LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment

Monday, March 20, 2006

France: Crisis of the Capitalist State

For my Left Libertarian friends and Liberaltarians who insist that there is some ideal capitalism that has existed without the state, some anarcho-capitalist ideal, the current crisis of capitalism and it's state in France proves once again what I have said here, ad nauseaum, that there is no modern State without Capitalism.

They go together like a horse and carriage as the song says.

Or as Herr Doctor Marx once said; the State is the "executive committee of the ruling class."

Business leaders tell Villepin to stand firm

Another executive who attended the meeting and declined to be identified was less optimistic.

"There was a feeling among many of the participants that if the law is withdrawn you can kiss goodbye to reform for the next 10 years," he said, according to his spokesman. "It would send a terrible signal.".

The businessmen's comments come against a backdrop of escalating social unrest over the First Employment Contract, an initiative known by its French initials as the CPE and closely associated with the prime minister, who drafted the new law in an effort to ease double-digit youth unemployment.

Six weeks after student organizations and labor unions embarked on their campaign to have the new contract scrapped, the latest battle on France's streets goes well beyond the fate of one unpopular law.

It has become a critical test of another French government to carry out economic change and has emboldened an opposition that has rallied around job security ahead of next year's presidential election.

"We are now at a point that is well- known in France: the point at which a reform measure has become a symbol of reform itself," said Elie Cohen, a member of the Council of Economic Analysis, a panel of independent economists advising the prime minister. "This is no longer just about the CPE, it is about the ability to reform France."

As the IWW preamble says; The Employing class and the working class have nothing in common.It's class war in France. France under threat of general strike Less than six months after violent riots erupted across its cities, France is in turmoil again as opposition to a controversial new employment law threatens to shut down the country.

And as we syndicalists say Political Power, parliamentarism, will change nothing. And France as much as America is the home of the revolutionary syndicalism.

It will take the whole of the proletariat, employed and unemployed workers, students, housewives, immigrants, sans papiers, etc. to mobilize direct action, to overthrow the neo-liberal State whether the new bosses are the Left or Right of Capital.

If the executive class of Capitalism in France fails to get what it wants with a Right Wing government well there is always the Left Wing it can appeal to. Which shows that to mobilize itself as class for itself, even the traditional Left must be superceded by the revolutionary proletariat.

Beigbeder, another prominent entrepreneur, said that any future French government - even if it was a Socialist government - would have to attempt labor reform to jump-start economic growth.

"In the end there will be a flexible labor contract in France, even if we are the last in Europe to adopt this kind of reform," said Beigbeder, who also leads the research and innovation arm of the French employers' union, Medef.

Indeed, he said it might take a leftist government to win the fight on labor market reform in France.

"If the left wins," he added, referring to the 2007 elections, "they will present a similar contract, maybe even a better one, because sometimes it's easier for the left to get the support of the unions and others from the left."

So far, business has been slow to take a public stance on the contract, fearing that this could create an even-greater backlash against a law regarded by many as a charter for exploiting young employees.

As I have said this is a revolutionary situation in France, not unlike May 68, and like the mass strike wave of a decade ago. It comes as a rejection of Blairs Thatcherism for Europe, and the EU constitution which would transform the member nations into modern neo-liberal captialist states. Like Britain.

And for a different view from the student/workers side of the Barricades see: Parisian riots, take two

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No Shock and Awe

Three years ago the world watched as America invaded Iraq in what it called operation Shock and Awe. A phony war based on a phony excuse for the President to teach nasty Saddam a lesson his daddy wisely forego.

Three years later and the demonstrations against the war continue. Smaller than the mass demonstrations that greeted the first months and year of the war. Global demonstrations to mark third anniversary of Iraq war

Leaving Blogging Tories and right whingnuts to giggle and chortle in their beards. But the laugh is on them. Sure the numbers this weekend were small 500 in Australia, 2000 in Toronto, 15,000 London, thousands in the U.S. but there were protests that's whats important.

Enui may have settled in now that we are three years into the war, the urgency that created an unprecidented groundswell of protest in those early days three years ago has given way to "I told You So" as Iraq falls into Civil War.

The fact is that in the early days before the Invasion and after record numbers of people, in the millions did something they had never done before, protested a war before and as it was just begining.

