Thousands affected by French air traffic strikes

Tens of thousands of passengers are set be affected by a French air traffic control strike on Friday.


Thousands affected by French air traffic strikes© Getty Images

Ryanair has cancelled 420 flights, most of which were scheduled to fly over France, affecting 80,000 passengers.

EasyJet has cut 76 flights, British Airways has cancelled 22, while Air France said it would only run 45% of its short-haul flights.

Separately, on Monday 15% of Heathrow Airport's schedule will be altered during Queen Elizabeth's state funeral.

To ensure the skies over London fall quiet during the events, there will be flight cancellations, including 100 British Airways flights and four Virgin Atlantic flights.

French strikes

The strike action in France is being taken by the SNCTA air traffic control union is row over wages, as inflation soars, and recruitment.

Ryanair says all passengers affected have been notified. The low-cost carrier normally operates more than 3,000 flights per day.

Neal McMahon, Ryanair operations director, said it was "inexplicable" that thousands of European citizens and visitors "will have their travel plans unfairly disrupted".

"It is inexcusable that passengers who are not even flying to or from France are disrupted," he said.

He said French laws protect French domestic flights, but not ones flying over the country.

"It is time that the European Union step in and protect overflights so that European passengers are not repeatedly held to ransom by a tiny French air traffic control union," he said.

Budget rival EasyJet said it had cancelled flights at the request of French authorities.

EasyJet said: "While this is outside of our control, we would like to apologise to our customers for any inconvenience they may experience."



Thousands to be hit by French air traffic strike© Getty Images

British Airways said along with the 22 cancelled flights to and from Heathrow, there could be some extra delays on Friday.

Air France is only running 45% of its short and medium-haul flights, and 90% of long-haul. It has also warned that delays and last minute cancellations cannot be ruled out.

The flight cuts affect the whole of France, the French civil aviation authority - DGAC said. It added that it was currently working with the European air travel regulator Eurocontrol to help airlines avoid the country's air space.

Strikes across the aviation industry caused severe disruption to Europe's summer traffic, including ground and cabin personnel, who are seeking pay rises to cope with increased living costs amid high inflation.

In July, several strikes by firefighters and staff at Paris' Charles De Gaulle airport led to cancellations and delays.



Thousands affected by French air traffic strikes© Getty Images

Heathrow disruption

Separately, Heathrow Airport said Monday's flight schedule would change during the Queen's funeral.

Heathrow said that all take-offs and landings on Monday will be delayed for 15 minutes before and after the two-minute silence at the end of the funeral.
Bus strikes called off after Queen's death
Strike action cancelled after the Queen's death

Following that, there will be no arrivals between 13:45 BST and 14:20 BST during the procession of the hearse, and no departures between 15:03 BST and 16:45 for the ceremonial procession via the Long Walk to Windsor Castle.

Between 16:45 BST and 21:00 BST, departures will be reduced to support the committal service at St George's Chapel.

Flights will also be diverted around Windsor Castle "to minimise noise during the private family service and interment", it said.

The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) has issued guidance which means that air passengers whose flights are cancelled or badly delayed on Monday because of Heathrow's changes will not legally be entitled to financial compensation. That is because these are likely to be deemed extraordinary circumstances.

However, airlines are offering customers refunds or re-bookings.

Neurotic in paradise: Capitalist hangover on a ‘red’ Greek island

Opinion by Belén Fernández - Yesterday - Al Jazeera


It was some years ago during a brutal winter in Bosnia that I first learned of the existence of the remote Greek island of Ikaria. Prior to the pandemic, Sarajevo was one of my regular stops as I pursued a life of frenzied international itinerance, eschewing a fixed residence and, more importantly, avoiding my execrable country of birth, the United States.

Drone footage of a beach on the island of Ikaria, Greece

 [Dimitris Tosidis/EPA-EFE]

On this particular visit to subzero Sarajevo, I alternated between falling on ice outdoors and sitting in my apartment looking at pictures of summertime scenes on the internet. And it was on account of the latter pastime that Ikaria entered my consciousness, via a spate of articles extolling the island’s rugged beauty and the extraordinary longevity of its inhabitants.

A Guardian dispatch from 2013, for example, starred 100-year-old Gregoris Tsahas, who enjoyed a pack of cigarettes and more than a few glasses of red wine per day, trekked four hilly kilometres between his home and his regular café, and had never once been sick minus a bout of appendicitis.

A 2012 New York Times Magazine essay relayed the story of Stamatis Moraitis, who was either 97 or 102 years old, and who had returned to his native Ikaria from the US in the 1970s after being diagnosed with cancer. He recovered with no sort of treatment aside from gardening, winemaking and playing dominoes past midnight with friends — and proceeded to outlive all his American doctors.

No one has pinpointed the precise secret to Ikarian endurance, but it appears to involve a combination of a slow life, social camaraderie, olive oil, wild sage tea, goat’s milk, outdoor labour, afternoon naps, therapeutic winds and sexual activity into old age — not to mention the sheer exquisiteness of the physical environment. As if that weren’t good enough, it gets even better: Ikaria is known locally as the “red rock” in reference to its communist tendencies, which only intensified in accordance with the island’s service as a place of banishment for Greek leftists in the mid-twentieth century.

