neo-liberalism

While the latest reports from Greece indicate that the country’s supermarket shelves could soon be out of food stocks and humanitarian war rhetoric bellows across the Eastern Mediterranean towards the terror-stricken Levant, Europe’s degenerate oligarchs are silently waging another war against a sovereign European state: the Republic of Belarus.

Original article on 7 June 2012 by Gearóid Ó Colmáin posted on Global Research.

The European Union imposed sanctions on the Republic of Belarus in Janauary of last year and further sanctions this year, due to the failed attempt by the West to install a mob of putschists in power after the re-election of Alexander Lukashenko as president in December 2010.

The sanctions are, of course, punishment for the Belarusian government’s arrest of hundreds of rioters after they attacked the
Belarusian parliament buildings with iron bars, bottles, screw drivers and other weapons.

Arresting criminals attempting to install a Western puppet regime constitutes an unpardonable violation of "human rights" according to the insane kleptocrats in Brussels and
Washington. Like all criminal gangs, the Western-backed putschists began to fight among themselves even before the attempted seizure of parliament! The same in-fighting and criminality has characterized the NATO hordes that took over Libya last year and the current terrorists attempting to seize power in Damascus.

It was the second time since 2006 that a Western-backed "colour revolution" failed to take effect in the Republic of Belarus. The dismal failure of NATO-fomented regime change in Minsk has driven Europe’s delusional oligarchs to despair

Sanctions and threats are all that remain of NATO’s indefatigable desire to extend its power to the Russian border.  In spite of the fact that the EU sanctions are illegal according to international law, the restrictions they impose on Western European companies eager to trade with a robust and stable Eastern European economy are a cogent example of the madness that currently reigns among Europe’s ruling elite.

As European economies tether on the edge of collapse, sabotage, as well as economic, and media warfare is waged on the only government in Europe that is still providing full employment for its citizens through a strong industrial production base, while increasing its exports and ensuring a standard of living for the worker that has continued to rise since Alexander Lukashenko promised to rid the post-Soviet republic of corruption, oligarchs and predatory capitalism in 1994.

Belarus is probably the only country in Europe that still invests more of its GDP in the education, healthcare and housing of its people than it does in zombie banks, rogue financial institutions and foreign wars of conquest. The story of Belarus and its survival in the chaos of the post-Soviet space is one every trade unionist should learn. It is the story of a people who said no to unregulated privatization, no to an economy based solely on greed and inequality, yes to education, yes to healthcare and yes to a future of full employment for its people.

That is why the only news about Belarus the trans-Atlantic elite want you to hear is bad news; news about "human rights" activists paid by America’s National Endowment for Democracy( a front organization for the CIA) and arrested by the "regime"; people like Alias Bialiatsky of the "human rights" centre Viasna, a member of the Féderation International de Droits de l’Homme(FIDH),of which Bialiatsky is the vice-president.

The FIDH supplied false information to the Human Rights Council of the United Nations in 2011, leading to the bombing and destruction of the Libyan Arab Jamahirya, Africa’s richest state, and the lynching and assassination of its revolutionary leader Muammar Gaddafi; acts of fascism which President Lukashenko rightfully compared to the brutality of Nazi Germany.

The North Atlantic Terrorist Organisation (NATO) will not be able to treat the people of Belarus to the version of "humanitarian" bombing it unleashed on Libya, but the possibility of using the "Salvadorian option" of  death squads and armed gangs, which has been pursued in Syria since March 17^th 2011, was openly admitted to the London Times by the US ambassador Micheal Kozak to Belarus in 2000 where he said that in Belarus the American""objective and to some degree methodology are the same" as in Nicaragua.

Reagan’s covert 1980s Contra-war against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua resulted in the deaths of thirty thousand people.

The failure of copious fake NED-funded "opposition" media outlets, phony demonstrations and attempted coups could yet prompt Washington and Brussels to opt for destabilization through the funding and training of terrorist gangs as in Syria. But this is unlikely to come in the following months as NATO undertakes its attempted conquest of Syria.

Meanwhile, Belarus continues to conduct peaceful relations with all its neighbours, signing extensive bilateral agreements with emerging economies such as China, Bangladesh and Vietnam, and expanding its export market in Latin America where it has agreed to supply Cuba with new buses and technical and medical supplies, Venezuela with agricultural and medical equipment together with the construction of thousands of new social housing units.

Virtually unknown in Western Europe, Alexander Lukashenko enjoys considerable prestige in left-wing Latin American countries. He received the Order of José Marti from Fidel Castro in 2000 for his achievement in preserving what was best of the USSR, and President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela has described Belarus as a "model state".

The inauguration of the Eurasian Union in 2012 has hammered another nail in the coffin of the moribund EU, as the geopolitical chessboard moves to Central and Eastern Asia. In a multi-polar world with its centre in Eurasia, there will be no place for trans-Atlantic plutocrats.

The integration of Belarus, Russia and Kazakstan together with the strengthening of ties with China through the Shanghai Co-operation
Organisation poses a serious threat to NATO’s plans for global domination.

Belarus is perfectly positioned to play a leading role in this integration as the portal to Eurasia.  Although significant privatization has taken place in Belarus since the dissolution of the USSR, the vast majority of enterprises remain in public control. This is in contrast to Russia where predatory oligarchs have reduced millions to dire poverty.

President Vladimir Putin made his first foreign visit to Belarus on 31th of May where he made the following joint statement with the President Alexander Lukashenko:

""In accordance with the purposes and principles of the UN Charter and based on the value of diversity of ways of progressive development, as well as recognizing the right of peoples to determine their own path of social and economic development, Belarus and Russia will coordinate efforts to counter attempts to interfere in the internal affairs of the Union State and the Common Economic Space member- states, putting pressure on them by the introduction of restrictive measures and sanctions,"

The defense of the UN Charter sent a clear message to the war-mongers law-breakers of the NATO states that the Eurasian Union would assume its responsibilities in restoring international law, peace and diplomacy.

Relations between Russia and Belarus have improved considerably since the re-election of Vladimir Putin. If Russia is to survive it inevitable confrontation with the West, it will have to ollow the economic model of Belarus, as a nation run by oligarchs and private interests will never have the power and unity to defeat NATO. Russians should know this from their own history, for as David Stahl amply proves in his book ‘Operation Barbarossa and Germany’s defeat in the East’, it was the productive and organizational superiority of the socialist economic system which enabled the Soviet Union to defeat Nazi Germany single-handedly during the Second World War, a fact right-wing Cold war historians have repeatedly distorted.[1]

Other European neighbours have also expressed admiration for Belarus’s socially-oriented economy.

Latvia’s former Minister for Economics Ingrida Latimir Udra told the Pro100 TV channel on May 23:

"In 2004 there was no alternative to the EU. However, if politicians had started thinking about it in 1991 when we separated from the USSR
and when the USSR collapsed, we would have had alternatives. We would have been developing like Belarus.

"Belarusians are developing their industry. They produce tractors, machines, TV sets. And they trade. They receive foreign investments
despite any political disagreements. Even Americans invest there. They are building up their national capital and it is not bad,"

That a former minister of an EU state should make such an astonishing admission shows that sanctions and aggression against the Republic of Belarus are destined to fail in the long term. Many business people in Latvia are unhappy with the EU’s decision to continue with sanctions against Belarus and some have called for 1 billion Euro from Brussels to compensate for the exorbitant rise in freight and cargo costs caused by the sanctions.

The presidents of Lithuania and Latvia Dalia Gribauskaite and Andris Berzins made a joint declaration in Vilnius on 22 March stating that the sanctions against Belarus would adversely affect business on both sides of the border. The Latvian and Lithuanian economies have been reduced to abject debt slavery to the EU and the IMF. These economies will die a slow death or else gravitate towards a Belarusian-lead Eurasian Union.

The obsessive media campaign against the Republic of Belarus regularly resorts to the most absurd conspiracy theories to create the image of a dark, totalitarian dictator "oppressing his own people". After the terrorist attacks in Minsk on April 11  2011, paranoid conspiracy theories abounded in the Western press suggesting that the bombs could be the result of an elaborate government plot, a pretext to "clamp down on opposition".

As in the terrorist blasts that have recently rocked Syria, there is little if any sympathy shown by the corporate press for the innocent victims. The two men convicted for the Minsk Metro were proven guilty in a court of law through video footage, confessions and witnesses. There was no evidence of torture, ill treatment or fraud.

Yet one mendacious propagandist in the Irish Times claimed that President Lukashenko approved the execution of two young men who were convicted of planting a deadly bomb in the Minsk metro, despite a paucity of evidence and suggestions the blast was used as a pretext to clamp down on growing anti-Lukashenko dissent.

How ironic that "suggestions" and conspiracy theories regarding terrorist attacks in countries resisting Western hegemony are perfectly normal and routine in the mainstream press, in spite of the absence of evidence, while no interrogation, speculation or investigation is ever tolerated by the same press agencies when terrorism strikes Western states.

The fact of the matter is that real opposition politicians and media play an active role in Belarusian society. The Belarusian government has no need to clamp down on dissent, as ‘dissidents’ in Belarus constitute no more of a threat to the government than Trotskyist or anarchist groups threaten the governments of the EU. In fact, the ridiculousness of the
Western-funded opposition in Belarus has only served to strengthen support for Lukashenko.

The problem for the Western leaders is that they could never hope to enjoy the confidence and support Lukashenko has in Belarus.

The reason working men and women in Western Europe never hear about the achievements of the socially-oriented industrial economy of Belarus is because the editors of the Western newspapers and TV channels are far too busy attending secret meetings with the captains of finance and other class-peers, in order to co-ordinate their next collective assault on the rights of working people all over the world through austerity, war and a vast quotidian tapestry of hypocrisy, deceit and lies.

Footnotes

[1] Whist I find my find myself strongly in agreement with the rest of this article, this claim, often made by people who share my left-wing world views, seems not to be born out by the evidence. Whist it is true that the Soviet Union 'won' its war against Nazi Germany, it won at a terrible cost of 23,400,000 lives as was noted in the article Need 60 million have died to rid the world of Hitler? of 17 Dec 2011 on candobetter. It needs to be asked: How many more lives could the Soviet Union have lost without losing the ability to further resist Nazism? It seems to me that this number was not unlimited. Had the Soviet Union suffered more reverses, for example, had they lost Stalingrad and had the Germans gained access to the oilfields in the Caucasus or beyond there, Iran, could the Red Army have continued the fight? Had the red Army lost the massive tank battle of Kursk in 1943, could they have pursued their war to defeat Nazi Germany or would they have felt no alternative but to sign a truce with Nazi Germany?

One factor that could well have made a difference between defeat and victory for the Soviet Union was the supply of equipment, particularly trucks from the United States. In fact, more of the credit for defeating Nazi Germany may rightly lie with the capitalist United States than with the 'socialist' (or 'post capitalist') Soviet Union. Even if the sacrifice of American lives was much less than that of the Soviet Union -- 418,500 as opposed to 23,400,000 according to Wikipedia --- it seems to me that what was far more decisive than the sacrifice of manpower in winning that fight was the supply of hardware, particularly vehicles for transport and fighting, fighter aircraft, bombers and warships. That hardware was supplied to itself and to allied nations far more abundantly by the United States than by any other single nation.

Whilst the United States military industrial complex appears to have, on a number of occasions, acted to deliberately prolong the Second World War, for example by having failed to bomb the Nazi German ball bearing factory at Schweinfurt, which would have very rapidly ended the production of any heavy equipment necessary for Germany to fight a modern war, it nevertheless appears that the United States and not the Soviet Union had the most decisive impact on that war.

Whether that was due to the innate superiority of 'capitalism' over 'socialism' or simply the United States' better access to petroleum, coal, metals and other natural resources is another question.

The Murdoch press promotion of Paul Kelly's misnamed book The March of Patriots, chronicling the Prime Ministerships of Paul Keating and the early years of John Howard's, has been supplemented, at taxpayers' expense, by Brisbane ABC local radio stations Conversations program.

See also: "Review of Naomi Klein's 'The Shock Doctrine'" of 21 Nov 07

The Murdoch press promotion of Paul Kelly's misnamed book "The March of Patriots," which chronicles the Prime Ministership of Paul Keating and the early years of John Howard's, has been supplemented, at taxpayers' expense, by Brisbane ABC local radio station's "Conversations" program.

"Conversations" is hosted by former Doug Anthony All Star Richard Fidler, who is now a Radio Presenter in Brisbane.

Tired old platitudes

The tired old platitudes that Kelly and other pro-corporate journalists have long used to sell these two discredited leaders to the Australian public -- "what you see is what you get", "a Prime Minister of conviction", etc. -- were lapped up uncritically by Richard Fidler in an astonishingly dull interview lasting almost an hour. Fidler challenged none of the 'free market' premises that Paul Kelly has used to justify the economic, social and ecological carnage wreaked on this country by Keating and Howard.

The central, supposedly controversial, thesis of Paul Kelly's book, is that today's wonderful, modern, prosperous 'free market' economy was created from a tired, outmoded, overly-regulated, protected, public-sector-dominated economy, through a common 'struggle' by these two leaders at different times.

