The scenes unfolded with one cute robot (Wall-E, short for "Waste Allocation Load Lifter -Earth Class ) doing what he had been programmed to do -- gathering, compacting and stacking trash. From time to time, through artificial intelligence, he would select things that he can use for his self-repair or for his enjoyment.

The setting was a planet where trash and other discards are thrown similar to that of the movie Soldier, starred by Kurt Russel in 1998. So I thought. But as the story progressed, it was actually earth, a post apocalyptic earth -- abandonado, tapukan ki basura, warang tubig asin may regular na dust storm.

The earth was un-inhabited and only this lone robot survives. Well, igwa man palan ki ipis. But apart from the forgotten robot and the cockroach, only garbages exists... until one day, a spaceship came. May iniluwas ining sarong ovoid robot na ang pangaran si Eve. But WALL-E calls her "Eve-a". Eve is armed and dangerous but after a time, WALL-E was able to prove that he is not an enemy. They became friends (do robots make friends also?) and WALL-E gave Eve a plant. Ito siguro an misyon ni Eve kaya as soon as she received the plant and placed it in her compartment, she became immobile. After a long wait, WALL-E decided to bring Eve outside to be picked-up by the spaceship. Ang kasunod, naki-hitch si WALL-E sa spacehip na pinapadalagan kan B&L (Buy and Large).

Sa spaceship palan na ito naka-istar su mga tawo na warang ka-aram-aram manungod sa mundo. And they have been in that stellar ship for centuries asin siniserbisyuhan lang kan mga robots. I won't discuss the details as I might pre-empt future viewers. Hilingon na sana nindo ta baka malugi an Disney Pixar.

The whole movie is an animation and is for general patronage. Sabi kan padihon ko, sa trailer pa lang urugmahon na su mga aki niya. But like Tom and Jerry (or even more thatn T&J), the movie has subliminal messages being conveyed -- at least to the adult viewers. And these are the dangers of capitalism -- far than what Adrian Remodo discussed in Mga Palatakot nin Kapitalismo.

The movie shows how one company rose to power, encouraged consumerism and ended up ruining the environment. The monopoly was stronger than what Karl Marx ever thought of. I am not sure if this followed Lenin's "Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism" for the only thing certain is that the human beings went to a space cruise and lived there for centuries. Generations come and go until nobody was not familiar anymore of the planet called earth, or at least knowledgeable of what the earth is all about.

And the ruin was not just a ruin like what happened to Cagsawa in 1814. The earth was actually defaced and became more than a Smokey Mountain. No water exists -- only garbage and periodic duststoms. Kaya ngani hona ko sarong colonial planet na arog kan sa Soldier. And this is all because of the lack of care for the environment coupled with consumerism.

Pixar was very creative in doing the movie. Hopefully, the viewers and would-be viewers will not just look at the animation and filmography but also at the message of the the movie as well. Capitalism and consumerism has a price. And this becomes worst when coupled with greed. And if uncurtailed, the price may include the earth...

There was a small incident one day that shows you the mentality of some of these large organisations.

In these supermarkets there is usually a machine called a ‘baler’   into which you throw the empty boxes and it compacts them into a bale so they can be tied up and taken away.

At seventeen I was not legally allowed to operate the machine but it was made clear to me that it was expected that we do it if we wanted to keep our jobs because otherwise it would slow down the workforce if they had to wait for an over-eighteen to do it – and it wasn’t exactly difficult.

Except that the machine was broken. The mechanism that was supposed to eject the completed bale onto a palette didn’t work. We had a rather uncomplicated method for getting the bale out of the machine which was to ram two large metal poles between the back of the machine and the bale and wedge it out.

One time we were doing this it came loose very quickly, the result being that one of the poles flew up and hit me on the head. I didn’t really feel much but a few people were looking a bit unsettled and then I realized that I was bleeding.

Someone ran away to get a supervisor and someone went to get me some of that blue roll tissue that they have in these places so I sat down. It was not a wide cut but deep and one person said you could see my skull.

So the assistant manager came along and gave me a form to sign. She told me it was an ‘Accident at work’ form. Being only young and a little bit dazed I didn’t think anything of it and signed it.

Then I was led out through the supermarket holding a little bit of tissue with blood coming down my forehead and onto my shirt. The funny part about this was that although I felt good enough, as I was walking out I went past my friend who was just arriving for his shift and I will always remember the shocked and puzzled look on his face.

After this I was deposited at the front door and told a taxi was coming to take me to the accident and emergency department in the local hospital to get stitches to close the cut.

So I waited, and waited, and waited.

Nothing came.

Bloodied and confused I wandered back into the shop to find one of the managers to see where my taxi was and was informed that no one had rang one for me.

Bastards.

So eventually in a rage I wandered out onto the main road to get myself a taxi. The first one refused to take me because he didn’t want blood on the seats and the second grumbled about it but eventually took me.

My anger subsided in the hospital when I was led past a man having stitches on his everything because he had just come off a motorbike badly. I got my stitches and went home.

Two days later I was back in work and was telling someone about it and they told me I was an idiot because by signing the ‘accident at work’ form I had given up my right to sue them.

So, when they see an employee covered in blood thanks to their policies, the first thing they want to do is make him sign away his rights.

I am certainly not the litigious type and would not have wanted to sue anyway but the least you would expect them to do is get you a taxi. But as a matter of fact, I did want to sue them after the final insult.

The final insult was that I kept the receipt for the taxi and they argued with me for a full 25 minutes saying there was nothing in my contract for such a circumstance before giving me the £3.50 taxi fare for the hospital… and I had to threaten to quit to get it. 

I haven’t forgotten the lesson I learned about all this but nowadays if anyone asks me how I got my little scar I just tell them that I hit myself on the head with an iron bar.

I wish you allowed for comments, oppressing free speech already? lol. First off, the idea of socialism is not a natural one. Nature's law is survival of the fittest. Natural selection provided the method by which humans evolved as a species to what we are now. Life was never meant to be fair. Why do humans seek equilibrium when nothing about our universe is static? Our earth is not a static environment; it is in constant motion and perpetually changing. We live in a dynamic universe. Socialism strives to make everyone equal. We are not all equal, species are not all equal, and the forces that drive our universe are not all equal. Some of us are smarter than others, some of us are stronger than others, some faster, some shorter, taller, fatter, agile, astute. To pretend everyone is in the same class is ridiculous. We are not all in the same class. I believe in the fair treatment of people, but fair does always mean equal treatment.

Like different species of animals who have found their evolutionary survival niche, so have the rich. They have chosen to use their wits versus a workers brawn. People make the rich as fat and lazy snobs. Well most that I have encountered are not fat, and lazy they are not. To stay on top you can't be stagnant, you have to be progressive. The working class hates on the rich because they envy them. They wish they didn't have to toil in the soil and sweat unlike the rich. They wish they enjoyed the same prosperity. Since they don't, socialism, like crabs in a can when one reaches the lip of the can another yanks it down, is an attempt to strip the wealthy from their harvest, as to relieve themselves from the sense of inadequacy by artificially making everyone equally adequate. This is something to the likes of killing your opponent if you can't compete with him.

While I don't believe we are in the same class, I do believe everyone should have similar opportunities. This is what makes the United States so appealing to the rest of the world, there are endless opportunities. Virtually anyone here can get a higher education. But do we all? Usually the poor lack education not because they can't but because they choose not to. It is a lot easier for most after high school (if they finish that); to get nine to five jobs rather than to work hard at a higher education related career or founding businesses. If there is no job available to them, then criminal hustles like drug dealing, prostitution, and theft is what they resort to. Some say they have no choice, but life itself is full of choices. Everyone makes choices and is accountable to themselves for the choices made.

Money is not what separates the wealthy from the impoverished, it is education and knowledge. I think what can narrow the gap between the rich and the poor is education. Socialism to me seems to be an artificial way of fixing the problem. It treats the symptom (money), versus the addressing the cause (education and opportunity). A pretty reliable stat is the uneducated have plenty more children than the educated. Children being the major priority in most parents' lives, the opportunities to escape poverty diminish with an every child.

And frankly, some people have a lot more drive and will than others when it comes to success. The truth is these ambitious people are the movers and shakers of society. Without competition no one would have the need to do things better. This allows for a dynamic progressive society. Like animals compete in the wild, humans also compete with each other, resulting in the fittest design surviving. Likewise, competition in a society bring out the best, not just business wise, but in ourselves. Adversity separates the weak and the obsolete from the best suited for a task (life). As humans we have a need to feel good about ourselves. We feel good when we achieve. We feel good when we are the best or at least talented. Nothing refines talent like competition. It is a natural pressure that pushes us to excel like hunger.

