Neo-Liberal State Capitalism In Asia

Reading the Right from the Left.

Free Trade Zones are the newest formation of state capitalism. Of course the contradiction here is that they pose as a form of free trade. When in fact the difference between them and state enterprizes is simply a matter of ownership. Name change really. Of course there are concrete structural differences to. But for all intents and purposes both are forms of state capitalism.

Whether they are called new economic zones; in Canada's Maritimes (dominated by call centres rather than the traditional use of these zones for manufacturing), Maquiadoras in the Caribean, Latin and South America, or Special Enterprize Zones zones in Asia and Aftica or economic reconstruction Zones in American inner cities, they remain a market distortion.

In India they are finding that the creation of these Special Enterprize Zones (SEZ) distort the market place. And since they are implemented as one of the tools of neo-liberalism to free the market of state control it is another contradiction of real existing captialism, rather than the text book capitalism of the Austrian or Chicago schools. Such text book capitalism showed its failure in the melt down of the Russian economy after its failed attempts to privatize with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989.


Attack on Indias economic zone plan

Since the passing of the Special Economic Zones Act in February, hundreds of businesses have rushed to take advantage of generous tax breaks, causing consternation in the finance ministry, the central bank and even the International Monetary Fund.

Special economic zones have been established in several countries, most notably in China, where they attracted the foreign investment and know-how that were central to the modernisation programme launched in 1978. However, critics claim SEZs attract investment only by offering distortionary incentives rather than by building underlying competitiveness and can delay real economy-wide reform

But economists believe the proposed SEZs are unlikely to help Indian manufacturers achieve scale efficiencies, since 133 of the 267 are less than 1 square kilometre in area. The average size is just 4.2 sq km.

“Mega-sized SEZs are the ideal solution,” said Chetan Ahya of Morgan Stanley. “We believe that in today’s highly competitive globalised world, the concept of small-sized SEZs is completely outdated.”

In a continuation of a long-running turf war with the commerce ministry, finance ministry officials said the scheme was providing unnecessary tax breaks to real estate development that would have taken place regardless of whether there was a SEZ scheme in place.

It remains the function of the state to create these zones, through cheap land, tax and regulation breaks, in particular labour laws, health and safety regulations, etc. In other words it is not about trade or even production but cheap manufacturing of goods, which can only be brought about by an attack on labours wages and benefits, which eat into surplus value (profit). When the neo-liberals call for de-regulation, ending red tape, etc. it is always the labour laws they focus on or laws that impact on workers. A couple examples from the Financial Times online should suffice to make the point.

UK in secret deal with Italy on China trade

Britain has just enough EU member states ready to support its exemption from the working time directive – seen as a vital part of Britain’s flexible labour market – but the coalition is flaky.But the proposed deal has hit a hitch: Italy has so far refused to give Britain the written assurances it wants on working hours. Communists and socialists in Mr Prodi’s coalition believe the UK’s working time “opt out” exploits workers and gives Britain an unfair advantage over countries where the 48-hour limit applies.



Another shift in ownership from an autarkic form of state capitalism to a monopoly state capitalism like India's (their so called Democratic State Capitalism) is currently occuring in China as part of its economic reforms. That is the creation of capitalist law, specifically bankruptcy law.

China state firms win stay of execution

The move, aimed at cushioning the social impact on employees of financially strained state companies, will slow the disposal of bad loans held by state banks and distressed debt companies and perhaps also reduce buyout opportunities for foreigners.

The bankrupcty law, passed in August after more than a decade of debate, is seen as crucial stage in China’s reforms as it enables creditors and investors to weed out underperforming companies by filing for bankruptcy to recover at least part of their funds.

However, the law, which is due to come into effect in June 2007, will not apply to 2,116 state-owned enterprises considered at financial risk by the Chinese authorities until at least the end of 2008.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Professor Li Shuguang, one of the authors of the new law, said that for those companies, employees’ health and wage claims would still take precedence over creditors’ claims, an arrangement that had so far slowed restructuring in some sectors.

Estimates of the claims by state employees range from hundreds to thousands of billions of renminbi, China’s currency.

