six decades of neocolonial US domination of the Philippines.
But the profound aspiration for independence and liberation has never been extinguished. Under proletarian revolutionary leadership, the workers and peasants, the women and youth, the indigenous peoples, the urban poor, the fisherfolk, teachers, health workers and other sectors of the Filipino people have been waging a revolutionary struggle since 1968.
They survived the massive attacks of the US backed-Marcos dictatorship from 1972 to 1986. Tens of thousands were subjected to the worst human rights violations: extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, and torture. More than a million were displaced. Yet the people fought on.
Organs of democratic power in 70 out of 81 provinces
At present, the revolutionary forces have built mass organizations and organs of democratic power in 70 out of 81 provinces throughout the country. In more than 110 guerilla fronts elected people's committees constitute the local people's government. The revolutionary forces are consolidating the people's democratic government, with the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), the New People's Army (NPA) and the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP).
Adherence to Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law
The NDFP declared in 1991 its adherence to Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, Protocol II and international humanitarian law.
In July 1996, the NDFP declared its adherence to the Geneva Conventions and Protocol I. It did this as the political authority representing the Filipino people engaged in an armed conflict against the Government of the Republic of the Philippines (GRP) in the exercise of their right of self-determination. It submitted this Declaration to the Swiss Federal Council, the official depositary and to the International Committee of the Red Cross, the official guardian of international humanitarian law.
The European Parliament, on July 18, 1997 and January 14, 1999, issued resolutions recognizing and endorsing the peace negotiations between the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) and the Government of the Republic of the Philippines (GRP).
The NDFP values the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which stressed the dignity and inalienable rights of every human being. The NDFP upholds the Algiers Declaration of 1976 which underscored the collective rights of peoples to fight for their liberation against foreign and local oppressors The NDFP likewise supports the UN General Assembly declaration of 1986 that recognizes the collective right of peoples to development.
Peace Negotiations
In its peace negotiations with the GRP, the NDFP has signed more than 10 agreements. Among these is the Hague Joint Declaration of 1992, the Joint Agreement on Safety and Immunity Guarantees (1995) and the Comprehensive Agreement on Respect for Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law (CARHRIHL, 1998).
In the CARHRIHL both Parties recognize that the principles of human rights and international humanitarian law are universally applicable. They acknowledge that the prolonged armed conflict in the Philippines necessitates the application of the principles of HR and IHL.
The International Legal Advisory Team (ILAT) and the Special Office for Children (SOPC)
The NDFP' is assisted by more than a dozen international legal experts who formed the International Legal Advisory Team (ILAT). Last year, the NDFP was assisted by the ILAT and Filipino lawyers as it formulated its Program of Action for the Rights, Protection and Welfare of Children. Subsequently, the NDFP set up its Special Office for the Protection of Children (SOPC). On other issues such as political affairs, the ILAT is also advising the NDFP.
Basis for Widespread Support of the People
The revolutionary forces within the NDFP carry out programs which respond to the aspirations of the Filipino people. It implements programs of land reform, health, education and culture. This is the basic reason for the widespread support and participation of the people in the liberation struggle.
Program of Genuine Land Reform
With 75% of the 100 million population consisting of the exploited and oppressed peasantry, the program for genuine land reform is the main content of the revolutionary program. It responds to the basic aspirations of the peasantry.
The minimum land reform program consists of lowering land rent, elimination of usury, and raising of farmworkers' wages. It is carried out widely and benefits millions of the rural population.
The maximum program of confiscation of land and free distribution to tillers is carried out where feasible in certain areas where the revolutionary movement is sufficiently strong. But the nationwide implementation of the maximum program will be possible only upon nationwide victory. It will include the provision of irrigation, farm to market roads, assistance for mechanization and building of cooperatives and collectivization towards greater productivity. Coupled with national industrialization it will lift the backward agrarian economy to a developed and prosperous one.
Educational and Health Programs
Revolutionary education on the history of the Filipino people and their culture is widely carried out. So are programs of literacy and numeracy. Revolutionary schools have been set up benefiting many thousands of peasants and national minorities, especially children and youth. Educational materials and works of art and literature have arisen from the revolutionary struggle. The revolutionary movement has promoted the use of Pilipino and regional languages.
Health programs making use of herbal medicines, acupuncture and Western medicine respond to vital health needs of the people. Health campaigns like anti-malaria and people's health clinics have been successful. Health professionals have been encouraged to serve the people in the countryside and in the urban slum areas. They have also trained paramedics to provide first aid and treatment for common illnesses. They popularize the use of herbal and traditional medicine culled from the aged-old practices of the masses.