So before we blame and chastise the rich, blaming others for our problems, let's self-reflect on what we can do better. For one instill the importance of an education in our working class children and secondly be more active in politics and government. Societies only change if the people that constitute them want to and care to make a change.

About guns, criminals in jail don't have guns, yet they find very creative ways to end life or injure. Before guns people still murdered each other just the same. But that's not my point. There is a reason why our founding fathers placed that clause in our social contract. It is a "just in case" clause; just in case government becomes oppressive (which by the way its on its way to being). Guns are a means by which the people can rebel and protect themselves from oppression. Many misuse freedoms, the 911 hijackers misused many of our liberties. Do we now strip everyone from these freedoms and rights for safety reasons, like the patriot act blatantly does? As Americans we stand for liberties and rights, this is who we are, our very identity. We are a free society (supposed to be at least). Would you choose an oppressed and safe life over a free life? Life is full of dangers; we don't live in kindergarten class where everything is child proof. Life by its very nature is dangerous and unfair, period. Survival of the fittest is the only rule that applies.

If poverty is the problem, then let's fix poverty. If un-education is a factor of poverty, let work on that. Treating the symptoms never cures the illness.

Daily Article from Mises.org by Gennady Stolyarov II | Posted on 7/4/2008

The Disney-Pixar film WALL-E has been adoringly received by the majority of the theatergoing public. This adoration is unjustified. The film blatantly conveys environmentalist, anticapitalist, and antitechnological propaganda — and aims it at an audience of children, who still lack the critical faculties and intellectual sophistication to evaluate all relevant aspects of the issues presented.

But I will not focus here on how egregiously unrealistic the film's scenario of humans completely trashing Earth is. A simple look around you will suffice to refute this possibility. Garbage is not piling up around us, and landfills are in fact remarkably effective at storing it safely and even using it to generate useful natural gases.

I will, rather, concentrate on a much more egregious error made by the creators of WALL-E — an error made in ignorance of basic economics and of commonsense insights regarding the nature of human behaviors and the incentives facing individual economic actors.

This error pervades the film's depiction of life aboard the Axiom, a starship made by Buy'n Large (BNL) corporation — a cross between Wal-Mart and the George W. Bush administration — to house the human refugees from Earth for 700 years after the Earth becomes too littered to remain habitable. First, the film makes the Marxian assumption that it would be possible for a single corporation to take advantage of ever-increasing returns to scale and thereby subsume the entire world — and still remain profitable and continually patronized by everyone. But as Ludwig von Mises showed as far back as 1920 in Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth, without the presence of multiple providers of goods in the economy, the single dominant firm is in the same position as a socialist central planner. In the real world, BNL would have no market price signals to help it discern consumer demand for and the relative scarcity of resources. It would not be able to engage in rational economic calculation and would make decisions arbitrarily. Surely, this state would not please many consumers, and the BNL monopoly would be short lived at most.

The startling aspect of life aboard the Axiom is its total homogeneity. Everyone is morbidly obese; everyone drinks fatty meal-replacement shakes; everyone rides around in automated carts instead of walking; no one engages in direct personal communication; no one exercises; everyone follows the BNL corporation's fashion advice (when the announcements tell the people that "blue is the new red," all Axiom inhabitants switch their suit color from red to blue at the press of a button). Not only does this homogeneity mark one instant in time; it has been present all throughout the Axiom's seven centuries of travel through space. During that time, there has been no technological progress, no cultural innovation, and no noncosmetic changes in the aesthetic, philosophical, and political arrangements aboard the ship. Imagine in 2008 if nothing had changed in human affairs since the year 1308.

The humans in WALL-E are not portrayed as evil; they are polite and well intentioned, but ignorant and torpid. Strangely enough, the ship has an extensive information database about life and conditions on Earth, and nobody bothered to examine this easily accessible information for seven centuries, until the Captain suddenly has a burst of interest. Are we to assume that curiosity and elementary initiative are such rarities that they are exercised only once in 700 years?

WALL-E is egregiously wrong in assuming that technological conveniences such as easily accessible food, transportation, entertainment, and communication render all people lazy, indulgent, and devoid of initiative. Some people, to be sure, respond in this way. In the real world, however, this response tends to be temporary. In the more economically advanced countries, it tends to affect lower-income individuals who have just begun accessing historically luxurious standards of living and have not yet developed cultural habits for managing their newfound wealth and opportunities responsibly. These habits will come with time — as they always have among groups of people that have lived prosperously for generations.

Already in the United States, the big fast-food chains are racing to offer health foods — salads, fruit, and other low-calorie snacks — to keep the patronage of those who would have been satisfied with Big Macs and Whoppers in the past. Meanwhile, a wide variety of health foods and diet foods — some genuinely effective and others of dubious merit — are being consumed more broadly than ever before.

In the meantime, of course, millions of people have never neglected healthful habits, even though they have for decades been surrounded by consumer goods that — in the anticapitalists' eyes — would lead them to ruin. Just as the ready availability of guns does not automatically turn peaceful people into rampaging maniacs, neither does the ready availability of all sorts of foods turn responsible, educated, self-respecting individuals into rage-of-the-moment hedonists.

With some kinds of wants met — such as food, shelter, and transportation — people virtually always tend to develop new wants or to focus on existing lower-priority wants not yet addressed. As Ludwig von Mises showed, people will act so long as they are faced with uncertainty and believe themselves capable of somehow affecting the uncertain future. These conditions will never stop existing — no matter how comfortable and prosperous people become. Thus, humans will always act and will always strive to improve their lives. A wholly static, apathetic, sated, and torpid society is inconceivable in reality.

The economy aboard the Axiom does however seem to be the dream economy of popular "static equilibrium" models, where nothing ever changes — not production, consumption, preferences, or expectations of the future. Yet, as Austrian economics informs us, such conditions have never existed nor can they exist. At best, they are merely useful theoretical constructs — certainly not accurate depictions of any realistic economy.

In the real world, there exist immense changes of preferences, widely dispersed information, tremendous uncertainty about the future, and numerous entrepreneurs who alert themselves to possible opportunities for satisfying people's wants in a better way than they are currently being satisfied. That there is not one entrepreneur aboard the Axiom prior to the Captain's paradigm-shifting discovery of information that was easily accessible to everybody for the last seven centuries is testimony to the filmmakers' ignorance of what makes economic change possible and ubiquitous.

The humans' return to Earth and attempt to "rebuild" their lives is ludicrous from any sound economic perspective. After having had a sustainable automatic food production system aboard the Axiom — which had apparently worked without fail for seven centuries — humans all of a sudden decide to resort to traditional agriculture. The one thing they have machine capital to do for them, they decide to do manually instead. Rather than devoting the precious time bought by the ready availability of food to, say, create art, repair all those broken skyscrapers, or design even better robots, the humans decide to manually dig holes in the ground and grow their food through backbreaking toil that led millions throughout history to die premature deaths. Oh, by the way, the film left that part out. Virtually no one today who romanticizes the "good old days" of traditional agriculture recognizes how nasty, brutish, and short life under such conditions had been for millennia. Once the first industrial factories opened — with their long hours, dangerous equipment, and meager pay — people flocked to them in droves, because the factory conditions (including the sanitation provided and wages paid) were greatly preferable to those of toiling virtually all day on the traditional farm.

The creators of WALL-E, sitting in their comfortable Hollywood studios, did a tremendous disservice to the civilization that made their work and high standards of living possible. They glorified a lifestyle that would likely have killed them — and countless others — had it actually been revived. I for one have seen a semblance of these "good old days," having spent summers as a child with my maternal grandparents in a remote Belarusian village — where little had changed since the 1917 socialist revolution. Those extolling the virtues of traditional farm life never mention the perpetual manual labor, lack of sanitation, lack of health care, and widespread inclinations toward alcoholism. I have spent my life to date moving increasingly further away from that, and I will resist vigorously the efforts of those who seek to drag our entire civilization back into miserable, decrepit premodernity.

WALL-E is an assault on modern civilization, borne of deep economic and historical ignorance. The film shamefully betrays the efforts of countless heroic individuals who have raised humanity out of the muck of barbarism. Its antitechnological, anticapitalist message needs to be exposed and countered by all thinking individuals.

WASHINGTON: US President George W. Bush left Washington Saturday for the Group of Eight (G8) meeting in Japan, where he aims to highlight Africa’s battles against hunger and deadly diseases and assuage Japanese concerns over his North Korea policy.

Leaders of the eight major industrial powers meet starting Monday at the northern island of Hokkaido’s Toyako resort, where they are reportedly set to agree on a new system of “food reserves” to assist hungry nations.

According to Japan’s Asahi Shimbun, each of the G8 members—Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States—will contribute grain to the global reserves.

Bush has said he would use the summit to press for progress on global efforts to fight climate change, promote free trade, and push G8 leaders to make good on pledges to help Africa fight HIV/AIDS and other illnesses.