In other words before the capitalist risks their investment, the public has alread invested more than the private capitalist ever would. Any change in the regulations of the state, do not minimize the state, they simply make it more open to the influence of monopoly capital for its own interest.

Private equity firms’ and foreign multinationals’ efforts to buy and restructure state companies would also suffer a setback.

Professor Li, who hosted a seminar for Wall Street analysts and investors at New York’s China Institute in September, said it was “the most important law in China’s development of a market economy”.

“It shows the central government’s commitment to introducing a market economy and to use the legal system to deal with the issues arising from a market economy. That would have been unthinkable 10 or even five years ago.”

Actually the most important development of the Chinese economy in its transition to monopoly corporate state capitalism from the autarkic variety was the opening up of the banking system to foreign investment and the development of a stock exchange.

The later was further enhanced by China's take over of Hong Kong one of the biggest market exchanges in the world. While the PR was that this was the end of British colonial rule over the island and the end of the age old battle between China and Britain which began during the opium wars, Hong Kong's value was its investment and banking window onto the monopoly capitalist world.

A major portion of the foreign investment in China consists of Chinese private capital
recycled through Hong Kong. The importance of Hong Kong for the growth of nonstate
enterprises in China lies in its efficient financial markets and legal system.
A Proposal to Privatize Chinese Enterprises and End Financial Repression
Cato Journal -Volume 26 Number 2, Spring/Summer 2006

This new bankruptcy law however is a major and significant change for enabling foreign captial to buy and operate state enterprizes, not create new ones with their own capital. In other words a Public Private Partnership (P3) the keystone of the neo-liberal economic reforms in this period of globalization.

Foreign Direct Investment, FDI in China is not being invested in new enterprize zones nor in the developing private sector. Rather it is focused on Partnerships in existing State Enterprizes or SOE's as they are called. This means that Western corporate monopolies financial and manufacturing, are partnering with existing state enterprizes awaiting the day they can buy them at fire sale prices.

The market reforms in China, as they have been applied elsewhere, once again shows the textbook liberaltarian idealists of the Von Mise institute and the neo-liberals at the CATO institute overlook the key determinant of the capitalist market that is the labour theory of value.

For them labour is reduced to an input value not unlike raw materials and technology. It is a form of variable capital investment. More importantly for this form of liberal economics, cost, price and consumption rule. Yet in reality, by their own admission labour value is the key to capital creation. Even in China during this transisition from the autarky of State Capitalism to a privatized state capitalism.

The key here is that the two components of liberalization are P3's in State industries and the transfer of the responsibility of social benefits to the State.
What makes private industry competitive is its ability to keep wages and benefits low even more than a cheap tax regime. The lattter is gravy.

China has allowed both private industry and its own state enterprizes to transfer their responsibility for wages and benefits to the state. Ironically the state has no infrastructure for the delivery of unemployment insurance, health care, welfare or social assistance, pensions etc. because these orginally had been the responsibility of the State enterprises.

With Dengs capitalist reformation the result was an uneven playing field. Free Trade Zones and private companies were allowed to exploit the vast labor market with low wages and no benefits. While the state enterprizes were expected to carry on with higher wages and benefits.

This produced the false impression that private enterprize and Free Trade Zone businesses are more productive than state owned enterprizes. They are not more productive, they are more profitable because they keep more of the surplus value of their labour due to lower wages and no benefits.

The sources of the Chinese economic miracle are well known. The
rise in rural incomes, with the adoption of the household responsibility
system (the shift away from collectivized farming) and the bonus
from the demographic transition with a fall in the dependency ratio
(the ratio of children and the old to workers), led to a marked rise in
savings rates.

A monumental unintended consequence of the decollectivization
of agriculture was the initiation of a boom in small-scale,
nonfarm rural enterprises, which began with Deng Xiaoping’s injunction
that it was virtuous to be rich. Local party officials took this to
heart, becoming directors and managers of township and village enterprises
(TVEs).

With the rise in farm incomes, the pent-up demand for manufactured
goods and housing was met by the TVEs, which were run as
profit-making capitalist enterprises, even though they were collectively
owned. They provided the local authorities with “extrabudgetary
revenues” and gave officials legal opportunities to become
rich.

