Speak Your Anus (yes, really)–a site unaccountably popular in some parts of the The Swamp™–encounters the Twat-O-Tron and experiences a click-bzzzt-reset…click-bzzzt-reset…click-bzzzt-reset… moment. Well, a sense of humour requires something collective, and that–as any fule know–is tyranny.
The output is so über-productive I am unable to keep up now.
ERBIL, Iraq, May 30 (UPI) — The Iraqi government has moved, demoted or fired more than a dozen people within the southern Iraqi oil sector this month as domestic and international union officials decry their treatment.This week reports surfaced that South Oil Co. Director General Abdul Jabbar Lauby was removed from the head of Iraq’s largest and most productive state oil company, as well as the head of the South Gas Co. and Iraqi Oil Tankers Co.
United Press International is told that the leadership at the top of the South Refineries Co. will be removed as well.
Lauby was offered a position as adviser to the Oil Ministry but reportedly has not accepted the position. Phone calls and e-mails to the ministry were not returned.
“It’s something up to the government,” said Hassan Juma’a Awad, president of the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions.
He said 11 people from the South Refinery Co. were demoted or fired. Eight were union members, including the vice president, the central committee manager and the secretary of culture and information, Awad said. The three administrative staff include the director general’s secretary, and administration and finance officers.
He said he expects more jobs shuffled or lost, including his, adding, “While Shahristani is in power, it will happen.”
Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani launched the Oil Ministry’s series of most recent crackdowns on the union — which officially are not legal, because a Saddam Hussein-era law has not been overturned or replaced despite the 2005 constitution calling for such a move. The workers, however, immediately formed a union after Saddam’s overthrow, and attempts to break them have failed.
Abu Bakr Faqi Mohammed, president of the oil union under the Kurdistan General Workers Syndicate Union, told UPI the government “tried twice to close our office” in Kirkuk.
“Our workers demonstrated, and they didn’t allow our office to be closed,” he said.
This month both the general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation and the president of the AFL-CIO wrote to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in part to protest the government’s attempt to control upcoming union elections.
Shahristani last year sent letters telling the state companies not to communicate or recognize the unions. And a short strike in part of the southern oil industry to protest working conditions, among other issues, was met by arrest warrants for leaders and was surrounded by security forces.
Mohammed said people in the south have been fired this month but are still working “because workers refused to have other people lead them.” He said some are pegged to be transferred to Kirkuk, Baiji, Mosul and Samawa.
The unions also have been one of the more vocal opposition groups in the debate over the draft oil law. They view it as not supportive enough of the domestic oil industry and too generous with Iraq’s oil toward international oil companies.
Lauby, the removed South Oil Co. head, was against the Oil Ministry’s new plan to bring international oil companies in for long-term development deals for Iraq’s largest-producing oil fields.
The energy information service Platts reports he welcomed the companies “as consultants and not as partners.”
Lauby, who is a native Basrawi, had the lead role in the South Oil Co. since 2003. He kept production up during Maliki’s military incursion into Basra earlier this year.
Although the government said the mission was to eradicate gangs and militias, the nearly sole targets were those loyal or believed to be aligned with Moqtada Sadr, the popular cleric whose followers include the Mehdi Army and local and national politicians.
With Basra more calm after the action, Maliki’s government — led by the Dawa Party and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq — appears to be clearing out two other opponents of its policies.
“A vote by the Basra provincial council — reportedly by consensus, and thus conceivably even involving some ‘defections’ from the local ISCI branch — protested against the central government’s decision to remove the head of the Southern Oil Co.,” wrote Reidar Visser, Iraq expert at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and editor of the Iraq-focused Web site Historiae.org.
The Basra council and the government of the oil capital of Iraq is controlled by the Fadhila Party, which withdrew its members from Maliki’s governing coalition and is attempting to keep power of Basra from ISCI.
… so I’ll cry if I want to.