“We need people who not only make promises, but write checks,” said the president on Wednesday. He will celebrate his 62nd birthday on July 6 in Japan.

Bush was also expected to hold bilateral talks with Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda as well as leaders of Brazil, China, Germany, India, Indonesia, Russia, South Africa, South Korea and seven African “observer” countries.

In addition to trying to revive global free trade talks, Bush hoped to win more support for a hard line on Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and Burma’s military rulers, while soothing Japanese anger at US policies toward North Korea.

“We are at a very pivotal point in the six-party process and the president [Bush] and the prime minister of Japan will want to compare notes and make sure we are working the same page,” said Dennis Wilder, National Security Council’s director of Asian affairs, aboard Air Force One en route to Japan.

Bush moved last week to take North Korea off the US list of state sponsors of terrorism, effective in 45 days, in response to North Korea’s accounting last week of its nuclear programs.

Some Japanese reacted angrily, accusing him of forgetting about the fate of Japanese abducted by North Korea.

Bush said Wednesday of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il that “expectations are that he will move forward, action for action” under a six-country diplomacy to address nuclear proliferation, and abduction issues.

“If they choose not to move forward on an agreed upon way forward—action for action—there will be further isolation and further deprivation for the people of North Korea,” he said.

Looking at the nuclear disputes with Iran and North Korea, Bush told Japanese media outlets, “Diplomacy has got to be the first choice of solving any of these problems. But military options remain on the table.”

White House Spokeswoman Dana Perino told reporters Saturday that the United States would “consult with our allies about what Iran’s response means,” before commenting on Tehran’s answer to a plan from six world powers offering Iran technology and negotiations if it suspends uranium enrichment.

Tehran has not released the details of its response.

The US president was also to push leaders at the July 7 to 9 summit to cope with the global food crisis by boosting shipments of food, fertilizers and seeds to afflicted countries and to reduce barriers to bio-engineered crops.

“It’s one thing to talk about the problem; this is a practical way to help countries deal with the lack of food,” said Bush.

The Asahi Shimbun has reported that the G8 countries will create a new system of food reserves in the wake of this year’s conflux of shortages and soaring prices in basic grains and other foodstuffs, leading to food riots in some countries.

The system would be modeled on oil reserves designed by the International Energy Agency to lessen the danger of oil shocks, the newspaper said.

G8 countries would be obliged to take part in the system and to release grains such as rice, wheat and corn at a time of crisis.

Bush will also make the case that no global climate change pact can work unless “greenhouse gas”-producing developing nations like China and India accept some form of long-term goals for curbing emissions.

Bush, who will appeal for continued help in Iraq and Afghanistan, was also expected to tackle fears over the battered US economy, including the weak US dollar, cited as a factor in soaring dollar-denominated oil costs.
-- AFP(ManilaTimes)

It is through this process of analysis that I make sense of the daily experiences of immigrant labor in this nation. When I say this, I do not only mean undocumented labor. The Southern Poverty Law Center provides a beautifully-detailed report on legal guestworker programs in place in the United States. “Close to Slavery” is a reminder of the brutal ways a government’s protection of the “rights” of an elite group of business interests–in the name of free market capitalism–sacrifices the humanity of hundreds of thousands of others.

Chris Kerr has it all. He is wealthy, successful, and controls his own destiny. Chris is married with two attractive children in their mid-20s, both educated at a local, prominent private school. One is a boy, and one is a girl, of course. He and his wife have been married for about 25 years, and they have lived happily ever after. Chris wife, Catherine, is a self-published author of books about local bicycle trails. The family is stable, happy, and comfortable. They epitomize  the perfect American family.

Chris owns a small but profitable business begun by his parents and bequeathed to himself. He has lived in the trendy, expensive, tourist-oriented town of New Hope, PA, all his life. About 10 years ago, Chris built himself a large new home on a vacant lot adjacent to the house in which he already lived. He decided to rent the old house, and maybe sell it later. Despite the modest size of the original house, its location alone will ensure a price of well more than a half-million dollars. But there is no reason to sell it immediately. The Kerrs don’t need the money. 

Chris’s compulsory education was at public schools. But college was different. Part of his university education was gained at the prestigious London School of Economics. Chris traveled around Europe, endeavoring to become the cosmopolitan he imagined himself to be. Although Chris studied Russian in college and retains some superficial knowledge, he is fluent in but one tongue, English. But don’t remind him of that when he is conversing with his foreign business connections.

The company Chris owns has one product, a catalog called Mariner’s Annual. It is a large book containing equipment and necessities used by the maritime industry. The book’s purpose is to serve as a common reference for those on ships and rigs and those on shore. Mariner’s Annual was first published in 1958, and has enjoyed success since. Chris’s parents operated the company until the late Seventies, when Chris was granted responsibility of daily business. His mother, a miserly, falsely modest German woman named Doro, has never relinquished the purse strings, however. She controls all money incoming and outgoing. Chris loves his parents, of course. They gave him everything. The building in which the business is located, Chris’s house(s), and his parents house, are all within 100 yards of one another.

Mariner’s Annual is staffed by fewer than 10 people, including Chris. The entry-level person is typically paid $20,000 per year. Chris pays himself $250,000 per year. But Chris doesn’t want anyone to think he is better off than they are. Like many shrewd business owners who do not want their employees to ask for more than they already get, Chris tries to show that there just isn’t anymore – not even for himself. Thus, Chris typically drives a base 4-cylinder vehicle, with a manual transmission. He dresses casually. He doesn’t want anyone to think he is any different than they are. But the differences are clear. The staff must be sure to be in on time, and to stay late to meet deadlines, and to get the job done. For Chris, those rules don’t apply. Irregular hours, frequent vacations, using company supplies for personal reasons, are characteristic of Chris. He hopes no one notices, but everyone does. The employees notice little things, like when he uses company stamps for his personal mail. They notice when he ships his wife’s books on the company tab. They notice bigger things, too, like that all of the company’s supplies are conveniently housed at his mother’s house – available for her personal use, too, on the company tab. When Chris announced “This company does own a 1200 DPI printer, it’s at my house but it does belong to the company” eyebrows were raised. Though such a high resolution printer would be perfect for an office that produces a book, it is also perfect for the owner’s wife who also produces books. Why should Chris use his own money for such a device when he can simply charge it to the company and keep it as his house? After all, it's not as if employees will ask to go to the owner’s house to print an advertisement proposal. Nevertheless, Chris was vocal to everyone about the importance of keeping his family’s personal property separate from the company’s property, “for tax reasons.”

Employees notice that Chris is paid more in two months than practically all his employees earn in one year. Employees also notice that they are paid on salary so that Chris need not pay them overtime, despite that during the several months when the book being readied for the printer, extended hours are an unspoken given. But why pay employees for their extra time when such can be avoided simply by paying everyone on salary?

Marx introduced the concept of “false consciousness,” meaning a mental framework that is illusory, and typically detrimental to one’s self. Having a false consciousness about reality is what Marx believes prevents the proletarians from rebelling about their exploitation: they simply don’t realize they are being exploited. Chris depends on the false consciousness of his employees to sustain his lifestyle. He depends on their inability to perceive Chris’s true relationship to them, how he prospers from their labor while not being justly rewarded for it.

Like every capitalist of his status, Chris lives off the labor of his workers. They produce the wealth, and Chris benefits from it disproportionately more than they do. One of Chris’s – and his mother’s – main tasks is to ensure that the employees do not realize the unequal benefits in the relationship. So far, Chris has been successful. Without consciously applying it, Chris uses Ricardo’s Law of Iron Wages with his employees: They are paid just enough to keep them  working, living well enough, not complaining, and not asking questions. An example of Doro and Chris’s success in keeping employees ignorant but happy:  One day Doro walked in the office and announced she had $40,000 worth of checks in her hand. One employee clapped and gleefully cheered. Why? Is it because that employee would benefit directly from that money? Would she receive a bonus because of it? Would she be given a fraction of it as a reward, since her personal labor helped obtain it? Not at all. She was joyful because she has perceives everything through the  false consciousness of the proletarian. She is happy that the money is there, that it will help the company. She thinks Chris and Doro share that view. She doesn’t realize that they are thinking only of themselves. For herself, this employee will not freely share in the fruits of her own labor. Instead, what she receives will be determined by Chris, because she has sold her labor to Chris at a price he, not she, has determined. Chris will always control that price. And that price will not be raised because of the income of the business.

