Jilin Connell: injury upon injury

Employees injured at work not only have their physical or psychological injuries to nurse; more often then not, they are subjected to the slander that they either caused the injury through their own negligence, or that the injury is psychosomatic, something they themselves have dreamed up. Victims of repetitive strain injury (RSI) were slandered in this way.

The most recent victims of such a slander are a group several thousand strong in an industrial zone in Jilin city, Jilin Province, China.

They were all either employees of the Jilin Chemical Fibre Company or nearby residents. All claimed that chemical discharges from a neighbouring firm, Jilin Connell Chemical Industry Co., Ltd. (JCCI) were to blame.

The Connell plant produces aniline, a highly-acrid poison used mainly in the manufacture of polyurethane. The capacity of the plant increased from 45,000 tonnes per annum to 66,000 t/a in the early 2000s, but was recently expanded to a massive 300,000 t/a. The aniline unit uses a nitrobenzene hydro-reduction process.

(Quite apart from the safety issues – or maybe they are linked after all - is a jockeying for position within the aniline industry in China which is facing a crisis of overproduction. Ironically, just as the poisoning scandal has erupted, a May 20-22 China Benzene-Aniline-MDI Industry Chain Conference is to take place in Beijing with discussion topics including Analysis of Benzene-Aniline-MDI industry chain development during economic crisis and How to rationally deal with "Aniline industry excess capacity". A “Background to the Summit” points out: “With JiLin ConNell Chemicals’ aniline device starting again soon, the situation of the domestic aniline excess capacity will be more serious.”)

Readily available website information identifies aniline as “toxic by inhalation of the vapour, absorption through the skin or swallowing. It causes headache, drowsiness, cyanosis, and mental confusion, and, in severe cases, can cause convulsions. Prolonged exposure to the vapour or slight skin exposure over a period of time affects the nervous system and the blood, causing tiredness, loss of appetite, headache, and dizziness”.

Around 450 of more than 900 workers who had sought medical attention from April 23, when the first symptoms were reported, remained in hospital by May 15, more than 3 weeks after complaints including headaches, numbness, and partial paralysis surfaced.

The Connell plant was closed on April 30. An investigative team was sent by the Health Ministry’s Centre for Disease Control and Prevention and concluded that releases of Connell plant gases such as carbon monoxide, hydrogen sulphide, aniline and benzene were within state limits. They also noted that none of the Connell workers had reported symptoms. In a report released on May 14, the health bureaucrats blamed “mass hysteria”.

Zhang Shoulin, who led the team, announced at a press conference organised by the city government that the “uncomfortable reactions” among workers were not caused by poisonous chemicals but rather by a socio-psychological phenomenon.

However, workers insisted that they were not imagining their symptoms.

“I cannot accept this conclusion,” said Wang Jinping, a worker of the Chemical Fibre factory. “Why are there so many sick people if there is no pollution?”

The issue was resolved following the intervention of the State Administration of Work Safety Supervision which released its own statement on May 18.

The work safety regulator confirmed that an accidental poison gas leak occurred in April at the Connell plant. Affected workers now have access to free medical treatment.

One wonders how, in a country in which the working class is meant to be exercising leadership, a bunch of Health Department bureaucrats can be so derelict in their duties, so totally dismissive of what workers themselves are saying, as to line up behind someone like the deputy manager of Connell, Wang Daxiang whose attitude was “We never discharged poisonous gases”.

In these circumstances, how can we not recall Chairman Mao’s scathing observation, in 1965, that “The Ministry of Public Health is not a Ministry of Public Health for the people, so why not change its name to the Ministry of Urban Health, the Ministry of Gentlemen’s Health, or even to Ministry of Urban Gentlemen’s Health?”

Extreme vigilance is required by the working class in China to defend the hard-won gains of the periods of revolution and construction, and to curb the arrogance and power of new elites who treat the workers with the same arrogance and contempt as do bourgeois elements everywhere.

(Sourced from Caijing Magazine, People’s Daily and various internet resources).

Condemn the coup in Nepal: the people will win!

(Maoist leader C.P. Gajurel told a 50,000 strong rally of supporters in Kathmandu on May 17, "Now we will capture the State!")

The Australian Government is a champion of parliamentary democracy, so you would expect that if a military commander defied an elected civilian government and forced the resignation of a Prime Minister then it might feel compelled to comment.

However, I don’t recall hearing anything from Rudd, Gillard or Stephen Smith, the Foreign Affairs Minister. The Department of Foreign Affairs has noted the “resignation of the Prime Minister on May 4” and issued an updated travel advisory notice calling on travellers to “exercise a high degree of caution in Nepal due to the uncertain political and security situation”.

The absence of any condemnation of this virtual coup is not surprising. The social-democratic Australian Labor Government is as much a supporter of US imperialism and international reaction as its predecessor, the conservative Howard Liberal Government.

The Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) led a 20-year people’s war against the feudal monarchy and its social props, the Nepalese bourgeoisie and landlords. In 2006, a ceasefire was arranged and in 2008, the CPN (Maoist) surprised the international community by being the largest party in the elections to the Constituent Assembly.

Maoist leader Prachanda became Prime Minister at the head of a coalition government led by the Maoists.

His government determined that the head of the landlord-bourgeois Army of Nepal integrate into its ranks the fighters of the PLA. He refused. He was then stood down by Prime Minister Prachanda. He refused to step down, defying the elected government. He was encouraged in his defiance by the reactionary Nepal Congress Party and by the revisionist parties.

Prachanda has accepted the defiance as a declaration of disloyalty to, and sabotage of, the Constituent Assembly and walked out of the parliament, taking the struggle once more to the streets.

Like Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who faced a coup in April 2002, Prachanda has now experienced the capacity of the old state machine to maintain its loyalty to reaction, to the old elites, and to maintain its monopoly on the machinery of violence to frustrate democracy.

Chavez rallied the people and stared down the plotters. Prachanda is rallying the people and will do likewise.

The words of Henry Lawson, great Australian poet, ring out with starling relevance:

We’ll make the tyrants feel the sting of those that they would throttle,
They need not say the fault is ours if blood should stain the wattle.

Sison victory against "terrorist" slander

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Press Release10 May 2009

Prof. Jose Maria Sison celebrates court victoryand launches two books in Amsterdam

Issued by International DEFEND Committee

Filipino and Dutch friends and well-wishers joined Prof. Jose Maria Sison in celebrating his legal victory in the Dutch courts and launching two new books containing his writings at the Mirror Centre in Amsterdam on 9 May 2009.

The books, entitled Democracy, Socialism and Peace and Democracy and Socialism against Imperialist Globalization, are the first two volumes of a four-volume series to be released this year.

On 30 March 2009 the Dutch Public Prosecution Service dropped the charges filed against Sison for allegedly ordering the killing of two Filipino military agents. Sison’s defense was handled by Michiel Pestman, Victor Koppe and Suus Hopman of the Bohler, Franken, Koppe & Wijngaarden law firm and his Philippine lawyers led by former UN judge Romeo T. Capulong of the Public Interest Law Center.

Sison was arrested on 28 August 2007 while Dutch police simultaneously broke into the office of the NDFP Peace Negotiating Panel and six colleagues' houses and carted away computers and voluminous paper files to search for so-called evidence. After 19 months of traveling back and forth to the Philippines interviewing dubious witnesses provided by the Philippine intelligence services, and a fruitless search for evidence from the computer and paper files the Dutch police had seized, the Dutch Public Prosecution Service has been forced to drop the evidently false charge against Sison.

The dismissal of the false charge of Prof. Sison is in accordance with the decisions of the District Court of The Hague, the Appellate Court and the examining judge ruling that there is no sufficient evidence and that the case has a political context involving the political motivation of the charge, the unreliability of witnesses provided by the Philippine government and the hindrances to Prof. Sison in cross-examining said witnesses and getting his own witnesses.

