Teachers are not to blame for education crisis; they are victims of it.

by Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

We hear it over and over again; autoworkers are the cause of the problems in the auto industry.  Muni (public transportation in SF) operators are the cause of the problems with San Francisco’s mass transit service, and social workers are to blame when young children are abused.

The war on the public sector is ferocious and the 1% and their representatives in the two Wall Street parties have teachers and their unions on top of their hit list, the main teachers Union, the NEA, is the largest Union in the country.  The capitalist offensive is determined to put the US working class on rations to do that it must wage a war on organized labor.

I just read an article in my local paper, the San Francisco Chronicle.  The article is about a new report being released today which calls for  “..an overhaul..” of  the way Oakland, a major city on the East Shore of the San Francisco Bay, runs its public school system.  I haven’t yet read the report itself which is the product of an evaluation by the National Council on Teacher Quality but it is clear that this is the same old story----blame teachers for the crisis in education. 

The evaluation was sponsored by a group called the Effective Teacher Coalition of Oakland which according to the Chronicle includes, “..local parent and youth groups, one of the school district’s labor unions, and the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area.”  The group commissioned the evaluation in order to get an “outside perspective on improving teaching in Oakland” and “a third party perspective.”, and got their wish.  The project also received funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation.  That should be a red light right there.

The recommendations from the NCTQ focuses on “..using market-based forces to improve teacher performance…”. But it is market based forces that are the cause of the crisis in education just like they were the cause of the 2007 crash, the cause of the crisis in auto, the cause of homelessness and lack of health care. 

Oakland CA Lakeview School sit in

It is shameful that a trade Union supports the project although it should come as no surprise given the role the leaders of this Union played last August during the occupation of an Oakland school that was scheduled to be closed. Such recommendations like curbing seniority rights; reducing sick leave from ten days annually to five, ending tenure for teachers after two years, and that districts be free to layoff teachers without using seniority which is now required by law are eventually supported in one way or another by trade Union leaders at the highest level throughout organized Labor. These attacks occur throughout all industries.

The response from leaders of the Oakland Education Association,  (OEA) as far as I can see, is the usual astonishment at the ferocity and full frontal attack, The Chronicle quotes Trish Gorham, OEA president,  “It’s an advocacy piece” she says.  Yes it is Trish, yes it is.  She adds, “It’s over the top, it wasn’t even subtle.”  This is the voice of a Labor official that has no answer whatsoever to the austerity agenda, it is a plea for help,  “We accept the changes are necessary but please be a little less aggressive.”  And the bosses have not been subtle for quite sometime, how could anyone not have noticed that.  Teachers have been savaged over the past period with job losses and wage cuts.  In this period concessions just lead to more concessions.

“The teachers’ union criticized the report as divisive and custom made to drive a broader policy agenda” the Chronicle writes. What on earth would make anyone think otherwise?  Have the policies and practices coming out of Washington and the US Congress regarding social services or toward workers and our families been “subtle” of late?  And of course there is a broader policy agenda. The question is, what is the leadership of organized Labor from the top down going to do about it?  So far they have cooperated with the austerity agenda as they whine about the excesses. The Labor hierarchy is wedded to the Team Concept, the view that workers and bosses have the same economic interests and this is what drives their class collaboration.  They worship market forces too and look to the market for answers to all things.

I worked as a teacher’s aid in the Oakland public schools many years ago.  It taught me to have nothing but the greatest respect for teachers; it is not easy to give a child the attention they need when you have 30 or 35 of them in a class speaking five different languages. But it is poverty and social disruption that is the main cause of the crisis in education. Children bring all the ills of capitalist society in to the classroom.  Job losses, home eviction, parents working sixty hour weeks, wage cuts, elimination of public services of all kinds, these have an affect on personal relations in the home. When capitalist economic crisis becomes more severe like the period we have come through, this makes matters worse. Social crisis makes it harder for teachers to teach and harder for students to learn.  The report says they want to cut down on absenteeism, but like social workers, these conditions outside of the classroom weigh heavily on teachers, making their jobs very stressful.

What really happens is that students, parents, family life is hit by capitalist crisis and through that, the teachers in our schools.  And like any job or profession, some people have difficulties or when conditions are bad become more disillusioned than others, the task is to help them. The report pays lip service to this but its main focus is on blaming teachers and weakening their Union.