Unlike SOEs, the TVEs did not carry any welfare responsibilities
and were free to hire and fire the abundant local labor. With Deng’s
creation of the Special Economic Zones in China’s southern rim in
the early 1980s, the TVEs—and later individually owned private
firms—became the spearhead of a Dickensian capitalism.

These nonstate enterprises have made China into the processing
center for manufactured goods in the world. Success has occurred by
using cheap labor in the Chinese countryside along with foreign technology,
and relying on self-financing from household savings and
enterprise profits, along with foreign capital from the Chinese diaspora
and a myriad of multinationals, and engaging in fierce locational
competition promoted by local municipal authorities.
This labor intensive industrialization is now spreading inland along
the Yangtze (The Economist 2004: 13).

These spin-offs from the decollectivization of agriculture were
aided by the massive buildup of infrastructure by the state.

Labor intensive export industries were further helped by domestic price
reforms and by one of the largest unilateral liberalizations of foreign
trade in history.

The rapid export-led industrialization in the private sector is based
on processing imported components with domestic and foreign
capital and technology, and cheap domestic labor.

In the pre-reform period (before 1978) China’s development strategy
provided only limited urban employment opportunities. Consequently,
the government assigned several workers to the same job,
leading to a large labor redundancy in the SOEs. As these industrial
workers only received a low wage to cover current consumption, the
government also had to cover their pension, health, housing, and
other social expenditures from the SOE revenues, which were mandated
to be remitted to the government.

In the reform period, the SOEs have been responsible not merely for wages but also for these “social” benefits, which has imposed a “social burden” on them that is absent in their non-SOE cousins. This burden has grown in the reform
period as wages and benefits paid by the SOEs have grown by 16 percent per annum between 1978 and 1996, while their output grew by 7.6 percent per annum (see Lin 2004).

A Proposal to Privatize Chinese Enterprises and End Financial Repression
Cato Journal -Volume 26 Number 2, Spring/Summer 2006

The new bankruptcy law as well as reforms to State owned companies, the ability to layoff and fire workers, reductions in wages and benefits, and a shift of the responsibility for these to the State, are being implemented in China. The profitability of SOE's is reduced because of the surplus value absorbed by labour.
Again it is not investment, nor techology nor the bueracracy that is the source of profit it is labour. In the case of the newly privatized corporations if the costs were the same they would actually be making less profit for Chinese investors as the techology and marketing aspects of these companies are in the hands of their foreign investors.

The fact is that both the private sector and the state owned enterprizes are kept afloat by the Chinese people by low wages and the banks investing their savings in these companies.

The key to the historic development of capitalism was the privatization of agriculture. The end of the commons and the creation of the encroachment acts. Historic capitalism developed in England before its advent anywhere else in the world. Because of the privatization of agricultural production. This has occured in China with the Deng reforms, privatization of land is the modern equivalent of the English encroachment acts, thus creating a capitalist economy regardless of the politics of the State.

The state can call itself anything it wants, communist, socialist, democratic, republican, blah, blah. The political ideology of the state is is irrelevant to capitalism as a system. Capitalism created the state in its image, for the centralized accumulation of capital. Its political forms regardless of the propaganda of the left and right, are neccasary for the primitive accumulation of capital. If a state is authoritarian at first, as the state was prior to the advent of capitalism, then it will be liberalized as it creates its own bourgoise, the private owners of wealth. Which accounts for the development of the national state in the 19th century and its further development in the 20th.

As long as the state functions to provide private land and labour for those with inherited wealth, then the economic system is capitalism. In the case of China instead of inheriting land, labour and wealth from ones aristocratic and fuedal status and holdings, the inheritance came from ones position in the Communist Party of China.

China’s task of moving from the plan to the market was much easier than that of the other
socialist transition economies of Russia and Eastern Europe because of differences in their
initial conditions. Russia and Eastern Europe had about 90 percent of their labor force in
industrial SOEs, while most of China’s labor force (80 percent ) was in agriculture. For
Russia and Eastern Europe the only route to a market economy was a “big bang” to
dismantle SOEs, which resulted in short-term losses in output and employment. In contrast,
China, by replacing its rural communes with the household responsibility system, all
but in name restored privately run and owned family farms. This Chinese rural “big bang”
led to a rise in output and allowed China time for gradual reform of its inefficient stateowned
industrial enterprises.

