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http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/07/06/1025667073364.html Abbott: a boon to the dark satanic mills By Terry Lane July 7 2002 http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/07/06/1025667073364.html Is it possible that Mr Tony Abbott MHR is a time traveller? Could he really belong in another era and place but has somehow slipped through a warp and has found himself wandering bewildered in the 21st century? One asks the question because one is determined to understand his quaintly archaic philosophy of human relations. You know his statement: "Most of us would accept that a bad boss is a little like a bad father or a bad husband. Notwithstanding all of his faults you find that he tends to do more good than harm. He might be a bad boss, but at least he's employing someone ..." Here's my proof for my time-traveller theory. Once upon a time I visited a "dark satanic mill" on the outskirts of Manchester. The British National Trust has spruced the place up and Disneyfied it to within an inch of its life, but you can still get an inkling of what went on there in the early days of the industrial revolution. This particular DSM manufactured cotton goods, spinning the yarn and weaving it on huge looms. These looms were so noisy that we take it for granted that industrial deafness was the norm for everyone. The air was filled with flying cotton fibre, so we must also assume that the workers' bronchials were taking a hammering. But there is something that makes this particular DSM special, even among the taken-for-granted horrors of the pre-trade union industrial revolution. There was an orphanage attached to the mill. The owner had the bright idea of buying up an asylum for parentless children in metropolitan Manchester and transporting the contents to his mill. Lots of little kids, given board and lodging and forced to work in the factory. At the mill today, stuck up around the walls, are extracts from Hansard of a parliamentary inquiry into child labour. Little children were well-suited to work in the weaving room. They scuttled around under the moving looms clearing out the cotton fluff. Every now and then one would get squashed and killed by the fast-moving loom. This would bring the entire factory to a standstill while the little corpse was extracted from the works. Other workers directed their hatred at the dead child because they lost wages, such as they were, while the plant was idle. Many children developed rickets due to malnutrition and the unnatural strains placed on young bodies by the demands of the job. Nevertheless, the owner of the DSM argued before the parliamentary inquiry that, although he might be a bad boss, he was better than no boss at all. There were many who believed him. Good people tut-tutted about the rigours of child labour, but it was better than having the little blighters running wild in the streets with the arse out of their pants. Others reckoned that 10 hours toil six days a week, followed by four hours in chapel on the Lord's day, would do them the world of good. The mill owner saw himself - and was seen by others of his class - as a regular philanthropist. Karl Marx blew away the spurious argument that bosses do the proletariat a favour when they give them jobs. Capitalists can only be capitalists if they are in a position to command the surplus value created by workers' labour, so if anyone should be grateful it is the owner of the mill. Mind you, when boss and worker are bound together in mutual loyalty and respect it is a beneficial symbiosis. Marx foresaw the day when, under the self-serving dogmas of globalisation and free trade, the owners of capital would be able to draw on such a vast global reservoir of unemployed people for their labour that any poor sod lucky enough to get a job would be so pathetically grateful he would forget his dignity. Mr Abbott reckons that that is the way God intended it to be. He is from another age. QED.