Yet the employees are not totally enveloped in the fog of false consciousness. Despite what Chris thinks, the employees sometimes discuss the most obvious aspects of the unequal distribution of benefits between themselves and Chris. Yet, where they realize the inequity, they – like millions of others who also realize it in their own lives, passively accept it. One employee of Chris’s said, regarding the unfairness inherent in the relationship between Chris and everyone said, “That’s just the way it is.” Meaning, yes, it is unfair that a business owner should profit so much more than his employees. That there are different economic and social rules for the employers and the employees. (But is that so?) Chris couldn’t have hoped for a better sentiment to be uttered. Passive resignation to the inequalities and exploitation inherent in capitalism is what Chris, his mother, and people like them depend on for their survival.

Mariner’s Annual, the book, is divided into two sections. The first is the catalog section, which covers equipment used by the marine industry on oil rigs and sea-going vessels. The catalog section serves the purpose of the book’s existence. Those are the pages that are used by the people on the ships, and the people who order for the ships. Pictures, specifications, and other information about the products are all located in the catalog section. While that section is most important to the users of the book, it's the second section that is most important for Chris and the company: The advertising section. These are pages for advertisements by companies who manufacture or sell the equipment presented in the catalog section. It’s by selling space for advertising in this section that the company generates its main income. The advertising is separated from the catalog section, which means a user of the book would need to intentionally choose to look at an ad before he actually sees one. Probably the number of workers on oil rigs or sailors in the merchant marine who decide to browse the ads in Mariner’s Annual is slim. Probably the number of ship chandlers who do that is equally small. So who looks at the advertisements in the advertising section? What justifies the price Chris’s advertisers are paying? When asked why any advertiser would buy space in a segregated part of the book, given that it will probably not be seen by the users of the book – who will instead be looking at the catalog pages – Chris’s response was a wry smile and “Shhhh! Let’s not talk about that.” Just as Chris depends on the passive acceptance of the capitalist system by his workers, he also depends on the blind financial promiscuity of his advertisers, whose money Chris spends to send his kids to private school. When Chris finally receives the anxiously-awaited check from 3M, the book’s biggest advertiser, he always says in an exaggerated voice of relief “Oh good, we can eat.” Would ship suppliers not know of 3M without a full page ad way in the back of Chris’s book? That is just another question Chris hopes is not asked. 

Chris’s business is located in a dilapidated converted small motel, owned by Doro. Of course, the company pays rent to Doro for use of the building. That is yet another way the Kerrs have found to siphon company money to the family. Another is that Doro remains on the payroll, despite that she does little more than guard the company-purchased paper towels and white-out buried in her closets.

The office has one level, and spans the length of the building. But Chris’s customers are lead to believe that the Mariner’s Annual world headquarters is a sprawling, elegant building quaintly nestled in a small river town. Each customer feels special because they deal directly with Chris, the president. But all of them deal with Chris, because he doesn’t trust anyone else to deal with them. Chris also deals with the paperboy and trash collectors.

Chris lives in a world of illusions and false reality. Some he has created, and others have been created for him. Superficially, Chris is a good-natured businessman who lacks pretension and lives modestly. He treats his workers well, they are happy, and he wants everyone to prosper. But looking more closely reveals the objective reality. Chris’s stable, happy life is sustained by an organization he had no part in creating, but that he inherited. His wealth is generated by people who, while benefiting themselves in his employment, are benefiting Chris inordinately more. Without Chris, the company would function and prosper. But without the workers, the business will fail. Despite the greater importance of the workers to the survival of the company, they are rewarded less than a man whose presence isn't necessary for the business to live. There is an inverse relationship between who labors the most, and who is rewarded the most from the labor. That, of course, is a situation that exists in practically every organization.

Chris projects an image of modesty and equality. But he denies employees the eagerly-anticipated June bonus during what he called a “financially difficult year” only weeks before he begins construction of his massive new home. While the company may have a difficult year, Chris never does. Further, Chris’s lack of adherence to his personally-expressed hard work ethic is unequalled by anyone working for him. While Chris wants everyone in early and to stay late, Chris is self-exempt. Chris knows that he need not stay for the tasks to be complete. Yet, somehow, he deserves for his pay to be 600% higher than the average employee’s.

Chris’s survival depends on a world populated by people who equate tradition with correctness. He benefits because people accept what is given to them, and don’t ask questions. In a world of questioning, critical people, Chris’s life would be much different. He would be the equal that he pretends to be. And his employees would be the equals that they deserve to be. 

While this essay focuses on one man, one family, and one business and its employees, the problems presented are universal and timeless. Chris Kerr is no different from the thousands of others who share his economic circumstances. Because of those circumstances, they all tend to share the same attitude, opinions, and beliefs. This suggests that a person’s economic situation influences – if not determines – a person’s very thoughts and behavior.

Chris is a Quaker. Quakers believe in the equality of individuals before God, and to each other. The Quaker who founded Chris’s home state of Pennsylvania, William Penn, created a stir when he would address the king of England as a common man. But to Penn, the king was indeed just another man, equal to everyone else in the sight of God. However, Chris’s life could not be sustained if he shared Penn’s attitude. If he treated everyone as he treats himself, his business could not function. If he allowed everyone to work only when they wished, utilize company property for personal uses, and to pay themselves $14,000 per month after taxes, there would be no money left for business operations, among other problems. Therefore, Chris accepts the inequality that his religion’s founder rejected, because he profits from it. The profit motive is Chris’s “inner light.”

Chris takes pride that he is one of the biggest financial supporters of his Quaker Meetinghouse.

The American colonel, troubled by what he was hearing, tried to stall at first. But the declassified record shows he finally told his South Korean counterpart it "would be permitted" to machine-gun 3,500 political prisoners, to keep them from joining approaching enemy forces.

In the early days of the Korean War, other American officers observed, photographed and confidentially reported on such wholesale executions by their South Korean ally, a secretive slaughter believed to have killed 100,000 or more leftists and supposed sympathizers, usually without charge or trial, in a few weeks in mid-1950. Extensive archival research by The Associated Press has found no indication Far East commander Gen. Douglas MacArthur took action to stem the summary mass killing, knowledge of which reached top levels of the Pentagon and State Department in Washington, where it was classified "secret" and filed away.

Now, a half-century later, the South Korean government's Truth and Reconciliation Commission is investigating what happened in that summer of terror, a political bloodbath largely hidden from history, unlike the communist invaders' executions of southern rightists, which were widely publicized and denounced at the time.

<...>

As the front moved south, in July's first days, Air Force intelligence officer Donald Nichols witnessed and photographed the shooting of an estimated 1,800 prisoners in Suwon, 20 miles south of Seoul, Nichols reported in a little-noted memoir in 1981, a decade before his death. Around the same time, farther south, the Daejeon killings began. Winslow recalled he declined an invitation to what a senior officer called the "turkey shoot" outside the city, but other U.S. officers did attend, taking grisly photos of the human slaughter that would be kept classified for a half-century.

Journalist Alan Winnington, of the British communist Daily Worker newspaper, entered Daejeon with North Korean troops after July 20 and reported that the killings were carried out for three days in early July and two or three days in mid-July.
He wrote that his witnesses claimed jeeploads of American officers "supervised the butchery." Secret CIA and Army intelligence communications reported on the Daejeon and Suwon killings as early as July 3, but said nothing about the U.S. presence or about any U.S. oversight.

In mid-August, MacArthur, in Tokyo, learned of the mass shooting of 200 to 300 people near Daegu, including women and a 12- or 13-year-old girl. A top-secret Army report from Korea, uncovered by AP research, told of the "extreme cruelty" of the South Korean military policemen. The bodies fell into a ravine, where hours later some "were still alive and moaning," wrote a U.S. military policeman who happened on the scene.

<...>

When Washington's British allies protested, Dean Rusk, assistant secretary of state, told them U.S. commanders were doing "everything they can to curb such atrocities," according to a Rusk memo of Oct. 28, 1950. But on Dec. 19, W.J. Sebald, State Department liaison to MacArthur, cabled Secretary of State Dean Acheson to say MacArthur's command viewed the killings as a South Korean "internal matter" and had "refrained from taking any action."

It was the British who took action, according to news reports at the time. On Dec. 7, in occupied North Korea, British officers saved 21 civilians lined up to be shot, by threatening to shoot the South Korean officer responsible. Later that month, British troops seized "Execution Hill," outside Seoul, to block further mass killings there.

An American historian of the Korean War, the University of Chicago's Bruce Cumings, sees a share of U.S. guilt in what happened in 1950. "After the fact — with thousands murdered — the U.S. not only did nothing, but covered up the Daejeon massacres," he said.

Der Begriff [der Fairness] spielt in der traditionellen ökonomischen Lehre kaum eine Rolle. Der Homo oeconomicus gilt als Egoist und denkt nur an den eigenen Vorteil. In den vergangenen Jahren aber hat eine steigende Zahl von Wirtschaftsforschern durch Experimente herausgefunden, dass diese Sicht zu kurz greift.

