On May 3, 3:16=A0am, "Stephen R. Diamond" <srdiam...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> On Fri, 02 May 2008 04:19:22 -0700, rab <rogeralanblackw...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
=
=A0
> wrote:
>
> > On 1 May, 21:44, Vngelis <meberr...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> >> On May 1, 5:27 pm, rab <rogeralanblackw...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>
> >> Voting isn't a panacea. One must know when to vote and when not to
> >> vote.
>
> > So it's a question of 'when not to vote is it?' =A0Those that refuse
to
> > defend the previous gains of the working class will not be able to
> > make new ones - that's the principle here!
>
> >> Livingstone is standing on a pro-globalist ticket on how 'successful'
> >> and multicultural London is, as if that has any meaning when the City
> >> of London dominates and Brown is bending over backwards handing
> >> workers money to the bankers, a move the SWP actually sup****ts.
>
> The usefulness of a parliamentary boycott is pretty much limited to
those =
=A0
> times when sma****ng parliament is on the agenda, that is, to periods =A0
> rather the opposite of the present--at least with the hindsight of the
=A0=
> British returns this morning. So I can't agree with vngelis. I think I
too=
=A0
> would call for a vote for Labor. And notwithstanding David's remarks, I
=
=A0
> cannot detect even a touch of ultra-leftism. What the OCI calls =A0
> "self-proclamation," definitely. But not ultra-leftism, such as
vngelis's =
=A0
> at least refre****ng abstentionism. And again pace David, I think the =A0
> correct perspective for this election round would be propagandistic. The
=
=A0
> reasons vngelis gives for boycott seem to me actual reasons for a =A0
> propagandistic approach.
>
> My problem with the editorial is that it gives uncritical sup****t to =A0
> Livingstone. One reading it without knowing the WRP's position would
think=
=A0
> there's a progressive faction in the Labor Party and a reactionary =A0
> faction, and workers should unite behind the progressive Livingstone to
=
=A0
> get rid of the reactionaries and take on the Tories. Yes, defend past
=A0
> gains, but uncritical sup****t of Livingstone is no real defense, as the
=
=A0
> results showed.
>
> I would tell the workers honestly, "Look, blokes, we know Livingstone is
=
=A0
> barely worth the couple of hours it will take to vote for him. But you
can=
=A0
> make an afternoon of it, meet your mates after voting, have some beer,
and=
=A0
> it won't be all that bad. Labor will have the same objectives as the =A0
> Tories, but they will have to move just a little slower. That's reason
=A0=
> enough to waste a few hours on the clown, isn't it?"
>
> srd
A reasonable approach... But the BLP were badly mauled all over
Britain.
I think that when you have a labour party and well established trade
unions, even if it has sold out time after time you need to be aware
that WHEN the working people start to say enough is enough it is VERY
likely that they will do so within the framework of those
institutions.
I post this as evidence of this phenomenon.
This weekend the NSW Australian Labour Party, in government in that
state, holds its Annual Conference. Australia has seen a huge amount
of privatisation (bringing the world into line with the USA pattern)
both by state and federal governments, often with the acquiescence of
the unions. The Hawke-Keating ALP governments from the eighties and
early 90s set the ball rolling with the privatisation of the huge
government owned Commonwealth Bank and many other government
enterprises. This was continued under the Federal Liberal government.
Victorian electrical energy stations and grid were privatised under an
ALP government. The NSW ALP government is determined to repeat this
performance but it appears that there is considerable resistance in
NSW by the trade unions and labour party branches as well as
communities to any further privatisations. As a result it looks like
the Premier and Treasurer of NSW will be lose the vote at this
weekends conference.
This article by a veteran leftist within the NSW ALP gives some
background to that controversy:
The issues involved in, and the consequences of, electricity
privatisation
Bob Gould
The economic arguments advanced for electricity privatisation by Mick
Costa, Morris Iemma and Ian Macdonald are completely unsound. They=92ve
been thoroughly refuted by the veteran public infrastructure
economists, Bob and Betty Con Walker.
The Walkers have pointed out that the electricity system in the
2006-07 financial year returned a profit of $1.542 billion, or between
25 and 30 per cent of equity, which in any financial terms is pretty
good, and explains a bit about why private interest want to get their
hands on these public assets.
Mick Costa started out a few months ago saying sale of the electricity
system would realise $15 billion, but the figure most often cited now
is more like $10 billion. In a few months, this vital asset has
quietly been discounted by 30 per cent, and who knows what cozy deal
would eventually be cooked up behind the cloak of commercial
confidentiality?