According to the SF Chron. The report recommends giving principals complete control over hiring, a sort of education equivalent to Detroit’s new one-man dictatorship.  The report adds that, “Oakland needs to find ways to consider the best interests of students when deciding where to assign teachers…”

Since when do these people care about the “best interests” of students?  Oakland has been closing schools left right and center, schools that are attended primarily by students of color, an already distressed community in the madness of capitalist society, this will add to problems this community faces.  But all aspects of public education are on the chopping block. We saw the beginnings of what could have been a mass movement to drive the capitalist offensive back in 2010 when college students arose in masses to oppose fee hikes but the heads of organized Labor in California, with 2 million workers affiliated to it refused to bring the power of Labor to the table.

These battles cannot be won by individual cities, individual school districts or individual local Unions.  Beyond the Occupy movement we have also seen numerous pockets of resistance to foreclosures, environmentally destructive projects like the pipeline, the prison industrial complex which houses two million souls, and against cuts in education. We must link these struggles together and we do that by broadening our demands.

We have to build a generalized mass movement against all aspects of the austerity agenda.

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Iraq War: A good investment for some

War Criminal Dick Cheney

Reprinted from Reader Supported news

Cheney's Halliburton Made $39.5 Billion on Iraq War

By Angelo Young, International Business Times 20 March 13

he accounting of the financial cost of the nearly decade-long Iraq War will go on for years, but a recent analysis has shed light on the companies that made money off the war by providing support services as the privatization of what were former U.S. military operations rose to unprecedented levels.

Private or publicly listed firms received at least $138 billion of U.S. taxpayer money for government contracts for services that included providing private security, building infrastructure and feeding the troops.

Ten contractors received 52 percent of the funds, according to an analysis by the Financial Times that was published Tuesday.

The No. 1 recipient?

Houston-based energy-focused engineering and construction firm KBR, Inc. (NYSE:KBR), which was spun off from its parent, oilfield services provider Halliburton Co. (NYSE:HAL), in 2007.

The company was given $39.5 billion in Iraq-related contracts over the past decade, with many of the deals given without any bidding from competing firms, such as a $568-million contract renewal in 2010 to provide housing, meals, water and bathroom services to soldiers, a deal that led to a Justice Department lawsuit over alleged kickbacks, as reported by Bloomberg.

Who were Nos. 2 and 3?

Agility Logistics (KSE:AGLTY) of Kuwait and the state-owned Kuwait Petroleum Corp. Together, these firms garnered $13.5 billion of U.S. contracts. As private enterprise entered the war zone at unprecedented levels, the amount of corruption ballooned, even if most contractors performed their duties as expected.

According to the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan, the level of corruption by defense contractors may be as high as $60 billion. Disciplined soldiers that would traditionally do many of the tasks are commissioned by private and publicly listed companies.

Even without the graft, the costs of paying for these services are higher than paying governement employees or soldiers to do them because of the profit motive involved. No-bid contracting - when companies get to name their price with no competing bid - didn't lower legitimate expenses. (Despite promises by President Barack Obama to reel in this habit, the trend toward granting favored companies federal contracts without considering competing bids continued to grow, by 9 percent last year, according to the Washington Post.)

Even though the military has largely pulled out of Iraq, private contractors remain on the ground and continue to reap U.S. government contracts. For example, the U.S. State Department estimates that taxpayers will dole out $3 billion to private guards for the government's sprawling embassy in Baghdad.

The costs of paying private and publicly listed war profiteers seem miniscule in light of the total bill for the war.

Last week, the Costs of War Project by the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University said the war in Iraq cost $1.7 trillion dollars, not including the $490 billion in immediate benefits owed to veterans of the war and the lifetime benefits that will be owed to them or their next of kin.

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Rios Montt trial: Just one of the small fry.

Guatemalans set up a “disappeared wall” during one of the protests to demand the trial of Ríos Montt. Photo: Natasha Pizzey-Siegert source

by Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444 retired

Today, the trial of one of Central America’s most murderous dictators begins in Guatemala. Efrain Rios Montt is being charged with genocide and crimes against humanity for his role in the murder of as many as 200,000 people, mostly members of the Mayan community, during Guatemala’s civil war that lasted 26 years from 1960 to 1996.

