[LAAMN] Paul Krugman: Hawks and Hypocrites, George Bush Accidently Vots for Obama [No Kidding]
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/12/opinion/krugman-hawks-and-hypocrites.html? partner=rssnyt http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/12/opinion/krugman-hawks-and-hypocrites.html ?partner=rssnytemc=rss emc=rss Hawks and Hypocrites Paul Krugman: NY Times Op-Ed: 11/12/2012 Back in 2010, self-styled deficit hawks - better described as deficit scolds - took over much of our political discourse. At a time of mass unemployment and record-low borrowing costs, a time when economic theory said we needed more, not less, deficit spending, the scolds convinced most of our political class that deficits rather than jobs should be our top economic priority. And now that the election is over, they're trying to pick up where they left off. They should be told to go away. It's not just the fact that the deficit scolds have been wrong about everything so far. Recent events have also demonstrated clearly what was already apparent to careful observers: the deficit-scold movement was never really about the deficit. Instead, it was about using deficit fears to shred the social safety net. And letting that happen wouldn't just be bad policy; it would be a betrayal of the Americans who just re-elected a health-reformer president and voted in some of the most progressive senators ever. About the hypocrisy of the hawks: as I said, it has been evident for years. Consider the early-2011 award for fiscal responsibility that three of the leading deficit-scold organizations gave to none other than Paul Ryan. Then as now, Mr. Ryan's alleged plans to reduce the deficit were obvious flimflam, since he was proposing huge tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations while refusing to specify how these cuts would be offset. But in the eyes of the deficit scolds, his plan to dismantle Medicare and his savage cuts to Medicaid apparently qualified him as a fiscal icon. And how did the deficit scolds react when Mitt Romney served up similar flimflam, with Mr. Ryan as his running mate? Well, the Peter G. Peterson Foundation is deficit-scold central; Peterson funding lies behind much of the movement. Sure enough, David Walker, the foundation's former C.E.O. and arguably the most visible deficit scold in America, endorsed the Romney/Ryan ticket. And then there's the matter of the fiscal cliff. Contrary to the way it's often portrayed, the looming prospect of spending cuts and tax increases isn't a fiscal crisis. It is, instead, a political crisis brought on by the G.O.P.'s attempt to take the economy hostage. And just to be clear, the danger for next year is not that the deficit will be too large but that it will be too small, and hence plunge America back into recession. Deficit scolds are having a hard time with this issue. How can they warn us not to go over the fiscal cliff without seeming to contradict their own rhetoric about the evils of deficits? This wouldn't be hard if they had been making a more honest case on the budget: the truth is that deficits are actually a good thing when the economy is deeply depressed, so deficit reduction should wait until the economy is stronger. As John Maynard Keynes said three-quarters of a century ago, The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity. But since the deficit scolds have in fact been demanding that we make deficits the priority even when the economy is depressed, they can't go there. So what we get instead, for example in a white paper on the fiscal cliff from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, is a garbled set of complaints: The adjustment is too fast (why?), or it's the wrong kind of deficit reduction, for reasons not made clear. Or maybe they are made clear, after all. For even as it rails against deficits, the white paper argues against raising tax rates and even suggests cutting them. So the deficit scolds, while posing as the nation's noble fiscal defenders, have in practice shown themselves both hypocritical and incoherent. They don't deserve to have a central role in policy discussion; they really don't even deserve a seat at the table. And they certainly don't deserve to have one of their own appointed as Treasury secretary. I don't know how seriously to take the buzz about appointing Erskine Bowles to replace Timothy Geithner. But in case there's any reality to it, let's recall his record. Mr. Bowles, like others in the deficit-scold community, has indulged in scare tactics, warning of an imminent fiscal crisis that keeps not coming. Meanwhile, the report he co-wrote was supposed to be focused on deficit reduction - yet, true to form, it called for lower rather than higher tax rates, and as a guiding principle no less. Appointing him, or anyone like him, would be both a bad idea and a slap in the face to the people who returned President Obama to office. Look, we should be having a serious discussion about America's fiscal future. But a serious discussion is exactly what we haven't been having these past couple years - because the discourse was
