From logo to logistics: curriculum control coming our way?

South Australian principals reading through the 2011 NAPLAN (national literacy and numeracy tests) Online Student Participation Website User Manual may or may not have noticed the Pearson logo sharing equal billing with that of DECS (SA Education Department).

However, they must surely have noticed that the website, on which they had to record their Statement of Compliance confirming that they had read and understood the NAPLAN Handbook for Principals, and to confirm or update student details, was not a DECS or DEEWR website, but the website of Pearson Online, and that it is a private multinational corporation.

Further, readers of that enlightening publication, Murdoch's Advertiser, may have seen the little column on May 12 that revealed that since the 2009 NAPLAN tests, Pearson Research and Assessment has had the contract to print, package, distribute and collect NAPLAN tests and results.

Storm in a teacup, or crony capitalism?

Get onto Pearson’s pearsonplaces website, and we find that simultaneously with the development of the new Australian Curriculum, Pearson’s “national author and review teams” have already produced texts and support materials for English, Science, Maths and History.

In fact the pearsonplaces website makes the Australian Curriculum look like a commodity marketed and distributed by the giant multinational.

So, a major corporation has used its smarts to get in quick and corner the market on texts for a new national curriculum. It’s also making big bucks out of NAPLAN. What’s the worry?

Time to revisit the educational cesspit of the United States.

The US is introducing a type of national curriculum for the first time. It is called Common Core Standards.

The Gates Foundation and the Pearson Foundation have teamed up to write a K-12 curriculum that will promote online learning and instructional video gaming.

Diane Ravitch, well-known educationalist and critic of standardized tests and “school choice”, was outraged.

“It is way past time to get mad,” she wrote. “When did we vote to hand over American education to them? Why would we outsource the nation’s curriculum to a for-profit publishing and test-making corporation based in London? Does Bill Gates get to write the national curriculum because he’s the richest man in America?”

The development of national curriculums means that publishers previously working within smaller state level markets now have national markets where a reduced range of products can be “taken to scale” (produced more cheaply with increased volume).

Pearson is moving quickly to capture not just the paper text book market, but the eText and iPad markets as well. They have teamed with Apple and the State of Virginia to run the first-ever complete social studies curriculum for the iPad, which will include games and self-test apps. If it is successful in Virginia, it will go national.

The transferability within English-speaking nations of certain curriculum and support materials (a shortcut to profits) is evidenced in pearsonplaces’ promotion of the Fountas and Pinnell Benchmark Assessment Systems “world-class literacy learning and assessment tools”. These were developed in the US and have been developed and used for over twenty years. Pearson is currently marketing them to Australian primary schools. The authors make no attempt to hide their “one size fits all” philosophy, stating that “When everyone in the school uses the same assessment, contnua and language as they move from observation to instruction, a common conversation occurs.”

If the big corporate octopus becomes any more involved with development of Australian curriculum materials and NAPLAN tests, will there ever be any place for the innovative and creative teacher who develops resources to suit the learning needs of diverse groups of students? Or will teachers simply become instructors of corporate classroom materials?

It is worth considering the approach adopted in Finland where the Minister for Education Henna Virkkunen praises the professionalism of educators:

“Teachers in Finland can choose their own teaching methods and materials. They are experts of their own work, and they test their own pupils. I think this is also one of the reasons why teaching is such an attractive profession in Finland because teachers are working like academic experts with their own pupils in schools.”

Amen to that!

Humphrey McQueen's Workers' Memorial Speech

Historian and author Humphrey McQueen (above) was a guest at the South Australian May Day celebrations last weekend.

Hundreds gathered under wet conditions on Saturday morning for the May Day march. They included CFMEU member Ark Tribe who last year won his battle against the reactionary Australian Building and Construction Commission. Ark (third left, above) proudly carried the Eureka flag during the march.

Good numbers of young people also attended.

Also at the front of the march were the red flag of the international working class, the flag of the Aboriginal Australians (black at the top for the people, red underneath for the land, and both under the yellow sun), and the flag of the Eureka rebellion of 1854 which today symbolizes working class leadership of the people’s struggles for democracy and in defence of their rights and liberties.

On Sunday, McQueen spoke at the Workers’ Memorial at Port Adelaide (below), and later that night at the May Day Dinner (second, below) at which Ark Tribe was acknowledged as a people’s hero to a standing ovation.

The text of McQueen’s speech at the Workers’ Memorial commemoration is reproduced below:

Port Adelaide Workers Memorial

(Speech by Humphrey McQueen, May Day, 2011)

One does good, neither from fear of punishment nor promise of reward, but because good is good to do. These were the sentiments of the nineteenth-century American Rationalist, Colonel Robert Ingersoll, whose writings would have been popular with some of the people whose names went onto the Workers’ memorial. We can be certain that all of them had lived according to that point of view. None of them behaved as they did with any thought that they might be honoured in any way other than through the respect of their friends, neighbours and workmates.

That is why it is an honour to be at the Port as your guest on May Day to reflect on their lives and the importance of this monument.

We gather in the shadow of Anzac Day and of International Workers’ Memorial Day. This event brings the two commemorations together. Looking back to the establishment of this memorial between 1917 and 1921 we see a period of intense propaganda in support of King and Empire.

It is often forgotten that war is work for capital. Slogging in the trenches for the capitalist state is as much a form of wage-slavery as is laboring on sites for a particular capitalist. Eight of the forty-one original names were of local workers who had been killed in the war. In one sense then, this workers’ memorial is also a war memorial. But I suggest that all the war memorials are also memorials to the working people whose lives and limbs were lost in the service of capital. Those monuments are ours too. We must reclaim them from the warmongers.

During the 1971 Moratorium March in Newcastle, the thousands of workers paused at the small war memorial outside the Post Office in Hunter Street. An elderly miner spoke: ‘When I was a lad I was silly enough to volunteer to fight for the British Imperialists. I’m proud to say that my son fought in the anti-fascist war. We’re both here today to make sure that my grandson is not conscripted for the imperialist war in Vietnam’. As anti-imperialists, part of our task is to make the experiences of three generations part of every Anzac Day.

Adding the statue of ‘Justice’ with her scales of equality in 1921 was another call to arms. Those scales can never be balanced in a class society. We have a horrible reminder of the law as a regime of injustice in the 2004 murder of Daniel Madeley. I say ‘murder’ even though Marx explained why ‘killing is not murder when done for profit’. Similarly, the escape of the directors of Hardie’s on yet another of those legal technicalities is proof that capital gets away with mass murder. As one of the asbestos widows put it: ‘There is no appeal from the grave’.

The bias built into bourgeois law is written all over the persecution of Ark Tribe by the Building and Construction Commission. It pursues workers trying to enforce Health and Safety regulations but turns a blind eye to the violators. To make matters worse, the anti-labour party government is harmonising OH&S down to the weakest common denominator.

Hence, the necessity for Justice to have a sword. Under the rule of capital, that defensive weapon is a militant union movement. The significance of organised labour was voiced in 1916 by a Hobart labourer, Samuel Champ:
Our liberties were not won by mining magnates or stock-exchange jobbers, but by genuine men of the working-class movement who had died on the gallows and rotted in dungeons and were buried in nameless graves. These were the men to whom we owed the liberties we enjoyed today. Eight hours and other privileges in Australia had been won by men who suffered gaol and persecution.

Shortly after Champ’ s speech, our liberties were protected by the defeat of the two plebiscites to impose conscription for overseas military service. The labour movement knew that industrial conscription would follow. According to the Solicitor-General, the War Precautions Act already meant ‘that John Citizen was hardly able to lift a finger without coming under the penumbra of some technical offence’. How appropriate then that we are meeting in the courtyard to the prison cells where militants were held.

Among the victims of this repression were ‘the IWW twelve’ jailed for arson. All but two got early release after a Royal Commission. That investigation was one achievement of the Industrial Socialist Labor member for Broken Hill, Percy Brookfield.

