Urgently needed: a responsible US attitude to North Korea

Professor Martin Hart-Landsberg here gives details of US relations with North Korea, showing that the perverse state is not the North Korean entity but the US itself which has proven to be utterly unreliable and deliberately provocative in its dealing with North Korea…

The US government remains determined to tighten economic sanctions on North Korea and continues to plan for a military strike aimed at destroying the country’s nuclear infrastructure. And the North replies that it would respond to any attack with its own strikes against US bases in the region and even the US itself. What is happening is not new.

• The US began conducting war games with South Korean forces in 1976 and it was not long before those included simulated nuclear attacks against the North. That was before North Korea had nuclear weapons.
• In 1994, President Bill Clinton was close to launching a military attack on North Korea with the aim of destroying its nuclear facilities.
• In 2002, President Bush talked about seizing North Korean ships as part of a blockade of the country, which is an act of war.
• In 2013, the US conducted war games which involved planning for preemptive attacks on North Korean military targets and “decapitation” of the North Korean leadership and even a first strike nuclear attack.

The cycle of belligerency and threat-making is intensifying, and a miscalculation could trigger a new war, with devastating consequences. Even if a war is averted, the ongoing embargo against North Korea and continual threats of war are costly. They promote/legitimatize greater military spending and militarization more generally, at the expense of needed social programs, in Japan, China, the US, and the two Koreas. They also create a situation that compromises democratic possibilities in both South and North Korea and worsen already difficult economic conditions in North Korea.

An alternative that the US government is unwilling to consider, much less discuss is for the US to accept North Korean offers of direct negotiations between the two countries, with all issues on the table. The US government and media dismiss this option as out of hand. We are told:

1. the North is a hermit kingdom and seeks only isolation
2. the country is ruled by crazy people hell-bent on war
3. the North Korean leadership cannot be trusted to follow through on its promises.

None of this is true.

1. If being a hermit kingdom means never wanting to negotiate, then North Korea is not a hermit kingdom. North Korea has been asking for direct talks with the United States since the early 1990s. The North was dependent on trade with the communist countries and their fall to capitalism left the North Korean economy isolated. Since then, they have repeatedly asked for unconditional direct talks with the US in hopes of securing an end to the Korean War (it is still not over because no peace treaty was ever agreed) with a peace treaty as a first step toward their desired normalization of relations. They have been repeatedly rebuffed. The US has always put preconditions on those talks, preconditions that constantly change whenever the North has taken steps to meet them.
   

   The North has also tried to join the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank (WB), but the US and Japan have blocked their membership. The North has tried to set up free trade zones to attract foreign investment, but the US and Japan have worked to block them. So, it is not the North that is refusing to talk or broaden its engagement with the global economy; it is the US that seeks to keep North Korea isolated.

2. The media portray North Korea as pursuing an out-of-control militarism that is the main cause of the current dangerous situation. But it is important to recognize that South Korea has outspent North Korea on military spending every year since 1976. International agencies currently estimate that North Korean annual military spending is $4 billion, while South Korean annual military spending is $40 billion. And then we have to add the US military build-up. North Korea has largely been responding to South Korean and US militarism and threats, not driving them. As for the development of a nuclear weapons program, it was the US that brought nuclear weapons to the Korean peninsula. It did so in 1958 in violation of the Korean War armistice and threatened North Korea with nuclear attack years before the North even sought to develop nuclear weapons.
   

3. North Korea has been a more reliable negotiating partner than the USA. Here, we have to take up the nuclear issue more directly. The North has tested a nuclear weapon five times: 2006, 2009, 2013, and twice in 2016. Critically, North Korean tests have largely been conducted in an effort to pull the US into negotiations or fulfill past promises. And the country has made numerous offers to halt its testing and even freeze its nuclear weapons program if only the US would agree to talks.
   

North Korea was first accused of developing nuclear weapons in the early 1990s. Its leadership refused to confirm or deny that the country had succeeded in manufacturing nuclear weapons but said that it would open up its facilities for inspection if the US would enter talks to normalize relations. As noted above, the North was desperate, in the wake of the collapse of the USSR, to draw the US into negotiations. In other words, it was ready to end the hostilities between the two countries. The US government refused talks and began to mobilize for a strike on North Korean nuclear facilities. A war was averted only because Jimmy Carter, against the wishes of the Clinton administration, went to the North, met Kim Il Sung, and negotiated an agreement that froze the North Korean nuclear program.

The North Korean government agreed to end their country’s nuclear weapons program in exchange for aid and normalization. And from 1994 to 2002, the North froze its plutonium program and had all nuclear fuel observed by international inspectors to assure the US that it was not engaged in making any nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, the US did not live up to its side of the bargain; it did not deliver the aid it promised or take meaningful steps toward normalization.

• In 2001, President Bush declared North Korea to be part of the “axis of evil” and the following year unilaterally canceled the agreement. In response, the North restarted its nuclear program.
• In 2003, the Chinese government, worried about growing tensions between the US and North Korea, convened multiparty talks to bring the two countries back to negotiations.
• In 2005, under Chinese pressure, the US agreed to a new agreement, in which each North Korean step toward ending its weapons program would be matched by a new US step toward ending the embargo and normalizing relations.
• Exactly one day after signing the agreement, the US asserted, without evidence, that North Korea was engaged in a program of counterfeiting US dollars and tightened its sanctions policy against North Korea.
• In 2006, The North Korean responded by testing its first nuclear bomb. And shortly afterward, the US agreed to drop its counterfeiting charge and comply with the agreement it had previously signed.
• In 2007, North Korea shut down its nuclear program and even began dismantling its nuclear facilities—but the US again didn’t follow through on the terms of the agreement, falling behind on its promised aid and sanction reductions. In fact, the US kept escalating its demands on North Korea, calling for an end to North Korea’s missile program and improvement in human rights in addition to the agreed-upon steps to end North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. And so…
• In 2009, frustrated, North Korea tested another nuclear weapon.
• The US responded by tightening sanctions.
• In 2012, the North launched two satellites. The first failed, the second succeeded. Before each launch the US threatened to go to the UN and secure new sanctions on North Korea. But the North asserted its right to launch satellites and went ahead.
• In 2013, after the December 2012 launch, the UN agreed to further sanctions and the North responded with its third nuclear test.

This period marks a major change in North Korean policy. The North now changed its public stance. It declared itself a nuclear state, and announced that it was no longer willing to give up its nuclear weapons. However, the North Korean government made clear that it would freeze its nuclear weapons program if the US would cancel its future war games. The US refused and its March 2013 war games included practice runs of nuclear equipped bombers and planning for occupying North Korea. The North has therefore continued to test and develop its nuclear weapons capability.

So, the history shows that whenever the US shows willingness to negotiate, the North responds favourably, and when agreements are signed, it is the US that abandons them. The North has pushed forward with its nuclear weapons program largely in an attempt to force the US to engage seriously because it believes that this program is its only bargaining chip. It is desperate to end the US embargo on its economy.

We lost the opportunity to negotiate with a non-nuclear North Korea when we cut off negotiations in 2001, before the country had a nuclear arsenal. Things have changed. Now, the most we can reasonably expect is an agreement that freezes that arsenal. However, if relations between the two countries truly improve it may well be possible to achieve a non-nuclear Korean Peninsula, an outcome both countries profess to seek.

So, why does the US refuse direct negotiations and risk war? The logical reason is that there are powerful forces opposing them. The tension is useful to the US military industrial complex, which needs enemies to support the build-up of the military budget. The tension also allows the US military to maintain troops on the Asian mainland and forces in Japan. It also helps to isolate China and boost right-wing political tendencies in Japan and South Korea. And now, after decades of demonizing North Korea, it is difficult for the US political establishment to change course.

The outcome of the recent presidential election in South Korea might open possibilities to force a change in US policy. Moon Jae-in, the winner, has repudiated the hardline policies of his impeached predecessor, Park Guen-Hye, and declared his commitment to re-engage with the North. The US government was not happy about his victory, but it cannot easily ignore Moon’s call for a change in South Korean policy toward North Korea, especially since US actions against the North are usually presented as necessary to protect South Korea. Thus, if Moon follows through on his promises, the US may well be forced to moderate its own policy toward the North.