I, myself, was not terribly concerned with making it to 97 or 102, but I did find the prospect of immortal wine-drinking island communists singularly inspiring. After running around in a tizzy my whole life, I figured I should probably slow down and see how it was really meant to be done. My first attempt to visit Ikaria in 2020 was thwarted by the coronavirus, but on June 12, 2022, I arrived by ferry from Athens in the small Ikarian coastal village of Armenistis.

My plan was simple: I was going to take one month to relax, sort myself out and become a supremely tranquil person who — nourished by goat’s milk and communist vibes — took constant naps and read books by the sea.

Things initially looked promising. The terrace of my attic apartment offered a wide view of the Aegean Sea and of a cove below, where the water comprised a mind-boggling array of shades of blue. I went on hikes through the hills, smelled the smells of island plants and flowers and drank half-litres of homemade wine at the taverna, above which lived a man who looked to be about 90 and was often swimming or tooling around on his motor scooter.

The man had lived in New York, he told me, and invited me to swing by his farm down the road for some apricots. A younger Ikarian — who had also tried his hand at life in America and promptly repatriated himself — commented wryly to me: “Ikarians are very bad at capitalism.”

Unfortunately, it quickly became clear to me in Armenistis that I happened to be quite good at it. Although I wanted to chill out, indoctrination dies hard. I effectively began applying a capitalist mindset and work ethic to leisure.

It was insufficient to chill on the beach with a book; rather, I had to be the absolute best beach book person ever, emanating grace and harmony with the serene backdrop even as I raced to fulfil my daily page quota. I had to simultaneously be the best island hiker, island plant smeller, taverna frequenter, sea swimmer, and so on, despite fully recognising the counterproductive nature of my approach. Leisure became a chore and/or competition and the vicious cycle was only reinforced by my increasing agitation at the fact that I was, obviously, failing to relax.

I was also acutely aware that this was a grotesquely privileged sort of torment — and that the vast majority of people in the world could not spend their time being neurotic in paradise. Whenever it seemed that I would not complete all the myriad tasks I had assigned myself for the day, I experienced heart palpitations of the sort that had defined my teenage years in the US. Back then, the need to excel at all academic and extracurricular endeavours to attain perfectly “well-rounded” status on college applications had done a number on my nervous system.

On June 29, I attended one of Ikaria’s famed panygiria — feasts that honour saints and that often last all night. These festivities were not compatible with my schedule, given my habit of waking prior to the crack of dawn to feel that I was beating the rest of the world. Still, off I went to the village of Pezi, up the mountain from Armenistis, to celebrate Saints Peter and Paul.

I opted to hitchhike, and was first picked up by a Norwegian couple in search of a gas station and then by a young Greek man on a motorcycle. He swung calmly around mountain curves as the sun set over the sea, and I dug my fingernails into his shoulders and emitted yelps of varying decibels.

Hundreds of people were already at the outdoor party, consuming goat meat, drinking local wine and dancing to music supplied by a tireless four-person ensemble. Concentric circles of dancers spun around and around with hands clasped; off to the side, a grey-haired man executed an energetic leap to the encouragement of a man and woman crouching on the ground in front of him, clapping.

At first, I hung back, wallowing in the existential pain of having no culture, community, or, I decided, even identity, aside from being a cog in the capitalist machine. Eventually, however, I’d had enough wine that none of this mattered, and I broke into the outer circle, grabbing a hand on either side of me. Around we went at dizzying speed, as I held on for dear life and felt preemptive nostalgia for this moment of fleeting eternity.

I tried to leave the panygiri at one o’clock in the morning but was informed by the Greeks at my table that I would never find a ride at such an early hour. I finally left at 2:30am and was escorted halfway back to Armenistis by three men in a car. Two women in another car took me the rest of the way.

The next day, I developed a massive rash that began under my right arm and extended down my side and across my back. I rushed to the closest thing to a pharmacy in Armenistis, which also served as a barber shop and where I had purchased a beach towel with a giant lion on it. The daughter of the proprietor took one look and pronounced it the work of the Ikarian white moth, which, she said, I must have come into contact with at the panygiri.

In response to my next petrified question, she looked at me with a mixture of amusement and utter seriousness and responded: “Of course you’re not going to die, you’re in Ikaria.”

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

BANKING IN LEBANON

Armed man detained after holding up south Lebanon bank to access own savings - security source


BEIRUT (Reuters) - An armed man was detained after holding up a Lebanese bank in the southern city of Ghazieh on Friday morning in an attempt to retrieve his savings frozen in the country's banking system amid a three-year financial meltdown, a security source told Reuters.

The man was able to retrieve a portion of his funds from Byblos Bank in Ghazieh before being detained, the source added.

It was at least the third such incident this week involving a depositor entering a bank to try to retrieve their money by force.

