Sovereignty.

If a drone could think

By ROLAND G. SIMBULAN
- See more at: bulatlat.com/main/2013/08/14/if-a-drone-could-think/#sthash.e76a1MxN.dpuf

Bulatlat.com

If a smart bomb could think
will a drone ask why it has become
America’s deadliest, lethal
global fighting machine?

If a drone could think
will it ask why it disrespects sovereignty
and spies, maims and kills foreign citizens
thousands of miles away?

Will a drone be afraid
why it is called the scariest
of names: Switchblade,
Predator, Avenger, Reaper?

If a drone could think
will it ask why its controllers
direct it to bomb other nations for ‘justice’
while other bombs are ‘terrorist acts’ ?

Will a drone wonder why
it is made to trigger
undeclared wars and conflicts
thru borderless offensive operations?

If a drone could choose
would it refuse to deliver
death from the sky that scatter
the flesh and blood of the innocents?

If a drone could choose
would it still disperse deadly pellets
that cause extensive damage
and rain death on helpless children?

If a drone could think
would it rather spy on corrupt tyrants
supported by U.S. dollars
and cease terrorizing foreign lands?

If a drone could think
would it transform itself into social programs
instead of being a part for space-directed wars
that create more hatreds and sufferings in the world? 

But a drone is a machine
and it is in the hands of humans
who think and choose
to regenerate their kind.

Quezon City
August 3, 2013
(http://bulatlat.com)
- See more at: bulatlat.com/main/2013/08/14/if-a-drone-could-think/#sthash.e76a1MxN.dpuf

Philippine mining situation at a glance


Latest Philippine export data of minerals to major destinations such as Japan, China, US and Canada amounted to $1.59 billion, mostly of copper, gold and nickel.

See also: Mining giants to pass on impact of mining crisis to people?

By MARYA SALAMAT
Bulatlat.com

MANILA – When it comes to mineral resources, the Philippines is considered the fifth richest country in the world. It has the largest nickel reserves – which explains perhaps why most of the 35 operating metallic mines in the country as of Oct. 2012 based on data from the Mines and Geosciences Bureau are into nickel mining. The Philippines is also rich in gold deposits. It is third in the world for gold; fifth in copper. On top of these, the Philippines is reportedly rich also in non-metallic and industrial minerals such as marble, limestone, clays, feldspar, rock aggregates, dolomite, guano and other quarry resources.

The Philippines has an estimated $840 billion worth of untapped mineral resources according to the Mines and Geosciences Bureau (MGB). That is said to be 15 times the amount of the country’s foreign debt.



Open pit mining

Of the 30 million hectares total land area of the country, about a third or nine million hectares have been identified as having high mineral potential, and nearly four percent of these lands (1.14 million hectares as of Jan. 2012) are covered with mining tenements. These areas are still “subject to mandatory relinquishment provided under the law,” the MGB said. It simply means there are still furious and bloody struggles over these lands that the government has approved for mining. Over half of these lands are ancestral domains of indigenous tribes in the Philippines, the Katribu Partylist said. Militarization is happening over these lands such that cases of human rights violations ranging from forced evacuation, harassments and massacres of locals opposing mining operations are being reported.

Defend Patrimony cited data from the Task Force-Justice for Environmental Defenders (TF-JED) saying that mining-related murders make up three-fourths of the total recorded killings of environmental advocates under the Aquino government. The latest was the murder of B’laan chieftain and staunch opponent to Xstrata-SMI, AntingFreay and his son, Victor, last August 23 at the hands of paramilitary troops under the Armed Forces of the Philippines’ Task Force KITACO. His wife, Kiit Freay, survived the attack. Bryan Epa, an anti-mining activist in Nueva Vizcaya, was also the latest victim of enforced disappearance when he was illegally arrested by the local Philippine National Police last August 21 and has not been seen since.