US Americans and we, onlookers and passive supporters of this perfidy, have a responsibility to become better educated about US policy toward both Koreas, to support popular movements in South Korea that seek peaceful relations with North Korea, to progress toward reunification, and to work for a US policy that promotes the demilitarization and normalization of US-North Korean relations.

Professor Martin Hart-Landsberg is Professor Emeritus of Economics at Lewis and Clark College, Portland, Oregon; an Adjunct Researcher at the Institute for Social Sciences, Gyeongsang National University, South Korea. His areas of teaching and research include political economy, economic development, international economics, and the political economy of East Asia. He is also a member of the Workers' Rights Board (Portland, Oregon) and maintains a blog, ‘Reports from the Economic Front’. Here he gives details of US relations with North Korea, showing that the perverse state is not the North Korean entity but the US itself which has proven to be utterly unreliable and deliberately provocative in its dealing with North Korea.

Media on Trial: Contextual Notes

Probably every conflict is fought on at least two grounds—the battlefield and the minds of the people, via propaganda. Propaganda is to rally people behind a cause, often a miliary or political one, by publicising it, but also by exaggerating, misrepresenting, and lying about it. Some of the tactics used in propaganda include:

• selective stories
• partial facts and background
• exaggerating threats to people’s security and reinforcing reasons and motivations for them to respond to them
• offering only a narrow range of insights into the situation, vouchsafed as undeniable (rather than one viewpoint among others that are not considered) and needing to be confirmed—viz, only official government sources or retired military personnel for conflicts
• denigrating as “bad guys” and name-calling the opponent or the enemy for supposed dastardly acts
• jumping to judgement based on inadequate information and before adequate or often any valid discussion, especially of the facts and the options available, has been considered.

These ploys are constantly used by our media to “persuade” people to the stance preferred by the group controlling the sources of propaganda—usually the vested interests of big businesses or the party of the ruling clique, and internationally, the USA, NATO and the West generally. All of these approaches have been used in the latest interventions by the West in Syria, Ukraine, Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan, but extend back over much of recent history through a multiplicity of US interventions since WWII including Chile, Vietnam, Korea, the Cold War against the USSR and China, and continue still against Venezuela, Brazil and other South American states. Since the end of WWII, the United States has:

• attempted to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, most of which were democratically-elected
• dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries
• attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders
• attempted to suppress a populist or nationalist movement in 20 countries
• grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries
• been more involved in the practice of torture than any other country in the world for over a century (although not easily quantified), not just performing the actual torture, but teaching it, providing the manuals, and furnishing the equipment.

These are facts not loony “alternative facts” or “fake news” and can be found in the Western liberal media (WLM), but are not constantly plugged as the propaganda points are, so are quickly forgotten even if they were originally noticed at all by the typical receiver of the media’s news. The WLM pretends to have a “watchdog” role, an independent voice that somehow assists social accountability. Yet it has really been the source of propaganda and public enthusiasm for wars like those on Iraq, Libya and Syria. By describing bloody and vicious interventions as being “humanitarian”, journalists deliberately switched off their critical faculties and thereby switched off ours! Thus they hid a murderous spree of US/NATO “regime change” across the region.

For the US and the UK criminal enterprise against Syria, the challenge was as ever selling it to their electorates—public relations! Justifying the dirty war called on mass disinformation. Seeking “regime change” the US and its NATO allies hid behind proxy armies of “Islamists” accusing the Syrian Government of atrocities, and so a narrative had to be built and promoted. It required a relentless propaganda campaign demonizing the Syrian government and everything it did. So, the mild-mannered optometrist, Syrian President, Bashar al Assad, was described as worse than Hitler. They did this by constant reliance on partisan sources, such as the UK-based Rami Abdul Rahman (SOHR, the self-styled Syrian Observatory on Human Rights), the US-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International (AI), the latter two firmly embedded in a “revolving door” relationship with the US State Department, at least under Democrat administrations.

As western peoples we have been particularly deceived by this dirty war, reverting to our worst traditions of intervention, racial prejudice and poor reflection on our own histories. The popular myths (manufactured lies) of the dirty war are that…

• It is a “civil war”—a “popular revolt” in 2011 was violently quashed by Assad.
• Assad is a brutal dictator who enjoys killing “his own people”.
• The opposition are actually Syrian rebels who want rid of their hated leader.
• The US/NATO/Saudi Arabia/Qatar are justified in backing the rebels.
• So “terrorists” in Syria are really just dissident Syrians fighting for their freedom.
• The Syrian forces backed by their ally Russia’s airforce are deliberately killing Syrian people not terrorists.
• The Syrian people will welcome regime change and the replacement of Assad with a US/Nato approved government.

Each and every one of these assertions can be shown to be lies from the Western press itself, though finding the rebuttals is not easy amid the mass of propaganda. It is easier to find the detailed rebuttals from the alternative media as represented by some of the speakers here (and listed below), and sometimes from honest academics, also represented in tonight’s addresses. Their articles will often cite the confirmatory references in the main stream media.
Some reliable authorities worth looking up online and reading…

Prof Tim Anderson
Chris Hedges
Craig Murray
Finian Cunningham
Glen Greenwald
Jon Pilger
Jonathan Cook
Pepe Escobar
Thierry Meysanne
William Blum
Robert Parry
Neil Clark
Michel Chossudovsky
Piers Robinson

And some of the websites and political online magazines where counter propagandist material can be found…

Global Research
Counterpunch
Dissident Voice
21st Century Wire
BS News
Consortium News
Truthdig
Naked Capitalism
Zero Hedge
Truthout
Morning Star

The Media: Railroading the Electorate

The Guardian correspondent, Jonathan Steele, continues to plug the insane Guardian line of opposing the UK referendum decision to leave the EU. He goes so far as to say the Labour Party manifesto should declare that an incoming Labour government would abort the negotiations immediately. There will be no Brexit and no talks about how to achieve one!

Steele and his paymaster, the Guardian, seem to think it makes sense to defy a democratic decision, taken by 52% of the electorate, to pander to the 48% who did not get the result to remain in the EU that they wanted. He backs this up by saying over 60% of Labour supporters voted to remain, and are now "in despair", he claims. That is, of course, utter rubbish. Even if it were originally true, many of those Labour remainers are now pig sick of the LibDems and Greens harping on in defiance of a decision we have already taken--TO LEAVE!

Moreover the "two thirds of labour supporters" actually includes mostly urban liberals tempted to Labour by the Liberal Labour focus-group mentality of the Blairite years when winning the election was more important than having socialist policies. Traditional Labour Party members were already asking, "what is the point of winning then implementing Tory policies?". Quite! And the result was an erosion of faith in Labour and consequently loss of support in successive elections until we were conned into the unelected ConDem coalition of 2010 that led to our present sorry state (and the deserved collapse of the Liberal Democrats!).

Steele and the Guardian will be glad to see the present continuous false emphasis on Brexit and the perpetual attacks on Corbyn confusing the electorate to the extent that they achieve a similar collapse of Labour. We need to remember that most of the traditional Labour areas outside the metropolitan zone are the very areas (and some LibDem areas) that voted to leave, and the reason is plain--it is because the neoliberal policies of all the main parties for more than 50 years neglected the concerns of the voters in those deprived places--the "rust belt" of the UK--abandoned since Thatcher to decay with no prospects for their futures.

Labour must campaign vigourously for the votes of those neglected working people, and to persuade them that the Party is not backward looking, as the media are trying to persuade the young, but has a policy of "back to the future" to restore all that was good that Labour brought in after WWII and that successive right wing governments have been eroding ever since, and especially in the last 7 years.

The media and the present government in power are doing their utmost to persuade people that Corbyn is an ineffective leader, but that is not true. He has put forward a prospective programme that would benefit us all (except the over rich!), none more than the young! What is true is that the media are refusing to cover what Labour is offering, so the policies that everyone agrees are what are needed are not being associated with the Labour leader and his party in the minds of the electorate. Instead only negative associations are being propagated.

