Stop Corporate Welfare Kings

Ralph Nader

“Tax day” comes and goes each year, but unfortunately, the systemic issues that plague American taxpayers linger on without resolution well past the mid-April deadline.

The U.S. tax code has long been manipulated by corporate lobbyists and their corporate tax attorneys. (President Jimmy Carter once called the loophole-ridden tax laws “a disgrace to the human race.”) A primary purpose of these perforations is to arrange the law and regulations so that certain categories of profit-rich companies can avoid paying their fair share to Uncle Sam.

In many states, it is a literal race to the bottom for elected officials to offer corporations sweeter tax deals to keep jobs in their locality — see the 2013 Boeing controversy in the state of Washington, in which the aerospace industry, much of which is made up of Boeing, was awarded $8.7 billion in tax breaks over 16 years to produce the 777X jetliner in-state. Notably, Boeing paid zero in federal income tax that year — along with many other major U.S. corporations such as GE and Verizon. Some of these Fortune 500 companies even get a rebate check!

According to Citizens for Tax Justice, “American Fortune 500 corporations are avoiding up to $600 billion in U.S. federal income taxes by holding more than $2.1 trillion” of retained profits offshore, which they designate as “permanently reinvested” to avoid a tax liability.

And of course, millionaires and billionaires often pay less in taxes than middle-class Americans do, taking full advantage of tax loopholes, deductions, deferrals and other forms of creative accounting. The Republican-controlled House of Representatives now intends to pass legislation to repeal the estate tax, which would see that “vast amounts of money that has never been taxed will be passed tax-free to the heirs of today’s billionaires,” according to Scott Klinger of the Center for Effective Government.

The end result is that, through a myriad of tax avoidance schemes, the wealthy 1 percent continue to profit using public resources, subsidies and infrastructure while the 99 percent disproportionately pay the bills for it — all while struggling to pay their own bills, mortgages, student loans, and more. And when Wall Street runs amok, it’s the taxpayers who have paid the bills for the catastrophic damage as a result of regulatory surrender. Millions of these taxpayers also lost their jobs and pensions in the 2008-2009 Wall Street collapse of our economy.

This brings us to the Internal Revenue Service — which has been made into a dirty word to many Americans. Those Americans might be surprised to learn, however, that the current IRS enforcement budget is $10.9 billion, after a cut of $346 million from the previous year. To put that in perspective, Apple Inc. spent $14 billion just to buy back its own stock last year, a move that only serves to provide a meager benefit, if that, to its shareholders, while nourishing executive compensation packages.

The IRS loses an estimated $300 billion a year due to tax evasion. A budget proposal by the Obama administration claimed that the IRS could bring in an additional $6 for every dollar it adds to the enforcement budget. IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said that he pushes this very convincing point in Congress to little reception or reaction. “I say that and everybody shrugs and goes on about their business,” he told the AP in 2014. “I have not figured out either philosophically or psychologically why nobody seems to care whether we collect the revenue or not.”

The effects of these budgetary cuts are already being seen. Current staffing levels at the IRS are at 87,000 — the lowest since the early 1980s. The agency lost 13,000 employees from 2010 to 2014 and expects to lose another 3,000 this year. In the final stretch towards April 15, many taxpayers have experienced excruciatingly long waits on hold and long lines at local IRS offices as a result. Congress doesn’t care. (National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson, who operates independently within the IRS, detailed this degradation of service in her annual report to Congress. (See;taxpayeradvocate.irs.gov.)

Republican presidential hopeful Ted Cruz has gone so far as to publicly state his intention to abolish the IRS entirely, calling that radical course of action the “simplest and best tax reform.” It’s not clear how Senator Cruz intends the federal government to collect revenue to pay for his presidential salary, the White House budget and expanding his giant military budget if he should be elected and not recover his senses.

It is clear, however, that significant rational tax reform is necessary. What remains unclear is who will benefit the most from such reform. Americans must seriously ask why individual U.S. taxpayers are fronting the money for hugely profitable corporations. These are funds that could potentially be used to repair critical public infrastructure, create decently paying jobs, or simply reduce the tax burden on middle-income individuals.

One solution to ensure that the interests of small taxpayers are accounted for and protected is to establish taxpayer watchdog associations across the country. These organizations would work full-time in each state to make sure that individual taxpayers get the best deal possible. After all, big corporations can afford to support an army of tax accountants and attorneys to continually update the playbook of tactics to avoid having to pay their fair share. Most taxpayers don’t have this luxury. What they do have, however, is sheer force of numbers. Organization of such watchdog organizations could be facilitated by including a notice on the 1040 tax return inviting people to pay a small due and join these advocacy and educational nonprofit groups. These associations would be supported by membership dues and would receive no tax money. The members would elect a board of directors that could hire researchers, organizers, accountants and lawyers.

Such pressure from united citizen bodies would provide the organizational mechanism to enhance the influence of individuals in the tax-collection and policy-making process — something that is much-needed in our current American plutocracy.

A simple motto to consider when asking what we choose to tax is: “Tax what they burn, not what we earn.” Before we place the largest burdens of taxation on workers, we should tax areas that have the greatest potential negative or damaging influence on our economy and our society. Tax the polluters, the Wall Street speculators, the junk-food peddlers, and the corporate criminals. Consider that just a fraction of a 1-percent sales tax on speculation in derivatives and trading in stocks could bring in $300 billion a year! (See robinhoodtax.org.)

If taxpayers really want to protect their interests, they must organize and fight for them. The corporations certainly have the money — but they can’t match the manpower or votes of an organized citizenry.

In the meantime, big corporations on welfare like Walmart, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Pfizer, General Electric, Weyerhaeuser, and ExxonMobile should declare April 15 to be Taxpayer Appreciation Day. The corporate welfare kings should have the decency to, at least, thank smaller taxpayers who pay for all the freeloading that the corporatists have rammed through Congress. (See goodjobsfirst.org for much more on this issue.)

Outlaws in the Eyes of Amerika

Ron Jacobs

In recent decades, several books have been written about radical left organizations that flourished in the 1960s and 1970s. Most of these books are about mass organizations determined to build a large and popular radical Left in the United States. Their primary foci were US racism and the US war on Vietnam. Perhaps the best known and most radical of the organizations were the student group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Black Panthers. Although not necessarily the two groups with the most support, their name recognition probably topped any other leftist groups at the time. SDS most likely popularity peaked in 1968 and 1969 before its fateful July convention in the latter year. It was during that convention that the organization fractured never to regain its former strength. The Black Panthers lasted perhaps another two-three years before they too were irreparably split. In the wake of these two groups’ disintegration a more desperate form of revolutionary organizing took hold. While most radicals involved in this new organizing formed Marxist-Leninist groups and shifted to organizing working people in the factories they worked at, others took up the gun and the bomb, deciding it was time to wage guerrilla war.

