Israeli and Palestinian Trade Unions
by Will, 7 August 2008
The Israeli national trade union centre Histadrut and the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU), both of which are affiliated to the ITUC, have reached a landmark agreement to protect the rights of Palestinian workers employed by Israeli employers, and to base future relations on negotiations, dialogue and joint initiatives to advance “fraternity and coexistence between the two peoples.” The current agreement draws on the terms of an initial 1995 agreement, which it had not been possible to fully implement in the intervening years.
The agreement follows on from that what was blogged on here back in October 07.
The Unbearable Idiocy of Certain American “Foreign Policy” Wonks
by Transmontanus, 6 August 2008
Have a glance at Conn Hallinan’s “Afghanistan: Not a Good War” in Foreign Policy in Focus and you will be subjected to an almost pornographic illustration of the craven, shallow and moronic habits of mind that prevail within what passes for the intellectual content of American “anti-war” polemics.
All in aid of the case for abandoning the Afghan people by simply assembling the more powerful nation-state powers in the region and cutting a deal with the Taliban, the column begins with a revisionist straw man, ends with a silly and meaningless platitude, and in between, almost every paragraph contains a non-sequitur, a logical fallacy, or an embarrassing, transparent error. It’s simply so bad, so shallow, so wrong and so stupid, one wonders where to start.
But one has to start somewhere, so let’s go with Hallinan’s claim that the Afghan people exhibit a “strong ambivalence about the presence of foreign troops.” If you follow his citation, you will see it leads to an Environics poll (pdf) released in Canada last year, which Hallinan misrepresents in this way: “Only 14% [of Afghans] want them out now, but 52% want them out within three to five years. In short, the Afghans don’t want a war to the finish.”
In fact, that’s pretty well exactly the opposite of what the poll actually shows: Forty-three per cent of the Afghan respondents said they want foreign troops to remain in their country “however long it takes” to defeat the Taliban and restore order, while 15 per cent said they want foreign troops to remain for three to five years, 12 per cent said two years, and 11 per cent said foreign troops should remain one more year.
Further contradicting Hallinan’s claims that there exists a “strong ambivalence about the presence of foreign troops” among Afghans, is the mere fact that the poll shows that the Afghans who support the presence of foreign troops (a presence Hallinan ridiculously describes as an “occupation,” a favourite stoppist canard) actually outnumber those who want foreign troops out immediately by about five to one. In any public opinion poll, in any country, on any issue, results like that are about as far from “ambivalence” as it’s possible to get.
But even if you don’t know much at all about Afghanistan, you only have to be a person of average intelligence with your wits about you to notice the sleight of hand at work within the essay itself, at its very core. You should be able to see it without checking Hallinan’s facts or following his citations at all. (Should I mention that Hallinan, a prevost at the University of California at Santa Cruz, is also a denizen of that swamp that emits its noxious vapours via Counterpunch, the far-right Ayn Rand sect than runs AntiWar.com, and is also one of those apples that falls not far from the tree? Oh What, and The, and Hell.)
The “West’s story line of the enemy as a tightly disciplined band of fanatics” does not even exist, so it is no wonder Hallinan provides no evidence for it; no one who knows anything about Afghanistan asserts that the country’s armed “insurgent” groups, drug-runners, gangsters and thugs (even those we all tend to collectively describe as “the Taliban”) are in any way tightly disciplined or united.
And that’s where Hallinan’s house of cards collapses on account of its own internal idiocy. The Taliban leadership itself is especially and violently disunited on the matter of negotiations, power sharing, and deal making. Yet negotiations, power sharing and deal making constitute the very course Hallinan counsels.
We would all like a negotiated peace to be possible. The Afghans themselves wish this was possible, although accommodating the Taliban is a proposition you could accurately say Afghans really are “ambivalent” about, as the same poll shows. But in order for any deal to work, the main body of belligerent, obscurantist crackpot gangsters would have to agree to put down their guns and knives, accept the Afghan constitution, and be prepared to do such things as run for office, like everyone else. And they haven’t, don’t and won’t agree.