It is quite deliberate. One lesson that is always difficult to get over is that the media are not, and never have been fair. They offer biased views constantly, one of which is, of course, that they are actually fair, and it would be undemocratic to change the situation. The hacking scandal and the Leveson enquiry prove otherwise. An important question we should always ask when considering potential bias is, "who benefits from this opinion being accepted as true?" (Cui Bono? in Latin). In other words, in this case is the beneficiary of the view or the policy the rich or the poor? If it is not beneficial to poor people, or if it is vastly more beneficial to the rich, then there is cause for doubting it as a fair viewpoint. Why? Because the newspapers are owned by a handful of very rich people who run them for the benefit of their own kind--the very rich! Note, the VERY rich, not the slightly richer than the rest!

The Morning Star is the only daily paper in the UK to be biased toward the ordinary people, and the Peoples World is the equivalent in the USA. Yes, they are biased too, but they are biased against the rich. But an unbalance can only be corrected by an opposite force. If you must read media like the Guardian, then the opposite pan in the scales should be equally weighted by reading the Morning Star (or Peoples World) to get a balance.

The media are trying to railroad the electorate into a dead end by bad mouthing the Labour Party and its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, though the failures of Labour are the failures of Corbyn's predecessors like Tony Blair (who always has a platform in the anti-Corbyn media). Corbyn, like the late Tony Benn, does not engage in slagging matches. That is not a sign of weakness but of strength. Anyone dismayed by Corbyn's fairness and politeness has the answer, as did Benn, in his policies, in the issues. Corbyn's policies address the issues important to working people, May and the Tories aggravate them because they aim to benefit the rich, and that they do at the expense of the poor!

People’s Assemblies: Norfolk’s Experience

Re-posted from The Morning Star.

Norfolk People’s Assembly has been at the forefront of the battle to beat the Tories. David Peel explains how the group has had such an impact

Look around. Our country is being torn apart. People are suffering and dying. Lives are being wrecked. Public services destroyed. Changes we never believed possible are being forced through against our wishes. They call it "austerity forever"—the idea of a handful of arrogant, aloof Eton public schoolboys and their rich friends.

However, as Karl Marx once said about capitalism, they are creating their own gravediggers. The British people, true to centuries of tradition, are rising like lions. We are on the move and our movement is called the People’s Assembly. Our message is simple—no cuts, no austerity, and if it won’t listen, no coalition government.

Since we launched in June last year around 100 assemblies have sprung up across Britain, rooted in local communities. This is our movement’s great strength, and why we are here to stay. We have united thousands of activists and campaigners with ordinary people, many of whom have never been involved in this kind of “politics” before. And we don’t get together to bemoan austerity. We plan and take action.

In Norfolk, this has been particularly successful—but why? And what drives us?

Here’s one reason. People with severe mental health needs in this county and in Suffolk are taking their own lives in utter despair as a direct result of cuts in services.

When Norfolk People’s Assembly was told about these deaths from comrades in the mental health services we took action straight away and occupied the constituency offices of “Care” Minister and local MP Norman Lamb. We filmed a statement from inside his office, rightly blaming him and his coalition for the deaths, and uploaded it to the internet. The minister was dragged kicking and squirming onto the media to answer the charges. Thousands saw our angry message and witnessed his discomfort. Today the campaign against mental health cuts which have plunged the service into crisis is one of the biggest, most active and successful we have seen in years. Mental health staff, patients and carers have been given the confidence to blow the whistle and fight back. They now have the mental health trust board of directors by the balls, and their campaign is saving lives. It was kick-started by a People’s Assembly initiative.

Here’s another reason. Today in Norfolk, no coalition cabinet minister dares breeze in, make a few sham announcements and breeze out again. They are met with vigorous protests. When Prime Minister David Cameron visited, demonstrators crowded round every entry to the TV studios where he was to be interviewed. Those who later saw the broadcast said he looked rattled. I didn’t see it. I was inside a police station, under arrest for attempted criminal damage to his armoured Jaguar car having thrown a small cardboard placard at it—allegedly. The Crown Prosecution Service recently dropped their case. On local radio, listeners calling a phone-in about the incident backed our action, criticising the media for its craven attitude to coalition ministers. When Chancellor George Osborne came his car was surrounded and stopped by our activists. It disrupted his speaking engagement. We were interviewed by the media, catapulting the People’s Assembly onto news bulletins watched by tens of thousands. No coalition minister—or shadow minister who supports austerity—should be able to visit any People’s Assembly area, anywhere in Britain, without protests.

Here’s a third reason for our success. When Norwich City Council threatened to evict families for bedroom tax arrears, we put down a public question, then turned up the volume with a highly visible Spanish-style pots and pans protest outside. Inside the chamber we were verbally abused by ruling Labour group councillors, but we extracted a precious and very public promise from the deputy leader. No tenant would be evicted for bedroom tax arrears. It put us—and the council pledge—on the front of Norwich evening news.

We are not fools. If the council betrays its pledge, we will have a "stop evictions network" of activists around any home threatened by bailiffs. They shall not pass. We have marched, occupied banks like Virgin, shops like Primark, stood on picket lines with firefighters, handed out leaflets at schools supporting striking teachers and hassled local MPs like Brandon Lewis, Chloe Smith and Simon Wright. We are the self-appointed official opposition to austerity in Norfolk where every mainstream political party is implicated in hundreds of millions of pounds of cuts.

Our activism never ceases, as readers of the People’s Assembly house newspaper the Morning Star will know. Every local assembly in Britain planning action should be telling the Morning Star. This is the only daily newspaper on sale round this country which is fighting austerity tooth and nail. In Norfolk, we have a sympathetic newspaper too, the Kett Gazette, named after home-grown rebel leader Robert Kett. We always warn visiting coalition ministers that they will get "a robust Kett county welcome" if they come here.

In just six months Norfolk People’s Assembly has transformed the best activists in the county into a force to be reckoned with. We spoil coalition PR opportunities, put anti-austerity on the agenda and inspire others to join us and fight back. Action is the life of all. People join us because we take action. We have courage and commitment, but don’t get us wrong—we are not hotheads. Our actions are thought through. Campaigners come to us because we have experience. We can organise demonstrations, liaise with police, set up and speak at public meetings, lead occupations, ambush ministers, hold councils to account, lobby charities and churches and build networks which are broad and strong.

Our media profile is strong. We pour out information, shaping the debate and thinking around austerity. We never get defensive when criticised but stay upbeat, positive, and proactive. Our campaigns are creative and imaginative. We cannot be ignored. We have earned respect.

We are led by women, most of our officers are women, the majority at our meetings are women. Women alongside the disabled are hardest hit by this austerity. We are inextricably bound to trades councils and trade unions fund us. We go to union meetings. They come to ours. It gives us a militant, organised edge. For the first time in years, we are bringing members of the public to strikers’ picket lines.

The People’s Assembly is about to step up several gears. Perhaps here in rebellious Norfolk we have blazed a trail. Here might be one strategy for growing this movement in our communities, taking it to a place in our national life where we can turn the tide of austerity, and history, and bring this unelected coalition down.

Media Coverage Affects Viewers’ Judgement of Presidential Debates

Media pundits wrote almost uniformly that Obama came out of the first debate with Romney poorly. New research led by Ray Pingree, assistant professor of communication at Ohio State University, suggests media coverage of the presidential debates influences how they affect voters!

Researchers conducted two different studies in which young Americans viewed clips from the 2004 and 2008 presidential debates and then read media coverage of the debates. Afterward, the viewers had to describe the debate to a friend. From these descriptions, the researchers found how the media coverage affected what viewers focused on when reflecting on the debates.

A “game frame” is one in which the media approach the debates as a sporting event. They discuss who won the debate, who looked best, and who appealed to certain key blocs of voters. A “policy frame” is one in which the media discuss the issues, such as which candidate supported certain policies and the reasons he gave for that support.

• The first study found that media coverage of the debate focusing on it as a competition between the candidates led viewers to think less about policy issues. Media coverage that focused on the substance of the discussion led the viewers to think about the candidates’ policies.
• The second study, in a different elections with a bigger and more varied sample, reinforced the first—people were influenced by the media coverage of the debates.