As time would prove, neither approach would bring a revolution to the world’s most powerful nation. The latter approach would, however, wreak a fair amount of havoc in certain quarters of the ruling establishment and drive a few law enforcement agencies to commit numerous crimes of their own. As for those books I mentioned, they would include memoirs, histories from the Left, the Right and the middle, and even a few films. The most recent of these books is the newly-published work by journalist and author Bryan Burrough. Titled Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence, this book provides a fairly detailed history of six underground armed revolutionary groups that existed in the US between 1969 and the early 1980s. Sourced from newspaper and magazine articles, previously written books, FBI files, interviews with former members of these groups and former FBI agents, among other sources, Days of Rage is written in what I would term a mainstream approach to crime reportage.

The author’s perception is from a middle-class viewpoint with all that such a perspective implies. He tends to assume the moral correctness of the system and its police forces, accepts their version of the events he describes, despite a historical record that proves not only that the government had its own questionably moral agenda, but that it was more than willing to violate the laws it was supposedly upholding to destroy these groups and terminate not only their activities but their politics. The political analysis in the text is as shallow as Time magazine. Although not rabidly right wing like FoxNews, the politics of this book reside in the template that informs virtually all US mainstream journalism. In other words, it protects the wealthy, assumes the sanctity of private property, believes the political system is fair and democratic, and that law enforcement mostly enforces a just social order. Furthermore, this mindset is unwilling to acknowledge that the US imperial culture lacks a humane foundation.

The chapters on the Weatherman/Weather Underground Organization are sensationalist in nature. Burrough states he drew much of the background and understanding of Weather from two sources. One of those sources was a Rolling Stone article written by two New Leftist s who became right wing fanatics–David Horowitz and Peter Collier. As a Weather historian, I can state without reservation that this article was not only sensationalist; it reads like a piece of tabloid journalism and is of questionable veracity. Burrough’s other main source is a book by the police informant Larry Grathwohl. Grathwohl’s book remains a piece of self-aggrandizing reportage and its truth should be taken with several grains of salt.

In the case of Black Liberation Army member Assata Shakur, Burrough ignores everything but what the authorities have said. Differing accounts of the events around her arrest prove much of the police story is questionable at the least, and more likely just not true. The acceptance of law enforcement’s story also prevails during his narration of the case of the Soledad Brothers and George Jackson. He writes as truth what is in reality unproven and challenged by many legal observers. This is also the case when he writes about the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). In his telling of that group’s creation and crime spree, Burrough completely ignores SLA leader Donald DeFreeze’s informant work in California. Indeed, Burrough does not even mention the questions brought up in investigative articles published in The Realist, The Black Panther and other papers that challenged law enforcement’s version of how the SLA came about and the police links to some of its members. For example, Defreeze was not only able to easily escape from prison, he remained at large in the Bay Area for more than ten months with law enforcement’s knowledge. In addition, his contacts with known LAPD and California Highway Patrol confidential informant Louis Tackwood are never mentioned, nor are Defreeze’s multiyear relationships with these agencies. Although these investigations were not conclusive, they were well-conducted and raised serious questions about the SLA’s origins and actual motivations. The fact that Burrough ignores them is, at the least, somewhat lazy journalism.

Despite its pretense, Days of Rage is not an objective history any more than those written by myself and other leftists. It is a book that legitimizes the powers that be in the United States and the law enforcement agencies that serve those powers. Burrough seems alternately repelled and fascinated by the people and actions he describes. Not once in his litany of criminality by radical groups and individuals does Burrough acknowledge the criminality of the system and authorities they opposed. Without this element of political understanding to make sense of those actions and people, the histories of these groups and these actions are nothing but true crime stories. In other words, they come off as fascinating but ultimately senseless. It is true that some of the actions described were plainly self-serving and criminal. However by including these actions and equating them with those that were definitively political, Burrough obfuscates the political nature of the actions which were solely political.

Nonetheless, Days of Rage is a useful account of individual and personal details regarding this period of US history. Burrough’s book reminds radicals that, unless revolutionaries have popular support for the changes their actions hope to help bring about, they will be portrayed as the very criminals their enemies see them as. This is especially the case in a nation as counterrevolutionary as the United States. As a result, not only will the radicals be discredited, so will their politics.

Extractivism in Latin America

Don Fitz

Are songs of praise to electric cars leaving out a critical stanza?  Lithium batteries are essential for electric cars, which corporations push as an “environmentally friendly” method of transportation.  When progressives give an approving nod to electric cars, they reveal a serious lack of understanding of environmental cooptation.

Eye-closing and ear-covering to inherent problems with toxic chemicals is not limited to lithium.  It reverberates throughout discussions of “extraction,” or removing elements from the Earth.  Policies that expand extractivism in progressive Latin American countries bring up a host of contradictions: How do the short-term benefits of financial gain from extraction compare to its long-term destructiveness?  What options are available for reducing poverty without increasing mining, logging and GMO monocultures?  Could the climate change effects of extraction actually hurt the world’s poor more than helping them?  How can struggles against extractivism chart a path to economies based on human need rather corporate profits?

The lithium fantasy

Let’s get back to the overrated promise of lithium.  It is not unusual to read that lithium batteries contain no toxins and that mining the metal is “an environmentally benign process.”  In reality, lithium affects the use of water by organisms, especially those with nervous systems.  Obtaining it via underground reservoirs of dissolved salts known as salar brines is harsh on creatures in any desert-like environment where it is extracted.

In order for batteries to function, lithium must be used with chemicals that are even more toxic. Friends of the Earth (FOE), Europe states: “The release of such chemicals through leaching, spills or air emissions can harm communities, ecosystems and food production. Moreover, lithium extraction inevitably harms the soil and also causes air contamination.”

Electric vehicles (EVs) appear to have a lower environmental impact only if an evaluation limits itself to the use phase of the product (driving).  This does not happen when the manufacturing phase is included because producing lithium batteries requires lots of electricity.

Though lithium mining may seem like a panacea to Bolivia’s economic difficulties, the long list of minerals that have been mined out in that country waves a cautious flag.  Lithium mining could last for a much shorter period of time than often anticipated because its use in electronic devices could cause demand for it to soar.  Or, if a substitute chemical process were to be discovered, a crash in prices could pull the rug out from under lithium production.

Other effects of lithium mining cannot be quantified monetarily.  These include the destruction of nature and the loss of cultures if indigenous people are pushed off of their land.  Huge concentrations of lithium occur in “beautiful and ecologically fragile places, such as The Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia.”

The greatest disaster of producing lithium for EVs encompasses all others: An electric car is still a car.  The car is one of the most destructive machines that capitalism has foisted upon us.  Rather than endorsing corporate advertisements, social justice activists should be working with genuine environmentalists who are designing (and, in some cases, implementing) transportation systems to replace the individually owned car.

Why extraction?

No one denies that there are good reasons for removing minerals from the Earth.  Mining is the starting point of complex economic systems.  It allows societies to produce goods that are needed for survival.

In a capitalist society, that creates jobs for working people.  Distributing part of the wealth from increased extraction has greatly improved the lives of countless poor people in the “pink tide” (progressive, but not necessarily socialist) countries of Latin America.