Brookfield held the balance of power in the NSW parliament. To cling to office, the Labor cabinet gave way on the IWW and on OH&S for Barrier miners
Percy was on his way to Sydney via the Port when ‘he died for his people’ at Riverton in March 1921, ninety years ago. He had often passed through here and no doubt many locals wanted to add his name to their memorial. He has his own in the Broken Hill cemetery and now Paul Adams’s biography is now available with that stunning title - ‘The Best Hated Man in Australia’.

Percy Brookfield was special. However, until 1915, he was just another miner and unionist. Similarly, Ark Tribe had been an everyday builders’ labourer for twenty-three years before he took his stand. The same is true of the Eureka rebels. They were not saints or angels before November 1854. People rose to the call in1929 here and again in 1998 against Patricks. Stories about past struggles encouraged them to say: ‘We could do that!’ And they did.

Women have always done so too. Yet only one out of the forty-one names in the first listing was of a woman, Christina Fox. More have been added, for example, the Aboriginal activist, Ruby Hammond. Yet there were many, many more who were busy behind the scenes – ‘Because that’s what women do’, to quote a line from the 2004 musical Eureka! They ‘did good because good is good to do’. Researchers are finding more of their names for you to consider adding.

Why are there not more memorials to workers? There is a marble statue of a cane-cutter at Innisfail. And there are memorials to a few of the tens of thousands killed on the job, for instance, to the Truckies at Tarcutta. And as we saw earlier there are the war memorials for the tens of thousands slaughtered to make the world safe for big capital.

However, we need to remember that we are surrounded by memorials to working people wherever we go. A plaque to the architect of St Paul’s cathedral in London, Christopher Wren, reads ‘ If you seek his memorial, look about you’. An avalanche of capitalist propaganda makes it hard for us to recognise the memorials to workers that are all around us. The first ticket-holder in the Shearers’ Union in Wagga Wagga in 1886, Charlie Sullivan, knew the truth when he wrote his memoirs forty years later:
Not one word is written of the thousands of workers who toiled in the heat, in the cold, and in the rain, who cut through rock and blasted channels, who reared great walls and buildings, not a word of the lives lost, of those who toiled with the crushed fingers of their calloused hands, dripping blood into the concrete, or staining steel. It has been thus from the time millions of straining naked slaves built that magnificence which was Babylon, and those monuments which are known as the Pyramids. The names of kings and warlords are handed down in manuscripts and in books to after generations, but few ever think of the great and humble army whose sweat and blood are mingled in the concrete and bricks as surely as if the walls were built over a framework of human flesh.

They will remain unhonoured and unsung till workers write the histories that are taught in our schools.

Gathering here today we take a stand to inscribe Charlie’s longing for a red armband account of Australia’s past.

Although I have dwelt in the past, you would not have come out this morning if you did not know in your hearts that this is a monument to the living. When you lay your flowers you commit to a future where any murder for profit is outlawed, where class bias is no more, and where every human being flourishes through social equality. Until then, organised labour as the embodiment of Justice dare not lay down our sword.

Geronimo should be honoured, not associated with bin Laden

The vile creature bin Laden is dead, conspiracy theorists notwithstanding.

But what a sad reflection on the mentality of the US imperialists that he was code-named after a great indigenous patriot and warrior, Geronimo.

Are the grown men and women who comprise the inner sanctum of US ruling circles really nothing more than outgrown children, still playing “cowboys and Indians” in the backyard?

To code-name bi Laden “Geronimo” is to revel in the expansionist war crimes and land seizures of settler America, and is an insult to every living US indigenous person.

Geronimo (June 16, 1829 – February 17, 1909) was a prominent American First Nations leader of the Chiricahua Apache who fought for several decades against the expansion of Mexico and the United States into Apache tribal lands.

After an attack by a company of Mexican soldiers killed many members of his family in 1858, Geronimo joined revenge attacks on the Mexicans and later against the United States. He became known for bravery and daring feats and was revered by the Apaches as a warrior with spiritual powers.

Lisa Balk King, of Indian Country Today Media Network, wrote that the nickname sends "a disturbing message that equates an iconic symbol of Native American pride with the most hated evildoer since Adolf Hitler."

“Potentially the most disturbing fact is what this says to American Indian children. It equates being Native American with being hated, an enemy to the world, and someone to be hunted down and killed, and re-casts one of their heroes into a villainous role,” she said.

Unlike bin Laden, who was summarily executed upon capture, Geronimo was kept alive as a prisoner of war and died in captivity after being thrown from his horse in 1909.

So, the lone superpower that cooperated with anti-fascist forces to raise the standard of international justice to new heights with the Nuremburg War Trials has now descended to the depths of vigilante assassination.

This is of no surprise to anti-imperialists, but is causing concern to many democratic-minded and justice-loving persons.

All that the US ruling class can do is to smother itself in the jubilant lumpen exreta of “USA! USA!”, “Got what he deserved - the people in the Twin Towers weren’t armed either!” and so on.

Lies and misinformation typical of imperialist spin are slowly dissolving.

Yesterday, a US reporter was telling readers of our local Murdoch rag that “Bin Laden was located in an upstairs room using a woman, believed to be one of his wives, as a shield as he fired at the soldiers.”

This justified his killing and discredited him as a coward.

However, Pakistani sources are now saying there was no fire fight anywhere in the compound. "Not a single bullet was fired from the compound at the US forces and their choppers,” said the source.

And persistent questioning of the sort rarely seen these days by the kept reporters of the White House elicited a reluctant admission from the US that bin Laden was unarmed.

Now bin Laden’s 12 year old daughter, who was present when he was killed, has claimed that her father was first captured and then shot, in front of her and other members of the family.

His wife had not been used as a shield, but had rushed at the US soldiers who had shot and wounded her.

So, one pack of bastards has eliminated another bastard - the creature they created in their fight with the Soviet social-imperialists for control of Afghanistan.

No wonder they wanted him dead. What stories he might have told!

And in the process, the children of indigenous USA are defeated all over again in the continuing Apache Wars.