Setting aside the matter of how long a “peace” like that would last and what would have to be conceded in otder to secure it, more to the point is the fact that the Karzai regime, with the assistance of the United Nations and the International Security Assistance Force, has already negotiated the disarming, surrender and rehabilitation of tens of thousands of “insurgents”anyway. Further to that, for good or ill, but certainly to the chagrin of Afghan human rights activists, Karzai persists in inviting Taliban leaders to accords in exchange for what amounts to amnesty and even the control of specific ministries in Kabul.
What these facts betray and reveal about the “Let’s Talk With the Taliban!” trope as it’s deployed by the likes of Hallinan is the emptiness of its content, which should alert you to the good sense of immediately scrutinizing its function. And when you do that, you notice that its main utility in the so-called “West” is as a polemical gimmick designed to conceal the absence of any emancipatory, progressive, sensible alternatives available within the “anti-war” discourse, while in Afghanistan, its main purpose is as a kind of balustrade for the most enthusiastic supporters of deal-cutting, democracy-crushing and women-betraying - which is to say the most reactionary, misogynist, cynical and corrupt of the Kabul elite.
No wonder then, the plaintive, pride-hurt and oft-heard American refrain: “Why do they hate us?” Here’s your answer: You will be hated. You don’t get to decide about that. But you do get to decide who will hate you, and who will not. So suck it up and decide, and then you might be better equipped to confront your pride, and your shame.
In the meantime, for particularly sensible Americans of the left, pay attention to Platypus.
Same old Tories
by hakmao, 6 August 2008
Vote for the solid, stable choice:
Ian Oakley, 31, of West Drayton, northwest London, admitted mounting a two-year hate campaign against Sal Brinton, who he considered his main rival to defeat the sitting Labour MP.
Oakley admitted making silent phone calls to her home and sending lesbian magazines and letters addressed to “Sal Bitchton” to her workplace.
The candidate, who resigned from the Conservative Party after his activities were discovered, also slashed tyres and wrecked shutters at the party’s local offices.
[…..]
“Mrs Brinton had lesbian magazines sent to her home address and her work address,” she said.
“Campaign material was sent to her office which had been defaced with such phrases as ‘Go back to Cambridge, you evil bitch’ and ‘Suck my cunt Sal Brinton’.”
His extraordinary campaign later broadened to include anyone associated with the Watford Lib Dems. From February to May this year, Oakley hounded Russell Wilson, a Watford borough councillor, with letters accusing him of paedophilia and daubed graffiti on his home branding him a “scum scum perv”.
“Letters were in fact sent to his neighbours stating he was a member of a child-abuse ring,” Ms Rayner said.
“A further letter said he was a ’sick cunt and child abuser’ was sent and torn Liberal Democrat leaflets were put through his door.”
Not that the Lib Dummies are strangers to these sorts of tactics.
Cranky doomsayers — for the millionth time
by Will, 6 August 2008
One of the reasons I said that criticism of the “anti-war movement” had to take absolute priority over expressions of anti-war sentiment is because I thought that we — as aspiring Leftists with social-emancipatory intent, with a longer view — needed to be prepared for a U.S. “success” in Iraq.All the doom-mongering of the anti-war movement was worse-ism of the worst sort, and extremely cynical and lying-through-the-teeth, to boot (e.g., attributing the sectarian violence to the U.S. and Britain, as Tariq Ali has done, and not recognizing the U.S. interest in cooling the sectarianism and avoiding civil war in Iraq).
In the primary campaign, Obama offered himself as the truly “anti-war” candidate, calling the Iraq war a “strategic blunder.” This harmonized with the “Left’s” wishful thinking that Iraq was becoming a “quagmire” for the U.S.