The SWP Israel obsessives in the UCU have struck again. A bizarre resolution - “colleagues be asked to consider the moral and political implications of educational links with Israeli institutions” - has been passed after the, uncomfortably democratic, proposal to put it to a vote of the whole membership was defeated. It is worth reading really good posts by Eve Garrard, Jim Denham, Jon Pike, George Szirtes, and on Z Blog.
Resolution 25 bundles together a diffuse selection of items. For instance, it declares “criticism of Israel or Israeli policy are (sic) not, as such, anti-semitic“. Indeed it is not necessarily so, but it can be - and frequently is. And the original boycott call was deemed discriminatory. On top of which, parts of the left have been rediscovering their dark tradition of anti-Semitic sentiment.
Then there is this line about the “apparent complicity of most of the Israeli academy“. The logic is impeccable. As a British academic I can now expect a citizen’s arrest from George Monbiot. I deserve no less. But then what about the academics from the Israeli left, supporters of peace and human rights? Hmm…
However, I really want to comment on Sally Hunt’s defensive statement about the resolution,
I have to state that we have passed a motion to provide solidarity with the Palestinians, not to boycott Israel or any other country’s academic institutions.
Well that is one interpretation, though all the measures are aimed at Israel and Israelis. I too have expressed my solidarity with the Palestinians in the past and I have long seen myself as pro-Palestinian, but I am utterly depressed by this constant, ignorant and utterly negative campaign.
There are two solutions to the conflict on offer - one-state and two-state. The one-state solution is largely the preserve of the Israeli and Palestinian nationalist right. It envisages a total victory for one side, denying the legitimacy of the other, often accompanied by calls for the removal of the bulk of their population. It is the politics of continuing conflict, of expulsion and extermination. The left favour a two-state solution, but of a particular kind.
Rather than envisage the division of the land into two hostile and separate entities, temporarily stabilising instead of ending the conflict, it sees that both the Palestinian and Israeli peoples’ national histories are inextricably entwined. A progressive two-state solution is one that would build a constructive relationship between the two peoples and allow for a mutually supportive realisation of national self-determination. This is the painfully difficult politics of peace.
And it is in the advancement of a politics of peace where education can play a key role in helping develop collaboration and coexistence between both nations, of examining and addressing the distortions of history that infect their national narratives, of comprehending the lives of each community, of humanising the enemy. So what does the UCU do? It embraces the politics of conflict. Where is the support for organisations that work across the divide - e.g. IPCRI or One Voice? No mention even of Zochrot, an education project to translate the experience of the Palestinian Nakba into Hebrew. UCU act as if there was no Israeli left or peace movement with roots in Israeli academic institutions.
The present situation is indeed a Palestinian tragedy, simply read the ILO report on conditions in the Occupied Territories for confirmation. Will it be eased by this gesture politics, driven by a misconceived and ill-informed ideological project? Not one bit. The Palestinians need and deserve better.
UPDATE
Read Norm here
“While Motion 25 stands, the union is a tainted, a befouled, organization; it is a cesspit. It accommodates people who would treat their Israeli counterparts as pariahs. It should be held in contempt and shunned. The only good reason for anyone now to belong to UCU is to exert themselves to take it back from the boycotters and turn it into something better than a cesspit”.
The only point of departure for me is that there are other purposes to membership. They are to take collective action to defend, for instance, adult education nationally and to deal with the sometimes difficult industrial relations we can face locally. I have a funny feeling that the proposers of Motion 25 couldn’t give a toss about either.
For anyone interested - the dirty ultra-right wing non-historian apologist for imperialism and colonialism and other assorted atrocities, genocides and shit like that - Niall Ferguson - wrote a piece for The Times that is so obnoxious I wasn’t going to even mention it. However - I feel I must.
Disgusting filth like Ferguson should have their ‘jobs’ taken away from them and their families should be deported to islands where no water or food is readily available. Disgusting turd apologist scum and that, that’s what he is and that. Can we not have a place built to house these vermin on said island? I would volunteer for such an enterprise so I would. I am handy with bricks and shit.