As with other stooges of US capitalism and the CIA in Latin America, hopefully Rios Montt will get his just rewards. But we see this all the time, secondary figures like Rios Montt, Slobodan Milosevic, Assad being labeled war criminals, if these people are guilty of crimes against humanity what about the people that were behind them?

The US through the CIA supplied the Guatemalan dictatorship with arms along with the Israelis. Ronald Reagan said of Rios Montt, "President Ríos Montt is a man of great personal integrity and commitment. ... I know he wants to improve the quality of life for all Guatemalans and to promote social justice."

US capitalism’s interference in the affairs of Guatemala has deep roots. In 1954 a CIA sponsored coup overthrew the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz on behalf of the United Fruit Co. and other big landowners. Arbenz had introduced land reforms that threatened the domination of the United Fruit Company over Guatemalan society. Only 2% of landowners owned 72% of the arable land, much of it unused. United fruit alone held 600,000 acres of mostly unused land. The Guatemalan colonel that the CIA selected to replace Arbenz immediately outlawed hundreds of trade unions and returned more than 1.5 million acres to United fruit Co.

Instrumental in planning the coup were the Dulles brothers, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother, Allen Dulles who was director of the CIA. These two also helped orchestrate the CIA coup that overthrew the secular democratic government of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 and replaced him with the murderous Shah. They were former partners of United Fruit’s main law firm in Washington. By 1985 some 75,000 people were dead or had disappeared at the hands of the Guatemalan dictatorship; a huge amount in this tiny country. Some 150,000 Indians fled to Mexico and beyond. Many of the brothers and sisters we see on the streets as day laborers are from this area.

Hilary with Mubarak:  a friend of the family.

It is the support the US gives these undemocratic regimes that allows civil conflict to go on for so long causing tremendous suffering for the population.  The regime of Hosni Mubarak, the murderous Egyptian dictator was also a recipient some $2 billion of US taxpayer money.  As Egyptians were fighting for democratic rights and an end to Mubarak’s tyranny and torture chambers, Hilary Clinton, then US Secretary of State told Egyptian TV that "We consider Egypt to be a friend."  And that "I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family. So I hope to see him often here in Egypt and in the United States."

Behind Rios Montt and the slaughter of 200,000 Guatemalans in this conflict stood George HW Bush, Oliver North, Ronald Reagan and all these other far more important war criminals.  The same with Mubarak, Milosevic, Gaddafi whose police were trained by the British. 

We must not lose sight of this when these small fry are paraded to the world as orchestrators of crimes against humanity and genocide.  They are never from Britain or the US.  The US predatory war in Iraq has slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Iraqi’s and displaced hundreds of thousands more.  The western support for the so-called Syrian opposition is them yet again linking up with very dubious characters as they did with Bin Laden and others; it is not workers they look to, but any section of the ruling class or religious hierarchy that will allow multinational corporations to continue to plunder the region’s resources. .  Let’s also not forget that up until 1999, every Taliban government official was on the payroll of the US government. 

The world has yet to enjoy the pleasure of seeing mass murderer Henry Kissinger brought to the dock.  The blood of Rene, Schneider, the constitutionalist Chilean general is on Kissinger’s hands, as is Allende’s and the deaths of some 3 million Vietnamese.

While Guatemalan’s should rejoice at Rios Montt being brought to trial these events are of limited significance as long as their masters roam free.

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South Africa: Miners Struggles---no job losses

DEMOCRATIC LEFT FRONT

www.democraticleft.za.net

18 March 2013

PRESS STATEMENT: NOT A SINGLE JOB MUST BE LOST AT AMPLATS


The National Steering Committee (NSC) of the Democratic Left Front (DLF) met in Johannesburg over the past weekend. The meeting received a detailed report from representatives of the Amplats Workers’ Committee on current worker mobilisation to fight and stop the retrenchments at Amplats. These retrenchments were announced on 15th January and threaten the jobs of some 14,000 workers at 4 mines (Khuseleka 1&2, Khomanani 1 & 2) in Rustenburg, and the Union Mine in Pilanesberg which Amplats threatens to sell. This is equivalent to 3% of the national mine workforce. After the 15th January announcement, the statutory 90-day consultation and negotiation process is due to end on 15th April. After this date, the Labour Relations Act provides for another 2 months until 15th June before the retrenchments can start. However, Chris Griffith, the Amplats CEO, told investment analysts in February that the retrenchment process is unlikely to extend beyond April (‘Time benefit possible in ‘constructive’ Govt/Anglo talks’, Mining Weekly, 15th February 2013). This is negotiating in bad faith.