Today, even the industry lobby group, the National Generator Forum,
asserts confidently that the figures cited by Costa and others, for
the likely proceeds of the sale of the electricity assets are
completely fanciful.
In current market conditions, with the international slump, and with
the looming costs involved in the reducing greenhouse gas emissions,
to which all Australian governments are committed, the amount realised
in any sale wouldn=92t be anything like the tasty figure dangled at us
by Costa.
In addition to the mad economics of the sale in current conditions,
there=92s quite an ugly record of public-private partner****ps in big
infrastructure projects in recent times. The Cross-city Tunnel, the
Lane Cove Tunnel, the ****t Macquarie Hospital public-private
partner****p and the white elephant railway to Sydney air****t have all
involved guarantees of compensation to the private investors, which
were usually big banks involved in speculation, should the ventures
fail. The ventures cited above have failed, or partly failed, and as a
result the taxpayers of NSW are shelling out millions of dollars to
cover these guarantees.
Why would the sale of the electricity assets be any different?
What=92s involved, really, is passing over another of the people=92s
assets to the most speculative and shadowy commercial entities at the
big end of town, with the likely end buyer being the municipal
government of a province in south China. It=92s a well-known fact that
the government entities and big capitalist businesses in China are
notoriously the playthings of the bureaucracy that runs China.
These business operations in China are notoriously engaged in highly
speculative ventures and aren=92t subject to even the limited scrutiny
to which such entities are subject in Australia. It=92s a macabre piece
of irony that the assets of the people of NSW are being touted for
sale to big speculative enterprises interlocked with the Chinese
government and the unrestrained business practices that prevail these
days in China.
It also must be said that nothing like real trade unionism exists in
China. The interlocking big business ventures, comprador capitalists
and the Chinese government don=92t allow trade union agitation as we
would understand it in Australia.
As a lifelong sup****ter of the Chinese Revolution in its better days,
it=92s a cruel irony for me to have to assert these facts of political
life, and I do it without an iota of racism. Costa=92s cynical
accusation of racism against John Robertson for pointing to this
reality just underlines Costa=92s political bankruptcy, and he was no
doubt grinning at the picture of his hero, the neoliberal economist
Friedrich von Hayek on his office wall, as he said it.
The likely consequences of this privatisation
We only have to look around us at the effect of the various
privatisations in the past few years. I run a small business and I
rely on the telephone for an im****tant part of that business. Since
Telstra was privatised the universal experience is that it=92s much
harder to get a fault in the system fixed quickly because of the cost
cutting.
When you ring up about a fault, the poor operator on the Telstra
switch is programmed to be evasive about giving any time frame to fix
a fault, but immediately you ring up about a fault, that seems to
trigger a series of phone calls, which tend to drive you mad, offering
a multitude of incomprehensible new plans to get you to spend more
money, but the fault often seems not to get fixed for a long time.
One of the results of electricity privatisation in Victoria was that,
after a recent natural disaster many electricity consumers were
blacked out for a whole week because of the privatised utility=92s
cutbacks on maintenance.
Privatisation always means a diminution in services and a continual
attempt to screw more money out of working people and small business
people, and everyone knows this, which is why it=92s on the nose with
most of the population. No amount of spin doctoring from the big
cor****ations, the media and assorted politicians is as powerful as
people=92s own experience of privatisation.
Another good example is the sale of the Commonwealth Bank. King
O=92Malley and the people who founded the Labor Party would have turned
in their graves at the sale of the Commonwealth Bank, which was
conceived, as were the state banks, as sources of cheaper finance for
working people and small business, and as a check on the depredations
of the private banks. Again, it=92s the cruelest irony that the
Commonwealth, as a private bank, is usually the first to put up its
interest rates.
It=92s also a supreme irony that we=92ve just managed to get rid of Howard
and the tories and elect a Labor government federally, but all the new
Labor treasurer can do, it seems, is go along slavishly with the
commercial desires of the private banks.
Because of the wildly speculative practices of the new generation of
shadowy financial sharks globally, quite a number of shonky banking
structures have gone bust. That, we are told, has pushed up the cost
of credit, because the remaining banks don=92t trust each other and =93the
market=94 dictates, you see, that we must have much higher interest
rates.
That=92s the sort of conventional bourgeois economic madness that was
peddled by the ruling class at the start of the Great Depression,
against which Jack Lang, and E.G. Theodore in a different way, quite
properly revolted, but all you get from Labor governments these days
is that the market must prevail.
