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The following articles were published by The Guardian, newspaper of the Communist Party of Australia, in its issue of February 1, 2012. Reproduction of articles, together with acknowledgement if appropriate, is welcome.
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INDEX
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01. Car industry – battle for Australian manufacturing
Bob Briton
The press’ business pages are full of predictions that Ford, GMH and Toyota will take their Australian car making operations offshore. Almost every columnist is taking a dry economist’s attitude to the prospect – that it’s inevitable and that governments should stop supporting the industry. The Opposition agrees. Speculation has been prompted by sackings at Toyota and a lack of commitment from Ford or Holden to produce vehicles in Australia when current models end their cycle. The jobs of 50,000 workers employed in the car industry hang in the balance along with the future of Australia as a country where people “make things”, to borrow a phrase from former PM Kevin Rudd.
Most Australians don’t agree with the neo-liberal stance taken by pro-corporate columnists. A survey by Essential Media Communications found that:
79 percent agree Australia should retain its manufacturing sector
68 percent support current levels of industry assistance to support jobs in the Australian car industry
62 percent agree that other manufacturing industries should receive similar assistance
Decisions of this magnitude are not made by the Australian people, however. They are made in boardrooms in distant locations by companies determined to squeeze the biggest profits possible from their global operations. The car industry internationally has taken a hit from the capitalist economic crisis that appears set to worsen. Many sectors of the Australian economy are performing badly and workers’ purchasing power is down.
Fewer cars are being sold and people are scaling down the size of the cars they buy. Car making in Australia, for export in particular, has been rocked by the high exchange rate for the Australian dollar. Manufacturing workers will be forced to pay the price for all this chaos of capitalist production.
Assistance through
the front door
Australia’s car making industry used to be supported by tariffs of up to 60 percent. The Whitlam government took an axe to protection of locally based manufacturers for a time during its term in office. The systematic reduction of tariffs began in the early days of neo-liberalism with the Button Plan – named after Bob Hawke’s Minister for Industry and Commerce during the 1980s.
The ultimate consequences of this policy of unilateral disarmament became so alarming to Australian governments in terms of reduced local sales and job losses that a new way to assist carmakers had to be found. Protectionism was still taboo for legislators committed to capitalist globalisation. “Industry assistance” – cash bribes to manufacturers to stay in Australia – became the by-word. The policy of cash grants didn’t prevent Mitsubishi deserting its Adelaide plants in 2008.
Undeterred, the Rudd Government unveiled a New Car Plan. Gillard cut assistance back last year as her government set out after another neo-liberal Holy Grail – a budget surplus. The Australian equivalent of the “cash for clunkers” program was taken off the table. Other cutbacks were announced. Nevertheless, the New Car Plan with its core Automotive Transformation Scheme is still worth $3.4 billion.
The poor carmakers
Toyota’s announcement of the sacking of 350 workers (or 10 percent of the workforce) from its Altona plant provoked an outpouring of official sympathy. Max Yasuda, the chief of Toyota Australia painted a grim picture. “The reality is that our volumes are down. What we assumed would be a temporary circumstance has turned into a permanent situation,” he said.
When the redundancies were announced, industry minister Kim Carr was feeling Mr Yasuda’s pain. “Ultimately, companies have to take the tough decisions based on commercial realities to ensure that their business model remains sustainable, and that is what Toyota has done today.”
He should be feeling sorry for the workers. Toyota did not honour commitments to the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union to make any redundancies voluntary. The redundancy packages have been trimmed back. The company is talking about how to make production at Altona more “competitive”, i.e. how to speed it up with a more “flexible workforce”. It made public its “regrets” that workers took industrial action last year after 16 years without any such action.
Workers are right to look to their own collective interests and be sceptical of company and government pronouncements. Mitsubishi workers were constantly being assured that the latest sacrifice was necessary, that the transnational was committed to its Adelaide workforce, and so on. When it finally closed its doors in 2008, the Rann Government offered a range of widely hyped “adjustment support”. The assumption made by the corporate media was that these workers would find new jobs as the invisible hand of the market worked its magic. Three years later a study revealed that most had not found suitable employment. Many had been bankrupted after taking on various franchised small businesses.
What to do?
The Gillard government is in a trap set by decades of neo-liberalism and commitment to capitalism in general. It would be an exceedingly difficult thing at this stage to establish a nationalised car industry to take over where Toyota, Ford and GMH leave off. The government is stuck with a policy of offering bribes to the monopolies to maintain their Australian base. It is right when it says the Opposition leader Tony Abbott’s threat to choke off assistance would be a deadly blow to local jobs.
A list of incentives is being drawn up. Holden may get between $100 million to $200 million to stay put for a while longer. The latest announcement was made at the Detroit Motor Show earlier this month. Ford will get $34 million of federal funds to improve fuel economy and emissions on its Falcon and Territory models. The amount was topped up by $19 million from the Victorian government and $50 million from the parent company to complete a $103 million total package.
However, even with this sort of investment, industry pessimists are in the majority. Industry Minister Kim Carr was accompanied to the US during his recent visit by the newly appointed SA Premier, Jay Weatherill. He was on a mission to extend GMH’s production at Elizabeth but his other courtesy calls give an indication as to the state government’s vision beyond the demise of local vehicle building. On his return, the Premier announced a new contract for BAE systems to make titanium components for the tailfins of the US Joint Strike Fighter.
Defence industries and uranium mining make up the government’s retrograde vision for the future of the South Australian economy and it appears other states and the federal governments are thinking along similar lines. Given the class allegiances Australian governments have taken up, it is unlikely they will engage in any planning independent of the transnationals. They will have to be forced to do so.
Australia has considerable manufacturing prowess. As has been noted, it is only one of 13 countries with the capacity to bring cars from the drawing board stage to full production. It could just as easily be a centre for industries making green energy and public transport infrastructure. The battle to force Australian governments to go down that sustainable path is now on. The alternative is bleak – a deindustrialised, deskilled country with few prospects.
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02. EDITORIAL – Needed: a new system
The Great Transformation: Shaping New Models was the theme of the World Economic Forum (WEF) held in Davos from January 25-29. The reference is to “new” models of capitalism. The “Arab Spring” protests demanding democratic rights and social justice, the Occupy Movement in the US and the millions of people across Europe who have taken to the streets are worrying governments and big business. People around the world are demanding jobs, social justice, democratic rights, and some are even questioning the system of capitalism. Inside the exclusive Swiss ski resort, 2,600 business and government leaders, academics and “safe” (not going to question the capitalist system itself) trade union and NGO leaders rubbed shoulders.
Outside the conference, the 50 or so protestors who braved the cold and camped in igloos, were prevented by 6,000 security forces from going near the streets of Davos. The armed fighter jets that patrolled the skies above proved ineffective when protestors decided to “occupy the sky” above the conference with large red weather balloons.
WEF managing director Lee Howell warned, “It’s no longer simply cyclical, with everybody down and everybody getting to go back up. This time some people may not get up.” His comments reflected those of many corporate and banking leaders, looking for ways to clean up their image and the need to address the inevitable deepening of the crisis and halt the growing protest actions by the victims of the crisis and austerity measures.
Speakers blamed poor corporate governance, development of technology, the greed of individual capitalists, anything but the capitalist system itself. Likewise their solution, their “new” models, included training more job-ready workers, the need to be “good corporate citizens”, philanthropy to the poorer nations, economic reforms within capitalism. But not a word suggesting the system might be the problem. They regurgitated the old “capitalism with a human face” in its various forms.
There was even a session on the future of capitalism which was sponsored by Time Magazine. (Yes, even the sessions had corporate sponsors – after all WEF is a massive money spinning capitalist venture!) Former ACTU president and now International Trade Union Confederation general secretary Sharan Burrow told delegates that the business community had “lost its moral compass”. “We must redesign the model. We must reset it. Stop the greed. Unless employers and workers sit down with governments, the system will continue to fail.” On the eve of the forum, Burrow had ruled out real change: “It is too simplistic to say we need a new system. The system is not working because of extraordinary greed, extraordinary inequality and attacks on workers’ rights that are leading to a crash in demand.”
Burrow told delegates: “We need to say if capitalism is going to sustain itself, if it is going to provide secure jobs, it has to distribute wealth evenly and it has to make a contribution to the common good.” Her comments only serve to mislead trade unions and workers that under capitalism wealth can be “distributed evenly” and there is such a thing as “the common good” between capitalists and the workers they exploit.
Burrow put forward a set of five principles: jobs; social protection, sustainable demand and decent work; financial regulation (dealing with speculative trading on financial markets and registration of credit rating agencies); fair and progressive taxation; and climate action. These are all progressive and desirable reforms, but even as reforms they are weak; they fail to address many of the pressing issues – privatisation, sackings of public servants, lower pensions, neo-liberal trade and financial deregulation, etc.
More importantly they divert attention from the cause of the crisis. As the statement issued by the 13th Meeting of Communist and Workers Parties in Athens last December stated, “… the crisis is a crisis of the system. It is not faults within the system but the system itself that is faulty, generating regular and periodic crises.
“It results from the sharpening of the main contradiction of capitalism between the social character of production and the private capitalist appropriation and not from any version of the management policy of the system or from any aberration based on the greed of some bankers or other capitalists, or from the lack of effective regulatory mechanisms. It highlights the historical boundaries of capitalism and the need to strengthen the struggles for anti-monopoly anti-capitalist ruptures, the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism.” (See Guardian #1532, 25-01-2012)
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03. Speaking out for the disenfranchised
Bob Briton
January 2012 saw the arrival of Immortal Technique for his first ever Australia and New Zealand tour. Immortal Technique is a Harlem based Hip Hop artist of African-Peruvian descent. He is well known for his political lyrics and activism that are deeply critical of, for example, US imperialism.