Latest Philippine export data of minerals to major destinations such as Japan, China, US and Canada amounted to $1.59 billion, mostly of copper, gold and nickel. That was just the export data from Jan. to Sept. of 2012. The country’s gross production value of metallic minerals in 2012 reached P100.80 billion ($ 2.3 billion). It was lower by 18 percent compared to the P122.98 billion ($ 2.8 billion) produced in 2011.

These data from MGB suggest the high profitability of mining in the Philippines, given that in just nine months of 2012, a third of the total mining investments from 2004 to first half of 2012 (amounting to $4.630 billion) was already matched by export earnings.

In fact, the total mining investments amounting to $4.630 billion since 2004, when the Philippine Mining Act was being legislated to the first half of 2012, have already generated $5.1 billion in gross production value of metallic minerals in years 2011 and 2012 alone. Little wonder then that mining companies desire to continue operating in the Philippines.

In 2011, the mining industry generated P22.079 billion (about $503 million) in national and local taxes, fees, and royalties and employed more than 200,000.

In 2012, the mining sector employed 252,000, a very small percentage of the country’s employed, but the MGB said “it is conservatively assumed that for every job in the industry, about four indirect jobs may be indirectly generated in the upstream and downstream sectors.”

Meanwhile, local communities affected by mining rue the loss of their former livelihood in fishing, agriculture and forestry, as some of them were forced to become mineworkers instead, or service workers for those at work in the mines, including some women becoming prostitutes, reportedly driven to it by the combination of their family’s loss of land, livelihood and influx of men working in the mines.

Environmentalists also blame the liberalized mining sector for the greater destructiveness of natural disasters in the country. Mining companies are blamed for contributing to massive siltation of the rivers, poisoning the waterways and agricultural fields with toxic chemicals and rendering communities more vulnerable to flooding.

A “case in point, Philex’s Padcal mine, has up to now cleaned up only one million metric tons or just five percent of the total amount of toxic mine tailings it spilled from its outdated dam facilities last year. Philex has in fact refused point-blank to pay the P6.42-billion demanded by the National Power Corporation for the rehabilitation of the affected San Roque Dam. It can only be concluded that big mines are unwilling to pay environmental and social costs they entailed to protect their profits in these times of crisis,” Clemente Bautista, national coordinator of Kalikasan PNE said in a statement.

During the Supreme Court hearings last month on the petitions against the mining act, Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno, reading from a list of submitted by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, reportedly found out that most of the 350 registered mining companies in the country do not have or do not indicate an “environmental work program” in their mining concessions with the government. The DENR cannot even tell the High Court how much is being spent to protect the environment, if any.

Kalikasan PNE and Defend Patrimony, in picketing at the street leading to the confab of large mining companies’ representatives this week, called for the immediate pullout and demobilization of all military and paramilitary troops from mining areas and the immediate filing of criminal charges against military, paramilitary, police and security forces with track records of killings and human rights violations. Finally, they called for the passage of the People’s Mining Bill, a progressive policy on large-scale mining that seeks to reorient the industry towards domestic economic development, genuine environmental safety and a needs-based extraction. (http://bulatlat.com)

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imarxman.wordpress.com/2012/02/07/sovereignty/


Sovereignty


Posted on February 7, 2012 by imarxman

Sovereignty – pre-eminence; supreme and independent power; the territory of a sovereign or of a sovereign state: such is “The Chambers Dictionary” definition of the word.

Sovereignty has become a vital issue for Britain, one that requires informed and urgent consideration by the British working class. And working class means the great majority of the British people who must work to earn the means of their livelihood.

In the past “…the territory of a sovereign…” literally meant the land ruled by a monarch. The present queen not withstanding, a modern rendering would be to identify where power actually lies in a country.

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 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 on behalf 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 so threatened at the moment. However, a homegrown sovereignty issue threatens the integrity of the nation. That issue is Scottish independence.