[LAAMN] The Petreus Resignation
General David Petreus has resigned after evidence of an extramarital affair surfaced. A highly regarded, efficient military officer has been brought low by behavior that is as old as time. This reinforces The Empire's narrative that their soldiers are honorable me. To be sure, most of them do not piss on dead civilians, torture live ones, or rape women and children, as has been documented. But the army itself is an army of invasion and occupation, and General Petreus was part of its leadership. The civilians who commanded him are as guilty of war crimes as Adolf Hitler. Like Rommel, Petreus may be a good soldier and a good man. I would bet hard currency that he deeply regrets his affair with Ms. Broadwell, not only because it was wrong, hurting his family and his career, but also because she seems to have been somewhat unhinged. Certainly, he did the honorable thing, which unfortunately puts him in a distinct minority. Colin Powell should have resigned when it was shown that he had lied to the whole world about Iraq. (And BTW, that lie led directly to the army and Petreus being sent there, of course.) Other people in the military should be resigning when it is shown that there men have engaged in the lower level war crimes I mentioned at the beginning of this article. That General Petreus was an officer in an army that invaded a sovereign nation that had NOT attacked the U.S. is clear. At the time he received his orders to carry out actions in Iraq, he certainly must have believed the propaganda about Saddam Huseein, but later when his army found no WMD, what did he do? Did he resign? And that army of which he was part also used weapons like Depleted Uranium, which is arguably prohibited by international law, and white phosphorus, which is clearly prohibited, also make everyone who used it vulnerable to charges of war crimes. The dreadful and brutal occupation of Fallujah, which has been pretty much hushed up by the U.S. media, was also carried out by the U.S. military. Are we to suppose that Petreus didn't know anything about it? At the time (2003), he was engaged in fighting south of Baghdad (Fallujah is west of the capital.) In 2009, he was quoted as saying that what turned Fallujah around was the local populace rejecting al-Qaeda. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-502243_162-3232352.html That Petreus resigned, whether voluntarily or under some sort of duress which we as yet know nothing about, was sad for him and his family. It was entirely a mess of his own doing, though, and for that, our sympathy should be somewhat limited. That he was an officer of an army of occupation, both in Iraq and Afghanistan, stretches my sympathy to the breaking point. The people who deserve our sympathy are the hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians who died in that war, and the thousands of veterans who committed no war crimes voluntarily, yet languish in military hospitals or whose bones rot in graveyards. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] --- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --- Unsubscribe: mailto:laamn-unsubscr...@egroups.com --- Subscribe: mailto:laamn-subscr...@egroups.com --- Digest: mailto:laamn-dig...@egroups.com --- Help: mailto:laamn-ow...@egroups.com?subject=laamn --- Post: mailto:la...@egroups.com --- Archive1: http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn --- Archive2: http://www.mail-archive.com/laamn@egroups.com --- Yahoo! Groups Links * To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/laamn/ * Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional * To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/laamn/join (Yahoo! ID required) * To change settings via email: laamn-dig...@yahoogroups.com laamn-fullfeatu...@yahoogroups.com * To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: laamn-unsubscr...@yahoogroups.com * Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
[LAAMN] Fwd: RAC-LA Celebrating 5 Years of Organizing the Members of the MacArthur Park Community
-- Forwarded message -- From: John A Imani johnaima...@gmail.com Date: Mon, Nov 12, 2012 at 10:28 AM Subject: RAC-LA Celebrating 5 Years of Organizing the Members of the MacArthur Park Community To: rac-lasupport...