I attended the show in my hometown, Adelaide. There was an interesting mix of the usual Hip Hop crowd and people interested in an alternative in music and-or-society more broadly. Supported in Adelaide by Social Change and Dialect & Despair and nationally by AKIR and Poison Pen, Immortal Technique played tunes from all four of his releases (Revolutionary Vol.s 1 & 2, The Third World and The Martyr). It was great to see a supportive, enthusiastic and peaceful crowd joining in with chants of “Free Palestine” etc.
Technique told the story of when he was seeking a deal to distribute his second album “Revolutionary Vol. 2”. An executive advised him to remove politically “sensitive” songs from the album in order to get a distribution deal (songs such as The Cause of Death, “the United States sponsored the rise of the 3rd Reich/ Just like the CIA trained terrorists to the fight/ Build bombs and sneak box cutters onto a flight”, for example).
For artists working in any genre this kind of censorship is at best disturbing and totally undermines both their integrity and the driving force behind their art. The issue raises interesting questions about the music industry and how it works with the media to misrepresent Hip Hop in particular. Hip Hop culture has at its heart the interests of young black people, people who are institutionally marginalised and disenfranchised by society: it was always going to be a target for the establishment.
The controllers of music and the media don’t want a strong and united urban culture that advocates for black power or people power. It is my belief that the promotion of the so-called Gangster Rap of the 1990s comes from the need of the establishment to prevent the audience, whether black, white young or old, from listening to anything that challenges the status quo. Labelling music in this way not only switches off the audiences’ minds to challenging the system but also denigrates the makers of such music, mostly young working-class black men. What better way to manipulate a culture than to label it as violent, overtly sexual, misogynist and purely concerned with crime?
Artists like Immortal Technique have become successful in spite of this through sheer hard work and determination. No doubt the Internet era has helped artists stay independent through direct downloads from their own websites and social media sites. It will be interesting to see what develops from here.
At the end of the night, Technique urged the audience to support independent and underground Hip Hop artists on the local scene. I have no doubt that the culture in Australia is strong and so long as artists commit to keeping their integrity and refusing to “sell out”, the culture will remain strong.
The Martyr is available for free download from the Viper records website:
viperrecords.com/index.php/artists/immortal-technique
There is also a mixtape featuring AKIR and Immortal Technique available for free download at:
www.datpiff.com/AKIR-The-Secret-mixtape.119835.html
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04. Back to the bad old days
for Abbott
Peter Mac
Federal Liberal leader Tony Abbott loves old fashioned political “solutions”. Last week he provoked anger when he declared, with reference to Canberra’s Aboriginal tent embassy that things should “move on”.
Abbott later denied he had meant nothing offensive. But how could anyone interpret his statement other than meaning that the embassy should be removed?
He’s also reported to have said that the embassy is an eyesore. On the 40th anniversary of its establishment, his statements were bound to offend Aboriginal people and others who consider the treatment of Indigenous Australians an eyesore on the history of Australia.
A jackass, but dangerous
Not content with offending Aboriginal people, Abbott also sparked a domestic and international furore by declaring that under a conservative coalition government the Australian Navy would force asylum seeker boats back to Indonesia.
Richard Towle, regional representative of UNHCR (the UN High Commission for Refugees) tactfully pointed out: “Any such blanket approach would potentially place Australia in breach of its obligations under the Refugee Convention and other international law obligations, and – as past experience has shown – is operationally difficult and dangerous for all concerned.”
This didn’t worry Abbott. He indicated that the Coalition would just sort things out with the Indonesians, and wouldn’t lose much sleep about international treaty obligations. He sneered: “The next Coalition government will have a Jakarta focus to its foreign policy, not a Geneva focus”.
Adopting the arrogant stance of colonial powers, he stated imperiously: “The (Australian) Navy has done it before. [There’s] no reason why they can’t do it safely again. … The legal home of these vessels, Indonesian flagged, Indonesian crewed, Indonesian ported, is in Indonesia.”
The Indonesian government was less than impressed. The Indonesian national police chief spokesman stated: “You have to hand them (asylum seekers) over for processing to UNHCR, just like Indonesia.” A spokesman for the president stated bluntly that his country did not interfere with Australian political affairs. Hinting that Abbott’s policy had the potential to damage diplomatic relationships between Australia and Indonesia, he said pointedly: “We closely observe the long-term relationship of the two countries”.
Following suicidal precedents
Alarmed at Abbott’s approach, the Australian Navy’s Admiral Barrie pointed out that it was both impractical and highly dangerous for asylum seekers and (by implication) for our regional relationships.
He said: “Irrespective of any government’s policy, I’m sure our officers will act in accordance with international law and the safety of life at sea conventions. Policy can’t override international law and cannot tell a commanding officer what decisions he must make at sea at the time.”
Admiral Barrie also noted that under international law a boat must be seaworthy and navigable, and its passengers in good condition before it can be turned around. His well-intentioned advice was wasted. If Abbott ever became Prime Minister the evidence to date indicates strongly that he would direct the Navy to carry out his orders, regardless of any potential breach of international treaty obligations, or any risk of damage to our international relations. However, if a diplomatic row did break out, he’d be the first to blame someone else for it.
Since Abbott gained leadership of the federal Liberals, his behaviour has given the government plenty of reasons to reject all his reactionary policies. But it hasn’t done so. For example, the Northern Territory intervention, initiated by Abbott’s idol John Howard, remains in place. It was one of the prime underlying causes of the resentment that erupted in last week’s Canberra restaurant demonstration.
The odious policy of processing asylum seeker applications for asylum off-shore has also been preserved as official Labor policy. The government doesn’t have the number of parliamentary seats to implement its infamous “Malaysian solution”, because of the implacable opposition from the Greens, and from the conservative Coalition who claim that the equally infamous Nauru option is a better deal.
It is, however, possible that the government is cynically using the off-shore processing impasse to its electoral advantage. After all, the fact that processing is now of necessity taking place on the mainland has taken some of the sting out of objections to the off-shore policy, which had been voiced by a very wide range of organisations and individuals – including one former Liberal prime minister. On the other hand, each of the two major parties can reassure redneck voters that the failure to implement off-shore processing is the other party’s fault.
The government has taken a number of initiatives that have been highly praiseworthy – for example plain paper packaging for cigarettes. However, it remains committed to the same policies as the Liberals, with only slightly modified variations, on a wide range of issues.
It has, for example clung limpet-like to mandatory detention of asylum seekers. That policy has resulted in the gross overcrowding of detention centres, agonising delays in processing of applications, (sometimes for years), suicides, mental breakdowns, riots, and punishment that has included jail sentences for some asylum seekers who have rebelled against this grossly unjust treatment.
The government has also adopted a policy of charging members of the crews of asylum seeker boats with people smuggling, and has introduced mandatory sentencing for this offence. As a result the government has been able to claim that dozens of people smugglers have been apprehended, whereas in reality most of those imprisoned have been young men and boys from impoverished rural families, innocent of any serious offence.
Almost all the real people smugglers have remained secure in the ports of origin of the boats. According to Federal Police, only two percent of those charged have actually been involved in organising people smuggling, and most of that two percent were extradited from other countries, rather than arriving with the boats. Moreover, the mandatory detention regime has imposed enormous financial and managerial burdens on the states’ courts.
The Labor government should abandon these “copy-cat” conservative policies. If they don’t, the electorate will certainly abandon the government.
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05. Struggle and
working class history
“Should workers struggle?” was the theme of a meeting of trade union and Communist Party activists held in Sydney towards the end of 2011. The following article is the contribution to the meeting by MALCOLM TULLOCH, NSW state secretary of the Construction and General Division of the CFMEU.
The history of the working classes has always been one of struggle. There is no condition or entitlement that we have today that hasn’t been hard fought for.
Superannuation, long service leave, an eight-hour day, rostered days off, paid holiday leave, workers’ compensation, paid sick leave, accident insurance and pay rises were not given to workers by generous bosses.
Instead, workers united around these causes, put their pay packets and jobs on the line and fought with strikes and demonstrations to secure justice in the workplace.
It is a historic fact that each of these incremental victories by the working class was fought against with the fury of a world war by employers, big business and conservative political forces. They were Hanrahans who declared “we’ll all be ruined before the year is out”. And that was and remains the big lie that business pushes.
Despite dire predictions, almost 60 years after the 40-hour working week became law, it’s never been a better time to be big business and workers are fighting a rearguard battle to defend even the right to a decent day’s pay.
In 2011 we have the obscenity of corporation after corporation in Australia hitting record profits. Here’s a few to contemplate:
BHP Billiton made $23.6 BILLION dollars profit – a corporate record in Australian history.
Australian banks are among the most profitable in the world. The Commonwealth Bank alone made a $6.83 billion full-year profit with Westpac just pipping it in the history-making stakes with a $7 billion profit. The ANZ and NAB weren’t far behind and the sector will have a combined profit this year of $26 billion.
In construction, profits in 2010 increased 55.5 percent and Australia’s biggest builder Leightons made $300 million profit in the first three months of this financial year alone.
Qantas bosses tell us the company is struggling yet it is one of the most profitable in the world and despite floods and earthquakes still pulled in half a billion dollar profit in the financial year just ended.
It’s not only corporate Australia that is doing very well – the people that run corporate Australia are having the time of their life. In Australia the average CEO’s total pay packet is now worth almost 100 times that of the average worker. So Alan Joyce at Qantas can give himself a 70 percent pay rise, and at the same time refuse to negotiate a fair pay rise for the people that actually help keep the planes in the sky.
So we have record profits and obscene executive pays and big business still wants more. When Joyce shut down all Qantas flights, it wasn’t about a pay dispute – it was about crushing the union movement and you could hear big business cheering from the sidelines. It is no surprise that the Qantas board is overloaded with anti-union heavyweights from mining multinationals, chief among them chairman Leigh Clifford who headed Rio Tinto during its push to put workers on contracts.