(Reporting by Timour Azhari; Editing by Hugh Lawson)

CLIMATE CRISIS IS A CAPITALI$T CRISIS

Oxfam: Acute hunger has surged in climate hotspots

Deutsche Welle - 

As poorer countries suffer the most from extreme weather, the charity has slammed major polluting countries in the West over a "stark demonstration of global inequality."The number of people facing acute hunger has more than doubled in the world's climate change hotspots, according to an Oxfam report released on Friday.


Afghanistan is one of several countries where climate change is contributing to a hunger crisis© Sanaullah Seiam/Xinhua/picture alliance

The report found that extreme hunger has risen by 123% over the past six years in Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Djibouti, Guatemala, Haiti, Kenya, Madagascar, Niger, Somalia and Zimbabwe -- the ten countries with the highest number of United Nations aid appeals driven by extreme weather events.

Across these countries, 48 million people are estimated to suffer from acute hunger, which is defined as hunger resulting from a shock and causing risks to lives and livelihoods. In 2018, that figure was 21 million people.

"Climate change is no longer a ticking bomb, it is exploding before our eyes," Oxfam's international chief Gabriela Bucher said.

"It is making extreme weather such as droughts, cyclones, and floods -- which have increased five-fold over the past 50 years -- more frequent and more deadly."

Appeal for international action to combat climate-related hunger

Oxfam said climate-fueled hunger is a "stark demonstration of global inequality" because the least-polluting countries are the most affected by droughts, floods and other extreme weather events.

Bucher said Western countries could forgive debt to free up resources in affected countries, and should also help pay to tackle climate-fueled hunger globally.

"They must pay for adaptation measures and loss-and-damage in low-income countries, as well as immediately inject lifesaving funds to meet the UN appeal to respond to the most impacted countries," Bucher said.

The UN humanitarian appeal for 2022 comes to $49 billion, which Oxfam noted was equivalent to less than 18 days of profit for fossil fuel companies, when looking at average daily profits over the last 50 years.

zc/rt (AFP, dpa)

Copyright 2022 DW.COM, Deutsche Welle. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

UN warns up to 345 million people marching toward starvation

THE ENTIRE POP OF THE U$A IN ONE YEAR

By EDITH M. LEDERER, Associated Press - Yesterday 

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The U.N. food chief warned Thursday that the world is facing “a global emergency of unprecedented magnitude,” with up to 345 million people marching toward starvation — and 70 million pushed closer to starvation by the war in Ukraine.

 Fatuma Abdi Aliyow sits by the graves of her two sons who died of malnutrition-related diseases last week, at a camp for the displaced on the outskirts of Mogadishu, Somalia, Sept. 3, 2022. Millions of people in the Horn of Africa region are going hungry because of drought, and thousands have died, with Somalia especially hard hit. 

(AP Photo/Farah Abdi Warsameh, File)

David Beasley, executive director of the U.N. World Food Program, told the U.N. Security Council that the 345 million people facing acute food insecurity in the 82 countries where the agency operates is 2½ times the number of acutely food insecure people before the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020.

He said it is incredibly troubling that 50 million of those people in 45 countries are suffering from very acute malnutrition and are “knocking on famine’s door.”

“What was a wave of hunger is now a tsunami of hunger,” he said, pointing to rising conflict, the pandemic’s economic ripple effects, climate change, rising fuel prices and the war in Ukraine.

Since Russia invaded its neighbor on Feb. 24, Beasley said, soaring food, fuel and fertilizer costs have driven 70 million people closer to starvation.

Despite the agreement in July allowing Ukrainian grain to be shipped from three Black Sea ports that had been blockaded by Russia and continuing efforts to get Russian fertilizer back to global markets, “there is a real and dangerous risk of multiple famines this year,” he said. “And in 2023, the current food price crisis could develop into a food availability crisis if we don’t act.”

The Security Council was focusing on conflict-induced food insecurity and the risk of famine in Ethiopia, northeastern Nigeria, South Sudan and Yemen. But Beasley and U.N. humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths also warned about the food crisis in Somalia, which they both recently visited, and Griffiths also put Afghanistan high on the list.

“Famine will happen in Somalia,” Griffiths said, and “be sure it won’t be the only place either.”

He cited recent assessments that identified “hundreds of thousands of people facing catastrophic levels of hunger,” meaning they are at the worst “famine” level.

Beasley recalled his warning to the council in April 2020 “that we were then facing famine, starvation of biblical proportions.” He said then the world “stepped up with funding and tremendous response, and we averted catastrophe.”

“We are on the edge once again, even worse, and we must do all that we can — all hands on deck with every fiber of our bodies,” he said. “The hungry people of the world are counting on us, and … we must not let them down.”

Griffiths said the widespread and increasing food insecurity is a result of the direct and indirect impact of conflict and violence that kills and injures civilians, forces families to flee the land they depend on for income and food, and leads to economic decline and rising prices for food that they can’t afford.