Until now, many of us had naively assumed that both these men had been working to counter eachother's political agendas.

In reality the supposed 'struggle' amounted to these two men imposing a neo-liberal free market agenda on the Australian public with full cooperation and support from Paul Kelly and others in the Murdoch Press.

Shock doctrine techniques

The techniques used by the ex-prime ministers resemble those Naomi Klein describes in her towering work of political analysis, The Shock Doctrine of 2007. The Shock Doctrine documents cases where the neo-liberal project was imposed through trickery and deceit in apparently democratic states, rather than through outright military dictatorship. Although The Shock Doctrine does not contain any chapter on Australia, readers are still likely to gain a vastly better understanding of what happened to Australia under Keating and Howard than they will from reading The March of Patriots.

Paradoxically, the initial stages of the economic neo-liberal project began during the Whitlam years. In spite of Whitlam's many other economic nationalist policies, some manufacturing tariff barriers were reduced. The Fraser Coalition Government which followed in the late seventies and early eighties allowed greater rights to foreign concerns to buy Australian mineral wealth and companies. These policies were given a boost with Keating's sudden embrace of financial deregulation and his floating of the Australian dollar when he was Federal Treasurer, shortly after Labor won office in 1983. During the 1985 election the then opposition leader, John Howard, announced a hit list of twelve publicly-owned enterprises that would be sold off by a Coalition government if it won.

Howard lost that election, but by the time he won government in 1996, of the twelve on Howard's hit list, only Telstra remained in public hands. The other eleven, including the Commonwealth Bank, QANTAS and the national satellite company Aussat, were all disposed of in a Labor Government frenzy of privatisation.

Similar agendas - Howard and Keating

The other key plank of economic neo-liberalism implemented by Keating was the privatisation of retirement income, otherwise known as 'superannuation reform'. This was first undertaken by the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. Not even the corrupt, cravenly pro-corporate Bush regime dared try to put that one over the American public, but the Keating 'Labor' Government did so to Australians in the late 1980's and we are all reaping the terrible whirlwind this decade with the global financial meltdown.

Howard's policies since 1996, with the possible exceptions of his attempt to break the Maritime Union in 1998, and his imposition of his so-called "Work Choices" legislation in 2005, were merely continuations of Labor's policies.

Hardly 'news'

None of this would have been new to critical observers of these two leaders, so Kelly's 'revelation' that Howard and Keating had worked in office to achieve virtually the same economic and social goals is hardly news.

Even though a good many of both leaders' policies were deeply controversial and strongly opposed by many Australians - often a majority in the case of the privatisations of Government assets - Richard Fidler failed to put any of this to Kelly. Other awkward topics not raised in the inteview included:

• The numerous lies peddled by both Howard and Paul Kelly's Australian newspaper to win public acceptance for the invasion of Iraq in 2003; and
• The Australian Wheat Board (AWB) scandal in which AU$296million in bribes were paid to the very Saddam Hussein Government that John Howard would tell us in March 2003 posed such a mortal threat to world peace that we were left with no choice but to invade immediately.

Boat people

One incredible assertion from Paul Kelly that Fidler accepted uncritically was that Howard's motive for taking a strong stance against boat people in the Tampa and "Children Overboard" affairs of 2001 was not electoral advantage, but rather his strong desire to maintain the integrity of Australia's borders. In fact Howard later loosened entry requirements and ramped up immigration to record high levels as the Sydney Morning Herald's economics editor reported in the story "Back-scratching at a national level" of 13 Jul 07.

The program, far from being a probing interview that Australian taxpayers should rightly expect from their ABC struck me as little more than free advertising for Paul Kelly and the Murdoch media.

Sugaring dubious medicine

Another consequence of the publication of Kelly's new book and the attendant marketing, in which the ABC is now participating, could be a normalisation in retrospect of the Keating and Howard Governments' unpleasant and undemocratic policies. Such a representation of political history could then be used to deter citizens from questioning new asset-stripping, austerity and wealth transfer programs, whether under the current Rudd Labor Government or under a new Coalition one.

See also: "Review of Naomi Klein's 'The Shock Doctrine'" of 21 Nov 07

Appendix: E-mail sent to Richard Fidler

The following e-mail was sent at 11.30PM, which would have been approximately 25 minutes into an interview lasting roughly 55 minutes.

Date: Monday 21 Sep 2009, 11:30:21 am
From: James Sinnamon
To: Richard Fidler

Paul Kelly's 'revelation' that both Keating and Howard both helped to bring Australia to what it is today is hardly news.

The interview has, so far, proven to be even more dull than #comment-235107">"Keating the Musical".

Have you read Naomi Klein's "The Shock Docrtine"?

Even though it doesn't have a chapter on Australia, it gives a much more accurate picture of what happened to this country than what Paul Kelly is giving.

A lot of us dispute that deregulation, privatisation, removal of trade union rights, etc, has been beneficial.

The GDP measures that economists use to prove that this has all been beneficial are flawed and capable of presenting massive declines in quality of life as increases. As an example, just ask yourself why at least two incomes are now necessary to buy even a modest dwelling when one was easily sufficient barely more than a generation ago.

Could you please consider questioning the economic neo-liberal premises of Kelly's glowing tribute to these two abysmal political misleaders?

sincerely,

James Sinnamon

This e-mail had no noticable impact on the remaining part of the interview. No reply has been received so far. If one is received it will be posted below.

The following article was adapted from a #comment-679127">post made on 1 Apr 09 to the Larvatus Prodeo discussion "More on the Yellow Peril".

Concern mounts at Chinese government program to buy strategic Australian companies

Concern grows in Australia as Chinese government-owned businesses mount an ambitious program to buy strategic Australian companies. This program includes the bid by Chinalco to buy a major stake in the mining company Rio Tinto and the bid by MinMetals to buy out OZ Metals. Adding to this concern have been recent news reports of Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon's undeclared free trips to China from a Chinese businesswoman friend, Helen Liu; a secret meeting between Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and the Chinese propaganda minister; and the ongoing efforts of communications Minister Stephen Conroy to impose a Chinese-style firewall on Australia's Internet users.

Lindsay Tanner

As in the past, the bogey of racism has been employed in an attempt to prevent discussion of these issues.

Federal Minister for Finance and Deregulation, Lindsay Tanner, crudely attempted to equate concerns raised by Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull with cold war 'yellow peril' racism, but was appropriately rebuked by Turnbull. Tanner's theme has also been echoed in Australian left/liberal circles.

Whether or not 'racism' motivates objections to growing Chinese influence, the fact remains that, if at some point these acquisitions and other Chinese penetration of the Australian economy are not stopped, Australians will find that they no longer control their own destiny in any sense .

Consider the story, "Bowen a sure thing for Chalco", of 26 Jun 08 in the Townsville Bulletin, which is highly sympathetic towards plans by the Chinese state-owned company Chalco to build a massive Aluminum refinery in the wetlands to the north of Bowen. It made the claim that "the Bowen community was largely supportive of Chalco". It went on to reveal that,

"... schools discussed the possibility of introducing the Chinese language into their curricula to expand job opportunities for students."

If the necessity of learning a foreign language in order to be able to secure employment in your own town is not a symptom of colonisation, then what is?

Locals oppose aluminium project because of high danger to wetlands north of Bowen

This aluminium project has been opposed by local environmentalists because it would practically guarantee the destruction of the wetlands to the north of Bowen, just as the Gladstone Aluminium refinery has already ruined the coastal waters around Gladstone. (See "Impacts of the Chalco Aluminium Refinery if located near Bowen", "Burdekin Greens candidate: break neck industrialisation threatens Bowen region environment"). And even if it were somehow possible to operate the planned Bowen aluminium smelter without poisoning its environment, its operation would still greatly increase the already grave problem of global warming.

Local short-term gains no trade against widespread long-term costs

Whilst some Bowen residents can hope to gain economically in the short term from this project, most Bowen residents and most Australians will lose.

Queensland Premier Anna Bligh, who is imposing this project on the Bowen community, also opposes moves to block Chinese acquisition of Australian mining companies. (See "Queensland Premier Anna Bligh urges Federal approval for Chinalco bid" in the Courier Mail of 18 Feb 09).

To let Chinese companies build and operate whatever factories they choose in this country, wherever they like, and to let them buy-out our resources sector, is a short-term political route of least resistance.

Our mining executives, having allowed their companies to become insolvent by gambling that the demand for our mineral resources, particularly from China, would continue to grow indefinitely, now need Chinese investment to make themselves solvent again.

Government must represent Australians

But ordinary Australians sensibly resist handing across control of our mineral wealth to the board rooms of Hong Kong and Shanghai.

Our governments must do whatever it takes to prevent this. If necessary, the funds to buy back our mineral wealth should be raised from the Australian people. A good start would be to cancel Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's idiotic scheme to distribute pocket money to Australians in the hope that the money will be somehow spent in a way that would stimulate Australia's chronically dependent and backward economy enough to avoid a depression. That money would be far better spent on buying back the farm.

Although Australia's political leaders today don't have the stomach for this, the political leaders of our forefathers who fought in the jungles of South East Asia in the 1940's to defend our freedom almost certainly would.

Update: 75% of respondents to a Courier Mail online poll believed that Australia was too reliant economically on China, 2 Apr 09. Note: although on page 35 (2nd of 2 letters' pages) of the printed version of the Courier Mail tells its reader to "cast your vote at couriermail.com.au", I couldn't find it. Can anyone tell me how to find it? - JS

See also: Forum discussions #comment-679127">"More on the Yellow Peril" of 31 Mar 09 on Laratus Prodeo, , "Federal government and China" of 30 Mar 09

Let's imagine, for a moment, how different the public debate would be today if it had been unions that had caused the current economic turmoil.

In other words, try to imagine a scenario in which union leaders - not financial managers - were the ones whose reckless behaviour had driven a number of Wall Street firms into bankruptcy and in the process triggered a worldwide recession.

Needless to say, it's hard to imagine a labour leader being appointed to oversee a bailout of unions the way former Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson was put in charge of supervising the $700 billion bailout of his former Wall Street colleagues.

My point is simply to note how odd it is that the financial community has emerged so unscathed, despite its central role in the collapse that has brought havoc to the world economy.

Of course, not all members of the financial community were involved in Wall Street's wildly irresponsible practices of bundling mortgages into securities and trading credit default swaps. But the financial community as a whole, on both sides of the border, certainly pushed hard to put in place an agenda of small government, in which financial markets largely regulated themselves and citizens (particularly high-income investors) would be spared the burden of paying much tax.

The agenda advanced much further in the U.S., but had an impact in Canada, particularly on the tax front.

One would think that those who pushed this agenda so enthusiastically would, at the very least, be a tad embarrassed today.

But so influential are those in the financial elite - and their hangers-on in think-tanks and economics departments - that they continue to appear on our TV screens, confidently providing us with economic advice, as if they'd played no role whatsoever in shaping our economic system for the past quarter century.

Of course, we're told there's been a major change in their thinking, in that many of them are now willing to accept large deficits in today's federal budget, in the name of stimulating the economy.

While this does seem like a sharp departure from the deficit hysteria of the 1990s, a closer look reveals the change may not be that significant.

In fact, financial types have always accepted deficits - when they liked the cause. Hence their lack of protest over George W. Bush's enormous deficits, which were caused by his large tax cuts for the rich and his extravagant foreign wars.

What they don't like is governments going into deficit to help ordinary citizens - either by creating jobs or providing much unemployment relief.

So the Canadian financial community has been urging that the stimulus package consist mostly of income tax cuts - even though direct government spending would provide much more stimulus and do more to help the neediest.

If the Harper government follows the financial community's advice, we will simply move further along with the small government revolution launched by Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s.

Of course, tax cuts are not the same as financial deregulation. But they are twin prongs of a bundled package aimed at reducing the power of government to operate in the public interest.

Surely it's time to rethink this resistance to government acting as an agent of the common good.

And maybe it's time for a little humility on the part of a financial elite that long has enjoyed such deference while turning out to be so spectacularly inept.

Also published on www.informationclearinghouse.info. Original article by Linda McQuaig published in the Toronto Star on 27 Jan 09.

The ABC Radio National Background Briefing program, "Metals, money and madness" (2 Nov 2008), discussed the growing problem of theft of metals, particularly copper, often entailing the vandalism of electrical, rail or telecommunications infrastructure or any readily accessible artifacts, such as public statues and bronze medallions on gravestones.

In the words of John Seabrook of the New Yorker magazine:

"Well, there is a kind of apocalyptic aspect to it -- I would say a 'Mad Max' aspect ... of metal theft, and not only in the States, but in Europe, too, in the sense that the very infrastructure is being torn out -- ripping up lines from railway yards, taking bronze statues out of parks ... and melting them down, bronze medallions on grave stones, storm drains -- anything made out of metal that you can get away with -- manhole covers ... In the Ukraine a whole suspension bridge was stolen, railroad tracks are stolen. ... Round the world it's a big problem."