Professor Pingree said:

The media have a strong influence on whether viewers think of the debate in terms of a discussion of the issues or simply as a competition between the candidates. We need the media to treat the content of the debates more seriously. Viewers want to hear how their vote choice connects to real problems facing the nation and they want help from the media in figuring out which policies will actually be more likely to solve problems. There will be other times for the media to focus on who won or who looked better.

The media coverage had a strong effect on whether the viewers engaged in policy reasoning. Even though they all were exposed to the same clip, viewers who read the media article with the game frame—emphasizing who won the debate—listed the fewest policy reasons in their description of the debate. Those who read the article with the policy frame listed the most policy reasons. Those who didn’t read any coverage fell in the middle. Pingree said:

Even though all the participants were exposed to the same clip of the debate, they took away very different messages depending on the media coverage. Postdebate coverage that uses the game frame undermines the ability of debates to get citizens reasoning about politics.

They were influenced by media framing of the presidential debates because framing is often invisible to us. Pingree commented:

If we think someone is trying to change our mind about something, our alarm bells go off and we resist the influence. But we don’t often notice framing by the media, because we have our own thoughts related to both frames. Most people can think about political issues either as a game or as a substantive discussion of how best to solve a problem. What the media are doing is simply drawing our attention to whatever thoughts we already have about the game aspect, which is the aspect of politics that is not as valuable to democracy.

How It Will Be Done! The Struggle for Socialism

• A United Response
• Who Overspent?
• Leading the People
• Building Socialist Unity
• Democratic Choice

A United Response

The ferocious and intensifying attack by the rich men’s party on the people who actually do the work needs an united response—by us! Yet we remain in a deplorable state of hesitation, disunity and confusion. Plenty of organizations and people online on various lists, forums and Facebook grumble away together discontentedly, but with no sound, agreed analysis of what is going on, though that is what is needed. The difficulty is that it is hard to get unity when the government is supported by the millions of issues of propaganda printed daily by the capitalist media, and the almost identical, selective “news” presented by the TV channels.

Yet we have one daily newspaper in the UK that is consistently in favor of the interests of ordinary people, the Morning Star. This paper is not run by capitalists, but millions who are discontent with the mass media still choose capitalist newspapers with their anti-worker agenda instead of a newspaper that suits us in our struggle against bank induced austerity, and for decent jobs, pay, conditions and benefits when we are ill or have fallen into unemployment, situations that are far from unusual but can be disastrous for families in starkly capitalist countries like the USA, the model for Cameron’s party here in the UK.

The satisfaction of these demands is impossible in the present dire capitalist crisis, which will only be settled within the system when wages are forced down by mass unemployment and enforced suffering. That is the nature of the capitalist system.

We can be sure that as soon as people start reading the progressive daily paper, and thereby begin to co-ordinate their opinions and efforts that the police will find excuses for arresting those leading and co-ordinated the protests. Protesters will be described in the capitalist media as “rentacrowd”, “anarchists”, “conspirators”, “rioters” and “hooligans”, with the aim of painting the leading protestors as extremists or louts, and magistrates will issue them with punitive fines or terms of penal servitude, the basis for all this having been set by the heavy punishments imposed on youths even for trivial misdemeanors following the riots of August 2011. That when a government minister, Stephen Laws, who stole £40,000 in false expenses was let off then taken back into government!

Such happenings must anger us all the more, and stir us to greater protest until it becomes a mass protest that simply cannot be handled by the authorities in that unjust and bullying manner, and the ones incarcerated have to be released. Not being willing to act will yield the ground to the capitalist agents posing as a democratically elected government—the ConDems, the Conservative and Liberal Democratic coalition.

Who Overspent?

But although being that determined can beat back ConDem assaults against our persons, we need an alternative programme, and so far the Parliamentary opposition has not been adequately opposing the ConDems because New Labour has essentially the same outlook and motivation as the Tories and the Liberals. New Labour under its leader Ed Miliband remains the New Labour of Tony Blair, an alternative capitalist party. There is nothing socialist in the principle that only the private sector can run the economy, and that is the core of New Labour.

It was the Labour party when in power, that gave away to the bankers and their rich owners the contents of the British Treasury—money that the government took from us ostensibly to provide us with common services. Now the Treasury is empty because we have overspent. The TV stations are good at finding worthy but ignorant people, often pensioners and the unemployed with no means of overspending anything, to say on camera, no doubt for a modest incentive, "we have overspent, so we have to tighten our belts". We did not overspend, as the media propaganda has it, but it illustrates the power the capitalist media have over us, the confusion it generates, and the reason we need to read our own newspaper. That alone would help to get rid of the learned helplessness, apathy and inertia workers currently feel.

The government we elected to manage the country on our behalf gave to the rich the money we had put into the exchequer to give us health benefits, work and a pleasant environment to live in. The rich had gambled on junk stocks consisting of mortgage debt packaged for resale to permit the spreading among many buyers of the risk of lending money on inadequate security. So long as the housing boom continued, the value of a house would increase and eventually would equal and exceed the mortgage, leaving the debt secured and the bonds safe and yielding riches from mortgage repayments for decades into the future. The housing boom did not continue!

The banks that had devised the bonds and the greedy rich who had bought them were left broke, holding a load of nigh on worthless junk, and many banks were technically bankrupt. A run on any of them in that condition would have ended them. That is why national governments had to fill the void in the banks’ vaults by emptying the national treasuries. The greedy gamble of the rich was so bad and the banks so involved by their laying off individual risks with each other, just like bookies, that £trillions had to be given to banks in every western country to secure the ruling rich class from going bust! It was none of our business to bail them out. Governments elected to look after the interests of all of the people essentially protected the sole interest of the super rich one per cent, at the cost of the middle class and the poor worker.

With treasuries virtually empty, the national governments had to cut the services they were meant to supply via taxation, so civil servants and other public servants had to be cut. Ordinary people therefore were sold the lie that we had been overspending and a period of austerity—job losses especially from public services, and wage and benefit reductions—was needed to get us back on track. Meanwhile the rich are not even asked to pay back in taxes any of the £trillions they have ungratefully received from the taxpayer as a gift.

Leading the People

The economic leadership of working people in capitalism has always been the ones willing to step forward and lead the trades unions—activists and shop stewards. But these trades unionists realized they needed a political branch and set up the Labour Party, which remains to this day the party for most working people. Regrettably, though, the trades unions did not use the financial power they had over the Labour Party as the source of its funds to make it stick to its principles, particularly the important one of the socialization of the means of production, distribution and exchange, or Clause 4 as it was called.

The Labour Party has been controlled hitherto by trades unionists closest in ideology to the ruling class, those who were careeristic and opportunistic in outlook and willing to compromise with capital to maintain what they perceived as an advantageous position in the social hierarchy. Ultimately, the Labour party abandoned any pretense of socialism, but despite that, being able still to rely on the support of leading trades unionists who had grown indifferent to the question of socialism. Yet a concerted movement and campaign within the trades unions for a firm line on the Labour Party would be immensely beneficial to the effectiveness of working people in countering the pressing powers of wealth and the undemocratic European Community.

Now New Labour is all things to all men, including many working people who mistakenly believe it is still what it was. So long as that is the case, activists ought to do their utmost to bring it back into the fold, via trades union pressure and demands from the membership.

Here we have to convince substantial numbers of workers who believe themselves to be middle class and natural Tory voters—white collar workers like office workers, technicians, scientists, foremen and charge hands, or lower management generally, and small business people like small sole proprietorships! They wrongly identify themselves with the capitalist class even though they do not have enough capital to live off without working—they must work to live, yet deny that they are working class. Their interests are those of workers, not those of monopolists and financiers, yet they wilfully support the parties and policies of their class enemy, thereby giving their enemies the rope to hang them.

Of course, the capitalist media try to encourage readers and viewers to support the free-and-easy Labour Party of unprincipled political opportunists. With a capitalist Labour Party as well as a capitalist party, the UK has got closer to the American system of two alternating rich man’s parties, and no alternative policies. It is a system that holds no fears for the ruling rich class. What the rich do not want is the Labour Party to respond to trades union pressure and adopt anew the socialist principles it once has, at least in name.