Rev. Hans Visser of the Committee DEFEND congratulated Sison for his victory in the court case. Committee DEFEND was set up by friends and sympathizers of Sison to defend him against political persecution after he was put on the terrorist list in August 2002 by the US and Dutch governments. Citing the current global economic crisis which has brought untold sufferings to millions of people around the world, Visser said that instead of a “terrorist list”, what is needed is a list of greedy capitalists who have dragged the world into the abyss of crisis.

Sivanandam Sivasegaram, a professor from Colombo, Sri Lanka, made a review of the first book Democracy, Socialism and Peace. He said that Sison’s writings are unambiguous in their aim to serve the Philippine people’s struggle for liberation, democracy and socialism. And for this he has paid a heavy price, he said. “The price includes incarceration in the Philippines under Marcos, forced exile and various forms of persecution and maltreatment by a combination of forces including the reactionary Government of the Philippines, its US imperialist master, and reactionary allies in the Government and the state apparatus of the Netherlands, including being branded as a 'terrorist', denial of political asylum, deprivation of employment and social benefits, unlawful detention; and threats of and attempts at assassination.” But he added that despite all these, Sison has been defiant in the face of adversity and has held firmly to his commitment to advance the Filipino people’s struggle and international solidarity against imperialism and reaction.

Bert de Belder, a Belgian doctor who stayed in the Philippines for 8 years, sharing his medical knowledge and helping to train “barefoot doctors” who served the needs of peasants in the countryside, made a review of the second book Democracy and Socialism against Imperialist Globalization. He said that well before the explosion of the full-blown global crisis in 2008, Sison had made well-grounded scientific analyses of the causes and implications of the ever-worsening crisis of the world capitalist system pointing out that such crisis was also laying the ground for socialism.

Rey Casambre of the Philippine Peace Center spoke on behalf of Aklat ng Bayan, the publisher of Sison’s two books. He said that Sison had predicted the current global crisis as early as eleven years ago. He said that the publication of the two volumes was heartily welcomed by progressive people in the Philippines who always wanted a compilation of Sison’s writings readily accessible.

At the end of the program, Sison thanked the Filipino people and friends and sympathizers from all over the world who had supported him in his long-running struggle against political persecution. He said that his court victory in the Dutch courts would help him in his battle at the European Court of First Instance in Luxembourg to remove him from the European terrorist list.

After the short program, he signed copies of his books and had pictures taken with the book buyers and well wishers. The entire event was covered by live video stream on the Internet at www.mogulus.com/book launch

Marathon cleans up Mt Gee, gets dumped on at HQ

Marathon Resource’s clean-up of the despoiled Mt Gee site within the Arkaroola Wilderness Sanctuary has now been formally approved by PIRSA, the government department overseeing minerals development in South Australia.

In anticipation of government approval for a resumption of exploratory drilling, major players, believed to include the shady Lebanese Black Pearl outfit, coal boss Ken Talbot, and Director John Lynley, have been buying up big. Lynely took up 375,000 shares at 40 cents each on April 24. Today, on May Day, they are worth 67.5 cents, or a neat $106,250 profit on an outlay of $150,000. Someone’s got to make these sacrifices to keep the capitalist system going!

Marathon has rather tamely declared that it will spend the next couple of months working out how best to proceed with its program, and has announced (yet another) resources upgrade with references to increased mineralization.

The reason for its subdued response to the PIRSA clean-up approval was the fact the Minerals Minister Holloway had told SA Parliament on Tuesday that there were still hurdles facing the company:

"Marathon's activities on this exploration lease brought to light some deficiencies in compliance and enforcement provisions of the Mining Act 1971 that need to be strengthened. In the coming months, I will be giving notice of proposed amendments to the Mining Act. As indicated to this council previously, the government will not contemplate any further ground disturbing activity by Marathon Resources on Exploration Licence 3258, at least until that legislation is in place."

Holloway is clearly trying to buy time: the State government faces an election next March and wants to minimise the impact of the Marathon issue in state politics.

Meanwhile, May Day started at the Marathon offices on Port Road with the discovery that “vandals” (surely as clear a case of the pot calling the kettle black as we are ever likely to find), had daubed the front door and the footpath with some sort of green slime. The capitalist press reports:

A chemical spill at Hindmarsh, suspected to be a protest against mining company Marathon Resources, brought traffic to a standstill today before playing havoc with a mass bikie run to Parliament House.

The pale-green substance, splashed across Marathon's front entrance, was found by employees as they arrived for work this morning.

The spill is believed to be a protest against Marathon's exploration of Mt Gee for uranium deposits.

Cleaning company Graffiti Kill SA was dispatched to clean up the spill, but when cleaner Richard Everson arrived at the scene, he quickly called the Environmental Protection Agency.

"It was giving off a foul smell, like ammonia," Mr Everson said.

Not wanting to risk a fine, he contacted the EPA - but, he says, they were busy.

"The woman I spoke to said it was going to be a while, and that I should call 000."

Emergency crews arrived moments later in over a dozen fire engines, police cars and ambulances, and shut down east-bound traffic on Port Road.

A hazardous materials team, sealed from head to toe in bright yellow chemical suits, entered the exclusion zone and collected samples of the substance.

They could not identify the substance, but determined it was not dangerous.

District officer Kevin Eckermann said that emergency services worked by the book.

"We've always got to assume the worst to protect our personnel and ensure the safety of the public," Mr Eckermann said.

Police later re-opened two of the three inbound lanes on Port Road while fire officers cleaned the spill.

Marathon Resources employees declined to comment, with CEO Peter Williams saying it would be "innappropriate" for him to speak.

Marathon Resources has been exploring Mt Gee, within the Arkoola Wilderness Sanctuary in the Flinders Ranges, for uranium. However, in January 2008, the Minister for Mineral Resources Development suspended the exploration licence after it was found that Marathon had dumped almost 23,000 bags of non-radioactive waste and 20 drums of samples within the sanctuary.

No group has claimed responsibility for the stunt.

And hold those congratulatory emails…it weren’t me!

Derivatives and the Overproduction of Capital

So, what is a quadrillion? It’s a thousand trillion, or one million billion. A bit later in this article, I’ll direct you to an amazing series of graphics that tries to give some sense to these terms.

For the moment, let us just note that the Bank of International Settlements has recently reported that global outstanding derivatives have reached 1.14 quadrillion dollars. Most of which doesn’t exist. It’s fictitious. And most of it is in the process of getting wiped out – written off as bad debt. To hell with it too, except that somewhere back along the food chain there are certain assets that this fictitious capital claims some connection with, and that’s why one of my friends said he lost $300,000 from his superannuation fund last year. Others report similar losses.

Let’s look at some fundamental questions of the capitalist economy.

Lenin characterized imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism, as capitalism in its decadent, moribund final phase.

It was that stage of capitalism in which finance capital, which had arisen from the merger of industrial and bank capital, had created a financial oligarchy within the bourgeoisie. These finance capitalists had assumed the leading role, the strongest and loudest voice among the component parts of the capitalist class.

The export of capital from the centres of advanced industrial production to the colonial periphery had played the major part “in creating the international network of dependence on and connections of finance capital” (All quotes from Lenin are from Section 3, “Finance Capital and the Financial Oligarchy” in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.)

The publication of Lenin’s work was a creative development of Marxism, drawing together all the threads and all the newly developing phenomena in the capitalist economies since Marx’s theoretical studies of the “laws of motion of modern capitalism” in his 3-volume Capital. In the final volume of that work, Marx had noted that the endless pursuit of the accumulation of capital had accelerated the usurious and speculative practices by bankers and financiers on the stock market. The tendency for the rate of profit to fall in conventional industries created an attraction for the owners of finance capital to speculate in financial markets. There had already been precursors to today’s sub-prime crisis and credit crash, for example the South Sea Bubble of 1720, and Marx was well aware that such speculations caused fictitious capital to be created and destroyed in great cycles of financial melt-down.

By Lenin’s time, the concentration of production in great monopolies was accompanied by a growing separation of banking and industrial capital from finance capital. Today, the term “real economy” is still used to refer to that part of the productive process associated with the manufacture and sale of goods and services, as opposed to the speculative and parasitic world of the financiers.