Other instances of metal theft include:

• In Victoria, in October, a truck pulled up at a new housing estate. The cover over the Telstra underground cable housing was removed, the cable was lifted out and hooked onto the truck, and the truck drove off, dragging 300 metres of cable. Evidently, the people in the truck believed the cable was copper and had not realised that Telstra now used cables made of less valuable aluminium.
• In South Australia, theft of copper power lines resulted in 30,000 homes being blacked out.
• In South Africa, a special police unit, known as the "Copperheads", has been formed to combat the theft of metal.
• In the U.K. the copper conducting wire, necessary to power trains, is regularly stolen.
• In Serbia, about a year ago, a large part of a communications network was crippled through theft of copper cable.
• In the U.S. theft of copper gas piping caused a gas leak and a house to blow up.
• A sculpture with a scrap metal value of only AU$200 was stolen from outside an art Gallery in Penrith NSW recently. In the U.K. a sculpture by Henry Moore has vanished.

In the U.S. and South Africa, drugs such as crystal methamphetamine, also known as "ice", have been deliberately supplied to metal thieves in order to make them oblivious to the risks entailed, such as the removal of live high voltage copper electricity transmission lines.

Such crimes have been driven, in part, by a reduction in output from the world's copper mines. Scarcity has driven up the price of copper. Copper currently sells for US$4,000 per tonne, but not so long ago, shot up to around US$8,500 per tonne or US$8.50 per kilogram, because of strikes by miners in some of the world's major copper mines.

#GovtVsMarket" id="GovtVsMarket">Managing essential resources: The role of government vs the market

About three years ago, when I argued on an online discussion against our excessive consumption of natural resources, particularly petroleum, the #comment-38089">inevitable argument came back to me from neo-liberal ideologues, that 'price signals' would fix everything and that any government intervention would only make our predicament worse.

"Governments will only be able to 'guide' the market where they have more wisdom than the sum of the governed. It may happen one day, but it has not happened yet. ..."

...

"At the moment there is no substitute (for petroleum). 50 years ago there was no substitute for bakelite. Before telephony there was no substitute for hiring someone to deliver messages (other than walking them around yourself). ... There may be large reserves of oil as yet undetected. The point is that no one knows; so trying to run around as Chicken Little did is senseless. Make sure the price signals are allowed to get through and the problem will be solved."

It is hard to believe that a thinking mature adult could espouse such ideas, yet most public policy over the last two decades or so has been, and continues to be predicated on such simplistic rationales.

Today, the 'price signals' that we were promised would solve everything for us are, in many parts of the world, driving a new crime wave that has the potential to destroy the basic infrastructure needed to keep civilisation functioning.

This comprises only part of the whirlwind that was sown when we were 'persuaded' to allow our destiny to be decided two or three decades ago by 'price signals', rather than by our collective human intelligence, as expressed through our elected political representatives.

In 1974 Minerals Energy Minister Rex Connor attempted to borrow money by unconventional means in order to buy back Australia's energy and mineral wealth in order to make Australia energy-independent. It is a matter of historical record that this was subject to a beat-up by the hostile newsmedia. It became known as 'the Khemlani affair', and led to the downfall of the Whitlam Labor Government in 1975.

Afterwards, Liberal Party Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser started a process which led to breaking down of limits to foreign companies owning Australia's mineral wealth. This has led to the circumstances of today where most of our one-off endowment is in the hands of foreign companies and is being flogged off at an accelerated rate to overseas countries. Our own production of petroleum has passed its peak and we can expect to become ever more dependent upon increasingly expensive petroleum imports.

Of course, the neo-liberal ideologues still insist that Australia is better off because the Whitlam Government was restrained from intervening in our mineral wealth sector and thereby prevented from impairing the claimed efficiency of the free market for all those years.

Across the world, other governments, guided by the same dogma, similarly stood back, as mining and petroleum companies largely helped themselves to their countries' mineral resources and encouraged accelerated consumption of those resources for commercial reasons.

Now the supply of many metals, as well as fossil fuels, that were treated then as either infinite, or easily replaceable, is now dwindling and we are beginning to suffer the consequences.

#PublicCost" id="PublicCost">Public cost and private profit

Strong evidence supports a view that some metal recyclers actively encourage the theft of copper. In view of the disruption and the enormous cost of replacement and repair of infrastructure destroyed by copper thieves, can we afford to leave the management of supply and recycling of essential materials to the market?

At the moment, the scale of the problem may seem manageable, at least in Australia. This is because, for many potential thieves, the risk involved in stealing copper, despite the high prices, probably well outweighs the few hundred dollars to be gained. However, in coming times of increasing economic hardship and scarcity-driven increases in the costs of metals, the rewards may be much higher and the desperation so much greater.

If we leave supply and demand to the discretion of private operations, as now, we stand to see much of our infrastructure destroyed as a result of theft.

Greater regulation of the metal recycling business has been proposed to combat metal theft. One proposal for metal has been a "tag and hold" system, similar to what now operates in the U.S., where scrap metal is tagged and held for up to 28 days after it has been bought to provide an opportunity for anyone who may have had that metal stolen to come forward and identify it. A similar system is also applied to second hand goods dealers prevent theft.

However, Luke Parker, the Managing Director of metal recycler Sell and Parker, objected to greater regulation of the industry. He argued:

I don't think it's fair to blame the scrap industry for advertising the fact that we recycle scrap, much as I don't think it's fair to blame Cash Converters ... for stolen video recorders, or stolen jewellery. That's not really the case, We advertise that we pay cash for scrap so people will recycle it. By far the bulk of scrap that's recycled is legitimately sourced, and we need to tell our legitimate customers that we're paying for scrap. However, it's fair to say as well that just as we're advertising to our legitimate customers some of the non-desirables also see the advertisements and think, "Well, there's a good deal there; I can get some cash for scrap regardless of how they acquire the scrap." But I'd be hesitant to say that because we operate in a competitive market and we have to market the fact that we recycle and we pay for the metal, and we do pay a handsome price for it, that we are somehow to blame for it.

Whether or not the scrap industry as whole is to blame, there is clearly a problem which can only get worse over time. Background Briefing reported, "In Victoria 33 people have been charged with copper theft, 16 scrap metal yards investigated and just under 49 tonnes of stolen copper reclaimed."

Of the 'tag and hold' method", Luke Parker objected,

"... Tag and Hold works fine for a hock shop that's holding jewellery, or holding video recorders, they don't get many in, they don't take much space, they're all very unique. But everyone that's walked through our site ever discussing promoting tag and hold, once you actually get into a scrap metal yard, have a look at what happens, have a look at the volume of materials coming through, tag and hold just wouldn't work. It would destroy the economics of the industry, it would make it impractical to do a lot of recycling and for very, very little benefit."

#CaseForPublicOwnership" id="CaseForPublicOwnership">The case for a publicly owned metal recycling service

Indeed, regulation could be costly. Perhaps then, the solution may lie in completely removing any incentive for scrap metal dealers to accept stolen metals. In other words, make metal recycling a government responsibility that is to be performed as a public service and not for profit.

This suggestion would almost certainly be dismissed out of hand by this society's opinion moulders as 'socialism'.

However, should such an objection prevent us from making a democratic choice to adopt, as a society, what may prove to be the only measure likely to prevent the eventual destruction of our electrical and communications infrastructure, which, together with with petroleum-fueled internal combustion engines, virtually defines industrial civilisation?

Obviously the idea of nationalising the scrap metal recycling industry is fraught with a number of political, economic and moral difficulties. Two of these are:

• What do we do about those people who worked hard to build up businesses which put to good use material which would have otherwise been wasted?
• How might such useful businesses be preserved in some form?
• How can we guarantee that the recycling of metals can be operated efficiently and not become a burden to the taxpayer?

In regard to the first two questions, it would be appropriate for the Government to offer fair compensation, that is within its means, for taking over the businesses. It should also see to it that the owners, manager and current employees of those businesses are employed by the Government Metal Recycling Service in appropriate capacities with wages and working conditions that are at least commensurate with what they currently enjoy.

To address concerns that employment by the Government will automatically lead to feather-bedding, there should be reasonable work performance benchmarks for all employees, but these should allow work to be conducted at a civilised pace and preferably for considerably fewer hours than today's norm of 38-40.

The charter of the Government Metal Recycling Service should be to recycle as cheaply as possible for the taxpayer, the suppliers of scrap metals and the consumers. The charter should also specifically include proactive discouragement of the theft of metals. In any case, without the profit motive, the crude economic incentives for operators to accept stolen metals would not be present.

For the Government Metal Recycling Service to run as efficiently as possible, its processes should be totally transparent to the public, except where this might encroach unreasonably upon the personal privacy of employees. There should be almost no business secrets and no "commercial in confidence" clauses in any contracts signed with the Government Recycling Service.

If the full nationalisation of recycling is considered too politically difficult for the moment, there should however be no reason, other than the usual blanket objections of 'free market' ideologues, why we could not at least set up a such a service to operate alongside private recyclers, with greater regulation of the latter. If that should prove insufficient to prevent metal theft and the destruction of our infrastructure, then we should look again at full nationalisation at some time in the future.

See also: transcript of ABC Radio National Background Briefing program "Metals, money and madness" (2 Nov 08).

See also "Treasurer talks tax rises, job cuts" in SMH of 13 Oct 08, "Tax hike risk if NSW remains in the red" in the Australian of 12 Oct 08.

NSW Greens Media Release: 14 October 2008

The reliability of the companies behind the state's AAA credit rating has been called into question before a NSW Legislative Council budget estimates committee today.

Standard and Poor's and Moody's have been heavily implicated in the subprime mortgage crisis, according to Greens NSW MP John Kaye.

Dr Kaye said: "They rated many Collateralised Debt Obligations based on highly unreliable mortgages as AAA.

"NSW Treasurer Eric Roozendaal is relying on Standard and Poor's and Moody's to justify a slash and burn mini-budget despite their fingerprints being all over the current global financial meltdown.

"Treasurer Roozendaal laughed off concern about Standard and Poor's and Moody's track record with Iceland and the CDOs.

"A fortnight ago Moody's rated Iceland Aa1.

"Since then the Icelandic financial system has collapsed and Britain has been forced to step in to guarantee bank deposits.

"NSW pays Standard and Poor's and Moody's for the privilege of being rated in what is effectively a ‘cash for comment' arrangement.

"The one unpaid credit agency, Fitch, rates NSW as AA+, one down from AAA.

"Cutting spending on services and infrastructure at a time when the state is experiencing negative growth will undermine the Federal Government's stimulus package.

"It is a recipe to throw the state into recession," Dr Kaye said.

For more information: John Kaye 0407 195 455

Ian Douglas of Fair Water Use (www.fairwateruse.com.au) shows how the 'reform', commencing in 1994, which promised to rectify the Murray-Darling's chaotic piecemeal water management structure by making water allocations a marketable commodity separate from the land titles, has, instead, only help bring the Murray-Darling system to the brink of collapse . In accord with our national constitution's provisions for such national crises, he calls for the declaration of a state of emergency.

Originally published with readers' comments on the ABC News web site on 16 Sep 08 08:48:00

By Ian H Douglas

Originally published on the ABC News web site on 16 Sep 08 08:48:00

In the midst of the cacophony of political lambasting, parochial foot-stamping and media static engendered by the crisis currently affecting the Murray-Darling Basin, there has been scant voicing of what many view as the underlying anthropogenic cause of its plight: the 1994 decision of the Council of Australian Governments "to implement a strategic framework to achieve an efficient and sustainable water industry", emphasising "the adoption of pricing regimes based on the principles of consumption-based pricing"; in effect, the establishment of an open water market.

For the majority of the subsequent 14 years, this water "reform" process has induced increasingly polarised opinion but little frank debate. It was left to the likes of then Victorian Premier, Steve Bracks, shortly before his resignation last year, to call the beast by its true name, privatisation.

Moreover, in recent months it has become increasingly clear that the maze of administrative and governance mechanisms responsible for the welfare of the basin are dysfunctional and frequently self-defeating. Concerns have even been raised regarding the validity of current arrangements under Section 10 of the Australian Constitution insofar as it applies to the "reasonable use" of water.

Current events confirm that the chaos continues, with "environmental" water being acquired as a result of one administrative decision, only to be redirected by another. This was demonstrated by the recent purchase of water-rich properties in the Darling catchment involving the Federal and NSW State Governments, raising hopes that our elected representatives were beginning to understand the importance of holistic ecological health as applied to the Murray-Darling Basin, followed all too quickly by last week's approval of the Victorian Government's North-South pipeline by the Federal Minister for the Environment and erstwhile conservationist, Peter Garrett. The Minister apparently believes that this project "will not require an environmental study" as "it will not impact on matters of national environmental significance".

The recent statement from the Queensland Department of Natural Resources and Water that much of the rainfall in the upper Darling catchment "breaks out into floodplains or alternatively feeds into terminal wetlands resulting in a great loss of this water" confirms that some authorities have yet to grasp that the ecological health of the basin is essential to the economic well-being of its agricultural sector.

Such is the morass that is governance of the Murray-Darling.

Proponents of water reform, including the Wentworth Group, largely adhere to the mantra that a consumption-based pricing policy, monitored by an "independent" body, is the mainstay of efficient water management; trusting the market to take care of the precious resource that is Murray-Darling water. Under the circumstances, might the free market be a superior arbiter? Based on the evidence, this is certainly not the case.