A few years ago, I remember Nike was flogging a T-shirt that featured Michael Jordan with his arms spread out all fucking jesus-like, and underneath the picture was the quotation “No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings.” A Blake quote and all that. It may have been better to have used: “Enough Of This Pissing Fucking Bullshit For Once And For All”.
When some comedian emailed me a link to our Bren’s latest foray into the Mouth of Madness™, titled Down with the Dalai Lama, I was expecting an account of an evening’s particularly hardcore chanting, but no — rather than getting down with the Dalai, the invertebrate ‘contrarian’ has laced on his kicking boots, laid into old baldy’s slats, and launched into a king-sized moan about what a bastard he (Dalai) is.
Has there ever been a political figure more ridiculous than the Dalai Lama?
Yes, but who really cares? The Dalai is a ‘battering ram’ in a ‘culture war’ with China — not that Dalai Lama supporters would recognise this. Why are these ‘westerners’ so attached to the Dalai Lama? It seems that many set store by obscurantism, if you consider the cures and soothsaying peddled everywhere — horoscopes and reiki and homeopathic remedies. Many, who have absolutely no ‘problem’ with modernity, are merely revolted by cruelty, and the Dalai Lama appears to them to offer a more humane alternative to Chinese occupation — unless you seriously believe that Tibetans are desperate for the reintroduction of feudalism and serfdom. Still others — hiya! — don’t really care one way or another about the Dalai Lama, but support the cause of Tibetan self-determination.
Granted the Dalai Lama has done really bad things, such as edit an edition of Vogue and appear in an Apple advertisemment — if he’d done Nuts and PCWorld and signed up for the new series of Big Brother he’d be alright.
There is a glimmer of hope in the CiF comments. One wag asks:
What next? Aung San Su Kyi: A Right Bitch”?
More like Your Pets Are Trying to Eat You — Eat Them Now or better The Strawmen are out to get us — we must kill them before it’s too late.
This week we’ve had the excellent news that the British government has decided to overrule a faction within the military which insists that the use of cluster munitions is justified. This despite the fact that the bomblets have a tendency to take the limbs and lives of inquisitive children.
Another dodgy military technology in the news this month is depleted uranium, which is added to shells and armour-piercing bullets to give them added oomph. The problem is that residual amounts of the U-235 isotope present in depleted uranium can persist in the environment for decades, damaging internal organs and triggering cancers. Decontaminating battlefields involves collecting and disposing of munitions fragments by hand, but this crude litter collection cannot deal with the uranium dust that coats the sites in question.
There is a solution, however. Researchers led by Geoffrey Gadd at the University of Dundee have found that several common types of fungi can grow on depleted uranium and digest it. When the fungi are put into contact with the metal, it becomes coated with a yellow substance that includes several forms of uranyl phosphate. These compounds can lock-in the uranium, preventing its uptake by plants and animals.
Obviously the best solution would be to cease using munitions that contain depleted uranium. But in the short term at least the fungal fix is good news. Apart from military enthusiasts for depleted uranium munitions, I imagine that the only objectors are those who claim that environmental amelioration technologies give license to polluters.
This Utube is great on a number of levels.
As the source says … “she would give Chris Rock a run for his money…”
Enjoy:
In response to Mike Ion’s post about the best way to confront the BNP, Chris Dillow makes the following argument:
“The fact is that our electoral system gives Labour little incentive to fight the far-right, or listen to its core supporters.Labour will not lose the next election because of the rise of the BNP in places like Stoke (Mike’s example). It makes no difference if Labour’s 10,000 majorities in Stoke’s constituencies are cut by thousands because of the BNP or abstainers. What will cost Labour the election is the loss of places like Worcester or Oxford West. And although abstentions or BNP votes by white working class voters in those areas could be a problem, they are less a danger than middle-income floating voters swinging to the Tories. It was his grasp of this fact that helped Blair win three elections.
So, could it be that ignoring its core support - and the rise in the BNP this threatens - is one of the prices we must pay for our first-past-the-post system?”
