Free Bradley Manning: Transparency isn’t treason

Transparency isn’t treason: New York Times journalists criticize “aiding the enemy” charge

By Nathan Fuller, Bradley Manning Support Network. January 18, 2013.

PFC Bradley Manning. Photograph: AFP/Brendan Smialowski/Getty

Last week in Fort Meade, MD, government prosecutors said that if PFC Bradley Manning had released documents to the New York Times instead of WikiLeaks, they would still charge him with indirectly ‘aiding the enemy,’ which carries a life sentence.

This would be unprecedented: never before has a soldier been sent to jail for ‘aiding the enemy’ as a result of giving information to a news outlet. Government prosecutors argue that Manning needn’t have intended to aid the enemy; merely that he knew Al Qaeda could use the information is enough. This would turn all government whistle-blowing into treason: a grave threat to both potential sources and American journalism.

Following this contention in court, the Los Angeles Times called on the government to drop the ‘aiding the enemy’ charge, writing in an editorial, “That charge strikes us as excessive in the absence of evidence that Manning consciously colluded with hostile nations or terrorists.” Since then, even higher-profile media members have condemned the military’s pernicious claim and the precedent it would set. In an email in which she explained she couldn’t speak on behalf of her newspaper but could comment as a lifelong journalist and a former newspaper editor, New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan said,

“The implications for press freedom in the Bradley Manning prosecution trouble me, as does the federal government’s unprecedented targeting, in recent years, of whistleblowers and those who leak to the press.  The issues certainly aren’t black and white, but if the public expects the press to do its crucial job in our democracy, people ought to be more worried than they apparently are.  And I agree with the Los Angeles Times editorial that the “aiding the enemy” charge, which could result in a life sentence, is excessive.”

New York Times columnist and former executive editor Bill Keller said, “I think the treatment of Manning feels heavy-handed and out of proportion to actual harm done.”
In Michael Calderone’s story for the Huffington Post, “Manning Case Raises Troubling Questions For Journalists,” about the implications of this argument, the Washington Post’s Dana Priest said, “they don’t want other people to get the idea that they should be doing this,” and that it’ll have a “chilling effect on sources.”
Glenn Greenwald wrote for the Guardian, “[the government’s argument] can be – and almost certainly will be – just as easily applied to the vast majority of leaks on which investigative journalism has always relied.”
Mainstream news outlets, Greenwald said,

“might want to take a serious interest in this fact and marshal opposition to what is being done to Bradley Manning: if not out of concern for the injustices to which he is being subjected, then out of self-interest, to ensure that their reporters and their past and future whistle-blowing sources cannot be similarly persecuted.”

So why does the government continue to prosecute this way? Keller said, “It’s been clear from the outset that the government decided to make a lesson of Bradley Manning,” and that “the extreme conditions of his early confinement and the aiding-the-enemy charges suggest a deep animus toward Bradley.”

As the government works to discourage future leakers and to tighten security, it also classifies exponentially more documents every day. This harms the very people Bradley Manning wanted to inform in the first place: the American people.

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Capitalism at work: US workers fall further behind

by Richard Mellor

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reckons more than 40 million Americans aren’t getting enough sleep, that’s 30% of the civilian workforce and researchers at Harvard Medical School say “sleep deprivation costs US companies $63.2 billion in lost productivity per year.”

Well, that’s a problem, lost production. The bosses have a new word for it, not absenteeism but “presenteeism” people making it to work but being too sleep deprived for them to extract sufficient surplus value from their Labor power------big problem indeed. Capitalists, the purchasers of Labor power don’t put people to work out of the kindness of their hearts, their profits come from surplus value, the difference between the value of the capital involved in the Labor process (work) and the value of the product produced by it, a product that he or she is the rightful owner of.

So a worker not performing up to par cuts in to their profits.  "If we treated machinery like we treat the human body, there would be breakdowns all the time," James Maas, a former Cornell University psychologist tells the WSJ.  We know that throughout history, workers have always been treated as machinery or like any other object owned by its purchaser.  Capitalism has been no different as the Dickensian world of Victorian England; the textile mills of New England, the mines of Bolivia and factories of Asia today show us.

