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Greedy energy companies - take them over

Ellie Keen — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 20:45:38 +0000

New Labour has climbed down before big business again, on the issue of a windfall tax on the energy companies.

Brown’s pathetic advice, that the elderly should wrap up warm and switch off lights when prices go up, makes you wonder whether we voted for Labour or the Big Six gas and electricity companies to run the country in the last election. Brown says he has a cunning plan to lag people’s cavity walls and lofts and save fuel bills in the long term, rather than a windfall tax now. The trouble is, there is no doubt that more people will die in the short term – this winter – as a direct result of the hike in heating bills.

‘Money for us’

They will also die as a direct result of the cowardice of Brown and this government. Let’s hope for all concerned that it’s a mild winter. E.ON senior executive Mark Owen-Lloyd remarked that spiralling fuel bills "will make money for us." E.ON ‘only’ made £877m profit last year. The Big Six are looking at £4.5bn profits this year. Owen-Lloyd’s little joke shows the contempt that the fuel barons correctly feel for this gutless government. Does he sound as if he could care less that millions more will end up in fuel poverty or that thousands of elderly people could die of hypothermia this winter, faced with the choice of heating or eating?

The facts are not in dispute. The Big Six energy companies are responsible for distributing 98% of gas. E.ON also owns Powergen, which supplies electricity to millions of households. They are members of a sinister body, the Energy Retail Association. It costs £100,000 to become a member. Meetings are ‘private and confidential.’ These people have the power to drive millions into fuel poverty and to cause thousands of deaths with excessive heating bills. They stick up two fingers to us, the British people and the elected government, and declare, ‘Mind your own business.’ What they’re plotting is our business – it’s our standard of living they’re attacking.

Adam Smith

We may well be inclined to draw the same conclusion as that champion of free markets, Adam Smith, "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."

We see them now in the process of edging up prices, colluding in fleecing the consumers – ‘After you, Claude’. EDF have put prices up by 22% so far this year, and there’s more to come. Household fuel bills are soaring as we write. Average household energy bills are likely to be over £1,000 – some say £1,200 – by the end of the year. 4.5 million people are in fuel poverty, defined as spending more than 10% of disposable income on heating bills. More families are being tipped over the edge by ever-rising prices. There could be 6 million fuel poor by the end of the year.

Windfall tax?

Socialist Appeal believes the only solution to these desperate problems for working people is the renationalisation of the gas and electricity companies, as we shall explain later. The demand for a windfall tax on windfall profits among trade unions Party members and rank and file Labour MPs is understandably popular. We believe a windfall tax is better than no windfall tax, though it’s not a permanent solution to the problem of rising heating costs.

After all the energy companies have shown no entrepreneurial skills to ‘deserve’ this money. They have just marked up their prices with the price of oil, and their profit margins increase automatically. How hard is that? Oil prices are important for electricity generation and because the price of natural gas is closely linked with the price of oil. But hang on, oil prices were $150 a barrel a couple of months ago and now they have slipped below $100. Aren’t we all due a rebate? Don’t be silly! It is a characteristic of oligopoly industries that they put prices up when costs go up and don’t put them down when costs go down. It’s evidence that they are ‘a conspiracy against the public.’

Dividends

Brown and New Labour hope the energy giants will invest. Fat chance! Last year they declared £1.64bn in dividends, up from £1.38bn the previous years. Shareholders must be licking their lips at the bonanza they’ll get as a result of the increases this year. In the end it’s our money, of course. Dividends just fly out of the industry without even touching the sides.

The plunderers oppose a windfall tax. David Porter, spokesperson for the Association of Electricity Producers, warns, "Whenever people impose costs on an industry like ours, inevitably the bill to some extent always ends up with the customer." He might as well have said, ‘To hell with you. Either way, we’ll shaft you.’

So we’ll pay either way. This is more proof that the Big Six are abusing monopoly power. That is the case for renationalisation in a nutshell. These greedy parasites are holding us all to ransom. It is high time we took them over.

From fantasy finance to global crash

Ellie Keen — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 21:17:45 +0000

When corporations at the heart of American capitalism, Ford and General Motors, find themselves close to bankruptcy, there is no surer sign that financial mayhem is turning into economic disaster for the masses who actually work for a living rather than speculate with other people’s money and lives.