In Ecuador, 15% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is now funding roads, health centers, schools and hospitals.  Education spending has doubled since Rafael Correa came to power.  “Anyone who has traveled to Ecuador can attest to the dramatic improvement in its roads.  Poverty rates are now one third lower. Child mortality has fallen.”

Improvements in Bolivia have been no less dramatic.  As a result of a four-fold increase in royalties and taxes, 80% of profits from extraction go to the government.  This has led to a steep decline in income inequality, with Bolivia’s Gini index dropping from 0.56 to 0.47 in 2011.

Less well-known are changes in Bolivia’s transportation infrastructure, which include a new municipal bus program and an outstanding urban cable car system called the Teleférico.  Roughly 100,000 users go between La Paz and El Alto every day.

Why not extraction?

These very real advantages of extraction go hand-in-hand with major problems.  Most overlooked is the inability of capitalism to separate producing goods that people need from the creation of gargantuan quantities of toxic junk that threaten humanity’s future.

A narrow focus on increasing extraction can result in the misguided belief that it is the only way to create jobs and wealth for poor countries.  Becoming defensive about extractivist policies can lead to underestimating the poisoning of workers and communities.

Lithium shows how silent denial of negative effects can lend support to fake “green” options.  No mineral is used in isolation.  Its environmental and health consequences can only be measured accurately by evaluating the totality of its interaction with other substances and the social consequences of its being mined and used to expand consumerism.  Dependence on any type of extraction leaves a country vulnerable, both to a sharp decline in market values, and to effects of the mineral being exhausted or replaced by another substance.

The fundamental problem with policies of “pink tide” governments is not that extraction occurs but that extractivism as a method of obtaining wealth is increasing.  In Bolivia, there is “intensified exploitation of the country’s natural resources, principally from fossil fuel production, mining, and the growth of large-scale, mono-crop agriculture.”

We all agree that extraction is required for producing life’s necessities. No one denies that a country that has been dependent on extraction for centuries cannot immediately wean itself. The “anti-extractivism” view is simply that activities such as mining should decrease, even if slowly.  “Pro-extractivists” advocate that countries increase extraction rapidly, regardless of the consequences.

Complexity

The most challenging question is whether increasing extraction today can lay the foundation for decreasing extraction tomorrow.  According to the argument, increased revenue from extraction allows countries to diversify their economies into manufacturing and other areas, which leaves them less dependent on international capital.  Ecuador’s Director of Planning and Development Pablo Muñoz insists that “Reducing poverty is the government’s first priority, the second is changing the systems of production…”

Unfortunately, if the international price of an extracted commodity falls, a country focusing on extraction will have a difficult choice.  In order to obtain the same return it will have to either lower wages or intensify the rate of mineral exploitation.  Poor countries may not be as free from international financial institutions as is often implied.

Raul Zibechi documents that in June 2014, “Ecuador delivered half of its gold reserves to Goldman Sachs as collateral for a loan of $400 million dollars, thus a return to foreign financing, with no risk to the lender…”  Market forces can be devastating for forest protection.  As the prices for commodities such as oil plunge, forest cover could be threatened by countries’ attempting to maintain economic growth by driving deeper into the jungle.

As of now, it seems highly dubious that a country can increase its addiction to resource extraction and wake up one morning with the addiction cured.

Exiting poverty

Many countries, especially Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador have used revenue from extraction to improve the quality of life of millions.  But could there be other paths to the same goal?  There are several interrelated questions:

1. Could there be enough wealth remaining in the hands of the richest 1% in “pink tide” countries to eliminate poverty by redistributing that wealth?

2. Could poverty be dramatically reduced by changing production to create what people need rather than manufacturing playthings for the rich?

3. Could poverty be dramatically reduced by redesigning manufacture to produce goods that endure rather than being designed to fall apart, fall out of fashion, or become obsolete?

4. Is there evidence that the amount of wealth added by extraction exceeds the value that should be subtracted by the tangible effects of poisoning land and people for centuries or millennia?

5. Is there evidence that wealth added by extraction exceeds the value that should be subtracted by the intangible effects of destroying native cultures and disrupting ecosystems for eternity?

For a rampant increase in resource extraction to be a viable policy, it would be necessary to demonstrate both that there are no economic alternatives and that the total improvements exceed the cost of increased illnesses, dislocations, human suffering, cultural extermination and species extinction.

Denial: Economic reality

It is unfortunate when progressives deny (or ignore) obvious realities, such as there being limits on the amount of destruction that can occur before ecosystems and economic systems collapse.  The usually knowledgeable Federico Fuentes claims that it is “ludicrous” to suggest that supporting extraction of fossil fuels by progressive governments means supporting burning them.

This extractivism denial makes it useful to review elementary economics:

1. If a country extracts fossil fuels to increase its income, it must sell those fuels.

2. In order to sell fossil fuels, the country must have a buyer.

3. Purchasers buy virtually all fossil fuels so that they can be burned.

4. Burning fossil fuels contributes to climate change.

When the Green Party of Greece first discussed merging into the left political party SYRIZA, it presented programmatic proposals which included “independence from fossil fuels within 20 years, addressing desertification by supporting forests, protection of fisheries … SYRIZA accepted every one of the policies.”  Two opposites could not be reconciled if SYRIZA-type governments spread throughout Europe and “pink tide” governments spread throughout poor countries.  It makes no sense to advocate that some countries increase the production of fossil fuels in a world that desperately needs to reduce burning them.

Denial: Climate change and the world’s poor

Climate change will lower food production.  Many farms and coastal cities will disappear.  Infrastructure will deteriorate.  “The poor will face ever-increasing deprivation.”  Most climate-related deaths “will be due to diminished food production, increased disease, heat waves, loss of employment, fires, floods and storms.”

Many of those in Latin America, and the Caribbean will succumb to the spread of tropical diseases.  Warming will likely increase not only well-known diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis.  There are already over a billion people who suffer “Neglected Tropical Diseases” such as “river blindness” and dengue.  These are mainly poor people in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa.  The horrendous plagues visited first upon the poor and then upon all of humanity are where climate change denial meets extractivismdenial.

The very fabric of life could begin to unravel as ocean acidification and the “sixth great extinction” advance.  We know that 80% of fossil fuels must stay in the ground if CO2 emissions are to raise temperatures less than 2°C.  Otherwise, self-perpetuating and interconnected feedback loops will make the planet unbearable.

Denial often appears as a passive failure to address what climate change means for economic reorganization.  Extractivist programs designed to lift people out of poverty will almost certainly have environmental effects which grind them (or their descendents) into a vastly worse form of poverty.

Denial: Struggle

Extractivism denial can take the form of trivializing efforts to challenge it.  People across the globe are unfurling an incredible variety of tactics to oppose oil drilling, fracking, logging, land grabs, GMO monocultures, mining of coal, gold, uranium and many other types of extraction.

Some progressive extractivists heap scorn on genuine concerns.  In a radio speech, Ecuador’s Rafael Correa emphasized “we will not let that childish left, with its feathers, its ponchos, destabilize the process of change.”  Federico Fuentes believes that referring to “the enormity of movements” opposing extraction is “an exaggeration at best.”  He says that Bolivia has many more protests over economic issues such as wages and basic services.