Massive Corruption Further Isolates Aquino Regime
The recent massive corruption scandal involving GPH President Aquino and many congressmen enrages the people. The amounts stolen run into hundreds of billions of pesos. The legal democratic movement is isolating the Aquino regime.
Escalating US Military Intervention
The US and the Aquino regime are finalizing an agreement for allowing increased US troops, warships and aircraft into the country. US troops based in the Philippines have started to fly surveillance drones .This escalating US military intervention will be further underlined with US President Obama's visit on October 11. All these serve the US strategic shift of its forces to the Pacific.
Call to Advance the People's War for National Liberation
The revolutionary forces are determined to carry on their struggle for genuine democracy, independence and self-determination and national and social liberation. They are resolutely striving to advance the people's war for national and social liberation from the strategic defensive to the strategic stalemate.
International Solidarity
In so doing, they relate with other struggling peoples and progressive international forces. The revolutionary forces in the NDFP are committed to help build the international solidarity among peoples and progressive forces in the international community.
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Post by dodger on Sept 29, 2013 8:33:13 GMT
While the European Union set about destroying the independence of nations, and the US attempted to do the same in Central and South America, a new debate was beginning. It centred on integration and cooperation – but on the basis of national sovereignty...Together, but sovereign: how Latin America and the Caribbean are forging their own future
WORKERS, MAY 2012 ISSUEAll the wrath of the European Union is aimed at Argentina at the moment. As Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner announces plans to renationalise the Spanish owned oil company YPF, the Spanish parent company REPSOL threatens court action against Argentina around the globe. Unelected European Commission president Barroso threatens Argentina over investment agreements between the EU and Argentina, and Spain threatens industrial war against Argentina. And Catherine Ashton, the EU’s unelected foreign policy chief, cancelled a meeting of the EU/Argentina Joint Committee.Argentina shrugs off these threats as it did the threats from the IMF, US and EU in 2002/03 when the country defaulted on its debts and told these august bodies that they would be paid only when Argentina decided. As if Spain and the EU are in a position now to wage industrial war!Standing upIt’s not just Argentina. Many countries in Latin America and the Caribbean have learned how to stand up to the imperialists. It all started with the US government’s intention to set up the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) and to include every country in the Americas except Cuba. Broadly speaking, the FTAA would have led to the effective annexation of nation states by the USA. Its predecessor, the North American Free Trade Area, covered Canada, the USA and Mexico. Most Latin American nations had seen the experience of this “Free Trade agreement” in destroying agriculture in Mexico due to a subsidised US agriculture sector.On 1 May 2001, Cuba launched its own campaign against the FTAA based on the slogan “Plebicito si, anexo no”, or “Referendum yes, annexation no”. In other words, let the people in each country decide for themselves. That’s the same as we wish for Britain and the EU. Cuban trade unions campaigned online, among other Latin American trade unions. Street scene, Haiti: cooperation across Latin America and the Caribbean is seen as
the key to tackling poverty both caused and ignored by the US.
Photo: WorkersVenezuela was next to join the campaign against the FTAA and the debate deepened across the continent. Mercosur, the trading group of the southern cone representing Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Chile etc, and CARICOM, the Caribbean trading group, took up the debate.The game changer was Venezuela’s proposal to establish ALBA, the Bolivarian Alliance of our America, as a direct alternative to the FTAA. The concept was immediately supported by Cuba and Bolivia. ALBA would establish a host of cooperation projects in the field of energy, health, media, education, literacy and trade.Originally, ALBA comprised only Venezuela and Cuba, but they were later joined by Bolivia, Nicaragua, Dominica, Antigua & Barbuda, Saint Vincent & the Grenadines, and Ecuador with Haiti and Paraguay indicating their intention to join. ALBA established the ALBA Bank to assist its members and introduced a trading currency, the Sucre.The southern cone countries decided to establish a Bank of the South as an alternative to the IMF with $20 billion of assets. Venezuela, also one of the countries party to the decision to set up the Bank of the South, has proposed that members of the Bank of the South leave the IMF after the bank is established.
SovereigntyPerhaps the most significant development was the opening of a debate across Latin America and the Caribbean about the concept of integration, not on the basis of the EU or FTAA, but based on Simón Bolivar’s concept of a united Latin America with national sovereignty at its heart. This debate has included those countries outside of ALBA. There has been general agreement across Latin America and the Caribbean that they should become independent of the USA in terms of trade and finance. One thing common to every country
in the region – Cuban doctors.