[...]

Zwar ist der Homo oeconomicus damit keineswegs tot. Eine ganze Reihe von Teilnehmern in Fehrs und Schmidts Experiment etwa verhielt sich so, wie die herkömmliche Theorie es vorsieht. Aber es wird zunehmend klar, dass der Homo sapiens doch ein wenig anders funktioniert und es sich die Ökonomen lange Zeit zu einfach machten - bei ihrer Analyse von Arbeitsmärkten, Geschäftsverträgen, Steuersystemen. Und womöglich auch anderswo.

Is ja n Ding. Das hätte mir jetzt jeder, der schon mal mit jemandem befreundet war, auch sagen können, aber manche brauchen halt ein bisschen länger. Irgendwann finden die Ökonomen noch mal raus, dass die Menschen den Beruf gar nicht deswegen über (fast) alles andere stellen, weil sie so furchtbar gerne im Büro sitzen bzw. am Fließband stehen. Und wenn sie dann auch noch rausfinden, dass Afrikaner auch Essen brauchen, wird alles wieder gut.

Von wegen, eine Abkehr vom Kapitalismus ist realitätsfremd. Erst durch Experimente darauf kommen, dass Menschen bereit sind, auf andere Menschen acht zu geben, das ist realitätsfremd. Ich bin dafür, VWL als Religionsgemeinschaft anzuerkennen. Ihre Bekehrungsheftchen liegen ja jetzt schon in der Tageszeitung.

appoint a panel of three people, the chair of which has already written two books advocating the end of postal monopolies, to determine whether Canada Post should be allowed to continue to provide us with universal service and some of the lowest postal rates in the world, or whether it would somehow be better to deregulate it so that private corps can have a piece of it?

It's a question to which we all know the answer, unfortunately. April Reign was pondering it a year ago. Of course, Canada Post already has a test case for privatization. Tony Blair 'liberalized' Britain's Royal Mail in 2006, to the massive benefit of large companies who poached profitable routes from the government while leaving those less lucrative to languish. Sure, it sounds good on paper, but how did it work out?

The government's strategy of opening up the postal market to private sector competition has provided "no significant benefits" for consumers and smaller businesses, while representing a "substantial threat" to the future of the Royal Mail, an independent report commissioned by ministers warned yesterday.

Oh dear. Then again, perhaps we're thinking too small here. Perhaps instead of simply selling off existing postal routes, we should be encouraging innovation and ambition. Shouldn't anyone with a Westphalia caravan, a few burlap sacks and a sense of adventure be able to start their own postal route, charging a reasonable fee, without the vigourous suppression of entrepreneurship by so many government officials?  Criss-cross Canada with small-business pluck and pan-national determination. Surely we can get far more farcical than suggesting a profitable government service that supplies high-paying union jobs with good benefits and boasts a 96 to 97% punctual delivery record should be sold off to the more 'efficient' private sector? Perhaps, to combat the current tyrannical stance of our governments to such economical initiative, we should follow Thomas Pynchon's forty-year old suggestion of covert civil disobedience:

"You weren't supposed to see that," he told them. He had an envelope. Oedipa could see, instead of a postage stamp, the handstruck initials PPS.

"Of course," said Metzger. "Delivering the mail is a government monopoly. You would be opposed to that."

Fallopian gave them a wry smile. "It's not as rebellious as it looks. We use Yoyodyne's inter-office delivery. On the sly. But it's hard to find carriers, we have a big turnover. They're run on a tight schedule, and they get nervous. Security people over at the plant know something's up. They keep a sharp eye out. De Witt," pointing at the fat mailman, who was being hauled, twitching, down off the bar and offered drinks he did not want, "he's the most nervous one we've had all year."

"How extensive is this?" asked Metzger.

"Only inside our San Narciso chapter. They've set up pilot projects similar to this in the Washington and I think Dallas chapters. But we're the only one in California so far. A few of your more affluent type members do wrap their letters around bricks, and then the whole thing in brown paper, and send them Railway Express, but I don't know . . ."

"A little like copping out," Metzger sympathized.

"It's the principle," Fallopian agreed, sounding defensive. "To keep it up to some kind of a reasonable volume, each member has to send at least one letter a week through the Yoyodyne system. If you don't, you get fined." He opened his letter and showed Oedipa and Metzger.

Dear Mike, it said, how are you? Just thought I'd drop you a note. How's your book coming? Guess that's all for now. See you at The Scope.

"That's how it is," Fallopian confessed bitterly, "most of the time."

—Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1969)

I suppose under capitalism, even satire needs some competition.

Now while obviously they'll not do anything materially to halt the flow of capital to the elite as the biosphere collapses they should pull the usual ploy of a PR makeover because, well there's one born every minute plus it helps the hacks who geisha them retain a modicum of self respect, hey look they're different stop being such a downer you rabble rouser's (I mean Davos lets you put youtube clips of questions to ask the great and good, imagine it, so democratic!). So the G8 should become The Gr8t! Maybe using Queen's 'One Vision' as a theme, a song so incredibly fascistic it took Laibach the arch Slovenian situationists (or anti-situationist depending on your mood) & satirists to bring out its latent shallows-

Next they will need to sucker in those ever gullible youths and this might be where Hokkaido comes in, emulating the climax of Godzilla movie- scientists in one last ditch attempt gather at the island base to defeat the rampaging monsters. The Gr8t! will produce a graphic novel (soon to be a major motion picture) where they fight terror, crime and gigantic atomic monsters (possibly Iranian ones) from this island fortress. And the protesters will be revealed as zombie slaves of the evil forces of Anti-Neoliberalism, mindless drones intent on depriving the North's consumers of shiny things that use batteries...or something. Of course you might be suspicious that his has already taken place looking at what is exhibited in cinemas now, which is doing a far better job for it being less explicit. But I'm sure The Gr8T! would like to be immortalised as super heroes directly, because while the ability to enjoy any depravity coupled with the power to indulge without consequence will keep them sated for a while, it's always better to have the lower orders marvel at your supremacy, to see your glory and cruelty reflected in their terrified, institutionalised yet adoring eyes.

[audio http://joe.monterosso.net/music//superman_theme.mp3]

By Gaither Stewart
www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE
7/4/08

Dedicated to those who continually raise the bugaboo of the Communist menace to the make-believe, hypocritical, lying and socially perfidious “American way of life”.

(Rome) I visited the tomb of Antonio Gramsci in the Poets’ Cemetery in Rome. An inconspicuous urn resting in the center of the mound contains the ashes of the Marxist philosopher and founder of the Italian Communist Party. The tombstone bears only his name and his dates—1891-1937. The fresh red flowers indicate that the site is tended.

I visited Gramsci’s tomb because I wanted to speak of one of the most representative men of the positive side of Twentieth century Europe, an advocate of a new social-political-economic structure, a major figure in shaping progressive thought from the early XX century. I wanted to speak of Gramsci today because the Italy that many people love is threatened by reaction and Fascistic dictatorship.

The figure of Antonio Gramsci is emblematic of the profound dichotomy between progress and reaction marking Europe since the end of the Nineteenth century. The Marxist Gramsci would have ambivalent feelings about his neighbors in the Poets’ Cemetery: Lying near him are dozens of “White Russians,” the adversaries of the Bolshevik revolution in Tsarist Russia in 1917, which Gramsci supported, while the culture of the Russian exiles was dedicated to maintaining the hegemony of the Russian upper class over the masses, which Gramsci opposed.

Gramsci must have had sympathy for the progressive English poets, John Keats and Percy Byshe Shelley, who lie under two pines in a distant corner of the same cemetery. Keats (“I saw pale kings, and princes too” from his La Belle Dame san merci) wrote, as Gramsci must have at some point, “I am ambitious to do the world some good.” As much as he appreciated their culture and admired Keats’ universal words, ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ Antonio Gramsci, did not worship all the names of the Western literary canon because he was mistrustful of the deadly compromises running through the intellectual community and became aware of the difficulty of intellectuals to be free of the dominant social group, as is the case in the USA today.

Born in Sardinia, Gramsci moved to Turin in 1913 and while at the university came into contact with the strong Socialist movement in that north Italian city. He was a co-founder of the Italian Communist Party in 1921 and became its head the year after. Elected to Parliament in 1923, he was arrested by Fascist police three years later and spent most of the rest of his life in prison.

Like Keats, Gramsci hoped to change the world. His point of departure however was the Marxist idea that everything in life is determined by capital. The class that controls capital is the dominant class. The capitalist class formulates its ideology to secure its control—or in Gramscian language, its hegemony—over the people. This is the rule of the game everywhere: capitalism acts eternally and uniquely in its own interests; its goal is to acquire more and more of the world’s wealth and power; it is never but never sparked by social motivation.