Right now, that kind of mad capitalist world market is going down the
gurgler at a rate of knots, and it=92s in that situation Costa and Iemma
are trying to flog the NSW electricity assets for the very small
amount they=92re likely to get.
Costa and Iemma are proposing to throw good assets and money after bad
into the very hungry maw of the crumbling speculative financial
system, at the centre of which are the creaking pirates who they=92re
trying to get as agents to on-sell the assets to the bureaucratic
caste in China.
The ideeological dimension in Labor politics
Mick Costa keeps attacking the Labor rank and file, saying we=92re
ideologically driven in our opposition to privatisation. What a hide
this man has: an ostensibly Labor treasurer who decorates his office
with pictures of Hayek and says another neoliberal, one of the
darlings of John Howard, Milton Friedman, is his bedside reading.
(These comments on Costa are based on Imre Saluszinsky=92s interesting
and candid profile in the Weekend Australian a couple of weeks ago.)
Well, there is an ideological aspect to this battle. The Labor Party
that I joined in the midst of the Great Split as a kid of 17 in 1954
did have a lot of ideology, and really had two wings: a secular,
socialist wing, which I soon joined, and a moderate Catholic wing,
which I knew a fair bit about because that was my personal cultural
background.
These two wings, in retrospect, despite the fact that they fought for
hegemony in the Labor Party, in practice had a surprising amount in
common, ideologically. The secular socialists looked to a rather hazy
socialist future, but were preoccupied with day-to-day battles to
improve, expand and defend the public sector. That kind of approach
was at the core of left social democratic Labor ideology.
The Catholic wing was more moderate in tempo, but its core ideology,
based on papal encyclicals, also favoured public owner****p of what
they called natural monopolies, such as water, electricity, railways
and banking.
The whole of the Labor Party, the secular socialists and the Catholic
wing, had been enthusiastic sup****ters of Chifley=92s attempt to
nationalise the private banks a few years before, which unfortunately
failed in a fiercely fought referendum campaign.
The active Labor people of those times, both right and left, would
literally have lynched anyone in the party who tried to privatise
electricity. Both the left and the right of those times had no problem
describing themselves as socialists, as embodied in the Labor
member****p pledge. Our tribal ancestors, in my view, would be turning
in their graves at the picture of modern leaders of a Labor government
proudly proclaiming themselves as economic conservatives.
The Labor Party of those days, and for the next 40 years or so, as I
experienced it, was firmly based on the hegemony of the unions in the
party. Both left and right had a strong base in the unions, which were
often the terrain of big struggles for control. This was the case even
in the Great Depression of the 1930s, when union density fell to about
the same relatively low level that it has reached today. Union
member****p increased again when the depression lifted.
The activists, both left and right, from whom I learned in a long
political apprentice****p, would have thought that anyone in the Labor
Party who wanted to remove union influence was a political traitor to
Labor, and quite mad as well, from a practical point of view.
So, yes, Mick Costa, there is an ideological dimension to this
struggle over electricity privatisation, and all the other
privatisations that are waiting in the wings, and it=92s the conflict
between the ideology of the ruling class and the traditional ideology
of the labour movement =96 of defending workers=92 interests, a goal
shared in the past by both left and right.
Mick Costa, Ian Macdonald and ideological issues in the labour
movement
I=92ve known Ian Macdonald since he was an extremely left-talking Maoist-
inclined leader of Students for a Democratic Society in Melbourne. I
rubbed shoulders with him in the Vietnam antiwar movement. I didn=92t
like him much, as in those days I thought he went in for a certain
amount of ultraleft demagogy. I=92ve been a bit fascinated by his
evolution from that network of political positions ultimately into the
Labor cabinet and now into the most energetic advocate of
privatisation, ostensibly on the left of the Labor Party.
I first encountered Mick Costa a little later, in the mid-1970s, when
he was an angry young high-school kid in Leichhardt. At that stage he
was also a pretty angry ultraleftist. He came to a couple of meetings
of a small socialist group with which I was associated, but we were a
bit too stodgy for him, as we were mainly concerned with unions and
the Labor Party, and he rapidly moved on the most left-wing thing he
could find, a group called the Communist League, which joined later
with what is now the Democratic Socialist Party.
As a youth, Costa was a kind of classical ultraleftist with an
extremely mercurial temperament, which we now know has a certain
organic basis. One thing that pulled me up abruptly in Saluzsinsky=92s
profile of Costa was his bald assertion of contempt for both of his
parents. When he was younger he seemed proud that his father had been
an active socialist in Cyprus. It has always seemed to me that paying
out on your parents is a pretty strange thing to do, particularly in a
political context.