Bob Dylan plays Beijing and Shanghai, but not for Ai Weiwei

Bob Dylan, 70-year old veteran troubadour, played Beijing and Shanghai in early April. It was his first visit to the country and went without hitch following the cancellation of a tour originally planned for last year. While audience reviews by expats and locals were overwhelmingly positive, Western print media in particular engaged in an orgy of punning around the titles of some of his best-known songs from his early days, like “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times, They Are A-Changin’”. The problem as they saw it was that Dylan had sold out by not dedicating a song to, or making comment about, Ai Weiwei, a so-called dissident artist who was arrested shortly before Dylan’s arrival in China. The accusation largely reflects the ignorance about Dylan’s long-time rejection of labels such as “spokesman of a generation” and “protest singer”. Such ignorance looks for a politics that can be reduced to a five word slogan held on a placard. Far from selling out, Dylan kept true to himself and played a set list that was consistent with what he’s been doing around the world recently. It included “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”, “Desolation Row”, “Ballad of a Thin Man”, “Highway 61 Revisited” and arguably his most political song (although it depends on your own interpretation), “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”. But who is this Ai Weiwei that Dylan is accused of betraying? Ai Weiwei, 53, is the son of Ai Qing, a poet whose repudiation of the dictatorship of Chiang Kai-shek) led him to change his surname from Jiang (i.e. the pinyin form of Chiang) to Ai in the early 1930s. He was imprisoned by Chiang Kai-shek, but also sent into exile on state farms in the northeast and in Xinjiang from 1958 to 1975. Ai Qing was a revolutionary and a patriot. Here is his 1938 poem, “I Love This Land”: If I were a bird, I would sing with my hoarse voice Of this land buffeted by storms, Of this river turbulent with our grief, Of these angry winds ceaselessly blowing, And of the dawn, infinitely gentle over the woods… - Then I would die And even my feathers would rot in the soil. Why are my eyes always brimming with tears? Because I love this land so deeply… According to the New York Times, Ai Weiwei “takes the role of China’s conscience”. The LA Times and The Economist tried to boost his prestige by incorrectly describing him as the designer of the “Bird’s Nest” stadium built for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. He was a minor consultant to the architects but his ideas were not used. Ai Weiwei left for the US in 1981. He was expelled from a New York design school for chronic absenteeism in 1983 and became an illegal immigrant, gaining a US Green Card when his profile as a “dissident” associated with the downtown art world in New York grew. He returned to China in 1994 and embedded himself in the avant-garde “artists’ village” on the outskirts of Beijing. Ai Weiwei’s “art” would probably seem old hat to anyone familiar with the filth and vomit of the punk era of Western pop music, but for those who were not exposed, be warned that the following passages contain adult themes…. In 2000 during the Shanghai Bienniale Ai Weiwei was co-curator of a show called “F*** Off” which included photos of his upraised middle finger pointed at Tiananmen Square, and an exhibit that purported to show the bodies of two dead babies. For China’s 60th Anniversary in 2009 he launched a video of himself and various others standing in front of a white board with the handwritten characters “grass-mud-horse, motherland” in the background. In Chinese, the words “grass-mud-horse” are homonyms for “F*** your mother”. The phrase, or a close variant, is repeated monotonously by each of the eight people including an aggressive-looking young white American male. Ai Weiwei utters a phrase that says, somewhat impolitely, what he has done to his motherland’s genitals. Such is the “art” of the man who “takes the role of China’s conscience”. He was not arrested in relation to this role, or at least, the charges do not refer to it. He was arrested in relation to financial irregularities involving a Shanghai art studio. Dylan may or may not have heard of him. Her may or may not like his ideas. But he is not a spokesman for US imperialism and does not have to arrange his set lists to serve causes that the US government espouses.

Cometh another Superman....

Yesterday, a group of us watched Waiting for Superman, a film about the Charter school movement in the US. The Charter school movement is one of the vehicles through which “social venture capitalists “(billionaires like the Waltons, the Broads, and Bill Gates) invest in, and shape to suit their own purposes, public education. Australia does not have a history of private philanthropy comparable to that of the US, but like every American plague, it is about to be visited upon us big time.

Below is an article by right-wing economics commentator Robert Gottliebsen, published online today. (The additional gratuitous and insulting comments are mine.) The current newsletter of his organisation, SVA, provides a link to the recruitment page of Teach for Australia. The Chief Executive of SVA, Michael Traill, was made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in 2010. He established SVA after 15 years as a co-founder and Executive Director of Macquarie Bank's venture capital arm, Macquarie Direct Investment. In that capacity he “helped rescue more than 550 childcare centres from the ABC Learning collapse”, earning him the title of “Childcare ‘saviour’” from the Sydney Morning Herald.

Duncan Peppercorn is an executive director of SVA.

Enough. Read on….

Duncan Peppercorn – an agent for change Robert Gottliebsen Published 3:21 PM, 29 Mar 2011 Last update 10:02 AM, 30 Mar 2011
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Applying the management techniques embraced in management consultancy firms, like Bain and Company and McKinsey’s, to the non-profit sector creates a very different outcome to that produced by your traditional social worker. (Now there’s a nice opening stereotype - we all know what “traditional social workers” are like!)

Duncan Peppercorn left the high corporate life for the non-profit sector (Yeah? Sounds like a good guy), with the financial backing of the Macquarie Group Foundation and a series of wealthy philanthropists (Uh oh….) . The organisation he leads, Social Ventures Australia (SVA), helps and advises groups working in education and employment for the disadvantaged. (Double uh oh!)

With the eye of a trained management consultant (Wow! That good huh? Circling like an eagle over us rabbits down below…), Peppercorn points out that the problems in education and in employment for those suffering from disadvantage are concentrated in a series of postcodes, usually on the outskirts of major capital cities (Yes, the man’s a genius! No-one else could have worked that out!!!). He is careful not to actually mention specific suburbs (Far out, all that genius and professional integrity too!), but indicates that if you are addressing the problem, your focus can be narrowed to particular areas (Did a light globe turn on above your head too?) .

And when it comes to education, is the answer huge investments in facilities? (One, two, three…all together now: “No-o-o-!!!”) They may help, (But we know they don’t - that’s why we put in the word “may”) but the only answer that works is the quality of teachers, he says (Lo and behold! Here cometh a man with the wisdom of Solomon) – that’s what makes the difference (We interrupt the sledging to make a serious comment. The research so often quoted by Julia Dullard and others in support of this contention is that of NZ Professor John Hattie. His research conclusion is that “the single greatest in-school influence on student engagement and influence” is the quality of the teacher What neo-liberals and education deformers don’t point out is his important caveat that there may be more important out-of-school influences that he chose not to look at in his study: in his own words, his book isn't about "what cannot be influenced in schools - thus critical discussions about class, poverty, resources in families, health in families, and nutrition are not included - this is NOT because they are unimportant, indeed they may be more important than many of the issues discussed in this book. It is just that I have not included these topics in my orbit” [see http://www.nzherald.co.nz/maori/news/article.cfm?c_id=252&objectid=10582708 accessed 3 June 2010]). So, if you want to help the disadvantaged, the first step is to recruit and train quality teachers (Because, of course, those idiots now teaching them are no good – worse even than those bloody social workers we dismissed earlier).

A second step is to find a way to avoid the poverty trap (Fantastic! At last we’re going to address the real issue in poor educational outcomes namely, the relatively high percentage of Australian children living in poverty), whereby working makes no sense because the reduction in social services benefits offsets the wage income (Oh bugger! This isn’t about education at all. It’s saying that heaps of working Australians prefer bludging off the dole to working. Hell, we’ll either have to raise minimum wages or lower the dole. Hmmm, I can see where this is going…).

One day politicians will wake up to that (Yep, let’s get ‘em to force people into shitty jobs on crap wages by quarantining their dole….OK, so we’re doing that to our indigenous brothers and sisters in the Territory and we plan to do it elsewhere, but what’s wrong with simply slashing the dole and starving them into wage slavery?) but it’s not easy to change because there is an army of people who want the existing system to stay as it is (That’s right, all them teachers and social workers) .

The third step is to find a way to encourage large corporations to employ disadvantaged people to help them avoid the poverty trap (How? Funny, but we seem to have run out of ideas right about here!) .

In his interview, Dr Peppercorn sets out what needs to be done with the precision of a management consultant (Oh spare me, the “precision of a management consultant???”). But he is also, in there, working to achieve change (Wow, a knight in shining armour. But change for whom? Change by whom?) in selected areas. It will be no easy task; and small steps are usually better than trying to change the world with a grand design (Don’t let “them” cotton on to what you’re up to. Stealth and caution, stealth and caution) .

Australia has enormous numbers caught in the poverty trap, and so, it is one of the most important management tasks in the nation (Hang on, it was management tasks that put most of them in that poverty trap!) . And it has a human dimension that those who work for management consultants often miss out on (Now ain’t that the feckin’ truth!) .

Imperialists Out to Destroy Libyan Independence

The US, British and French “coalition” attack on Libya occurs behind the fig-leaf of concern for the safety of citizens of the country.

Meanwhile protesters in Yemen and Bahrain continue to be killed by US puppet regimes backed, in the case of Bahrain, by soldiers sent in from Saudi Arabia and the Emirates.

The hypocrisy is staggering.

Libya’s Gaddafi came to power in 1969 when he and his supporters overthrew the pro-US regime of King Idris. Oil and other major industries were nationalised and the giant US Wheelus Air Base forced to close.

Gaddafi’s anti-imperialist credentials were established and he began supporting various national liberation struggles around the globe.