Oh dear, oh dear. I’m inclined to apologise in advance for the tone of this response because electoral systems is part of the Modern Studies syllabus and while I’m a fan of our Chris, I’m really struggling to avoid going into default sarcasmo-teacher mode here - which is what I would be doing if one of my senior pupils submitted an essay with an evidence-free bullshit argument like this.
Every pupil knows - or at least the ones that attend my classes do - that PR facilitates the representation of minorities that tend to be penalized in a majoritarian voting system. All very well and good if these minority parties are cuddly ones like those Greens who want you to put windmills on your roof. But we hope that they would also be able to grasp that the representation of minorities isn’t an unalloyed benefit if the minorities in question happen to be vicious bastards like the BNP.
We would then go on to make an international comparison. I don’t concern myself with English local government on the grounds that a) we’re not English b) it’s not in the syllabus c) it’s boring - and compare national legislatures instead. We can confine ourselves to this point: with the exception of Germany, which has banned explicitly neo-Nazi parties for obvious historical reasons, there is only one other European country that has no representatives from fascist parties in its national legislature. That country is Britain. We could congratulate ourselves for a national character that proscribes this - but I take the view that FPTP might just have something to do with it. No Greens - but no fascists either: that may be the price we pay for our majoritarian system. If so, it’s one well-worth paying.
But too much is claimed for voting systems anyway and a lot of crap - historical and contemporary - is written about them as a consequence. Weimar? Don’t get me started. PR produces greater economic growth? It shouldn’t have taken the rise of China before this was filed under ‘bullshit’. Increases voter turnout? See all these journos and bloggers who pontificate about the international situation - have they heard of a small province at the north of Britain called Scotland? Evidence past and present would tend to suggest not. PR is ‘fairer’? It’s a coincidence that parties tend to argue that the system that is ‘fair’ just so happens to benefit them, is it? Gimme a fucking break. Actually, there is an exception to this: one party in Scotland opposed both devolution and the PR system Holyrood adopted - despite the fact that they clearly benefited - and this would be the Scottish Tories. But don’t give them too much credit for this because they seem to have changed their minds recently. Funny that.
In this vein, I need to qualify the above observations about far-right representation. There’s another country in Europe that doesn’t have this in its national legislature and it is Scotland. Will this be enough to ditch this nonsense about voting systems? Greater variables are at play. We have PR yet no BNP. Amongst the reasons for this is because the BNP are, despite their name, a fundamentally English phenomenon. But what if this were not so - ditch PR? No, no - ask yourself: what do you want your voting system to do - then leave it at that. There are other ways of dealing with the far-right and here I find myself in disagreement with Mike Ion as well as Chris. Address the problems of the working class because it is a matter of good policy, of justice, but fuck the BNP. Hasn’t history taught us that fascists have moveable grievances that take on a momentum of their own and have little connection with their supposed original ’causes’?
Here I find my liberalism stretches only so far as to give them enough rope to hang themselves. Should this fail they should be crushed without pity. You can complain that this is undemocratic and illiberal if you like but understand this: remembering that the concept of ‘enemies of the state’ has sinister precedents shouldn’t blind us to the fact that the state does indeed have enemies - and that history teaches us liberty folds when it has delegitimized the means by which it must defend itself. Or to understate it another way: one should be parsimonious with the freedom we allow those who would extend it to no-one but themselves.
On Sunday South African President Thabo Mbeki finally spoke out against the murderous xenophobic violence perpetrated against migrants and refugees in South Africa, a great number of whom, it should be noted, have fled the violence, oppression and starvation in neighbouring Zimbabwe–on which he remains silent.
The violence against the weak and the vulnerable–which has seen the return of the abominable practice of ‘necklacing’–is worse than deplorable, although it is not unfathomable if you look beneath the veneer of the post-Apartheid state. The prescription as advocated by various Western liberals–and increasingly–governments, was simple: enfranchise the population and all else will follow.
As has become increasingly obvious to anyone paying attention since 1994, national liberation is not sufficient–it is not enough to hand power from one elite to another and wait for things to take care of themselves, as the gulf between the poor and the middle class widens in an expanding economy–there is now a greater distribution of inequality. The problems of atomisation and increasing stratification of wealth and class are not confined to South Africa, although the effects and levels of poverty are particularly acute–as the poor of the townships direct their anger not at the ruling class, but on those who have even less than they do.