As Wall Street crashed (again) yesterday, the car giants found themselves in the eye of the storm, their shares valued at next to nothing. Sales have slumped as lending to consumers dries up. Both Detroit corporations had their credit ratings reduced to “junk”, making it impossible for them to borrow. Bankruptcy looms as the unthinkable becomes reality.

In Britain, the trade deficit between imports and exports is the biggest since the end of the 17th century. Paul Dales, UK economist at Capital Economics, said the data supported other evidence suggesting that Britain entered a recession in the past three months. Exports orders have fallen rapidly as the global economy goes into reverse.

So as finance ministers from the major economies began to gather for an emergency session in Washington, we had this admission from Alistair Darling yesterday: “The world economy is changing. Sticking with the solutions of the past is not an option. Now, more than ever, we need new ideas.” But this is the man who has been a willing, even fervent promoter of the no-alternative school which holds that global capitalism is the only game in town.

So all of their energy, as well as our savings, taxes, pensions, livelihoods, and council services, are devoted to the task of ensuring that the system survives. The “new idea” is that politicians pledge to work together to do “whatever it takes” to restore “stability”. The plan is that the bankers cash in and the rest of us take the pain. In that, all the major bourgeois parties are agreed in an outbreak of “bipartisanship”, which meant the House of Commons devoted an entire 19 minutes to the crisis yesterday. Democracy? It’s a luxury at a time of national crisis.

Certainly there can be no effective action to prevent the descent into an unprecedented slump. And the market speculators know it, selling shares not just in banks but in retailers and manufacturers. The souring of relations between Britain and Iceland, with the government using anti-terror laws to freeze accounts, shows how the breakdown of the global financial system turns friends into enemies overnight.

We’re not alone in pointing out that following the 1929 Crash, it took a decade and a half of the Great Depression and the destruction of surplus productive capacity and tens of millions of human beings in a world war. Only then, could the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement establish the basis for restarting the process of profit making and capital accumulation.

The post-war period of growth induced by a controlled expansion of the money supply began to suffer a series of worsening setbacks and shocks from the end of the 1960s. Control had given way to uncontrolled inflation and the Bretton Woods arrangements broke down in 1971. This left the world prey to three and a half decades of naked credit-led growth. This produced global corporations and subservient governments which encouraged gross over-consumption.

It had to end. More and worse financial shocks reverberated around the world throughout the 1990s. The bursting of dot com bubble in 2000 was the writing on the wall. When the outpouring of commodities bought on credit overwhelmed the consumers’ ability to service their debts by 2004, the game was already up. (NB Chancellor Darling).

Darling says that “All forecasters, including the International Monetary Fund, have been surprised by the profound impact of this shock.” Not us, chum. We wrote about it in 2004 in our book A World to Win. And we continued to study it until, at the end of 2007, we published A House of Cards, with its prophetic sub-title, from fantasy finance to global crash.

But Darling is right about one thing, sticking to “solutions of the past” won’t do the trick. A revolutionary break with the past is needed in opposition to international plans for bailing out bankers while ordinary people suffer. We’ll be discussing our solutions on Saturday week, October 18, at the Stand Up for Your Rights festival. And, we can promise you, we won’t be talking about how to save the present financial and economic system.

Batting for bankers

tim — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 21:32:12 +0000

Gordon Brown’s plan to “nationalise” Bradford & Bingley is simply a smaller-scale replica of the Bush administration’s bail-out of a banking sector bleeding to death from self-inflicted wounds.

The Prime Minister is batting for the bankers, intervening, with our cash, to ensure a resurgence of banking activity and private profits.

As with Northern Rock, over which government dithered for six months, transfixed by fear over the N word, Mr Brown is not opting for nationalisation to extend democratic control of the economy.

He plans to land us with £41 billion of shaky B&B mortgages, which no other bank is prepared to take off its hands, while selling the 200 high street B&B offices and savings business to other institutions.

This is in addition to the £20 billion plus interest that the government still has invested in Northern Rock.