Class struggle results when the people try to change the rules and take power. Gramsci believed that political action was the correct path to challenge the hegemony of the capitalist class. Though a revolutionary, he did not advocate a totalitarian world outlook. The Marxist Gramsci separated from Leninism, which remained as only one ingredient in his theory for social change.

Leninism is now largely history, and its tenets such as the vertical party format are outdated, while many of Gramsci’s contributions to Socialist thought are intact. Leninism is the opposite of Gramscian intellectual pursuit and culture. In Gramscian thinking revolutionary violence is not the only way to change things. As one of Europe’s major Communist thinkers, Gramsci amended Marx’s conviction that social development originates only from the economic structure. His distinction of and emphasis on culture was a major advance for radical thought, and it still holds today.

Yet, the Italian Marxist considered political freedom a requisite for culture: if religious or political fanaticism suppresses the society, art will not flower. To write propaganda or paint conformist art is to succumb to the allures and/or the coercion of the reigning system. For that reason, most artists, like Keats and Shelly, are countercurrent.

WHO LOVES COMMUNISM?

Rightwing regimes today adore Communism. Just the word “Communist” sets their hearts a flutter. Communism in Italy is the scarecrow that it has been in capitalist America since the Russian Revolution. In countries with less solid democratic traditions, reactionary forces have regularly exploited the threat of Communism to establish dictatorial regimes. Nearly every day you can see it in action. Like terrorism, Communism has been the excuse for emergency laws in the Philippines and Peru as in Chile and Argentina. Emergency laws, special prisons, torture, the sky is the limit in the war against the Communist bugaboo.

Though the Stalinist brand of Communism in East Europe failed long ago and those states disappeared, the Right—in Italy, France, Spain, Greece as well as the USA—continues to raise the specter of the “Communist” threat to “family” and “our values” while it co-opts the idea of patriotism, making it such a necessary virtue that not to be anti-Communist is unpatriotic and is to hate one’s native country. As if super-patriotism were moral superiority.

But what is Communism today? Why is the word so frightening? In the minds of non-Communists, Communism is associated with the former USSR. In reality, Communistic ideas are as old as man: a social system characterized by the community of goods and the absence of private property. Such ideas marked the organization of the first Christian communities. Jesus Christ himself is often pinpointed as the first Communist.

Communism first appeared in ancient Greece advocating the community of all goods. In the Nineteenth century communistic ideas inspired reformists all over Europe, ideas of equality and the abolition of private property. What then is so terrible to the average man about the Marxist motto: “From each according to his capacity, to each according to his needs.”

Communist parties born last century from the European Socialist movement called themselves Marxist. The totalitarian parties of East Europe called themselves Communist, but their states were called Socialist republics. For non-Communists they blackened the idea of Communism and Socialism that had inspired earlier reformists. Today however, Communist slogans sound more utopian than threatening. Today, Communism in practice is nearly a myth, abstract even in countries that call themselves Communist, like China.

With the broadening of the European Union toward the East the question of Communism is recurrent today since the EU is formed by peoples with opposite perceptions of it. For many East Europeans, Communism in practice was a nightmare. Nor was the exit from totalitarian regimes in East Europe a happy one in that it led some of those countries to blind faith in a savage market economy and abandonment of the spirit of social solidarity.

However, aggressive non-Communists—I don’t call them anti-Communists for as a rule they have no clear idea of just what it is that they oppose—for many people in the world the word Communism is not a dirty word. I repeat: Communism is not a dirty word for billions of people of the world.

Though the totalitarian regimes in East Europe vanished and Communist parties are today marginalized, for the 450,000,000 people of the now twenty-seven nations of the European Union the memory of Communism is alive, even though controversial. Though Communism in practice is no longer considered an alternative to free market democracy, though it no longer aims at revolution and though it is crushed by its Soviet totalitarian past, its memory is alive. Today I spoke with a Romanian woman who assured me that people in Romania as well as in Hungary, the Czech Republic and Bulgaria miss many aspects of Communism, the sense of social security and the aura of solidarity that infused East Europeans despite the infringements on personal freedoms and the errors of the regimes. People speak of the Communist era and compare the relative drawbacks and benefits. It is not all cut and dry. What are we to make of that? Such an evaluation would come as a surprise to anti-Communists.

The question of Communism has not been settled.

Now for a look at the positive side of the question. In West Europe, Communists led the resistance against Nazism. In post-WWII, Communism was at the center of the political opposition. After the economic collapse of Communism in East Europe–impoverished by the war against Nazism, which it essentially won at the cost of 20 million lives—the anti-Communist Pole, Pope John Paul II, wrote that Communism was still necessary to combat unbridled Capitalism. In the year before his death, Pope Karol Wojtyla made his famous pronouncement concerning the evils of our times: “Nazism,” he wrote, “was the absolute evil, and Communism the necessary evil,” with the emphasis on “necessary.”

An interesting historical note: At the end of World War II, America was quick to get its hands on Nazi scientists, spies, and officers, war criminals or not, who were known to be anti-Communists. War criminals were helped to avoid war crimes trials in exchange for their cooperation. It emerged that Americans and Germans alike considered Communism and the USSR the real enemy; America recognized Nazi Germans as the most adept Communist hunters in the world, so it made good sense to employ them! Many Americans began to view WWII as a war against Communism not against Nazi Germany and therefore sided with the Fascists against the Communists. According to one view (my view too) of history, the war against Communism began with the German invasion of Russia in 1941 and ended in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed. Germany and Japan had fought the first part of the war; from 1945 the USA took over.

Reformed Communist parties abound in modern Europe. In Italy, Communist parties are integrated into progressive forces and have well over ten per cent of the national vote. Communist parties play political roles in France, Spain and other countries, scandalizing only the extreme Right. The original ideas of Communism survive chiefly as a theoretical alternative to rampant capitalism—as the anti-Communist Pope John Paul proclaimed—and a brake on the dismantling of the social state, the goal of capitalist anti-Communists.

Communism has always had multiple faces—political, social, economic and cultural. In some places its roots were deep in society; in some it still enters into traditional political parties as in Italy and to a lesser extent in France. Perhaps its Christian ideals on one hand and its economic promises on the other explain its survival.

Karl Marx wrote in 1848 that the ghost of Communism haunted Europe. Today, it is the memory of that ghost that resists in Europe and the USA. The ghost however is so powerful that the political Right regularly dangles its threat before the eyes of voters each time they go to the polls.

Residues of Communist culture, the spark of utopia that all men desire, bolster and explain the spirit of anti-capitalism in the world. The memory of Communism also explains the resistance of the social state to an unfettered market economy. It is in man’s interests, while capitalism is anti-man. Communism offers an alternative view of history, another approach to the present, and for some a vision of the future.

In order to put aside the confusion of Stalinism and Communism, I will recall that Antonio Gramsci was one of the early critics of the structures of Stalinist Communism, even though he did not live to experience the degeneration of Soviet Communism. He didn’t know the extent of Stalin’s purges, of the repressions and the deportations of entire peoples, and of the transformation of Communism into Soviet nationalism. On the other hand, since all of history is open to revision, I believe that also Stalinism, as extreme and cruel as it was, will also be reassessed. We should however recall that Stalinism and Soviet nationalism were Russia’s response to western encirclement from the Revolution up until today, as America continues to encircle Russia and push back its borders, with US-NATO military bases in Turkey, Iraq, Kosovo, Georgia, Germany, Poland and elsewhere and is now trying to engulf Ukraine, something like New England to the United States.

After Stalin’s death, the revelation of his crimes at the XX Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956 shook the world. That same year the arrival of Soviet tanks in Communist Budapest to crush the uprising of Hungarian workers was the last straw for many Western Communists. In those ideological times, some Western Communists recalled Gramsci’s reservations. Some broke with Moscow. The relationship between West European Communism and the USSR deteriorated. As one Italian Communist recently recalled of the year 1956, “the age of innocence was over.”

Meanwhile, under the unrelenting capitalist onslaught, some of Italy’s social system has been dismantled but the conversion to a market economy has not worked and economic growth is low. The problem of modern market economies is the distribution of wealth, which is anathema to capitalism. As in the USA, the inequalities between rich and poor in much of Europe have never been greater. The richest five per cent of Italy controls a disproportionate part of the nation’s wealth.

While the gap between the rich and poor is widening everywhere, free market exponents cry for more and more “freedom”, freedom for the capitalists to become richer. But everywhere there is a missing factor in the equation: equality. Equality is out. Equality! alarmed free marketers exclaim. An infringement on my freedom! They cry and wring their hands.