Driving wages down
The truth is business in Australia is intent on driving wages down. Westpac’s profit was in large part fuelled by getting rid of staff. They are not the only ones shedding workers to boost profits. Qantas has announced 1,000 job cuts and wants to send jobs off-shore to Asia. We all know the fate of Bluescope steel workers in the Illawarra and there is BHP’s record-breaking results.
There is in Australia a conga-line of corporations that have no moral compass when it comes to workers’ safety, job security and rights.
This lack of morality in business is best exemplified by Albino Albores, a carpenter who worked for Bovis Lend Lease for 35 years. The CFMEU is now fighting an unfair dismissal claim for Albores after he was sacked recently because of the downturn in construction. It’s not so much the loss of his job that has hit Albores, but the manner in which it was done.
This 60-plus-year-old was convinced to come back to work from a rare use of his sick leave because Lend Lease needed him to work. So he turns up at 7am and is told he needs to clean out a container. He walks around to the container and standing there is a Lend Lease manager with Albores’ termination papers.
So after 35 years of loyalty, the company can’t show this ordinary man enough respect to take him into an office and offer him a chair while they sack him.
That is how big business operates in Australia today. The bottom line is everything and humanity and dignity cost too much.
In Australia, unions are fighting a concerted bid by business to drive wages down. They are doing this by offering individual contracts, using illegal immigrants and by turning workers into small businesses through the use of Australian Business Numbers and sham contracting. Not only does this reduce the cost to business it means ordinary workers are carrying the risks of injury and sickness and safety.
World struggle
Across the world there is a desire and a momentum for change coming from the working classes. Nations are still reeling from the global financial crisis created by corporate excess and corruption. The bonus system is still operating on Wall St and trillions of dollars has been spent propping up the capitalist structure. So those that created this crisis have walked away unscathed. Yet the innocent in all this – workers – are still paying.
Beside the drop in superannuation income, in Greece huge cuts to pay are being demanded to meet debts. In the US, Republican States are using their debt issues as leverage to cut health insurance to public sector workers and ban collective bargaining. In Australia, the Qantas dispute has in many ways galvanised and come to symbolise the working class’s fears for the future of their work and a sense of fatalism about job security.
The union movement needs to take up this challenge here and overseas. We need to seek out our brothers and sisters in developing nations and stand by them as they create labour movements. First world businesses should not reap record profits on the back of other people’s poverty. Rather than a race to the bottom, we should be demanding first-world conditions, safety and pay for third-world workers. Not only will this help pull those nation’s economies forward, it will negate the need to move jobs offshore.
In first world nations like Australia, workers need to remember the gains of collective struggle and raise their voice politically to protect that right. We cannot be apathetic. We must honour the gains of the past by continuing the fight. We are here today asking should workers struggle? The answer is, was, and always will be, YES.
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06. Don’t trade away health
The Australian government is negotiating a Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPPA) free trade agreement with the US, New Zealand, Chile, Peru, Brunei, Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam.
But the agenda on health issues is being set by giant US pharmaceutical and tobacco companies. They have made submissions stating that they want to use the negotiations to:
Impose US intellectual property laws which give pharmaceutical corporations more rights to charge higher prices for longer periods for medicines;
Restrict the ability of governments to provide medicines at affordable prices through systems like the Australian Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS);
Give corporations like Philip Morris the right to sue governments for millions of dollars when they try to protect public health through negotiation like the tobacco plain packaging legislation.
We need to ensure the Australian government stands by its policies and does not agree to these proposals.
US pharmaceutical companies want more intellectual property to charge high prices for longer
Intellectual property law already gives the inventor of new medicines the right to a patent, which means they can charge monopoly prices for 20 years before anyone else has the right to produce a cheaper generic form of the same medicine.
US pharmaceutical companies want to use the TPPA to get other countries to agree to changes that give more rights to patent holders. This would mean more than 20 years of monopoly prices, and would delay cheaper generic drugs from becoming available. This is not about free trade, but about greater rights for these corporations to charge high prices for a longer time. This would also be a disaster for the developing countries in the TPPA, as it would make many medicines completely unaffordable for them.
In April 2011 the Australian government responded to public pressure and announced in its new trade policy that it would not agree to increase intellectual property rights in trade agreements. But US corporations and the US Trade Representative are still pushing for these rights in the TPPA negotiations. The Australian government should stand by its policy not to agree to increase intellectual property rights and should not sign an agreement that is not consistent with this policy.
US companies want to reduce access to affordable medicines through the PBS
In the US, where the government does not have the same control over the price of medicines as the Australian government does, the wholesale prices for medicines are three to ten times the prices paid in Australia, and many people cannot afford to buy medicines.
In contrast to the US, the Australian PBS is based on the principle that everyone should have access to affordable medicines. Under the PBS, the wholesale price of medicines is lower than in the US because health experts compare the price and effectiveness of new medicines with the price of cheaper generic medicines with the same health effects. This results in a lower wholesale price for the pharmaceutical companies, which is why they oppose it. The government then subsidises the retail price we pay at the chemist, currently $5.60 for pensioners and $34.20 for others. As well as keeping the prices of medicines low for consumers, the lower wholesale price reduces the cost to the taxpayer. This makes the PBS more sustainable in the long term.
US pharmaceutical companies argue that the PBS is a barrier to trade. They want to be able to charge higher wholesale prices for new medicines, which would increase the cost of the PBS and lead to higher retail prices at the chemist. They want changes that would enable them to appeal against PBS decisions more easily and argue for higher prices for some medicines.
They also want to advertise their products direct to consumers. But health experts generally agree that that this leads to over-prescribing, and it is not an accepted practice except in the US. Australian government policy says that it will not agree to changes that would weaken the PBS, but the companies and the US Trade Representative are pushing for them in the TPPA negotiations. The Australian government should not agree to these changes.
US Tobacco companies want special rights to sue governments for damages
US corporations like the Philip Morris tobacco company want special rights in the TPPA for individual companies to sue governments for damages if their investments have been harmed by a particular law or policy. These disputes, known as investor-state disputes, are heard by international investment tribunals, which give priority to the interests of the corporations, not to the public interest. There are no health experts involved in these tribunals.
Using these special rights in the North American Free Trade Agreement, US corporations have sued governments for millions of dollars over health and environmental legislation.
International corporations can use their subsidiaries to find a forum which allows them to sue. For example, Philip Morris is an international company based in the United States. However, it recently claimed to be a Swiss company in order to use a Swiss investment agreement with Uruguay to sue the Uruguayan government over restrictions on tobacco advertising. It has also claimed to be a Hong Kong company in ordered to sue the Australian government for its proposed tobacco plain packaging legislation, using an obscure 1993 Hong Kong-Australia bilateral investment treaty.
Australian trade policy states that Australia will not support these special rights for investors to sue governments and will not seek them from other trading partners. But US companies and the US Trade Representative are still pushing strongly for them in the TPPA. The Australian government should not agree to investor-state dispute processes being included in the TPPA.
What you can do
The TPPA negotiations are continuing through 2011 and a framework agreement is expected in November. The negotiations are held in secret and the danger is that the Australian government could agree to some of these policies in return for access to other US markets. We must hold our government accountable and ensure that this does not happen.
The Australian Fair Trade and Investment Network has a website (www.aftinet.org.au) with resources that you can use to:
Send a message to the Trade Minister and the Health Minister and get your organisation to do so;
Raise the issues with your local member of parliament.
Beacon, Dec/Jan 2012
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07. CC Secretariat statement
Bringing war to our doorstep
US “pivots” to Asia, Pacific and Indian Ocean
“The United States is a Pacific power, and we are here to stay,” said US President Obama during his visit to Australia late last year as he announced the stationing of 2,500 US Marines in Darwin, more visits by US ships and aircraft to Australia, greater US access to Australian military bases, more joint military exercises, and storage of more US military equipment in Australia. Then on January 5 at the Pentagon, President Obama formally announced a new US policy which will bring war to Australia’s doorstep.
Sustaining US Global Leadership: Priorities for the 21st Century Defence outlines a “historic shift” in which the US will maintain its military presence in the Middle East and Europe but will now give priority to Asia, the Pacific and the Indian Ocean.
As more US ships, aircraft and troops come to Australian military facilities, the level of Australian military integration with an aggressive and destabilising US government will rise, further undermining Australia’s independence and security.
Over 160 years ago, Karl Marx predicted that the Pacific Ocean – “the great waterway of commerce” – would serve as “the centre of gravity of world commerce’, playing the same role as the Atlantic did in his century and the Mediterranean in Roman times. Marx’s comments captured the essence of the significant shift in global political economy that we are witnessing today, with increased trade and investment across the Pacific basin.
The Bush administration recognised the growing economic, political and strategic significance of the Asia-Pacific region over two decades ago. However, following the 9/11 attacks it gave priority to its “war on terror” to control the resources and political direction of the Middle East.
Now the Obama administration has ramped up the US interest in the Pacific basin and Asia, but also added the Indian Ocean.
The central US goal is control of the planet, power to install governments subservient to its demands, power to privatise and deregulate the economies of every nation in the world, the power to inflict on peoples everywhere “free market” corporate capitalism. US supremacy will be ensured by preventing the emergence of any other potentially competing power or government independent of its control.
The new US military policy is clearly designed less to cut US military spending than to reorder Pentagon priorities to ensure full spectrum dominance (dominating any nation, anywhere, at any time, at any level of force) for the first decades of the 21st Century. As President Obama himself said, after the near-doubling of military spending during the Bush era, the new doctrine will slow the growth of military spending but “it will still grow, in fact by four percent in the coming year.”