Lenin wrote, “It is characteristic of capitalism in general that the ownership of capital is separated from the application of capital to production, that money capital is separated from industrial or productive capital, and that the rentier who lives entirely on income obtained from money capital, is separated from the entrepreneur and from all who are directly concerned in the management of capital. Imperialism, or the domination of finance capital, is that highest stage of capitalism in which this separation reaches vast proportions. The supremacy of finance capital over all other forms of capital means the predominance of the rentier and of the financial oligarchy; it means that a small number of financially “powerful” states stand out among all the rest. The extent to which this process is going on may be judged from the statistics on emissions, i.e., the issue of all kinds of securities.”

In fact Lenin was only touching the surface of what would emerge from the creativity of the “best and brightest” of this financial oligarchy. He might never have guessed how limited and infantile his phrase “all kinds of securities” might appear from the vantage point of the 1970s and onwards.

A finance vocabulary has come into existence since the 1970s that would have sounded like gobbledegook to an earlier generation of economists. Structured investment vehicles (SIVs) collateralised debt obligations (CDOs), CDOs of CDOs, credit default swaps (CDS), hedge funds, private equity firms, funds of funds, and so it goes on.

Just what are derivatives? According to Ellen Brown, author of the book Web of Debt, “Until recently, most people had never even heard of derivatives; but in terms of money traded, these investments represent the biggest financial market in the world. Derivatives are financial instruments that have no intrinsic value but derive their value from something else. Basically, they are just bets. You can "hedge your bet" that something you own will go up by placing a side bet that it will go down. "Hedge funds" hedge bets in the derivatives market. Bets can be placed on anything, from the price of tea in China to the movements of specific markets.”

In other words, unlike investments in the “real economy”, derivatives create nothing but the demand from banks for extensions of vast of amounts of credit that constitute fictitious amounts of capital.

The scale of this fictitious capital is almost beyond our ability to see how big it really is.

The Gross Domestic Product of all the countries in the world prior to the current collapse stood at about $US60 trillion. The amount gambled in the big derivatives casino stands at $US1.1 quadrillion. Given that a quadrillion is 1000 trillion we can start to appreciate the fantastic (as in “fantasy”, “not based in reality”) scale of this speculative and parasitic overproduction of finance capital.

To really “see” the scale of this fraud we’ll use the following graphics sourced from here (they are bigger and easier to see in the original).

We start with a $US100 bill.

One hundred of these is half an inch thick and can fit in your pocket. That’s $US10,000.

One hundred packets of these could comfortably fit into a backpack. That’s $US1 million.

One hundred of these would fit onto a standard-sized pallet ($US100 million)...
...and ten pallets would represent 1000 million dollars, or $US1 billion.

A trillion is one thousand billion, so we multiply our ten pallets one thousand times…and it's getting hard to see our human figure at the bottom left hand corner of the pallets, now double-stacked to keep within the frame.

You’ll have to do the next bit yourself. A quadrillion is one thousand times the last image.

And don’t forget, our unit of measurement was a $US100 note, so we’d need one hundred lots of our quadrillion to see what a quadrillion $US1 notes look like!

And all of this money has created nothing (but non-existent values of itself) and will collapse back to nothing unless the banks and financial institutions that have underwritten this gambling idiocy are bailed out by taxpayers.

"Too big to collapse?" You bet! (It's a safer bet than derivatives trading!)

Lenin was unaware of the potential for the overproduction of finance capital (ie the creation of fictitious capital) on this scale through derivatives trading, but he was aware that in the imperialist era, it would be this sector of capital that would require the whole of society to pay for its speculations. He wrote, “Finance capital, concentrated in a few hands and exercising a virtual monopoly, exacts enormous and ever-increasing profits from the floating of companies, issue of stock, state loans, etc., strengthens the domination of the financial oligarchy and levies tribute upon the whole of society for the benefit of monopolists” (emphasis added).

At the moment a social-democratic wind has emerged in the aftermath of the super typhoon of the credit collapse prompted by the sub-prime crisis. Australia’s Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has written a lengthy piece attacking neo-liberalism and declaring that “Not for the first time in history, the international challenge for social democrats is to save capitalism from itself” (The Monthly, February 2009). US Democrats President Barak Obama states, “We need not choose between a chaotic and unforgiving capitalism and an oppressive government-run economy” (Global Viewpoint, March 2009).

Suddenly it is fashionable for servants of capitalism to talk like socialists, even if it’s for the purpose of further service to capitalism and the capitalists!

Our task is to rebuild the revolutionary movement of anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist elements under working class direction and leadership and to create a sustainable, collective, planned and regulated economy that meets the needs of the people.

Li Minqi and The Rise of China

Li Minqi’s book The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World Economy (Monthly Review Press 2008) is an important contributor to discussion about the relationship between that sector of the Chinese economy that is capitalist and the greater world capitalist economy.

In particular, Li reaffirms again and again in his book, often through extensive statistical evidence, that the capitalist system of production for profit in pursuit of an endless accumulation of capital for its own sake is simply unsustainable. In a masterful final chapter he shows how the insatiable demand by capital that it have its own value reproduced over and over again is in conflict with environmental sustainability and life-sustaining climatic parameters. There can be no disagreement with his conclusion that “humanity must work for the overthrow of the global capitalist system as soon as possible” (p. 187).

Equally convincing is his analysis of the emergence and victory of the restorationists within the Chinese Communist Party. As he did in his earlier online study, Capitalist Development and Class Struggle in China written between 1993-96, Li traces the emergence of the restorationists to an urban, intellectual elite that formed as a new bureaucratic class through their membership of the CCP not long after the foundation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. In Li’s view, this class survived the mass mobilization of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution because Mao Zedong and other Marxist-Leninists failed to grasp the need to form a new Party of the proletariat to carry forward the revolution under the conditions of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Li even disputes the existence of a proletarian dictatorship arguing that such can only exist when workers have complete control over production unmediated by government and Party cadres.

Nevertherless, he is entirely supportive of the economic gains of the so-called “Maoist” period and the new book’s second chapter Accumulation, Basic Needs and Class Struggle: the Rise of Modern China is an essential companion piece to Mobo Gao’s The Battle for China’s Past and Han Dongping’s The Unknown Cultural Revolution: Educational Reforms and Their Impact on China's Rural Development, 1966-1976 (East Asia (New York, N.Y.).)

For a book that is looking at the world system of capitalism, written by a self-described “Marxist-Leninist-Maoist” (Intro p. xiv), it is unfortunate that the Leninist analysis of imperialism as “moribund capitalism” is totally ignored in favour of Wallerstein’s “world systems” approach. If a “Leninist” (as Li claims to be, or perhaps he grew out of that when he started reading Wallerstein in 2001)) prefers a systems theory approach to analyse trends in capitalism to the approach used by Lenin then I would at least expect some comparative analysis of the two and some justification for preferring Wallerstein to Lenin. But there is none. You will look in vain for Lenin’s name in the index, and the term “imperialism”, which is mentioned in passing three times, is also excluded from the index.

I find the world systems approach to be static and mechanistic and question some of the conclusions that Li draws by using this approach. It is central to Li’s argument that the hegemony of the United States, now in decline, can not be rivalled or replaced. A continent-sized rival hegemon is required (size does matter!) and neither Brazil, Russia, China, or India (the so-called BRIC states) can mount the challenge and still maintain a sustainable world capitalist economy.

Li argues, “To the extent that the existing world-system has exhausted its ability to renew and restructure itself through the construction of a new hegemonic power, it has reached its own historical limit” (p. 23). This might be hoped-for news, but I don’t think it exhausts all the possibilities that materialist dialectics reveals: the movement of things towards their opposites; one divides into two, and so on. If imperialism is on the verge of collapse, then it is not for lack of jostling for position and rivalry between contending capitalisms.

Li even hints at a Leninist perspective on inter-imperialist rivalry when he observes that “capitalism is a world economy without a world government that can effectively represent the collective interests of global capitalists as a whole. Instead, individual capitalist states are motivated primarily to maximise their national rates of accumulation in order to prevail in global competition” (p. 144). However, he takes this analysis no further.