But who then is to defend equality? Certainly not capitalists. An inexplicable mystery for free marketers is that people in Social Democratic countries in Scandinavia enjoy the world’s highest standard of living. These mixed economies, part social, part capitalist, work. There, the rich pay dear. They grumble and dodge taxes, but in the end a majority of them accept higher taxes for they realize that future generations of their society will be the better for it. Put any label on it you want, but that is one form of Communism at work.

We don’t need economists to tell us that inequality is incompatible with freedom. Freedom, now one of the most complex words in our vocabulary, is often an evil word. What kind of freedom? Freedom for whom? At whose expense? The truth is that the poor and miserable are seldom represented politically. Who represents the real interests of even the brainwashed ignorant who write in to leftwing publications about the threat from Communism? Who represents the poor in America’s near one-party system? America’s poor, who are poorer than the poor of much of Europe where parts of the staggering social state still survive.

Antonio Gramsci today would agree that though democracy must guarantee fundamental rights like ownership of property, it must also guarantee a decent economic status to everyone, as exists in Scandinavia, as still exists in some of Europe. There is little evidence of infringements on the rights of the rich anywhere; but as far as the poor are concerned, the minimum wage is hardly a sign of equality.

The “social” economy recognizes the existence of inequalities and places limits on them. Market economy theoreticians, on the other hand, explain that inequality is quite a good thing; it is a stimulus to improve one’s position by hard work or innovation; success is a hope for all, an aspiration, something to strive for; it makes a society more vital. That is the “American way of life.” That is Americanist propaganda. To believe in it is to be patriotic.

As in this metaphor: I have gray hair. Yet when I see myself in the mirror I see my hair black as it once was. I have to remind myself that I am looking at an illusion: I have to tell myself that my hair is the gray other people see. It is gray, gray, gray. The same for the US Patriot Act, which is in effect anti-patriotic in that it threatens freedoms. In the same way no seeing sane person can believe that social and economic inequalities are a necessary price to pay for the economic freedom (that word again!) of a few.

First, let’s redistribute wealth dramatically. Then we can talk about acceptance of inequalities as a boost to economic progress.

Gramsci insisted on the role of intellectuals to lead the way toward reform. He recognized the need for an organization. Gramsci considered mass media the chief instrument used by the dominant class to spread its hegemony, but he pointed out that the media could also be used to counter that hegemony. Throughout the world today we see the confrontation—still unequal—between establishment media on one side and the spread of alternative media on the other: ezines, independent publishers and filmmakers and the free press.

Gaither Stewart, Senior Contributing Editor for Cyrano’s Journal/tantmieux, is a novelist and journalist based in Italy. His stories, essays and dispatches are read widely throughout the Internet on many leading venues. His collections of fiction, Icy Current Compulsive Course, To Be A Stranger and Once In Berlin are published by Wind River Press. (www.windriverpress.com). His recent novel, Asheville, is published by Wastelandrunes, (www.wastelandrunes.com).

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"On the night of 6 July 1988 Bob was an electrician on Piper. When the first explosion rocked the platform he was in his bunk reading a book. He mustered in the galley where it quickly became became evident that no plan of evacuation or leadership was on offer...

"He soon found himself in the company of others taking refuge from the inferno in a workshop. Eventually getting to the edge of the platform he lowered himself by rope part way to the sea and jumped the rest. As debris and burning oil rained down around him the current took him slowly away from the platform... watching the flame and explosion devour Piper, the strong thought came to him more than once that it was just a nightmare and that he would soon awake. He was one of 62 men to escape. One hundred and sixty five of his colleagues on the platform died along with two rescuers.

"Not one day of his life passed from that night on when he did not  think of those that he had left behind. He campaigned relentlessly to ensure the world knew that the disaster had been waiting to happen, foretold by the men and women who worked offshore. The unholy alliance of a government greedy for revenue and even greedier oil companies had long eclipsed the foreboding felt by many for worker safety offshore..."

Read the rest here. OILC (the Offshore Industry Liason Committee) emerged as a direct result of this, initially as a rank-and-file committee within the AEU, and then as an independent union shamefully excluded from the TUC by the AEU and its successors. They recently merged with the RMT. As they explain here, they've been fighting UK governments and the UK Offshore Operators Association (UKOOA) for basic safety legislation and the application of measures like the European Working Time Directive, ever since.

by Sherwood Ross
Global Research
July 5, 2008

Eight universities were in the running to get the Bush Presidential Library but Hunt Oil Co. head Ray Hunt, of Dallas, an economics major from Southern Methodist University, co-chaired the SMU search effort and came out on top. His long time pals-ship with “The Decider” may have had more than a bit to do with it.

Hunt has done a lot for Bush and vice-versa. Bush named Hunt in 2001 to his President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, and reappointed him five years later. Hunt also sits on the National Petroleum Council that gives industry advice to Bush’s Energy Secretary.

An oilman’s oilman, Hunt is a member of the board of the American Petroleum Institute and has been showered with awards from the petroleum sector, including “All-American Wildcatter.” Success in Oilsville doesn’t get any headier than that.

Now it turns out Hunt Oil clinched a separate deal last September with Iraq province Kurdistan he might not have won if he were not Bush’s Good Buddy. Some folks think, according to a front page New York Times report July 3, the deal “runs counter to American policy and undercut Iraq’s central government.” Baghdad reportedly is furious over it.

Hunt got this free pass to explore Kurdistan’s oil riches last September 8 when he inked an exploration pact, one likely to give him a share of the boodle of any future gushers. “Hunt would be the first U.S. company to sign such a deal,” a State Department official told the Times. And according to reporter Jay Price of McClatchy News Service, the Iraqi oil minister, speaking for Baghdad, “called the Hunt deal illegal.”

The Hunt deal, though, may resemble the national oil law Bush seeks to push through Parliament. This law, writes Antonia Juhasz, an analyst for watchdog Oil Change International, would “allow much (if not most) of Iraq’s oil revenues to flow out of the country and into the pockets of international companies.”

In an Op-Ed of March 13 last year in The New York Times, Juhasz wrote if the Bush-backed bill became law the Iraq National Oil Company would have exclusive control of just 17 of Iraq’s 80 known oil fields, “leaving two-thirds of known---and all of its as yet undiscovered-fields open to foreign control.”

By contrast, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, “maintain nationalized oil systems and have outlawed foreign control over oil development,” Juhasz said.

Allowing the separate Hunt Oil deal---whose details Hunt and the Kurds will not divulge---will surely benefit the Kurds but fleece most Iraqis, hence the anger in Baghdad. This gives the lie to Bush’s statement of March 16, 2003, that “We will make sure that Iraq’s natural resources are used for the benefit of their owners, the Iraqi people.” If you count hundreds of thousands of labor union members as people, which Bush may not, there is a loud outcry in the streets against Bush’s oil policy.

Meanwhile, the Times reports, the Administration is defending help the U.S. provided in drawing up no-bid contracts between Iraq’s Oil Ministry and five western oil firms to operate in other Iraqi oil patches. The U.S. said it provided purely technical help writing the contracts and played no role in choosing the winners. Believe that one, if you can. But why no bids again? Whatever happened to free enterprise?

This is the same crony capitalism that gave Halliburton, formerly headed by Good Buddy Vice President Cheney, a controversial, multi-billion no-bid contract to truck oil into Iraq. Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root(KBR) also got named sole source contractor to douse any oil well fires that might break out in Iraq.

KBR landed that no-bid plum even though Army Corps of Engineers contract chief Bunnatine Greenhouse found there were other qualified bidders. She was demoted for not signing off on it.

The Hunt and Halliburton deals offer vivid proof that “crony capitalism,” not the free market brand, is being practiced divvying up Iraq’s oil resources and the other spoils of war. This has long been Bush’s modus vivendi. The Wall Street Journal once noted his Harken Energy Co. acquired exclusive offshore drilling rights from Bahrain in 1990 even though it had never drilled a single well. How did Harken get it? Well, Bush’s father at the time occupied the White House.

Maybe when SMU puts all the Bush papers on display about why he attacked Iraq---a war that so far has killed a million souls---it will include the fine print of the contract Hunt signed with the Kurds. It will show how high Hunt could rise with a degree in economics from SMU, and how far Bush would go to sell out the Iraqi people in order to favor a Good Buddy. Is there anyone who still does not believe the Iraq war is about oil? #

Sherwood Ross is an American writer that covers political and military issues. Reach him at sherwoodr1@yahoo.com

© Copyright Sherwood Ross, Global Research, 2008

The url address of this article is: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=ROS20080705&articleId=9510

In response to WWFs report on green capitalism, Weathercocks and Signposts: the environment movement at a crossroads they ask whether Priuses and solar bikinis herald the first steps towards systematic change, or are merely an adaptation for a limited market segment.

Social marketers argue that it doesn't matter why people are doing good as long as they're doing good. Crompton's research suggests that the reasons for their actions matter enormously, and in many ways determine how much good they will ultimately do.