@lists.riseup.net Comrades, The Revolutionary Autonomous Communities-Los Angeles--formed in the wake of the Police Riot in MacArthur Park on May Day 2007--was initiated as a response to demonstrate that the right of human laborers to go where ever it is that we might find work w/o regard to man-made inventions such as borders. On May Day 2007 the LAPD took a position that should one demonstrate for this (and other) human rights then that one (and all who do so) will be attacked by the armed power of the state. The radicals who formed RAC-LA, in opposition to this, did so with the express intention of organizing not only paper-less migrants but the lowest economic rung of the working class, the homeless, the hungry, the work-less, the lowest paid members of our class so as to: 1.) provide mutual aid with and to each other through RAC's 'Programa Comida', our 'Food Program' which weekly provides fresh vegetables and fruits free of charge to now over 200 of those in need; and, 2.) lay the plans and develop a model of revolutionary resistance that ought serve as an example of new ways of thinking, new methods of work. Below our announcement, you will find a political-economic description of the methods and manners of RAC-LA's organization. Join us Sunday Nov 18th to celebrate 5 years of the efforts towards achieving these goals. JAI RAC-LA RAC-LAs Participation in The Circuits of Production *1st Circuit* *Planning* *(First Circulation Circuit)* * * */ \* *4**th**Circuit 2**nd** Circuit* * Consumption Production* * a. individual* * b. productive * * * * \ /* *3rd Circuit* *Allocation and Distribution* *(Second Circulation Circuit) * The circuits of capitalist production, indeed those of any and all modes of production (e.g. slavery, feudalism, socialism, communism, even hunter-gathering) consist of 1.) Planning; 2.) Production; 3.) Allocation and Distribution; and, 4.) Consumption. In Planning, decisions are made as to what things are to be produced and therefore what factors of production (materials, tools and labor), necessary to produce them, have to be allocated (in capitalism this means purchased) and arrayed before production can begin. In the circuit of Production, these factors are combined so as to fabricate or grow or mine, etc. the desired objects. In distribution, the items are apportioned to their end-users (in capitalism this means sold to the end-users). And, in consumption the end-users make use of them either for direct consumption as consumers or indirect consumption, that is productive consumption, by making these goods available as factors for the allocation decisions made in circuit 1 as means of production. Though RAC-LA hardly represents the might, mass and complexity of the coming socialist commonwealth, it does have, albeit in microcosm, similar economic problems in each of its circuits that it too must solve. *The First Circulation Circuit-The Factors Market* In order to understand RAC-LAs participation in its own Circuit 1, the planning of production, it is necessary to understand the product that is being produced. That product is not this or that fruit nor these or those vegetables, rather it is the bundles of food themselves which are composed of the fruits and vegetables. Up until this time, as we have now acquired a small garden space, RAC-LA has not itself manufactured nor farmed any item save T-shirts. Instead, what is planned and what is done is the assembling of the packages that for 4 ½ years we have distributed to an average of more than 175 people every Sunday in MacArthur Park in Los Angeles. Items that, while still healthy and nutritious, might bear some blemish that make them un-saleable but not un-consumable. These items form the raw material for RAC-LA workers production, in our Circuit 2, of bundles that contain items that we have salvaged from being tossed. The first phase of RAC-LAs planning therefore consists therefore of allocation of its labor-powers to make the pick-ups. Now, as there are no waged-workers who might do this, nor are there bosses who might have ordered these last to do so, this is and has been accomplished by the free and voluntary acceptance of these tasks by comrades who take upon themselves particular assignments. Should, for any reason, the comrade who is scheduled for a pick-up is unable to perform, her place is immediately taken by another comrade. This voluntary association will implicitly color much of what follows
[LAAMN] ACLU-SC Pasadena/Foothills Foreclosure Forum Returns November 13
ORECLOSURE CRISIS #2 EDUCATIONAL FORUM: WHAT PROGRESS HAVE WE MADE LOCALLY, STATEWIDE, AND NATIONALLY? Representatives from Occupy Fights Foreclosure, LA Housing Authority, and Occupy Pasadena will answer. When: Tuesday, 13 November 2012, 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. Where: Neighborhood Church, 301 No. Orange Grove Bouldevard, Pasadena Who: * Lori Gay, LA Neighborhood Housing Authority * Suzanne O'Keeffe, Occupy Fights Foreclosures * Ruth Sarnoff, Occupy Fights Foreclosures Free event, open to the public Contact: aclupasad...@yahoo.com [aclu foreclosure forum] http://www.laprogressive.com/?p=72284 [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] --- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --- Unsubscribe: mailto:laamn-unsubscr...@egroups.com --- Subscribe: mailto:laamn-subscr...@egroups.com --- Digest: mailto:laamn-dig...@egroups.com --- Help: mailto:laamn-ow...@egroups.com?subject=laamn --- Post: mailto:la...@egroups.com --- Archive1: http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn --- Archive2: http://www.mail-archive.com/laamn@egroups.com --- Yahoo! Groups Links * To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/laamn/ * Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional * To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/laamn/join (Yahoo! ID required) * To change settings via email: laamn-dig...@yahoogroups.com laamn-fullfeatu...@yahoogroups.com * To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: laamn-unsubscr...@yahoogroups.com * Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