In pursuing its own narrow ends the SNP is attempting to persuade the Scots their best interests would be served by faux independence. Faux 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, Germany and France.

An “independent Scotland” would have to negotiate terms of entry into the EU as it is Britain, not its constituent parts, that presently hold membership. Having severed its national ties, the Scottish government would be in no position to make advantageous demands. Undoubtedly, the EU would impose conditions whereby any vestige of sovereignty must be expunged.

Britain’s strength and progress has from inception with the Act of Union been its unity. Cultural differences within Britain have been maintained and celebrated with pride and no presumption that any of the constituents are any less British. Scots are Scots, the Welsh Welsh and English remain English, except, of course, many families contain elements of all three.

If the SNP are truly concerned about the issue of independence then they should join in the demand for a British referendum on withdrawal from the EU. This is the true test of British sovereignty.

Such a demand for a referendum would bring the working class to engage with political forces that are not its natural allies. Undoubtedly many Tory MPs would not only support that demand, but would actively campaign for a vote in favour of leaving the EU.

This illustrates a feature of working class sovereignty, which is the pre-eminent supreme power. The working class is not shackled to what are arbitrary notions of Right Wing or Left Wing ideas. It acts on its own behalf irrespective of definitions and labels others might wish to impose.

New Labour under Tony Blair, with TUC support, undoubtedly wanted Britain to join the euro at its inception. However, the British working class, even without anything as formal as a ballot, was so apparently opposed the New Labour administration 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.

The sovereignty of the working class 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.

The collective will and wisdom of the British working class has been its strength since it emerged during the industrial revolution. It continues to be the only source of opposition to and the possibility of superseding the present vagaries of finance capitalism.

If Britain is to be rebuilt as “…the territory of a sovereign or of a sovereign state…” 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.

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Capitalism depends on us. But the reverse is not true. Indeed, unless we strike out on our own we will never have what we want…



Why workers need to run Britain



WORKERS, DECEMBER 2009 ISSUE



Ever since Thatcher, governments here have thought they had “picked a winner”, the City of London as a whole. How does the City operate? Low interest rates enable City traders to borrow cheap, lend dear and hedge the risk, encouraging easy loans and reckless lending, creating housing and credit bubbles.



It’s money for old rope. Leverage and the bull market, not fund management genius, brought the hedge funds’ success. Their customers paid very high fees for very low performance. The hedge funds’ big con was packaging default risk so they could sell it – they said – without risk: the market would magic the risk away! Then they put these dodgy deals into shell companies, mostly based in the Cayman Islands, to shift the deals off the books. (Try telling the taxman that your income is “off the books”!)

But cuts in interest rates do not make economies grow. Businesses borrow when they can make money, not because interest rates are low. All the City’s gambling does not create wealth: only labour creates wealth – finance capital just seizes its profits from the great streams of wealth, our wealth, our savings and pensions, flowing through the financial markets.

They need us

The City depends on us, not vice versa. As Karl Marx wrote in Das Kapital, “Gain and loss through fluctuations in the prices of these titles of ownership [stocks and shares]…become, by their very nature, more and more a matter of gamble, which appears to take the place of labour as the original method of acquiring capital wealth.”

Free movement of capital aids corruption, just as free movement of labour aids people trafficking. The profits from moving illegal gains from graft and corruption, and from tax avoidance, are major revenue sources for banks. Capital only operates freely in Britain and, it seems, Haiti. Note, if trade liberalisation and spending cuts brought wealth, Haiti would be the richest country in the world.

The state imports low-paid immigrant labour to keep wages low and to rob other countries of their skilled labour. Around 80 per cent of new jobs in the private sector have gone to migrants from Eastern Europe “keeping wages down”, as the Adam Smith Institute noted approvingly.