If things have not changed for the majority, it is evident that little has changed in the Afrikaaner heartland either. Simon Reeve, visiting the town of Louis Trichardt remarked that things appear to have changed dramatically–the town centre was previously the domain of white farmers–however, appearances are deceiving, as Boer militias train with assault weapons in the bush in order that they are ready to ‘handle’ any serious attempt to overturn existing social relations. Reeve, shooting an AK47, said the experience made him feel strangely powerful–to which his Boer host responded with great candour ‘that’s the problem’, ie the power which emanates from the barrel of the gun undermines the ‘natural’ ‘authority’ of the white farmer. Later Reeve showed disgusting, bloated Boer vigilante pigs patrolling the border, having arrogated to themselves the authority to stop and search people, before trussing them with plasticuffs to be returned to starvation.
The South African experience is a text book example of the failure of the neo-liberal economic model to address the problems of states on the periphery of capitalism, although what else could the ANC have done but become part of the global economy? You cannot have socialism in one country. The root cause of the impotence of the ANC government is South Africa’s subservient position as a former outpost of imperialism.
In conclusion–No One Is Illegal.
The annual report of the International Labour Office (ILO) on the situation of workers of the occupied Arab territories depicts a much degraded employment and labour situation showing that the plight of the Palestinian people has deteriorated alarmingly in a number of respects (Note 1).“Working poverty is rising, genuine employment is declining, and frustration is growing”, the report says.
According to the report, only one person of working age (15 years and above) in three living in the occupied Arab territories was employed for all or part of the time, with unemployment hovering above 20 per cent. Over 80 per cent of the population in Gaza is now dependent on food aid as a result of the severe economic siege imposing a closing of all crossings save essential humanitarian supplies.
What’s more, about half of all Palestinian households are dependent on food assistance provided by the international community, a situation which has become even more critical with the rise in food prices, the report says.
The incidence of extreme poverty was 40 per cent of the population in Gaza and 19 per cent in the West Bank in November 2007, showing some improvement compared to November 2006 levels though remaining alarmingly high. According to the report, the reduction was mostly due to the resumption of wage payments to civil servants by the Palestinian Authority who regained the financial support of the international community.
The report was prepared for the ILO’s International Labour Conference which opens its annual session here on 28 May. The findings of the report are based on missions sent to the occupied Arab territories and Israel and to the Syrian Arab Republic earlier this year to assess the situation of workers of the occupied Arab territories, including the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan. The ILO mission also consulted with the Arab Labour Organization (ALO) and the League of Arab States in Cairo.
The report evokes the concerns of the ILO mission about the danger of a growing gap between peace talks, which have acquired a new momentum following the Annapolis Conference in November 2007, and the continuing ‘facts on the ground’ as reflected in closures, military incursions, checkpoints, the permits regime, the endless patience required to cross the Separation Barrier, the continuing construction within settlements, and ‘settlers-only’ roads, including the separation of East Jerusalem from the Palestinian territory.
“With the devastation of military action, and the continuing fine net of restrictions on movement, there is no doubt that economic and social hardship is mounting in the occupied Arab territories”, the report says, adding that “pitting the claim ‘security first, then peace’ against ‘peace as a condition for security’ leads to an impasse”.
According to the report, the unfolding employment crisis is compounded by systematic disregard of the fundamental right of Arab workers to equality of opportunity and treatment in employment and occupation.
The report also says that institutions representing free and democratic employers and workers are facing interference in their right to organize, leading to considerable difficulties in carrying out their basic functions.
In response to these challenges and in parallel with the ongoing political negotiations, the ILO will continue to support employment and decent work policies and programmes in the occupied Arab territories. In recent months, the ILO took important steps to revitalize its technical cooperation activities and develop a new programme of assistance, which aims to combine short-term job creation initiatives with longer-term capacity development goals.