Re: [LAAMN] The Petreus Resignation
Indefinite detention, torture, assassination of any and or all peoples. NO SWEAT! But in puritanical USA, have sex with someone not your wife? End of career for anyone in our elite system! (not so for the 99%). Wow, you should be able to talk to people outside of the Island Nation USA, and hear/see how they laugh at us. The rest of the worlds leaders openly have Mistresses, or even if they don't, it's not a big deal, but murders and assassins, killers of mothers fathers and little kids can be dethroned for sex outside of wedlock has to terrify the BeJesus out of the rest of the world, what psychos would have those problems? Oh yeah, the ones with ALL THE CHEMICAL WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION IN THE WORLD AND 90% OF ALL NUCLEAR WEAPONS IN THE WORLD. Laugh quietly at us or someone might determine you don't have enough Democracy or Civilization. We practice Government Issue, when your no longer of any use, discard and destroy, so no one else can use you either. Scott General David Petreus has resigned after evidence of an extramarital affair surfaced. A highly regarded, efficient military officer has been brought low by behavior that is as old as time. This reinforces The Empire's narrative that their soldiers are honorable me. To be sure, most of them do not piss on dead civilians, torture live ones, or rape women and children, as has been documented. But the army itself is an army of invasion and occupation, and General Petreus was part of its leadership. The civilians who commanded him are as guilty of war crimes as Adolf Hitler. Like Rommel, Petreus may be a good soldier and a good man. I would bet hard currency that he deeply regrets his affair with Ms. Broadwell, not only because it was wrong, hurting his family and his career, but also because she seems to have been somewhat unhinged. Certainly, he did the honorable thing, which unfortunately puts him in a distinct minority. Colin Powell should have resigned when it was shown that he had lied to the whole world about Iraq. (And BTW, that lie led directly to the army and Petreus being sent there, of course.) Other people in the military should be resigning when it is shown that there men have engaged in the lower level war crimes I mentioned at the beginning of this article. That General Petreus was an officer in an army that invaded a sovereign nation that had NOT attacked the U.S. is clear. At the time he received his orders to carry out actions in Iraq, he certainly must have believed the propaganda about Saddam Huseein, but later when his army found no WMD, what did he do? Did he resign? And that army of which he was part also used weapons like Depleted Uranium, which is arguably prohibited by international law, and white phosphorus, which is clearly prohibited, also make everyone who used it vulnerable to charges of war crimes. The dreadful and brutal occupation of Fallujah, which has been pretty much hushed up by the U.S. media, was also carried out by the U.S. military. Are we to suppose that Petreus didn't know anything about it? At the time (2003), he was engaged in fighting south of Baghdad (Fallujah is west of the capital.) In 2009, he was quoted as saying that what turned Fallujah around was the local populace rejecting al-Qaeda. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-502243_162-3232352.html That Petreus resigned, whether voluntarily or under some sort of duress which we as yet know nothing about, was sad for him and his family. It was entirely a mess of his own doing, though, and for that, our sympathy should be somewhat limited. That he was an officer of an army of occupation, both in Iraq and Afghanistan, stretches my sympathy to the breaking point. The people who deserve our sympathy are the hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians who died in that war, and the thousands of veterans who committed no war crimes voluntarily, yet languish in military hospitals or whose bones rot in graveyards. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] --- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --- Unsubscribe: mailto:laamn-unsubscr...@egroups.com --- Subscribe: mailto:laamn-subscr...@egroups.com --- Digest: mailto:laamn-dig...@egroups.com --- Help: mailto:laamn-ow...@egroups.com?subject=laamn --- Post: mailto:la...@egroups.com --- Archive1: http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn
[LAAMN] Economist-Russell Means Obit