The new doctrine places China at the centre of US “security” concerns and prioritises expansion of US war making capacities in Asia and the Pacific and Indian Oceans, This means greater involvement of Australia, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and now India as the US “pivots” from Iraq and Afghanistan to the heartland of the 21st Century global economy, Asia and the Pacific.
The US strategy is to first exaggerate the level of China’s present military build-up, to encircle China through the acquisition of military bases in the Asian-Pacific region, to establish anti-Chinese alliances, and to deploy Theatre Missile Defence (TMD) systems near China as a way to negate their existing force of 20 nuclear missiles.
The US is making an effort to woo India into the American orbit by offering them help with nuclear weapons and Star Wars technologies. Australia is assisting with the supply of uranium. US armaments companies are facilitating India’s military expansion, especially space development, through an aggressive move into South Asian markets to supplement reductions in their Pentagon contracts.
Sustaining US Global Leadership: Priorities for the 21st Century Defence includes a focus on Iran, clearly intended to ensure that Tehran cannot jeopardise the West’s neo-colonial control of the Middle East and its oil which is so essential to their economies and militaries.
China’s military expansion is actually small compared to the US military. Australia’s intelligence community has stated that China’s current limited military build-up is not a threat to Australia. Rather it is China’s response to the huge US military expansion in the Asia-Pacific region.
China and Iran are the primary targets of: weapons systems to be developed; of expanded US military alliances, bases, access agreements and an increased tempo of military exercises; as well as advanced cyber and space war capabilities.
Despite the fact that China’s military budget is less than one tenth that of the US, China is providing the “enemy” the US military-industrial complex requires.
Preparing for war with China provides additional super profits for the US armaments corporations. It will be the primary justification for the acquisition of these costly new weapons systems.
Dennis Muilenburg, President of Boeing Defence, Space and Security (BDS), has estimated that countries such as Australia, South Korea, Japan, India, and Malaysia will be strong markets for its fighter jets, unmanned systems, helicopters, energy systems security and even cyber-warfare technology amid a slowdown in defence spending in its US home market.
The new US thinking on the region was foreshadowed in June 2005 when former Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld gave a speech in Singapore in which he criticised what he called China’s ongoing military build-up and claimed that it posed a threat to regional peace and stability.
US strategy was spelt out in the Pentagon’s 2006 Quadrennial Defence Review (QDR). This said the US will not allow the rise of a competing superpower. “Of the major and emerging powers,” the QDR says, “China has the greatest potential to compete militarily with the United States and field disruptive military technologies that could over time offset traditional US military advantages.”
The expansion of “missile defence” systems in Australia, Japan, South Korea and on US military platforms near China is intended to assist with these plans. It will actually create more regional tension and instability, increasing the possibility of war.
The US is engaged in an extensive build-up of military forces as part of a strategy to strengthen and position US and allied forces to contain or even militarily defeat China. Victory from these efforts would give the US its major economic goal of securing the natural resources, cheap labour and increasing productive strength of the region for the US transnationals.
With breathtaking arrogance, Hilary Clinton wrote last November in Foreign Policy that the Asia-Pacific focus puts the US “in the best position to sustain our leadership, secure our interests, and advance our values ...
“Harnessing Asia’s growth and dynamism is central to American economic and strategic interests ... . Open markets in Asia provide the United States with unprecedented opportunities for investment, trade, and access to cutting-edge technology. Our economic recovery at home will depend on exports and the ability of American firms to tap into the vast and growing consumer base of Asia.”
Liberal and Labor governments have been obediently trotting after the US, with a bloated “defence” budget now costing taxpayers $80 million every single day.
Labor’s opposition to missile defence has been abandoned and Australia may acquire its own limited missile defence capabilities – an additional part of the noose being tightened round China.
North West Cape (the Harold E Holt military base at Exmouth in WA) is the expected site for the establishment of the US Space Surveillance Network sensors. The Australian government has recently signed an agreement for US forces to return to North West Cape.
It is madness for the Gillard government to risk escalating tension and even war in the region, instead of good relations with a major trading partner, for the sake of an alliance with the United States.
The Gillard government’s decision to escalate its military relationship with the US is intended to strengthen US efforts to contain China as well as to strengthen Australia’s role in the region. It is all about strategic, political and economic dominance, directed first and foremost against China.
The ANZUS treaty underpins Australia’s military relationship with the USA.
Despite the views of the Australian public, ANZUS does not contain specific commitments or any guarantees that the US will assist Australia in times of need, even though it speaks vaguely about “consultation” and “action in accordance with constitutional processes”.
The only times the treaty has been invoked in the 60 years since its signing, Australia has ended up paying in one way or another for US strategic interests and US aggression.
It is not a mutual pact. It is a treaty of Australian subservience and a cover for aggression.
A 21st century US-China cold war catastrophe must not be allowed to happen. Because Labor and the Coalition basically agree, there has been relatively little public scrutiny or debate about Australia’s military strategy and military spending. It’s time to begin one.
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08. CULTURE & LIFE – Hurrah for a free press!
Rob Gowland
Were you as surprised as I was by the full page ad that appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald on Friday January 6? This pretentious page of self-adulation contained few words, but left you gobsmacked none the less.
The short text, printed on a page that was coloured pale blue but was otherwise blank, comprised these memorable sentiments:
“IT’S MORE THAN A MISSION” followed by
It’s the ingredient that makes us stand out from the crowd.
It’s the freedom to do what we’re passionate about.
It’s impartiality, it’s fairness.
It’s the licence to pursue excellence, above all else.
It’s our independence. And we’re proud of it.
At the bottom of the page were the words “Integrity/independence/every day” followed by the name of the paper and its web address.
Now the only people likely to see this ad are people who have already bought a copy of the Herald. Preaching to the converted? Coals to Newcastle?
Or was the ad intended to impress advertisers? Is that really the sort of thing advertisers care about?
The Herald might pride itself on being our local journal of record, but as for “impartiality” and “fairness” one has to say that that is bullshit. The Herald is a capitalist newspaper that unashamedly serves the interests of the ruling class.
The owners of the corporations that control “free enterprise” news media make a big song and dance about their “independence and freedom” being a cornerstone of democracy, but the last thing they want is for the news media to be taken over by the people, no matter how democratic that might be.
No, monopoly control over access to news is in fact a cornerstone of monopoly class rule, and the ruling class has no intention of giving up that control. In fact, maintaining private, for-profit control over the mass media is fundamental to capitalism.
Of course, the ruling class cannot expect much support from the mass of the people for that argument, so they dress it up in high-sounding phrases about “free speech” and the benefits of a “free press”, meaning free of government or community control, not free of corporate control.
To genuinely democratise the mass media in this country would require some severe shaking up. To begin with, the government could establish a national newspaper commission rather like the ABC, to run say The Sydney Morning Herald and its stablemates, while The Telegraph and The Australian could be given to the trade union movement to run.
Since these papers could no longer fund themselves from advertising without compromising their independence from corporate control, they would have to have guaranteed funding from the state.
The nature of bourgeois democracy being what it is, the ruling class knows only too well that our much-vaunted “democracy” under capitalism is anything but democratic. It is a safety valve: by allowing the people to oust one ruling class political party from office and install another, it gives the people the illusion that they are in control of their destiny.
But this is democracy within strictly controlled parameters: in Australia, you can elect either Labor or the Liberals. Occasionally a coalition partner is admitted to vary the mix, but nothing of significance is allowed to change.
In the past, the bourgeoisie has found it expedient to provide the workers with their own political party to support, for those occasions when the policies of mainstream capitalist political parties were just so on the nose that the people would no longer tolerate them. Social democratic or labour parties traditionally fill this bill, parties that pose as workers’ parties but actually support the capitalist system and the rule of the exploiters.
In recent years however, beginning in the USA, the capitalists have realised that they no longer need these bogus workers’ parties: they can get by quite well offering people a “choice” between two overtly bourgeois parties, between two millionaire (or even billionaire) candidates. All it needs is control of the mass media, to put the proper “spin” on the party or candidate.
In the presidential election campaign that has just begun in the United States, millions and millions of dollars are going to be spent just to get nominated, many millions more to get elected. Of course, only the very wealthy can even try to be candidates these days.
Republican candidate Mitt Romney last week released figures showing that his income in 2010 was a cool US$21.7 million, which because of the tough economic climate fell to a mere US$20.9 million in 2011. Mitt and his wife Ann collected most of these millions in capital gains from “a profusion of investments” as well as stock dividends and interest payments.
The majority of Republican voters are industrial workers and hard-hat construction workers (stockbrokers also tend to vote Republican but there are not as many of them). Workers get their income from wages. None of Mitt Romney’s income is from wages.
Obama is already campaigning on a basically right-wing platform, dressed up with some “progressive” rhetoric. Whoever wins the Republican nomination will also campaign on a right-wing platform, perhaps slightly further to the right than Obama and the Democrats (but not much).
Globally, the capitalist world is in deep crisis. What the US government does will affect us all. The global economic crisis has caused a lot of soul-searching among bourgeois forecasters and financiers, and while none are advocating socialism outright, quite a few are flying kites about the possible advantages of “state capitalism”, government controls, regulation, etc. They are looking to socialism to bale them out.
But they want to bale out capitalism by shifting the burden to the backs of the workers, by making ordinary people carry the can the way they did when the big banks got into strife. Now, when the banks are once again staring at humongous bad debts, caused by the conniving of those same banks, they expect the people to pay the debts for them.
It’s time to tell the capitalists: “No more baleouts!” And let’s raise the issue of socialism for real.
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END END END
The following articles were published by The Guardian, newspaper of the Communist Party of Australia, in its issue of February 1, 2012. Reproduction of articles, together with acknowledgement if appropriate, is welcome.