“Massive struggle” includes a massive power of ideas driving the struggle as well as a massive number of people who participate.  In early struggles against US slavery, abolitionists were outnumbered by those seeking to ameliorate it.  Abolitionists changed history—today, no one identifies with ameliorationism.

A few decades later, the revolutionary Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) had 150,000 members at its high point while the reformist American Federation of Labor counted millions.  The IWW occupies an “enormous” place in labor history because of its inspiration for a new society.  In the late 1960s, Students for a Democratic Society had an enormous impact on halting US violence against Viet Nam.  The millions who voted for the Democratic Party had little to no effect.

When concerns over economic and environmental oppression merge with a common program for a better life in the future as well as now, their combined strength will be greater than either movement by itself.  Right now, “it is the indigenous societies of the world, who are amongst the most oppressed, despised, ‘primitive’ and disadvantaged of all peoples, who are in the lead when it comes to ecological concern for the future of the planet.”

Clamping down

Many of the “pink tide” governments have been charged with silencing or manipulating opponents as they increase the rate of extraction.  In particular, Rafael Correa is accused of centralizing power by dividing social movements.  In Ecuador, there are hundreds of indigenous leaders and activists charged with doing the same things as those who brought Correa to power.

Ben Dangl believes that there is a serious undermining of grassroots power in Bolivia.  “A new Mining Law passed by the MAS-controlled congress … criminalizes protest against mining operations, and gives the mining industry the right to use public water for its water-intensive and toxic operations, while disregarding the rights of rural and farming communities to that same water.”

The government in Venezuela is admirably critical of US pressure, but not so much of its own oil extraction.  When the United Nations Conference of the Parties [COP20] planned to meet in Lima, Peru in December, 2014 to adopt a toothless approach to climate change, the Venezuelan government invited 200 representatives to an alternative conference.  Its method of reaching decisions was criticized as being top-down and ignoring views that could embarrass Venezuelan extractionism.  The conference’s final document omitted the key demand of leaving 80% of fossil fuels in the ground and references to limiting global temperature rises.

The Left may be strongly united in many struggles as long as a right-wing government is in power.  Though distressing to many, it is hardly novel for the Left to become divided when a progressive government takes the reins and some apologize for whatever mistakes that government makes. [1]

Remembering our spiritual grandparents

None of the leftist governments in Latin America has a perfect environmental record.  Yet, the tremendous steps they have taken to overcome poverty and challenge US hegemony is something that progressives throughout the world support.  It is no less vital to point out the very real problems that accompany increased resource extraction.

When first participating in anti-Viet Nam War events, I remember older radicals claiming that to pull people out of poverty the USSR had to build nuclear power plants.  Since it had abolished capitalism, nukes would be so safe that they could be built inside of big cities.  Then there was Chernobyl.  If the mistake of nukes reappears in the form of expanded resource extraction, history will not repeat itself as farce, but as catastrophic ecological devastation.

The Inadequacies of Liberalism

Edward Martin & Mateo Pimentel 

Though historically important in the evolution of justice theory, liberalism has evidenced limitations in providing a clear foundation for a just and equitable society. Rights set forth in liberal theory are related to each other by their common foundation in the freedom of the individual person to choose desired ends within the confines of designated policies and laws. However, to restrict these fundamental rights, that is, the right of the person not to be impeded in the pursuit of his or her happiness, is to attack individual liberty—the foundation of liberalism. For John Locke, one of the originators of the liberal rights doctrine, the natural state of humanity is the foundation of all legitimate political power, which for Locke is “a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they see fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave, or depending on the will of any other man.”

Within the same tradition, H. L. A. Hart has argued that if rights exist, they are ramifications and extrapolations of individual freedom. In Hart’s view, constitutional and moral rights are rooted in the fundamental right to liberty. Thus he states, “If there are any moral rights at all, it follows that there is at least one natural right, the equal right of all to be free. By saying that there is this right, I mean that in the absence of certain special conditions which are consistent with the right being an equal right, any adult human being capable of choice (1) has the right to forbearance on the part of all others from the use of coercion or restraint against him save to hinder coercion or restraint and (2) is at liberty to do (i.e., is under no obligation to abstain from) any action which is not one coercing or restraining or designed to injure other persons.” Consequently for Hart, rights are negative.

While this is not the case for every liberal apologist, it is the general tendency of this system. Rights are the boundaries and parameters around which an individual acts, speaks, associates, accumulates wealth and determines his destiny without restriction by the positive action of other persons or the state. Duties corresponding to rights in this theory are also negative, rather than positive, in content. Any action is protected by right “which is not one coercing or restraining or designed to injure other persons.” For John Stuart Mill, however, this excludes preventing others from doing as they like, unless they are determined to abolish liberty itself. The development of the “harm principle,” in On Liberty, excludes, in Mill’s estimation, attempts to restrict the liberty of others by force or threat of force while it rules out killing (except for self-defense) and slavery. However, Hart notes that Mill’s liberal theory does not rule out competition, “even though in fact, owing to scarcity, one man’s satisfaction causes another’s frustration.”

Other liberal strategies have been offered for promoting social justice, such as John Rawls’ work in A Theory of Justice. The major justification for liberal society, according to Rawls, is based on the premise that human rights are to be defined in terms of the maximum amount of freedom and autonomy for all persons as long as the most needy in any society are helped in this process. Thus, for Rawls, justice must benefit all in some way. Other liberals (such as Hart), in their critique of Rawls, are prepared to admit that it may be naïve or pretentious for Rawls to exhort starving persons to maximize their freedom by eating whatever food they can earn or find. The implication here is that liberties of certain well-off people or corporations may have to be curtailed to some degree to help the poor. In response to this criticism, Rawls is willing to acknowledge that the provisions of a system of equal civil liberties will be of no less value to the poor, and that these
liberties can be negotiated to advance the cause of those most in need. Rawls states, “The denial of equal liberty can be accepted only if it is necessary to enhance the quality of civilization so that in due course the equal freedoms can be enjoyed by all.” And while casting doubts on libertarian notions of justice in the case of Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia, (i.e., the maximum amount of economic liberty will provide basic human needs for all), Rawls nevertheless believes that certain rights can be constructed in society in order to maintain a minimum standard of living for the poor. However, this reconstruction is in no way absolute for Rawls who states, “To be sure, it is not the case that when the priority of liberty holds, all material wants are satisfied. Rather these desires are not so compelling as to make it rational for persons in the original position to agree to satisfy them by accepting a less than equal freedom. The account of the good enables the parties to work out a hierarchy among their several interests and to note which kinds of ends should be regulative in their rational plans of life. Until the basic wants of individuals can be fulfilled, the relative urgency of their interest in liberty cannot be firmly decided in advance. It will depend on the claims of the least favored as seen from the constitutional and legislative stages.”