What the right wing isn't laughing about is the fact that the American public three years later is now giving George Bush and his War the biggest thumbs down in public polling ever for a War President.Sky falls in on Bush the outcast

A tip o the blog to the comrades in Edmonton who managed to brave the snowstorm on Saturday to march. Good on ya. Protesters defy heavy snow to march against war
Edmonton Journal , Canada - 19 Mar 2006
EDMONTON -- The near-record snowfall blanketing Edmonton on Saturday didn't stifle the messages of groups rallying for peace on the third anniversary of the US ...

'Way too much bloodshed'

Sun, March 19, 2006
Protesters across the country call for an end to military action in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The demonstrations in Canada were important in order to oppose our involvement in taking over US operations in Afghanistan. Qualified support for Afghan mission: poll They will have an impact on Canadian public opinion.

Especially now that Defense Minister O'Connor has clarified that there will be NO DEBATE on the current commitment in Afghanistan. As he told CTV news Craig Oliver on Sunday's Question Period, that debate is over. Even the redeployment in February will not be debated. He said only NEW operations will be debated.

Which is contrary to what the Conservatives have been saying for the past month.

Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor is adamant that there will be no vote on Canada's role in Afghanistan, even if that vote were to strengthen the Conservatives' mandate to continue that mission.

While Canadian troops have been in the nation since 2001, some have called for new debate as Canadian troops take on a more aggressive combat role that is at odds with Canada's more traditional role as peacekeepers.

However, O'Connor rejected that notion.

"Our policy is that if we take on a new venture in a different country, we will bring that forward to Parliament for a vote," the former general told CTV's Question Period Sunday.

"But this is a continuing commitment. This started in December of 2001."

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In Like A Lion

Winters final rage against the coming of the Spring dumped 25 centimeteres of snow on us between Saturday and Sunday. That meant three shovelings in order to clean up the mess. What a dump on the final weekend before Spring arrives. Largest snowfall ever recorded.

Record falls along with all that snow

Between 20 and 25 cm of snow fell between late Friday and Saturday evening, when the flurries tapered off.

- That virtually ties the record snowfall for a single day in March, when 23 cm fell at City Centre Airport on March 11, 1982.

- Record snowfall at International Airport for a single day in March was 21.1 cm, set March 13, 1974 .

(Source: Environment Canada)

Which is what this winter has been all about record breaking. Driest, brownist, coldest days, mildest winter over all. Weird. As in them Norse sisters.

http://photos.goldmarkart.com/art/22/22_387_m.jpg

All of March has been cold and snowy in Edmonton, indeed across Alberta. Remember it was only in late January and we were having grass fires in southern parts of the province. The longest brownest winter we had. And since the begining of March we have had cold frigid -26 below weather and Snow. Fine Winter in one month, ok.

Now that we have gotten that out of our system can we now move on to Spring.

Which begins today officially this morning

SPRING
March 20 2006
at 11:26

Of course it's going to be a white spring.

In like a Lion out like a lamb as they say.

I wonder if the Lion's name is Aslan since we are so close to Easter?

Aslan the Lion in art from Walt Disney Pictures'
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - 2005

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LNG

Those darlings of Monopoly the Irving Family Compact are in another battle with the Citizens of New Brunswick as this blog documents. I have written here about their infamous paternalistic capitalism.

Now they want to set up a Liquified Natural Gas, LNG, terminal on the island and then set up a pipeline to ship the gas south to the USA. Ironically their deal which is with Repsol, the Spanish oil giant, is about delivering Bolivian gas into the U.S.

While Bolivia has yet to deal with Repsol on new terms for purchasing the peoples resources in that country. Repsol is accused of not paying duty on 230,000 barrels of crude oil valued at some €7.5 million.

Premier Bernard Lord's Conservative government introduced legislation Wednesday that will clear the way for the city of Saint John to grant a special property-tax rate for Irving Oil and Repsol YPF, S.A., its Spanish partner in the LNG project.

The proposed rate is a fraction of what the property taxes would be normally.

''We're doing this on behalf of the city of Saint John for the LNG terminal,'' said Local Government Minister Brenda Fowlie.

''They felt they needed to do this in order to make sure the facility did come to New Brunswick and to the Saint John area specifically.''