So the media keep up their pressure for the Labour Party to stay in the “political center” of a scale that is constantly redefined as excluding the “extreme left”, meaning anyone on the left, socialist, communists, anarchist, or any other leftist view, eventually even liberal! So the political center creeps continuously to the right. The assumption of the media seems to be that voters have fixed political views, and parties have to change their policies to attract a greater spread of voters. So they all go for a broad enough spread to encompass the center, and end up overlapping substantially leaving little choice in practice.

Building Socialist Unity

1. Political Struggle. The working class must not be diverted from the political struggle and instead be persuaded to settle for an endless economic war against the employers and their governments which leaves the employers wealth and power intact. To do so simply leaves working people at the capitalist’s mercy. The capitalist class simply regroup for another bash at the people—to restrict their conditions and freedom at a later date. That is not to say that an economic battle does not accomplish the political war. It does! After all, peoples’ immediate concerns are their economic welfare, but the political angle comes with the realization and acceptance that the capitalists and capitalism must be replaced by socialism if the class war is to end with the victory of the general good. For exploitation to be ended, capitalism must be ended. That is the object of the political struggle.

2. Eschewing Capitalist Media. Given that the capitalists control the mass media, the mass of the working class is too confused to be relied upon to spontaneously find the correct reply to the attacks made upon it by the government of the rich. It is too easy for the mass media to pick on easy scapegoats in society and direct reactionary elements among the workers who are seeking easy targets, to put the blame onto them rather than the class enemy. Easy scapegoats must be easily recognized, so racialism is the first preferred distraction used by the media, currently black and Moslem immigrants. Events will not spontaneously take the right course. It is too easy to blame an accessible scapegoat when the real enemy is well hidden and protected by the state.

   People need principled leadership, and a principled party to do it, and the practical leadership of that party will be publicized and explained through the socialist newspaper. Wealth can always be converted into weapons for use against the workers whether by hand or by brain—the rich have the advantage in the age of capital. But the working people have the power through their co-ordinated ability to stop working and bring the economy to a halt, hitting the rich where they feel it most—in their wallets. Whatever the rich try to do, with the working people sufficiently determined and united, synchronized rolling strikes or a steadfast general strike can stop it. Building that degree of unity in the face of the capitalist media is essential, and is the reason why every socialist should eschew financing capitalist propaganda while the socialist news organ is undersubscribed and underfunded… and therefore of limited effect.

3. Socialist consciousness. Equally, spontaneity implies and requires a widespread socialist consciousness and politico-economic understanding that takes a lot of practical experience and considerable devotion to Marxist study to gain. As most people will not have that sort of understanding without a proper journal to provide it, to imagine ordinary people will spontaneously do the right thing is likely to be a serious error, denigrating also the efforts of those who have tried to decipher the political signs. Moreover, it yields to those elements who will use any local crisis as an opportunity to get the reputation as a leader without adequate preparation, or to police agents provocateurs who use such situations to lead people astray and into traps.

   Marxism offers the proper framework for interpreting the crises and opportunities that arise in the struggle against capitalist exploitation. No two situations are alike, so Marxism is no crystal ball, at least in the sense of giving high definition answers, but it suggests the conditions and limits for successful action, and so is an essential guide to it. The active working class leader needs both theory and practice—often called praxis—understanding of both Marxist theory and practical experience in class struggle.

4. Marxism. Those who press for a purely spontaneous rising against the oppression of the ruling class base their stance on the importance within capitalism of the economic struggle for fair wages and, decent conditions, and jobs. One might call these people “economicists” because they restrict the class struggle to one bounded by capitalist economics and social conditions. The “economicists” assume the capitalist system and cannot transcend it.

   Many active workers in trades unions, including too many of their leaders, are “economicists”, but more than economics is needed if the class struggle is to go further and have some prospects of ending in an ultimate victory for the class of working people. Indeed, some do go further, seek to inform themselves of Marxism despite the widespread disdain for it propagated by capitalist politicians, academics and media, and especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union. So they prepared themselves better for the full scale assault we are now experiencing.

   Marxism preceded the Soviet Union and cannot rationally be rubbished by reference to the failings of its leaders. Marx’s analysis of capitalism remains sound, as the events of the financial collapse since 2007 prove, and capitalism’s reason for demeaning Marxism is not that the capitalists want to relieve simple people of a mistaken attitude, but because they know it remains sound and so is dangerous for them. By wrecking the belief workers’ leaders had in Marxism, capitalist agents are seeking to assist capitalism, not to educate the people.

   A worker conscious of economic unfairness and injustice under capitalism has two choices, a capitalist or a socialist ideology. To belittle socialist ideology—Marxism—is to strengthen capitalism. It explains why our society spends so much money and effort on mocking trades unions, working people’s practical workplace organizations, and socialism and communism, and their theoretical outlook, Marxism.

5. New Labour. For the same reason the Labour party, which began as an umbrella organization for left wing groups some of which were Marxist, by degrees expelled the Marxists until, under the leadership of Tony Blair, it got rid of all pretense of socialism and established itself as another capitalist party—New Labour, though “Not Labour” would have been more appropriate. This party, however, still has the loyalty of many workers, despite its record, and still has the loyalty and uncritical financial support of significant leaders of large trades unions. It is, though, the party of the “economicists”, having ditched “Clause 4” as an objective, as we saw, this being the clause which required the socialization of the means of production, distribution and exchange. So now New Labour, at best, stands for modest social reforms within an eternally present capitalism, thereby necessarily helping capitalism to remain stable and profitable. Reform, needless to say, leaves the economic system itself unaltered, so New Labour is never going to change society for the better.

   It is not socialist, but it remains the focus of working class aspirations because working class understanding is moulded by the capitalist media. Moreover, it still has good socialists in its ranks, and conceivably, if the trades unions that fund New Labour used their financial power to change the rules and the selection of parliamentary candidates, the Labour party could be reborn as a class party capable of fighting back against the ConDem assault on us. Class conscious workers therefore must use their influence in the trades unions to move Labour towards the left.

   

   Fortunately, besides the Labour Party, a variety of smaller left wing parties and campaign groups exist, but unfortunately they tend to be sectarian and particular, and so resistant to campaigning in unison. The natural principled party of the left is the Communist Party, but over a long period of time in the 1970s and 1980s, the party was infiltrated and destroyed from within, disbanding itself in 1991. Its successor, the CPB, remains small but with the important role of supporting and expanding the newspaper of the working people, the Morning Star, and promoting a socialist stand in the trades unions. It recognizes the centrality in the history of British socialism and working class thinking of the Labour Party, which it wishes also to return to its foundational principles and away from class collaboration and delusions of managing capitalism for the capitalists.

   The main point about the CPB is that it is guided by Marxism—it has principles and a method of applying them. The New Labour Party now has none, having abandoned them to fulfil the ambitions of careerists like Kinnock, Blair and Brown whose only principle was winning elections at any price, even abandoning socialism and selling the UK to Rupert Murdoch.

6. The Working Class. Emphatically “economicism” is a result of capitalist media spreading confusion and negative propaganda about socialism among the working people. It is a tactic that has succeeded remarkably well. It has turned the working class against its own interests at a time when exploitation by an egregiously greedy capitalist class was hurting more than for eighty years. As noted, working people even blame themselves for overspending when it was the bankers and their rich clients who had done it. The perpetual money making machine they thought they had inevitably failed, proving their greed and stupidity, but still nothing has been done to curtail it.

   Offered inadequately secured loans by the banks, people accepted them in all innocence, believing the propaganda from co-conspirator with Tony Blair to destroy the Labour party, Gordon Brown, that “boom and bust” had ended, and that bankers knew what they were doing. They did not, and Gordon Brown gave away the contents of the national exchequer to save the greedy rich and their bankers from suffering catastrophic losses. The governments of most major capitalists countries followed Brown’s lead.

   We suffer today because the national treasuries are empty, and services we need, provided traditionally by public and civil servants cannot be provided, unless the government cuts staff to cut costs, and borrows money to pay the wages of those who remain in post, and the benefits of those cast out of work. Who does the government borrow from? Who else but the banks! They have been given all our taxation money, and they are now lending it back at interest! We are having to pay interest to borrow our own money. Meanwhile, the beneficiaries are not even taxed, but the workers and middle class have to economize, “tighten their belts” and suffer unemployment not seen in a lifetime. We are most definitely not “all in it together”.