Rawls claims that he is essentially describing, at least theoretically, the way justice should be promoted in America and by constitutional decree. The heart of this theory is based on procedural “fairness” which contains two basic principles. Known as the “difference principle,” the first claims basic equal liberties for all. The second asserts an equality which negotiates or conditions fairness in that “social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged and (b) attached to positions open to all under conditions of fair equality and opportunity.” Here, it is important to keep in mind, Rawls stipulates that his notion of liberty is restricted to the equal right to vote, eligibility for public office, freedom of speech and assembly, freedom of conscience and thought, the right to own property, and the freedom from arbitrary arrest and seizure. On the other hand, Rawls excludes economic freedoms such as the freedom to own productive property, freedom of contract, freedom to appropriate what one has produced, freedom to inherit or to leave one’s possessions to persons of one’s choice. In sum, economic freedoms for Rawls do not constitute basic liberties and rights.

Even with the introduction of the “difference principle” into liberalism, Rawls has failed to some degree to definitively guarantee the rights of marginalized persons. In effect, Rawls has thus reinforced the liberal ethos embedded in capitalism. However, in “Fairness to Goodness,” Rawls contends that there are cogent arguments which, if true and factual, would lead to the conclusion that capitalism and his notion of justice are incompatible. This admission by Rawls effectively opens the way to remediating liberal theory and supporting a more radically egalitarian system. In extrapolating upon this notion, Robert Admur has developed three arguments which would necessitate that Rawls’ theory of justice as fairness, based on the “difference principle” would lead to socialist remedies. Admur essentially argues: (1) the Rawlsian principles of justice would require some sort of socialism if the stability of a well-ordered society could be achieved in no other way; (2) the principles of justice would require some sort of socialism if the self-respect of the worst-off could be achieved in no other, or if the fair value of liberty could be protected in no other way, or if fair equality of opportunity could be achieved in no other way; (3) assuming that capitalism and socialism are equally acceptable in terms of their effects on self-respect, liberty and equal opportunity, then the principles of justice would require socialism if a socialist economy were capable of providing the worst-off with a higher level of wealth and income than could be provided under any other system. Admur contends that the Rawlsian formulation of justice—that is, justice as fairness based on the “difference principle”—can be fulfilled only in a democratic socialist economy. Thus, Rawls’ theory makes greater sense if it is understood and implemented as an integral part of a socialist system, precisely because liberal theory fails, as argued earlier, to definitively prioritize the economic liberties and rights, especially of the poor and marginalized.

Marxist and Catholic traditions reject, for the most part, Rawls’ and liberalism’s attempt to justify the division of the general conception of justice into two principles: one governing the sphere of political freedoms and the other governing the distribution of wealth, economic opportunity, and social participation. Where liberal democratic rights theory grants primacy to the individual’s negative immunity from interference or political coercion, Marxist and Catholic theories of human rights stresses positive entitlements to participate fully in the public life of society, along with the right of workers to own and control the means of production. Social and economic rights, in particular the right to work and the acquisition of basic necessities, are preeminent in both traditions whereas, in Rawlsian terms, these rights are not guaranteed. While Rawls’ “difference principle” attempts to soften and complement the one-dimensional nature of negative rights, liberalism, for Rawls, nevertheless insists on the presupposition that individual autonomy is the decisive factor in understanding rights and human dignity. It is in this sense Rawlsian liberalism fails to adequately construct a theory of positive rights.

Yet, the centrality of socio-economic rights for Marxism and Catholic social justice is based on its conviction that freedom is both negative and positive, individual and social. This social reality cannot be achieved by an individual acting in isolation but rather in solidarity with others, which requires freedom understood as solidarity, participation, contribution to the common good, and self-determination in social life, especially for the poor. Moreover, freedom to obtain basic needs is founded on the dignity of the human person, which is a concern shared equally by Catholic social teaching and Marxist praxis. Solidarity in both traditions thus prioritizes basic human needs and rights better than liberalism.

Side Effects

Gary Corseri

Used to be, when I flipped channels, I’d go from one movie to another, one drama to another, one news show to another, etc. These days, I’m more likely to go from one commercial to another—and more likely than not, it’s a prescription pill commercial!

Wasn’t there supposed to be a “War on Drugs”? Pinch me awake, but I’m guessing that we Baby Boomers lost… because it’s pretty clear that drugs—especially the “legal” ones—have proliferated in the heart of the Empire the way drones have darkened the skies over Afghanistan, Pakistan and all the little stans.

The commercials are getting longer, more numerous, and more absurd. At least half of what they’re packaging is the sound-track! A commercial starts out with Cajun music, folks enjoying themselves over barbecue. Congenial, upbeat. Think shrimp, crabs, Tabasco. They’re selling you something for diabetes or high blood pressure or—it almost doesn’t matter. Next time you’re feeling bad in any way, you’ll call your doctor—do people still call their doctors?—you’ll go to the hospital and you’ll ask whomever it is who’s giving you a 5 minute exam if “Invokana” or whatever is what you need? (You’ve heard it will “lower your numbers.”) Doc will stroke his/her chin, and probably prescribe—you asked for it by name, didn’t you?

Whatever it is, you get caught up in the music, the sound track about how good this stuff is for you—you can be “down with Crestor”! You can wear an orange bowling jersey, pretend you’re still in your carefree college days; with all that cheerful musak playing in your head, you tend to forget the side effects. Yes, it can “lower your blood sugar” and you’ll “love your numbers,” but—soft voice here—could cause dehydration, kidney problems, yeast, rash, difficulty breathing or swallowing….

No time for any real cogitation. It’s throw the worms out there, and reel the fish in! Our politics works the same way.

Every third time I flip, I land on a “news” program where there are yakking heads (used to be talking, now they just yak—kind of like real yaks!)—giggling, oohing, ah-ing, laying odds on latest announcements by Hillary Shrillary, Jeb the Bush, Rand the Paul, Ted the Harvard-Hispanic guy, and Marco the Cuban-American guy.

To be fair, I should not call her “Shrillary.” That was the old Hillary—or rather, the young Hillary of the early 90s when she refused to stay at home and bake cookies. New model is “mature,” “experienced,” “seasoned” who wants to be the “champion of the Middle Class.” Great! Let’s narrow the gap between the gazillionaires and the rest of us. Isn’t it time for a woman in the White House? Side effects: Likely to cause “buyers’ remorse.” Not the “buyers” who will put up the $2.5 billion her campaign managers estimate she’ll need to run and keep running for the next 560 days+ days. No, those buyers—people like Soros—will be fine because Lady McHillary will deliver. (It’s all there in the secret, somehow erased, emails!)

Switch to Jeb the Reliable. You got to trust this guy because… didn’t he step aside to let his nincompoop younger brother play at the presidency for 8 years? His family is famous, man! And didn’t he run the Sunshine state just impeccably—that state where they fire scientists who utter the phrase “climate change” in public! (Google it!) Didn’t his old man do a bang-up fine job with the Gulf War? Side effects: Endless wars seem to run in the family, and may be habit-forming.