Russell Means Russell Means, an American-Indian activist, died on October 22nd, aged 72 Nov 10th 2012 | from the print edition DRIVING one day through the Diné lands in New Mexiconot Navajo, a white mans wordRussell Means suddenly stopped the car. His wife wondered why. He had stopped to look at a shepherd among the scrubby hills, walking with his flock. No one told that man where to go or what to do. He was living with the land. Even better, he was praying, for that was what Indians did when they listened. And best of all, he was a free man. Silently, fervently, Mr Means saluted him. His own God-given sovereignty blazed inside him, igniting the Indian-rights movement he led for several decades. He was pure Oglala Lakota, born in the sacred Black Hills of South Dakota, and with the build of a chief, strapping and tall. His hard, dark eyes seemed to stare from another century, re-running ancient battles; his handsome face was crossed with scars, though these were less ritual marks than the souvenirs of bar-room brawls in Sioux Falls or San Francisco. The long braids (never cut, for hair carried memories), the beads, the leather: everything cried out his heritage. But being Indian, he fiercely said, didnt mean dressing in feathers like a bird and going to a pow-wow for a couple of hours. No Indian was authentic if he wasnt as free as his ancestors had been. He was far, very far, from that. The ramshackle Pine Ridge reservation, his birthplace, was still prisoner-of-war camp 344 in Pentagon records. The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), which oversaw such slums, was a den of corruption and incompetence. The modern tribal governments were mere puppets and collaborators. Indians everywhere (never Native Americans, another colonisers word) had been robbed, corralled and turned into cowed, self-loathing lemmings in white schools. Every treaty made by the white man with the Indians had been broken. America was the biggest liar in the world. He defied the lies in small ways and large. Not for him a driving licence or a fishing permit; the land he drove on, the river he fished in, belonged to his people anyway. For 21 years he paid no income tax. He refused to carry an Indian ID card. He ran on an activist platform for tribal, state and national office (for the Libertarian Party, in 1987), though never successfully. All this time he was the leading member of the American Indian Movement (AIM), as charismatic as he was divisive. The movement had turned him, at 29, away from a drifters life and towards a cause. At AIM he organised a succession of publicity stunts, including the occupation of Alcatraz Island; the seizing of a replica *Mayflower* in Boston Harbour on Thanksgiving Day, 1970; a prayer-vigil on top of Mount Rushmore, on Lakota holy land; and the occupation and trashing of the BIAs Washington offices in 1972. All were tasters for the most daring stunt of all, the occupation in 1973 of the hamlet of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge reservation, where in 1890 around 300 Lakota had been killed by the American army. Chilled and starving, but steeled by the free-walking spirits of the dead, Mr Means and 200 others held out, through blizzards and machinegun fire, against massed federal guardsmen for 71 days. He tried to dictate the terms of the surrender; the Nixon administration naturally reneged on them. *An arrow to the sun* Most of the time he was angry, an anger so intense that it was almost uncontrollable. His drinking did not help. Violence dogged him. Enemies, probably agents of the BIA, tried to shoot him. He got into fights, had spells in jail, married and then neglected several women in the style of the head-buck wandering male. His years in AIM were chaotic; he resigned six times before the movement split. While other groups, blacks and women, surged ahead, Americas Indians went nowhere much. In 2007 Mr Means and several others withdrew from the United States to form the Republic of Lakota, covering thousands of square miles in five states. Not even brother-Sioux would recognise it; but their freedom was too firmly mortgaged to white men. He lamented that his people had no natural allies: not Marxists, for they were rationalists who reduced men to machines; not Christians, for their notion of God was incompatible; not even blacks, for their experiences of repression were too different. The revolution he wanted was unlike anyone elses. It was the revolution of the medicine wheel, the sacred hoop of life, in which all things ended as they began: in which the world was turned slowly but beautifully backwards, towards the freedom in Nature the ancestors knew. He himself, though, went westwards, to Hollywood. In The Last of the Mohicans and Disneys Pocahontas in the 1990s he played the sort of wise, far-seeing chief he should have been, had everything been different. He became the standard Indian, sympathetic enough, but speaking the white mans script under the white mans
[LAAMN] Romney and his funders going for the WIN!