A Proposal to Privatize Chinese Enterprises and End Financial Repression
Cato Journal -Volume 26 Number 2, Spring/Summer 2006

China's advantage over India as stated at the begining of this article, is a matter of land. Both countries have labour capacity, manufacturing base, but it is land capacity that restricts India's ability to compete with China for manufacturing. Which is why India's techonolgical development has been centred, like our own in the Maritimes, around call centres, and the outsourcing of IT and software development, as well as phamaceuticals. Such tertiary businesses do not need large amounts of land, and with cheap labour can provide for high rates of profit.

India is the world's fastest wealth creator
So, where is the growth going to come from? The answer is infotech (IT), pharma and textiles. With more wealth, the investment pattern too is expected to change from predominantly cash deposits (which constitute over 60% of the AUM in India, China and Korea) to equities and more sophisticated instruments.

China is becoming like its neighbours , Korea and Japan, a market driven state capitalist economy. India is developing as primary resource based manufacturing economy; steel and developer of tertiary industries in its fordist economy.

The neo-liberal shaping of state capitalism in both China and India into market states relies soley on its devaluation of labour, not tax or land incetives.

See

China

India

Marx

Capitalism

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Blog Lies About Layton

There are a whole raft of blog lies being circulated about Jack Layton and the NDP. See: New Democratic Party::Jack Layton and New Democratic Party::Criticism

For instance how he was snubbed by Karzai. He wasn't they met yesterday in Montreal.

Karzai, Layton discuss Afghanistan mission
CTV.ca, Canada - 15 hours ago
NDP Leader Jack Layton and Afghan President Hamid Karzai agreed to disagree on the role of Canadian troops in Afghanistan. "Clearly ...
Karzai, Layton agree Ottawa Citizen (subscription)
Afghan president, Layton discuss military mission Toronto Star
Karzai, Layton find common ground CBC - Newfoundland & Labrador

Now the latest smear campaign is how the NDP is changing it's positon on Afghanistan. It isn't. I blogged about it here right after the convention. And I further elaborated on it here.

Now you don't have to read my blog to get it. It was also published in the MSM. But of course if you don't pay attention to what is actually said by the NDP: the need to have a peace process in place, support for reconstruction and a limited troop prescence in the North You will continue to make stupid comments like these;

Layton's spectacular about-face on Afghanistan

Taliban Jack Now says He didn't say withdraw the troops


Also See:

NDP

Afghanistan






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Libertarian Communism A Definition

Since I continue to get comments from those who attempt to enlighten me as to why you cannot be a Libertarian and a Communist the latest being here.

I thought I would let an expert on the subject explain it. For those who are so blighted by half baked Republican interpretations of both terms that they just don't get it.

This is an exerpt from the 1910/1911 Encyclopedia Britannica entry on Anarchism; by Peter Kropotkin

Anarchism continued to develop, partly in the direction of Proudhonian ‘mutuellisme’, but chiefly as communist-anarchism, to which a third direction, Christian-anarchism, was added by Leo Tolstoy, and a fourth, which might be ascribed as literary-anarchism, began amongst some prominent modern writers.

The ideas of Proudhon, especially as regards mutual banking, corresponding with those of Josiah Warren, found a considerable following in the United States, creating quite a school, of which the main writers are Stephen Pearl Andrews, William Grene, Lysander Spooner (who began to write in 1850, and whose unfinished work, Natural Law, was full of promise), and several others, whose names will be found in Dr Nettlau’s Bibliographie de l’anarchie.