The city of Saint John has voted to give Irving Oil, owner and operator of Canada's largest oil refinery, a fixed property-tax rate of C$500,000 per year for the terminal for the next 25 years. Irving Oil Gets Clearance for Major Tax Break

Where-ever LNG is delivered by tankers concerns are raised about safety; Coast Guard has safety concerns about LNG terminal plans and of course the environment.

LNG is supercooled liquefied gas that is shipped from far-flung countries -- Iran, Qatar, Russia and Indonesia are major suppliers -- to coastline terminals, where it is heated, vaporized and fed into a pipeline. Sempra and other companies are convinced that LNG is key to keeping a lid on gas prices in the United States as domestic supplies dwindle.

The rub: Many coastal communities don't want massive fuel tankers hogging their shores. Regulators approved five new LNG terminals in Texas and three in Louisiana, but companies have struggled to find a home outside the Gulf of Mexico, particularly in California and New England.

That's not to say that all Mexicans welcome LNG either. Lobster fishermen and the owner of a neighboring resort say Sempra's hulking plant threatens business. Surfers say a phenomenal surfing spot was destroyed after the San Diego-based company began construction in March.

Environmentalists have waged a spirited -- and so far unsuccessful -- campaign to derail Sempra, regularly blocking traffic at the plant entrance and bringing activists from around the world to rally local opposition. They sued the California Public Utilities Commission in state court last year to force the regulator to reconsider a ruling that cleared the way for Sempra to pipe gas from the plant to the U.S. grid near Tecate, Calif. West Coast's first LNG terminal finds a home in Mexico

As usual for the Irvings they are demanding tax breaks from St. Johns NB for their business of setting up the LNG terminals and pipelines. And they are asking the Volk to pay for the destruction of their tourist industry to benefit the greedy family compact that is the Irvings.New Brunswick town hopes to stop LNG tankers

Saint John city councillor Glen Tait is dismayed at the pressure tactics used by Irving Oil Ltd. to extract a long-term municipal tax break for its latest megaproject. In his view, it's a form of blackmail. "They're big enough to come down with a hammer," says Mr. Tait, describing the ultimatum that forced city council to ram through a 25-year tax deal for Irving's $750-million liquefied natural gas terminal -- or risk losing the project for Saint John.

While in St. Johns citizens were told they had to give the Irvings a tax break so they can run the LNG pipeline through a public park! Protests are now growing around saving the park from the Irvings.

The provincial and municipal tax breaks, meaning citizen funding, gives the Irvings extra cash to invest in Ireland!. The artistocratic gaul of the Irvings knows no bounds.

Irving Oil Eyes Global Expansion

Besides the Saint John oil refinery, Canada's largest, Irving Oil owns and operates more than 500 convenience stores in eastern Canada and New England primarily under the brand Bluecanoe. It has also partnered with Repsol YPF, the largest private energy company in Latin America, to develop an liquified natural gas terminal in the Port City, according to the report.

Alhajji said in the report Irving's dominance in the downstream oil industry makes it perfectly suited to jump into Ireland's market.

"They are suited to take over, basically, because they are focused to serving the consumer at the end," he told CanadaEast.com.

Bill Simpkins, an energy industry consultant in Halifax, said in the report that convenience stores are profitable operations for oil companies. The market for quick to-go foods and beverages can be quite lucrative.

"I think overall the Irving companies are very astute in terms of where they invest," he said.

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What's Your Value

Canadians worth $137,300 each: Statistics Canada
Which just goes to show that we should not be paying personal income taxes until we begin earning over $100,000 annually. See my; A Peoples Program for Alberta

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Roll Up the Rim

This gives a whole new meaning to roll up the rim to win.

Tim Hortons shares ready to hit stock market

Investors to bet on Tim Hortons' growth prospects

Tracing the roots of Canada's iconic chain

Tim shares could double double

Tim Hortons quick facts

Canadian Press

Published: Sunday, March 19, 2006

A look at Tim Hortons' initial public offering:

-- The stock will trade under the ticker symbol THI on the New York Stock Exchange and Toronto Stock Exchange.

-- The estimated initial price per share is between $21 and $23 Cdn, $18 and $20 US.

-- Tim Hortons will offer 29 million shares.