Switch to Rand Paul. I admit: I liked his father. Principally, because he spoke out against the American Empire’s proclivity to make war upon all those who are not, in the judgment of Madelyn Albright types, “indispensable.” Ron also suggested we might, just might, maybe, a teensy-weensy, consider re-balancing our lopsided, unbalanced, out-of-kilter relationship with the new Goliath of the Middle East—Israel. Rand, of course, has learned well from his father: learned what not to do. In his announcement speech he said he was not afraid to name the enemy—“Islamic Fundamentalism!” He said he wants to “restrain government and expand freedom.” (Just what is this “freedom” stuff they all talk about, but never bother to define or qualify?) Side Effects: Likely to precipitate Adelsonitis, a $100-million ailment, from which Mitt Romney suffered, causing quixotic delusions.

Switch to ad for Symbicort: Open with paunchy, grandfatherly type seated on couch with cute 5-yr old boy; grandfather reading from a children’s book of fairy tales. Cut to pictures in children’s book, suddenly animated, showing big, bad wolf in front of final dwelling of the 3 little pigs. Grandfather’s over-voice: something about wolf “huffing and puffing.” Cut to grandpa and kid on sofa. Kid: “Kind of like you, Grandpa.” Grandpa: “Well, if you have COPD, it can be hard to breathe.” Cut to bedraggled, animation of wolf, huffed and puffed-out, in female wolf-doctor’s office. (We’re supposed to feel sorry for the wolf, not happy for the pigs!) Solution for COPD sufferers (wolverines and humans, supposedly): Symbicort! Side Effects: Those who bother to Google, will find on the first page): “Generic Name: budesonide/ formoterol.” “It is possible that some of the side effects of Symbicort may not have been reported. These can be reported to the FDA….” “More common” side effects include, “difficulty with breathing” (!), fever, body aches or pain, loss of voice, shortness of breath (!).

Switch to Prilosec commercial. Redneck comedian is about to run his little rowboat–with revved-up, back motor right thru a burning hoop. This clown has box of Prilosec in his hand, as we cut to long shot of boat jumping thru the hoop (obviously a different actor). Cut to Redneck comedian still hawking Prilosec to conquer heartburn. Side Effects:May cause idiocy!– a belief that one can eat any kind of garbage one pleases and survive to jump rowboats thru burning hoops!

Switch to short interview with Bernie Sanders on CNN’s Wolf Blitzer show. Highlights: Sanders is unsure he’ll run because of the gargantuan task of taking on the special interests—the huge costs of a campaign. Says we’ve got to take on the billionaire class, overturn Citizens United (Amen to that!). Notes that the top 1/10 of 1% of Americans control more money than the bottom 90%; and, some 99% of the money “returned” to Americans since the “Great Recession” has gone to the top 1%…. Sanders notes in passing that he’s the longest-sitting Independent US Senator in US history. (I’ll note, in passing, that he comes from Vermont—perhaps the best state in the US, and I’ve been in 40 of them.)Side Effects: After some topical applications of Bernie-think, one might develop an incurable case of AutoCogitationitis—an incorrigible desire to think for oneself.

A Hunk of Burning Sin

DAVID YEARSLEY

On my road trip from Ithaca, New york to Oberlin yesterday I listened to lots of Christian contemporary music on my car radio.  What fascinates me is the friction between sensuality and its suppression that gives sacred pop its weird energy.  A musical style redolent of sex is repurposed for chaste devotion. When these sung prayers and testimonials disappear into the confessional chamber they throw off their vestments and embrace the sinful pleasures of rock ‘n roll.

Fear of musical pleasure is older than the first writings about music. Plato was a great one for preaching against the lascivious tendencies of the wrong kind of song. In the Protagoras he fulminated against those musicians “possessed by a frantic and unhallowed lust for pleasure.” These degenerates contaminated decorous musical genres with imports from inappropriate sources. Such panderers slandered their profession through their “unholy lusts.” In the Republic, Plato decried the dangers of womanly song, and made sure to banish effeminate music from his ideal state: from Plato onwards women are often taken as the prime culprits in the debasement of song and the debauchery of man. Following Plato’s lead, Tipper Gore had fits over that androgyne Prince. Plato would certainly have argued that it was Prince’s feminine side that beguiled him into creating the scurrilous Darlin’ Nikki—met in hotel “masturbating to a magazine” according to the lyrics—and then to ignite Tipper’s outrage.

Having enjoyed the pleasures of the body before his conversion, Augustine understood better than anyone the complicated force field created when prayerful song tries to resist the magnetism of lust. In the Confessions he admits that the mind is “more sacredly and fervently raised unto a flame of devotion by the holy words themselves when sung than when not.”  Yet danger lurks: “This contentment of the flesh, to which the soul must not be given over to be enervated, doth oft beguile me, the sense not waiting upon reason, and patiently following her; but having been admitted merely for her sake, it strives even to run before her, and lead her.”  Sin seduces the soul through song.

But Augustine goes on to chide himself for his own overreaction to these dangers, when, “erring in too great strictness,” he seeks to banish “the sweet music of David’s Psalter from my ears and the Church’s too.” Taken to its extreme, fear of music could lead to its complete banishment from communal services and private devotions, thus depriving the believer of the vital tool of faith that is song. The right kind of singing is the best: when liturgical texts are “sung with clear voice and proper modulation; they are of great use to the church.” But one must always be on guard against the libidinous: ”When it befalls me to be more moved by the voice than the words sung, I confess I had sinned greatly, and would rather not hear music.”

Not all musicians and writers on music felt compelled to resist these supposed temptations. The forebidding counter-Reformation cardinal of Milan, Frederico Borromeo was so enamored of the ravishing madrigals of Claudio Monteverdi that he wrote alternative texts for them so that he could smuggle this music into the church.  One of the most vivid of these is the famous “Si, ch’io vorrei morire” from Monteverdi’s Fifth Book of Madrigals of 1605, a central document in the controversy swirling around the composer and a piece that helped set the course of “modern” music at the beginning of the seventeenth century.

At the time Monteverdi was severely criticized for the license he took with the hallowed rules of composition. The preface to the Fifth Book defended these liberties by arguing that the composer was articulating an alternative, “second practice” of music in which the words should hold sway over the harmony, and not the other way around, as he argued, ha dlong been the case.  To express a text with greater force, harmonic and contrapuntal strictures might have to be stretched or even broken.  This argument was both a clever nod to of Augustine and a subversion of the thought of this conflicted Church Father: for Monteverdi, the pleasure of voice and harmony would service the words, but the words themselves were all about the body.

The celebrated madrigal from that Fifth Book, “Si ch’io vorrei morire,” is one such piece full of searing dissonances that are simultaneously painful and pleasurable. It disports itself between the sheets with heated sighs, leaps and resolutions that gloriously violate the hallowed rules of composition—all of these liberties taken in the service of depicting sex until, at least, the sweet release of the final chord.

The English translation of poet Maurizio Moro’s text runs as follows:

Yes, I would like to die now that I’m kissing, sweetheart, the luscious lips of my darling beloved. Ah! dear, dainty tongue, give me so much of your liquid that I die of delight on your breast! Ay, my love, ah, crush me to this white breast until I faint! Ah mouth, ah kisses, ah tongue, I say again: Yes, I would like to die!