A prominent position among the individualist anarchists in America has been occupied by Benjamin R. Tucker, whose journal Liberty was started in 1881 and whose conceptions are a combination of those of Proudhon with those of Herbert Spencer. Starting from the statement that anarchists are egotists, strictly speaking, and that every group of individuals, be it a secret league of a few persons, or the Congress of the United States, has the right to oppress all mankind, provided it has the power to do so, that equal liberty for all and absolute equality ought to be the law, and ‘mind every one your own business’ is the unique moral law of anarchism, Tucker goes on to prove that a general and thorough application of these principles would be beneficial and would offer no danger, because the powers of every individual would be limited by the exercise of the equal rights of all others. He further indicated (following H. Spencer) the difference which exists between the encroachment on somebody’s rights and resistance to such an encroachment; between domination and defence: the former being equally condemnable, whether it be encroachment of a criminal upon an individual, or the encroachment of one upon all others, or of all others upon one; while resistance to encroachment is defensible and necessary. For their self-defence, both the citizen and the group have the right to any violence, including capital punishment. Violence is also justified for enforcing the duty of keeping an agreement. Tucker thus follows Spencer, and, like him, opens (in the present writer’s opinion) the way for reconstituting under the heading of ‘defence’ all the functions of the state. His criticism of the present state is very searching, and his defence of the rights of the individual very powerful. As regards his economical views B.R. Tucker follows Proudhon.

The individualist anarchism of the American Proudhonians finds, however, but little sympathy amongst the working masses. Those who profess it - they are chiefly ‘intellectuals’ - soon realize that the individualization they so highly praise is not attainable by individual efforts, and either abandon the ranks of the anarchists, and are driven into the liberal individualism of the classical economist or they retire into a sort of Epicurean amoralism, or superman theory, similar to that of Stirner and Nietzsche. The great bulk of the anarchist working men prefer the anarchist-communist ideas which have gradually evolved out of the anarchist collectivism of the International Working Men’s Association. To this direction belong - to name only the better known exponents of anarchism Elisée Reclus, Jean Grave, Sebastien Faure, Emile Pouget in France; Errico Malatesta and Covelli in Italy; R. Mella, A. Lorenzo, and the mostly unknown authors of many excellent manifestos in Spain; John Most amongst the Germans; Spies, Parsons and their followers in the United States, and so on; while Domela Nieuwenhuis occupies an intermediate position in Holland. The chief anarchist papers which have been published since 1880 also belong to that direction; while a number of anarchists of this direction have joined the so-called syndicalist movement- the French name for the non-political labour movement, devoted to direct struggle with capitalism, which has lately become so prominent in Europe.

As one of the anarchist-communist direction, the present writer for many years endeavoured to develop the following ideas: to show the intimate, logical connection which exists between the modern philosophy of natural sciences and anarchism; to put anarchism on a scientific basis by the study of the tendencies that are apparent now in society and may indicate its further evolution; and to work out the basis of anarchist ethics. As regards the substance of anarchism itself, it was Kropotkin’s aim to prove that communism at least partial - has more chances of being established than collectivism, especially in communes taking the lead, and that free, or anarchist-communism is the only form of communism that has any chance of being accepted in civilized societies; communism and anarchy are therefore two terms of evolution which complete each other, the one rendering the other possible and acceptable. He has tried, moreover, to indicate how, during a revolutionary period, a large city - if its inhabitants have accepted the idea could organize itself on the lines of free communism; the city guaranteeing to every inhabitant dwelling, food and clothing to an extent corresponding to the comfort now available to the middle classes only, in exchange for a half-day’s, or five-hours’ work; and how all those things which would be considered as luxuries might be obtained by everyone if he joins for the other half of the day all sorts of free associations pursuing all possible aims - educational, literary, scientific, artistic, sports and so on. In order to prove the first of these assertions he has analysed the possibilities of agriculture and industrial work, both being combined with brain work. And in order to elucidate the main factors of human evolution, he has analysed the part played in history by the popular constructive agencies of mutual aid and the historical role of the state.

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Uh Oh Ozone

View of the Ozone layer shot by European Space Agency (ESA) satellite ERS-2

The seasonal ozone hole over Antarctica is reaching a record size previously seen in 2000 and 2003, the World Meteorological Organisation has said.

And since it is spring now down under watch out for break away Ozone....

New Zealanders are being warned to cover up and use sun block as a patch of thin ozone layer moves across the country.



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Progressive Economics Blog

Found this economics blog. Maybe they should be invited to join the Progressive Bloggers seems like a natural fit.