Already, Amplats has broken a previous agreement with workers. The workers at Amplats agreed to return to work after their historic strike on three conditions:
i)               No arrests of workers due to conflicts that happened during the strike
ii)             The early start of wage negotiations
iii)            No retrenchments

Workers were arrested at Dichaba and the company has not started wage talks. Instead, the company announced plans to retrench 14,000 workers. To add insult to injury, on 19 February company security shot 13 workers at the Siphumelele mine for demonstrating against the re-imposition of the NUM by the Amplats bosses and the ANC government.

The DLF rejects the Amplats retrenchments and calls on Amplats to negotiate in good faith. The DLF fully supports the decision of all Amplats workers to resist, fight and stop the retrenchments. The DLF calls on government to support worker resistance to the retrenchments. The DLF calls on government to use its power to ensure that not a single job is lost at Amplats. The retrenchments are unnecessary and a deliberate attack by Amplats against workers’ demands for a living wage.

As Amplats’ annual reports and reports from Statistics South Africa show, the mining bosses are milking it from the sweat and toil of thousands of black workers. Since the 1990s, the platinum mining sector has risen fast and has become a bigger sector than gold or coal. From 1994 to 2009, platinum output in South Africa expanded by 67% in response to skyrocketing global prices. This led to massive profits which attracted huge inflows of foreign capital into platinum mines in the North West and Limpopo provinces. In 2001, Amplatsbecame the first South African company to report an annual profit of US$1billion earned solely from its domestic operations. In 2007 and 2008, Amplats paid R29,7 billion to its shareholders whilst the total wage bill for the platinum sector was R26,5 billion for these years. In other words, a few hundred shareholders were paid R3,2 billion more than at least 100,000 mine workers in the platinum sector as a whole. In this period of massive profitability, instead of rising along with profits, workers’ wages in the platinum sector declined relative to profits. In 1998, of all the money made from platinum, 60% went to workers and 40% went to profits. In 2010, this had changed to 27% going to workers’ wages and the remaining 73% being profits. Even worse, these profits did not stay in South Africa. Rather they were shipped to Anglo American (Amplat’s parent company), which, thanks to the ANC’s neoliberal macroeconomic policy, now has its primary listing in London. Even before the Marikana-inspired strikes in the platinum belt, Amplats had been planning retrenchments in order to maintain short-termist profit-maximisation at the expense of thousands of workers and their families.

Over the last two years, platinum bosses and mainstream media have falsely claimed that the post-2008 fall in the global price of platinum has reduced profits below sustainable levels and therefore justifies retrenchments.But the problems are greatly over-exaggerated. The average platinum price since the global financial crash of 2008 has still been almost double that during the ‘boom’ period of the early to mid-2000s, and almost three times the average platinum price in the 1990s. And Amplats has continued to make substantial profits since 2008. It claims that the four mines threatened with closure are unprofitable but Amplats’ own figures show otherwise. In 2010, the Khomanani 1& 2 mines contributed R129 million to company profits in 2010. In 2011 this increased to R234 million. In 2010, the Khuseleka mine contributed R290 million. In 2011, this was R341 million. The same Amplats’ reports show that the shafts became more profitable because labour productivity increased: workers worked harder and produced more. In all these mines threatened with closure, labour productivity increased by 20% for the 2010-2011 years and the volume of platinum produced 30% from 2010 to 2011. During the same period of increased worker productivity and profitability the remuneration of the Amplats directors (just 22 people) increased by 30% at the same time that the company held workers’ wages down and claimed that the company was in crisis. By the end of 2011, the combined annual pay of the top two individuals at Amplats was R34 million. Amplats’ good fortunes have benefitted shareholders and managers, and punished workers.

Amplats accounts for 40% of global platinum production and controls the bulk of South Africa’s platinum reserves, which are by far the largest in the world. Rather than being a ‘price-taker’, it is thus uniquely empowered to ‘make’ the world price by controlling supply – the essence of its long-term strategy. The retrenchments are therefore about reducing production in order to boost the global price and maintain profitability, and once market conditions improve the threatened shafts in Rustenburg will be bought back on stream. Indeed, Amplats and financial analysts alike have repeatedly stated that the mid- to long-term prospects of the platinum industry 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’. 