Similarly, for Wallerstein, it is not the models of proletarian revolutionary seizures of power that count, but rather the example of the large, powerful and militant Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) in Brazil. All power to the comrades in the MST, but the force at the core leading our cause forward must be a Marxist-Leninist Party, imho.

Wallerstein’s remedy for the current ills of capitalism were articulated recently in an article in The Nation (and reproduced here on a comrade’s very useful Political Economy Research website).

He asks “What can we do?” and replies, “First of all we must be clear what the battle is all about. It is the battle between the spirit of Davos (for a new system that is not capitalism but is nonetheless hierarchical, exploitative and polarizing) and the spirit of Porto Alegre (a new system that is relatively democratic and relatively egalitarian). No lesser evil here. It’s one or the other.”

What are the battle tasks? “The primary thing to do is to encourage the decommodification of as much as we can decommodify. The second is to experiment with all kinds of new structures that make better sense in terms of social justice and ecological sanity. And the third thing we must do is to encourage sober optimism.”

This is an eclectic and confused scenario, and I divert from directly discussing Li Minqi’s book only because of the heavy reliance he places upon Wallerstein’s approach for his own conclusions.

Li’s book is a study in the unequal exchange of values between the core advanced capitalist economies and the periphery and semi-periphery. He establishes beyond doubt that there is a massive transfer of surplus value from the proletariat in the latter two zones to the owners of capital in the core. This is a tremendously useful study (although I’d like to see some of the graphs that generally finish around 2006 with the economic information of the last couple of years added. Going south anyone?)

It can be argued that the concentration on this exchange of unequal values, however, has led Li to ignore the moribund and parasitic over-production of finance capital in its fictitious bubble form. I don’t mean to say that he should have predicted the detail and timeline of the events that have unfolded since the sub-prime crisis first occurred, but he hints at something of this in a discussion of “mobile financial capital” (p. 114) and then leaves it alone. The fact that the global derivatives market has been estimated recently at $US1.1 quadrillion (that’s 10 to the power of 15, or $1000,000,000,000,000!) and that most of this just don’t exist is testimony to the parasitic and moribund state of imperialism (and it is just one of the forms, and one of the values, of fictitious capital currently disappearing before our eyes).

Li Minqi has written a very good book (in fact one of three “good books” on China that have appeared in the last year or two, together with The Battle for China’s Past and The Unknown Cultural Revolution.)

His work should be widely read by all seeking an understanding of contemporary China and the current crisis of capitalism.

Whoever opposes Chairman Mao is an enemy of the people

The following is my translation of a poem posted on the Chinese language “China Red Travel” website on February 26, 2009. The broad masses of the Chinese people love Chairman Mao and revere his memory. With the restorationists having the upper hand, the masses who have lost the right to free education and health care, and who are suffering as a result of China’s integration into the crisis-ridden system of world capitalism, are increasingly voicing their anger at the new system.

The original poem has a strict seven character per line structure which is impossible to replicate in English, and difficult to translate from as it jettisons conventional grammar. If any Chinese speaker would like to correct my translation, I would very much appreciate it so that my learning of Chinese improves.

Whoever Opposes Chairman Mao is an Enemy of the People

1

The clowns who oppose Mao must be struck down
Their hatred of communism has not disappeared
Monsters and demons want to overturn the heavens[1]
The moneybags and landlords want to stage a comeback

2

Capitalist-roaders have emerged from within the Party
An evil wind rises to oppose Lord Mao[2]
Lord Mao conquered the world for the people
And restored the cool breeze to Heaven with his hands

3

Lord Mao held power for thirty years
The workers and peasants of the whole country beamed with joy
Everybody had a bowl of rice
And you didn’t need money to go to school or to a doctor

4

The workers and peasants managed things and were the masters of the house
From that time on, they had the right to speak
The broad masses of the people supported Chairman Mao
Capital and Self have given us the Word of Deng[3]

[1] Literally “Cow monsters and snake demons”, a traditional epithet used widely for counter-revolutionaries and capitalist-roaders during the Cultural Revolution.
[2] The Chinese original has a strict 7-character per line structure. Referring to Mao as “Lord Mao” (2 characters) rather than “Chairman Mao” or “Mao Zedong” (both three characters) allows greater flexibility within the line. The character for the feudal term “lord” or “duke” has passed into common parlance as an indication of respect or reverence for an elderly male. Mao is more often referred to as “laorenjia” (a bit like “the old man”) in everyday speech, which has the same meaning, but the more formal term of reverence is appropriate to the poetic form.
[3] Deng Xiaoping eventually succeeded Chairman Mao. Deng’s reforms, centering on a “socialist market economy” have opened the door for the reemergence of capitalist economic practices and capitalist relations of production in China.

China needs more leaders like Shi Zongyuan

(Comrade Shi Zongyuan, above, at the March 2009 National Peoples Congress)

China needs more Shi Zongyuans

Shi Zongyuan is the Party Secretary of south-west China’s Guizhou Province. Last year he personally intervened in the Weng’an Incident after the masses had attacked local government offices and set cars and buildings on fire. The Weng’an Incident was a very complicated affair. I covered it in a post here, and, as far as one can from a distance, judged Shi Zongyuan’s actions as having been very much in the mould of the true leader. I was impressed by his statement that “You cannot impose the dictatorship of the people onto the people themselves”.

I was therefore intrigued to see an interview with Shi on the Caijing website in which he explains how he uses the internet to monitor and respond to people’s complaints and difficulties.

China needs more honest Party leaders like Shi Zongyuan. The efforts of the working class and peasants to keep China on the socialist road require the Communist Party to be composed of communists.

The interview follows:

A Chat with Webaholic Shi Zongyuan
03-12 17:05 Caijing comments( 0 )
The party secretary of Guizhou has directly handled more than 600 cases based on opinions posted on the comment board on the internet.
By Editor Hu Shuli

(Caijing.com.cn) On the eighth day of the National People’s Congress, I had a chance to dine with Shi Zongyuan, secretary of the Guizhou Provincial Party Committee. How he surfs the Internet interests me most.

A former head of the General Administration of Press and Publication, Shi is a kind of “webaholic.” The first thing he does every day is surf the net. He usually turns on the computer at about half past seven. “I do odds and ends when the computer is powering up. After the program starts, I read the web.”

He spends about an hour on the Internet. His most visited sites are People.com.cn, Xinhuanet.com and Sina.com.cn. Generally, he first visits the People site. Apart from important news, he never misses reading a comment board for local authorities on the People site. He opens his ears to the Guizhou public. Some people leave messages with an IP address but no other contact information. Others, however, provide contact details that allow him to take note of messages and reply when there is any important news.

“I don’t give feedback on the comment board,” he said. “But I try to take real action in response.” This is the principle Shi follows. He said he has directly handled more than 600 cases based on opinions posted on the board. “I have done as much as I can do.”

I later visited Shi’s comment board on the People site and found 1,038 messages on his pages through March 11, 2009.

Shi told me he usually visits the news page of Sina for international news and then domestic news to try to grasp the breadth and depth of current issues.

In fact, Shi’s history of listening can be traced back to five years ago when he was head of the General Administration of Press and Publication. After that, less attention was paid after he was appointed secretary of the Guizhou Provincial Party Committee in December 2005. But in responding to a special event in Weng An County last August, Shi’s speedy management and frank manner won him a great deal of support from the general public. That event shifted my attention toward him and now, like many people, I feel he is a good boss.

The Weng An case was triggered by a girl’s death last June 21. The girl, Li Shufen, after having dinner with her boyfriend and other friends, jumped into a river and drowned. Local police conducted a postmortem examination, but the girl’s relatives refused to accept the results and claimed she had been killed. The incident aroused a great deal of attention from the local public.

More Western media lies about Tibet

An Agence France Presse photo and accompanying caption that have been widely copied (Yahoo, Wall Street Journal etc) have revealed again the way that facts are distorted to suit the prejudices of anti-Chinese forces in the West.