Relentlessly Progressive Economics

Commentary on Canadian economics and public policy

A Blog of the Progressive Economics Forum

The Progressive Economics Forum is a network of Canadian economists with a progressive bent. See the main PEF website here.

The Forum was officially founded at a special meeting at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada in late May 1998. About 125 people attended an introductory panel on the future direction of economics, and about half of those stayed for the formal founding business meeting of the PEF. The business meeting formally adopted our name and a constitution, and elected a Steering Committee to which additional members have been added.

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About Time

This is news in Texas.

Alberta scraps royalty tax credit after 3 decades

- The Alberta government eliminated the Alberta Royalty Tax Credit on Thursday in a move that Energy Minister Greg Melchin said would add $111 million a year to government coffers when it comes into effect on Jan. 1.

The tax credit is one of the last vestiges of the Alberta-Ottawa energy wars of the 1970s, enacted in 1974 to counter a move by the federal government to eliminate tax deductions for royalties paid by oil and gas companies.

Leach suggested that the credit fell victim to politics. All the major candidates in Alberta's Tory leadership race advocate steps to increase the province's share of resource revenues, which amounted to $14 billion in the last fiscal year."We think it's responding to uninformed criticism of Alberta's royalty regime," he added.

Thursday's decision received unqualified support from an unlikely source --provincial NDP leader Brian Mason.

"We are very pleased that the government has finally been forced to cancel this corporate giveaway," he said. "The end of this program means a victory for Albertans."

Now lets adjust that pitiful 1% royalty we get paid for the people of Albertas resources namely the Tar Sands.

Yes it is a sop to the complaints raised about the fact we have the lowest royalty rate in the world. I like the guy who says we are uninformed....we are well informed that we are being ripped off.

First, contrary to popular belief, the Alberta government derives much more in royalties from natural gas than it does from oil. In 2004-05, it received $9.7 billion in resource revenues. Of this, $6.4 billion was from natural gas royalties, $2.0 billion was from oil royalties, andthe remainder was from other sources such as land sales. BMO Report January 2006 Alberta’s Long-range Outlook: “Oil’s Well”

Heck Newfoundland has a higher royalty rate than we do for all that Tar Sands oil.

And lets not forget that the Alberta Advantage did not begin under Ralph but under Lougheed,and it was created by OPEC and the oil boom of the seventies. Yet the Lougheed government still gave out corporate welfare. Without both Federal and provincial state capitalism the Tar Sands would never have been developed.

See

Oil Royalties


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CJSR Fund Drive

Donate to the Far Left of the Radio Dial. Community radio station CJSR is having its annual fund drive. And its a charitable donation, with a tax reciept and great swag. You can't get that from PBS.




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Trade Not Aid Redux

Did you know there are Christians in the Middle East. Why of course you did. But it seems to be forgotten in the propaganda war we experience daily.

Did you know that their are Christians in Palestine. And they are farmers. Did you know that they experience the same repression that their fellow Palestinians do at the hands of the Zionist occupation. Well of course you did.

Now here is an interesting point of view from one of them. A pig farmer whose land is being annexed by Israel and their Berlin Wall. Their bulldozers have destroyed the basic farm economy of the Palestinians. Their security wall and military outposts do not allow Palestinians access to the market. And they have been doing this for years before Hamas took power. So lets not use that as an excuse. The Wall Destroys Palestine's Olives, Farmers and Agriculture

Like their attack on Lebanon their occupation and domination of the Palestinians is as much an economic war as it is a political one. They do not want competition from the Palestian farmers whose lands are fertile and productive. And have been the source of the agriculture exports of both countries since Israel was formed. So they destroy their economic competition and have done so since 1967. Now they are doing it with bulldozers, illegal settlements and the security wall.

Palestinian farmers fear advance of West Bank wall

Fellow farmers in Jayyous, in the region known as the “garden” of the northern West Bank, made a living selling their fruits and vegetables before the wall was built there in 2004. Up to half of the population of 3,500 people now get aid from organisations such as the World Food Programme.

The wall separates the farmers of Jayyous from two-thirds of their land and six water wells, which are now on the Israeli side of the barrier. Two gates that were supposed to allow them access were closed by Israel during harvest times and fruit rotted on the vines.