These huge figures dwarf the costs associated with such proposals as a decent state pension, free prescriptions, abolition of student fees, provision of student grants, renationalisation of rail and utilities, which have all been rejected by new Labour on cost grounds.

As with imperialist wars, for which Mr Brown decreed that “whatever is necessary” would be found, new Labour has infinite funds to bail out the private sector and nothing but soft soap for measures to defend working-class living standards.

While working people are expected to tighten their belts, accepting below-inflation pay rises and job losses – 20,000 of which are likely in Britain’s financial sector alone – the reckless profiteers in banking boardrooms are cosseted by cash hand-outs.

The PM played to the gallery at Labour Party conference, insisting on greater corporate responsibility and a curb on excessive pay-outs, which seduced some trade unionists into believing that a change of direction was in the offing.

Don’t be fooled. The details of his B&B nationalisation plan illustrate where his priorities lie.

He and Chancellor Alistair Darling claim that their ministerial experience means that they are best fitted to see us through this latest crisis of capitalism, but they reject the view that it has arisen largely as a result of their obsessions with reliance on market forces and minimal regulation.

The B&B collapse also marks the utter failure of building society demutualisation, with every single society that opted for conversion to a bank and engaged in a voracious profits campaign, based on borrowing cheaply on world markets to fund buy-to-let and overambitious 125 per cent mortgages, going belly up to be swallowed up by bigger banks or rescued by the government.

In contrast, Nationwide, which has remained a mutual, has thrived and been in a position to help smaller societies facing difficulty.
Surely a reality check is called for by government leaders rather than a suicidal steady-as-she-sinks complacency.

The government’s neoliberal strategy is a disaster. It has failed and there has to be a change of direction or the boardroom excesses of recent years will return to haunt us, as will today’s attempts to resolve the crisis at the expense of working people.

B&B should certainly be nationalised as an entity, prime assets as well as bouncing cheques, and this, together with Northern Rock, should form a national bank to offer probity and stability in contrast to the reckless greedfest of the private sector.

Unusual suspects

Alex Doherty — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 17:48:21 +0000

White collar crime, which includes fraud and crimes committed by corporations, businesses and professional groups, is generally excluded from the zero tolerance approaches and calls for tough punishment attracted by what is popularly represented as ‘crime’. Yet the high toll of death, disease, injury, economic loss and damage to the environment which these crimes cause has consistently been argued to exceed that of other crimes. This article will firstly explore the significance, in the Scottish context, of these offences, before turning to consider how more innovative approaches could be adopted in an effort to control them.

The economic impact of these crimes is considerable. Fraud has recently been said to be increasing and to cost every person in Scotland £330 each year (Scottish Government Press Release 12/5/08), and that, says Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary for Scotland in its 2008 report, excludes the cost of tax evasion. This, along with many other forms of fraud, is extremely difficult to estimate, and the report accepts that the real extent of fraud is impossible to assess. What is certain is that Governments have far fewer resources at their disposal as a result of the many and varied tax evasion schemes of wealthy individuals and corporations for whom avoiding taxes is good business practice. The Scottish economy, like any other, is also vulnerable to global trends and spectacular company frauds, like that of Enron, have a rippling effect and reduce the legitimacy of business and finance. It is also notable that United States agencies are investigating the criminal aspects of the current ‘credit crunch’ (Herald 25/06/08). Other major losers from fraud include the National Health Service, which loses at least 1 per cent of its annual budget to fraud – a situation prompting the Scottish Government to proclaim a policy of zero tolerance. While fraud in this area is often associated with ‘scroungers’ and patients falsely claiming free prescriptions, professional groups are also involved. Examples reported include dentists claiming to have used precious instead of non-precious metals in fillings and falsifying claims for NHS work; opticians claiming for more expensive lenses than have either been needed or supplied; pharmacists claiming for expensive brand name drugs when cheaper alternatives have actually been dispensed, and GPs, who have prescribed these drugs and been found to have had ‘inappropriate’ relationships with representatives of pharmaceutical companies (Sunday Herald 26/01/08).