Democratic Choice

Democracy is meant to be a system where candidates have principles to let voters choose a representative whom they consider represents them. They have clear choices. The same should apply even in a party system. Parties should be formed to offer a set of policies implementing principles that the voters can choose from. When party leaders change their policies to make their candidates more electable, they are abandoning some of their principles, so that others who voted for those very principles are now being tricked or have no party to represent them.

An example is what happened at the end of the 18 years of Tory rule under Thatcher and Major. People were sick of Thatcherite Toryism, and wanted the distinct change they thought Labour would offer. But under Blair Labour had become New Labour, the face of which was the cloying charm of the sociopathic Blair himself, and his compact with the media devil, Murdoch. The ultra right wing media baron, Murdoch would never have entered into any compact with a socialist, and many of the leading Labour party activists knew Blair had changed his spots. He was the first Labour Prime Minister to “sell out” even before he took power. Blair was voted in only to apply with his co-conspirators, Brown and Mandelson, another thirteen years of Thatcherism, made possible by his pact with the devil, and the demoralization of the Tories and their own disunity.

It demonstrates how important it is to have an alternative socialist newspaper, and how it ought to be used to clear the confusion spread among voters by the capitalist media. Working people need not be helpless in the face of the austerity assault of the government. Otherwise we have little alternative to the incessant beat of capitalist propaganda, and no prospect of rebutting by socialist principles what is presented as unarguable norms of capitalist economics.

Nor will there be much prospect of moving people from their apathy into the consistent activity needed to bring down the system we live under of lies, injustice and unfairness. Only when a significant portion of the employed public and those left unemployed to keep wages down get their information from a daily newspaper committed to the interests of ordinary people and the poor will there be any chance of them acting sufficiently coherently to make a difference. Then people will be able to organize their efforts in unison, to unite their thinking ideologically, rather than being distracted one way and another by divisive issues like the intolerance and racism spread by the capitalist media. And whereas the capitalist media deliberately ignore or misrepresent working class protests, the socialist newspaper reports them and publicizes them to maximize awareness and response.

In the UK, the Morning Star is that newspaper—in the USA, the People’s World. There are many single issue organizations with news sheets, albeit not daily, and perhaps websites, and they help in raising awareness, but it is piecemeal. A political theory to unite the single issues and offer a consistent explanation is vital. That is Marxism, and the vehicle for presenting that view is the revolutionary newspaper, allowing people to see how single issues have a common explanation in the class struggle.

Tax the Rich Every Last Penny Until the Money Banks Stole is Replaced

Too many people believe the political and media propaganda that we have overspent and we must cut back.

Keep reminding them that the banks overspent, thinking mortgage collateral—houses—would rise in value to cover it—in fact, on the assumption that housing prices would rise indefinitely. They spent money they didn’t have, giving themselves massive bonuses for doing it, then, when the housing market collapsed, they told governments, governments!, they were too big to fail, and told governments, supposedly our governments, they had to give them £$trillions from national treasuries—our money collected as taxes—to replace the money the inept bankers had lost on junk mortgages and junk bonds. What did we have to do with it?

We have already paid the banks—the money they were given was not the government’s money, it was our money, entrusted by us to governments for nation wide social use—yet these governments, supposedly our governments are making us pay again, through enforced austerity measures that have nothing to do with us overspending. Tell them to stuff their austerity measures that hit everyone except the super rich, and to get every penny back from the rich leeches who do nothing and deserve nothing of ours.

Media and Ruling Class Undermine Social Values by Labelling Valid Demands as Extreme

Ever wonder why the media will report a few protesters breaking windows or fighting police when a hundred times as many register their protest peacefully? Naturally, like much media focus, it distracts from the purpose of the protest, but new research shows how support for a popular cause can be cut by labeling it as “radical” or “extreme”. Thomas Nelson, co-author of the study and associate professor of political science at Ohio State University, said that is why calling political opponents extremists is so effective, and popular as a political tactic. he added:

The beauty of using this “extremism” tactic is that you don’t have to attack a popular value that you know most people support. You just have to say that its supporters are going too far or are too extreme.

And people fall for it because we mostly consider ourselves civilized, and not at all extreme, and so tend to divorce ourselves from the extreme cause or group, even though we might actually prefer it given a fair chance. Thus people supported a gender equality policy when other supporters were not mentioned, but when the proposers of the same policy were described as “radical feminists”, participants in the study supported the policy much less.

Experiments in Evidence

1. 233 undergraduate students were asked to read and comment on an essay that they were told appeared on a blog. The blog entry discussed the controversy concerning the Augusta National Golf Club’s “men only” membership policy. This policy caused a controversy in 2003 before the club hosted the Masters Tournament. Participants read one of three versions of an essay which argued that the PGA Tour should move the Masters Tournament if the club refused to change this policy:

1. One group read that the proposal to move the tournament was led by “people” or “citizens”.
2. Another group read that the proposal was led by “feminists”.
3. The third group read that the proposal was led by “radical feminists”, “militant feminists”, and “extremists”.

Additional language reinforced the extremist portrayals by describing extreme positions that the groups allegedly held on other issues, such as getting rid of separate locker room and restroom facilities for men and women.

Participants were then asked to rate how much they supported Augusta changing its membership rules to allow women members, whether they supported the Masters tournament changing its location, and whether, if they were a member, they would vote to support female membership at the club.

The findings showed that participants were more supportive of the golf club and its rules banning women, less likely to support moving the tournament, and less likely to support female membership, when the proposal to move the tournament was described in language redolent of extremism and radical feminism. Nelson explained:

All three groups in the study read the exact same policy proposals. But those who read that the policy was supported by “radical feminists” were significantly less likely to support it than those who read it was supported by “feminists” or just “citizens”.

By associating a policy with unpopular groups, opponents are able to get people to lose some respect for the value it represents, like feminism or environmentalism.

2. In another experiment, 116 participants read the same blog entry used in the previous experiment. Again, the blog entry supported proposals to allow women to join the golf club. One version simply attributed the proposal to citizens, while the other two attributed them to feminists or radical feminists.

Next, the subjects ranked four values in order of their importance as they thought about the issue of allowing women to join the club:

1. upholding the honor and prestige of the Masters golf tournament
2. freedom of private groups to set up their own rules
3. equal opportunities for both men and women
4. maintaining high standards of service for members of private clubs.

How people felt about the relative importance of these values depended on what version of the essay they read:

1. Of those participants who read the proposal attributed simply to citizens, 42 percent rated equality above the other three values. But only 32 percent who read the same proposal attributed to extremists thought equality was the top value.
2. On the other hand, 41 percent rated group freedom as the top value when they read the proposal attributed to citizens. But 52 percent gave freedom the top ranking when they read the proposal attributed to extremists.

Observations and Conclusions

Nelson commented:

Tying the proposal to feminist extremists directly affected the relative priority people put on gender equality v group freedom, which in turn affected how they felt about this specific policy. Perhaps thinking about some of the radical groups that support gender equality made some people lose respect for that value in this case.

This tactic of attacking a policy by tying it to supposedly extremist supporters goes on all the time in politics. Opponents of President Obama’s health care reform initiative attacked the policy by calling Obama a “socialist” and comparing the president to Adolf Hitler. Nelson explained:

These tactics can work when people are faced with competing values and are unsure what their priorities should be.

Environmental values, for example, may sometimes conflict with economic values if clean air or clean water laws make it more difficult for companies to earn a profit.

If you want to fight against a proposed environmental law, you can’t publicly say you’re against protecting the environment, because that puts you in the position of fighting a popular value. So instead, you say that proponents of the proposed law are going to extremes, and are taking the value too far.

The problem with this tactic for society is that it damages support of the underlying values, as well as the specific policy. Nelson:

If you use this extremism language, it can make people place less of a priority on the underlying value. People may become less likely to think environmentalism or gender equality are important values.

Maybe that is why supporters of the Republican Party in the USA seem to be utterly immoral and obnoxious in general, although large numbers of them profess Christianity. As their bibles say, if they ever got round to reading them, you cannot serve God and Mammon. They serve Mammon, and so their Christian values, if they had them in the first place, evaporate.