Mr Sous does not want aid. The Hamas-run Palestinian Authority is under a western aid embargo aimed at moderating the militant group but Mr Sous has no need of aid, so far. “I don’t want to sell my land or leave. I just need to be able to make my living.”

See the farmers don't want Aid they want Trade. This should appeal to the capitalist sensabilities of the the right wing in North America. Any Blogging Tories, neo-cons, liberaltarians or free traders willing to take up their cause? Nope, they would rather critize CUPE for calling for a boycott of the Israeli Aparthied State.

A state which benefits by its monopoly of power over the farmers, their competitors in Palestine. A state which uses the Palestinians as a cheap labour source. A state which isolates them and keeps them imprisoned in occupation zones.

The agricultural sector in Gaza has a significant position within the local society as it supplies food products to the majority of the local population. Moreover, its contribution to the economy of the area is noteworthy as an earner of foreign exchange. Its share of the GDP is about 10 %. About 20 % of the employed labour force in Gaza worked in the agricultural sector in 2004, with many more considered to be active in informal agriculture . Moreover, in times of political-economical difficulties such as the prevailing intifada, the sector is known to absorb large numbers of unemployed people who lost their jobs in Israel or in other local sectors of the shrinking economy (PARC, 2004)Gaza Urban Agriculture Palestine

The resulting destruction of agriculture in the West Bank and Gaza are increasing the desertification of the area. The environmental damage to Palestine is key to the occupation efforts. With the destruction of farmland comes further settlement opportunities and urban construction on occupied territory, which creates an economic boom for real estate and construction companies in Israel.

Since the founding of Israel in 1948 the Zionists have justified this destruction of the farmlands by promoting the myth that the Palestinians are lazy and unproductive. It was because the Palestians were in direct competition with them for agricultural exports and still are.

War is just capitalist competition by another name.

See:

Israel

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Soldiers In Our Streets

Remember the warning during the election that the Conservatives would put soldiers in the streets of Canadian Cities. Well it happened. In Ottawa. On Friday. Thousands of 'demonstrators' rallied to support the war in Afghanistan. They happened to be not average, severely normal Canadians. Nope they were our armed forces personnel, their families and the military brass. They were paid civil servants released to go to the rally. And they were addressed Nuremburg Rally style by the Fuerher himself.


Prime Minister Stephen Harper speaks to the rally on Parliament Hill in support of Canada's troops in Afghanistan. (Tom Hanson/Canadian Press)

"Your actions here today are a tangible sign to (soldiers) that their service is not unseen, their actions are not unappreciated and indeed their sacrifice is appreciated greatly," said Gen. Rick Hillier, chief of defence staff, who stood for most of the rally beside Pte. Michael Spence, a soldier wounded in a recent friendly-fire incident.

Does anyone else get nervous when our armed forces gets political and rallies for war. Not in memory of the fallen, but to support war, to support more funding for more weapons of war..Hello. It looks like Thailand. Can you say Coup detat.

Hillier said it is important that the Armed Forces connect with the public.

"We got distanced from society these past decades and when something went horribly wrong, our society, our population was quite eager and quite willing to dispense with us . . . and simply become our critic," he said."We're no longer going to let that occur. This is your army and navy and Armed Forces," he told the crowd.

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Climate Change Skeptics the New Flat Earthers

When the Wall Street Journal published and editorial this summer attacking the scientific facts behind global warming and climate change it strayed from its usual area of expertise in economics to tangle with science.

Now of course economics is not a science, no matter how hard it tries to be one. It is at best a statistical model. As G.B.Shaw said if you put all the economists in the world end to end they would still not reach a conclusion.

Well the WSJ editorial got much play in the conservative blogosphere and in the right wing press as yet another conclusive reason to deny the obvious, and to deny the 'science' of global warming. It's called grasping at straws. Or in this case hockey sticks. It attacked a graph produced by a climate scientist that modeled global warming over the past 900 years that appeared similar to a hockey stick. The blogosphere and the usual right wing flat earthers had a field day with it.