Forming collective associations won better conditions for workers but as we are witnessing presently, the bosses are forever seeking ways to increase the exploitation of Labor, it’s the way the system works.

There’s a general perception that, “sleep is for sissies and lingerers,” the Journal writes.  But this mentality doesn’t arise from thin air.  This view is quite strong in the US as is the idea that we should be open 24/7 and eat our breakfast on the run or never take sick days or holidays.  Time spent from work is surplus value lost.

The big business media boasts of the superior productivity of US workers.  But we are more productive because we spend more time on the job.  We are away from home, away from or families, own less of our own time than workers in practically all of the major advanced capitalist economies.

In 1960, 20% of mothers worked.  By 2010 70% of American children lived in households where all adults arte employed according to the Center for American Progress.   One aspect of this is that despite advances made by women, most of the child rearing and household work still falls to them.

In addition, according to the CAP:

The U.S. is the ONLY country in the Americas without a national paid parental leave benefit. The average is over 12 weeks of paid leave anywhere other than Europe and over 20 weeks in Europe.

Zero industrialized nations are without a mandatory option for new parents to take parental leave. That is, except for the United States.

Here are some other causes of sleep deprivation in the US:
At least 134 countries have laws setting the maximum length of the workweek; the U.S. does not.

In the U.S., 85.8 percent of males and 66.5 percent of females work more than 40 hours per week.

According to the ILO, “Americans work 137 more hours per year than Japanese workers, 260 more hours per year than British workers, and 499 more hours per year than French workers.”

Using data by the U.S. BLS, the average productivity per American worker has increased 400% since 1950. One way to look at that is that it should only take one-quarter the work hours, or 11 hours per week, to afford the same standard of living as a worker in 1950 (or our standard of living should be 4 times higher). Is that the case? Obviously not. Someone is profiting, it’s just not the average American worker.

American Paid Vacation Time & Sick Time:
There is not a federal law requiring paid sick days in the United States.

The U.S. remains the only industrialized country in the world that has no legally mandated annual leave.

In every country included except Canada and Japan (and the U.S., which averages 13 days/per year), workers get at least 20 paid vacation days.  In France and Finland, they get 30 – an entire month off, paid, every year.

When we add to this incredibly fast paced and competitive existence, the insecurity, inequality and lack of social services, it is no wonder people can’t sleep at night.  This generally unhealthy environment, being subjected to endless ads and living in a 24 hour marketplace pressed to buy the commodities produced in every corner of the globe in order that the owners of capital can realize the wealth from the unpaid Labor that they contain within them, it is this that makes us sick in so many ways, even to the point of violence.

How disgusting are the ads we see now of young 12 year olds telling two other 8 year olds how they “have it made”because they can download something faster from their phones or “record four shows at once”. Is this really happiness? Civilization?

One of the primary factors in the increased exploitation and “squeezing” of more productivity for less pay from workers in this country is the decline in Union power and the complete capitulation by the heads of organized Labor to the laws of the market.  The 1984 AFL-CIO platform to the Democratic Party Convention called for shorter working hours.  A 32 or 30-hour workweek with no loss in pay is not in the lexicon of the Labor hierarchy who have abandoned any pretense of fighting back against this offensive of capitalism.

But this would be a very first and basic step in reducing the stress people face in their lives.  This will have to be fought for by the mass movement, but we must at least overcome the obstacle in our own consciousness that tells us it is unrealistic or society cannot afford it.  Like the discussions between the two Wall Street Parties on what they call the budgetary crisis, or the crisis of stress and sleeplessness that overwhelm America n workers, the only solutions on their table are those that improve their ability to make profit. 

Freedom isn’t an I Phone or the fact that you can own a Harley, a 42” TV or a pistol. Freedom is controlling our work life and collectively owning the means of producing what we need; it’s having power in the workplace.  Instead of life beginning after work it should begin at work.  “Man is born to labor and the bird to fly” it says in the book of Job.  Humans produce things of use, that’s what we do, what we’ve always done and we’ve done it most efficiently as a collective.  Without production there is no life.  But until workers of all types and nations control production, how we produce our needs, what we produce, and how we distribute the products of our labor, it is not an exaggeration to say that life as we know it will cease on this planet. 