The Guardian,
Editorial, 74 Buckingham Street,
Surry Hills, Sydney NSW 2010, Australia
Communist Party of Australia,
74 Buckingham Street, Surry Hills,
Sydney NSW 2010, Australia
General Secretary: Dr Hannah Middleton
Phone (02) 9699 8844 Fax: (02) 9699 9833 Email CPA
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
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INDEX
- Car industry – battle for Australian manufacturing
- EDITORIAL – Needed: a new system
- Speaking out for the disenfranchised
- Back to the bad old days for Abbott
- Struggle and working class history
- Don’t trade away health
- CC Secretariat statement – Bringing war to our doorstep
- CULTURE & LIFE – Hurrah for a free press!
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01. Car industry – battle for Australian manufacturing
Bob Briton
The press’ business pages are full of predictions that Ford, GMH and Toyota will take their Australian car making operations offshore. Almost every columnist is taking a dry economist’s attitude to the prospect – that it’s inevitable and that governments should stop supporting the industry. The Opposition agrees. Speculation has been prompted by sackings at Toyota and a lack of commitment from Ford or Holden to produce vehicles in Australia when current models end their cycle. The jobs of 50,000 workers employed in the car industry hang in the balance along with the future of Australia as a country where people “make things”, to borrow a phrase from former PM Kevin Rudd.
Most Australians don’t agree with the neo-liberal stance taken by pro-corporate columnists. A survey by Essential Media Communications found that:
79 percent agree Australia should retain its manufacturing sector
68 percent support current levels of industry assistance to support jobs in the Australian car industry
62 percent agree that other manufacturing industries should receive similar assistance
Decisions of this magnitude are not made by the Australian people, however. They are made in boardrooms in distant locations by companies determined to squeeze the biggest profits possible from their global operations. The car industry internationally has taken a hit from the capitalist economic crisis that appears set to worsen. Many sectors of the Australian economy are performing badly and workers’ purchasing power is down.
Fewer cars are being sold and people are scaling down the size of the cars they buy. Car making in Australia, for export in particular, has been rocked by the high exchange rate for the Australian dollar. Manufacturing workers will be forced to pay the price for all this chaos of capitalist production.
Assistance through
the front door
Australia’s car making industry used to be supported by tariffs of up to 60 percent. The Whitlam government took an axe to protection of locally based manufacturers for a time during its term in office. The systematic reduction of tariffs began in the early days of neo-liberalism with the Button Plan – named after Bob Hawke’s Minister for Industry and Commerce during the 1980s.
The ultimate consequences of this policy of unilateral disarmament became so alarming to Australian governments in terms of reduced local sales and job losses that a new way to assist carmakers had to be found. Protectionism was still taboo for legislators committed to capitalist globalisation. “Industry assistance” – cash bribes to manufacturers to stay in Australia – became the by-word. The policy of cash grants didn’t prevent Mitsubishi deserting its Adelaide plants in 2008.
Undeterred, the Rudd Government unveiled a New Car Plan. Gillard cut assistance back last year as her government set out after another neo-liberal Holy Grail – a budget surplus. The Australian equivalent of the “cash for clunkers” program was taken off the table. Other cutbacks were announced. Nevertheless, the New Car Plan with its core Automotive Transformation Scheme is still worth $3.4 billion.
The poor carmakers
Toyota’s announcement of the sacking of 350 workers (or 10 percent of the workforce) from its Altona plant provoked an outpouring of official sympathy. Max Yasuda, the chief of Toyota Australia painted a grim picture. “The reality is that our volumes are down. What we assumed would be a temporary circumstance has turned into a permanent situation,” he said.
When the redundancies were announced, industry minister Kim Carr was feeling Mr Yasuda’s pain. “Ultimately, companies have to take the tough decisions based on commercial realities to ensure that their business model remains sustainable, and that is what Toyota has done today.”
He should be feeling sorry for the workers. Toyota did not honour commitments to the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union to make any redundancies voluntary. The redundancy packages have been trimmed back. The company is talking about how to make production at Altona more “competitive”, i.e. how to speed it up with a more “flexible workforce”. It made public its “regrets” that workers took industrial action last year after 16 years without any such action.
Workers are right to look to their own collective interests and be sceptical of company and government pronouncements. Mitsubishi workers were constantly being assured that the latest sacrifice was necessary, that the transnational was committed to its Adelaide workforce, and so on. When it finally closed its doors in 2008, the Rann Government offered a range of widely hyped “adjustment support”. The assumption made by the corporate media was that these workers would find new jobs as the invisible hand of the market worked its magic. Three years later a study revealed that most had not found suitable employment. Many had been bankrupted after taking on various franchised small businesses.
What to do?
The Gillard government is in a trap set by decades of neo-liberalism and commitment to capitalism in general. It would be an exceedingly difficult thing at this stage to establish a nationalised car industry to take over where Toyota, Ford and GMH leave off. The government is stuck with a policy of offering bribes to the monopolies to maintain their Australian base. It is right when it says the Opposition leader Tony Abbott’s threat to choke off assistance would be a deadly blow to local jobs.
A list of incentives is being drawn up. Holden may get between $100 million to $200 million to stay put for a while longer. The latest announcement was made at the Detroit Motor Show earlier this month. Ford will get $34 million of federal funds to improve fuel economy and emissions on its Falcon and Territory models. The amount was topped up by $19 million from the Victorian government and $50 million from the parent company to complete a $103 million total package.
However, even with this sort of investment, industry pessimists are in the majority. Industry Minister Kim Carr was accompanied to the US during his recent visit by the newly appointed SA Premier, Jay Weatherill. He was on a mission to extend GMH’s production at Elizabeth but his other courtesy calls give an indication as to the state government’s vision beyond the demise of local vehicle building. On his return, the Premier announced a new contract for BAE systems to make titanium components for the tailfins of the US Joint Strike Fighter.
Defence industries and uranium mining make up the government’s retrograde vision for the future of the South Australian economy and it appears other states and the federal governments are thinking along similar lines. Given the class allegiances Australian governments have taken up, it is unlikely they will engage in any planning independent of the transnationals. They will have to be forced to do so.
Australia has considerable manufacturing prowess. As has been noted, it is only one of 13 countries with the capacity to bring cars from the drawing board stage to full production. It could just as easily be a centre for industries making green energy and public transport infrastructure. The battle to force Australian governments to go down that sustainable path is now on. The alternative is bleak – a deindustrialised, deskilled country with few prospects.
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02. EDITORIAL – Needed: a new system
The Great Transformation: Shaping New Models was the theme of the World Economic Forum (WEF) held in Davos from January 25-29. The reference is to “new” models of capitalism. The “Arab Spring” protests demanding democratic rights and social justice, the Occupy Movement in the US and the millions of people across Europe who have taken to the streets are worrying governments and big business. People around the world are demanding jobs, social justice, democratic rights, and some are even questioning the system of capitalism. Inside the exclusive Swiss ski resort, 2,600 business and government leaders, academics and “safe” (not going to question the capitalist system itself) trade union and NGO leaders rubbed shoulders.
Outside the conference, the 50 or so protestors who braved the cold and camped in igloos, were prevented by 6,000 security forces from going near the streets of Davos. The armed fighter jets that patrolled the skies above proved ineffective when protestors decided to “occupy the sky” above the conference with large red weather balloons.
WEF managing director Lee Howell warned, “It’s no longer simply cyclical, with everybody down and everybody getting to go back up. This time some people may not get up.” His comments reflected those of many corporate and banking leaders, looking for ways to clean up their image and the need to address the inevitable deepening of the crisis and halt the growing protest actions by the victims of the crisis and austerity measures.
Speakers blamed poor corporate governance, development of technology, the greed of individual capitalists, anything but the capitalist system itself. Likewise their solution, their “new” models, included training more job-ready workers, the need to be “good corporate citizens”, philanthropy to the poorer nations, economic reforms within capitalism. But not a word suggesting the system might be the problem. They regurgitated the old “capitalism with a human face” in its various forms.
There was even a session on the future of capitalism which was sponsored by Time Magazine. (Yes, even the sessions had corporate sponsors – after all WEF is a massive money spinning capitalist venture!) Former ACTU president and now International Trade Union Confederation general secretary Sharan Burrow told delegates that the business community had “lost its moral compass”. “We must redesign the model. We must reset it. Stop the greed. Unless employers and workers sit down with governments, the system will continue to fail.” On the eve of the forum, Burrow had ruled out real change: “It is too simplistic to say we need a new system. The system is not working because of extraordinary greed, extraordinary inequality and attacks on workers’ rights that are leading to a crash in demand.”
Burrow told delegates: “We need to say if capitalism is going to sustain itself, if it is going to provide secure jobs, it has to distribute wealth evenly and it has to make a contribution to the common good.” Her comments only serve to mislead trade unions and workers that under capitalism wealth can be “distributed evenly” and there is such a thing as “the common good” between capitalists and the workers they exploit.
Burrow put forward a set of five principles: jobs; social protection, sustainable demand and decent work; financial regulation (dealing with speculative trading on financial markets and registration of credit rating agencies); fair and progressive taxation; and climate action. These are all progressive and desirable reforms, but even as reforms they are weak; they fail to address many of the pressing issues – privatisation, sackings of public servants, lower pensions, neo-liberal trade and financial deregulation, etc.
More importantly they divert attention from the cause of the crisis. As the statement issued by the 13th Meeting of Communist and Workers Parties in Athens last December stated, “… the crisis is a crisis of the system. It is not faults within the system but the system itself that is faulty, generating regular and periodic crises.
“It results from the sharpening of the main contradiction of capitalism between the social character of production and the private capitalist appropriation and not from any version of the management policy of the system or from any aberration based on the greed of some bankers or other capitalists, or from the lack of effective regulatory mechanisms. It highlights the historical boundaries of capitalism and the need to strengthen the struggles for anti-monopoly anti-capitalist ruptures, the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism.” (See Guardian #1532, 25-01-2012)
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03. Speaking out for the disenfranchised
Bob Briton
January 2012 saw the arrival of Immortal Technique for his first ever Australia and New Zealand tour. Immortal Technique is a Harlem based Hip Hop artist of African-Peruvian descent. He is well known for his political lyrics and activism that are deeply critical of, for example, US imperialism.