However, his Green (Islamic) Revolution did nothing to empower the strongest component of the anti-imperialist forces in his country - the workers. Reactionary political measures were taken to impose restrictions on their independent activity and to ensure that the colour of the revolution remained green (Islamist) and not red (socialist).

Not being a Marxist, Gaddafi began to embrace terrorism as a weapon against imperialism, failing to understand that terrorism is essentially counter-productive and damaging to the causes with which it is linked.

He may or may not have authorised the nightclub bombing in Germany, for example; what it provided was an excuse for the Reagan regime to invade Libyan airspace in 1986 and savagely bomb a number of Libyan cities, causing huge loss of civilian life. Indeed Gaddafi’s own compound was bombed and his daughter killed.

Condemned as a terrorist and a rogue by the imperialists, Gaddafi was forced to re-evaluate his position after the demise of the social-imperialist Soviet superpower, China’s growing accommodation to the needs of imperialism, and the subsequent change in the international balance of power.

From the late 90’s on, Gaddafi began capitulating to imperialist pressure. He scrapped his nuclear weapons program and destroyed stocks of weapons and in return, in 2003 his country was removed from the US’s list of “terrorist states”.

Multinational corporations were given access to the Libyan economy in a wave of neo-liberal “reforms” demanded by the World Bank and the IMF. The living standards of the Libyan people, once the highest in Northern Africa, began to plummet so that at the same time as he was beginning to bask in international approval he also had to confront growing internal dissatisfaction.

When that dissatisfaction boiled over into protests followed by civil war in the wake of the great Tunisian and Egyptian people’s struggles, the imperialists seized the opportunity to complete the undermining of Libyan independence and clamoured for a “regime change”.

Vision of Libyan jets striking rebel strongholds in the east of the country created a favourable public opinion environment for intervention by the imperialists.

Learning from the mistakes surrounding their unilateral aggression against Iraq, the US imperialists adopted a relatively low profile, leaving the front running to the British and French with the support of a shaky Arab League. A motion was rushed through the United Nations Security Council on Thursday March 17 authorising the imposition of a “no-fly zone” on Libya. Brazil, Russia, India, China and Germany abstained, while the Organisation of African Unity condemned the move.

Gaddafi declared his compliance with the resolution with an announcement of a ceasefire but no time was provided by the imperialists to let this take effect.

Nor was a “no-fly zone” simply a matter of patrolling the skies over Libya to ensure that Gaddafi’s jets remained on the ground.

Despite a Pentagon spokesperson’s assurance that a “no-fly zone” had been successfully imposed, the US and British imperialists launched 112 Raytheon Corporation Cruise Missile attacks from naval vessels on 20 different Libyan sites on Saturday March 19.

Included in those sites was Gaddafi’s compound – a “symbolic” gesture according to some in the capitalist press, and no doubt intended to remind Gaddafi of his daughter’s death in 1986 and therefore of his own personal vulnerability.

Not to be outdone, the British and the French sent warplanes to attack convoys of Gaddafi forces. This has been one of the more successful of the imperialists’ actions as there have been no reports of tanks and troop carrying vehicles taking to the skies since the attack.

It would be too cynical to suggest that each new act of aggression by imperialism provides opportunities to test the latest weaponry in real life…or death….situations.

But Boeing will be pleased that its EA-18G Growler, is providing electronic warfare support to the “Coalition’s” attacks on Libya. This is the first combat mission for the Growler which not only went after Libya’s surface-to-air missiles, but also helped the aggressors conduct air strikes on loyalist ground forces going after rebel strongholds.

US B-2 Stealth bombers haven't seen a lot of action since the days of "Shock and Awe" over Iraq. But with the mission to destroy Libyan radar and missile sites -- and airfields, and command posts -- in full effect, the B-2 is back in effect. The one pictured at the top of this blog, returning from a bombing run, flew all the way from Missouri's Whiteman Air Force Base.

British Typhoon fighter jets are being used in their first-ever combat missions and nations like Belgium, Spain and the Netherlands are seeing how their warplanes perform in real….well, whatever, conditions.

In May 2009, Raytheon Missile Systems proposed an upgrade to the Tomahawk Block IV land-attack cruise missile that would allow it to kill or disable large, hardened warships at 900 nautical miles (1,700 km) range, just to give you some idea of its destructive capacity. Although guided by GPS systems and able to be re-targeted in mid-air, it is apparently incapable of turning around and going back home if citizens get in its path. It’s great for Raytheon that the new Block IVs are getting a work-out.

In time it will be revealed that the imperialists never really intended to simply impose the conditions for a “fair” fight between Gaddafi and his opponents, that the “no-fly zone” had more to its agenda than just providing a level playing field between the Government and the rebels. After all, where does that argument begin and end? X has aerial superiority and we support Y, so we’ll impose a “no-fly zone”. But X also has more tanks than Y, so we’ll Tomahawk his excess tanks. But he’s also got more troops, so how about we knock a few tens of thousands of them out as well. And if he’s got more popular support, well, we’ll just have to slaughter his civilians so as to protect those supporting Y.

By coincidence, on Monday March 21 the German magazine Der Spiegel released photos of a smiling US “kill team” posing with the bodies of tortured and killed Afghan civilians from whose bodies gruesome “trophies” had been cut. (See http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/21/us-army-kill-team-afghanistan-posed-pictures-murdered-civilians ).

Although its early days yet in the imperialists’ war of aggression against Libya, these are the observations that can be made now:

1. Imperialism is by its very nature opposed to the interests of humanity. It cannot and will not provide “humanitarian assistance”.
2. It is the inalienable right of the Libyan people to rebel against reactionary authority, whether that takes the persona of Gaddafi and his regime, or is constituted by the aggressive coalition of the imperialists.
3. Freedom and independence can neither be imported nor exported; rather, it can only be won by each people conducting its own difficult and protracted struggle.
4. That does not mean leaving a people to its own fate. The basis of assistance to those carrying out a just struggle is proletarian internationalism. Only the people can provide assistance to each other without interfering, bullying, subverting and seeking to control – all of which characterise imperialist intervention.
5. The key to the resolution of contradictions in Libya is the emergence of the working class in an organsied, conscious role as leaders of the fight to defend the independence of their nation and the liberation of their people.

Wisconsin - the world is watching

Whilst the focus of the world in recent weeks has been on the Middle East and North Africa, and the great democratic revolt shaking regimes in that region, events in Madison, Wisconsin have also come into prominence.

The State’s Republican Governor Walker is trying to push through a “Budget repair” Bill that will make public sector workers carry the burden of the State’s economic woes. Some public sector unions have already agreed to pay more towards their pension and health care funds.

However, none are prepared to give away their right to collective bargaining over wages and conditions, which is also part of the Walker package.

When public sector unions called for rallies outside the State Capitol (parliament), tens of thousands responded. They included teachers who do not have the right to strike in Wisconsin, but who phoned in sick over four successive days, effectively closing down the public school system. Huge numbers of students walked out of schools to join the protest. Heaps of amateur videos have been put up on YouTube recording this.

Walker’s reaction was to threaten use of the National Guard to arrest any public employee deemed to be “on strike”.

His problems were compounded when the State legislature’s Democratic Party representatives boycotted proceedings in the House, denying Walker the quorum he needed to get his Bill through.

To prevent themselves being seized by State Police and forcibly returned to the legislature, the whole group fled interstate, effectively going into exile while protest numbers mounted outside the Capitol.

And not only outside the Capitol. The good citizens of Wisconsin claimed the House as their own and set up sleep-ins and occupations.

On the Saturday before last, a crowd estimated at anywhere between 70,000 and 100,000 claimed the centre of Wisconsin, dubbing it “the new Cairo” and calling for “Governor Walker Mubarak” to stand down. Signs went up calling for the “overthrow of the Pharaoh”.