Not getting enough sleep will be the least of our problems.

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AFT, NEA, and the Privatization Drive Against Public Education

By Jack Gerson

Last weekend I spoke in San Francisco on a panel that addressed the topic:  "Public Education, Privatization and The NEA/CTA, SEIU and AFT/CFT-What Can Education Workers, Students & Parents Do To Defend Public Education?"   My presentation was recorded by the Labor Video Project and it's now up on YouTube:

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The Austerity Mantra

Austerity Mantra

Everything must be on the table.
Your ninety seven year old granny
is no longer cost effective, would
benefit greatly from being brought face to face
with a compassionate baseball bat.
The figures speak for themselves and will
be worse by morning. The paraplegic
in his insanely expensive wheelchair
will have to crawl as God intended.
Here are the figures that won’t stop
speaking for themselves, this is the table
everything must be on. Yesterday my name was
Temporary Fiscal Adjustment.
Tonight, the insect in the radio calls me
The Inevitable. When the economist
puts his hand up, take care not to cough.
Everything’s on the table and
the table’s tiny. I’d send you a pillow
to hold hard over the child’s face
‘til the kicking stops, but at current rates
there’ll be no pillow. I am the unthinkable
but you will think me. Pack her mouth
with tea towels, hold down firmly
your old mildewed raincoat,
‘til there’s no more breath.
Tomorrow I’ll be known as
Four Year Consolidation Package.
Lock the cat in the oven and bake
at two hundred degrees centigrade.
Tie your last plastic bag over
your own head. The figures speak for themselves
and there is no table.

Kevin Higgins
Kevin Higgins was born in London in 1967, and grew up in Galway City where he still lives. He is co-organiser of the highly successful Over The Edge literary events. His first collection of poems, The Boy with No Face, was published by Salmon in 2005. The Boy With No Face was short-listed for the 2006 Strong Award and has recently gone to its second printing. His second collection, Time Gentlemen, Please, was published by Salmon in 2008. He is the poetry critic of The Galway Advertiser and also regularly reviews for Books In Canada: The Canadian Review of Books. A collection of his essays and reviews, Poetry, Politics & Dorothy Gone Horribly Astray, was published by Lapwing in 2006. Kevin has read his work at most of the major literary festivals in Ireland and at a wide variety of venues and festivals in Britain, France and the United States. He won the 2003 Cúirt Festival Poetry Grand Slam and was awarded a literary bursary by the Arts Council of Ireland in 2005. 

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World Economy: The global crawl

by Michael Roberts

In this post I am returning to my theme that the world capitalist economy is in a Long Depression in which the recovery in output and employment after the end of the Great Recession of 2008-9 is very weak and much less in extent and pace than we have seen in previous recoveries after capitalist slumps like those of 1974-5, 1980-2 or 1990-1.  Be warned, in doing so, there will be an awful lot of graphs!

Global industrial production is crawling along.  The World Bank produces a monthly index of global industrial production, making it a very good measure of how well the productive sector of the world capitalist economy is doing.  This index covers the world and is not confined to the major capitalist economies (G7) or even the advanced economies.  It includes the likes of China, India and emerging Asia and Latin America.

What does the index show?  It shows a real crawl – indeed in the latter half of 2012, global industrial output growth slowed to no more than a 2% year-on-year pace, below the average seen over the last 20 years of about 3% a year.  There was a sharp recovery after the humongous fall in the Great Recession, but that recovery seems to have dissipated and is certainly not nearly as strong as the recovery in the 1990s up to the emerging economy crisis of 1998 or after the slump of 2001.

The weakness is particularly visible in the major capitalist economies of the US, Europe and Japan.  In a recent post, Michael Burke highlighted how just awful the relative decline in UK industrial output has been since the Great Recession (http://socialisteconomicbulletin.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/20-years-of-lost-output.html).  See his graph below.