The Queensland Government recently announced that it intends to grant tradable water licences to irrigators in the Condamine-Balonne river system, for volumes only marginally less than their current allocations: entitlements which were all but gifted to them not so very long ago. The current drought has convinced some agribusinesses that there would be more profit to be made from selling their water than using it for the purpose for which it was originally allocated to them.

It is not entirely implausible to suggest that, in the near future, some water-rich farming enterprises will list agriculture as a non-core activity, their primary income being derived from water trading.

In other parts of the basin, despite direct warnings from CSIRO scientists, irrigators are increasing the volume of water extracted from already stressed aquifers, as it is more financially advantageous to use groundwater rather than purchase the water they require from the rivers and associated impoundments; apparently oblivious to the absolute connectivity of water in river systems.

This is merely the neonatal phase of a process which, if unchecked, will lead to decisions directly affecting the price and availability of water being made by those whose sole credential is financial clout. Regrettably, neither Mother Nature nor the majority of the farming community have the credit rating required for membership of this potential star chamber. Overseas interests are becoming increasingly invested in this country's water-based commodity market. The unfettered export of our dwindling water resources continues. Under the doctrine of economic rationalism espoused by the water reform movement, there must be major concerns as to where water will be allocated and the uses to which it will be put.

Frustrations are escalating throughout the region: from the headwaters of the Darling, where farmers accuse their neighbours of water theft, to the Goulburn, where opponents of Premier Brumby's pipeline are threatening militant action, and in the Lower Murray, where, while large sections of the local community maintain their strident insistence that fresh water must be injected into Lakes Alexandrina and Albert, other residents are equally strongly advocating the opening of the barrages to allow ingress of seawater. Water wars, as feared by some overseas commentators, are surely not on the cards in this fine country; but the rumblings are unsettling and must be heeded.

National Water Plans and Senate Inquiries offer little hope of prescribing the empirical rethink that is manifestly required. The implications of "getting it wrong" are quite simply too momentous to leave the task in the hands of those who happen to be charged with governmental responsibility at this time.

Australians should indeed be grateful to those who drafted our Constitution, defining the processes to be invoked in response to national crises: a state of emergency must be declared, to enable application of the necessary treatments to address the acute aspects of the malaise affecting the Murray-Darling Basin. A Royal Commission of Inquiry should also be established, to carry out an all-encompassing and independent review of the past, present and future of this ecologically profound and vital natural resource.

Ian H Douglas is the national coordinator of Fair Water Use (Australia), a lobby group which advocates environmentally responsible use of the nation's water.

See also: Environmental group calls for declaration of State of Emergency to save dying Murray-Darling system, Water stolen from dying Murray-Darling by technicality.

Readers comments

Of course privatisation of water is a disaster

Of course privatisation of water is a disaster. Look at the schemozzle private enterprise has made of electricity and the railways.

All the arrogant hyper actives want to do is play Monopoly as they have been doing with banks and investment companies. No matter what disaster they cause, these types walk off with millions.

Every public utility should be controlled by elected boards. If they don't behave to the best advantage of the community, fine them and sack them.

Keep solicitors and MBA's (Masters Of Bugger All) away from anything that requires intelligent direction.

Set up chairs of public administration in all universities.

We've had enough of large enterprises being handed over to executives with no experience in the industry.

Once privatised, publicly owned things, become a remnant of what they once were

Aah monopoly. The great game of collusion that creates winners amongst the related and losers of everyone else. It's true that most things once publicly owned that become "privatised" become a remnant of what they once were however it is the "mantra" of apparently modern economics and public management. This of course is closely tied to the other screamer of "the market will sort itself out" which can be seen to be so blindingly untrue following any of the "recent" financial collapses in the U.S. and their flow on effects on world markets.

The States have absolutely stuffed up water management yet you need to ask why. The short term provision of either votes or monetary income has allowed the State Governments to use water as a means to an end. This use has been exploited to a point that is detrimental to the health of the river systems in question. What exactly is it that has fed this insatiable desire to irrigate. Cotton of course. Now you can't eat cotton and the material that cotton makes isn't actually of much long term value however it posts a great return to a solicitor's trust fund and also enables certain "tax deductible investments" to be used in the greater desire of earning more money. Money is the funny thing, you can't eat that either. But they think they can buy anything they need when they have it.

The biggest scam ever perpetrated on a sovereign state

Don't just stop at water, electricity and railways.

Private enterprise makes a hash of most things - except ripping off profits and delivering executive salaries, perks and bonuses.

The biggest scam ever perpetrated on a sovereign state is that the market and private enterprise works better for people than government services.

Victrorian Government neglect of Sunraysia compounded by water management debacle

The management of the Murray Darling basin and all water management should be in the hands of one authority who would look at the interests of all water users and not just those in the City. The passing of the legislation for the pipeline is the final disgrace.

The people of Sunraysia where I live are being given a raw deal in many ways including transport, proposed closure of CSIRO and research station at Walpeup, the closure of FMIT, the difference in water allocation between NSW and Victoria, no train service, little public transport, a hospital which cannot cope with demand within budget, a private hospital with no nurses so midwifery wing closed and should you need medical treatment in a capital city then be sure you have a couple of thousand dollars each time you travel.

This is all on top of the debacle called water management which is putting emotional and financial strain on all members of the community.

Add environmentally inappropiate crops to that list of failings.

I'd add using environmentally inappropiate crops to that list of failings. Australia, as we are all well aware, has a vastly different climate and terrain yet we persist with water thirsty crops.

Real problem is growing water-thirsty crops in a semi-arid desert

The real problem is that of trying to grow crops which need water in what is essentially a semi-arid desert. Over much of the basin there is no run-off to top up the river, most of the flow originates in the Great Divide. For most of its length it flows through areas where the evaporation rate far exceeds the rainfall. All of this talk of water allocation and water trading is all crap if the water is just not there in the system, it is a smoke haze to hide the real problem.

We need to acknowledge the fact that Australia is not Europe, and as such is totally unsuitable for growing any crops that need any water other than whatever rain falls from the sky. We can all sit around making clever speeches, having committees pass resolutions, have special boards of inquiry and then feel smug about it all, but the whole Murray-Darling system really is beyond help unless we get rid of any forms of agriculture etc that cannot sustain itself on whatever rainfall there is. This will never happen, of course, because there is too much money and livelihood tied up in it all, even though it has no future. The future is that the lower Murray becomes a series of pools and only occasional flow every few years. Most of South Australia becomes dependent on Teflon Mike's desalination plant, at huge expense. The towns along the river, from the riverland, through sunraysia and upstream all wither as there is no income and the whole of western Victoria and central NSW become desolate ghost towns...

The real water guzzlers are the livestock industries and crops

One of Australia's main exports is dairy, and also red meat. We know cotton and rice are water-consuming crops, but the real water guzzlers are the livestock industries and crops, and so much of it is for wealth creating exports. At least 50% of our milk is exported. Why not save water and stop these exports? We should consider Australia first, not companies that are making money and profits from it. Much of our dairy is owned by Japan now, and they want it for Japan. Our ecosystem has helped make our prosperity, but Nature is screaming out that this cannot go on. We need to ensure our own food bowl, and not use if for wealth creation. Export 21st century technologies instead is what we need to do, not irrigation agricultural products. - Vivienne

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A copy of the article One Year After the Publication of The Shock Doctrine, A Response to the Attacks was included in the Naomi Klein newsletter (www.naomiklein.org/contact-naomi-klein) which I received today. There was almost complete silence from the right wing think-tanks exposed in The Shock Doctrine for many months following its publication. In Australia, I nearly always encountered total silence from the ideological co-thinkers of Milton Friedman in online discussions, that is, until very recently when, in an Online Opinion forum discussion Winning the War In Iraq , I encountered posts, the content of which seemed to originate from a paper The Klein Doctrine - The Rise of Disaster Polemics published by The Cato Institute on 14 May. Klein's article is a response to this and to a similar article Dead Left by Jonathan Chait in The New Republic of 30 July 08.

This article exposes conclusively how these articles employ various dishonest debating including doing precisely what the accuse Klein herself of doing, that is taking quotes "out of context". As Klein writes she doesn't have time to comprehensively refute every falsehood in these articles. Her "full rebuttal is the book itself."

However, there is one other criticism that Klein has yet to respond to, that is her failure to take a stance against high immigration and her implicit depiction of all groups opposed to high immigration as reactionary anti-humanitarian and xenophobic. I have sent three e-mails so to either Naomi Klein or Debra Levy (debra [AT] naomiklein org) her chief researcher on this and have yet to receive a response. These concerns are also discussed in the article Why is Naomi Klein uncritical of mass immigration to the First World? of 27 July 08 by Sheila Newman.

However, in spite of this serious blemish, The Shock Doctrine remains a groundbreaking and indispensable work and her ongoing journalistic activism remains an immense service to humanity. - James Sinnamon

See also: Online Opinion discussions in which The Shock Doctrine is discussed: NSW power without pride and Winning the war in Iraq.

One Year After the Publication of The Shock Doctrine, A Response to the Attacks

By Naomi Klein, 2 September 2008, orignal article at www.naomiklein.org/articles/2008/09/response-attacks.

Contents: #FriedmanSupportedTheWar" id="FriedmanSupportedTheWar">Sorry Boys, Milton Friedman Supported The War, #AttackTheAuthor" id="AttackTheAuthor">Ignore the Reporting, Attack the Author, #GraspingStraws" id="GraspingStraws">Grasping at Straws, #StrawMenMassacre" id="StrawMenMassacre">A Massacre of Straw Men, #GoToTheSource" id="GoToTheSource">Go to the Source

Exactly one year ago, I set off on a book tour to promote The Shock Doctrine. The plan was for it to last three months, quite long by publishing standards. Twelve months later, it is still going http://www.naomiklein.org/meet-naomi/tour-dates . But this has been no ordinary book tour. Everywhere I have traveled- from Calgary, Alberta to Cochabamba, Bolivia - I have heard more stories about how shock strategies have been used to impose unwanted pro-corporate policies. I have also been part of stimulating debates and discussions about how the current round of crises - oil, food, financial markets, heavy weather -- can be transformed into opportunities for progressive change.

And there have been other kinds of responses too. The Shock Doctrine is a direct attack on the intellectuals and institutions that have disseminated corporatist ideology around the world. When I wrote the book, I fully expected to get hit back. Yet for eight months following publication, there was an eerie silence from the 'free-market' ideologues. Sure, a few dismissive reviews appeared in the business press (www.naomiklein.org/articles/2007/10/business-press-unrequited-love) . But not a word from the Washington think tanks that I name in the book. Nothing from the University of Chicago economics department. Even The Economist magazine, which used to attack me gleefully and with great regularity, never mentioned the book in print. An American television producer, who was trying to find an opponent to debate me on-air, confided that she had never been turned down so consistently. "They seem to think if they ignore you, you'll go away."

Well, the silence from the right has certainly been broken. In recent months, several articles and reports have come out claiming to debunk my thesis. The most prominent are a 'background paper' (www.cato.org/pubs/bp/bp102.pdf (663K), www.cato.org/pubs/bp/html/bp102/bp102index.html) published by The Cato Institute, extended into a full length book in Swedish (!), and a lengthy essay www.tnr.com/story_print.html?id=69067f1c-d089-474b-a8a0-945d1deb420b in The New Republic by senior editor Jonathan Chait.

Several readers have written to this site (www.shockdoctrine.com) asking me to respond to these attacks, if only to help them defend the book more effectively. I resisted at first (clinging to my summer vacation) but I appreciate the feedback and several points do need correcting. Since the reports by Cato and The New Republic - though purporting to come from radically different points on the political spectrum - share some marked similarities, I've decided to tackle them together. Here goes.

#FriedmanSupportedTheWar" id="FriedmanSupportedTheWar">Sorry Boys, Milton Friedman Supported The War

Both Jonathan Chait and The Cato Institute claim that the late economist Milton Friedman was a staunch opponent of the invasion of Iraq. The Cato paper states of me that, 'She claims that Friedman was a 'neoconservative' and thus in favor of an aggressive American foreign policy, and she argues that Iraq was invaded so that Chicago-style policies could be implemented there%. but nowhere does she mention Friedman's actual views about the war. Friedman himself said: 'I was opposed to going into Iraq from the beginning. I think it was a mistake, for the simple reason that I do not believe the United States of America ought to be involved in aggression.' And this was not just one war that he happened to oppose. In 1995, he described his foreign policy position as 'anti-interventionist.''

Similarly, Chait accuses me of not knowing the difference between libertarians and neo-cons and chides me for never mentioning -- 'not once, not anywhere' -- that Friedman 'argued against the Iraq war from the beginning.' Apparently Friedman's anti-war stance should be 'morbidly embarrassing' to me.