Well here is a challenge made to the WSJ and to all those of you who oppose the science of global warming, which puts you in the same camp as the creationists. It's from a column in Scientific America. Not known for being a kooky journal.

Fiddling While the Planet Burns

Will the Wall Street Journal's editorial writers accept a challenge to learn the truth about the science of global climate change?

By Jeffrey D. Sachs

The Wall Street Journal editorial page has for years railed against these scientific findings on climate change, even as the global consensus has reached nearly 100 percent of the scientific community, including the reports commissioned by the skeptical Bush White House.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page completely ignored this report. Instead, it cited a report commissioned by Congressman Barton from three statisticians with no background in climate science, who quibbled with aspects of Mann's methodology. Yet climate scientists quickly showed that addressing the criticisms has no practical effect on Mann's conclusions. Nonetheless, on this thoroughly flimsy and misleading basis, the editorial page declared that "there's no reason to believe that Mr. Mann, or his 'hockey stick' graph of global temperature changes, is right," called the research "dubious," and said that the climate science community "often more closely resembles a mutual-admiration society than a competitive and open-minded search for scientific knowledge." In other words, it hid the evidence and trashed climate science.

Many of the paper's own reporters laugh or cringe at the anti-scientific posture of the editorials, and advise the rest of us simply not to read them. Nevertheless, the consequences of those editorials are significant. The Wall Street Journal is the most widely read business paper in the world. Its influence is extensive. Yet it gets a free pass on editorial irresponsibility.

As a neighbor to the paper at Columbia University, the Earth Institute has repeatedly invited the editorial team to meet with leading climate scientists. I've offered to organize such a meeting in any way that the editorial board would like. On many occasions, the news editors have eagerly accepted, but the editorial writers have remained safe in their splendid isolation.

Yes Mr. Sachs is that Mr. Sachs, the economist not a climate scientist. But he has them ready to take on the flatearth society that is the editorial board of the WSJ and the science reporters at Fox.

RealClimate heartily endorses such an approach and, while we leave it to others to judge who the 'world leading' authorities are, we'd certaintly be willing to chip in if asked. To those who would decry this as a waste of time, we would point to The Economist who recently produced a very sensible special on global warming and proposed a number of economically viable ways to tackle it, despite having been reflexively denialist not that many years ago. If the Economist can rise to the challenge, maybe there is hope for the Wall Street Journal....

Any takers?


See:

Global Warming


Climate Change




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The Pentacost of Poverty

Your Sunday Sermon.

Ok folks what do these two points have in common?


Empire of Oil: Capitalist Dispossession and the Scramble for Africa
Michael Watts
Everyone’s worst urban nightmare—Lagos—grew from 300,000 to 13 million in over fifty years and is expected to become part of a vast Gulf of Guinea slum of 60 million poor along a littoral corridor 600 kilometers stretching from Benin City to Accra by 2020. Black Africa will contain 332 million slum dwellers by 2015, a figure expected to double every fifteen years. The pillaging and privatization of the state—whatever its African “pathologies”—and the African commons is the most extraordinary spectacle of accumulation by dispossession, all made in the name of foreign assistance. The involution of the African city, notes Mike Davis (Planet of Slums, Verso, 2005) has as its corollary not an insurgent lumpenproletariat but rather a vast political universe of Islamism and Pentecostalism. It is this occult world of invisible powers—whether populist Islam in Kano or witchcraft in Soweto—that represents the most compelling ideological legacy of neoliberal utopianism in Africa.


Monthly Review January 2006 James Straub Unions and Evangelicals In The Rust Belt

However, it remains undeniable that Bush’s Ohio victory did come in part from a massive outpouring of socially conservative evangelical Christians to the polls. A large majority of these Republican evangelicals were blue-collar Ohioans voting against their self-interest, many mobilized by Burress’s anti-gay marriage amendment.

Africa and America share a common problem. One has no manufacturing base and the other has lost it. When the poor get poorer they turn to religion rather than revolution. And in particular to evangelical faiths ( be it charismastic Islam or Christianity) and faithhealers, witchdoctors, etc. that profess a direct relationship with god, possession by god in fact (pentacost) , to feel that they have power in a world where they are in fact powerless.

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right

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