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[NYTimes] January 20, 2002 Parched, Big Steel Goes to Its Washington Well By LESLIE WAYNE As one industry after another troops to Washington to ask for handouts, Thomas J. Usher, the chief executive of the U.S. Steel Corporation, has an offer he feels the Bush administration cannot refuse. He wants $12 billion in government aid to pay for employee retirement benefits that are now the obligation of the steel industry. After that, he wants antitrust clearance to allow U.S. Steel to acquire a raft of steel makers, for practically no cash, giving his company a near monopoly among old-line steel makers. There's more. He wants the government to impose tariffs on imported steel of up to 40 percent, to protect U.S. Steel and others - tariffs that could raise the price of every refrigerator and automobile sold in America and that could threaten thousands of jobs in steel-using companies. Finally, he wants it done soon - in the next few months, he says - to prevent the domestic steel industry from collapsing. "Although my proposal is ugly," said Mr. Usher, who has been rallying the industry and its unions behind his plan, "it's not as ugly as liquidating some of these steel companies and putting 20,000 or 60,000 steelworkers and their families on the street without health care or pension plans." With some, but not all, of the domestic steel industry reeling, Mr. Usher and platoons of steel executives and union officials have been meeting with the White House to press their case. Aspects of his proposal are so audacious that even some within his industry - mainly the Nucor Corporation (news/quote), a mini-mill steel maker - have taken out newspaper advertisements denouncing some elements as "corporate welfare." Still, Mr. Usher has been given an open door at the highest levels of the Bush administration, which has been surprisingly sympathetic to the pleas of Big Steel. "Inside the administration, this issue has gotten more high-level attention from the cabinet than any other on the economic front," said Grant D. Aldonas, under secretary of commerce for international trade. "There's lots of intense review of the numbers the industry has put forward, and we are trying to get a bottom-line number on what the cost to the taxpayer would be." The "can't refuse" aspect of the plan is the political cost that goes with not backing it. While the Bush administration has not said whether it will support the plan, Mr. Usher and his fellow executives, as well as leaders of the politically powerful steelworkers union, paint a bleak picture of what refusal would mean. Particularly vivid is the specter of another round of industry bankruptcies and the shuttering of steel mills. That would throw thousands of angry steelworkers into the streets in crucial battleground states just as the Republicans are seeking more Congressional seats in midterm elections. "The cost to the administration of doing nothing has bad politics associated with it," said Terry Straub, a U.S. Steel lobbyist. "You would have lots of bankruptcies in steel states, and the politics of that speaks for itself. The Republicans see opportunity in states that traditionally do not have strong Republican support." William Klinefelter, a lobbyist for the United Steelworkers of America, concurred: "If things work out, the president can go back to those states and say, `This is what I did.' " Big Steel believes that it has a friend in President Bush. The companies were heartened by Mr. Bush's decision to spend his Labor Day at a steelworkers picnic near Pittsburgh and to see Vice President Dick Cheney campaigning in 2000 at Weirton Steel (news/quote) in West Virginia. Even more important has been the administration's effort to enact some of the broadest restrictions on foreign-made steel in over a decade. Within the next month, Mr. Bush is widely expected to impose large duties or quotas on imported steel, something that the Clinton administration had steadily resisted. "Frankly, these guys have been a lot easier to deal with than the Clinton White House," one steel industry lobbyist said. "For four years, we got a lot of lip service, but not action." To prevail in Washington, U.S. Steel is leaving nothing to chance. The company has doubled its lobbying budget, spending $2.7 million in the first six months of 2001, the most recent figures available, compared with $2.3 million for all of 2000. Its lobbying team includes Washington heavyweights like Edward Gillespie, a former official in the Bush Commerce Department and a top Republican strategist, and former Representative Vin Weber, a Republican from Minnesota. The company recently hired Joe Lockhart, the former Clinton press secretary, as its spokesman. In the last week, some of this fancy footwork has paid off within the industry. On Tuesday, U.S. Steel announced that it had gained the support of Nucor, which had been leading the opposition among steel mini- mi
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January 31, 2001 Pirate Attacks Reach Record High By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 12:25 p.m. ET KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) -- Pirate attacks have reached an all-time high, with 72 people killed in 469 attacks last year, and the waterways of Indonesia remain the most dangerous, a maritime monitoring group reported Wednesday. The number of pirate attacks in 2000 rose 57 percent compared to 1999, with about one-third occurring in Indonesian waters, the International Maritime Bureau said in its annual report. Indonesia, the world's largest archipelago with 13,000 islands, was also the country where pirate attacks were most violent, the report said. Pirates, many armed with knives, boarded 86 ships, hijacking two, and tried to attack 31 other vessels in Indonesian waters, the report said. ``There are no signs the attacks will drop unless Indonesia takes serious steps to address the problem,'' the maritime bureau said in a statement. Piracy also increased in Bangladesh, India, Ecuador, the Straits of Malacca and the Red Sea, the report said. The United Nations is set to discuss piracy in May, the report said, and Japan's Coast Guard had expressed its readiness to spearhead a multinational anti-piracy effort. The International Maritime Bureau is a London-based organization funded largely by ship owners and insurers.