What’s the government doing? Gordon Brown buried the Cruickshank report urging curbs on profiteering. He sank a plan to encourage new investment in industry. He saved the tax havens like the Cayman Islands and the “off the books” banks. He refuses to stop banks gambling our money away in the stock market. He opposes even the tiniest tax on the $1000 trillion annual trade in currencies. He bought the banks’ debts as dearly as possible, so as not to hurt them, whatever the cost to us, running up huge debts and printing money, to save the banks. He put private debt into public hands.

We are not a property-owning democracy but a debt-owning plutocracy. Bankers run Britain. The bail-outs are part of capital’s war on the working class.

What are the prospects? What do the bankers say? After Wall Street collapsed in 1929, Harvard University’s Economics Society said, “A serious depression like that of 1920-21 is outside the range of probability.” The Society kept on predicting recovery, until it sadly went bankrupt two years later.

Boom and bust

In 2005 a book was published with the title, Why the real estate boom will not bust and how you can profit from it. The International Monetary Fund said in 2006, “The dispersion of credit risk by banks to a broader and more diverse set of investors … has helped to make the banking and overall financial system more resilient” ensuring “fewer bank failures”.

Gordon Brown told us in June 2007 that deregulating Britain’s banks would bring “the beginning of a new golden age”, that growth was “expected to be stronger this year than last and stronger next year than this. We will succeed if like London we think globally … advance with light-touch regulation, a competitive tax environment and flexibility”. The government forecast last year that the economy would start to recover this summer.

Now the National Institute of Economic and Social Research tells us that the recession is over, so there’s no problem, job done, we can end the discussion now. Although, it also tells us that unemployment will carry on rising well into next year and that “there may well be a period of stagnation now, with output rising in some months and falling in others; the end of the recession should not be confused with a return to normal conditions.” In the real world, investment between April and June was down by 18.4 per cent on last year, the biggest fall for 40 years. The OECD forecast a 4.7 per cent fall in Britain’s GDP this year, far worse than in any other advanced country.

What do we need to do?

John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1933, “Advisable domestic policies might often be easier to compass, if, for example, the phenomenon known as ‘the flight of capital’ could be ruled out. … I sympathise, therefore, with those who would minimise rather than maximise economic entanglement between nations. Ideas, knowledge, art, hospitality and travel – these are the things which should of their nature be international. But let goods be homespun whenever it is reasonably and conveniently possible; above all let finance be primarily national. … the retention of the structure of private enterprise is incompatible with that degree of material well-being to which our technical advancement entitles us … economic internationalism embracing the free movement of capital and of loanable funds as well as of traded goods may condemn this country for a generation to come to a much lower degree of material prosperity than could be attained under a different system.”

Keynes is often described as a liberal, but calling for “a different system” doesn’t sound much like the modern Liberal Party. Keynes said that we needed “a somewhat comprehensive socialisation of investment”. But he breezed over how to do this. How could we socialise investment without taking power from the capitalist class?

Imports

The Observer recently quoted an investment banker, no less, who said, “Many industries are so big and important that long-term, central planning is essential.” The chap who used to be the World Bank’s chief economist, Joseph Stiglitz, agrees: “development … requires long-term thinking and planning.” So we need to think and plan. Stiglitz also says that imports destroy jobs. So we need to control imports.

Stiglitz points out that “migration of unskilled labor leads to lower wages for unskilled workers in the developed world”. So we need to control immigration.

He notes that “the European Central Bank pursues a monetary policy that, while it may do wonders for bond markets by keeping inflation low and bond prices high, has left Europe’s growth and employment in shambles.” So we don’t need the EU’s Central Bank. The Maastricht Treaty, which set up the Bank, prevents EU governments from investing for recovery.

What are we to do? All too often, people agree with Thatcher and say there’s no alternative. But there is and it’s blindingly obvious – an economy based on making here the goods we want, an economy with jobs for all who can work, an economy with decent, well-funded services, an economy that educates and apprentices young people, an economy where resources are invested not gambled away, an economy where labour uses capital and industry uses banks, not vice versa, an economy based on equity and cooperation.