I attended the show in my hometown, Adelaide. There was an interesting mix of the usual Hip Hop crowd and people interested in an alternative in music and-or-society more broadly. Supported in Adelaide by Social Change and Dialect & Despair and nationally by AKIR and Poison Pen, Immortal Technique played tunes from all four of his releases (Revolutionary Vol.s 1 & 2, The Third World and The Martyr). It was great to see a supportive, enthusiastic and peaceful crowd joining in with chants of “Free Palestine” etc.
Technique told the story of when he was seeking a deal to distribute his second album “Revolutionary Vol. 2”. An executive advised him to remove politically “sensitive” songs from the album in order to get a distribution deal (songs such as The Cause of Death, “the United States sponsored the rise of the 3rd Reich/ Just like the CIA trained terrorists to the fight/ Build bombs and sneak box cutters onto a flight”, for example).
For artists working in any genre this kind of censorship is at best disturbing and totally undermines both their integrity and the driving force behind their art. The issue raises interesting questions about the music industry and how it works with the media to misrepresent Hip Hop in particular. Hip Hop culture has at its heart the interests of young black people, people who are institutionally marginalised and disenfranchised by society: it was always going to be a target for the establishment.
The controllers of music and the media don’t want a strong and united urban culture that advocates for black power or people power. It is my belief that the promotion of the so-called Gangster Rap of the 1990s comes from the need of the establishment to prevent the audience, whether black, white young or old, from listening to anything that challenges the status quo. Labelling music in this way not only switches off the audiences’ minds to challenging the system but also denigrates the makers of such music, mostly young working-class black men. What better way to manipulate a culture than to label it as violent, overtly sexual, misogynist and purely concerned with crime?
Artists like Immortal Technique have become successful in spite of this through sheer hard work and determination. No doubt the Internet era has helped artists stay independent through direct downloads from their own websites and social media sites. It will be interesting to see what develops from here.
At the end of the night, Technique urged the audience to support independent and underground Hip Hop artists on the local scene. I have no doubt that the culture in Australia is strong and so long as artists commit to keeping their integrity and refusing to “sell out”, the culture will remain strong.
The Martyr is available for free download from the Viper records website:
viperrecords.com/index.php/artists/immortal-technique
There is also a mixtape featuring AKIR and Immortal Technique available for free download at:
www.datpiff.com/AKIR-The-Secret-mixtape.119835.html
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04. Back to the bad old days
for Abbott
Peter Mac
Federal Liberal leader Tony Abbott loves old fashioned political “solutions”. Last week he provoked anger when he declared, with reference to Canberra’s Aboriginal tent embassy that things should “move on”.
Abbott later denied he had meant nothing offensive. But how could anyone interpret his statement other than meaning that the embassy should be removed?
He’s also reported to have said that the embassy is an eyesore. On the 40th anniversary of its establishment, his statements were bound to offend Aboriginal people and others who consider the treatment of Indigenous Australians an eyesore on the history of Australia.
A jackass, but dangerous
Not content with offending Aboriginal people, Abbott also sparked a domestic and international furore by declaring that under a conservative coalition government the Australian Navy would force asylum seeker boats back to Indonesia.
Richard Towle, regional representative of UNHCR (the UN High Commission for Refugees) tactfully pointed out: “Any such blanket approach would potentially place Australia in breach of its obligations under the Refugee Convention and other international law obligations, and – as past experience has shown – is operationally difficult and dangerous for all concerned.”
This didn’t worry Abbott. He indicated that the Coalition would just sort things out with the Indonesians, and wouldn’t lose much sleep about international treaty obligations. He sneered: “The next Coalition government will have a Jakarta focus to its foreign policy, not a Geneva focus”.
Adopting the arrogant stance of colonial powers, he stated imperiously: “The (Australian) Navy has done it before. [There’s] no reason why they can’t do it safely again. … The legal home of these vessels, Indonesian flagged, Indonesian crewed, Indonesian ported, is in Indonesia.”
The Indonesian government was less than impressed. The Indonesian national police chief spokesman stated: “You have to hand them (asylum seekers) over for processing to UNHCR, just like Indonesia.” A spokesman for the president stated bluntly that his country did not interfere with Australian political affairs. Hinting that Abbott’s policy had the potential to damage diplomatic relationships between Australia and Indonesia, he said pointedly: “We closely observe the long-term relationship of the two countries”.
Following suicidal precedents
Alarmed at Abbott’s approach, the Australian Navy’s Admiral Barrie pointed out that it was both impractical and highly dangerous for asylum seekers and (by implication) for our regional relationships.
He said: “Irrespective of any government’s policy, I’m sure our officers will act in accordance with international law and the safety of life at sea conventions. Policy can’t override international law and cannot tell a commanding officer what decisions he must make at sea at the time.”
Admiral Barrie also noted that under international law a boat must be seaworthy and navigable, and its passengers in good condition before it can be turned around. His well-intentioned advice was wasted. If Abbott ever became Prime Minister the evidence to date indicates strongly that he would direct the Navy to carry out his orders, regardless of any potential breach of international treaty obligations, or any risk of damage to our international relations. However, if a diplomatic row did break out, he’d be the first to blame someone else for it.
Since Abbott gained leadership of the federal Liberals, his behaviour has given the government plenty of reasons to reject all his reactionary policies. But it hasn’t done so. For example, the Northern Territory intervention, initiated by Abbott’s idol John Howard, remains in place. It was one of the prime underlying causes of the resentment that erupted in last week’s Canberra restaurant demonstration.
The odious policy of processing asylum seeker applications for asylum off-shore has also been preserved as official Labor policy. The government doesn’t have the number of parliamentary seats to implement its infamous “Malaysian solution”, because of the implacable opposition from the Greens, and from the conservative Coalition who claim that the equally infamous Nauru option is a better deal.
It is, however, possible that the government is cynically using the off-shore processing impasse to its electoral advantage. After all, the fact that processing is now of necessity taking place on the mainland has taken some of the sting out of objections to the off-shore policy, which had been voiced by a very wide range of organisations and individuals – including one former Liberal prime minister. On the other hand, each of the two major parties can reassure redneck voters that the failure to implement off-shore processing is the other party’s fault.
The government has taken a number of initiatives that have been highly praiseworthy – for example plain paper packaging for cigarettes. However, it remains committed to the same policies as the Liberals, with only slightly modified variations, on a wide range of issues.
It has, for example clung limpet-like to mandatory detention of asylum seekers. That policy has resulted in the gross overcrowding of detention centres, agonising delays in processing of applications, (sometimes for years), suicides, mental breakdowns, riots, and punishment that has included jail sentences for some asylum seekers who have rebelled against this grossly unjust treatment.
The government has also adopted a policy of charging members of the crews of asylum seeker boats with people smuggling, and has introduced mandatory sentencing for this offence. As a result the government has been able to claim that dozens of people smugglers have been apprehended, whereas in reality most of those imprisoned have been young men and boys from impoverished rural families, innocent of any serious offence.
Almost all the real people smugglers have remained secure in the ports of origin of the boats. According to Federal Police, only two percent of those charged have actually been involved in organising people smuggling, and most of that two percent were extradited from other countries, rather than arriving with the boats. Moreover, the mandatory detention regime has imposed enormous financial and managerial burdens on the states’ courts.
The Labor government should abandon these “copy-cat” conservative policies. If they don’t, the electorate will certainly abandon the government.
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05. Struggle and
working class history
“Should workers struggle?” was the theme of a meeting of trade union and Communist Party activists held in Sydney towards the end of 2011. The following article is the contribution to the meeting by MALCOLM TULLOCH, NSW state secretary of the Construction and General Division of the CFMEU.
The history of the working classes has always been one of struggle. There is no condition or entitlement that we have today that hasn’t been hard fought for.
Superannuation, long service leave, an eight-hour day, rostered days off, paid holiday leave, workers’ compensation, paid sick leave, accident insurance and pay rises were not given to workers by generous bosses.
Instead, workers united around these causes, put their pay packets and jobs on the line and fought with strikes and demonstrations to secure justice in the workplace.
It is a historic fact that each of these incremental victories by the working class was fought against with the fury of a world war by employers, big business and conservative political forces. They were Hanrahans who declared “we’ll all be ruined before the year is out”. And that was and remains the big lie that business pushes.
Despite dire predictions, almost 60 years after the 40-hour working week became law, it’s never been a better time to be big business and workers are fighting a rearguard battle to defend even the right to a decent day’s pay.
In 2011 we have the obscenity of corporation after corporation in Australia hitting record profits. Here’s a few to contemplate:
BHP Billiton made $23.6 BILLION dollars profit – a corporate record in Australian history.
Australian banks are among the most profitable in the world. The Commonwealth Bank alone made a $6.83 billion full-year profit with Westpac just pipping it in the history-making stakes with a $7 billion profit. The ANZ and NAB weren’t far behind and the sector will have a combined profit this year of $26 billion.
In construction, profits in 2010 increased 55.5 percent and Australia’s biggest builder Leightons made $300 million profit in the first three months of this financial year alone.
Qantas bosses tell us the company is struggling yet it is one of the most profitable in the world and despite floods and earthquakes still pulled in half a billion dollar profit in the financial year just ended.
It’s not only corporate Australia that is doing very well – the people that run corporate Australia are having the time of their life. In Australia the average CEO’s total pay packet is now worth almost 100 times that of the average worker. So Alan Joyce at Qantas can give himself a 70 percent pay rise, and at the same time refuse to negotiate a fair pay rise for the people that actually help keep the planes in the sky.