Beyond platinum, generally South African mining companies are guaranteed high profitability on the back of cheap black labour and a compliant government. It is no surprise that other workers at the Exxaro coal mines in the Mpumalanga province and the construction site at the Medupi power station in Lephalale also went out on strike in the last two weeks to demand a living wage. The DLF supports the demands and struggles of these Exxaro and Medupi workers.

The foregoing show that privately owned mines undermine democratic accountability, wealth redistribution, a living wage and job creation. For this reason, the DLF calls for sustained worker and community mass struggles to demand and win the democratic public ownership of mines under workers’ democratic control in conjunction with the local communities in the mining areas. The ANC and capitalists may think that the ANC Mangaung has buried what it saw as the spectre of nationalisation. We know that the ongoing exploitation of mine workers, mining-affected communities and the environment underline with each passing day the need for public ownership of our mineral resources: all the minerals underneath the soil must be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole. 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 low-carbon 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.

AMCU, as the new union of the Amplats workers, must play an important role in the fight against the retrenchments. Beyond the union’s role, the DLF is aware that it is not union bureaucracies that will win this fight. It is thousands of united, organised, fighting and militant workers who will successfully defend their jobs and win a living wage. It is with the class solidarity of all other workers in mines and other industries, as well as the solidarity of the unemployed and mining-affected communities that the Amplats can put pressure on Amplats and government. It is this united action which must pressurise the pro-capitalist ANC government to use its power by reviewing the mining licence of Amplats to insert a no-retrenchments clause. The ANC government has the power to take such action instead of its current narrow focus to protect the profits of mining capital alongside the development of a class of black mining capitalists.

The DLF calls on all Amplats workers and other mine workers to bring all their mass power, determination, resolve, unity and militancy in order to stop these retrenchments. It is workers’ united power and ability to close down all the Amplats shafts that can force the bosses to cancel their retrenchment plans. The resolutions of last week’s COSATU Collective Bargaining Conference can only come to life through such worker action. Working with the Amplats Workers’ Committee, the DLF is an active part of worker mobilisation against these retrenchments.

The DLF calls on all other workers and the entire South African labour movement to join and support this crucial struggle of Amplats workers. This struggle will determine whether workers can win a living wage. As we saw with last week’s announcement by the Free Market Foundation of a legal challenge to labour laws, the bosses and their ideologues in South Africa are determined to destroy worker militancy for a living wage and to keep South Africa a low wage economy. If the Amplats workers are defeated and retrenched, the door will be open in all other industries for the bosses to defeat the confidence and militancy of fighting workers. The DLF is aware that Lonmin and Implats bosses are also planning their own round of retrenchments. To allow any of these retrenchments would be to surrender hundreds of thousands of workers to unemployment and starvation wages, and millions of families to lives of penury, whilst leaving the platinum and other mine bosses with restored profits and continued exploitation of cheap black labour that underpins South African capitalism.Therefore, the Amplats’ retrenchments must be resisted and stopped with all the necessary worker action, political action and solidarity across the length and breadth of the country and internationally.

Farmworker struggles

The DLF meeting also reviewed reports of the responses of commercial farmers against the 52% wage settlement victory scored by farm workers earlier this month. Commercial farmers are now seeking to evade paying the R105 minimum wage as many of them have applied to government for exemptions. Many are also threatening to replace labour with machinery, raise rents and charges for electricity and water, threatening evictions and victimising worker leaders and so on. This is unacceptable and requires government to act decisively in favour of farm workers and the broader landless mass of rural people. The DLF will continue with its work to organise farm workers to defend the victory and to stop the farm retrenchments. The DLF calls for ongoing solidarity with farm worker struggles. In the long-term, this organisation of farm workers and dwellers must be extended to demand state-led land redistribution to farm workers and transformative agrarian reform as a basis for a transformed countryside. This is the only way to end baaskap and exploitation in the commercial farms.