More On Tim Hortons

More On Timmies

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Sunday, March 19, 2006

Consultation Alberta Style

Ralph Klein promised consultation with the Volk of Alberta over his "discussion paper" on Third Way Health Care reform. When challenged by the Liberals to speak to Albertans at open forums they are sponsoring or in a televised debate, he balked and said the only discussion will be in the Legislature. Then he traveled to B.C. to discuss his ideas at a closed meeting where tickets sold for $100 per and $500 if you wanted to sit with Ralph.

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Prison Nation

Belarus held a farcical election today, with police patrols in the main square in order to avoid a Ukrainian like Orange Revolution. The people apparently voted for the dictator by over 80%. Mr. Lukashenko who rules Belarus was once a prison guard. Poor Belarus is a prison nation. Belarus vote ends in dubious landslide
Even in One Party State Alberta King Ralph only gets 72% in the popular opinion polls.

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The Spectacle of War on Terror

An excellent article in New Left Review, available online, is a review of NLR's Verso publication Afflicted Powers Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War
by the Retort Collective based in the Bay Area of San Fransisco.

A collective effort they use Situationist theory of the Spectacle to analyze the current Bush phony war on Terror.

In light of the Pentagon release of Al-Qaeda materials this weekend that show Osama bin Laden understood the importance of media imaging of his war on the U.S. especially the attack on 9/11. It was the unreal reality of TV imaging, that then created the market response of 'reality' TV.

Retorts analysis of this as a Spectacular War, a media war fought in images and through media including the internet, becomes important for the Anti-War movement and the Left to understand.

They also use the theory that the permanent war economy that the US has embraced is a form of primitive accumulation of capital, which is also discussed in an earlier article in NLR.

It is this analysis that I have also posited here, that capitalism as globalization still requires primitive accumulation of capital, war zones with the consequential piracy and brigandism that marks the earliest form of capital accumulation.

Julian Stallabrass: Spectacle and Terror

The central claim of the book is that, with the attacks of 9-11, the us state was wounded at the level of the spectacle and cannot endure this ‘image death’ or ‘image defeat.

The perpetrators were fully conscious of what they were about, were in fact Debordian in their thinking, reasoning that capitalism is dependent on the colonized social circuits that comprise spectacleÂ—including confidence in the market and the state, and an identification with commodity cultureÂ—and that to disrupt spectacle may have great and unpredictable consequences. The attacks, Retort claim, were not atavistic pinpricks but modern politics, an assault above all on the Â‘ghost socialityÂ’ purveyed by the media The assault on spectacle, not on economic power or even people, was their main business, and in this sense they were for a short time remarkably successful.

There is much that can be said to qualify this view. The motivations of the bombers themselves may never be known, although Retort point to tracts on media theory found in Al Qaeda camps. They must indeed have known that the consequences of their acts could not have been accurately predicted, and this makes their political motivesÂ—as opposed to their religious ones, or the desire for just revengeÂ—murkier still. Retort are correct that the void at the level of the image in the mainstream broadcast media was remarkable

In any case, it may be that the point of terror is not merely to disrupt spectacle by producing indigestible images, but to exceed it. Retort highlight the paradox of the vanguard Islamic revolutionaries, who deny themselves all that capitalist spectacle has to offer, and harden themselves against mundane sentiment and appetite, yet who still hold to the effectiveness of the image, and propagate images of their acts through websites. Just as in their lives and deaths they seek the unmediated, so their atrocities perform it, being designed to produce real, bodily fear (not the sublime of air shows), to blanket a city with the smell of fire and blood, to bring to a people sunk in spectacle the ineluctability of arbitrary death. The July 2005 London underground bombings were not meant primarily to create images, but to spread the terror of living burial among the cityÂ’s populace.
Retort argue that the result of the spectacular defeat of 9-11 has been to push the state into actions that are as much governed by spectacle as by material considerations. Warfare has been elevated from an intermittent action to permanent imperial conflict. They claim that one frequently repeated charge of the anti-war movementÂ—that the war was fought for oilÂ—when taken too simply, ignores the Â‘partially non-factual imperatives of capital accumulation. These include the effort to repair spectacle, and the drive to normalize war in the minds of citizens.