In the report below, a visitor to a Beijing exhibition marking the 50th anniversary of democratic reforms carried out in 1959 in Tibet is described as looking "at guns used by Chinese soldiers". (The 1959 reforms followed an uprising by senior monks and upper class Tibetans and freed the region from its feudal theocratic system. As the head of that system the Dalai Lama, who had pretended to cooperate with Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party, chose to side with the reaction and fled to India.)

Before we look again at this picture and its caption, one might well ask, "What else was on display here? What other exhibits might there be about either the system that was replaced, or the new way of life that emerged in Tibet after 1959? Why was this the only image chosen to represent the exhibition? Are the Chinese so blood-thirsty that they would really display the guns that they had used to 'suppress' the Tibetans? Are they boasting about their 'invasion' and 'dictatorship'?"

But the truth will out! The labels on the exhibition reveal a different reality to that dreamed up by Agence France Presse reporter Peter Parks, and gleefully replicated by other anti-China media.

The label closest to the front actually reads (in Chinese and English) "A Bren machine gun used by rebels in 1959".

The second label, on the bottom of the wall at the rear of the display case actually reads "An M1A1 Thompson machine gun used by rebels in 1959."

The Chinese captions additionally reveal that both weapons were manufactured in England, hinting at connections between the Tibetan reactionary ruling class and the imperialists.

We have seen this sort of deliberate falsehood before: Nepalese police of the old regime attacking Tibetan exiles in Kathmandu being passed off as Chinese police "attacking innocent Tibetan civilians in Lhasa" during last March's shameful campaign against the international passage of the Olympic torch.

Caught out once again, the capitalist press must always be regarded with suspicion as a source of misinformation about workers' struggles, liberation movements...progressive politics of any kind.

"Behind the scenes" with Marathon

Senior South Australian Liberal Party figurehead, Federal Senator Nick Minchin, has said that “revelations about the rather intriguing and complex background to Black Pearl Global Opportunity Fund, now a substantial shareholder of Marathon Resources…should be of considerable interest to all South Australians, given Marathon’s thoroughly undesirable proposal to open a uranium mine in the Arkaroola Wilderness Sanctuary.”

In a letter published in the current edition of Adelaide newspaper The Independent Weekly, Minchin continues, “If Marathon is to become the plaything of international hedge fund operators operating out of the Cayman Islands, then I for one am even more convinced that the Rann Government should not allow Marathon to renew its controversial test-drilling program at Arkaroola, and should announce that it will never allow a uranium mine to be established in a part of SA that is simply too precious to mine.”

Minchin’s long-standing personal opposition to the Marathon venture is very welcome, although probably not by his old Senatorial sparring partner, Labor’s (former) Senator Chris Schacht.

Schacht has just added to his shareholding in the company by taking up some of his entitlements as a Director under a rights issue. He’s increased his holdings from 45,000 to 63,000 shares whilst CEO Peter Williams has increased his from 684,000 to 817,600.

These acquisitions occurred on December 10, 2008. However, the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) was only notified on March 3, 2009 despite a rule that requires notification within 5 business days.

When the ASX sent Marathon a “please explain”, the best Marathon could do was to plead “inadvertent administrative error and the fact that the holiday period followed the issue and allotment date”.

Pretty bloody sloppy, and the ASX must be getting sick and tired of sending this mob “please explains”.

The real “please explain”, however, should be why Williams and Schacht are buying further into a company that does not yet have its exploration program reinstated and whilst State Parliament is yet to vote on Greens Senator Mark Parnell’s private members Bill to ban mining at Arkaroola.

And why, for that matter, Ken Talbot, former CEO of Macarthur Mining, whom the kiddies in the chatroom are convinced is “a very smart man” has gone on a buying spree starting January 20, 2009 and increased family company Talbot Group Holding’s stake from 13.7 million shares or 18.1%, to 14.5 million shares or 19.1% of Marathon Resources with on-market purchases. The shares were acquired at between 34 cents to 40 cents per share.

One of my chatroom readers (g’day “lazyguns”) believes that Talbot is “patiently waiting for the smaller holders to sell down in to them due to the DOW panic etc. IMO they seem to be putting a lid on the price at 40c to soak up as many shares as they can in the mid 30s range….he seems to be a man who knows what is going on behind the scene.”

Talbot and Chinese investment giant CITIC formerly had a Memorandum of Understanding to act as associates in Marathon (as they have in several other ventures), but dissolved that partnership on January 15.

Did CITIC not want to waste more of its money on Marathon?

Did the MOU have to go to free Talbot’s hand?

Is someone getting assurances that the State Government will accept Marathon’s “change of heart”, block Parnell’s Bill and restore the exploration licence “under the close supervision and monitoring of PIRSA”? (PIRSA is the SA government’s primary industries department.)

Who else knows “what is going on behind the scenes”?

Songs champion the cause of China's rural poor

(Above: migrant workers appeal for help - their slogans, written on sheets of newspaper read Wo yao hui jia or I want to go home.)

The rise and rise of China has depended to a large extent on a vast reservoir of cheap human labour: the peasantry.

Men and women, girls and boys from Anhui, Hebei, Henan and other rural provinces have come to the big coastal cities in droves since the mid-eighties. Like a blind flood, rural workers who had only known their local village became restless nomads following rumours of work on building sites, in manufacturing and in domestic service.

The market in human labour power was the condition for capital accumulation on a vast scale.

All of the ugly prejudices against the poor that Mao had tried so hard to eradicate, particularly during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, resurfaced as senior Party leaders fell in behind Deng Xiaoping and his exhortation, “It is glorious to get rich!”

Deng gave a green light to the restoration of capitalist practices with another slogan: “It doesn’t matter whether the cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice”.

The colour of the cat, if you’ll excuse a mixed metaphor, was always a red herring: the real question was “for whom?”. For the use of the workers and the peasants, or for the private expropriation by, and enrichment of, an emerging capitalist class…that is the question.

The treatment of the mangliu, the migrant workers, has been scandalous.

As of 2006, the total amount of unpaid wages owed to migrant workers in mainland China amounted to 10 billion yuan. Unpaid wages in the construction industry amounted to 72.2% of the total.

New land laws have removed the one safety net that existed for most of these migrant labourers – the farms that they had walked away from in search of cash payments in the city.

In order to satisfy the demand for land for manufacturing expansion, a Chinese-style of enclosures has been visited on some villages with compensation rarely meeting the needs of farmers for relocation and rebuilding of homes.

A new form of land leasing, or renting, is now leading many peasants to sign away their rights to land so that returning migrant workers, laid off from the big factories and job sites, have no farmland to fall back on for sustenance farming.

It is estimated that 20 million rural workers have been dismissed from factories that have been faced with a crisis of overproduction following the disappearance of finance capital from world markets and the evaporation of credit that has substituted for the immediate realisation of surplus value through the sale of commodities.

Two songs have recently commented on the plight of the migrant labourers. One can be seen in a video clip here, whilst the second can be seen by following the link further down the same page (you can ignore the instructions to install a language pack)

The lyrics of the first read:

Cuihua (his wife’s name), mom and dad, I won’t go back home for the Spring Festival,

Without wages in my pocket, I cannot face you all

Son and daughter, don’t ask me where the red envelopes are

I cry to the heaven and to the earth but where can I complain?
Why does the boss himself have a luxurious life but no money to pay the wages?

He has no reason to be so proud even when he drives a BMW or Mercedes because that’s what he owes us.

Repay my wages, Repay my wages

We are thousands of miles from home

We work so hard in the cities

We are from Shaanxi, Shandong, Sichuan, Hubei and Anhui

We build the high-rise buildings but we are ironically looked down on

We are not paid and there is nothing we can do about it.