Photo: WorkersThis development led to a summit of the various interregional organisations held in Mexico in February 2011 which built on the experiences of all the those organisations and formally established the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) representing all countries on the continent with the explicit exclusion of the USA and Canada. CELAC’s combined GDP puts it in third position in the world, and with a population of 600 million, the world’s largest oil reserves and the first and third global producer of food and energy respectively, it is understandable that confidence levels are so high.A first CELAC summit was held in Caracas in December 2011 and Cuba, which had been excluded from the Organisation of American States since 1962, was selected to host the 2013 summit while being a member of the “troika” of Cuba, Venezuela and Chile that will lead the organisation. In fact, CELAC’s President for 2013 will be Raul Castro.Another summit was held in April 2012 in Cartagena, Colombia, scheduled to launch the FTAA. In fact this marked its death knell, with countries calling on Obama to support Argentina over the Malvinas Islands and condemning the USA for continuing to try to isolate Cuba. Oh! How times have changed!This movement is wider than leaders and inter-regional trade groupings. Trade unions have been actively organising to be in advance of these developments. In February 2011 Cuba’s trade union centre, the CTC, hosted the first “Train the Trainers” educational process for union members from across the continent at its trade union school in Havana. The objective was to raise political and working class awareness across the trade unions of Latin America and the Caribbean, particularly among trade unions in the ALBA countries.Keeping paceSome trade unions were not keeping pace with the social and political developments in the ALBA countries. The activists were trained to go back to their countries and organise similar programmes for their own trade union activists. Through this process more political training programmes were developed at events in Nicaragua, Brazil, Mexico and Chile, each with participation from across the continent.All these developments seem to have passed Cameron by. They put his stand over Las Malvinas, or Falkland Islands as he prefers to call them, into a different perspective. He is not dealing with a tin pot military Argentinian dictator like Galtieri, but a president who won 54 per cent of the vote in the last election (which puts the Tory vote to shame). Cameron is dealing with a country that, like any other, wants sovereignty over its natural resources including those offshore. Argentina is a country that is part of a group of 33 nations who have broken free from one country with imperial designs over the sub-continent and who will not tolerate another’s challenge to their national and resource sovereignty.Cameron sent HMS Dauntless to the area. This is the most powerful warship in the world, described by a boasting Royal Navy spokesman as capable of “destroying every plane at every Latin American airbase before they could get off the ground”.What did Cameron think the response would be? How would this be perceived across Latin America and the Caribbean? Speaking at a ceremony to mark the 30th anniversary of the war, Argentinian President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner said of Cameron’s stance, “Every day that goes by it looks more ridiculous, more absurd in the eyes of the world. It is an injustice that in the 20th century there are still sixteen colonial enclaves around the world, and ten of those belong to the United Kingdom.” ■
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Post by dodger on Oct 20, 2013 1:48:48 GMT
Fine critique of deep globalisation, 5 Aug 2011
This Will Podmore review is from: The Globalization Paradox: Why Global Markets, States, and Democracy Can't Coexist (Hardcover)
Dani Rodrik, Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard University, argues against financial globalisation and for countries to put their people first through industrial policy. He points out that the Bretton Woods system was built on the belief that countries' domestic needs would and should trump the global economy's demands.
Countries that rely on international finance do poorly. He writes, "The benefits of globalisation come to those who invest in domestic social capabilities. These investments in turn require some degree of support for domestic firms - protective tariffs, subsidies, undervalued currencies, cheap funding, and other kinds of government assistance ... The deep integration model of globalisation overlooks this imperative. By restricting in the name of freer trade the scope for industrial policies needed to restructure and diversify national economies, it undercuts globalisation as a positive force for development."
As Rodrik notes, "National democracy and deep globalisation are incompatible." Governments cannot meet both the demands of foreign creditors and the needs of their own people.
He argues against trade fundamentalism, as expressed in World Trade Organization rules and in World Bank and IMF practice. Fixed exchange rates and capital mobility both enslave countries to other countries' monetary policies. Opening up to foreign economic intervention means facing greater risks, and less growth. More capital inflows do not mean more growth.
In 1991, Argentina's Convertibility Law tied the peso to the dollar, strangling the economy, just as the euro is doing to Greece, Portugal, Cyprus, Italy and Spain. In 2001-2, Argentina defaulted on its foreign debt, reimposed capital controls, devalued the peso, froze utility prices, increased social spending, improved its tax collection and created import substitution industries. The markets screamed, but Argentina's economy grew by 63 per cent in six years, pulling 11 million people out of poverty.