The failing ANC state and service delivery

Beyond the workplace, the unemployed are also fighting against the anti-poor capitalist policies and failures of the ANC government: a failing state, lack of accountability, poor housing, poor service delivery, anti-poor cost-recovery in what should be free basic services, inadequate and expensive public health and transport systems. These conditions sustain and reproduce violence against women, criminality and other social crises . All this underlines the need for sustained working class mobilisation as we have seen with the Unemployed People’s Movement’s work in support of the murdered Thandiswa Qubuda and the 6th March march to the Moqhaka Municipality led by the Rammulutsi and Viljoenskroon Crisis Committee (RVCC). Both the UPM and the RVCC are DLF affiliates. Like millions of other unemployed people, the people of Rammulutsi are fed up with false promises and failure of the ANC government to end apartheid and capitalist logics and geographies. The mass of the unemployed are demanding a universal social wage of free public goods and services, and employment. Millions of women demand equality, freedom and self-dignity. Sustained unity and mass action by workers and the unemployed for wealth redistribution and democratisation of the economy are the only way forward to win a just South Africa.

FOR COMMENTS, CONTACT:
Mazibuko K. Jara – 083 651 0271, email – mazibuko@amandla.org.za
Vishwas Satgar – 082 775 3420, email – copac@icon.co.za

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Life is what we make it. Is that so?

by Richard Mellor
AFSCME Local 444 retired

Life is what we make it.  If you work hard, you can achieve anything, riches, fame, lots of superficial relationships and sex.  We are in control of our own destiny, the dominant ideology in society tells us.  I was watching an ad on TV yesterday for Ancestry.com. A black guy was telling us about how he found his father I think it was and that he was “born a slave and died a businessman.

This propaganda is designed to show us that if you believe, if you work hard and don’t let the world get you down, if you persevere, you will make it. If you don’t, the responsibility is yours and yours alone. It’s the individual that makes things happen. In this case above, the mass collective struggle of black folks up to and including the civil rights movement had nothing to do with his father moving from slavery to the business world, wasn’t the main factor that opened some cracks in a brutal racist system. You see, you can't be successful as a worker, as one of the vast majority, the millions of people that go to work every day providing a social service whether it be delivering produce to a store or water to a home, or health care to the elderly or education to our children. Being a buyer of Labor power, a capitalist, as opposed to a seller of it, is success.

My mum left school at 14 and died at 84 still working. She wasn’t a businessperson but a homeworker most of the time, unpaid labor power.  Women's unpaid labor in the home amounts to trillions of dollars globally each year.  Like most women, my mum also worked for wages outside the home to supplement the family income, low wages.  She was still basically a carer up until the time she died of exhaustion basically. If she’d have been smarter and worked harder she’d have been somebody I suppose.

I am driven to comment on this as I happened to read about the huge oil reserves that are believed to be under the earth in Africa. Kenya’s Great Rift Valley is the new hot spot and could make Kenya a major player in oil production.  One of the companies involved in oil exploration on that continent is Tullow Oil.  Tullow is a small town near Dublin Ireland. Tullow Oil is one of Europe's largest companies and one of the world's largest oil exploration companies as well.

The founder of Tullow Oil, Aidan Heavey happened to be talking to guy in the bank in Tullow about the small oilfields in Africa that the major producers were abandoning as not profitable to develop, especially as North Sea oil production was going full steam ahead.  This is where the idea to form Tullow Oil came from.

In Heavey’s own words, “I contacted another friend of mine in the World Bank who told me about a project in Senegal. They had some small gas fields that they were trying to get people to develop, so I setup Tullow Oil to rework those old fields. I knew nothing about the oil and gas industry at the time, which made it more challenging. No one thought Tullow would succeed because of my lack of knowledge of the industry, no major backers and I was starting a company in a country with no oil industry.”

See how easy it is.  If my mum had not been so busy feeding, clothing and raising two kids while working outside the home at the same time, she could have called herfriend at the world bank.  What a loser.

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Cambodians clash with cops over land grabs

Like China, there are repeated clashes between authorities and the population over the government's seizure of land for developers. There is undoubtedly an increased global struggle against capitalist globalization and all its by products, from the factories of Bangladesh, to the indigenous communities of Latin America and here we see it in Cambodia. The US mass media, more than the mass media of any other industrialized nation does a very good job of keeping the news simple, provincial and demoralizingly mind numbing. The Kardashians, sports, murders etc.

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Labor hierarchy abandons macho defense for shared sacrifice.

Boston cops help scabs drive thru. Greyhound strike 1983

by Richard Mellor

AFSCME Local 444 retired

What seems a lifetime ago I was on the picket lines during the Greyhound strike. It was the early eighties and the strike began to take on somewhat of a national character as a few of the strikes did during that decade.  Local P9 UFCW, the Eastern strike etc. I was in San Francisco and we had attempted to get in to the Greyhound building which had padlocked doors and a couple of cops stationed outside. 