A woman sells food items at a market in Owo, Southwestern Nigeria, Tuesday, June 7, 2022. Nigeria's consumer inflation surged to a 17-year high in August 2022, its statistics agency said on Thursday, Sept. 15, 2022, signalling more hardship for citizens and businesses in Africa's largest economy.

 (AP Photo/Sunday Alamba)

After more than seven years of war In Yemen, he said, “some 19 million people — six out of 10 — are acutely food insecure, an estimated 160,000 people are facing catastrophe, and 538,000 children are severely malnourished.”

Beasley said the Ukraine war is stoking inflation in Yemen, which is 90% reliant on food imports. The World Food Program hopes to provide aid to about 18 million people, but its costs have risen 30% this year to $2.6 billion. As a result, it has been forced to cut back, so Yemenis this month are getting only two-thirds of their previous rations, he said.

Beasley said South Sudan faces “its highest rate of acute hunger since its independence in 2011” from Sudan. He said 7.7 million people, over 60% of the population, are “facing critical or worse levels of food insecurity.” Without a political solution to escalating violence and substantial spending on aid programs, “many people in South Sudan will die,” he warned.


People receive food rations in Kabul, Afghanistan, May 10, 2022. The U.S. and Swiss governments and Afghan economics experts say they'll transfer $3.5 billion in frozen funds from Afghanistan’s central bank to use for the country’s people as hunger grips every province there. The Taliban government will not be a part of the new Afghan Fund, which will maintain its account with the Bank for International Settlements in Switzerland. 

(AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi, File)

In northern Ethiopia’s Tigray, Afar and Amhara regions, more than 13 million people need life-saving food, Griffiths said. He pointed to a survey in Tigray in June that found 89% of people food insecure, “more than half of them severely so.” Beasley said a truce in March enabled WFP and its partners to reach almost 5 million people in the Tigray area, but resumed fighting in recent weeks “threatens to push many hungry, exhausted families over the edge.”

In northeast Nigeria, the U.N. projects that 4.1 million people are facing high levels of food insecurity, including 588,000 who faced emergency levels between June and August, Griffiths said. He said almost half of those people couldn’t be reached because of insecurity, and the U.N. fears “some people may already be at the level of catastrophe and already dying.”

Griffiths urged the Security Council to “leave no stone unturned” in trying to end these conflicts, and to step up financing for humanitarian operations, saying U.N. appeals in those four countries are all “well below half of the required funding.”

Should Congress make Social Security permanent for children?

Noah Berlatsky
September 14, 2022

Three Chlidren playing with blocks (Shutterstock www.shutterstock.com)

One of Joe Biden’s signature achievements was passing the expanded Child Tax Credit (CTC). It pulled millions of children out of poverty.

Yet no sooner had the policy proven effective than it lapsed.

Checks stopped. Children fell back into poverty. The CTC quietly disappeared from the Democrats’ agenda, to be mentioned only quietly and in passing as the congressional elections approach.

All thanks to Republican opposition.

Why aren’t Democrats running on the Child Tax Credit the way they are running on social security and abortion rights?

Stanley Greenberg at the American Prospect argues that Democrats simply do not understand the importance of working-class issues.

There’s something to that. But I think that the Child Tax Credit has also suffered from its own efficiency. The CTC is in many ways the perfect wonky technocratic antipoverty solution, delivering targeted and direct aid to the neediest in the least wasteful way possible.

The elegance has muted opposition to an extent. But it’s also led proponents to underplay its transformative effects and to frame it as a limited program to fix social glitches, rather than as a sweeping assertion of children’s rights to flourish. Bolder claims, less focused demands, may make it easier to rally support for a vital program.

The Child Tax Credit has been around since 1997. As the name suggests, it gives working families with children a tax rebate.

But the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (ARPA) expanded and transformed the program into what had been essentially a regular cash payment for low-income families with children.

It increased annual payments from $2,000 to $3,600 per child under 6 and to $3,000 between 6 and 17. It closed a loophole that shut out a third of children if their parents’ earnings were too low. Instead of a lump sum, it provided for monthly checks of $250 to $300 per child.

The results were stunning.

In the six months the program operated, child poverty plummeted by 30 percent. Food insufficiency fell by 26 percent. Each month, the program kept more than 3 million children out of poverty.

Researchers found that 91 percent of families spent the money on basics. There was no evidence that the money led people to quit their jobs or stop looking for work. Nonetheless, Republicans and conservative Democrats like US Senator Joe Manchin decided the payments were coddling the poor, and refused to renew them.

Predictable result: 3.7 million children fell back into poverty.

The evidence couldn’t be clearer.

The expanded CTC ensured food, shelter and basic needs for the poorest children in the United States. You’d think Democrats would tout such a successful program. But they’ve been oddly reticent.

As Greenberg points out, Biden has included the expanded CTC in speeches only sporadically. Progressive Senator Bernie Sanders has championed it. But even he and other progressives like Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have tended to emphasize it less than (also important!) programs like Medicare for All, student loan forgiveness and climate legislation.