I direct those non-Augustinians out there towards the intoxicating libation that is the recording of this seminal book of madrigals by the Italian group, La Venexiana. The ensemble has done all of Monteverdi’s madrigals by now, confronting love and war and many things in between. None have done them better in the age of recorded sound, though I will admit to an enduring affection for the superficially more chaste interpretation from a few decades back by the Consort of Musicke. Churning beneath its more demure surface is a uniquely English brand of eros.

Borromeo re-wrote Moro’s salacious text and fitted his own devotional poetry to Monteverdi’s music, re-tooling the madrigal as a love song to Jesus: O Jesus mea vita:

“O Jesus, my life, in whom is true salvation.
O light of glory, dear Jesus, O Precious beauty; 
Grant me your gentle sweetness, Sweetness to be tasted.
O my life, O glory of heaven; 
Ah, tie me to you in eternity. 
O Jesus, my light, my hope, my heart, 
I give myself to you, O Jesus my life.”

One notes the eruption of sensuality here, too, in that frequent form of sublimation, taste.  Nor have the gasps of pleasure been fully erased: one last erotic sigh remains to be heard: “Ah tie me to you in eternity.” Listen to the recording of these alternate texts by Le Poème Harmonique and hear sounds that are as ravishing in the chapel as they were in the ducal hall of mirrors.

If celibacy must be obeyed this is the necessary soundtrack. Can one really imagine that when Borromeo listened to this music in his lavish chapel he was not transported more erotically than spiritually? It is the imagery of bodies in sensual motion that is bound to this madrigal’s music in eternity.

Which brings us back to the paradox of Christian Rock and the aptly named Kathleen Carnali: she offers spiritual delights in the form of carnal pleasure in her hit, Dangerous Prayer, which I heard yesterday evening as I slogged along a rainy stretch I-90 near Erie, Pennsylvania.

Carnali is no Monteverdi, nor even a Borromeo.  Her music seethes with rhythmic urgency, though one much different from that of the lustful variety of Monteverdi’s madrigal. After the breathy opening strains, the snap of the drumbeat, like the crack of a whip, conjures the disco rather than the well-lighted hall of praise. Augustine would have been disturbed by Carnali’s voice, which pursues the favored modulation of modern pop: husky and forced, dangerously close to erotic sighing. Right from the start, text refuses to distance itself from such lurid associations:

“Lying here awake? Or am I still dreaming? 
Have I made a mistake? Or can I trust what I am feeling?”

The metaphors of the chorus are highly suggestive, while indulging happily in the kind of cliché favored by many a Christian Rock lyricist:

“Jesus, rain on my parade, 
Strip me down again, 
So I’m desperate … for you.”

In the rapturous refrain the carnal voice arches upward to its highest register, the entwined harmonies yearning for climax.  What’s most dangerous about this prayer, as Augustine would gladly tell her as he listens down from his bishop’s throne in heaven, is that Rock ‘n Roll will always be about sex: try as one might to contain off erotic desire with a devout text, sin always burns away the Christian shroud.

State premier threatens to “disengage” from Australia

Mike Head

Western Australian Premier Colin Barnett this week declared that he is preparing a policy of “disengagement” from Australia over looming cuts to the state’s share of national Goods and Services Tax (GST) income.

Exacerbating the conflict is the fact that Barnett’s Liberal-Nationals coalition government faces a haemorrhaging of the former “mining boom” state’s tax and royalty revenues, particularly because of collapsing world iron ore and gas prices.

Confronted by plummetting media poll ratings, Barnett is also seeking to divert, in a divisive “states rights” direction, the mounting social discontent caused by rapidly growing unemployment, wage cutting and cuts to basic social services. Thousands of jobs have been destroyed in mining-related industries over the past two years, sending the state’s official jobless rate soaring to 5.7 percent, just below the national average of 6.3 percent.

In a demagogic reference to the 1773 tax revolt that became the beginning of the American Revolution against British colonial rule, Barnett said Western Australia (WA) faced its “Boston tea party moment” by being forced to give other states greater shares of GST revenues. He even spoke of importing goods to the resources-rich state from Asia rather than eastern Australia.

“If the GST is not resolved, Western Australia’s future is not with the rest of Australia in a financial or economic sense,” he told the Australian while in Singapore as part of an eight-day trip to India and other Asian countries, seeking to boost trade and investment talks. “Our future then shifts to Asia even more strongly than it is now.”

There is an obvious element of maneouvre and posturing in Barnett’s threat. It was issued in the lead-up to a Council of Australian Governments meeting between the federal and state and territory leaders in Canberra tomorrow. That meeting is now likely to see clashes between WA and other states over this year’s annual allocation of GST revenues by the nominally independent Commonwealth Grants Commission.

Barnett is demanding at least a 50 percent “floor” in WA’s share of the GST revenue that is raised in the state, overturning the planned allotment for 2015–16 of less than 30 percent. Under agreements struck between the federal and state governments when the GST was introduced 15 years ago, the Grants Commission re-allocates GST revenues on the basis of a formula designed to “equalise” government spending across the country. Because of its high revenues from mining, WA has for some years received less from the GST than the tax generates within the state, with the proceeds redistributed to poorer states.

Whatever his precise intentions, Barnett’s ultimatum points to the devastating impact of the implosion of the resources boom that has sustained Australian capitalism for decades. WA’s government has relied on mining royalties for no less than 20 percent of its budget.

Barnett’s declaration raises the spectre of the fracturing of the country at the hands of rival factions of the corporate elite. Speaking on behalf of elements in the mining-based ruling circles, Barnett is seeking to make a separate Western Australian pitch for Asian markets and investment, based on mining resources that are located far from Australia’s eastern states.

Similar developments have emerged in other parts of the world, such as Scotland, as the international economic crisis has deepened. The globalisation of production and finance over the past three decades has opened up the possibility of better-off regions directly establishing their own lucrative relations with global markets and carving out privileged regional enclaves.

Barnett made his comments after visiting India, where he floated the prospect of boosting iron ore sales and establishing close connections with specific Indian states. He described India as the next “frontier” for mining exports to replace a “maturing” China and Japan.

WA’s highest-profile secession advocate, the state Liberal Party president Norman Moore, urged Barnett to carry out his threat to abstain from federal-state agreements until the GST conflict is resolved. In 2011, Moore, then Barnett’s mines and petroleum minister, said WA should secede and rely on China and the United States for military defence. Barnett has previously rejected Moore’s secessionist views but Moore noticeably praised Barnett for his “disengagement” statement.

Secessionist trends have raised their heads in WA during earlier periods of economic crisis. An unsuccessful state referendum was called in 1933 during the Great Depression. In 1974, amid a world slump, iron ore magnate Lang Hancock, whose fortune was inherited by his daughter Gina Rinehart, launched a Westralian Secession Movement, but it failed in a bid to win a federal Senate seat.

Today, however, the centrifugal pressures are far greater. The capacity to disconnect from the nation-state is feeding separatist tendencies that are intensifying amid the ongoing global economic breakdown. In the immediate aftermath of the 2008 crash, former WA Liberal Premier Richard Court declared that the case for secession was strengthened because WA accounted for 35 percent of Australia’s export income.