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Post by dodger on Oct 20, 2013 1:54:43 GMT
The best account of globalisation, 7 July 2011
This Will Podmore review is from: Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order (Paperback)
Michel Chossudovsky, Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa, has written a brilliant book on globalisation's effects. He has worked in Chile, Argentina, Peru, Brazil, Rwanda, Kenya, Nigeria, Egypt, Morocco, India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, the Philippines and Russia. His book is in six parts: global poverty, Sub-Saharan Africa, South and Southeast Asia, Latin America, the former Soviet Union and the Balkans, and the new world order.
He shows how the International Monetary Fund used the debt crisis of early 1980s to impose deadly policies, causing the present global depression. What are these policies?
They devalue the currency and `dollarise' prices, making all basic goods dearer. They deregulate banks and liberalise flows of capital, labour and goods. Capital flight then cuts tax revenues, drives up budget deficits, paralyses social programmes, and spurs ever-increasing public debts.
They attack wages, working conditions and trade unions. The free movement of labour aids this attack, as Chossudovsky notes, "Manpower exports, ... from both Mexico and the Caribbean, serve the purpose of depressing the wages paid to American and Canadian workers, as well as undermining the role of trade unions."
They destroy health, education and welfare services. They privatise public services and utilities. They dump US and EU food surpluses on poor countries, wrecking local farmers.
They make central banks independent of their countries and peoples, and dependent on the IMF. The IMF stops these banks funding public spending and providing credit through money creation, which stifles development. Chossudovsky writes, "Incapable of using domestic monetary policy to mobilize its internal resources, the country becomes increasingly dependent on international sources of funding which has the added consequence of increasing the level of external indebtedness."
They cut public spending and wages, and raise taxes, to release money to service external and internal debts. Development loans, Structural Adjustment Programs and bailouts divert revenue from social programmes to the military and the banks. IMF bailouts don't rescue countries; they aid speculators, ensuring that they can collect their debts.
As he notes, "The solution to the debt crisis becomes the cause of further indebtedness. The IMF's economic stabilization package is, in theory, intended to assist countries in restructuring their economies with a view to generating a surplus on their balance of trade so as to pay back the debt and initiate a process of economic recovery. Exactly the opposite occurs. The very process of `belt-tightening' imposed by the creditors undermines economic recovery and the ability of countries to repay their debt."
A senior IMF official admitted, "On the basis of existing studies, one certainly cannot say whether the adoption of programs supported by the Fund led to an improvement in inflation and growth performance. In fact it is often found that programs are associated with a rise in inflation and a fall in the growth rate." It failed to hit these claimed goals of lower inflation and more growth, but hit its real goal, increasing US company profits.
Starting with the 1995 bailout of Mexico, G7 governments gave the IMF with huge sums, raising their public debts, which were guaranteed by the same banks that had caused the crisis by their speculations.
Chossudovsky points out, "those who guarantee the issuing of public debt to finance the bailout are those who will ultimately appropriate the loot (e.g. as creditors of Korea or Thailand) - i.e. they are the ultimate beneficiaries of the bailout money - which essentially constitutes a `safety net' for the institutional speculator. The vast amounts of money granted under the rescue packages are intended to enable the Asian countries to meet their debt obligations with the financial institutions, which had contributed to stabilizing their national currencies. As a result of this vicious circle, a handful of banks and brokerage houses have enriched themselves beyond bounds; they have also increased their stranglehold over governments and politicians around the world."
The results? As Chossudovsky says, the IMF's policies amount to economic genocide. Worldwide there are one billion people unemployed, nearly a third of the world's workers. The World Bank says that if you get $1.01 a day you are not poor, so, it says, only 19 per cent are poor in Latin America and the Caribbean - yet 60 per cent go hungry. The UN Development Programme says that only 10.9 per cent of Mexicans are poor, yet, by the USA's definition of poverty, there were 13.7 per cent poor in the USA and 17.4 per cent in Canada.
Governments, relief agencies, donors and NGOs blame climatic factors for famines, but IMF-enforced policy is mainly to blame because it destroys economies, leading to famines and civil wars. Chossudovsky points out, "While `external' climatic variables play a role in triggering off a famine and heightening the social impact of drought, famines in the age of globalization are man-made. They are not the consequence of a scarcity of food but of a structure of global oversupply which undermines food security and destroys national food agriculture."