http://www.thenation.com/article/171048/super-storm-sandy-peoples-shock# http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/271-38/14495-focus-shameless-disaster-capitalism Author and activist Naomi Klein. (photo: CharlieRose.com) Shameless Disaster Capitalism By Naomi Klein, The Nation 12 November 12 Yes that's right: this catastrophe very likely created by climate change-a crisis born of the colossal regulatory failure to prevent corporations from treating the atmosphere as their open sewer-is just one more opportunity for more deregulation. he following article first appeared in the Nation. For more great content from the Nation, sign up for their email newsletters here. Less than three days after Sandy made landfall on the East Coast of the United States, Iain Murray of the Competitive Enterprise Institute blamed New Yorkers' resistance to big-box stores for the misery they were about to endure. Writing on Forbes.com, he explained that the city's refusal to embrace Walmart will likely make the recovery much harder: Mom-and-pop stores simply can't do what big stores can in these circumstances, he wrote. And the preemptive scapegoating didn't stop there. He also warned that if the pace of reconstruction turned out to be sluggish (as it so often is) then pro-union rules such as the Davis-Bacon Act would be to blame, a reference to the statute that requires workers on public-works projects to be paid not the minimum wage, but the prevailing wage in the region. The same day, Frank Rapoport, a lawyer representing several billion-dollar construction and real estate contractors, jumped in to suggest that many of those public works projects shouldn't be public at all. Instead, cash-strapped governments should turn to public private partnerships, known as P3s. That means roads, bridges and tunnels being rebuilt by private companies, which, for instance, could install tolls and keep the profits. Up until now, the only thing stopping them has been the law-specifically the absence of laws in New York State and New Jersey that enable these sorts of deals. But Rapoport is convinced that the combination of broke governments and needy people will provide just the catalyst needed to break the deadlock. There were some bridges that were washed out in New Jersey that need structural replacement, and it's going to be very expensive, he told The Nation. And so the government may well not have the money to build it the right way. And that's when you turn to a P3. Ray Lehmann, co-founder of the R Street Institute, a mouthpiece for the insurance lobby (formerly a division of the climate-denying Heartland Institute), had another public prize in his sights. In a Wall Street Journal article about Sandy, he was quoted arguing for the eventual full privatization of the National Flood Insurance Program, the federal initiative that provides affordable protection from some natural disasters-and which private insurers see as unfair competition. But the prize for shameless disaster capitalism surely goes to right-wing economist Russell S. Sobel, writing in a New York Times online forum. Sobel suggested that, in hard-hit areas, FEMA should create free trade zones-in which all normal regulations, licensing and taxes [are] suspended. This corporate free-for-all would, apparently, better provide the goods and services victims need. Yes that's right: this catastrophe very likely created by climate change-a crisis born of the colossal regulatory failure to prevent corporations from treating the atmosphere as their open sewer-is just one more opportunity for more deregulation. And the fact that this storm has demonstrated that poor and working-class people are far more vulnerable to the climate crisis shows that this is clearly the right moment to strip those people of what few labor protections they have left, as well as to privatize the meager public services available to them. Most of all, when faced with an extraordinarily costly crisis born of corporate greed, hand out tax holidays to corporations. Is there anyone who can still feign surprise at this stuff? The flurry of attempts to use Sandy's destructive power as a cash grab is just the latest chapter in the very long story I have called The Shock Doctrine. And it is but the tiniest glimpse into the ways large corporations are seeking to reap enormous profits from climate chaos. One example: between 2008 and 2010, at least 261 patents were filed or issued related to climate-ready crops-seeds supposedly able to withstand extreme conditions like droughts and floods; of these patents close to 80 percent were controlled by just six agribusiness giants, including Monsanto and Syngenta. With history as our teacher, we know that small farmers will go into debt trying to buy these new miracle seeds, and that many will lose their land. When these displaced farmers move to cities seeking work, they will find other peasants, indigenous people and artisanal fishing people who lost their lands