I am not the one who should be embarrassed. Despite his later protestations, Milton Friedman openly supported the war when it was being waged. In April 2003, Friedman told the German magazine Focus that 'President Bush only wanted war because anything else would have threatened the freedom and the prosperity of the USA.' Asked about increased tensions between the U.S. and Europe, Friedman replied: 'the end justifies the means. As soon as we're rid of Saddam, the political differences will also disappear.' [Read the whole interview in German (www.focus.de/finanzen/news/wirtschaft-lasst-erhard-auferstehen_aid_196501.html) and our translation (www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine/resources/milton-friedman-war-iraq).] Clearly this was not the voice of anti-intervention. Even in July 2006, when Friedman claimed to have opposed the war from the beginning, he remained hawkish. Now that the U.S. was in Iraq, Friedman told The Wall Street Journal, 'it seems to me very important that we make a success of it.'

All of this has nothing to do with my book, however. In The Shock Doctrine, I describe the invasion and occupation of Iraq as the culmination of Friedman's ideological crusade because he was America's leading intellectual favoring the privatization of the state - not because he personally supported the war, which is irrelevant. For more than five years Iraq has been the vanguard of this radical privatization project. Private contractors now outnumber U.S. soldiers and corporations have taken on such core state functions as prisoner interrogation.

Furthermore, I never said Friedman was a 'neo-conservative' and I discuss, at length, how difficult it is to find terms to describe the corporatist project that are acceptable to all readers. On page 17 (all page numbers refer to the Picador paperback) I write:

'In the attempt to relate the history of the ideological crusade that has culminated in the radical privatization of war and disaster, one problem recurs: the ideology is a shape-shifter, forever changing its name and switching identities. Friedman called himself a 'liberal,' but his U.S. followers, who associated liberals with high taxes and hippies, tended to identify as 'conservatives,' 'classical economists,' 'free marketers' and, later, as believers in 'Reaganomics' or 'laissez-faire.' In most of the world, their orthodoxy is known as 'neo-liberalism,' but it is often called 'free trade' or simply 'globalization.' Only since the mid-nineties has the intellectual movement, led by the right-wing think tanks with which Friedman had long associations-Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute-called itself 'neo-conservative,' a world view that has harnessed the full force of the U.S. military machine in the service of a corporate agenda.'

The significance of the 'neo-con' label gaining currency in the mid-nineties is that it was then that the Republicans, under the leadership of Newt Gingrich and backed by the think tanks I mentioned, swept Congress promising a 'Contract With America.' At this point, the label 'neo-conservatives' was not a reference primarily to hawkish foreign policy positions but to harsh economic ones. Back in the mid-nineties, many of the people most associated with the neo-con label today - David Frum and William Kristol and much of the Weekly Standard crowd - were squarely focused on demanding Friedmanite cut-backs and privatizations inside the United States. Frum, for example, first made his name in the U.S. with Dead Right,, his 1994 book exhorting the conservative movement to return to its free market economic roots. After Bill Clinton embraced much of this economic agenda, several of the key neo-con warriors narrowed their focus to American dominance on the world stage, a fact that has allowed their keen interests in Friedmanite economic ideas to be largely overlooked.

#AttackTheAuthor" id="AttackTheAuthor">Ignore the Reporting, Attack the Author

Both Chait's essay and the Cato paper are marked by a stubborn refusal to wrestle with the evidence quoted in my book. For instance, Chait dismisses out of hand my suggestion that there were economic interests behind the 1999 NATO intervention in Kosovo (though he grudingly admits I never claim that economics was the sole motivator). I do write that there were other factors motivating the war besides Slobodan Milosevic's egregious human rights violations. I base this claim on the post-war analysis provided by Strobe Talbott, Deputy Secretary of State under U.S. President Bill Clinton and the lead U.S. negotiator during the Kosovo war. In a 2005 essay (quoted on page 415), Talbott wrote:

'As nations throughout the region sought to reform their economies, mitigate ethnic tensions, and broaden civil society, Belgrade seemed to delight in continually moving in the opposite direction. It is small wonder NATO and Yugoslavia ended up on a collision course. It was Yugoslavia's resistance to the broader trends of political and economic reform-not the plight of the Kosovar Albanians-that best explains NATO's war.'

Instead of explaining how the words of a top-level U.S. official could so clearly coincide with my argument, Chait chooses to completely ignore the Talbott quote. Again and again, readers of The New Republic are left with the distinct impression that The Shock Doctrine is a work of opinion journalism, rather than a thesis based on research and reporting.

When Chait and the Cato Institute do acknowledge my reliance on facts, they accuse me of manipulating them to fit my thesis. Interestingly, the first time Chait quotes my work, he does just that. To explain to his readers what kind of an extremist he is dealing with, he quotes my first book, No Logo. In it, I allegedly described the world as a 'fascist state where we all salute the logo and have little opportunity for criticism because our newspapers, television stations, Internet servers, streets and retail spaces are all controlled by multinational corporate interests.' If he had let the quote continue for one more sentence, his readers would have known that I went on to dismiss this worldview as overly caricatured. The next sentences read: 'there is good reason for alarm. But a word of caution: we may be able to see a not-so-brave new world on the horizon, but that doesn't mean we are already living in Huxley's nightmare... Instead of an airtight formula, is a steady trend... but riddled with exceptions.'

This is just the first of countless instances in which Chait twists my words to fit his thesis. When manipulation fails, he simply takes my points and passes them off as his own, without attribution. (I am well aware, for instance, that both Marxists and Keynesians have exploited crisis and disaster, which is why I explore left-wing disaster opportunism on pages 21-25, 65-70, 283, 316-317.)

#GraspingStraws" id="GraspingStraws">Grasping at Straws

The Cato paper does, at times, acknowledge that there are facts in my book, but faults me for failing to provide sources for my statistics. This is a bold charge to make against a book with 74 pages of endnotes. The one example mentioned is the statistic 'that between 25 and 60 percent of the population is discarded or becomes a permanent underclass in countries that liberalize their economies.' I did not provide a source for this stat because it is an amalgamation of stats I had already cited and for which I had already provided multiple sources. This is standard practice: once a statistic has been sourced, it can repeated (for the sake of brevity) without repeating the source. So here are those stats on which the 25-60 per cent amalgamation is based, with their sources, straight out of The Shock Doctrine endnotes:

• Unemployment in Bolivia was between 25% and 30% in 1987 (page 186. Source: Mike Reid, 'Sitting Out the Bolivian Miracle,' Guardian (London), May 9, 1987.)
• 25% of Russians lived in desperate poverty in 1996 (page 300. Source: Russian Economic Trends 5, no. 1 (1996): 56-57 cited in Bertram Silverman and Murray Yanowitch, New Rich, New Poor, New Russia: Winners and Losers on the Russian Road to Capitalism (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2000), 47.)
• Unemployment for black South Africans more than doubled from 23% in 1991 to 48% in 2002 (page 272. Sources: 'South Africa: The Statistics,' Le Monde Diplomatique, September 2006; Michael Wines and Sharon LaFraniere, 'Decade of Democracy Fills Gaps in South Africa,' New York Times, April 26, 2004.)
• Unemployment in Poland was at 25% in some areas in 1993 (page 241. Source: Mark Kramer, 'Polish Workers and the Post-Communist Transition, 1989-93,' Europe-Asia Studies, June 1995)
• 40% of young workers were unemployed in Poland in 2006 (page 241. Source: Andrew Curry, 'The Case Against Poland's New President,' New Republic, November 17, 2005)
• 59% of Poles had fallen below the poverty line in 2003 (pages 241-242. Source: Przemyslaw Wielgosz, '25 Years of Solidarity,' August 2005.)

Elsewhere, the Cato paper claims that, 'Klein never provides the reader with any data over a longer period. She% never once admits that Chile is the social and economic success story of Latin America and has virtually abolished extreme poverty.' In fact my economic analysis of Chile covers a 34-year span and I provide facts and data that directly challenge the claim that the country is a free market success story. Here is a relevant passage (pages 104-105):

'The only thing that protected Chile from complete economic collapse in the early eighties was that Pinochet had never privatized Codelco, the state copper mine company nationalized by Allende. That one company generated 85 percent of Chile's export revenues, which meant that when the financial bubble burst, the state still had a steady source of funds%. By 1988, when the economy had stabilized and was growing rapidly, 45 percent of the population had fallen below the poverty line. The richest 10 percent of Chileans, however, had seen their incomes increase by 83 percent. Even in 2007, Chile remained one of the most unequal societies in the world-out of 123 countries in which the United Nations tracks inequality, Chile ranked 116th, making it the eighth most unequal country on the list.'

#StrawMenMassacre" id="StrawMenMassacre">A Massacre of Straw Men

Most of the attacks on The Shock Doctrine involve manufacturing claims, falsely attributing them to me, then handily tearing them down. For example, Jonathan Chait telescopes my point about Donald Rumsfeld's holdings in the Disaster Capitalism Complex like this: 'Donald Rumsfeld maintained his stock in Gilead Sciences, which holds the patent for Tamiflu, even while serving as defense secretary. Get it? Rumsfeld would stand to profit from a flu pandemic. But surely you don't have to be an admirer of Rumsfeld to doubt that he would engineer an outbreak of a deadly virus in order to fatten his stock portfolio.'

Actually, that is the plot of the movie V for Vendetta; it has absolutely nothing do with my book. What I do write about is how the Pentagon, under Rumsfeld's leadership, stockpiled Tamiflu and Rumsfeld stood to profit as the value of the stock increased by 807 per cent. On pages 394-395 I write:

'For the six years that he held office, Rumsfeld had to leave the room whenever talk turned to the possibility of avian flu treatment and the purchase of drugs for it. According to the letter outlining the arrangement that allowed him to hold on to his stocks, he had to stay out of decisions that 'may directly and predictably affect Gilead.' His colleagues, however, took good care of his interests. In July 2005, the Pentagon purchased $58 million worth of Tamiflu, and the Department of Health and Human Services announced that it would order up to $1 billion worth of the drug a few months later.'

There are many more straw men propped up in the Cato Institute paper. Most involve vastly inflating the role I attribute to Milton Friedman. And no little wonder. Other than the University of Chicago economics department, Cato is the institution most intimately aligned and associated with Milton Friedman's radical theories. Among other tributes, every two years, Cato hands out the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty, worth half a million dollars. (This year it went to a 23-year-old Venezuelan student activist to further his opposition to the government of Hugo Chavez). Since Friedman continues to serve as Cato's patron saint, it has much to lose from a diminishing of Friedman's reputation, as well as a direct interest in exonerating him of all crimes, real or imagined.

Here are a few more examples. The Cato paper claims that I put the entire blame for Pinochet's economic policies on the shoulders of Milton Friedman - then 'proves' that his direct involvement was minimal. Once again, I make no such claim. I do devote considerable space - roughly 60 pages -- to describing the impact of a U.S. State Department program that brought more than one hundred Chilean students to the University of Chicago as part of a deliberate effort to export free-market economic ideas to Chile. This is the program that gave birth to the infamous 'Chicago Boys' of Chile, several of whom were actively involved in planning the Chilean dictatorship's economic program before the 1973 coup even took place. Amazingly, the Cato paper makes absolutely no mention of this academic program in its effort to exonerate Friedman personally. The writer either missed 60 pages of my book, or deliberately chose to ignore them.

The greatest challenge in responding to the Cato paper is the scope if its dishonesty. Consider this one passage:

'Klein also blames Friedman and Chicago economics for the actions of the International Monetary Fund during the Asian financial crisis and the Sri Lankan government's confiscation of the land of fishing families to build luxury hotels after the tsunami. Yet the fact is that Friedman thought that the IMF shouldn't be involved in Asia, and he held that governments should be forbidden from expropriating property to give it to private developers. Of course, Klein could argue that Friedman was in some sense a source of inspiration for those policies, even though he was opposed to them. But she doesn't do that. She pretends that he agreed with them, and that that is what he and other Chicago economists wanted all along.'

Absolutely everything in this passage is wrong. I never say Friedman favored the IMF bailout in Asia, quite the opposite. On pages 335-336, I report that, 'Milton Friedman himself, now in his mid-eighties, made a rare appearance on CNN to tell the news anchor Lou Dobbs that he opposed any kind of bailout and that the market should be left to correct itself.' In what way could this constitute 'pretending' that Friedman supported the bailout?

I also freely acknowledge the fact that Friedman opposed the IMF on principle. However, as with Pinochet's government in the seventies, I also document that the IMF, at the time of the bailout, was packed with ideological Chicago Boys - a very different point than claiming the IMF was taking orders from Friedman. On page 202, I directly address this apparent contradiction:

'Philosophically, Milton Friedman did not believe in the IMF or the World Bank: they were classic examples of big government interfering with the delicate signals of the free market. So it was ironic that there was a virtual conveyor belt delivering Chicago Boys to the two institutions' hulking headquarters on Nineteenth Street in Washington, D.C., where they took up many of the top positions.'

The Shock Doctrine has room for this kind of complexity because it is not - despite what Cato claims - a book about the actions of one man. It is about a multifaceted ideological trend that has successfully served the most powerful corporate interests in society for half a century.