With protests showing no signs of dissipating, Walker was sprung discussing the possibility of planting agents provocateurs amongst the protesters to create disturbances that would provide an excuse and a PR cover for the police to smash the rallies.

According to Madison.com: Madison's mayor and police chief Thursday called on Gov. Scott Walker to explain statements he made in a secretly recorded phone conversation that he "thought about" planting troublemakers among the thousands of demonstrators at the Capitol.

"Someone in his inner circle raised seriously the possibility of hiring people to come in and apparently create violence in my city," Mayor Dave Cieslewicz said. "I find it appalling, and I want to know who that was."

Last Saturday, an even larger crowd than the previous week’s gathered outside the occupied Capitol. Walker’s response was to get his police to lock down the building, denying access to it from the outside and locking inside those who were occupying it.

This is the most recent (Monday February 28) report from the Wisconsin State Journal:

Protesters have filled the Capitol for two weeks, turning the historic building into a sort of protest village, complete with first aid centers, scheduled events and family centers. Capitol police started on Friday enforcing a new set of rules for the rotunda, most of them aimed at ending the situation.

On Sunday, Capitol police attempted to peacefully remove the remaining protesters. An ardent group refused to go and was still inside the building Monday. Most have complied with the new rules, including staying on the ground floor. A few have not, which has led to the standoff.

“My grandfather helped build this building,” said LaVorn Dvorak, a retired social worker from Brooklyn, who was stuck outside for two hours in below-freezing temperatures. “I expect to be able to get in. Now they’re telling us we can’t get in to our own statehouse.”

As Dvorak spoke, chants arose including “Let us in — please.” And “Whose house?” “Our house!”

Meanwhile, the man who is organizing a recall effort against the governor filed a hand-written request for an injunction in U.S. District Court in Madison Monday seeking to reopen the Capitol. In it, Jeremy Ryan of Defending Wisconsin PAC is seeking $10 million to be paid to the protesters for the alleged violation of their civil rights.

All power to the people of Wisconsin!

Smash Walker’s union busting!

Defend the right to collective bargaining!

The whole world is watching.

PS - See this online timeline full of interesting links: http://www.dipity.com/timeline/Wisconsin-Protests/

Egyptian independent trade unionists' declaration

The great wave of struggle sweeping through the Middle east and North Africa has a common theme – freedom from oppression.

Although the characteristics of that oppression in each of the countries concerned may be quite different, it has never been more apparent that oppression breeds resistance and that it is right to rebel against reactionaries.

The significant turning point in the case of Egypt has been the emergence of organised workers. There had always been workers and unemployed amongst the vast crowds in Tahrir Square, but the US-backed Mubarak regime had used the full force of the state to clamp down on the organisation of workers at the workplace, declaring all but an unrepresentative tamecat union apparatus illegal.

Just days before Mubarak resigned, there were signs of genuine mass organisations of the workers and the beginning of large-scale strikes in defiance of Mubarak and his union collaborators.

Reprinted below is a statement released on February 19 2011 in Cairo conatining the demands whose circulation helped crystallise the determination of workers to advance their own interests within the great democratic struggle of the people of Egypt.

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

Revolution – Freedom – Social Justice

Demands of the workers in the revolution

O heroes of the 25 January revolution! We, workers and trade unionists from different workplaces which have seen strikes, occupations and demonstrations by hundreds of thousands of workers across Egypt during the current period, feel it is right to unite the demands of striking workers that they may become an integral part of the goals of our revolution, which the people of Egypt made, and for which the martyrs shed their blood. We present to you a workers’ programme which brings together our just demands, in order to reaffirm the social aspect of this revolution and to prevent the revolution being taken away from those at its base who should be its beneficiaries.

The workers’ demands which we raised before the 25 January revolution and were part of the prelude to this glorious revolution are:

1. Raising the national minimum wage and pension, and a narrowing of the gap between minimum and maximum wages so that the maximum is no more than 15 times the minimum in order to achieve the principle of social justice which the revolution gave birth to; payment of unemployment benefit, and a regular increment which will increase with rising prices.

2. The freedom to organise independent trade unions without conditions or restrictions, and the protection of trade unions and their leaders.

3. The right of manual workers and clerical workers, peasant farmers and professionals, to job security and protection from dismissal. Temporary workers must be made permanent, and dismissed workers to be returned to their jobs. We must do away with all excuses for employing workers on temporary contracts.

4. Renationalization of all privatised enterprises and a complete stop to the infamous privatisation programme which wrecked our national economy under the defunct regime.

5.
* Complete removal of corrupt managers who were imposed on companies in order to run them down and sell them off.
* Curbing the employment of consultants who are past the age of retirement and who eat up 3 billion of the national income, in order to open up employment opportunities for the young.
* Return to the enforcement of price controls on goods and services in order to keep prices down and not to burden the poor.

6. The right of Egyptian workers to strike, organise sit-ins, and demonstrate peacefully, including those striking now against the remnants of the failed regime, those who were imposed on their companies in order to run them down prior to a sell-off. It is our opinion that if this revolution does not lead to the fair distribution of wealth it is not worth anything. Freedoms are not complete without social freedoms. The right to vote is naturally dependent on the right to a loaf of bread.

7. Health care is a necessary condition for increasing production

8. Dissolution of the Egyptian Trade Union Federation which was one of the most important symbols of corruption under the defunct regime. Execution of the legal judgements issued against it and seizure of its financial assets and documents. Seizure of the assets of the leaders of the ETUF and its member unions and their investigation.

Signed:
Workplace Name
Employee of the Meteorological Office Ahmad Kamal Salah
Health Technicians Hossam Muhammad Abdallah Ali
Nurse Sayyida Al-Sayyid Muhammad Fayiz
Al-Fayyum Sugar Refinery Ashraf Abd al-Wanis
Umar Effendi Department Store Abd-al-Qadir Mansur
Future Pipes Co, 6th October City Hafiz Nagib Muhammad
Egypt – Helwan Textiles Co. Muhammad Hassan
Tura Cement Mahmud Abd-al-Munsaf Al-Alwani
Egyptian Commercial Pharmaceutical Co. Ali Mahmud Nagi
Hawamidiyya Sugar Refinery Umar Muhammad Abd-al-Aziz
Egyptian Pharmaceuticals Muhammad Galal
Suez Fertilisers Co. Shazli Sawi Shazli
Military Factory No.45 Muhammad Ibrahim Hassan
Military Factory No. 999 Wasif Musa Wahba
General Transport Authority Gamil Fathi Hifni
Cairo General Contractors Adil Abd-al-Na’im
Al-Qanah Rope Co., Port Sa’id Ali Hassan Abu Aita
Information Centre Hind Abd-al-Gawad Ibrahim
Information Centre Hamada Abu-Zaid
Information Centre Muhammad Khairy Zaid
General Authority for Cultural Centres Hatim Salah Sayyid
National Postal Authority Muhammad Abd-al-Hakim
International Ibex Co. Ahmad Islam
Military Factory 99 Tariq Sayyid Mahmud
Military Factory 999 Nabil Mahmud
Trade unionist Mahmud Shukri
Military Factory 999 Ahmad Faruq
Military Factory 999 Usama Al-Sayyid
Future Pipe Industries Yasir Al-Sayyid Ibrahim
Tannery workers Mahmud Ali Ahmad
Future workers Abd-al-Rasul Abd-al-Ghani
Umar Effendi Department Store Ali Al-Sayyid
Property Tax Collectors (RETAU) Kamal Abu Aita
Property Tax Collectors (RETAU) Ahmad Abd-al-Sabur
Property Tax Collectors (RETAU) Salah Abd-al-Hamid
Property Tax Collectors (RETAU) Mahmud Umar
Worker Khalid Galal Muhammad
Petrotrade Co. Muhammad Zaki Isma’il

This is an impressive list of workplaces, many of which have been involved in big strikes in the past and during the last few weeks. The Mahalla textile workers are supportive of the declaration, but couldn’t send a representative to the meeting because of negotiations around their own strike. Solidarity messages should be sent to reta.union.reta@gmail.com and egypt.solidarity@gmail.com .