They’re probably lukewarm about the CTC because the public has been. The policy has majority support, but it’s not overwhelming. A December 2021 poll on renewing the credit showed 47-42 percent in favor. That’s a lot less than the support for expanding Medicare, which some polls have found has a whopping 83% approval.

The Times speculated that the CTC might be unpopular because older voters aren’t interested in giving money to needy children, or because the cost (about $25 billion a year) is too high.

But student loan forgiveness also helps the young. The cost is somewhere around $500 billion over a decade. It polls better than the CTC, with 51-39 percent approve of student loan forgiveness.

So why hasn’t the expanded CTC caught the public imagination? Maybe the problem is not that the program is too generous and ambitious, but that it’s not generous and ambitious enough.

The expanded Child Tax Credit is a good example of a program rooted in what sociologist Elizabeth Popp Berman calls “the economic style” of policy thinking. In her book, Thinking Like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in US Public Policy, published in June, Berman argues that this economic style has become entrenched in Washington over the last 60 years.

The economic style, Berman said, prioritizes efficiency and targeted interventions to help those in most need at the least cost. The expanded CTC sends money directly to low-income children. For every dollar spent, society gets back 84 cents in reduced healthcare and welfare costs. It’s a targeted, thrifty, efficient program.

The problem with efficiency, though, is that it fails to capture the imagination. Medicare for All proponents do say our current healthcare system is an expensive mess. But the real force is the insistence that health care is not a privilege, but a right. The climate movement is not just about more efficient, cleaner production. It’s about the imperative to preserve our planet for coming generations.

As Berman points out, the biggest social programs of the Roosevelt and Johnson administrations weren’t advertised to voters on the basis of efficiency. The New Deal and the War on Poverty were presented as necessary expenditures to assure equality and a social safety net for all. They promised to transform the nation, not make it more efficient. 

As Lyndon Johnson said:

QUOTE

The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time. But that is just the beginning.

UNQUOTE

Compare that rhetoric to Biden’s antipoverty program — which is called the expanded Child Tax Credit. That is a name that evokes fiddling with the tax code, not equality in our time.

The thing is, though, that the expanded CTC is consistent with expanded dreams. Greenberg suggests the program could be a “Social Security for children” — a framing that could have appeal.

Giving direct payments to children in poverty isn’t really an efficient tax tweak. It’s a bold statement that society owes all its young people food, shelter and some measure of comfort.

In that context, the CTC, for all its success, looks like a start rather than an end point. Cutting child poverty by 30 percent is good. But if we can do that, shouldn’t the goal be to eliminate child poverty?

The program already provided a wealth of information about how to help kids. Establishing it permanently, with a commitment to increase funding, could pull all 11.6 million children in need — 16 percent of all children in the US — above the poverty line.

Passing transformative legislation is difficult. It can take years or decades. It’s possible that if it isn’t seen as transformative, Biden and the Democrats might be quietly able to slip the expanded Child Tax Credit into law with some bipartisan support.

But given the way that momentum for the program has stalled out, it might be worthwhile for activists and progressives to embrace, and emphasize, the Child Tax Credit’s latent radicalism.

What would the United States look like if we decided that children and their families had a right to abundance and liberty? We should make Social Security for children permanent and find out.

Ukrainian astronomers observe bizarre, unidentified aerial phenomena over Kyiv

Wed, September 14, 2022

Astronomers report seeing strange objects ‘everywhere’ during observations for meteors. Illustrative photo

Read also: Russia must be barred from space programs after displaying sham republic flag on space station, says Ukraine's MFA

According to the article, a team of three researchers were using facilities in Kyiv and nearby Vynarivka to observe meteors when they observed the unknown objects.

Read also: European Union to close air space to Russian planes — head of European Commission

“We see them everywhere; we see numerous objects of uncertain nature,” Ukrainian researchers said in their article, which was later picked up by VICE to produce a story on Sept. 13.

The research categorized observed UAPs into two groups: Cosmics and Phantoms.

Read also: Ukrainian Sich-2-30 satellite shows up in US Space Force database

Cosmics were defined as light-emitting objects.

Phantoms, on the other hand, are “black bodies,” which do not emit radiation, absorbing it instead. This makes them stand out against the background, easy to detect, and to gauge their distance.

Both types of objects apparently move incredibly fast, making it exceptionally difficult to photograph them. The article said the UAPs were detected flying both alone and in groups.

“The human eye cannot register phenomena that last less than a tenth of a second,” the article said.

“Ordinary cameras are also unable to make these detections. It takes specialized, finely-tuned equipment.”

Read also: Volunteer explains benefits of ICEYE satellite, data Ukraine will now receive

The researchers only provided their observation data, without suggesting any explanations as to the nature of the phenomena. The objects were 3-12 meters in size, moving at speeds of up to 15 kilometers per second.

Public interest in UFOs has lately been on the rise again. Even the U.S. Department of Defense recently said it has detected some “clearly artificial” flying objects of unknown origin, which it said could potentially pose a danger.