As Michael puts it: “The base date for measuring output is 2009 when the IP was set at 100. This means that in each of the last 3 months industrial production has been below the level seen in 2009, which was the deepest recession in Britain since the 1930s….. The British economy has slumped to levels of output last seen 20 years ago”.

Another more recent measure of activity in the global productive sector is the global Purchasing Managers Index (PMI), something I have followed in other posts to establish a more up to date gauge of where the world economy is going.  If the global PMI is above 50 then there is expansion indicated in the world manufacturing sector.  Below 50 means contraction.  After the initial burst of recovery from the Great Recession, expansion turned back into contraction in 2012 until the last few months.  The index is now just over 50, suggesting slow growth.


I’ve argued in this blog many times that the key to sustained growth is investment by the capitalist class in new equipment, plant and buildings (what is called capex).  The Oxford Economics research bureau has constructed a world capex index to see how productive investment is going.  Again it’s the same story.  After the initial recovery from the Great Recession, investment growth worldwide has slipped back and is now rising at no higher than 2% a year compared to an average of over 5% a year before the Great Recession.


Not all economists agree that investment is needed to kick-start or sustain economic growth.  The Keynesians seem to think that ‘effective demand’ is what is needed,  meaning not just or even mainly investment, but a significant rise in spending, mainly consumer spending, or failing that, any spending, namely from government.  This theory leads some Keynesians to argue, as Joseph Stiglitz does, that the reason for the weak recovery is rising inequality, which reduces consumer spending by the masses and so keeps ‘effective demand’ weak (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/19/inequality-is-holding-back-the-recovery/). 

However, other Keynesians like Paul Krugman reject this version of the ‘underconsumption’ thesis based on inequality.  For Krugman (as for Keynes), if capitalists have more to spend on luxury goods that will do for effective demand just as well, even if it is morally repugnant (http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/20/inequality-and-recovery/).

The Austrian school deny the role of consumption in sustaining economic growth.  On the contrary, more consumption means less saving and thus less investment.  And it is investment by the capitalist sector that matters.   Marxist economics agrees that investment is the driver of growth and employment.  The question is what will cause investment to rise.  The Austrians say it is plenty of saving, while the Marxists say it is plenty of profit.

Both the Austrians and the Marxists reckon that profit matters.  From profit flows investment and then employment and then consumption – not vice versa as the Keynesians would have it.  But there is one big difference.  The Austrians  reckon that profitability will be fine as long as the market is left to its own devices and there is no interference by trade unions or government or monopolies.  The Marxist view is that there is an inherent contradiction in the capitalist investment process, namely the tendency of the rate of profit to fall with accumulation.  That happens because of the capitalist mode of production for profit and leads to cycles of booms and slumps that interfere with steady investment expansion, whatever the ‘interference’ of government or monopoly.

If Marx’s law is correct, it should mean that rising profitability and especially rising total profits should lead to more investment.  Indeed in many posts (see http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2012/06/26/profits-call-the-tune/), I have tried to show that profits lead investment, not vice versa.  And in my book, The Great Recession, and in an academic paper, I have analysed the causal connections more closely (http://thenextrecession.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/the-profit-cycle-and-economic-recession.pdf).

Even better has been the work of A Tapia Granados, entitled Does investment call the tune?  Empirical evidence and endogenous theories of the business cycle, to be found in Research in Political Economy, May 2012, http://sitemaker.umich.edu/tapia_granados/files/does_investment_call_the_tune_may_2012__forthcoming_rpe_.pdf).   Tapia shows that in over 251 quarters of US economic activity from 1947, corporate profits stop growing, stagnate and then start falling a few quarters before a recession.  Using regression analysis, Tapia finds that pre-tax profits can explain 44% of all movement in investment, while there is no evidence that investment can explain any movement in profits.

Dr Jim Walker of the Austrian school has also confirmed that causation process: from profits to investment, not vice versa, in the business cycle.  Using Granger Cause analysis that tests null hypotheses, he tested two data series, US corporate  profits  and corporate investment, and found that the null hypothesis that ‘a change in corporate profits does not cause a change in corporate investment’ was strongly rejected.  In other words, corporate profits do appear to predate and explain movements in investment.