We need to develop all our energy industries. We need coal (we have 200 years’ worth left), oil, gas, wind, solar, tidal e.g. the Severn barrage, nuclear power, and energy conservation measures, new technologies like carbon capture and storage (which power stations in Canada and Germany are using already).

Some people disparage coal, but our civilisation is built on fossil fuels. It has been said, “With coal we have light, strength, power, wealth, and civilisation; without coal we have darkness, weakness, poverty and barbarism.”

The Institution of Chemical Engineers says that we must quickly replace our aging nuclear plants. We should demand that British workers using British technology build the new generation of nuclear power stations, not a French firm using east European labour. British workers should be doing all the work preparing for the Olympics.

Make it in Britain

We should be demanding that all that we need to build our new high-speed rail network be made in Britain, with British-made steel and British-constructed rolling stock. We should be building decent-sized new houses, with good insulation and domestic solar heating. We should involve unemployed young workers in all these projects, alongside skilled workers who can pass on their skills. In Chicago, trade union organisers marched skilled, jobless workers to building sites and demanded jobs. If site managers refused, the workers shut them down. In three years, they won jobs for 455 workers.

We could fund the work by using the state’s controlling interest in RBS, Lloyds and Northern Rock to form a new investment bank. All these proposals could and should become demands of the trade unions in those industries and of the TUC.

To survive, capitalism must have free movement of capital, goods and labour. So for workers to survive, we must plan to stop the export of capital, control imports and control our borders. We need our troops in Dover not in Afghanistan. We need capital and trade controls to rebuild and protect our national industry. For this, we must have national independence and sovereignty. For Britain’s sake, workers need to run Britain.

www.workers.org.uk/opinion/opinion_1113/power.html

It's our power, let's build and run it

WORKERS, NOV 2013 ISSUE

So Osborne went on holiday to China and came back with an agreement to let Chinese companies run our nuclear power stations. This is trumpeted as a win for Britain. In fact, it is an abandonment of national sovereignty and another step towards handing our energy security to foreign interests.

One thing is sure: the proposed link up between China General Nuclear (state-owned) and EDF (85 per cent owned by the French state) to build the Hinckley C nuclear station will not bring any prices down. The British government has agreed to pay between £89.50 and £92.50 per kilowatt-hour – current wholesale rates for electricity are “just” £55 per kilowatt-hour – and to index those rates to inflation. It’s a licence to print money.

Nor will the deal solve the looming gap between the energy we need and the energy we can generate. Hinckley C will take at least a decade to build. A report from the Royal Academy of Engineering, published last month, says that as early as December 2015 Britain will be at risk of power cuts.

We’ve got the European Union to thank for that – by the end of December 2015 its Large Combustion Plant Directive will have forced 11 gigawatts of coal-fired power stations to close (losing capacity equivalent to more than three Hinckley Cs).

And it’s not even certain that the European Union will agree to the government’s Hinckley deal. Brussels has the power to stop the plan if it rules that its competition rules are being broken. You’d almost think Brussels wants our lights to go out.

All that leaves aside the question of whether workers will be able to afford to switch on their electricity anyway. With further price increases in the pipeline for the winter, a recent report by Which? revealed how energy prices have risen much more than the rate of inflation – by 137 per cent for gas and 66 per cent for electricity since 2001. Before the rises announced in October the average cost of gas and electricity per household was £118 a month, £1,420 a year.

The energy market is dominated by six companies – British Gas, EDF, E.ON, npower, Scottish Power and SSE. Last year these six companies made £3.7 billion profit.

EDF says on its website that the new power station at Hinckley will bring 5,000 new jobs to Somerset. How many of them will go to Somerset, or even British, people, rather than to French and Chinese specialists?

Britain cannot let its energy be controlled from outside this country. A demand that British workers must be trained to build and run any new power stations would be a first step towards asserting our own control.