I remember about 1000 of us marched down to the building, tired of listening to Willy Brown, San Francisco’s Democratic mayor and friend of the Labor hierarchy promise us he was with us and all that nonsense. I recall it as a spontaneous action, the bursting out of pent up anger.  The cops were taken by surprise at a sight of 1000 angry workers surrounding the building they were supposed to protect.

In the end, the Labor officials derailed the attempted occupation along with some not so bright characters at the back of the crowd who threw rocks at the windows which rained glass down on us.

But another incident also stuck in my mind; one of the top Labor officials, Walter Johnson dragging his foot across a sidewalk declaring Labor’s line in the sand. Unfortunately the line has moved so far back that we are standing up to our knees in water.  The bosses’ laughed at such threats by the Labor hierarchy and 30 years later, empty threats and macho posturing in the face of a very serious offensive of capital has driven living standards closer to those in what we call low waged countries.  The Labor officialdom’s philosophy of, “if it doesn’t work do it again and again” is still the way to go.  It’s getting harder for them though as the offensive is becoming so fierce that there is little room to maneuver and the Labor hierarchy cooperates openly with the bosses in the elimination of gains made over the last century.  It is harder to play the macho card, especially among the ranks of organized Labor who have heard it so many, many times before.

But Labor officials can still impress young people and ranks of the unorganized who correctly see the benefits of organization and that these leaders rest on real a real social force with the potential for real power. I commented on this in a previous blog about a rally I attended in San Francisco last week. An AFL-CIO official was speaking to a crowd of mostly young people whose college is being savaged as part of the austerity program being instituted by the two parties of Wall Street. The official announced that “The Labor Council stands behind this institution”.  Unfortunately this doesn’t mean much if anything at all.  Labor leaders at the highest levels have promised union members through bitter defeat after bitter defeat that they were “behind them.”.  The reality is of course that they should be in front of us.  That’s where a leader should be, in the front not in the rear. As one person put it, they’ll fight to the last drop of your blood.

Experience has taught the bosses that they need not worry; they have friends in the Labor movement. They were very confident in their ability to take from the autoworkers the gains they made over 80 years. UAW officials “were realists who understand the problems facing the industry” the Wall Street Journal confidently boasted at one point. It’s nice having friends like that.

In Michigan, the governor has appointed a bankruptcy lawyer Kevyn Orr, to rule over the 700,000 souls who call Detroit home. The governor picked this lawyer, at a nice annual salary of $275,000, because of his “Interpersonal skills, legal and financial acumen..”.  He’s a man that can relate to all the coupon clippers, contractors, bankers and other scavengers that will benefit from Detroit’s demise and what it will take to fix it up.  The “elected”leaders of Detroit have no say in the running of the city although Mr. Orr says he will work with those elected leaders that agree with his plan.

Detroit borrowed a lot of money to cover its liabilities which included the pensions and health care for retired city workers.  These are now singled out as the main cause of the economic crisis US capitalism finds itself in. What do the heads of organized labor in Detroit have to say about this? The macho defense has been rejected by Albert Garrett, president of AFSCME Council 25 he’s got nobody’s back, he’s not even behind anyone except the enemies of working people as he’s one of the realists like his counterparts atop the UAW, “What we’re hoping for is that there must be concessions for more than just the workforce, that those who hold bonds or debt (moneylenders) take a haircut.”

Hope on Albert; a “haircut”, it’s a bit silly isn’t it. But the consequences of his role and others like him are dire.

I remember being at AFSCME International Conventions when then president Gerald McEntee used to call us the “lean green fighting machine.” He took his half a million a year salary and the retirement it bought him after being in the same position for some 30 years and kept his hair to boot.

The trade union leadership has completely capitulated in the face of the capitalist offensive and abrogated their right to lead, but they won’t leave without some help.  They have cooperated with the bosses in driving us farther and farther in to the quagmire that has increased our pain and suffering and made the climb out unnecessarily difficult, more difficult than it need have been.

One small life’s lesson that comes out of this is to beware those who are in leadership positions, who should be on the front lines, who have access to resources and the levers of the apparatus and announce to us proudly that they are “behind us” or “have our backs”

We’re not stupid.

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