So that brings us to a conundrum.  US profitability has made a significant recovery since the trough of the Great Recession in mid-2009.  And the mass of profit has jumped well ahead of the previous peak in early 2006.  So why has there not been a similar sharp recovery in investment and thus growth?  Well, the first thing to say is that US economic growth has been much better than that in Europe or Japan and so has investment growth.  And that would seem to follow as average profitability has not recovered much at all in Europe and Japan, as I shall show below.

Second, even though profitability in the US has risen, profitability in the productive sector (industry, manufacturing and transport) has not done so well.  The rate of profit in the US financial sector rose significantly from the mid-1990s as the credit boom began while the rate of profit in the non-financial sector remained in the doldrums.

As a result, net investment (after depreciation) remains at very low levels.


It’s true that the mass of profits did rise significantly after the trough of 2009 in the US.  But these profits seem to have been ‘hoarded’ as cash by the large companies in both the US and Europe.


One reason for this conundrum has been offered by a Canadian right-wing think tank, CD Howe Institute.  This institute points out that cash balances in corporations were building up for some years even before the crisis and slump.  It is not a reluctance of companies to invest because of the slump.  Instead they need cash on hand in order to source goods and raw materials in a hurry instead of building up inventories or stocks.  So cash has replaced high inventories in a world of ‘just-in-time’ manufacturing.  This may have some validity but it also suggests that high cash balances are no indicator of low investment.  And yet that is what we have.  So this explanation does not really seem to answer the conundrum.  I reckon there are better reasons.

The first is that even if the US profit share is up, US corporate profitability is still below the levels of previous peaks in 2006 and 1997 respectively.


Second, debt deleveraging still has some way to go, even though debt to income has come down for households (mainly through mortgage defaults).  Public sector debt to GDP is still rising and corporate debt is stable at relatively high levels.  Only low interest rates are keeping many companies from going under.   But Keynesian-monetarist type policies of low interest and ‘quantitative easing’ have done nothing to stimulate investment in the productive sectors,  Instead, they only jack up stock and bond prices for the financial sector and the rich.  And what fiscal stimulus and extra government spending there has been applied has not been to boost government investment.  Indeed, the US government is now preparing fiscal austerity measures for this year that will more than match anything done in Europe.

In some ways, the simplest explanation for this world in a crawl is that profitability has not recovered at all for most capitalist economies.  The US remains the exception.  Using the EU Commission’s AMECO database, I found that the net rate of return on the stock of capital in the major economies in 2012 was still well below the peaks of 2007 everywhere except the US (and on my own measure of the US rate of profit even there it is lower than 2007).


Dr Walker (op cit) looked at the return on equity for companies in Europe and Asia.  This is not such a good measure of corporate profitability, although it does measure profit against the value of a company’s stock price, which perhaps takes into account any fictitious capital.  On this measure, Walker found that only China really had achieved a higher average rate of return since the crisis.  Rates of return on equity in Europe and Japan were down 30-50% compared to before the crisis.


Now some investment bank economists have recently suggested that global manufacturing is set for a revival this year.   And it’s true that there have been some signs of a pick up in capital goods orders and we shall know by the end of this week if the PMIs in the Eurozone and elsewhere are also indicating some expansion – they are deep in contraction territory at the moment.


So I’ll return to those measures when we get the data.  But even if there is a pick up from the lows we’ve seen in 2012, the investment cycle will probably remain in the doldrums and so will global growth.

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US Union membership continues to decline

Note:
Re, my comments below, a reader points out correctly that I neglected to mention another very important aspect of the left and socialist groups and that is their refusal to offer an alternative to the class collaborationist policies of the present trade Union leadership.  In fact, as I have mentioned many times before (too many times according to some) most of the left act in one way or another as a left cover for the trade Union bureaucracy and their polices.  Any activist, worker, socialist or anti-capitalist that genuinely wants to fight for workers and strengthen and build our movement, especially those that are in Unions or are an adjunct to these bodies in one way or another, will inevitably be drawn in to conflict with the Labor hierarchy.  This has also contributed to the decline of workers' power and trade Unions in the US.