Arkaroola victory imminent

Today’s announcement that South Australian Premier Mike Rann is expected to declare the privately-operated Arkaroola Wilderness Sanctuary a National Park is a huge victory for the people.

The move will ban mining in the park and put an end once and for all to the environmental despoilers and would-be uranium miners Marathon Resources.

It is a huge victory because Rann had rebadged the Labor Party as “pro-business, pro-mining and pro-growth” and because Marathon had very close ties to Rann and his ministers.

Former Federal Labor Senator Chris Schacht worked with Rann to overturn SA Labor’s opposition to an expansion of uranium mining at a time when few knew that he was a shareholder in Marathon. After the company had its exploration licence suspended by Rann following disclosure of its illegal dumping of waste from its drilling activities, Schacht was elevated to an Executive Director so as to be able to better work his government contacts. Building on the ties to Labor, Marathon appointed another former Labor Senator John Quirke as its registered lobbyist.

Opposition to Marathon’s plans to mine Arkaroola has been steadily building in the community. Shareholder AGMs have been picketed and the Greens had tried in the SA Parliament to pass a bill banning mining at Arkaroola.

Liberal and Labor combined to defeat the Green’s bill.

With opposition growing steadily, the Liberals decided that they would prevent mining in Arkaroola, leaving Rann electorally vulnerable at a time when his government is already on the nose following attacks on unions and public sector workers and services.

Rann compounded his problems by restoring Marathon’s exploration license early in February. The kiddies in the chat rooms loved it. One with the nom-de-plume of “Ohmygod” exulted in the announcement with: “Fabulous news. Licence back and exploration to start up again…Get those drills spinning. Pronto. Find more Uranium and find out about the Rare Earths... This will be a tremendous stock for 2011.”

Another, Patmad, wrote: “Looks like a bit of waste land, nothing to see. Only good for mining and seeing that it holds Australia's third largest uranium deposit, may as well let them mine it. Might have to relocate one or two species if there is anything breathing or living.”

Such are the values of Marathon shareholders!

The two major shareholders in Marathon have been Talbot Group Holdings and China’s CITIC. Talbot Group Holdings belonged to Queensland mining magnate Ken Talbot, who was facing charges of corruption following the jailing of Gordon Nuttall, a former Queensland government minister who had accepted substantial sums of money from Talbot. Unfortunately, Talbot’s death last year in an African plane crash deprived the community of seeing him dealt with by the criminal justice system.

CITIC is a Chinese state investment fund. Despite the friendly gesture of loaning the Adelaide Zoo two pandas, the Chinese were committed to mining in a wildlife sanctuary that is crucial to the survival of arguably Australia’s prettiest wallaby and other rare species including frogs, birds, fish and flora. A public appeal to CITIC’s Australian managing director (and Marathon director) by the President of the SA Branch of the Australia-China Friendship Society to divest from Marathon has gone unheeded.

As for the Talbot Group, one can only speculate as to the nature of the tip-off they may have received to have prompted the sell-off of their 19.9 per cent stake in Marathon to US-based private equity and hedge fund Mount Kellett Capital just three days ago.

Marathon shares, which had once traded at over $6 per share, had been languishing at around 40 cents, but jumped to just over 80 cents following Mount Kellet’s acquisition at around 75 cents.

So to Chris Schacht and the whole stinking mess of Labor crony capitalism, to the Chinese for not respecting the feelings of the Australian people, and to former Goldman Sachs partner Mark McGoldrick and his Mount Kellett capital speculators – sucked in!

Enjoy the ride ‘cos it’s all downhill from here.

It’s our environment and we’ve made our decision.

Forestry communities fight sell-off

More than 3000 people and more than 60 logging trucks brought the centre of Adelaide to a standstill yesterday in protest at the State government’s plan to forward sell government-owned plantation forests in the south-east of the State to private interests.

The State Government's decision to forward sell up to three rotations of trees (each rotation representing a cycle of 37 years) to private and predominantly foreign owners has the potential to cause enormous social and economical harm to communities in the lower south east region of South Australia.

The planned forward sale of ForestrySA's plantation pine harvests threatens 5000 timber industry jobs and would trigger the collapse of hundreds of businesses reliant on the industry.

Foreign corporations purchasing logs from the state's 183,000 hectares of plantation forest will in all probability send logs offshore for processing, causing the shutdown of sawmills and supporting businesses.

Already, 10,000 tonnes of unprocessed logs each week are being exported from nearby Portland (Victoria) to Korea, and log exports out of Port Adelaide have begun.

The fight against the privatisation of SA forests via the forward sale mechanism is born of the last State Budget which has seen a massive community outcry against cuts to services, to workers’ entitlements and to public sector jobs.

Although a strong campaign by public sector unions has forced the resignation of State Treasurer Kevin Foley, his budget measures remain in place.

Different Treasurer, same policies….or different arsehole, same shit!

The struggle continues!

Egypt: “Restraint” is for slaves – lift the level of struggle

The Egyptian people have exploded in struggle against the autocratic pro-US Mubarak regime.

Like the Tunisian people currently struggling against the forces of counter-revolution, the Egyptians are being “advised” by the US imperialists and their followers (Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd, in our case), to “exercise restraint on both sides”.

In this way the imperialists attempt to project an image of neutrality and even-handedness, and even dare to insinuate that they are somehow on the side of people struggling for democracy, freedom and independence.

However, people who suffer oppression cannot be told by imperialists to “exercise restraint”. They have the right to rebel, to lift the level of their struggle and to overthrow and overcome all obstacles to their freedom.

The last big struggles in Egypt developed out of a demand by the poor for food at a time of rising food prices. The regime responded with murderous force. Such was the “restraint” of a regime backed by and supportive of US imperialism (see: http://mike-servethepeople.blogspot.com/2008/04/support-egyptian-peopple-against-neo.html )

Inevitably, there would have been lessons learned from the great struggles of 2008, just as there will be a drawing from the more recent experiences of the Tunisians.

To correctly build unity among all the anti-imperialist and pro-democracy forces, to give full play to the initiative and leadership of the working class, and to guard against the “soft” and hard tactics of imperialism will create the conditions for utilising opportunities in the current phase of the great Egyptian peoples’ struggles.

Government capitulates to private school lobby over My School

Today's launch of Version 2 of the My School website has been delayed, supposedly because the site is not yet “ready”.

My School is the lovechild of Prime Minister Julia Gillard and the discredited former New York Chancellor of Schools Joel Klein.

Klein led the way with an “accountability” agenda that saw school performance in standardized tests made public. The idea was to spook parents in public schools into exercising an “informed” choice about where to send their children for schooling. It was an agenda for the privatisation of schooling and the intended beneficiaries were the corporate and financial elite behind the Charter school movement and the testing industry.

When the first version of My School went to air some 12 months ago, public school supporters were horrified at the inaccuracies and the misleading comparisons between so-called “statistically similar schools”.

They were also angry that promised disclosures about the funds available to schools had not been made. These were promised by the Government to be a feature of version 2.

The private school lobby has fought tooth and nail to prevent transparency around funding. The funding data that will be available is still skewed in favour of the privates. Their lobby has forced government schools to have included a portion of the cost for head office capital and recurrent costs – costs that never find their way into schools. By the same token, they have succeeded in preventing a requirement that private schools should disclose their total wealth, including share portfolios, bequests and bursaries.

All of this was meant to have been online as from today.

But the private Empire has struck back!

Now it is crying foul and claiming that there are major inaccuracies in the website’s data.