Help NV continue reporting on the Russian invasion

Read the original article on The New Voice of Ukraine

Workers' councils and the economics of self-managed society - Cornelius Castoriadis




Cornelius Castoriadis/Paul Cardan's proposals for the workings of a society based on the principle of self-management by workers' councils, originally published in English by Solidarity in 1972. We have significant disagreements with it as it retains the key features of capitalism, but we reproduce it for reference.

Submitted by Steven. on August 20, 2013

Taken from http://www.lust-for-life.org/Lust-For-Life/WorkersCouncilsAndEconomics/WorkersCouncilsAndEconomics.htm

workers-councils-Cornelius-Castoriadis.pdf (4.02 MB)
workers-councils-Cornelius-Castoriadis.mobi (5.09 MB)
workers-councils-Cornelius-Castoriadis.epub (6.32 MB)

FASCIMILE PDF https://archive.org/details/sparrowsnest-3740/mode/2up

Spikymike

9 years ago

In reply to Welcome by libcom.org


So here is an extract from a short book review I wrote way back in 1972:

''This...is an honest and well thought out attempt at dealing with the problems of transition from capitalist to communist society (a phrase misleadingly described as 'socialism'). it's main objective is to disprove the arguments against communism which state that people cannot freely and democractically run their own social affairs, and that it is impossible to carry on production without a specially trained section of workers whose main task is to organise the rest along authoritarian lines.
Whilst dealing with the technical and organisational tasks in a realistic fashion avoiding the faults of both anarchism and bolshevism (if not of the De-Leonist SLP) they show an amazing ignoranceof capitalist economics. They warn that a certain group of readers will react emotionally to the use of terms such as money and wages in relation to 'socialism' and we must surely be amongst that group. But our response isn't just emotional - at first site it appears that these terms are used to describe something similar to Marx's non-circulating labour vouchers, one method Marx suggested might be used to deal with shortages at the beginning of communism. Their discussion of 'value' however shows that this is not just a terminological dispute. Solidarity seem to have taken Marx's model of 'pure' capitalism in volume 1 of CAPITAL and wish to apply it in practice. For instance Marx states that the value of a commodity is determined by the amount of socially necessary labour time embododied in it. Price on the other hand fluctuates about this point and with monoply conditions (and the averaging of the rate of profit) may stay permanently above or below its value. Solidarity seem to want to rationalise this system so that prices always equal value rather than abolish commodity production alltogether.....''

Looking back at this I was too generous in my interpretation of Castoriadis approach which was still stuck in a rather trotskyist understanding of 'socialism' as a distinct society from communism and omitted a more fundamental critique of it's democratic fetish. Unfortunately a longer more critical article we published shortly after this does not appear on-line but it went into more detail on the changes made by (an embarassed?) Brinton/Palace in his translation of the original which certainly came accross as a form of democratic 'market socialism' - actually a form of capitalism. In other ways this pamplets model has some of the same faults as other more modern abstract models for a claimed alternative society such as 'Parecon' and 'Inclusive Democracy' which are criticsed elswhere on libcom.

A slightly one-sided critique (by a party with it's own democratic fetish), which non-the-less still contains some valid points, can be found here:

http://worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1960s/1969/no-774-february-1969/%E2%80%98solidarity%E2%80%99-group-not-so-solid

and another relevant one here:

http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2000s/2005/no-1210-june-2005/solidarity-twenty-five-years.

Other discussions on this site relating to Council Communism and 'labour-time vouchers' are also relevent.

In relation to Castoriadis and Solidarity's lack of understanding of Marx's critique of the 'Value Form' it's also worth looking at David Brown's text 'The illusion of 'Solidarity' ' in the library here:
https://libcom.org/library/illusion-solidarity-david-brown

 UCP leadership race power rankings: Shoddy polls and even worse slogans

Duncan Kinney <duncank@progressalberta.ca>

Sep 15, 2022, 

Say you’re a curious journalist who’s doing a power ranking of the UCP leadership race candidates and you’re trying to figure out if there’s any data out there that supports your purely gut-based predictions from a week ago. Maybe polls would help?

The polls provided to the public via right wing media organizations are no use. In fact, the two most recent public polls on the UCP leadership race are as useful as Elon Musk’s social media manager.

One of those polls is from Leger and paid for by Postmedia; Don Braid wrote a whole column about it, fixating on the pollster’s prediction of Brian Jean winning on the sixth ballot.

What Don Braid’s column about the poll fails to mention is the sample size by the time it got the sixth ballot–273 people. Brian Jean’s margin of victory in the pollster’s prediction is about the same size as the margin of error of the poll itself, and what’s more, the poll came from an online panel (not a true random sample) of self-identified UCP supporters (not necessarily actual UCP members.) It’s silly to be making big predictions on the back of this kind of data.

The other of the two polls I mentioned is from Mainstreet and was paid for by Derek Fildebrandt’s right-wing media platform, the Western Standard. This poll didn’t bother with rounds of preferential voting, instead it just did a snapshot of support. Mainstreet’s poll, which had Danielle Smith at 44 per cent support, has the same problem with polling self-identified ‘UCP supporters’ instead of an actual UCP membership list too.