Years of class collaboration by the Labor officialdom through the Team Concept in the workplace and in the political arena through their support of the Democratic Party has led to lower unionization rates and Union membership in the US continues to decline.  We have all witnessed heroic struggles over the last 25-30 years that followed the crushing of PATCO by Reagan.  The two Greyhound strikes, the Hormel strike, Detroit Teamsters strike, Pittston Miners strike and the Staley battle in Decatur to name a few. 

While mistakes are inevitably made by leaders and workers at the head of these struggles, these are strikes were defeated primarily due to the role of the heads of organized Labor whose strategies comprise corporate campaigns and reliance on Democratic Party politicians rather than the independence and strength of workers' organizations and our communities.  As we have also pointed out on this blog, the left bears some responsibility for this decline, failing to build a left current and broad united front of action against the capitalist offensive, necessary factor made difficult by left sectarianism and competition between rival groups, putting the interests of individual groups ahead of the movement on the one hand and fluctuating between reformism and ultra-leftism on the other.  We have all been guilty of this.

Below we reprint some new statistics on unionization in the US that show the private sector declining further to just over 6% of the workforce.  The present assault on the public sector coming on the heels of the emasculating of the UAW with the help of Bob King and the leadership of that Union leaves the public sector as the last significant unionized sector in the US, a situation that will not be reversed until a mass movement below transforms the balance of class forces here in the US.  The public sector cuts are the reason for the recent decline, the result of a bosses' offensive that has not been challenged.

Richard Mellor

The piece is from the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Union Membership, 2012 

Written by John Schmitt and Janelle Jones   
Thursday, 17 January 2013 13:00

On January 23, the Bureau of Labor Statistics will release its estimates of “Union Membership” for 2012. Using the same data from the Current Population Survey (CPS), we have compiled advance estimates for union membership and coverage for 2012 and find a large drop in unionization last year. Most of the losses occurred in the public sector, where union membership fell 1.0 percentage points or about 231,000 members. But, membership also fell about 0.3 percentage points, or about 175,000 members in the private sector.

By industry, the biggest gainers were: administrative and support services (up 51,000 members); arts, entertainment, and recreation (up 24,000); and machinery manufacturing (up 24,000).
But, by far, the industries experiencing the largest losses were concentrated in the public sector, with educational services (down 199,000 members) and public administration (down 92,000 members).
Construction (down 60,000), hospitals (down 51,000), primary metals and fabricated metal products (down 36,000), and food manufacturing (down 30,000) also took big hits.

The high concentration of women in teaching and public administration depressed the union membership rate for women (down 0.7 percentage points) more than it did for men (down 0.4 percentage points).

Our estimates are based on complete 2012 data and should be very close (within a tenth of a percentage point or two) of published membership and coverage rates. But, as of January 2011, the publicly available CPS data use a slightly different weighting scheme than the internal version of the data that are used at the BLS. So, our estimates of the numbers of unionized workers will likely differ slightly from the final published numbers.

Each table shows union membership (the share of employees who are members of a union) and union coverage (the share of employees who are covered by a union contract, since some workers are covered by a union contract but do not belong to the union). Some of the year-to-year changes are affected by rounding error.

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South Africa: NATIONALISE MINES FOR CLIMATE JOBS

DEMOCRATIC LEFT FRONT

www.democraticleft.za.net

21 January 2013

PRESS STATEMENT: ANGLO PLATS CRISIS DEMANDS DECISIVE STEPS

NATIONALISE MINES FOR CLIMATE JOBS

Anglo Platinum’s announcement that over 14,000 mineworkers are to be retrenched at its Rustenburg operations demands decisive steps from the South African labour movement. Last year’s strike-wave, which began on the platinum belt and spread through the gold and other sectors, has exposed how far the South African mining industry continues to rely on apartheid-era mechanisms of exploitation, and has inspired the fight for a living wage among the mass of the poorest paid, not least the farm workers.