Furthermore, I never wrote, as Cato claims in that same passage, that Friedman had anything to do with 'the Sri Lankan government's confiscation of the land of fishing families to build luxury hotels after the tsunami.' His name does not appear once in my 25-page chapter on the tsunami. Once again, to write that I 'pretend' that Friedman is advocating these policies is pure fabrication. Furthermore, all of these inventions and misrepresentations appear in a single paragraph. The Cato background paper is 20 pages long and is comprised of dozens and dozens of equally dishonest paragraphs. Subjecting them all to this kind of rebuttal is simply too time consuming; my full rebuttal is the book itself.

#GoToTheSource" id="GoToTheSource">Go to the Source

Thanks to a fantastic team of researchers, especially my incredible research assistant Debra Levy, The Shock Doctrine has withstood a year's worth of intense media scrutiny in dozens of countries. It is not unscathed, but it has emerged in better shape than I dared hope. When errors are discovered, we immediately correct them in future editions and post a correction (www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine/resources/corrections-clarifications) and an explanation on the book's website. So far there has been only one significant error discovered, related to the profits earned from Dick Cheney's Halliburton stocks. It was immediately corrected. Readers of The Shock Doctrine know that this is but one of many examples that make the same point about conflicts of interest in the Bush Administration; indeed I devote an entire chapter to the topic. And this is the benefit of a methodology that is grounded not in anecdotes but in thousands of sourced facts and figures: the thesis does not rise or fall on any single example.

As to my critics' charge that I am selective in my use of quotations, that's a danger for any writer. It is also why Debra and I launched the 'resources' section (www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine/resources/chapter-resources) of the book's website. On this page, readers can access dozens of original reports, letters and studies that make up some of the key source material for the book. If you are concerned that I am exaggerating Friedman's support for the brutal regime of Augusto Pinochet, read a letter Friedman wrote to Pinochet http://wwww.naomiklein.org/files/resources/pdfs/friedman-pinochet-letters.pdf . If you are suspicious that I am making disaster capitalism seem more conspiratorial than it is, read the minutes www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine/resources/part7/chapter20/pro-market-ideas-katrina from a meeting that took place at the Heritage Foundation just two weeks after the levees broke in New Orleans. It lays out 32 'free market solutions' for Hurricane Katrina and high gas prices, many of which have been championed by the Bush Administration.

The thesis of The Shock Doctrine was not born of whimsy but of four years of research. Debra and I put these documents online because we want educators, students and general readers to move beyond an admittedly subjective version of history - as all histories are -- and go straight to the source. We invite you to explore these documents, send us ones we missed, and come to your own conclusions.

The Business Council of Australia says that the current design of the Government's Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme will force closure of at least three major business, cause four to "fundamentally review their operations", and force others to find ways to cut expenses. It claims to have surveyed 14 businesses over sectors including minerals processing, manufacturing, oil refining, coal mining and sugar milling.

Whilst the problem is real, there is really no avoiding it.

Whilst the problem is real, there is really no avoiding it. The fact is that the kinds of industries and clients that the BCA and similar groups represent cannot expect to survive in their current form. Neither can the tertiary industries that rely on them, such as expensive law firms, frenzied global stock-exchanges, advertising corporations, high-flying consultants and millionaire-salary CEOs.

"Propaganda about a ‘dematerialised economy’ makes it hard to establish the reality that material industrial productivity is not actually less reliant on burning fossil fuels than it was in the 1970s, and that drawdown on fossil fuels has in fact been multiplied by the needs of much greater populations. Similarly the obvious still needs to be pointed out that increasing productivity means burning more fuel and outputting more pollution, accelerating petroleum depletion and adding more greenhouse gases."[1]

We have to face reality. Business and economic structure and expectations have to change.

The Business Council of Australia writes in its recent news release of "The ‘truly dreadful
problem’ of the emissions-intensive, trade-exposed industries." It says, "Professor Ross Garnaut, in his review of emissions trading, accurately describes what he calls the ‘truly dreadful problem’ of EITE industries: so-called ‘carbon leakage’. If we price emissions fully in Australia, emissions-intensive activity might simply relocate overseas. Rather than eliminating emissions, Australia’s regime would move the source of the emissions offshore, most likely to jurisdictions with less stringent environmental standards. Thus a well-intentioned Australian regime could produce the truly perverse effect of actually increasing the level of global emissions."

It is all very well threatening to go overseas, but this will be a very temporary measure; as these industries try to continue to process and sell massive amounts of industrial product, they are going to run into the long-anticipated problem of not having any customers left in the industrialised 'richworld' to sell to, since the people in those 'first world countries', unburdened of corporate accelerated profit-making, will simply slow down and relocalise their activities. Big business will finish up mired in the poverty which it has sought to exploit in its offshore victims.

It adds that, "This problem affects a substantial slice of Australian economic life. The EITE industries contribute 16 per cent of Australian business investment, 51 per cent of exports, 15 per cent of gross value add and employ nearly one in 10 working Australians."

What to do about mass unemployment with the decline of mass production?

Val Yule often says, that it isn't that there isn't any work. It is that the work that needs to be done isn't done because of all the work we do that doesn't need to be done in paid employment which uses up our time and energy.

If we stop working to feed the profit machines, which only expend most of the profits we make for them on more growth, creating more needs for more growth, and less time for everyone, we could, instead, work according to our needs and desires, rather than the hypertrophied needs and desires of a small sector of global power-freaks.

Political commentator and climate activist, Clive Hamilton, writes in Growth Fetish,[1]

Reduction in working hours is the core demand for the transition to post-growth society. Overwork not only propels overconsumption but is the cause of severe social dysfunction, with ramifications for physical and psychological health as well as family and community life. The natural solution to this is the redistribution of work, a process that could benefit both the unemployed and the overworked.

He remarks that

“Moves to limit overwork … directly confront the obsession with growth at all costs,” and talks about the liberation of workers “from the compulsion to earn more than they need.”

Because growth is sustained by a constant ‘barrage of marketing and advertising’ Hamilton wants advertising taxed and removed from the public domain, and television broadcast hours limited so as to

“allow people to cultivate their relationships, especially with children.”

The era of big profits, big business and big government is in terminal decline

The problem is that, with rising fuel costs, the margins for profit are declining. Add this to costs for carbon emissions, and you are looking at a profound challenge for the growthist economy of profit.

We industrialised humans have to change the way we do business and the pace of business.
We are facing global climate change; futures of very unpredictable wind-speeds, temperatures, crop productivity and water availability. We are facing continuous declines in agribusiness productivity because of the decline in availability of fossil fuels. Permaculture will be better able to provide than agribusiness as fossil fuels decline and it will provide better socially as well. See Antony Boy's delightful "Photo essay of a rural Japanese city," for an excellent and entertaining discussion of the problems and solutions.

It is normal for the Business Council and for the Government to be worried, because the necessary changes threaten their systemic hegemony and the whole notion of profit.

If we attempt to go on as we are, Australia faces monolithic power production and government systems, in the effort of the current elite to retain a profit-oriented society, from which the elite themselves are the overwhelming social and financial beneficiaries, at the cost of the greater population. There will be continuous attempts to find finance for huge nuclear power plants to keep up ever less viable industries and giant cities.

The Nuclear route (...) implies total electrification, synthesising, using complex technology, the pattern of settlement and transport which arose from exploitation of the natural endowment of petroleum. It requires massive investment, and in Australia’s case, the investment sought is likely to be private. This implies ongoing loss by citizens of control over the country’s energy systems and all that flows from that – the future of work, the state of the environment, natural amenity. It implies the reshaping of Australian society by corporations with profit alone in mind, for the benefit of a small dominant asset-rich class, with the electorate a mere captive market.[2]

This is a truly unsustainable battle; it will just bring us into feudalism and a much deeper economic depression than a relocalising of all our systems will.

Not only do we not need all the goods we produce for consumption at home or abroad, we do not need the income they bring, and their acquisition is a poor compensation for lives given to industry. Wonderful jobs are few and far between. No-one wants to give those up. Some people also derive much of their social life from work but they would derive similar benefits, and perhaps more status and satisfaction, from other community activities. And plenty of people reach a stage of maturity where childlike obedience to workplace regimes in the cause of producing more and more widgets in different colours, or processing more and more customers a day, with unflinching subservience, challenges every natural instinct.

Instead of those complicated international agreements about percentile reductions in emissions over the years to come, which are hardly enforceable or even measurable, remaining mostly in the control of the corporate emitters, the solution lies much closer at hand, and could ultimately be controlled at grass-roots levels by the masses themselves. Relocalisation is obviously the best way to develop the solidarity and self-sufficiency to reorganize work.

It should be obvious that the slower we work, the more fuel will remain, the less greenhouse gas will be emitted. If the populations which have ballooned to unimaginable proportions since the 1950s were allowed to return (through natural attrition) to more natural sizes by 2050, and the economy permitted to slow, it would take the heat off the planet and us as well. With so much less effort we could make such a positive difference to the planet and to our personal effectiveness.

ENDNOTES

[1] Hamilton, Clive, Growth Fetish, Allen & Unwin, Australia, 2003 and Pluto Press UK, 2005, last chapter, especially, pp.218-220

This article contains extracts from :"101 Views from Hubbert's Peak" in Sheila Newman (Ed.) and from "France and Australia after oil," in Sheila Newman (Ed.) The Final Energy Crisis, Second Edition Pluto Press, UK, 2008 (Available in Australia in late August)

The original article by Alistair McConnachie was published on the web-site sovereignty.org.uk in September 2006.

There were fears of a new wave of clandestine migrants from eastern Europe last night after Poland announced it is opening its doors to workers from outside the EU.

In an attempt to ease labour shortages, people from Ukraine, Russia and Belarus will no longer need work permits to enter the country.

With thousands of its citizens flocking to the UK, Poland finds itself short of skilled workers.(Unaccredited, "Poland in new migrant alert",The Scottish Daily Mail, 2 Sep 06, p.55)

Irony of ironies! Poland is short of skilled workers because they're all flocking to Britain because, allegedly, we're short of skilled workers!

Such is the absurdity of neo-liberalism – the term which has come to refer to minimum government intervention in the economy, or government intervention intended to ensure complete freedom of movement of capital and labour.

This article demonstrates that neo-liberalism is upheld by those on the Left as well as those on the Right.

On the question of free movement of labour, the free-marketeers and capitalists on the Right meet the anti-capitalists and anarchists on the Left in complete agreement.

The reason the free-marketeers uphold a central pillar of neo-liberalism – free movement of people - is their desire to make a lot of money.

The free-marketeers cannot speak out against free movement of labour because that would require them to re-assess their commitment to free movement of capital.

It's unfortunate that some anti-EU groups simplistically advocate "free trade" without thinking it through properly and realising that the full implications may often be the antithesis of their professed belief in national sovereignty, both political and economic. After all, even if we left the EU, cheap labour would still come here, unless there were restrictions set on this particular aspect of "free trade."

The reason the anti-capitalists uphold a central pillar of neo-liberalism – free movement of people - is their desire to promote "equality".

In this regard, the Left emphasise "international workers' solidarity". This can often be a very good idea.

Constructive solidarity and politically perverse ‘solidarity’

For example, I realise that if my job is shipped to Mexico, the Mexican worker will probably have a pretty crummy job working for low-wages in poor conditions.

I can accept that the system is screwing us both.

We all benefit when living standards and working conditions rise in other countries. It means there is less chance of an employer in this country bailing out and going abroad to exploit cheap labour and poor working conditions, and there will be less of a migration push from these countries.

I can understand that if I can help the Mexican build a better economic system for his own country, then maybe in time there will be less incentive for the system to ship my next job out there, or to force his family over here.

In this sense, solidarity with workers internationally is an appropriate and fine thing, to be encouraged. Sovereignty carries a slogan on its back page, with every issue, which advocates "Solidarity with Farmers Internationally."

However, the idea of "solidarity" becomes a very bad thing if it is misused as a rhetorical device to neuter my opposition to having my living space invaded, or my work and wages undermined, or my environment destroyed, or when I'm expected to condone unlawful behaviour in its name.

For example, when we're expected to show "solidarity" with the massive influx of immigrants, especially the illegal ones – which the Left like to call "irregular" – and bogus asylum seekers, and to put from our minds the political, social, economic and ecological consequences of this immigration invasion – for the greater notion of "solidarity".

In that sense, "solidarity" is simply a slogan being used to undermine my rights and to prevent me articulating them and to stop me standing up for myself, and my group's interests. It is in this politically perverted sense that the Left today almost always use the term.

The driving ideology of ‘equality’

Why do the Left insist on doing this?

Why do they seek to geld opposition to neo-liberalism from the working class by misusing the idea of "international solidarity" when it is not appropriate to the circumstances, nor the interests, of the people to whom they are speaking?

The reason is because the Left's over-arching ideology of "equality" demands that they put "equality for all" before the interests of any specific element of the working class.

Therefore, if working class people in England are being displaced from apprenticeships, or jobs, by already qualified Eastern Europeans, or Somali refugees, then the Leftist will not stand up for the English indigenous working class because his doctrine of "equality" mandates that he cannot and must not "discriminate" between people in any way.