When the media run down anyone whose policies seem fair and right, remember these studies. Even civilized people might have to protest violently to stop the propagation of obnoxious and selfish ones by the 1% and their media and academic lackeys. So look carefully at what extremists are extreme about. You might agree with them.

LA Dodgers a Microcosm of American Society

The LA Dodgers are bankrupt. They do not have the cash to pay their employees’ wages. We are talking about a community here. The Dodgers are a baseball team much loved by its many patrons, as sports teams usually are, whether big or small. And the Dodgers are bankrupt despite recent success—they made the play offs as recently as 2008 and 2009. Why then has this catastrophe engulfed the team? Andrew Gumbel of the UK Observer has explained it.

The fact is that the owner of the team has sucked them dry for his own aggrandisement. It should be a lesson for Americans, especially those who persistently defend the mega rich, people whom they do not know and never will, and people who are richer than they can ever imagine—America’s plutocrats, the corrupt and greedy rich.

Frank McCourt, not the deceased Irish novelist but a car lot magnate, bought the team and bled it dry to support a life of luxury for himself and his family. McCourt bought the Dodgers from News Corp, who had used it to build up a regional sports network. To do it, McCourt borrowed $150m from Bank of America, $75m from Major League Baseball and $196m from Fox, so he had not spent a penny of his own money.

McCourt then sliced off what was most profitable, the stadium car park and the ticket office as his own operations, which charged the Dodgers rent, and, in turn, giving McCourt security to borrow more dollars. He paid himself $5m a year, his wife, Jamie, $2m pa as chief executive, and their two children $600,000 each—one was a student at Stanford University and Goldman Sachs employed the other. McCourt also enjoyed a private jet and four luxurious houses in Hollywood and Malibu. In typical robbing financier style, the money and debt were spread among, and constantly moved between McCourt’s shell companies and subsidiaries to hide what was going on.

And what was going on was that the assets of the team were being stripped and moved into the personal accounts of a single family and a few hangers on.

Yes, it ought to be a lesson for the average American, whether poor and unemployed or middle class and imagining that they are well off. You just do not have a clue, especially you Tea Partiers taken in by rich men’s stunts to keep you on side. The invisible über rich of the USA are taking you all for the same sort of ride as McCourt took the community that supported the LA Dodgers. They are robbing you silly, and too many of you are defending them!

You cheer because they are sending your boys to distant lands to get maimed and killed, and they make money out of armaments and the vast support industry of the military-industrial complex that supports it. Often you don’t even get a badly paid job out of it. They manufacture more and more abroad in low cost countries. You lose your jobs, or the threat is used to keep wages down or to get concessions from the city and the state treasury, and all of it goes into pockets just as McCourt’s did. You don’t know what is going on because they are like McCourt experts in hiding it, and have a gigantic publicity service called the media to feed you anything to keep you confused and divided.

Get real! You Yankees are like the Dodgers fans—being conned!

Our Heroic Leaders Lead us into a Fruitless War Again! Why?

Well, here we go again. We are three days into another crusade against the Moslems. Western leaders inevitably deny it, but it has become essential for us to effect regime change over certain Moslem leaders, some of whom, like Gaddafi and the late Saddam Hussein, who used to be so much in favour that western arms dealers sold them billions worth of modern weapons. Only a few weeks ago, the latest grubby British leader to emulate the avaricious and unprincipled T Blair, “Dave” Cameron, was selling arms personally to Arab sheiks and kings. Now he is sending “our boys” to risk death flying over Libya to bomb the poor souls beneath, to save them from being bombed by Gaddafi! Could anything be more hypocritical?

The spokesman for the Arab League did not think so. He complained that the Arabs understood a “no fly zone” was to stop Gaddafi’s aeroplanes from flying, not to stop Libyans from living, whether supporters of Gaddafi or rebels. Plainly Cameron and his vile coalition, including Obama, intend to weight the civil war, which until last week looked favorable to Gaddafi, heavily towards the rebels. No one seems to know what proportion of the Libyans oppose Gaddafi. They quickly seemed to capture the north eastern corner of the country around Benghazi, then could make no more progress. The bulk of Libya seems to prefer their present leader to some western puppet.

“Dave” admits he wants to see regime change, admitting that his objectives are the same as Blair’s and Bush’s in Iraq, but pretends the terms of the UN resolution 1973 forbid it. Even so, almost the first blow struck was a cruise missile strike against an important administrative building in Tripoli where there was a chance that Gaddafi might be himself killed. While the direct objective cannot be Gaddafi, “Dave” explains, he can be legitimately targeted because the UN resolution said all means can be used to stop Libyan civilians from being killed, so killing one Libyan civilian can be legitimate on those grounds, and, naturally, many others might be killed colaterally—sad that!

Hypocrisy

Meanwhile the hypocrisy of taking precipitate action against some oil rich dictators while favoring other equally unpleasant or worse oil rich dictators passes by the half of our knowing electorate that happily soak up every lie the BBC, Murdoch and company sling at them. Simultaneously with the rebellion against Gaddafi the people of Bahrein rebelled against their king, who after being forced to say he was willing to concede some reforms, was obliged by an unyielding public, to bring in the Saudi Arabian army, an army that is the personal arm-twister of the Saud family who rule Arabia.

Arabia is the best friend of all opportunistic western leaders because of their oil, and their oil wealth, which again makes them prime customers for arms dealers. The arms they sold were used against a tiny island, just a causeway off Saudi Arabia, but where is the call for the king of Bahrein and the wicked Saud family to yield to the legitimate rebels? Why is there a no fly Zone over Arabia? For the same reason that Bush chose to bomb Iraq as punishment of the Moslems for the 9/11 attacks, even though the 9/11 bombers were almost entirely Saudi terrorists, not Iraqi terrorists—Osama bin Laden is a Saudi. But the Saudi’s are chums of the west, specifically of the Bush family, it was said at the time. There can be no one with a brain cell today who does not know this, but sadly our cynical rulers know full well that there is nothing easier than for the minority to rule the majority. Just use media manipulation.

In the UK, before the war in Iraq, a million people turned out against the war. It woke up the British ruling class and their media pals to the need for continuous propaganda, so a campaign began that is continuing still. Almost the only history taught in British schools these days is Hitler and WWII, the way our “brave boys” beat the Nazis. They were indeed brave boys… then… fighting against a right wing racist dictatorship that wanted to control the world from Europe to India, and most of them conscripted, not professional soldiers, but it gets our youth admiring warfare, and imagining that we only fight just wars—now a big lie.

Our “brave boys” today are more like the Nazis, fighting against poor foreigners thousands of miles away who just want to live their own lives. But the propaganda in the last decade has worked, and these—our own soldiers—though they are killing farmers and their families trying to wrest back the control of their own land from foreigners, are hailed as heroes! Well, they are called that when they return in a box, or with bits of themselves missing. In the UK a charity was set up for these heroes called, would you believe, “Help the Heroes”, when the people helping could have been more help marching in an angry mass to stop these boys, and girls, from wasting their lives for no good reason. Helping rich men grab someone else’s resources, mainly oil not carrots, is not heroic. They do not differ from heavies working for gangsters, except that the heavies know what they are doing, and do it for profit, while our soldiers are paid little more than KPs.

We can always afford a good war!

Now the Queen has given the little Wiltshire town of Wootton Basset the accolade of “Royal” because it hosted a regular mass line up of people grieving for the victims as each one, returned to Lineham air base, proceeded in a funeral procession through the town. Some will have grieved genuinely. But how much more valuable it would have been if they had instead been protesting against the war. Instead it became a neo Nazi showcase of tattooed bikers, war veterans who ought to have known better, various other rentacrowd types, and, of course, BBC and Murdoch’s TV camera men duly filming it several times a week, for its propaganda value. The town naturally loved it—business had never been better.