At the same time, the tensions between the ruling elites in WA and the rest of Australia have been aggravated by the ongoing fall in world iron ore prices. These have dropped from a 2011 high of nearly $US200 a tonne to less than $US50 a tonne, due to slowing steel production in China and the downturn in China’s major markets in Europe and the US.

These pressures were underscored this week when the Standard & Poor’s credit rating agency warned that WA’s rating could be lowered again, from AA+, having already been cut from AAA in September 2013. The financial firm cited the state’s crashing iron ore revenues and the WA government’s “limited political will to make difficult decisions.”

Barnett’s government has already slashed social spending in response to the 2013 credit downgrade but this is nowhere enough for the money markets, whose demands are backed by the national financial elite and the federal Liberal-National government. Prime Minister Tony Abbott, Treasurer Joe Hockey and other senior ministers are insisting that the WA government must privatise assets such as the electricity grid, gut social services and impose further pro-market deregulation.

Federal and state Labor Party leaders have taken a similar line, with Victorian state Premier Daniel Andrews accusing the Barnett government of “spending like drunken sailors.”

While Barnett has baulked at some of these demands, fearing electoral oblivion, they represent the vicious social agenda that global capitalism insists upon, whether or not WA secedes.

Throughout the “mining boom,” the working class paid a high price for the huge profits gouged out by the mine operators—soaring housing costs, inhuman conditions for “fly in-fly out” mining workers and chronically under-funded health, education and welfare services.

Now, WA separatism is being fomented by sections of the ruling class as a means of dividing the working class along state and regional lines and diverting the hostility of workers to the destruction of jobs, the driving down of wages and conditions and the deepening cuts to social services.

Burmese regime signs draft ceasefire with ethnic separatists

John Roberts

The military-backed government in Burma (Myanmar) signed a draft peace accord with 16 ethnic minority separatist groups and militias in Rangoon (Yangon) on March 31, then declared the ceasefire to be “historic.”

The inflated description of the agreement reflects the government’s political needs and manoeuvres in the lead-up to national elections in November, and its anxiety to advance its economic and political engagement with the Western powers.

The accord does not include separatist militias in the Kokang region of Shan state, where the Burmese army is fighting the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) and its allies. Battles erupted there last month, near the border with China. Fighting also continues with the Kachin Independence Army.

The government’s Union Peace-making Work Committee (UPWC) signed the draft ceasefire with the National Ceasefire Coordinating Team (NCCT), representing the 16 groups involved in seven rounds of negotiations over 16 months.

The Burmese regime has concluded at least 34 bilateral ceasefire agreements with dozens of minority ethnic factions since 1989. Many of these subsequently broke down, including a 1989 deal with the MNDAA. This draft proposal, however, is the first to cover such a large number of organisations.

The agreement’s signatories do not include some of the best-organised and equipped militias, including the United Wa State Army and the Shan State Army-South, as well as the MNDAA. Of the 16 groups that signed the ceasefire, all but two already have bilateral peace deals in place and have co-operated closely with the regime.

The agreement is yet to be endorsed by a summit of the 16 groups. All have their own vested interests and are likely to press for greater autonomy within their political fiefdoms, a demand the military is never likely to grant. The generals want nothing less than total disarmament by the groups. Armed forces chief Senior General Min Aung declared on March 27: “In the implementation of the ceasefire and peace processes, disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration for security reconciliation are essential.”

The draft agreement would probably not have been signed at all if Burmese President Thein Sein had not held out two concessions. The first was a promise of greater devolution of political power and resource management, supposedly to establish a peace process leading “to a union on democratic and federal principles.” The second was a softening of the demand that rebel groups disarm before a ceasefire.

The draft calls for committees to monitor the ceasefire, and establishes rules for the conduct of the army and the ethnic militias during the truce. It also bans further recruitment by the signatories, confirms their territory and status, and outlines the nature of future political discussion. Despite many remaining problems, the government says it expects to finalise a full agreement within months.

The draft agreement was welcomed by the UN special adviser on Burma, Vijay Nambiar, who declared it to be “a historic and significant achievement,” as well as by US and Chinese diplomats in Burma. China’s ambassador Wang Yifang expressed the hope that a final agreement would “restore peace and stability to the China-Myanmar borders.”

It is the MNDAA, however, which is at the centre of the latest military conflict on China’s border. Moreover, in commenting on the accord, Burmese government spokesmen pointedly declared that dealing with this ethnic Chinese-based militia was a matter of “national sovereignty” and not an internal issue—a not-so veiled accusation of Chinese involvement.

While posturing as a supporter of the peace agreement, Washington has not criticised the Burmese army’s offensive against the MNDAA, nor its imposition of martial law in Kokang. The Pentagon is developing closer relations with the Burmese military under the pretext of schooling it in “human rights.” The US clearly regards the Kokang conflict as a means of undermining Chinese influence in Burma and in particular for thwarting Beijing’s plans for a strategic transport corridor through Burma.

The fighting in Kokang underscores how rapidly Burma is being drawn into the sharpening geo-political tensions fuelled by the US diplomatic offensive and military build-up against China, known as the “pivot to Asia.”

In 2011, Burma’s nominally civilian government, set up by the military under its 2008 Constitution, reacted to the “pivot” by seeking closer relations with Washington in order to lessen its economic and political dependence on Beijing. The pro-US opposition National League for Democracy (NLD) led by Aung San Suu Kyi fully supported the move and has worked closely with the regime.

In 2012, Suu Kyi and 43 other NLD members entered the military-dominated parliament through by-elections, lending credibility to the regime’s claims to be carrying out political reforms. The US and European Union responded by suspending most sanctions imposed on the former junta following its crackdown on the NLD after it won the 1990 elections.

Burma’s reorientation to the West has, however, reached a critical state. Both the US and EU have impressed on the Burmese government that a further improvement of relations is contingent on “credible” national elections this year and a ceasefire agreement with ethnic militias in the northern resource-rich regions of the country.

Last month’s peace accord went hand-in-hand with the government’s efforts to provide a democratic facade for national elections. Last week, President Thein Sein convened two meetings with political party representatives, including Suu Kyi, to discuss the poll. While the government media hailed the gatherings as a success, no agreement was reached over constitutional reforms and the conduct of the election.

Su Kyi hinted that her party could boycott the elections. Thein Sein brushed this aside, however, confident the NDL has little room for manoeuvre, given its support for the turn to the West and participation in the 2012 by-election. Even if the NDL does well in the election, the military will retain effective control of key security posts covering defence, home, home affairs and border security.

The regime is clearly hoping for a further easing of sanctions to encourage investment. Foreign direct investment more than doubled to $US8 billion in the 2014-2015 fiscal year compared to the previous year. However, most of the money went into the oil and gas sector and transport and communications. Only $1.5 billion was invested in manufacturing, which the government desperately wants to expand to increase employment and ease social tensions.

The draft peace accord, despite its limited and fragile character, is part of the government’s bid to consolidate closer relations with the US and its allies.