Therefore, he will argue that the Somali has a right to this job too and that the Englishman needs to see himself, not as part of a national citizenry, but rather as part of an amorphous "international working class" in which he is "equal" with this Somali and shares "solidarity" with this Somali "working class person". Viewed this way, the Englishman can only lose.

To promote "equality", the Englishman is expected to deny his interests, forfeit his rights and cede his space in the name of "solidarity" with someone he's never met, who is likely not a citizen, and is probably a law-breaker!

As a consequence of its ideological obsession with "equality", the Left cannot and will not oppose free movement of labour and so it must try deliberately to pervert and misuse the idea of solidarity in order to neuter any working class opposition to the open-borders of neo-liberalism.

The Left's obsession with "solidarity" can sometimes have its amusing manifestations.

I had a conversation with a Lefty in Buchanan Street this month. He was standing beside a stall and wanted me to sign a petition showing "solidarity" with some Cubans who, for reasons he was not able to explain clearly, had been thrown in jail in Miami!

Faintly amused, I smiled and said I didn't think that was of much relevance to people in Glasgow. Oh, but on the contrary, apparently, it was his group's aim to build "an international movement for working class solidarity".

I laughed out loud. "How are you going to do that," I asked, "when right here in Glasgow, we have the Scottish Socialist Party, who are now split right down the middle, and screaming hatred at each other. If they can't keep it together in Glasgow, how are you going to keep it together worldwide?" He didn't have much to say to that!

The Marxist bogus "greens"

The Leftist and Marxist "Greens" will point out that it is capitalism which drives immigration pressures.

Like all Marxists they will trace whatever it is they claim to be concerned about, to the economic system. They will try to claim that ecological crises are a product of social causes which themselves are products of the capitalist system and its injustices.

Of course, the economic system is often a factor, and one can recognize that without having to be a Marxist!

However, these people are Bogus Greens because the bottom line for them is not ecological sustainability, but like all other Leftists, the bottom line is their fundamentalist religion of "equality" which drives them on destructive routes.

Even if we work sincerely to correct the economic problems of which they complain, even if we work to ensure people want to stay where they are rather than migrate, even if the economics is changed for the better, they would still support ecologically damaging open borders and unlimited immigration – in the name of equality!

In this regard, compare the difference between genuine ecologically-aware advocacy, as found in Sovereignty (sovereignty.org.uk) with that of the Marxist Bogus "Greens":

Sovereignty challenges neo-liberalism. We campaign for economic justice for all. To those ends, we advocate building Self Reliance Worldwide (see for example, The Principles and Purposes of Foreign Aid, and Appendix to our Asylum Policy, we support the Cancellation of Third World Debt and we advocate thoroughly throughout this website, the economics of Localism not Globalism.

At the same time we advocate restricting immigration and asylum levels severely, and enforcing the immigration laws. We campaign for ecological sustainability and emphasise its central relevance to the issue of migration.

Marxist Bogus "Greens" on the other hand, put freedom of movement above economic justice and ecological sustainability because they are fixated on their religion of "equality" in every field of human life.

This ideology demands that there must be no laws which "discriminate" in any way towards any particular person for any reason whatsoever. Thus, immigration laws are inherently anti-equality and "racist" and must be torn down and there must be open-borders.

Moreover, they try to justify this in economic terms because they believe that freedom of movement is a necessary tool to achieve their economic goals in the first place.

They believe that only when we can all move about unimpeded will the world economy stabilise at a level which is the same for all. Only then, as a result of this economic equality will the social problems caused by inequality be sorted and ecological sustainability achieved.

Of course, in reality this free movement of people will be politically, socially, economically and ecologically damaging and unjust to many areas and peoples of the planet – but that is of little concern to them.

The Marxist Bogus "Greens" will destroy the planet in their efforts to achieve "equality".

sovereignty.org.uk

See also: How mass migration has devastated the social fabric of Britain.

The Australian Government is set to pass laws ending the single desk marketing of Australian wheat this week.

As reported by nineMSN, farmers have gathered in Canberra to protest the change. Wheat Growers Action Group chairman Peter Cannon, who helped organise the day of protests, said farmers were being dudded by the changes and wanted the public to know about it.

Wheat Export Market Alliance chairman Graham Blight also told the rally that growers' democratic rights were being ignored.

Without a single desk, "the weakest seller will determine the market", he said.

"The multinationals will come in and have a field day ... our government's given them a blank sheet".

Critics of single desk marketing have used the AWB/Iraq 'scandal' and one particularly heavy loss by Board to justify throwing out the whole single desk system. The opportunistic timing and predatory nature of their push for de-regulation is similar to the Disaster Capitalism modus operandi described by Naomi Klein in her book 'Shock Doctrine'.

The system preferred by many of these critics is - surprise, surprise - a free-market open-slather arrangement where the price of wheat can effectively be bid down to the lowest common denominator by the buyers. The buyers, in this case, would be the same sorts of multinational agri-business conglomerates that are lining up to market Australian wheat once the single desk is gone.

Not surprisingly, both Liberal (in the dubious form of Wilson Tuckey) and Labor (new Minister for Agriculture, Tony Burke) fully support the changes. Both operate in the mind-space of free-market economics, where any Government 'meddling' with the purity of the market is considered heretical.

Even when it helps Australian wheat farmers.

If there are problems with the way that AWB's been run, fix the problem. Don't change a structure that's served Australian wheatgrowers well for decades.

I hate to resort to clichés, but this is a ‘must read’ book – the kind that only gets published once in a hundred years.

The theory Klein develops is that the main reason for the rise of democracy and social-welfare with its old age pensions, public hospitals, public housing, and universal education after the Great Depression of the 1930s was that the beneficiaries of the robber-baron culture which had dominated until then were aware that if people were kept sufficiently miserable, they would turn to communism and socialism.

Reading of the desecration and live dismemberment of Iraq and seeing the name KPMG, I could not help but think of how our recent Premier, Steven Bracks, who was so fond of public-private partnerships, and whose government gave away 20 ha of public land in Royal Park to private 52% owned Singapore developer, Australand. In a move which even the departing Queensland Premier criticised, Bracks recently began to work for KPMG Peat Marwick, which, incidentally, is involved in reconstruction efforts in East Timor.

Also published on Web Diary. See also: "Shock Doctrine's Shocking Short Shrift" of 8 Nov 07 by Carolyn Baker.

A review of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine ( Penguin Australia, 2007)
By Sheila Newman. Also published on Web Diary. (2233 words)

Klein is a Canadian political scientist. She put this book together over a four year period, employing different teams of researchers for each chapter. The documentation is awesomely solid, making her assertions difficult to tear down, and thus supporting a theory which would otherwise seem almost fantastic, were it not also supported by more and more freestanding works.

The theory Klein develops is that the main reason for the rise of democracy and social-welfare with its old age pensions, public hospitals, public housing, and universal education after the Great Depression of the 1930s was that the beneficiaries of the robber-baron culture which had dominated until then were aware that if people were kept sufficiently miserable, they would turn to communism and socialism.

But the robber-barons, land-sharks and bankers were only waiting for an opportunity to break down any political system which would stop them from having anything they wanted. Their method was tried and true: a religion embracing trickle-down economics, endless growth and total deregulation. I have wondered for some time how so many dim-witted, narrowly educated people going by the tag of ‘economist’ came to inhabit the corridors of power in our society. This has been somewhat explained to me by Klein, who identifies the genesis of a theoretical basis, defence and propaganda effort for corporatist free-market replacing real government. She places the rise of the shock doctrine of economic rationalism at Chicago University in the Chicago School of Economics, led by economist Milton Friedman, the author of Capitalism and Freedom.

She describes how this school set about training people in its atrocious doctrine all over the world. Its practitioners sought to break down all examples of egalitarian, community oriented democratic states, speciously linking ‘democracy’ to the imposition of ‘free-market’ economics.

Although Klein does not make this connection, their program began in 1973 which was the time of the first oil-shock. She describes a course of corporatised looting, torture, slavery and repression which begins with Pinochet’s rise in Chile, with Milton Friedman as his advisor, and passes through similar horrors in Bolivia, Argentina, Uruguay, Poland, South Africa, Russia, and Irak. She finishes this incredible expose by describing the nauseating excesses of developers masquerading as foreign AID in Sri Lanka and Thailand after the tsunamis which so many Australians and others contributed their money to help.

Within 24 hours of the tsunami in Sri Lanka, where land had been 80% publicly owned, processes demanded by the World Bank, US AID, and the Asian Development Bank began to change the laws to transfer public land to private ownership, and to privatise public utilities and resources. Indeed those seem to be the signs that the shock doctrine is operating in a country – privatisation of public land, telephones, water, power and pharmaceutical distribution. Obviously I think that Australians should act quickly to familiarise themselves with Naomi Klein’s book and to begin to appreciate the danger to what remains of our democracy, public wealth and institutions. The possibility for land redistribution in South Africa by Mandela’s government had been similarly hamstrung.

Familiar bland illogical assertions come up along with the names of familiar corporations. Klein quotes (p. 355), “Michael Fleisher, the founder of the Chicago School based Shock Doctrine, saying in 2003 of Iraq that ‘protected businesses never, never become competitive’, and she comments: “he appeared to be impervious to the irony that Halliburton, Bechtel, Parsons, KPMG, RTI, Blackwater and all the other US corporations that were in Iraq to take advantage of the reconstruction were part of a vast protectionist racket whereby the US government had created their markets with war, barred their competitors from even entering the race, then paid them to do the work, while guaranteeing them a profit to boot – all at taxpayer expense. The Chicago School crusade, which emerged with the core purpose of dismantling the welfare statism of the New Deal, had finally reached its zenith in this corporate New Deal. It was a simpler, more stripped down form of privatisation – the transfer of bulky assets wasn’t even necessary: just straight-up corporate gorging on state coffers. No investment, no accountability, astronomical profits. The double standard was explosive, as was the systematic exclusion of Iraqis from the plan.”

Reading of the desecration and live dismemberment of Iraq and seeing the name KPMG, I could not help but think of how our recent Premier, Steven Bracks, who was so fond of public-private partnerships, and whose government gave away 20 ha of public land in Royal Park (Melbourne central) to private 52% owned Singapore developer, Australand. In a move which even the departing Queensland Premier criticised, Bracks recently began to work for KPMG Peat Marwick, which, incidentally, is involved in reconstruction efforts in East Timor.

Klein argues convincingly that the Chicago school acolytes have supported reigns of pure terror where peoples have, almost overnight, been reduced to poverty and starvation, with their states brought from sovereignty to economic indigence and crippling debt to the International Monetary Fund and other private agencies as they paid for ridiculously expensive, publicly resisted corporate projects and sold off state assets.

Klein tells how the IMF came about through an international agreement to prevent countries from falling into desperation and war by loaning them money to get through rough spots. It was modelled on the post WW2 Marshall Plan. The Marshall Plan for Germany was particularly careful to preserve protection for Germany’s industry and workers. But Chicago-school economics came to rule the IMF, she says, and the book is about how this doctrine stripped its victims of democracy, labour protection and public assets, and, when war broke out or torture and imprisonment were rife, its practitioners turned a blind eye, instead celebrating the chaos as a clean slate for the birth of a rational economy.

The hypothesis is that democracy is destroyed by causing social shocks to countries and, in the ensuing panic and disorientation, the political system is dismantled and the economy pillaged through privatisation and government contracted debt. The International Monetary Fund is severely implicated in this as are a number of international corporations.

Examples of things which socially shock a country, most of which are dealt with by Klein using examples in many countries, are:
- The Breaking down of labour laws and trade regulations
- Mass immigration and the Contracting of business to foreign imported labour in preference to local labour
- Falling wages
- bank privatisation, deregulation of the economy
- Breaking down of the public service, public welfare
- Loss of public subsidy of therapeutic drugs
- Privatisation of public hospitals, schools…
- Privatisation of public technology, power and utilities – telephones, electricity, water and energy resources like oil and gas
- Unaffordable privatised housing and land development
- Land speculation leading to homelessness
- Unaffordable justice systems
- Privatisation of the military – use of mercenaries and contractors
- Torture, disappearance, and war
- Natural disasters

Signs of the dismantling of a political system and its reinvention as a corporatocracy include:
- education of young people, educators and politicians, in economic rationalist doctrines as the only true way
- growth economics
- the normalisation of theft of the public wealth through its transfer to the private sector
- loss of restrictions on investment by political regulators
- acceptance of ostentatious lifestyles in politicians and their public frequentation of corporate figures
- Phoney enquiries
- Commercial-in-confidence activities which make it impossible for the public to obtain information
- the privatisation of areas normally administered by government, for instance mercenaries for soldiers, corporations for military support and logistics like accommodation, clothing and food, immigration (immigration agents)
- The institutionalisation with public funded support for corporations. (The Victorian Government’s gift to Australand of public land and $80 m in exchange for what many would call very little, comes to my mind).

At the end of the book Naomi Klein tells us about countries which are fighting back against the robber-baron corporatisation of their governments, land, and industries. Examples are described in Latin America, Lebanon, Thailand, and many other places.