So we have record profits and obscene executive pays and big business still wants more. When Joyce shut down all Qantas flights, it wasn’t about a pay dispute – it was about crushing the union movement and you could hear big business cheering from the sidelines. It is no surprise that the Qantas board is overloaded with anti-union heavyweights from mining multinationals, chief among them chairman Leigh Clifford who headed Rio Tinto during its push to put workers on contracts.
Driving wages down
The truth is business in Australia is intent on driving wages down. Westpac’s profit was in large part fuelled by getting rid of staff. They are not the only ones shedding workers to boost profits. Qantas has announced 1,000 job cuts and wants to send jobs off-shore to Asia. We all know the fate of Bluescope steel workers in the Illawarra and there is BHP’s record-breaking results.
There is in Australia a conga-line of corporations that have no moral compass when it comes to workers’ safety, job security and rights.
This lack of morality in business is best exemplified by Albino Albores, a carpenter who worked for Bovis Lend Lease for 35 years. The CFMEU is now fighting an unfair dismissal claim for Albores after he was sacked recently because of the downturn in construction. It’s not so much the loss of his job that has hit Albores, but the manner in which it was done.
This 60-plus-year-old was convinced to come back to work from a rare use of his sick leave because Lend Lease needed him to work. So he turns up at 7am and is told he needs to clean out a container. He walks around to the container and standing there is a Lend Lease manager with Albores’ termination papers.
So after 35 years of loyalty, the company can’t show this ordinary man enough respect to take him into an office and offer him a chair while they sack him.
That is how big business operates in Australia today. The bottom line is everything and humanity and dignity cost too much.
In Australia, unions are fighting a concerted bid by business to drive wages down. They are doing this by offering individual contracts, using illegal immigrants and by turning workers into small businesses through the use of Australian Business Numbers and sham contracting. Not only does this reduce the cost to business it means ordinary workers are carrying the risks of injury and sickness and safety.
World struggle
Across the world there is a desire and a momentum for change coming from the working classes. Nations are still reeling from the global financial crisis created by corporate excess and corruption. The bonus system is still operating on Wall St and trillions of dollars has been spent propping up the capitalist structure. So those that created this crisis have walked away unscathed. Yet the innocent in all this – workers – are still paying.
Beside the drop in superannuation income, in Greece huge cuts to pay are being demanded to meet debts. In the US, Republican States are using their debt issues as leverage to cut health insurance to public sector workers and ban collective bargaining. In Australia, the Qantas dispute has in many ways galvanised and come to symbolise the working class’s fears for the future of their work and a sense of fatalism about job security.
The union movement needs to take up this challenge here and overseas. We need to seek out our brothers and sisters in developing nations and stand by them as they create labour movements. First world businesses should not reap record profits on the back of other people’s poverty. Rather than a race to the bottom, we should be demanding first-world conditions, safety and pay for third-world workers. Not only will this help pull those nation’s economies forward, it will negate the need to move jobs offshore.
In first world nations like Australia, workers need to remember the gains of collective struggle and raise their voice politically to protect that right. We cannot be apathetic. We must honour the gains of the past by continuing the fight. We are here today asking should workers struggle? The answer is, was, and always will be, YES.
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06. Don’t trade away health
The Australian government is negotiating a Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPPA) free trade agreement with the US, New Zealand, Chile, Peru, Brunei, Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam.
But the agenda on health issues is being set by giant US pharmaceutical and tobacco companies. They have made submissions stating that they want to use the negotiations to:
Impose US intellectual property laws which give pharmaceutical corporations more rights to charge higher prices for longer periods for medicines;
Restrict the ability of governments to provide medicines at affordable prices through systems like the Australian Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS);
Give corporations like Philip Morris the right to sue governments for millions of dollars when they try to protect public health through negotiation like the tobacco plain packaging legislation.
We need to ensure the Australian government stands by its policies and does not agree to these proposals.
US pharmaceutical companies want more intellectual property to charge high prices for longer
Intellectual property law already gives the inventor of new medicines the right to a patent, which means they can charge monopoly prices for 20 years before anyone else has the right to produce a cheaper generic form of the same medicine.
US pharmaceutical companies want to use the TPPA to get other countries to agree to changes that give more rights to patent holders. This would mean more than 20 years of monopoly prices, and would delay cheaper generic drugs from becoming available. This is not about free trade, but about greater rights for these corporations to charge high prices for a longer time. This would also be a disaster for the developing countries in the TPPA, as it would make many medicines completely unaffordable for them.
In April 2011 the Australian government responded to public pressure and announced in its new trade policy that it would not agree to increase intellectual property rights in trade agreements. But US corporations and the US Trade Representative are still pushing for these rights in the TPPA negotiations. The Australian government should stand by its policy not to agree to increase intellectual property rights and should not sign an agreement that is not consistent with this policy.
US companies want to reduce access to affordable medicines through the PBS
In the US, where the government does not have the same control over the price of medicines as the Australian government does, the wholesale prices for medicines are three to ten times the prices paid in Australia, and many people cannot afford to buy medicines.
In contrast to the US, the Australian PBS is based on the principle that everyone should have access to affordable medicines. Under the PBS, the wholesale price of medicines is lower than in the US because health experts compare the price and effectiveness of new medicines with the price of cheaper generic medicines with the same health effects. This results in a lower wholesale price for the pharmaceutical companies, which is why they oppose it. The government then subsidises the retail price we pay at the chemist, currently $5.60 for pensioners and $34.20 for others. As well as keeping the prices of medicines low for consumers, the lower wholesale price reduces the cost to the taxpayer. This makes the PBS more sustainable in the long term.
US pharmaceutical companies argue that the PBS is a barrier to trade. They want to be able to charge higher wholesale prices for new medicines, which would increase the cost of the PBS and lead to higher retail prices at the chemist. They want changes that would enable them to appeal against PBS decisions more easily and argue for higher prices for some medicines.
They also want to advertise their products direct to consumers. But health experts generally agree that that this leads to over-prescribing, and it is not an accepted practice except in the US. Australian government policy says that it will not agree to changes that would weaken the PBS, but the companies and the US Trade Representative are pushing for them in the TPPA negotiations. The Australian government should not agree to these changes.
US Tobacco companies want special rights to sue governments for damages
US corporations like the Philip Morris tobacco company want special rights in the TPPA for individual companies to sue governments for damages if their investments have been harmed by a particular law or policy. These disputes, known as investor-state disputes, are heard by international investment tribunals, which give priority to the interests of the corporations, not to the public interest. There are no health experts involved in these tribunals.
Using these special rights in the North American Free Trade Agreement, US corporations have sued governments for millions of dollars over health and environmental legislation.
International corporations can use their subsidiaries to find a forum which allows them to sue. For example, Philip Morris is an international company based in the United States. However, it recently claimed to be a Swiss company in order to use a Swiss investment agreement with Uruguay to sue the Uruguayan government over restrictions on tobacco advertising. It has also claimed to be a Hong Kong company in ordered to sue the Australian government for its proposed tobacco plain packaging legislation, using an obscure 1993 Hong Kong-Australia bilateral investment treaty.
Australian trade policy states that Australia will not support these special rights for investors to sue governments and will not seek them from other trading partners. But US companies and the US Trade Representative are still pushing strongly for them in the TPPA. The Australian government should not agree to investor-state dispute processes being included in the TPPA.
What you can do
The TPPA negotiations are continuing through 2011 and a framework agreement is expected in November. The negotiations are held in secret and the danger is that the Australian government could agree to some of these policies in return for access to other US markets. We must hold our government accountable and ensure that this does not happen.
The Australian Fair Trade and Investment Network has a website (www.aftinet.org.au) with resources that you can use to:
Send a message to the Trade Minister and the Health Minister and get your organisation to do so;
Raise the issues with your local member of parliament.
Beacon, Dec/Jan 2012
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07. CC Secretariat statement
Bringing war to our doorstep
US “pivots” to Asia, Pacific and Indian Ocean
“The United States is a Pacific power, and we are here to stay,” said US President Obama during his visit to Australia late last year as he announced the stationing of 2,500 US Marines in Darwin, more visits by US ships and aircraft to Australia, greater US access to Australian military bases, more joint military exercises, and storage of more US military equipment in Australia. Then on January 5 at the Pentagon, President Obama formally announced a new US policy which will bring war to Australia’s doorstep.
Sustaining US Global Leadership: Priorities for the 21st Century Defence outlines a “historic shift” in which the US will maintain its military presence in the Middle East and Europe but will now give priority to Asia, the Pacific and the Indian Ocean.
As more US ships, aircraft and troops come to Australian military facilities, the level of Australian military integration with an aggressive and destabilising US government will rise, further undermining Australia’s independence and security.
Over 160 years ago, Karl Marx predicted that the Pacific Ocean – “the great waterway of commerce” – would serve as “the centre of gravity of world commerce’, playing the same role as the Atlantic did in his century and the Mediterranean in Roman times. Marx’s comments captured the essence of the significant shift in global political economy that we are witnessing today, with increased trade and investment across the Pacific basin.
The Bush administration recognised the growing economic, political and strategic significance of the Asia-Pacific region over two decades ago. However, following the 9/11 attacks it gave priority to its “war on terror” to control the resources and political direction of the Middle East.
Now the Obama administration has ramped up the US interest in the Pacific basin and Asia, but also added the Indian Ocean.
The central US goal is control of the planet, power to install governments subservient to its demands, power to privatise and deregulate the economies of every nation in the world, the power to inflict on peoples everywhere “free market” corporate capitalism. US supremacy will be ensured by preventing the emergence of any other potentially competing power or government independent of its control.