Retort are surely correct to point to the state’s efforts to create images that can counter the memory of 9-11, and to their insufficiency: Bush on the flight-deck proclaiming victory in Iraq, Saddam’s statue toppled, the dictator captured, the SmokinÂ’ Marine who was supposed to embody the cool courage of the us armed forces, and so on. It is not that these were ineffective pieces of propaganda, but they have subsequently soured as the war and acts of terror have continued. The most memorable images so far gathered by the us armed forces in Iraq are those taken on the phone-cameras of the torturers of Abu Ghraib. Similarly, us political support for Israel is seen as no longer being driven by strategic or military considerations, which now would operate against such an alliance, but rather as an attachment at the level of the image: both are simultaneously democratic consumer societies and highly militarized states with a pioneer ethos, and both harbour the guilt and pride of having taken their land by expelling and exterminating another population. The us in seeing Israel looks into a mirror and cannot abandon its own reflected image.

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War Faking

As I said here the other day; Iraqi Distraction, the sturm and drang in the media about Operation Swarmer in Iraq was a distraction in order to boost Bush's poll ratings. Galloping Beaver follows up with an excellent essay pointing out that the whole mission was a hoax, an elaborate media build up for a basic excercise with joint U.S. and Iraqi forces.

An excercise folks. A flexing of muscle to coinside with the muscular speeches given by the President this week. And here is the irony it was all made for the 24/7 TV news networks.

As Time magazine reported, though they own CNN which played right into the Defense Department/Pentagon PR campaign,

But contrary to what many many television networks erroneously reported, the operation was by no means the largest use of airpower since the start of the war. ("Air Assault" is a military term that refers specifically to transporting troops into an area.) In fact, there were no airstrikes and no leading insurgents were nabbed in an operation that some skeptical military analysts described as little more than a photo op.

Meanwhile with all the photo op material provided by the Pentagon, no media were allowed on this secret mission, it still was part of the attempt by the US to pretend its Iraqi puppet army was ready to deal with security. Which of course it isn't.

In fact this whole operation has managed to further upset the Sunni's and provide further fuel for political sectarian differences, and all they got out of it was peoples personal weapons. So much for defending the Second amendment.

One leading Sunni Arab, Iraqi presidential security adviser Wafiq al-Samaraie, urged that the operation ease restrictions on traffic across Samarra's vital Tigris River bridge, and cease "disarming the people of Samarra of their own authorized weapons."

But the US has to start pulling out troops this year, as the Brits have already begun. That was their timetable all along. However as much as the US has pushed for a government and army in Iraq that could take over based on this timetable, to extract troops prior to the November elections in the US, the Iraqi's have failed to live up to US expectations.

This excercise was a fake, it was nothing more than a regular police action, in order to distract from the serious failure of the US military and political strategy in Iraq. Three years after "Mission Accomplished".

U.S. lowering goals in Iraq

By Doyle McManus
Los Angeles Times

WASHINGTON — Three years ago today, as they ordered more than 150,000 U.S. troops to race toward Baghdad, Iraq, Bush administration officials confidently predicted that Iraq quickly would evolve into a prosperous, oil-fueled democracy. When those goals proved optimistic, they lowered their sights, focusing on a military campaign to defeat Sunni-led insurgents and elections to jump-start a new political order.

John Moore, Associated Press

Iraqi security forces carry weapons turned in by militia loyal to radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al Sadr in Baghdad in October 2004.

Now, as the conflict enters its fourth year, the Bush administration faces a new challenge: the prospect of civil war. And, in response, officials appear to be redefining success downward again. If Iraq can avoid all-out civil war, they say, if Baghdad's new security forces can hold together, if Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds all participate in a new unity government, that may be enough to allow the administration to begin reducing the number of U.S. troops in the country by the second half of this year.
In increasingly sober public statements — and in slightly more candid assessments in interviews with officials who refused to be identified — administration officials are working to lower expectations.
"It may seem difficult at times to understand how we can say that progress is being made," President Bush said in his weekly radio address Saturday, acknowledging that much of the recent news from Iraq has been bad. "But . . . slowly but surely, our strategy is getting results."
"We may fail," warned a senior official directly involved in Iraq policy. "But I think we're going to succeed. I think we're going to nudge this ball down the road. . . . It's not going to be easy, and it's going to take time."

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