Chavez Venezuela:

(p.455) “In Venezuela Chavez has made the co-ops a top political priority, giving them first refusal on government contracts and offering them economic incentives to trade with one another. By 2006, there were roughly 100,000 co-operatives in the country, employing more than 700,000 workers. Many are pieces of state infrastructure – toll booths, highway maintenance, health clinics – handed over to the communities to run. It’s a reverse of the logic of government outsourcing – rather than auctioning off pieces of the state to large corporations and losing democratic control, the people who use the resources are given the power to manage them, creating, at least in theory, both jobs and more responsive public services. Chavez’s many critics have derided these initiatives as handouts and unfair subsidies, of course. Yet in an era when Halliburton treats the U.S. government as its personal ATM for six years, withdraws upward of $20 billion in Iraq contracts alone, refuses to hire local workers either on the Gulf coast or in Iraq, then expresses its gratitude to U.S. taxpayers by moving its corporate headquarters to Dubai (with all the attendant tax and legal benefits), Chavez’s direct subsidies to regular people look significantly less radical.”

Lebanon:

(p.459) “So when delegates from thirty wealthy nations got together in Paris in January 2007 to pledge $7.6 billion in reconstruction loans and grants, they naturally assumed that Lebanon’s government would accept whatever strings they attached to the aid. The conditions were the usual ones: phone and electricity privatizations, price increases on fuel, cuts to the public service and an increase to an already controversial tax on consumer purchases. Kamal Hamdan, a Lebanese economist, estimated that, as a result, ‘household bills [would] increase by 15 percent because of increased taxes and adjusted prices’ – a classic peace penalty. As for the reconstruction itself, the jobs would of course go to the giants of disaster capitalism, with no requirement to hire or subcontract locally - ” …

(p.460): “Many Lebanese citizens, however, were distinctly less cooperative. Despite the fact that a lot of their homes still lay in ruins, thousands participated in a general strike, organized by a coalition of unions and political parties, including the Islamist party, Hezbollah. The demonstrators insisted that if receiving reconstruction funds meant raising the cost of living for a war-ravaged people, it hardly deserved to be called aid. So while Siniora was reassuring donors in Paris, strikes and road blockades brought the country to a halt – the first national revolt specifically targeting post-war disaster capitalism. Demonstrators also staged a sit-in, which went on for two months, turning downtown Beirut into a cross between a tent city and a street carnival.” … “The biggest motivator driving many of those camped out in downtown isn’t Iran or Syria, or Sunni versus Shiite. It’s the economic inequality that has haunted Lebanese Shiites for decades. It’s a poor and working-class peoples’ revolt.”

Thailand:

(p. 402), “Some of the most direct clashes took place in Thailand, where, within 24 hours of the wave, developers sent in armed private security guards to fence in land they had been coveting for resorts. In some cases the guards wouldn’t even let survivors search their old properties for the bodies of their children. The Thailand Tsunami Survivors and Supporters group was hastily convened to deal with the land grabs.”…

(p. 463) “…villagers approached all government promises with intense scepticism and refused to wait patiently in camps for an official reconstruction plan. Instead, within weeks, hundreds of villagers engaged in what they called ‘land reinvasions’. They marched past the armed guards on the payroll of developers, tools in hand, and began marking off the sites where their old houses had been…” (p.464) A Thai NGO, commented that, ‘With the entire community camping out there, it became difficult for the authorities to chase them away, especially given the intense media attention being focused on tsunami rehabilitation.’”

[Should the homeless in Australia and those who stand to lose their overly expensive homes due to government facilitation of land-speculation consider such a move?]

New Orleans:

And, with the dispossession by corporations and public private partnerships in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina (with which the book begins): (p.465) “In February 2007, groups of residents who had lived in the public housing projects that the Bush administration was planning to demolish began ‘reinvading’ their old homes and taking up residence. Volunteers helped clean out apartments and raised money to buy generators and solar panels.”

Klein concludes (p. 466), “The best way to recover from helplessness turns out to be helping – having the right to be part of a communal recovery.”… “These are movements that do not seek to start from scratch but rather from scrap, from the rubble that is all around. As the corporatist crusade continues its violent decline, turning up the shock dial to blast through the mounting resistance it encounters, these projects point a way forward between fundamentalisms. Radical only in their intense practicality, rooted in the communities where they live, these men and women see themselves as mere repair people , taking what’s there and fixing it, reinforcing it, making it better and more equal. Most of all, they are building in resilience – for when the next shock hits.”

I hate to resort to clichés, but this is a ‘must read’ book – the kind that only gets published once in a hundred years.

Also published on Web Diary. See also: "Shock Doctrine's Shocking Short Shrift" of 8 Nov 07 by Carolyn Baker.

To many, George Bush's $2 billion border fence will be but another testament to the futility of walls. In the face of persistent adversaries and technological advances, each of history's more notable barriers have proven obsolete over time. The 1500 mile Chinese wall was penetrated at least three times, most famously by the Mongols in the 13th century. The 300 mile Roman barrier of Limes was useless against the mass migration of Huns and Goths after the late 4th century, while only Hadrian's wall could claim some efficacy, until its garrison withdrew abruptly for the defence of Rome. And of course, the Maginot and Siegfried lines were spectacular failures.

That barriers can nevertheless be somewhat effective, however, is a reason that they continue to be built. The Moroccans built a 1600 mile wall to control Western Sahara in the1980s, and Israel has built a 120 mile barrier in the West Bank, and is planning to extend it by 140 miles. More pertinent perhaps to our interest, India is about to complete a 3034 mile $1 billion fence against Bangladesh to protect its precious Northern wilderness from 150 million Bangladeshi, many of whom have been displaced by the flooding that Indian deforestation of the Himalayas has caused.

The question is, though, how effective can barriers of any kind be in the long run. Bush's border fence, which could cost as much as $30 billion, not $2 billion, will not stop the one third of people who did not walk across the border illegally, but rather just entered on tourist, student or work visas and over-stayed. As for the other half million who come illegally each year, one has to realize that American corporations are so addicted to cheap labour, and smuggling is so lucrative, that come hell or high water ways will be found around the Tortilla Curtain, by land, sea or air.

What is troubling about most of the immigration-reduction movement---of which I am a part---the conservative wing particularly, is that they don't look at problems like the negative impact of immigration on the North American working class, and on the environment, and ask questions which go to the root causes of those problems. Questions like: "Why do people from very poor countries like Mexico want to leave their families and homeland all behind so badly that they take so many risks to move here and work for miserable wages?" American Republicans against amnesty don't ask these kinds of questions because they really don't know much about NAFTA and its impact on the Mexican people, nor do they care. Nor do they know anything about the IMF and Structural Adjustment Policies (SAPs), and their impact on the people of the Third World. They take no responsibility for Mexican poverty or the hardship and misery of the billions who will never even catch a glimpse of the Californian dream. They have no questions. Only answers. One answer. Send them home and slam the door shut behind them.

Well I agree that the door must be shut. And so does Ralph Nader, Presidential nominee for the Green Party in 2000, who said that open borders "is a totally absurd proposition." The environment must be allowed time to recuperate from the demographic onslaught it has suffered in the past two decades. Immigration-driven population growth is killing biodiversity and thwarting Kyoto targets. Each immigrant costs America one acre of farmland every minute and generates 23.8 tons of GHG annually. Canada has lost 18% of its best farmland to urban sprawl from immigrant-propelled growth, which is also threatening 70% of its endangered species. But shutting the door is one thing, keeping it shut is another. To do that we must relieve the population pressure that is coming from the outside.What is generating that pressure? The tautological answer would be population growth. But it is not just a fertility issue. It is an issue of economic justice, unequal distribution of wealth, and greed---institutionalized by larcenous trade agreements.

NAFTA, by allowing heavily-subsidized US corn and other agra-business products to compete with small Mexican farmers, drove two million Mexicans off the land and many of those that remain are living in desperate poverty, and attempt to cross the US border to feed their families. NAFTA's service sector rules also permitted large companies like Wal-Mart to sell Chinese-made goods so to bankrupt 28,000 small and medium-sized Mexican businesses. Mexican wages, not surprisingly, have fallen under NAFTA. It is considered the province of corporate lobbyists, not a "human" issue, and why not? Desperate conditions in Latin America and Mexico produce lower wages, pressure to reduce environmental protection, and help union-busting prospects.

If Mexico's plight is desperate, that of the global proletariat is worse. In Planet of Slums, Mike Davis reports that one-third of the world's urban population live in 250,000 slums, half of them people under 20, and 100 million of them street kids. In a decade nearly half of all city dwellers will be poor. Davis makes it clear. The IMF put those people in those slums and made it their "implacable future", by using the leverage of debt to restructure the economies of most of the Third World, and force the retreat of the state and its social safety net. The gap between rich and poor nations widened by century's end to a Gini coefficient level of 0.63.

SAPs forced developing countries to dump their raw unprocessed commodities for cheap prices in an effort to pay off the debt and pay for expensive imported goods from developed countries which often barricaded their agricultural products. Fifty third world countries depend on three or fewer commodities for over half of their export earnings. Some spent more on debt servicing than on education. Observing this relationship it might be said that the First World preaches free trade but practices good old fashioned mercantilism.

In describing the IMF program of slashing social services and infrastructure, escalating resource extraction to generate hard currency, re-orientating farm production from serving local needs to serving global markets, and increasing dependence on imported capital-intensive technologies---all in the name of debt-servicing---Raj Patel compared IMF policy to a weapon of mass destruction:

A fertilizer bomb that kills hundreds in Oklahoma. Fuel-laden civil jets that kill 4000 in New York. A sanction policy that kills one and half million in Iraq. A trade policy that immiserates continents. You can make a bomb out of anything. The ones on paper hurt the most.

Dale Allen Pfeiffer, author of the seminal book, Eating Fossil Fuels, put the case eloquently and cogently in his article Energy Depletion and Immigration:

Closing our borders alone will not stop the flow of illegal immigrants. It will only leave them more at the mercy of their employers within this country. As long as there is such a disparity in wealth and well-being between the US and other countries, there will be people attempting to flee to the US no matter what abuse they are met with on this side of the border. If we truly want to solve the immigration problem, then we must start by addressing the reasons why people would rather slave in the US than remain in their homelands. To solve the immigration problem, we must first face the fact that the US has built itself up on the riches of other nations (and) stop the flow of illegal immigrants into this country, then we must raise up the living conditions in their homelands. If these people could make a decent living in their own countries, they would not want to leave everything that is dear to them in order to slave in the US.

Unfortunately, Pfeiffer is among the vast army of environmentalists whose environmentalism is trumped by their laudable human rights agenda. Like many others, he has catalogued not only the appalling economic cost of the Bush border fence, but its cost to the wildlife whose viability is dependent on cross-border mobility. But he doesn't consider the countervailing cost to wildlife on the whole continent that the population growth from out-of-control immigration will cause. Indeed, the prime focus of any critique of world trade arrangements should not be there effect on global wealth distribution, but the fact that unfettered trade permanently reduces carrying-capacity. Ecological considerations supersede all others.

As Dr. William Rees has noted, trade only appears to increase carrying capacity because each trading country or region is treated as if it is a separate open system, and not integrated into a closed global system. Many wealthy nations have ecological footprints vastly in excess of their bio-capacities. For the UK, Holland and Japan, it is four, five and six times larger respectively, and the United States burdens the global commons with an ecological load twice its biophysical limit. Why?

Trade allows consuming populations in ecological overshoot (eg. the UK, the US) to feel insulated from their stressed local ecosystems, and without negative feedback they feel little need to curb their over-population or material growth and confine it within carrying capacity. Developing countries too, who receive remittance payments from expatriates in wealthy countries are somewhat buffered from the harshest reality of natural capital depletion.

So while open-borders advocates argue that is unjust to allow goods, services and finances to flow unhindered across borders but not people, Rees counters that "merely liberalizing migration to match the free-flow of goods/capital, the world should rather seriously consider re-regulating both to help achieve sustainability. On a planet in ecological overshoot, achieving sustainability will demand lower levels of material consumption, reduced movement of goods and people, and the rehabilitation of ecosystems." ( Globalization, Trade and Migration: Undermining Sustainability?")

Like a 21st century enclosure movement, global capitalism has chased third world farmers off the land into the lap of the cheap labour employers of North America and Europe. To open the doors ever wider would only serve its interests, it would only further depress the wages and displace the jobs of low-income native residents, further despoil the environment, not relieve world poverty but cripple our ability to alleviate it.

But not accepting immigrants or refugees makes it a moral imperative, and a matter of urgent self-interest, to aggressively redress trade agreements and SAPs or abolish them, and vastly increase foreign aid conditional on family planning. Building walls, figuratively or materially, is but an interim complement to these measures, a necessary but not a sufficient step to protecting our environment. An immigration moratorium, and a population plan that provides for population stability within our national carrying capacity as determined by that plan, can only buy us time.

Ultimately, we cannot build a wall against global warming, peak oil, peak grain or the tsunami of humanity that one day will sweep over us if we don't get the IMF and the World Bank off their backs and turn back the clock on globalization.

In closing our borders, we must not turn our backs.

Tim Murray
Quadra Island BC
Canada V0P 1N0
October 22, 2007.