So in the absence of useful polling data I looked at something more concrete: fundraising dollars. So far, only two campaigns have released fundraising numbers, and those are Danielle Smith’s and Travis Toews’. They both claim to have raised over a million dollars.

I reached out to every other UCP leadership campaign to see if they would disclose their fundraising numbers and none of them responded.

While preferential ballots can sometimes get wonky, and surprise candidates can come up the middle, if all but two campaigns are so embarrassed of their fundraising numbers that they don’t want to share them it appears this thing really is a two-way race. UCP members will get to pick between a guy who was a director at a Bible college that banned yoga and Dungeons and Dragons and a cryptocurrency bug who wants to do a modern version of Bible Bill’s prosperity certificates but with Bitcoin. Whee!

I did find one poll out there that isn’t as trash as the two I mentioned above. It’s behind a paywall at IPolitics. This poll was also done by Mainstreet but its sample is a little more credible. It polls past Conservative Party of Canada donors in Alberta and Mainstreet has followed up with them and asked if they’re both a UCP member and if they’re voting in the UCP leadership race. Only then are their answers logged in the poll.

You can get three free articles a week at iPolitics if you want to check it out. The poll has Danielle Smith defeating Travis Toews 58 per cent to 42 per cent on the sixth ballot. You have to be careful about making hard predictions from any poll, but at least this one appears to have more predictive power than the other two.

Okay, let’s end on some lighter fare: this week’s power ranking is of the UCP leadership campaign slogans.

7. Danielle Smith: “Alberta First”

Strong Trump vibes with this and as a result it goes last. America First was the official foreign policy doctrine of the Trump White House. There’s also a nasty little white supremacist group that goes by the name of Canada First.

6. Brian Jean: “Autonomy for Albertans”

It’s just impossible to care about a slogan this boring. With messaging like this it’s no wonder Smith is eating Jean’s lunch when it comes to courting the far right of the UCP base. This is the same dog whistle Smith is playing, but Jean’s is so inept that I have to rank him slightly ahead for being accidentally less evil.

5. Rajan Sawnhey: “Forward”

4. Rebecca Schulz: “Back on Track”

Upbeat, hopeful, and unlike Sawnhey’s actually communicates something: the proposal that the UCP was ‘on track’ to do something right, but got derailed and needs to be righted. Schulz’s campaign may be a complete flop but at least we can’t pin the failure on a bad slogan.

3. Todd Loewen: “Your Alberta, Your Way”

This slogan fits Todd Loewen like a glove. He probably came up with it himself, which gets some extra points from me. It’s the less-boring version of Jean’s pitch or the less overtly-Trumpist version of Smith’s: everyone gets to have their own special bespoke little Alberta where you can ignore the laws you don’t care for.

2. Travis Toews: “Toews for Alberta”

Rarely has a politician’s campaign slogan matched so well with the boring and wooden personality of the politician. This one’s as dull as Jean’s, but at least less evil; almost as empty of substance as Schulz’s, but at least Toews tells you who he wants you to vote for.

1. Leela Aheer: “Lead with Leela Aheer”

The best slogan of a bad bunch, since everything I just said about Toews applies here, but then you get a tiny little bit of fun alliteration on top. She has no hope of winning.

PS. If you liked this please share it with a friend. You can find this piece online here.

Duncan Kinney
http://www.progressalberta.ca/ 

Starbucks CEO is blind to the publicity in labor organizing

Jason Sattler, Alternet
September 14, 2022

Starbucks Corp Chief Executive Howard Schultz in Seattle, Washington March 18, 2015. REUTERS/David Ryder

The billionaire who built the Starbucks brand into one of the globe’s favorite recreational drug dealers returned in April as interim CEO of the company. He’s determined, it seems, to either kill the union drives sweeping up his company’s stores or his brand or both.

The National Labor Relations Board has accused Howard Schultz’s company of breaking federal labor laws with the carelessness and passion of a twice impeached president stealing nuclear secrets.

And the caffeineglomerate was recently ordered by a federal judge to rehire seven employees of a Memphis Starbucks, who claim they were fired for union organizing. Starbucks Workers United claims that’s a tiny fraction of the more than 75 workers who’ve been sacked by the company for seeking the basic right of collective bargaining.

READ MORE: How labor unions are combating domestic violence

We have no idea how much Starbucks is spending on union-busting compared to the millions being spent by Amazon. The company seems to be evading that reporting requirement.

But no matter how much that amount is, the result has been filling garbage bins with stinky wads of cash and setting them aflame.

Until the 12th month of 2021, there were zero – zero! – unionized Starbucks stores.

There are now 209.

READ MORE: Ralph Nader: The rule of law overwhelmed by 'unbridled political power of corporatism and other lawless forces'

This floundering matches Schultz’s embarrassing attempt to run as an “independent” for president, which flared out after a couple of “Morning Joe”s and a few fat checks to the political consultants – the only people excited by the idea of Schultz in the White House.