I ask myself whether there is any justice and I calm myself down

I persuade myself that I am the creditor and that’s no doubt

You owe me, You owe me…

The lyrics of the second follow:

I had a hard life in the mountain area

I needed to wait for my hen to lay eggs in exchange for cigarettes

One day I left the mountain with my uncle

I worked very hard in the construction site and earned six thousand yuan within a year

I was waiting for the pay and planned to spend the Spring Festival with my family

However, the boss said he was out of money and let me wait

After the third snow, the boss still didn’t pay me

He said he had no money to pay but he spent several thousand yuan to play Mahjong

He said he had no money to pay but he spent ten thousand yuan to get his mistress a new cell phone

People in the labor department were very warmhearted and they kept calling the boss until he powered off the cell phone

The boss said he was very angry because we sued him and he even threatened us

The Labor Department let me report it to the court

The court said it would process the case for us after New Year

We waited till then and the court did process the case

But the boss had run away with our wages

He said he had no money to pay but he spent several thousand yuan to play Mahjong

He said he had no money to pay but he spent ten thousand yuan to get his second mistress a necklace

The visuals associated with both sets of lyrics depict the cruel life and times of the migrant labourers.

At the end of the second song, the singer wields a large sword and leaves no doubt about what he would do with the laoban, or boss, should he ever catch him.

Two recent Beijing Review articles on this topic are also worth reading:

http://english.beijingreview.com.cn/quotes/txt/2009-02/06/content_177219_2.htm

http://english.beijingreview.com.cn/quotes/txt/2009-01/22/content_175201.htm

Native title: divide and rule tactics to split traditional custodians

Reposted with acknowledgement from the Adelaide Independent Weekly:
http://www.independentweekly.com.au/news/local/news/general/indigenousmining-dialogue-group-not-a-silver-bullet-acf/1439732.aspx?storypage=0



Indigenous-mining dialogue group not a silver bullet: ACF
LARINE STATHAM
20/02/2009 2:10:00 PM

A group set up to bridge the gap between Aboriginal Australians and uranium mining companies has been criticised as being a tool to rob native title holders of their land.

Former national ALP president and Aboriginal leader Warren Mundine has also come under scrutiny following his decision to become a board member of the Australian Uranium Association - the industry body responsible for establishing the dialogue group that Mr Mundine is now part of.

Jillian Marsh, an Adnyamathanha custodian, is one such critic who knows first hand how desperately Aboriginal people need an independent body they can turn to for impartial advice and information.

But she does not believe the dialogue group, co-convened by ten uranium industry experts and indigenous community leaders, is the answer.

"Isn't it a conflict of interest what (Mr Mundine) is doing?"

"There is just too many people working across too many boards and that is what concerns me," she said.

"And they are not closely enough connected with the communities who are dealing with this stuff on the ground."

The Beverley Uranium Mine site, based 520km north of Adelaide, rests at the northern end of the Flinders Ranges on the traditional lands of Ms Marsh and her ancestors.

"I went all around that country with my parents ... and now to see what is happening under native title and to see our lands just being ripped out in front of us," she said.

"Not having the right to say no to this, not being able to stop this destruction from going on, it makes me feel really sick.

"The way that money is being used to bribe Aboriginal people is really unethical," she said.

"We never talk about how these decisions split families up and divide communities.

"The native title process is failing them."

Holding its first dialogue group meeting this week, AUA executive director Michael Angwin said it was "too early" to speculate what deals might done with native title holders to secure future mining sites.

"We regard this group as a key stakeholder group ... to whom we can go to for advice on the bigger issues affecting our industry," he said.

Australian Conservation Foundation nuclear-free campaigner Dave Sweeney said indigenous communities had "been a major impediment for the uranium industry for a very long time".

"This is an absolutely cynical attempt on the part of the industry to reposition itself as an industry that listens, cares and is concerned," he said.

Mr Sweeney conceded some ACF members held biased viewpoints, but said "by the same coin" he was also concerned the information passed on to Aboriginal communities by the dialogue group might not be entirely balanced.

"No trader calls out 'bad fish'," he said.

"This information will be slanted.

"It is a group that is comprised of and paid for by Australian explorers and producers of uranium.

"It is not some balanced, measured, disinterested, impartial body, it is an industry advocacy group that is trying to facilitate the expansion of the uranium industry in Australia."

Mr Angwin, a former Rio Tinto executive, was open about the fact that discussions with indigenous community leaders would likely benefit the industry, but denied the group was borne out of any frustrations in gaining access to future mine sites or locations suitable for low-level nuclear waste.

"The impetus for this group came from a series of discussions which identified a series of common ideas," he said.

"If people have the right information... they'll come to good decisions and that's what we really want here - for people to make informed decisions based on evidence and not fear.

"If Aboriginal communities decide they don't want to be engaged with uranium, then so be it."
However, Mr Sweeney said Aboriginal people had no right of veto under the current native title system and that development applications were "profoundly weighted in favour of business".

"A lack of consent is not sufficient to stop development proceeding," he said.
"They act as if Aboriginal people have the right to say no and that this is an even playing field, but that is totally misleading."

As the chief executive of Native Title Services Corp, Mr Mundine said it was likely that most future mine developments would be established on indigenous land.

"I'm (part of the dialogue group) for the indigenous people, to put their viewpoints forward," he said.

Mr Sweeney said he questioned whether or not Mr Mundine would represent solely the interests of Aboriginal Australians during discussions, given his "unashamed support for the promotion of the industry" in the past.

"If you sit on the board, then you have nailed your colours to the mast," he said.

"It's no surprise, as he has for a long time pushed this barrow."

Mr Mundine said the ALP during its 2007 national conference scrapped its policy opposing the establishment of new uranium mines.

"And so this is an opportunity for development of the industry here for larger mining activity to happen," he said.

"We need to ensure that indigenous people receive the benefits that they so rightly deserve in the social and economic areas."

Mr Sweeney said he did not believe education, employment and infrastructure should be linked to mining operation approvals.

"They are citizenship entitlements," he told AAP.

"What does that say to those Aboriginal people who do not have access to the potential of a uranium mine?

"Do you only get out of the poverty trap if you've got a uranium mine on your country?"

"For the industry to say `we are the silver bullet, we will solve (Aboriginal dislocation)'; it flies in the face of reality and the lived Aboriginal experience," Mr Sweeney said.

"It is a cynical PR exercise."

The federal government last year granted the approval of a six-fold expansion of the Beverley Uranium Mine.

It is understood native title processes between the Beverley Uranium Mine operator, Heathgate Resources and the Adnyamathanha elders are ongoing.

A pair of parasites make a move on Marathon

The sordid little story of Marathon Resources just gets dirtier.

The latest development is the registration at the Australian Securities Exchange of Black Pearl Global Opportunity Fund as a substantial shareholder.

Although not yet listed on the Marathon Resources website as one of its Top Twenty Shareholders, BPGOF has purchased sufficient shares between December 8 last year and February 11 this year to move into fifth place behind ANZ Nominees Ltd with close to 4.8 million shares and a voting power of 6.3%.

So who is BPGOF?

It is a company incorporated in the tax haven of the Cayman Islands.

Its directors are Abbas Jafarian and Reza Irani-Kermani.

And that’s about all the website of its parent company, Black Pearl Capital (of which Jafarian is CEO) reveals. It’s worth going there just to get the flavour of this secretive operation (http://blackpearlcap.com/ ).

Further investigation reveals that both Jafarian and Irani-Kermani worked together at Brokerbox Limited, based at Chicago and for the Fixi Group based in London.

Jafarian had also worked as an investment executive at Morgan Stanley where he was responsible for the Middle Eastern region managing over $1.3 billion in assets. He has also worked for British Chartis Research’s mergers and acquisitions advisory service.

Drawing on that experience, Black Pearl Capital has a sister company to BPGOF in Onyx MENA Fund, also registered in the Cayman Islands. Onyx is a hedge fund with a target capital of $US250 million focusing primarily on the Middle East and North African (MENA) markets.

Jafarian has a number of other private equity outfits of which he is sole director, such as Verity Real Estate and Eurozone Equity Company, both of which are registered in another tax haven, Luxembourg.

Irani-Kermani has based his career on foreign exchange and investment management.

However, he came under the spotlight in 1999 through his association with Kia Joorabchian with whom he acted as a front for Russian gangster capitalist Boris Berezovsky when the latter took control of the influential Kommersant Publishing which runs the most influential newspaper in Moscow.