Obama is now in trouble to the extent that his anti-Iraq war perspective has seemed to be premised on the war’s failure, capitalizing on its unpopularity. (While it is not illogical to be opposed to a war even if successful, it seems difficult for bourgeois politicians to do so, because their opponents will accuse them of “disloyalty,” “lack of patriotism,” etc.).
The real challenge is to be able to critique and oppose wars even if they are successful and popular. But this requires that the principled basis for one’s opposition be clear (and sound).
Most if not all of the assumptions of the “anti-war” movement are indistinguishable from bourgeois defeatism, a la Obama, even if graced with some “theoretical” justifications (i.e., “Leninist” “antiimperialism”), and this made the present anti-war “movement” a bad replica (several generations’ degraded) of prior anti-war movements regarding Vietnam and Central American interventionism in the 1980s.
The question is whether, and how, one can and should oppose U.S. imperialism when it is successful and/or only opposed from the *Right* (as in the case of Iraq). Indeed, I would say that the fact that the U.S. is only opposed from the Right is already, regardless of the military consequences, a success/victory for the U.S. and therefore a specific kind of problem for the “Left.”
…
To be clear: I think that Obama has been no less dishonest and cynical about his opposition to the Iraq war than those on the “Left” have been. But whereas his position of bourgeois defeatism, opposing the Iraq war because it was opposed to the greater interests of the U.S. (see his playing the Afghan war off the Iraq war, etc.), is consistent while the “Left’s” opposition to the war is much more self-contradictory/incoherent. What they have in common, however, is what I want to call attention to.
What if the U.S. succeeds in Iraq and establishes a friendly/client state that does not blow up into civil war? What is this new Iraqi govt? is it not any more repressive or corrupt than other regimes in the region, but is perhaps less so? What if this success is not about the U.S. stealing Iraq’s oil wealth or establishing a significant strategic military presence there?
Then on what basis will the “Left” be able to have claimed its opposition to the war?
Pure pacifism? Anti-Americanism…
Won’t it be clear then that the “Left” is not anything but a cranky doomsayer, contingent whose purpose is not to offer true challenges or alternatives but just to provide some side-shows for opposition within mainstream/bourgeois politics? (If Obama is elected, and he engages in liberal “human rights” interventions that are only opposed by some paleo-conservative isolationists et al., and the “Left” … in the name of “anti-imperialism,” how will it be able to present this as progressive/emancipatory)?
We need to avoid the traps of more immediate “political controversies” in order to better cultivate the possibility of a longer perspective based on a real critique with some actually radical and progressive-emancipatory political prospects.
The “Left” was utterly mistaken in its judgment of the Iraq invasion and occupation (e.g., the culpability of the Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime, the duplicity of the European powers, etc.). It mistook the causes and reasons of the crisis that led to the war, the war itself, and the nature and character of the occupation.We…need to be able to register the necessary memory of the contribution of the anti-Iraq war movement as a milestone in the continued degeneration/”death” of the “Left.”
Meritocracy
by Gadgie, 5 August 2008
The top 10% of income earners get 27.3% of the cake, while the bottom 10% get just 2.6%. Twenty years ago the average chief executive of a FTSE 100 company earned 17 times the average employee’s pay; now it is more than 75 times. Since Labour came to power in 1997 the proportion of personal wealth held by the top 10% has swelled from 47% to 54%.
And
Tax consultants Grant Thornton estimated that in 2006 at least 32 of the UK’s 54 billionaires paid no income tax at all.
And
…as a group - with one or two exceptions - they were less intelligent, less intellectually inquisitive, less knowledgeable and, despite their good schools, less broadly educated than high-flyers in other professions. Their high salaries were not a sign of any obvious superiority.
All from here.
Peter Mandelson in 1998:
We are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich
Draw your own conclusions.
Remembering James and Amelia
by Transmontanus, 5 August 2008
You can keep your Thomas Jefferson. You can keep your Oliver Cromwell.
Fuck blogging — do it yourself — it’s all gone pear shaped like
by Will, 3 August 2008
Errr — just saying like.
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