While the pace of new unionized stores has held pretty steady – one every two days – Schultz has escalated his war on workers seeking collective bargaining by closing stores. The company says closures are coming for “safety” reasons. You’re probably not surprised at all to learn that union organizers disagree.

"Every decision Starbucks makes must be viewed through the lens of the company’s unprecedented and virulent union-busting campaign," Workers United said in a statement.

Likewise, everything Schultz does must be seen through the lens of a man who may hate unions more than he loves his company.

Because if you look at this historic union drive from almost any other perspective, you will see what could be the best thing to happen to the Starbucks’ brand this century.

Here’s why.

Labor is more beloved now than it’s been in half a century.

Organized labor hasn’t been this popular since Donald Trump got two of five deferments that kept him out of the Vietnam War.

The labor movement has experienced an extraordinary upswing in popularity since the beginning of the Great Recession, when the Occupy Movement was birthed. This accelerated in the birther era, when Republicans embraced the rhetoric of (white) worker populism as they continued policies engineered for billionaires’ pleasure.

The overwhelming embrace of unions is pretty remarkable given the country’s polarization and unions’ close relationship with the Democrats. But it’s even more remarkable given that the last time unions were this popular the share of workers who were in a union, 28.4 percent, was almost triple what it is today, around 10.3 percent.

With public affection for unions, an organized workforce would give Starbucks a serious competitive advantage against other chains.

Schultz is well aware his customers like the idea of a company that treats its workers well – it was a cornerstone of Starbucks’ appeal as the company’s stores reached near ubiquity. But the thought of giving workers a voice that puts them on more equal footing with shareholders is apparently his worst nightmare.

The National Labor Relations Board is an independent agency that enforces the National Labor Relations Act, which guarantees the right of nearly all private sector employees to organize. Of course, under Republican presidents they tend to do the exact opposite.

Since 2021, the Biden-appointed Democratic majority on the NLRB has been attempting to make the case that who the president is really, really, really, really, really, really, really important for workers.

“NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo is quite possibly the most pro-labor agency chief in its history,” according to Ryan Cooper of the American Prospect. She has “an agenda that would transform the American workplace.”

Schultz has decided to become the poster billionaire for union busting, stepping in the fray to take on labor directly right after Amazon’s Jeff Bezos stepped back and let someone else be the face of his company’s assault on organizing.

That means he has to be Public Enemy No. 1 of anyone who cares about workers’ rights. Gruesome tactics against Shultz’s employees will result in reputational loss for this man with a Venti ego.

But that’s not all.

Continued losses at the NLRB may not have a huge financial cost for the company (because our labor laws aren’t strong enough), they could embolden workers in the more than 15,000 Starbucks stores not yet close to being organized while shattering Shultz’s legacy.

Unless he wants to go down in history as a clownish Dickensian villain who got schooled by one of America’s favorite movements.

You have to forgive Baby Boomers for assuming that youthful values fade into reactionary retirement planning by time you buy a house. That’s certainly what happened for many of them and their peers.

But the times actually do seem to be changing, possibly because America’s young people have never been so diverse, connected and in love with labor organizing. They are helping power the organizing surge, according to the dean of labor journalism, Steven Greenhouse.

“Inspired in many instances by Sen. Bernie Sanders’s calls for economic justice and by the Fight for $15, Black Lives Matter, and the #MeToo and environmental movements, today’s young workers are more enthusiastic about unions than those who grew up during Ronald Reagan’s 1980s,” he wrote.

And young organizers include many TikTok and meme masters who have 50-plus years of coffee consumption ahead of them.

A tight job market with a beloved labor movement and a new generation of activated citizens who may actually be interested in living out their values make welcoming unionization the best advertising that Starbucks can’t buy.

Or Schultz can just keep on losing and hope right-wingers get back into power before it’s too late. Given his spectacular lack of political instincts, you can probably guess which path he’ll take.

READ MORE: How employers are trying to bust union efforts

Biden trolls WSJ editorial board after securing railroad worker deal they suggested wouldn't happen
Brad Reed
September 15, 2022

President Joe Biden is having better news this week, 

with Senate wins and an end to his Covid bout. 

(OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP)

President Joe Biden on Thursday took a victory lap after he and his administration secured a deal to avoid a nationwide railroad workers strike -- and he also used the opportunity to take a shot at his critics at the Wall Street Journal editorial board.

Writing on Twitter, Biden pointed to a WSJ editorial published this week that criticized the president and Democrats for not doing enough to avoid a railroad strike that would have had severely negative effects on the American economy.

"You'd think some $5 trillion in new spending by this Congress, much of which will fatten union bottom lines, would be enough to buy some labor peace," the editors wrote. "Let's see if Democrats side with their Big Labor allies, or with the U.S. economy that needs the trains to run on time."

On Thursday morning, Biden announced he and his administration had struck a deal between the railroads and the unions that increased workers' pay and also the ability to take unpaid time off of work to take care of routine preventative medical care.

"Thanks for your concern, WSJ," Biden wrote in response to the editors. "To answer your question: yes, the trains are running on time."