Irani-Kermani popped up again in dodgy circumstances when he was associated with Joorabchian’s purchase of the Brazilian soccer team Corinthians. It has been alleged that the men were involved in money laundering through player payments, marketing and so on. In less than a year, they had spent $US60 million through their football investments.

Whilst their share acquisitions in Marathon are perfectly legal (they have retained Adelaide-based law firm Johnson Winter & Slattery), it remains something of a mystery as to how Marathon Resources, a minor minerals explorer at the best of times, and one whose future is clouded by ongoing controversy associated with its despoliation of the pristine Arkaroola Wilderness Sanctuary, has come to their attention.

Is it just insignificant enough on the world scale to be set up for more money laundering?

With their expertise in hedge funds, are they going to seize an appropriate time to short it and race away with their pockets full (although it can’t be shorted too much at only 36 cents a share at the moment!)

With their private equity expertise, are they going to take it over completely, take it private and get it off the stock exchange so they can restructure and asset strip? It might need to have a structure first, to be restructured, and have assets for them to be stripped! It has neither at the moment.

So, the latest episode in our local little soap opera fails to clean the air.

Once again, the absence of an Independent Commission Against Corruption, consistently blocked by Premier Rann and his corrupt capitalist Labor administration, is very much felt.

Stay tuned folks, and let’s see what the Iranian pair of finance capitalists parasites can make out of the sad little Marathon mess.

Yingiya Guyula's statement on the Northern Territory Intervention.

(This statement has been posted at Sydney Indymedia, but it is important that the voice of Aboriginal Territorians be heard in relation to the Intervention and to the appeal against the suspension of the Racial Discrimiantion Act in the Northern Territory that is now going to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.)

STATEMENT: My name is Yingiya Guyula from Liya-dhalinymirr clan of the Djambarrpuy?u People. I am a Yolngu Studies lecturer at University in Darwin

The intervention has only created problems in East Arnhemland communities as well remote homeland centres. The Intervention has made our people more frustrated and confused, the white man’s way of thinking is forced on us, and forcing us to abandon our culture. Government Ministers have flown into Arnhemland communities just for few hours on the ground to gather a little bit of information, then they fly back into cities thinking they know how to fix the problems in the communities, thinking they know what’s best for us. Governments only looked at the fringe camps and towns and wet areas where people drink alcohol in places such as Nhulunbuy, Katharine, Tenant creek, Jabiru Alice Spring and Darwin.

White people see Aboriginal people in these places and think that these people that don’t care about life, who don’t care about living. But who are they to judge them. They class all Aborigines the same, but they are wrong. These white people and those bureaucrats do not go out to the East Arnhemland communities, where my people live, where there has never been alcohol, and these is no child abuse. There are Aboriginal people living on remote communities of Arnhemland, in homeland centres, away from towns, away from the binge drinking areas, poker machine and gambling venues. These are people that are able to manage their funds and work, or want work, educate, discipline, and practice ceremonies.

Quarantining of centrelink payments should be optional and not compulsory. Quarantining might be ok for people living in town camps and cities, where alcohol and gambling is a problem, but it doesn’t work for my people living on remote Arnhemland homelands where there is no gambling, no alcohol and no child abuse. We are asking simply for understanding that in life, their needs to be an understanding between two cultures. There needs to be respect between cultures. Mapuru homeland has a Coop store which won a National award for selling healthy food. Centrelink won’t approve it to accept quarantined money. This means an aircraft charter fight from the mainland homeland at Mapuru to the closest shop on Elcho Island costs 560 dollars return. This means it’s costing $560 return flight just to buy 150 dollars worth of food, where’s the sense in that?

Arnhemland is like the European Union, made up of many different nations, each clan-nation with their own language, each with it own national estate. Bringing everybody in from the homeland centres into the major settlements is not the right thing to do because people do not feel secure or happy living in another mans land. Children are forced to go to school, but really they do not feel safe and unsecure on other peoples’ land. There are about 40 children who willingly run to school every day at Mapuru homeland because it’s their home and they feel secure. Yet the N.T. Government wants to close down the homeland schools and bring everyone in to the major communities. They think it’s not worth spending money on homeland schools who have 40 or more children freely, and with their own will attending school, but is providing internet services, facilities and technology to white schools with attendances as low as 5. The Education department provides computers and internet and distance learning for hundreds of cattle station and small schools, across the Northern Territory, but homeland schools are neglected.

Further more I would like say that these homelands are our homes. There is no violence in the remote homeland communities, no child abuse happens, no alcohol, no pornography, because out there in the bush is where the cultural ceremonial grounds are, and from it is where strong discipline comes through spirits of our fathers talking through the land.

Both the Commonwealth and the Northern Territory Governments hasn’t given equal opportunity to us the First Australians to be able to exercise our rights. Through the intervention white man police stations have been put in the major communities for dealing mostly with cultural conflict issues (problems that can only be solved through traditional cultural justice), but instead the white policeman force white man law onto us, disrespecting our black fella law. They think they’ve done the right thing. But often they’re only making it much worst by locking up senior leaders, the very ones who are wise and keeping our Indigenous Law strong.

This time we are taking the case further where it can be heard loud and clear by people whose ears, brains, feelings have a heart for Indigenous Australians. It is now being taken further where there is an ear that will listen. We are taking it further, to the United Nations and will talk about the intervention, about how income management in the Northern Territory has had a devastating and debilitating impact on remote communities in Arnhemland.

Finally, we need you to support us. We need you to tell governments that we want the same opportunities as white people, to live and enjoy our own cultural life, but they must stop trying to make us like whiteman, we have our own cultural identity. Let us be who we are, and together we will have hope for the future.

Thank you

Victorian bushfire commentary

Organised and united, ordinary people are the strongest force on Earth

(The following commentary on the horrific Victorian bushfires was posted on the website of the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist) on February 11).

The tremendous community response to the devastation of the ferocious bushfires in Victoria and New South Wales, and the floods in Northern Queensland, have once again demonstrated that ordinary people will pull together to endure every hardship and sacrifice to defend their communities in the face of disasters. Unity and practical organisation give ordinary people the confidence and power to do extraordinary things.

In the bushfires that have raged across the state of Victoria during days of record high temperatures over 40o C, 181 deaths have so far been confirmed, while hundreds more have suffered burns and other injuries.

The townships of Kinglake, Marysville, Narbethong, Flowerdale, Wandong and Callignee have been virtually wiped out and more than a thousand houses and farm buildings lost. 450,000 hectares of native forest, plantations, scrub and grasslands have been burned out, along with power transmission lines, schools,telephone exchanges, communication towers, shops, community centres and other vital infrastructure. Farm animals, livestock and native wildlife have perished. It is the biggest natural disaster ever to hit the Australian people.

Courage and decency

Even though the state emergency services were alert and prepared for a busy “bushfire season”, the 4,000 fire-fighters and emergency workers were initially overwhelmed by the intensity, speed and extent of many fires which sent 15 metre flames racing across the countryside, fanned by howling winds. The fire-crews, some working 18 hour shifts, showed great discipline, humanity and courage in stalling the fire-fronts long enough for many people to escape to relative safety. Even though many lives were lost, many thousands more have been saved by the heroic teams battling to contain the infernos.

Unlike many other countries, Australia relies on a system of trained, volunteer fire-fighters, organised around a core of professional officers, with trucks and equipment in the country towns. Many volunteers are ordinary workers who put themselves at great risk out of their sense of care for their communities, families and friends.

Along with helicopter crews, police and other emergency services, they have stayed on the line for days on end. Some had even lost their own houses, or had no idea if their own families were safe, but they kept at it.

Behind this human wall of protection, ordinary people in the townships, the city and communities have quickly organised support networks, feeding and sheltering the homeless, caring for the injured, collecting clothing, looking after children and lost pets. They have assisted search teams and offered their houses, vehicles and energies to the arriving medical teams and welfare agencies. Finally, belatedly perhaps, the army has been called in, bringing heavy equipment to clear the roads and erecting tents for the homeless.