Capitalism wages more and more wars too, especially in the Middle East, North Africa and the Mediterranean. The US Central Command says, "the purpose of US engagement ... is to protect US vital interest in the region - uninterrupted, secure US/Allied access to Gulf oil."
Capitalism more and more concentrates corporate, especially financial, power. As Chossudovsky notes, "Under the Maastricht treaty, the process of political restructuring in the European Union increasingly heeds to dominant financial interests at the expense of the unity of European societies. In this system, state power has deliberately sanctioned the progress of private monopolies: large capital destroys small capital in all its forms."
We can put no trust in politicians. As a typical Social Democrat said, "From an economic standpoint, I can only agree with socially harmful measures in our society, such as rising unemployment or cutting workers' rights, because they are necessary to advance the economic reform process."
Chossudovsky sums up, "we must democratize the economic system and its management and ownership structures, resolutely challenge the blatant concentration of ownership and private wealth, disarm financial markets, freeze speculative trade, arrest the laundering of dirty money, dismantle the system of offshore banking, redistribute income and wealth, restore the rights of direct producers and rebuild the Welfare State."
We need to dismantle "the military-industrial complex, NATO and the defense establishment including its intelligence, security and police apparatus. ... We must restore the truth, disarm the controlled corporate media, reinstate sovereignty to our countries and the people of our countries and disarm and abolish global capitalism."
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Post by dodger on Oct 20, 2013 14:30:06 GMT
A thought-provoking survey of the modern world, 18 Oct 2010
This Will Podmore review is from: 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism (Paperback)
Ha-Joon Chang, Reader in the Political Economy of Development at Cambridge University, has written a fascinating book on capitalism's failings. He also wrote the brilliant Bad Samaritans. Martin Wolf of the Financial Times says he is `probably the world's most effective critic of globalisation'.
Chang takes on the free-marketers'' dogmas and proposes ideas like - there is no such thing as a free market; the washing machine has changed the world more than the internet has; we do not live in a post-industrial age; globalisation isn't making the world richer; governments can pick winners; some rules are good for business; US (and British) CEOs are overpaid; more education does not make a country richer; and equality of opportunity, on its own, is unfair.
He notes that the USA does not have the world's highest living standard. Norway, Luxemburg, Switzerland, Denmark, Iceland, Ireland, Sweden and the USA, in that order, had the highest incomes per head. On income per hours worked, the USA comes eighth, after Luxemburg, Norway, France, Ireland, Belgium, Austria and the Netherlands. Japan, Switzerland, Singapore, Finland and Sweden have the highest industrial output per person.
Free-market politicians, economists and media have pushed policies of de-regulation and pursuit of short-term profits, causing less growth, more inequality, more job insecurity and more frequent crises. Britain's growth rate in income per person per year was 2.4 per cent in the 1960s-70s and 1.7 per cent 1990-2009. Rich countries grew by 3 per cent in the 1960s-70s and 1.4 per cent 1980-2009. Developing countries grew by 3 per cent in the 1960s-70s and 2.6 per cent 1980-2009. Latin America grew by 3.1 per cent in the 1960s-70s and 1.1 per cent 1980-2009, and Sub-Saharan Africa by 1.6 per cent in the 1960s-70s and 0.2 per cent 1990-2009. The world economy grew by 3.2 per cent in the 1960s-70s and 1.4 per cent 1990-2009.
So, across the world, countries did far better before Thatcher and Reagan's `free-market revolution'. Making the rich richer made the rest of us poorer, cutting economies' growth rates, and investment as a share of national output, in all the G7 countries.
Chang shows how free trade is not the way to grow and points out that the USA was the world's most protectionist country during its phase of ascendancy, from the 1830s to the 1940s, and that Britain was one of world's the most protectionist countries during its rise, from the 1720s to the 1850s.
He shows how immigration controls keep First World wages up; they determine wages more than any other factor. Weakening those controls, as the EU demands, lowers wages.
He challenges the conventional wisdom that we must cut spending to cut the deficit. Instead, we need controls capital, on mergers and acquisitions, and on financial products. We need the welfare state, industrial policy, and huge investment in industry, infrastructure, worker training and R&D.
As Chang points out, "Even though financial investments can drive growth for a while, such growth cannot be sustained, as those investments have to be ultimately backed up by viable long-term investments in real sector activities, as so vividly shown by the 2008 financial crisis."
This book is a commonsense, evidence-based approach to economic life, which we should urge all our friends and colleagues to read.