The ILO remains committed to contribute, within its mandate, to a just and lasting settlement of the conflict in the firm conviction that decent work for all in the occupied Arab territories and Israel is a fundamental ingredient of peace.
Good to see esteemed comrade Hitchens is managing quite nicely to piss off all the people who should be pissed off (and on) while he is at the Hay Festival.
(Apparently he has been a bully).
I am perfectly well aware that there are many graver problems facing civilization, and many grosser violations of human rights being perpetrated as we speak. But this is something that we can all change at a stroke.
The Dude has made an appearance at The Hay Festival earlier today. New podcast of an interview now available from here*.
*(NB. unfortunately you will have to put up with Naomi Klein and George Monbiot and Gore Vidal and some other Guardianista bullshit all at the same time — actually, to be fair — Klein does make a couple of good points along the way).
The summer issue of Democratiya is online. Surveying the long list of reviews and articles my eye was caught by Philip Spencer’s piece on Daniel Cohn-Bendit and his new book, Forget 68.
There is a video here of a lecture by Danny the Red at Boston University, The Legacy of 1968: A European Perspective.
My interest is informed by having once taken a barefoot Cohn-Bendit on a midnight tour of Detroit. He wanted to find an auto plant where the security was lax enough for us to sneak inside. We were unsuccessful. Fun trying though.
A post at The Sauce by GraYhAm.
Here is a word salad — I now beg for comments. The end.
Eurovision voting is something to behold — a truly revelatory exercise in democracy — marvelous stuff and that.
Hilary Clinton isn’t best pleased about the system tho’ but.
You are the very reason for the downfall of Western Civilization with your Marxist Internationale mindset. It’s fat-assed goofs like you who ruin it for the rest of us with your torturous war-mongering dirty-dog wars. [link: http://www.natparty.com/wda.htm]
The missus says, “That’s not true. You have a very nice little ass.”
More on the white-power scum who say my ass is big here.
All because of this essay.
Previously: “Then there’s this one, often uttered in the form of a question: ‘Is this the right mission for Canada?’ This is the foreign-policy version of the question: ‘Does this make my ass look big?’ ”
[link to scum removed]
When I travelled through Israel in 2007, it dawned on me why the Arab states are so reluctant to let their countrymen cross over into Israel. They fear that the traveller might make comparisons – between the civil rights in Israel and those in their homeland, for example … he might suddenly see the injustice, the betrayal, to which the Arabs in his homeland have had a lifetime’s exposure in the name of “occupied Palestine”.
Najem Wali pleads for peace - and for freedom for Arab peoples as part of the realisation of the dream of the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz, in a 1978 letter to the Israeli Sasson Somekh:
“I dream of the day when, thanks to the collaboration among us, this region will become a home overflowing with the light of learning and science, and blessed by the highest principles of heaven.”
Opposing islamism does not entail the wholesale absorption of advanced capitalist ideology nor does it entail embracing racist Yank claptrap. One must rise above the malaise - not grasp the fucking malaise.
eg: http://www.hurryupharry.org/2008/05/23/dramatic-exeter/
The fuckfaced (and now severly disfigured) ignorant cunt responsible for the bomb shite is quite obviously a lunatic.
There is no news here.
The blog post at the shitehole Sauce is just a recycled report. It is in the press and there is nothing interesting or dramatic about it. Blogs aren’t readable unless there is either original reportage (rare) or personal opinions and experience, humour and/or links to good stuff you would like to share. The thick fucker has posted none of that — vile shitness is the result.
The only possible point(s) you could make about the news item is that islamist ideology has somehow become a ‘portable ideology’ — this has escaped the grand intellect of Sauce filth. Nothing else could be said on the matter — other than that the stupid prick responsible for said bomb is in need of some fucking help (medical) and a spell in a secure unit.
The scum at HP Sauce are ignorant racist filth — muzzie this and muzzie that — ten posts a fucking day on it — the fucking arseholes — they should all write for the Daily Fucking Mail.
PS — Hilary fucking Clinton on the masthead!!!!!!????? Whaaaaaaaaaat?