[LAAMN] South Africa-The Strike Wave and New Workers' Organisations: Breaking out of Old Compromises
The Strike Wave and New Workers' Organisations: Breaking out of Old Compromises By Leonard Gentle http://sacsis.org.za/s/stories.php?iUser=49 · 12 Nov 2012 Over the past weekend, the striking mineworkers of Amplats gathered at a mass rally in Rustenburg and howled their defiance of a series of ultimatums issued by the company. At De Doorns, farm workers are on a wildcat strike - the latest of a series that has become a feature of the South African landscape over the last three months, knocking Mangaung off the front pages. Something is stirring from below and it is time we got beyond the fear and trepidation that have become the stock response in the media. After the Marikana massacre President Jacob Zuma appointed the Farlam Commission and also convened an emergency Social Dialogue meeting of Business, Labour and Government in October. The partners released a statement calling on strikers to return to work and for the police to defend law and order and noted that the wave of unprotected strikes [could] undermine the legal framework of bargaining. So far the Farlam Commission has heard evidence of a police conspiracy, intimidation of witnesses, and a hotline line between Cyril Ramaphosa, Lonmin and the police. But with the strike wave continuing is it not also time to ask: Where did this much-vaunted legal framework of bargaining come from? And how virtuous, from the perspective of democracy and social justice, has that system been? South Africas Labour Relations Act (LRA), Basic Conditions of Employment Act (BCEA) and their associated institutions of the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA), the Sector Education Training Authorities (SETAs) and National Economic, Development and Labour Council (NEDLAC) came out of a series of engagements around the National Economic Forum, the Labour Market Commission and the National Training Board between 1990 and 1995. Like the World Trade Centre negotiations at Kempton Park, which shaped South African political compromises, there was a similar set of trade-offs being enacted within the labour market sphere between Labour (essentially COSATU) and Big Business. Under apartheid industrial relations legislation had been based on the racial alliance between Big Business and white workers, and the suppression of black workers. White workers could form trade unions and use their muscle to establish minimum wages, industrial councils to have industry negotiations and have systems of labour protection and training through apprenticeship and training boards. For black workers, however, strikes were illegal and they were excluded from labour protection and industrial councils. However the illegal strike wave amongst black workers outside Durban in 1973 saw black workers defy the labour laws and eventually set up strong unions and forge Recognition Agreements with large employers. New unions, like the Metal and Allied Workers Union, even broke into the Industrial Council system, eventually forcing the apartheid state, in 1979, to amend the LRA to grant African workers the right to form trade unions and to compel employers to deduct membership dues. By the time the labour market negotiations began in the early 1990s, COSATU wanted the state to legislate a legal duty to bargain on the part of employers, impose centralised bargaining and demanded that the new democratic state should provide a high degree of social protection for workers. Big Business, in turn, wanted maximum labour flexibility, little state intervention and little social protection. These opposing views appeared irreconcilable. The deal breaker was to take labour legislation out of the sphere of criminal sanction and state enforceability completely. Instead the state, and Big Business and Big Labour agreed to a system of what came to be called voice regulation and social partnership. So strikes and employer lockouts, unfair labour practices, unfair dismissals and incorrect wages, etc. would no longer be illegal but subject to discussion and rational persuasion through institutions like the CCMA. If your employer summarily sacked you or underpaid you, you couldnt get a labour inspector to reinstate you or have your employer compelled by law to honour a contract, you went to the CCMA where you could get a mediator to try and reach a compromise solution. Similarly, while there was no compulsion on the part of an employer to negotiate, you could invoke the power of your strong union to make life difficult in time for such a recalcitrant employer. And you could strike, albeit only on what was deemed to be a matter of interest (as opposed to unfair dismissal, which is deemed to be a conflict of right, over which you couldnt strike but had to refer to the CCMA for mediation and/or arbitration). So the labour movement got its plethora of rights, but which were dependent on their real organised power to exercise, because the state was not going to be involved. But Big