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Post by dodger on Oct 21, 2013 14:32:44 GMT
www.workers.org.uk/opinion/opinion_1102/ireland.htmlfirst thoughts: irish independence
WORKERS, NOVEMBER 2002 ISSUE BRITISH IMPERIALISM has a legendary role in conquering and dividing nations overseas and Blair continues this tradition recklessly. While he wants the US to run our foreign policy and the European Central Bank to run our government, he also wants the dying embers of Britain’s divisive interference in the affairs of Ireland to be fanned once more.
In a world in which national independence is being destroyed and petty chauvinisms and terrorism fostered, the move by Britain to suspend Stormont and thereby set back the process of peace and reconciliation in the north of Ireland is dangerous.
Ireland’s business is Ireland’s business. Britain should have no dominion there. Nor should the European Union. Ireland’s proud national traditions are thwarted by unelected bankers from the European Central Bank controlling the Dail and British Ministers dictating events in the six counties.
Ireland, like every other nation in the world, needs its own independent, secular government. Britain’s aspirations for the same will be delayed for as long as it remains within the European Union and at the beck and call of the US and also for as long as it tries to meddle in the affairs of Ireland.
The concept of national independence as the basis for secular government remains the key for workers’ progress in this period of history. The idea of national independence, so clearly expressed by the Irish in the first attempted revolution of the twentieth century, is central to the struggle for democracy across the globe at the start of the 21st.ering and dividing nations overseas and Blair continues this tradition recklessly. While he wants the US to run our foreign policy and the European Central Bank to run our government, he also wants the dying embers of Britain's divisive interference in the affairs of Ireland to be fanned once more.
In a world in which national independence is being destroyed and petty chauvinisms and terrorism fostered, the move by Britain to suspend Stormont and thereby set back the process of peace and reconciliation in the north of Ireland is dangerous.
Ireland's business is Ireland's business. Britain should have no dominion there. Nor should the European Union. Ireland’s proud national traditions are thwarted by unelected bankers from the European Central Bank controlling the Dail and British Ministers dictating events in the six counties.
Ireland, like every other nation in the world, needs its own independent, secular government. Britain’s aspirations for the same will be delayed for as long as it remains within the European Union and at the beck and call of the US and also for as long as it tries to meddle in the affairs of Ireland.
The concept of national independence as the basis for secular government remains the key for workers’ progress in this period of history. The idea of national independence, so clearly expressed by the Irish in the first attempted revolution of the twentieth century, is central to the struggle for democracy across the globe at the start of the 21st.
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Post by dodger on Oct 22, 2013 21:08:52 GMT
Brilliant demolition of the lie of 'humanitarian' interventionism, 25 Jan 2010
By William Podmore
This review is from: Humanitarian Imperialism: Using Human Rights to Sell War (Paperback)
In this brilliant book, French scientist Jean Bricmont exposes the liberal lie of humanitarian imperialism, showing that imperialism is never humanitarian.
Throughout the last century, the USA and its allies, principally Britain, constantly attacked progressive forces, upholding by force the unjust world order under which we live, attacking workers seeking justice and national sovereignty. The USA is the organ-grinder, Britain the monkey.
The key example is the Soviet Union, which was always forced to defend itself against aggression. As Bricmont notes, defending the Soviet Union, "The leftist discourse on the Soviet Union, especially on the part of Trotskyists, anarchists, and a majority of contemporary communists, usually fails to recognize that aspect of things in its eagerness to denounce Stalinism. But insofar as a large part of Stalinism can be considered a reaction to external attacks and threats (imagine again a regular series of September 11 attacks on the United States), the denunciation amounts to a defense of imperialism that is all the more pernicious for adopting a revolutionary pose."
Bricmont defends workers' nationalism, pointing out, "the `nationalism' of a people that wants to protect advantages gained in decades of struggle for progress is not comparable to the nationalism of a great power that takes the form of military intervention at the other end of the earth. Moreover, if it is true that national sovereignty does not necessarily bring democracy, there can be no democracy without it." Nations that lose sovereignty lose their democracy.
When peoples defend their national sovereignty against an aggressor, they are upholding international law. But for Britain to follow the USA into endless wars would militarise our foreign and domestic policies, destroy civil liberties and waste billions on the military, with no end to terrorism.
If Britain instead practised non-intervention and peaceful cooperation, and respected other nations' rights to self-determination and national sovereignty, we would free billions of pounds to invest in our industries and services.
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