Melbourne's Age for example, front-paged the plight of the Beechworth Montessori School which, with some justification, vigorously disputes its ranking as Australia’s third richest school (see http://www.theage.com.au/national/education/uproar-over-my-school-rankings-20101201-18gmx.htm l )

The Sydney Morning Herald was less sympathetic to the lobby, leading one report with:

“STUDENTS at Sydney's private boarding schools are from even wealthier families than first thought. So much so, that many schools fear they will lose funding once the secret is out.

“Socio-economic scores given to every school on the federal government's My School website have been recalculated this year using enrolment information instead of the census district data used for last year's scores.

“Using the new measure, the scores for private boarding schools have risen by up to 15 per cent on the new version of the My School website, expected to be released by next week.

“The federal government, however, still uses census district data to distribute funding.”

In deciding to delay the online release of version 2 of My School, Federal Minister for Education Peter Garrett is caught in a stand-off between Gillard and the big privates over the outing they will get from the MySchool financial data, even with its in-built bias in their favour.

How can you get such a big hand-out from the Feds in $ support and have millions in bricks and mortar (including non-school), in security portfolios, in property development (here and overseas) including shopping centres and apartment blocks and be earning more interest (let alone profit) each year than most of the disadvantaged schools in the state put together get from the Feds?

And if your NAPLAN results are a bit suss too compared to local publics....!! Maybe it's time for a super profits tax on them?

They are fearful that with a review of Federal funding on at the moment, Gillard will reduce the bonus payments to the Catholics and Independents and elevate grants to the publics. Then they'd actually have to use their own $. That will reduce profits and maybe even cause an asset sell-off for some.....the balance sheets are shuddering.

Big privates are big business. Garrett's three girls went to an exclusive private girls’ school in Hornsby, NSW. Garrett came from Wahroonga (a posh exclusive suburb on the North Shore). He also went to exclusive Barker College in Hornsby. He is a lawyer. He is being lent on by the old school tie powerful lobbyists (also lawyers) whom the privates employ to cajole the Federal Government. He is a committed conservative Christian and is very active in the Uniting Church which owns many schools in Australia, including some of the wealthiest. After all, didn't they just spend $2 million trying to save Annesley College from closure in Adelaide?

Trevor Cobbold, from the public school lobby group Save Our Schools very appropriately sums up the situation:

"The delay in launching My School 2.0 exposes the hypocrisy and double standards of the Federal Government.

"When private schools complain about inaccuracies on My School, the Government caves in without a whimper. When government schools complain about inaccuracies, the Government ignores them.

"When My School 1.0 was launched a whole gamut of problems were identified which disadvantaged government schools, such as comparing the results of small low socio-economic status government schools with high SES private schools. Yet, the Government went ahead even though these criticisms were subsequently found to be justified.

"If the Government is serious about fixing inaccuracies on My School it would go back to the drawing board on like school comparisons because the new system to be used in My School 2.0 is still biased against government schools.

"My School has yet again been discredited as being unreliable and inaccurate. It should be abandonded."

Hands off North Korea!

It is sometimes hard to defend North Korea.

The father-son-grandson line of succession is overtly feudal. I know that we have great Aussie Rules footballers who are the sons of formerly great Aussie Rules footballers, that Jacob Dylan is Bob Dylan’s son and that Charlie Sheen is the son of Martin Sheen. But I’m not convinced that the health of a proletarian dictatorship is established by creating a personal dynasty of the Kim family.

Leaving that aside, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (or North Korea) is entirely in the right in the current beating of imperialist war drums in that corner of the globe.

Before we go any further, just imagine how the US would react if the North Koreans declared that they were to hold annual war games with the Mexicans at Heroica Matamoros, just across the border from Brownsville, Texas. The very idea is preposterous, yet the Western world takes at face value the “normalcy” of the US imperialists leading war games exercises in waters that are claimed by both North and South Korea.

Technically, the North and South are still at war. The DPRK, which is demonized by the same media that promotes imperialism’s right to its war games, has consistently called for a formal Peace Treaty with the South, for direct talks with the US and for normalization of relations with the US.

The US response is the annual preparations for war that openly take the form of simulated invasions of the DPRK.

This is irrespective of whether US imperialism wears a human face (Obama, Clinton) or a death mask (Bush, Rumsfeld).

The western sea border between the North and the South, where the war games are being conducted, has never been agreed to by the North. The so-called Northern Limit Line (NLL) was unilaterally declared by the Commander of the United Nations Command in August 1953 after the matter had been left unresolved in the Korean Armistice Agreement signed a month earlier. The North had proposed that the terrestrial demarcation line (DML) which had been agreed by both sides be extended out to sea with provision for the South to access five islands it claimed through two 3-kilometre wide waterways.

This was unacceptable to the US which used the South’s claims to the islands to create an irregular maritime boundary close to the North Korean shoreline.

Common sense would dictate that both sides avoid any military activity in or around the disputed waters that fall within both boundary proposals.

But US imperialism sees only the opportunity for provocation, for bullying and interference.

It has four main aims.

Firstly it wishes to exacerbate tensions on the Korean peninsula in the hope of destabilizing North Korea.

Secondly, it wants to reassert its superpower military status in unequivocal terms so as to limit Chinese ambitions to emerge as an economic and political rival on the world stage.

Thirdly, it wants to create regional tension so as to justify the maintenance of its huge military base on Okinawa at a time when all political groups on the island want to see it shut down.

And fourthly, it suits the needs of the US military-industrial complex to extort further funds from a worried Congress for purposes of armaments research and production.

Both North Korea and China protested that the war games scheduled for the zone of disputed water was a provocation and should be cancelled.

They pointed out that the presence of a US nuclear “super carrier” the USS George Washington was clearly in violation of agreements to denuclearize the peninsula.

Indeed, the arrogance of the US imperialists knows no bounds. Singing from the hymn sheet of gunboat diplomacy, a US Defense Department spokesperson stated: “Where we exercise, when we exercise, with whom and how, using what assets and so forth, are determined by the US Navy, the Department of Defense, by the United States government.” (Agence France Presse, July 15, 2010).

So the games began as scheduled.

Initial reports in the capitalist press acknowledged that the South had fired first into the disputed zone, and that the North Koreans had responded with shelling of their own.

After this initial slip-up, the responsibility of the South for having fired first was simply disappeared from the media and the manufacturing of public opinion was set in motion with stories of North Korean “aggression”, of North Korean destruction of island villages, of North Korean murder of two marines and two civilians. Photographs and TV footage featured exclusively “evidence” of Northern “aggression” and “attacks”.

Fearlessly departing from their responsibility to provide informed background to the dispute, gutter journalists created “contexts” that placed all the blame on the North. The North, according to this rubbish, “attacked” because of an imminent leadership transfer and the need for the grandson of Kim Il-Sung to be “blooded” before being formally anointed as the new Dear Leader.

The ruling ideas about this conflict are those created to serve the needs and interests of the ruling US imperialists. The capitalist media lazily demonises the North instead of really investigating the incident.

Peace-loving and anti-imperialist forces must unite to condemn the US imperialists and the puppet regime in the South. It is they who must be held accountable for any further bloodshed.

Smash US imperialism!
Hands off North Korea!

Crony capitalism, an assault, and the Labor assault on workers' rights

At around 3am on the morning of Sunday Nov 28, the State Treasurer Kevin Foley was assaulted in an Adelaide city street.

There is no suggestion that there was any political motive behind the king hit that left him with broken glasses and a cut nose and forehead.

The previous morning, Foley had been the target of abuse emanating from more than 2000 traditional Labor supporters – mainly union and community organization members – who had rallied in rainy conditions from 8.30 am outside the South Australian Labor Party’s State Convention to demand that the government reverse its savage budget cuts and “return to true Labor values”.