The current marketing-based approach is fatally flawed, Crompton says. His work debunks the popularly held "foot-in-the-door" mantra (change your light bulb today, and you'll move to a walkable neighborhood and sell your car before you know it!), with documented psychological research revealing little evidence to support that individuals will continue to move up the sustainability ladder. Instead, actually, "There is some evidence that … individuals rest on their laurels," Crompton says: consumers often make some small steps and stop.

Evidence they cite suggests that increasingly people are expecting corporations rather than governments to solve major environmental problems. And that is problematic because while businesses may see it as in their interests to deliver goods and services that cause less harm, ultimately their motive is profit. They are businesses after all, not charities. Governments can regulate to produce outcomes, and where the market is incapable of delivering these, step in and fill the gap.

In capitalist societies, the market is not an opportunity to be taken advantage of, it is an imperative. Its logic structures and impels society, and its fundamental tenets, though conventional, come to appear as expressions of natural laws. But capitalism itself is relatively novel: its genesis is most often traced to 17th century England, from where it has spread, over the past four centuries, to encompass the entire globe. Against the view that capitalism's spread was inevitable, or even that it is latent in medieval commercial or traditional urban cultures, it can be argued that capitalist development amounts to a historical accident, an unintended consequence of pre-capitalist England's internal arrangement. The argument that capitalism should not be conflated with commerce or even bourgeois benefits immensely from the juxtaposition of the case of England and the case of France. The nascent capitalist dynamics of English society reveal themselves to be quite different from those of absolutist France, and the archetypal "Bourgeois Revolution," the French, shows itself to not be operating according to capitalist logic as those of its own absolutist way of doing things.

To see capitalism's historical specificity and contingency, it helps to bear in mind its defining characteristics. Capitalist societies open up a sphere of dominance, the economic, that in other societies was more or less subsumed into other forms of power. So, while it is never the case that market forces can function without the threat of political or military coercion, with capitalism they obtain an autonomy that previously they lacked. People are dominated in capitalism not by the direct (at least, not the continually direct) application of force but by economic convention; the surplus they produce is not extorted from them by the King's armed taxmen but in the fact that some have legal right to social product and others have legal right to sell their labor. Even political and military coercion come to be seen in terms of market logic: if you do not pay your rent, you will be forcefully evicted; in order to earn a good wage you must have a competitive skill set; "supply and demand" are used to explain the loss of one's livelihood. In this way, the political maneuverings, legal decisions, and nepotism of power-jockeying take on an impersonal aura, as if society itself were subject to not the personal whims of a despot and his troops, but the objective workings of a natural law. People living under such conditions internalize the structuring logic of society in such a way as to maintain their livelihood: if you are the owner of a small business, you keep abreast of developments in your sector, lest you fall behind; if you are a hedge fund manager you look for the highest return on your investments; if you are a laborer, you attempt to acquire a set of marketable skills. These things are not so much free choices as what you must do if you are to survive: they are imperatives, and they follow from the "laws" of economics. The purpose of all this is, of course, the accumulation of wealth via sale of commodities within a single market frame.

This is in sharp contrast to all societies that are not dominated by the market. Comparing this picture of capitalism with pre-revolutionary France, we see that each operated according to different internal dynamics. In capitalism, the route to wealth was through economic means, through ever more efficient production; in absolutist France, the quickest road to wealth was through state office. Because of this, the French bourgeoisie came to loggerheads with the aristocracy, who enjoyed privileged access to wealth generating offices and special exemptions from taxes due to title. The bourgeois class revolted from these unequal social relations and sought to put the Third Estate on equal footing. Their ideological products reflect the internal dynamics in which they worked: the great treatises on private property do not come from France but from England; the French Revolution gives us the sweeping proclamations of Universalism, of equality of access, citizenship, the like against the entrenched privileges granted to the aristocracy because of particular birth, kinship, estate, or class.

As should be clear from this, the wealth forming social relations of absolutist France were not economic, did not work according to the laws of the market. They were constituted according to extraeconomic power: via political, military, royal, or religious rights or privileges. And the struggle for power, between the various classes, focused on these these extraeconomic privileges.

The case of precapitalist Britain is the same as in France: the respective classes of British society struggled to reproduce themselves according to their historical positions. Unlike France's, however, Britain's aristocracy did not weild a vast array of extraeconomic means of extraction; nor were they vying with the central monarchy for extraeconomic power. What they did have, and what their French counterparts lacked, was a highly consolidated grasp of land rights. Even before the enclosures, British landlords owned a far larger percentage of land than did smallholders and peasants. Gradually, the landlords shifted the terms of their leases from traditional amounts to those determined by market conditions. Tenants, in effect, had to bid for their leases. This introduced a market compulsion to the subsistence of the vast majority of the population. Since tenants had to compete, in economic terms, with their fellows to lease a piece of land from landlords, they had to adopt whatever techniques had been discovered to squeeze a bit more of a yield from the earth. These techniques originally may have been understood as innovations; yet due to the nature of market, they became imperatives: those tenants who were unable or unwilling to adopt them would lose their leases, as others would be willing or able to extract more from the earth and so pay more for the right to farm it. The extraeconomic domination that followed this initial arrangement, such as the enclosures, was carried out under the banner of market relations: the land could be more productively used according to market relations, or so the argument went, so it was in society's (that is, the landlords' and their capitalist tenants') interest to close off traditional rights and subject the land wholly to market imperatives. From the initial severing of direct access of the means of subsistence and its mediation with market relations -- in the countryside, in agrarian social relations -- the course of capitalist development progressed. Unsuccessful capitalist tenants and dispossessed peasants first became laborers on farms, then migrated to the cities, where they became a supply of labor for newly functioning factories. But this movement was from the countryside, not the urban centers. And it has its genesis in the legal structures and social relations that determine how people are related to their most basic subsistence needs.

What's next?

SOCIALISM OR YOUR MONEY BACK
Blog post
July 1, 2008

Socialists have always contended that the world could produce enough to feed every human being on the planet. This has been confirmed time and again by bodies such as the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation and World Health Organisation as well as by agronomists and other specialists in the field. So, why is the world price of wheat, rice and other agricultural products rising? Surely this shows that enough food can’t be produced? No, it doesn’t. What it shows is that food is not produced today to meet people’s needs but to be sold on a market with a view to profit.

World food prices are rising, and this does reflect the fact that paying demand is currently exceeding supplies. But this does not mean that enough food cannot be produced. It means simply that enough food has not been produced.

Various explanations have been offered for this imbalance between demand and supply. Extra demand resulting from the migration of millions of people from the countryside to the towns in places like China and India. Diversion of land to growing biofuels instead of food. Such explanations concentrate on why demand has increased. An article in the Times (26 June) by Ross Clark offers an explanation why not enough food has been produced.

Clark is a supporter of the market (who thinks that any opponent of the “free” market is a “Marxist”) and so expects that sooner or later food supplies will increase to satisfy the paying demand. No doubt it will (but this will still leave those who can’t pay either to starve or to have to rely on minimal hand-outs from charities and from the UN and other agencies). He argues that food production has fallen because in previous decades it had been overproduced. It is of course obscene to talk of “too much” food being produced when there are millions in the world who are starving, but he means “too much” in relation to paying demand. Even so, his explanation is still interesting in showing the irrational way in which the capitalist system works.

According to him:

“The reason for the fall in cereal production over 15 years has not been soil degradation or climate change: while crops yields are not increasing as fast as they were doing in the 1960s, they have still risen by 1-2 per cent per annum over the past 15 years. Rather, the decrease in production has been a straightforward response to overproduction. Remember the grain mountains of the 1980s? They resulted in a collapse in prices that in turn persuaded grain producers to contract their operation. Now that prices are rising again the opposite has happened: the FAO estimates that this year's wheat harvest will rise by 13 per cent as a result of extra planting, putting downward pressure on prices next year.”

He points out that today:

“the background to rising food prices is the shrinkage of global agriculture over the past decade and a half. Globally, less food is being produced on even less land than was the case in the early 1990s. Take the US, which according to the FAO was producing 1,210kg of cereals per person per year between 1990 and 1992 and 1,104 kg between 2001 and 2003. Or Canada, at one time the “world's bread basket”, where cereal production fell from 1,905 kg per person per year in 1990-92 to 1,384 kg in 2001-03.”

Given the current strong paying demand for food, the 1990s levels may well be reached again but, as we just said, this will satisfy only paying demand. What about those who can’t pay?

Though it is far from his intention, Clark provides information which shows that enough food could be produced to satisfy their food needs too. Of course it won’t be, and never will be, under the capitalist market system which he supports. But it could be in a socialist world where production would no longer be limited to what can be sold.

Clark writes:

“the total landmass cultivated for