Now we learn that with the launch of the war against Libya, another propaganda charity has started, “Horses for Heroes”, in which disabled soldiers are riding from John o’Groats at the tip of Scotland to Land’s End at the tip of Cornwall, around 1000 miles, nominally to raise money, but, in fact, like “Help the Heroes”, to continue the war sympathy campaign on the British people. The UK is now like the US. It is on a permanent war economy, and even the media have to show some people, even veterans, saying so, and criticizing the hysteria for war sentiment. These wise people ask:

How can we afford these wars when we are bankrupt, and ordinary people are feeling the weight of government cuts through pay freezes and tax hikes. How can money be found, in these allegedly dire circumstances, for stupid overseas adventures which are of no concern for us.

The megarich financier class gets richer while ordinary people get poorer. The megarich, investment capitalists and bankers, get bailed out by poor people’s sacrifices, and arms dealers get rich by killing the poor, here allegedly being heroes, and abroad by being evil cowards blowing up our heroes to defend their land and homes. All is fair in war, as far as the rich are concerned, providing that the profits roll in. I wonder what they would do if we rebelled. Would they shoot rebels? It is what they have usually done. Does anyone seriously think they are different now?

What Makes Working People Happier? Labor Unions!

In the UK the latest fraudster to head the government is keen to find out what makes us happy, while doing his utmost to make us unhappy by destroying the services we treasure like the National Health Service, free schooling, and a fairly neutral but certainly professional civil service. Maybe David Cameron wants to know what makes people happy so that he can all the more effectively make them miserable.

An associated project which he laughingly calls the “Big Society” while dramatically making society considerably smaller, for many of us at least, would be more appropriated called “Yet Another Big Lie” (YABL), Cameron doing his utmost, it seems, to out-Blair the Great Liar Himself, Tony Blair.

Social Psychologists know a lot about social happiness, but Cameron pretends no one knows anything about it, in an attempt to give himself kudos. One thing is certain, and that is that happiness is a relative emotion. It is popularly said that “money cannot bring you happiness, but it helps”, and that is about the gist of it.

People can be unhappy because they yearn for something, and may feel ecstatic to get it, but the pleasure quite quickly wears off, and lack of some new object or experience kicks in to make people again feel unhappy. Being wealthy removes a lot of the fears that the poor have to endure through lack of sufficient cash, but having it just leaves people open to a new desire and new unhappiness. The greedy rich simply set themselves new targets of wealth. If a media mogul owns two newspapers, he will not be happy till he has three and a TV station. Then he wants Three TV stations, and so on.

These very rich people will unquestionably be very unhappy that the ordinary Joe and Jane often want to organize into trades unions to try to safeguard the pay and conditions that they have. Good pay and conditions cost money to the corporation boss, so they are much happier, for a while, when the unions are weak, or in their pocket, or when their lackeys in Washington and London are bringing in anti-union laws. That has been the situiation recently in Wisconsin where Governor Walker suddenly realized he meant to campaign over union power, but conveniently forgot while he conned the voters, so he has just reminded himself and the electorate that he aims to trash the unions as much as he can.

University of Notre Dame political scientist, Benjamin Radcliff, calls it “a perennial ideological debate in American politics—whether labor unions are good or bad for society”. You don’t need to be a professor of poliutics to know that effective unions are good for the members and bad for the members’ employers.

Are they good for society, though? Well, if, ultimately, the unions disappeared and bargaining was entirely at the whim of the boss, most people would be far worse off, and bosses would be therefore better off, at least initially. Unfortunately for the bosses, and this is something that oddly doesn’t make many of them unhappy, when the people do not have much cash to spend, they cannot buy things and industry collapses. That ought to make the bosses very unhappy one would imagine, but too few of them are intelligent enough to realize. Only the intelligent bosses do realize this, and they are very unpopular in their own circles for being wishy washy liberals or even hard nosed socialists.

Anyway, the general upper crust view is that Joe and Jane get too much, and should have less, so that is the message of the right wing media and the right wing puppets called politicians. Most academics too go along with the popular orthodoxy, however insane it is, but not all. Some academics warned against the 2008 crash, not many, but a few, but the rest, the bosses and the politicos, ignored them as Weary Willys.

Now, according to a study co-authored by Radcliff, people who live in countries with strong labor unions were happier, regardless of whether or not they belonged to a labor union themselves. Data from several European countries as well as Japan, Australia and the US, showed that happiness in life meant happiness at work. And the dominating factor that made people happier at work was the security they felt through having a strong union to help them. Happiness relates to the density of unions in a given country. Denmark ranks near the top in both categories, but the US ranks near the bottom for happiness in all the countries studied.

Radcliff found there was a direct effect and an indirect effect of strong labor unions. Members have obvious benefits—job security, fair wages, benefits and decent hours. But for those who are not members, there is the “indirect effect”.

People who have unionized jobs like their jobs better. And that puts pressure on other employers to extend the same benefits and wages to compete with the union shops.

Not surprisngly, lower paid labor union members found more contentment through organized labor than union members on the highest salaries. It’s no coincidence that American workers have never been more dissatisfied with their jobs.

Clever employers, those interested in long term stability rather than short term greed, would encourage trades union membership. They might have to lose some excessive short term profits, but would enjoy the benefits of stability over the long term. As it is, they should look on the Middle East in fear, and wonder what they might be stirring up at home by their unshackled greed, unjust treatment of the ordinary person, and bogus democracy. That goes in the UK for Cameron’s Conservative and Liberal democratic (or ConDem) coalition. People will only put up with so much, notably when they can see that the system is blatantly unfair.

Radcliff specializes in comparative and American politics. He is one of the world’s leading authorities on the study of politics and happiness, having published articles on it in scholarly journals including the American Political Science Review, Perspectives on Politics, Social Forces, and the Journal of Politics. He is author of the book Happiness, Economics and Politics.

Civilians in War Zones and International Law

In a discussion on Civilians in War Zones, eminent Judge, Richard Goldstone, formerly of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, characterized the last century as “very bloody”. At the beginning of the 20th century, there was one civilian killed for every eight or nine soldiers. In World War II, the ratio became 1 to 1. Now, for every soldier killed, nine civilians die. The cause is the use of indiscriminate air power which pays propaganda value lip service to supposed minimization of collateral damage, a euphemism for civilian injuries, but also because of “deliberate attacks against civilians” to terrorize them.

Though we already have some excellent international court facilities, like The Hague in Holland, not all countries co-operate in making them effective, including the US, and so to deter this trend, Goldstone wants better international courts and more international co-operation to bring criminals to justice:

Our only hope is in an efficient, international system of justice&hellip [and] …an effective, coherent international system of law.

The widespread availability of pictorial evidence, from digital cameras, mobile phones and hand held movie cameras, easily transmitted from country to country by the internet offers new ways of bringing criminals to justice. He said:

There should be true equality. People’s human dignity and their right to that dignity needs to be recognized, [through] a concerted effort to implement international law.

Helen Stacy, a Stanford scholar in international and comparative law, pointed to the admirable role of the US in bringing about the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and in pressing on with the Nuremberg Trials. Yet the US has fallen short of its once impressive standards in refusing to sign, for example, the Convention on the Rights of the Child. 194 nations have ratified this convention including all of the nations in the UN except Somalia and the US! Equally, the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, has only not been signed by the US.

The US has, of course, liberal forms of expression, and so notionally it is possible for citizens to raise these issues and press for them, but It is pretty plain to outsiders, if not to many people within the US system, that the fault in the system is the press and broadcast media which are overwhelmingly owned by one small section of society with a view of the world that does not favor many of these conventions, for all the past reputation of the US. The media either fail to highlight important international issues, or make light of them. Professor James Campbell, who headed Brown University’s Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice, said:

Conversations like this are enormously important. The future of international humanitarian law is being determined.

International humanitarian law is “a constant struggle, an inescapably political struggle assailed by powerful enemies, and curiously mocked by a public that regards it as naïve, feckless, or who regard the idea of international law as an oxymoron”. Nevertheless, “the rapid expansion of international law is ongoing… Just as freedom is a constant struggle, so is international humanitarian law. It is being waged in our country, in dialogues like the one we’re having today”.

Ultimately, the skepticism about international law, will remain valid as long as the most powerful country in the deliberately stands in the way of effective implementation because it prefers to be its own law. That would be fine, if that country operated internationally by the legal and democratic principles which it is fond of citing. Instead it uses the double talk of John Foster Dulles—it always agrees in principle, while in practice putting every obstacle in the way.