The Amplats announcement is clearly part of the bosses’ counter-offensive to break this new spirit of militancy. It coincides with Harmony’s indefinite lockout at the Kusasalethu goldmine, while the four shafts targeted for closure in Rustenburg have the highest concentration of AMCU members. Yet, in the first half of 2012, these same shafts achieved labour-productivity and output increases of over 20% and 30% respectively, according to Amplats’ own figures.

And this is just the beginning. The big investors are urging more cuts across the platinum sector to restore their profits and roll back the challenge to the low-wage economy that underpins South African capitalism.

Zwelinzima Vavi is therefore right to declare that COSATU will resist the Amplats assault with “everything in its power”. But these words must now be put into action. The entire labour movement must be mobilised and placed on a war footing. Every effort must be made to support the elected workers’ committees - which have led the struggle for a living wage - regardless of their union affiliation. The Amplats workers must know that when they strike, there will be massive sympathy action. They are now on the frontline of a struggle whose outcome will shape the future of every worker and their dependents. 

At the same time, the Rustenburg retrenchments reflect a deeper crisis in the platinum industry. This, however, is a crisis of the bosses’ own making and demands radical solutions. Amplats complains that it is the victim of the global recession and that its profits have been hit by the downturn in platinum prices. But its problems, and that of the wider platinum industry, are over-exaggerated.  It is certainly true that world platinum prices have fallen since the financial crash of 2008. However, they are still on average almost double those of the ‘boom’ period of the early to mid-2000s and almost three times the average platinum price in the 1990s.

At the same time, Amplats and financial analysts alike have repeatedly stated that the industry’s future prospects are good. In its interim financial report (June 2012), Amplats not only says that ‘despite the current short term challenges, the longer term outlook for the platinum business remains attractive’, but boasts that ‘with its superior asset base in terms of extent and reef type, [Amplats] is well positioned to adjust project prioritisation and scheduling to match future demand’. This gets to the heart of the matter. 88% of the world’s platinum reserves are concentrated in South Africa and Amplats alone accounts for 40% of global production. Rather than being a ‘price-taker’, it is uniquely empowered to ‘make’ the world price by controlling supply – the essence of its long-term strategy.

During the boom years Amplats and its competitors rushed to expand production. However, when the global crisis hit in 2008, Amplats sacked 19,000 workers, suspended three shafts and borrowed heavily from parent company Anglo American. Despite posting record earnings of $13.3 billion at the end of 2011 and paying out R1.1-billion in dividends, Amplats launched its operational review in February 2012 to boost flagging prices by further cutting production.  This is the source of the current jobs massacre, but the shafts will be kept ticking over for when market conditions improve.

 The ANC has publicly reacted to Amplats’ announcement with anger and has threatened to revoke its Rustenburg mining licences. This is simply rhetoric. It was the ANC government that allowed Amplats and the other SA mining giants to move overseas in the first place, and Susan Shabangu’s silence on the lock-out of workers at Harmony Kusasalethu goldmine, whose chairperson is Patrice Motsepe, indicates that her outburst has little to do with the well-being of workers. But even if Shabungu and co did see their threat through, the licences would be allocated to another capitalist who, regardless of the colour of their skin, would simply add to the problem.

It is time for workers in the platinum sector to stop paying the price of the anarchy of the market. The industry as a whole must be nationalised under workers’ democratic control in conjunction with the local communities in the mining areas. Only then can production be planned on the basis of need rather than falling victim to the private corporations, whose competitive scramble is the root cause of the sector’s recurrent crises of over-accumulation. There must be massive state investment in industries that use platinum in socially useful products like catalytic converters and fuel cells, which hold out the hope of eliminating environmentally harmful emissions. The platinum sector must be a driving force of a new green economy that creates hundreds of thousands of quality climate jobs that are well-paid and secure. It must benefit the majority that produce the wealth rather than the minority who steal it, and create havoc, misery and despair for us all in their endless pursuit of profit.

For further comment on this press release:

Noor Nieftagodien 082 457 4103

Niall Reddy (079) 5129584

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