The Communications, Electrical and Plumbing Union (CEPU) decided to call off planned state-wide industrial action against the Telstra monopoly, in order to allow hundreds of their workers to carry out urgent repair work on damaged and unsafe power lines and transmission towers in the fire zones.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Victorian Premier John Brumby offered words of support for the victims and quickly implemented assistance funds for the homeless and injured. But, in calling for the banks and insurance companies to be compassionate, Kevin Rudd was probably being over-optimistic.

Away from the disaster areas, hundreds of thousands of ordinary people of Australia have responded generously to the tragedy, raising millions of dollars in donations, lining up to donate blood for burns victims, donating food, clothing, toys and all sorts of services freely. The response to the call for donations was so overwhelming that many donations of food and clothing had to be turned away.

In these tragic events, there is much sadness, but also something to celebrate. We get some sense of the great power of humanity when ordinary people band together and work collectively and selflessly together with a clear objective in mind, supporting each other in a common cause. The petty things that divide people become trivial and irrelevant and the common decency that unites people comes to the fore.

Climate warming

There will be a Royal Commission to review all aspects of these fearful fires; the warning system, weather forecasting, communications, the management of resources and the decisions taken at the time.

Already, some are pointing to climate warming as a key factor. Australians have always lived with bushfires, but these fires have occurred in conditions of record high temperatures, record low humidity, months of virtually no rainfall, and gale force winds – the most extreme conditions imaginable.

Scientists are saying that climate warming will bring these conditions to Australia more frequently, as average temperatures rise and average rainfall decreases.

As climate warming triggers more extreme weather conditions around the world, such as the recent severe freeze in Britain, people everywhere will become increasingly insistent on better precautions against natural disasters, fires and floods.

They will demand an end to preventable man-made disasters such as greenhouse gas emissions, logging of native forests, soil degradation and erosion, the death of river systems and water catchments and the plundering of fish stocks. They want to live in harmony with nature, not at war.

As the bushfire tragedy demonstrates, when the power of ordinary people is mobilised and organised, it can overcome all difficulties and setbacks. When such power becomes a conscious political force, a new and better world can be built.

Marathon jump the gun at Arkaroola

Marathon Resources appears to have learned nothing from the state government's indefinite suspension of its exploration license at Mt Gee in the Arkaroola Wildlife Sanctuary.

True, in the immediate aftermath it did change the composition of its Board and produce a report, Learning from Waste in the Wilderness, in which it proclaimed a change of heart and a commitment to a new set of environmental and social standards.

These included an acknowledgement that the company had "failed to build sufficient trust with Mr and Ms Sprigg, the owner-operators of the Wilderness Sanctuary...Marathon will seek to build a better relationship with Mr and Ms Sprigg..."

So much for words.

The company announced at the end of January that its clean-up of the sites at which it had illegally dumped waste had been completed. However, the state's primary industries department PIRSA has yet to inspect the site and approve of the clean-up.

Yet Marathon has jumped the gun and served a notice of entry and notice of equipment on the Spriggs. It continues to disrespect them because of their public stand against mining within the Sanctuary. The Spriggs presumably immediately contacted state Greens MP Mark Parnell, who raised the matter in the Legislative Council of the SA Parliament on Thursday Feb 5.

This led to an exchange with Paul Holloway, the Minister responsible for mining, which clearly showed that even he was somewhat peeved with Marathon's "bull at the gate" approach.

The exchange follows:

MARATHON RESOURCES

The Hon. M. PARNELL (14:47): I seek leave to make a brief explanation before asking the Minister for Mineral Resources Development a question about Marathon Resources.

Leave granted.

The Hon. M. PARNELL: In September last year, in response to questions about the clean-up and disposal of radioactive and other waste illegally dumped in the Arkaroola Wilderness Sanctuary, the minister stated that Marathon Resources' exploration licence continued only because the company 'needs some authority in order to undertake the activities about which we have been talking, that is, the removal of the waste'. When questioned further, the minister said, 'As to the future of the exploration licence, that is something that we will have to await until the clean-up is finished.'

Last week, Marathon Resources released a statement to the Stock Exchange stating that its clean-up was completed on 18 December last year and that all rehabilitation and revegetation works relating to the formal rectification plan were completed early last month, and a report by the independent consultant verifying the work was submitted to PIRSA on 23 January. This morning, the owners of the wilderness sanctuary, Marg and Doug Sprigg, were served by Marathon Resources with a new notice of entry and notice of equipment. Now that the clean-up is complete, it seems that Marathon is preparing to resume its exploration activities once the minimum 21-day notice period expires. My questions of the minister are:

1.Now that the clean-up is complete and the company has served a new notice of entry, when will he make a decision on whether Marathon Resources will be allowed to resume its exploration activities and, in particular, its drilling activities?

2.Has Marathon Resources made a formal reapplication to resume its drilling activities, and has it submitted a new declaration of environmental factors?

3.Considering the high level of public interest in this issue, is there any scope for public comment on whether the company can resume its exploration activities?

The Hon. P. HOLLOWAY (Minister for Mineral Resources Development, Minister for Urban Development and Planning, Minister for Small Business) (14:49): As the honourable member said in his questions, a report was handed to the department on 23 January. The department has not yet signed off on that issue so, as far as the government is concerned, the clean-up of the Mount Gee region and exploration in the Arkaroola area by Marathon is not yet complete, and it will not be complete at least and until the department formally signs off on the work that is being done. I have certainly had no formal application from Marathon, and, certainly, I would not even contemplate one until the process is completed. In any case, I can say to the honourable member that he would be aware that some issues arose in relation to the fluoride (sic!) matter that pointed to some deficiencies within the Mining Act in terms of how these matters might be dealt with.

I will be bringing some amendments into this parliament. Certainly, I would not be contemplating any further activity by Marathon at least and until that legislation was in place, and that might well be some time away. It is certainly news to me that Marathon has served a new notice of entry. As I said, I have no intention whatsoever of approving that, or even considering any approach from it until the matters have been finalised to the satisfaction of the department. I understand that work is completed. I am not questioning that the work may not have been done satisfactorily, but that needs to be certified by the relevant authorities.
In any case, I think that, at the very least, the deficiencies of the Mining Act that were brought to light by Marathon's activities need to be corrected. Then, I think, the government would have to give consideration to the impact of any further exploration and, in particular, any public benefit that would come out of that given the history of this matter. I am not even going to consider that until at least those two preconditions are met, and I expect it would be some time at least before the legislation would be considered by this parliament.

The Hon. M. PARNELL (14:52): As a supplementary question, given the minister's response about his lack of knowledge of the notice of entry having been given, will the minister bring back to the council some advice on the validity of those notices and, in particular, the validity of the 21 day statutory periods under those notices, as well as any advice on whether, if invalid, those notices would have to be reissued at some future date?

The Hon. P. HOLLOWAY (Minister for Mineral Resources Development, Minister for Urban Development and Planning, Minister for Small Business) (14:52): I think that is a reasonable point. I will certainly have that looked at as a matter of urgency.

.............................

The "flouride" reference is actually to the rare mineral fluorite, a large crystalline deposit of which was stolen from the Mt Gee area. Marathon admits responsibility for damage done to the deposit by an employee, but denies the involvement of the employee in the theft.

The issue was extensively covered by photographer Bill Doyle on his blog unknownsa last November.

The issue was also featured prominently in Murdoch's daily paper the Advertiser on January 24 under the heading Missing minerals anger. It noted that the crystal was believed to have been sold on the internet. However, there has been no police action subsequent to the theft, and rather incredibly, PIRSA has stated that there are "no penalties under several State Government acts relating to mining and the protection of rare minerals.

Whilst there is obvious potential for the Marathon-Arkaroola issue to serve as a distraction from the grand crimes being committed by BHP-$Billion at Olympic Dam, we must still fight to save Arkaroola from the despoilers at Marathon and to continue to honour the vision of Reg Sprigg and the rights of the Adnyamathanha traditional owners.