Foley was a major target, both as the Treasurer responsible for cutting jobs and entitlements in the public sector, and for his arrogant dismissal of union objections. His description of unions as “dinosaurs” was responded to by unionists at huge rallies carrying inflatable Tyrannosaurus Rexes as a rebuff and a visible display of determination to take on Foley – often depicted as a Fred Flintstone-like character.

A report on the rally and whether or not the Labor Party can ever be expected to embrace the true values of working Australians can be found here

Under the leadership of Premier Mike Rann and Treasurer Kevin Foley the Labor brand has been rebadged as “pro-business, pro-mining and pro-growth” and a once reformist social democratic party changed into a grubby conservative outfit whose natural friends are now to be found amongst the corporate sector, the property developers, the miners and “defence” industries.

So high has the stench of crony capitalism risen in the fair air of the Athens of the South (a bit of hyperbole from the Dunstan era of the 70s when the ALP Premier of the day wore his pink shorts to Parliament and introduced homosexual law reform and land rights recognition for traditional Aboriginal owners of the land) that demands for an Independent Commission Against Corruption have been put forward from across the political spectrum. (See here for a Marxist-Leninist trifold leaflet on the issue).

How does this relate to the assault on Foley in the early hours of the following morning?

Foley had been at an end-of-year office party, letting off steam after surviving a call at the Convention for “generational change” or, less politely, for his sacking.

It has been suggested that the State Treasurer should not be wandering the streets of the city alone at 3am, and rumours circulated in the media about his attempts to befriend some girls half his age.

That’s his business. He’s an adult and doesn’t need to be Nanny-managed

What concerned me is that Foley was out drinking with two businessmen, one of whom has been identified as property developer Ross Makris, 40, who last year topped Business Review Weekly’s Young Rich List with an estimated wealth of $420 million. Makris is the son of the fabulously wealthy property developer Con Makris, whose influence on the ALP was covered in this blog here .

So here’s the Labor State Treasurer, who had to be escorted into his party’s State Convention by armed police just in case he was assaulted by any of the 2000 working people protesting at his betrayal of “Labor values”, in the preferred company of two businessmen, one of whom happens to be Australia’s richest “young Australian” and whose family is a major financial backer of the Government.

This, more than being out on the streets at 3am, is what should be the cause of public disquiet…even anger.

It is crony capitalism at its best, or worst. As the article in the first link, above, observes, the division between the ALP leaders and the ALP rank and file is sure to widen.

Clive Palmer’s Christmas Present

Ross Gwyther, November 2010

From the Surplus Value website: http://www.surplusvalue.org.au/index.html

“..The seed ye sow, another reaps;
The wealth ye find, another keeps..”(Shelley’s Song to the Men of England)

You may have been struck by the news in November that millionaire businessman Clive Palmer bought some of his workers a Mercedes for Christmas!

What a turnaround for the books. This slightly overweight and usually dishevelled capitalist who disdains the trappings of the suited corporate world treats his employees so handsomely. Or does he?

The story was told in the Australian on November 20th. Palmer’s nickel processing factory north of Townsville had netted him $200 million this year. In return he paid for a holiday to Fiji for each of the 750 workers at the plant. As well as this, he bought for the 50 most valued workers a $50,000 Mercedes Benz. Quite a Christmas present – or so our national rag would have us believe.

In reality what Clive did, was to give back to these workers a little of the money they had made for him. It takes only a minute to work this out for yourself.
$200 million profit created by 800 workers – that amounts to $250,000 profit created by each worker on average. This is after the cost of the raw material (nickel) and the other processing materials. It is after the cost of the electricity to make the plant operate. It is after the cost of renting or buying the factory. It is after the cost of paying each worker their annual wage.

Where did all the money – the costs of the raw materials and power and wages, as well as the $200 million profits come from? Well a moment’s thought answers the question. It came from the added value which the work of those workers created – they took nickel ore, and turned it into ingots of nickel. Each worker- whether they pulled the furnace, fixed the electric cabling, added up the company’s books, or designed the marketing brochures for selling the nickel – all were essential to this transformation of rocks into metal that could be sold to the world.

In other words it was their labour which transformed those rocks – and created the extra value which ingots of nickel have over dusty rocks from the centre of Australia.

Palmers “magnanimous” action puts him in the long tradition of the philanthropists of capital – the Carnegies and Rockerfellers. In the short run their actions endear them to the working class. They are portrayed as kind and generous, rather than as robber barons.

In the long run we can only thank them for exposing the reality of capitalism. Their actions show up in stark reality the full extent to which they exploit those who work for them. They provide a nice lesson in what surplus value really means – or as George Bernard Shaw said, “behind every great fortune, there is a great crime”
------
Ross Gwyther (PhD) works in Brisbane as an organiser with the National Tertiary Education Union, after an earlier career of more than 20 years as a research geophysicist specialising in earthquake studies. His interests centre around strategies for labour movement renewal and union organisation, and the intersection of these with community movements around ecological and peace issues.

Victory for Ark Tribe

Adelaide construction worker Ark Tribe has had charges laid against him by the bosses' mongrel "watchdog" the Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC) dismissed.

Ark had attended a stop-work meeting on a worksite at Flinders University over safety issues on May 30, 2008. He subsequently refused to attend a secret interrogation as required by the ABCC where he would have been questioned about what his mates had said at the meeting.

For this heinous "crime" he faced a mandatory six-month jail sentence.

Every time Ark has faced the courts over a period spanning eighteen months, workers around the country have stopped work and held rallies of support. The rallies have been attended by the staff and members of heaps of other unions as well.

The ABCC was created by the conservative Howard Government to break Ark's union, the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU). The social democratic "Labor" Party of Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, despite having promised to scrap the ABCC if elected, instead maintained it and have presided over its victimisation and intimidation of workers in the building industry.

Yesterday was the culmination of a mass campaign of support for Ark Tribe and for the defeat and repeal of the ABCC and its coercive powers. Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) national president Ged Kearney (above) spoke at a pre-hearing rally attended by several thousand workers and pledged Ark the continuing support of organised workers should he be sent to jail. She laughingly dismissed criticism of the CFMEU as a "rough and ready mob" and said that as President of the Australian Nursing Federation she had always found them to be the most reliable and supportive union.

CFMEU national president Dave Noonan (above) presented Ark a print-out of 2500 online messages of support. Messages of support had come in from friends around the world -from Asia, Europe and the United States.

SA Secretary of the CFMEU, Martin O'Malley (above left) drew parallels between the laws that had created and maintained the ABCC with the emergence of fascism in Nazi Germany and said the CFMEU would fight to "overturn the rotten laws that have spawned this evil situation".

Ark then introduced himself, as he always has at rallies, "as the proud father of Jake", acknowledging the teenage son who has stood at his side throughout. Thanking his workmates and his "family" at the Builders Labourers Federation Social Club for their support, he was embraced by SA Unions Secretary Janet Giles and then proceeded to recite the Oath of the Eureka Rebellion of 1854, saying "I swear to stand by by mates to defend our rights and liberties!"

With several thousand workers at his side, Ark took his final walk across the road to the Adelaide Magistrate's Court to hear the verdict on his case. Cheers broke out in the court as Magistrate David Whittle dismissed the charges on the grounds that they had not been laid by an authorised person!

Well, it was a technical knockout against the ABCC, but we were happy to take it!

"We got 'em!" said a jubilant Ark Tribe as he emerged from the court with both arms raised. "A victory for working Australians!"

Challenging the so-called "Labor Party" he added "To Julia Gillard and the Government - which side are you on???

SA Unions secretary Janet Giles welcomed Ark and the dismissal of charges against him on the steps of the Magistrates Court.

"However," she told the workers, "it doesn't change the fact that the laws which created this mess continue to exist, and other workers could face the same dreadful process that Ark tribe has just endured."

The ACTU's Kearney described the decision as "an important victory for the union movement in its fight against the ABCC".

"This is another nail in the coffin of the ABCC," she said, "another absolute step up in our campaign to have it abolished."