The new US military policy is clearly designed less to cut US military spending than to reorder Pentagon priorities to ensure full spectrum dominance (dominating any nation, anywhere, at any time, at any level of force) for the first decades of the 21st Century. As President Obama himself said, after the near-doubling of military spending during the Bush era, the new doctrine will slow the growth of military spending but “it will still grow, in fact by four percent in the coming year.”
The new doctrine places China at the centre of US “security” concerns and prioritises expansion of US war making capacities in Asia and the Pacific and Indian Oceans, This means greater involvement of Australia, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and now India as the US “pivots” from Iraq and Afghanistan to the heartland of the 21st Century global economy, Asia and the Pacific.
The US strategy is to first exaggerate the level of China’s present military build-up, to encircle China through the acquisition of military bases in the Asian-Pacific region, to establish anti-Chinese alliances, and to deploy Theatre Missile Defence (TMD) systems near China as a way to negate their existing force of 20 nuclear missiles.
The US is making an effort to woo India into the American orbit by offering them help with nuclear weapons and Star Wars technologies. Australia is assisting with the supply of uranium. US armaments companies are facilitating India’s military expansion, especially space development, through an aggressive move into South Asian markets to supplement reductions in their Pentagon contracts.
Sustaining US Global Leadership: Priorities for the 21st Century Defence includes a focus on Iran, clearly intended to ensure that Tehran cannot jeopardise the West’s neo-colonial control of the Middle East and its oil which is so essential to their economies and militaries.
China’s military expansion is actually small compared to the US military. Australia’s intelligence community has stated that China’s current limited military build-up is not a threat to Australia. Rather it is China’s response to the huge US military expansion in the Asia-Pacific region.
China and Iran are the primary targets of: weapons systems to be developed; of expanded US military alliances, bases, access agreements and an increased tempo of military exercises; as well as advanced cyber and space war capabilities.
Despite the fact that China’s military budget is less than one tenth that of the US, China is providing the “enemy” the US military-industrial complex requires.
Preparing for war with China provides additional super profits for the US armaments corporations. It will be the primary justification for the acquisition of these costly new weapons systems.
Dennis Muilenburg, President of Boeing Defence, Space and Security (BDS), has estimated that countries such as Australia, South Korea, Japan, India, and Malaysia will be strong markets for its fighter jets, unmanned systems, helicopters, energy systems security and even cyber-warfare technology amid a slowdown in defence spending in its US home market.
The new US thinking on the region was foreshadowed in June 2005 when former Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld gave a speech in Singapore in which he criticised what he called China’s ongoing military build-up and claimed that it posed a threat to regional peace and stability.
US strategy was spelt out in the Pentagon’s 2006 Quadrennial Defence Review (QDR). This said the US will not allow the rise of a competing superpower. “Of the major and emerging powers,” the QDR says, “China has the greatest potential to compete militarily with the United States and field disruptive military technologies that could over time offset traditional US military advantages.”
The expansion of “missile defence” systems in Australia, Japan, South Korea and on US military platforms near China is intended to assist with these plans. It will actually create more regional tension and instability, increasing the possibility of war.
The US is engaged in an extensive build-up of military forces as part of a strategy to strengthen and position US and allied forces to contain or even militarily defeat China. Victory from these efforts would give the US its major economic goal of securing the natural resources, cheap labour and increasing productive strength of the region for the US transnationals.
With breathtaking arrogance, Hilary Clinton wrote last November in Foreign Policy that the Asia-Pacific focus puts the US “in the best position to sustain our leadership, secure our interests, and advance our values ...
“Harnessing Asia’s growth and dynamism is central to American economic and strategic interests ... . Open markets in Asia provide the United States with unprecedented opportunities for investment, trade, and access to cutting-edge technology. Our economic recovery at home will depend on exports and the ability of American firms to tap into the vast and growing consumer base of Asia.”
Liberal and Labor governments have been obediently trotting after the US, with a bloated “defence” budget now costing taxpayers $80 million every single day.
Labor’s opposition to missile defence has been abandoned and Australia may acquire its own limited missile defence capabilities – an additional part of the noose being tightened round China.
North West Cape (the Harold E Holt military base at Exmouth in WA) is the expected site for the establishment of the US Space Surveillance Network sensors. The Australian government has recently signed an agreement for US forces to return to North West Cape.
It is madness for the Gillard government to risk escalating tension and even war in the region, instead of good relations with a major trading partner, for the sake of an alliance with the United States.
The Gillard government’s decision to escalate its military relationship with the US is intended to strengthen US efforts to contain China as well as to strengthen Australia’s role in the region. It is all about strategic, political and economic dominance, directed first and foremost against China.
The ANZUS treaty underpins Australia’s military relationship with the USA.
Despite the views of the Australian public, ANZUS does not contain specific commitments or any guarantees that the US will assist Australia in times of need, even though it speaks vaguely about “consultation” and “action in accordance with constitutional processes”.
The only times the treaty has been invoked in the 60 years since its signing, Australia has ended up paying in one way or another for US strategic interests and US aggression.
It is not a mutual pact. It is a treaty of Australian subservience and a cover for aggression.
A 21st century US-China cold war catastrophe must not be allowed to happen. Because Labor and the Coalition basically agree, there has been relatively little public scrutiny or debate about Australia’s military strategy and military spending. It’s time to begin one.
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08. CULTURE & LIFE – Hurrah for a free press!
Rob Gowland
Were you as surprised as I was by the full page ad that appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald on Friday January 6? This pretentious page of self-adulation contained few words, but left you gobsmacked none the less.
The short text, printed on a page that was coloured pale blue but was otherwise blank, comprised these memorable sentiments:
“IT’S MORE THAN A MISSION” followed by
It’s the ingredient that makes us stand out from the crowd.
It’s the freedom to do what we’re passionate about.
It’s impartiality, it’s fairness.
It’s the licence to pursue excellence, above all else.
It’s our independence. And we’re proud of it.
At the bottom of the page were the words “Integrity/independence/every day” followed by the name of the paper and its web address.
Now the only people likely to see this ad are people who have already bought a copy of the Herald. Preaching to the converted? Coals to Newcastle?
Or was the ad intended to impress advertisers? Is that really the sort of thing advertisers care about?
The Herald might pride itself on being our local journal of record, but as for “impartiality” and “fairness” one has to say that that is bullshit. The Herald is a capitalist newspaper that unashamedly serves the interests of the ruling class.
The owners of the corporations that control “free enterprise” news media make a big song and dance about their “independence and freedom” being a cornerstone of democracy, but the last thing they want is for the news media to be taken over by the people, no matter how democratic that might be.
No, monopoly control over access to news is in fact a cornerstone of monopoly class rule, and the ruling class has no intention of giving up that control. In fact, maintaining private, for-profit control over the mass media is fundamental to capitalism.
Of course, the ruling class cannot expect much support from the mass of the people for that argument, so they dress it up in high-sounding phrases about “free speech” and the benefits of a “free press”, meaning free of government or community control, not free of corporate control.
To genuinely democratise the mass media in this country would require some severe shaking up. To begin with, the government could establish a national newspaper commission rather like the ABC, to run say The Sydney Morning Herald and its stablemates, while The Telegraph and The Australian could be given to the trade union movement to run.
Since these papers could no longer fund themselves from advertising without compromising their independence from corporate control, they would have to have guaranteed funding from the state.
The nature of bourgeois democracy being what it is, the ruling class knows only too well that our much-vaunted “democracy” under capitalism is anything but democratic. It is a safety valve: by allowing the people to oust one ruling class political party from office and install another, it gives the people the illusion that they are in control of their destiny.
But this is democracy within strictly controlled parameters: in Australia, you can elect either Labor or the Liberals. Occasionally a coalition partner is admitted to vary the mix, but nothing of significance is allowed to change.
In the past, the bourgeoisie has found it expedient to provide the workers with their own political party to support, for those occasions when the policies of mainstream capitalist political parties were just so on the nose that the people would no longer tolerate them. Social democratic or labour parties traditionally fill this bill, parties that pose as workers’ parties but actually support the capitalist system and the rule of the exploiters.
In recent years however, beginning in the USA, the capitalists have realised that they no longer need these bogus workers’ parties: they can get by quite well offering people a “choice” between two overtly bourgeois parties, between two millionaire (or even billionaire) candidates. All it needs is control of the mass media, to put the proper “spin” on the party or candidate.
In the presidential election campaign that has just begun in the United States, millions and millions of dollars are going to be spent just to get nominated, many millions more to get elected. Of course, only the very wealthy can even try to be candidates these days.
Republican candidate Mitt Romney last week released figures showing that his income in 2010 was a cool US$21.7 million, which because of the tough economic climate fell to a mere US$20.9 million in 2011. Mitt and his wife Ann collected most of these millions in capital gains from “a profusion of investments” as well as stock dividends and interest payments.
The majority of Republican voters are industrial workers and hard-hat construction workers (stockbrokers also tend to vote Republican but there are not as many of them). Workers get their income from wages. None of Mitt Romney’s income is from wages.
Obama is already campaigning on a basically right-wing platform, dressed up with some “progressive” rhetoric. Whoever wins the Republican nomination will also campaign on a right-wing platform, perhaps slightly further to the right than Obama and the Democrats (but not much).
Globally, the capitalist world is in deep crisis. What the US government does will affect us all. The global economic crisis has caused a lot of soul-searching among bourgeois forecasters and financiers, and while none are advocating socialism outright, quite a few are flying kites about the possible advantages of “state capitalism”, government controls, regulation, etc. They are looking to socialism to bale them out.
But they want to bale out capitalism by shifting the burden to the backs of the workers, by making ordinary people carry the can the way they did when the big banks got into strife. Now, when the banks are once again staring at humongous bad debts, caused by the conniving of those same banks, they expect the people to pay the debts for them.
It’s time to tell the capitalists: “No more baleouts!” And let’s raise the issue of socialism for real.
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