Many of us in the workers movement have labour movement political
activists in our ancestry and we=92re usually rather proud of that, but
apparently not Mick Costa, these days. He pays out on his socialist
father from Cyprus, and has replaced him with other authority figures
such as Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman.
Mick Costa accuses his opponents of being ideologically motivated, but
his own preoccupation with electricity privatisation is very largely
ideological. It marks his personal transition from left to right.
The electricity system of NSW, the family silver of the labour
movement, is too im****tant a public asset to fall victim to Mick
Costa=92s rather mercurial ****ft from ultraleft to ultra-right.
=46rom a traditional Labor point of view, having Costa, the admirer of
Hayek and Friedman, as treasurer of NSW worries me considerably. It=92s
quite possible, it seems to me, that we could wake up some Sunday
morning to find that he may have quietly sold the hospital system, or
perhaps the water board, the state railways or even Parliament House,
to the government of North Korea, Burma or Zimbabwe, with Macquarie
Bank taking a rake-off as agent for the sale.
He=92s quite capable of doing something like that without telling the
Labor Party until after the deed is half-completed, in the way he has
tried to present electricity privatisation as a fait accompli.
The shadowy influences operating in these privatisation proposals
As this business has proceeded, a number of things have emerged fairly
clearly that tend to outrage a lot of rank and file Labor people and
the overwhelming majority of active trade unionists.
Some business operations appear to be kicking around in the shadows
behind these proposals. For example, Bob Carr is an adviser to
Macquarie Bank and Paul Keating is international president of Lazard
Carnegie Wylie, a company that specialises in privatisations, and both
of these former Labor politicians are presumably very well paid for
their services to these companies.
There=92s a new breed of speculative entity in the financial markets
that are at the cutting edge of the current meltdown in the global
financial system. Their activities are usually shrouded in secrecy,
and they seem to be driven mostly by the necessity to find further
investment to overcome the problem that many of their existing
investments are so speculative that their liquidity may be
questionable.
The current financial problems globally arise partly from the fact
that such entities seem to be falling over like ninepins in a bowling
alley.
The Iemma-Costa government, it emerges now, gave a firm guarantee to
the Electrical Trades Union and other unions before the last election
that there would be no privatisation of electricity. The leaders of
the government now try to argue that they were elected to lead the
state and therefore they can defy the unions and the Labor Party.
The polls suggest, however, that the people of NSW didn=92t elect Labor
to privatise electricity, because 80 per cent oppose the
privatisation. So where is the imperative coming from for the leaders
of the government to defy economic common sense in the current
economic climate?
Even the Liberal politician, Malcolm Turnbull, himself a privatiser,
pointed out this week that commercially this is not the time to try to
flog the NSW electricity infrastructure. The conclusion that most of
the ranks of the labour movement, political and industrial, pretty
well inevitably draw, is that many Labor politicians seem to want to
follow the path blazed by Carr and Keating into lucrative jobs with
big-end-of-town speculators.
We badly need a writer like Frank Hardy to write a new version of
Power Without Glory, fictionalised to avoid any problem with libel,
based on politics in NSW.
We want the ALP back!
In this context it=92s worth considering where we=92re holding this Labor
Party conference in the inferior location of the Darling Harbour
Convention Centre.
The cir***stances surrounding this change of venue are instructive.
We=92re told the Sydney Town Hall is being renovated. That in itself is
pretty strange, since in 1992 we had what was said to be the
definitive restoration of the Town Hall, and a pretty good job was
done. Why is it happening again so soon, other than to make lucrative
business for construction companies?
The Darling Harbour location is pretty symbolic. In the 1980s
psychiatric hospitals and inner-city hospitals were closed with the
very serious consequences that are now very evident, particularly in
relation to the psych hospitals. Those closures mainly happened after
a very big industrial battle, particularly with the nurses=92 union, in
which some of my friends were involved.
The story then was that the money was needed for hospital beds in the
western suburbs and to build the convention centre and other
facilities at Darling Harbour, which was to be a state-of-the-art
tourist attraction.
Many of the beds never made it to the west, as we know. NSW hospitals
are still desperately short of beds and there=92s still a crisis in the
health system. Darling Harbour was built, at very considerable
expense, with relative massive subsidies to big business. The problem
was that the business plan for the project had very limited success.
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