Corporate activities have also been associated with deaths, injuries and diseases, documented in a recent book by criminologists Steve Tombs and Dave Whyte (Tombs and Whyte 2007, Safety Crime, Willan Publishing). Deaths alone easily exceed those attributed to homicide. Scottish examples are all too well known. They include the deaths of 21 old age pensioners in Wishaw in 1997 following the failure, on the part of the butcher, John Barr to follow routine food preparation procedures; the death, in 1999, of the Findlay family in Wishaw in a gas explosion caused by the failure of TRANSCO to maintain supply pipes, and the death of six workers in the Stockline explosion in May 2004, again caused by a failure to check gas safety. 2008 saw the twentieth anniversary of the 167 deaths aboard the rig Piper Alpha, amidst reports that despite many subsequent changes, there is still much to be done to make oil rigs safe, a grim reminder of which was the death of two workers at the North Sea Brent Bravo platform in September 2003. To this high toll must be added the individual deaths which far less often receive headline publicity, and countless injuries, stress and occupationally caused diseases in the workplace. Consumers can also be injured and made ill as a result of contaminated food, dangerous toys, about which warnings abound at Christmas, inadequately regulated chemicals in household cleaners, toiletries and cosmetics, and the as yet unknown long term consequences of additives in food.

Environmental crime is also a major problem, and its impact includes the death of wildlife from illegal emissions of chemicals and farm slurry, the contamination of drinking water, sea water and beaches and its effects on the volume of damaging emissions. Scottish Water has been described as Scotland’s ‘most frequently prosecuted environmental criminal’ having amassed 16 prosecutions in just over three years. And these, argue Friends of the Earth, are merely the ‘tip of the iceberg’ (Sunday Herald 9/02/08). In addition the Scottish Government itself faces legal proceedings from the EU in respect of this and other matters including conservation, the quality of beaches and failures to meet pollution targets (Observer 4/05/08).

In addition, a whole host of questionable corporate activities affect us daily including bargain offers which aren’t bargains, meat and food which contain higher than permitted amounts of water and additives, and misleading advertisements. These very often lie on a fine line between honesty and dishonesty, legality and illegality. Phrases such as ‘healthy’, ‘traditional’, ‘low fat’ or ‘organic’ are often abused and pictorial images of foods often give a false impression of the size of portions or the origins of the food. Power companies have been notorious for ‘aggressive marketing’ on the part of sales representatives on the doorstep, persuading consumers to change their supplier on the promise, later unfulfilled, of large savings. The unsolicited phone calls which many companies now make, again promising savings, can be seen as intrusive and as examples of what could well be called anti-social business behaviour.

Many of these activities, including the most serious, are not, of course, widely or popularly represented as ‘crime’. Incidents which cause single or mass deaths are routinely presented as ‘accidents’, a description which, by implying inevitability and the operation of chance, all too often conceal a long history and indeed a culture of neglecting regulations. Phrases such as ‘misselling’ or ‘wrongdoing’ are often used to describe what are, in effect, fraudulent or corrupt practices. Victims may not be in a position to detect offences and, even when harm is done, very often do not report them as crime. A large number of offences, therefore, are not fully investigated, not prosecuted and, as will be seen below, leniently sentenced. Many are not the province of the police but a host of enforcement agencies such as the Health and Safety Executive, Environmental or Trading Standards Officers, who suffer from declining resources and very often prefer to issue warnings or advice rather than recommend prosecution. The Piper Alpha case was never prosecuted despite evidence of breaches of regulations.

Fines are the most widely used sentence but are often seen as far too small. Most recently, two companies responsible for the death of a baker in Maryhill who was hit by a faulty tail-lift were fined £33, 500 (BBC News Scotland 5/11/07), and a consultation paper for a proposed Bill on equity fines cites the average fine for offences related to injuries or deaths of employees between 2001 and 2005 in Scotland as £17,482 ( www.scottish.parliament.uk/s3/bills/MembersBills/pdfs/CriminalSentencing… ). This follows considerable criticism of, for example, the total fine of £200,000 fine given to Stockline in 2007, widely reported as amounting to a mere £44,000 per life (Scotsman 29/08/07). Even the £15 million fine given to TRANSCO, while hailed as a ‘record’ UK fine, could be criticised as amounting to a mere four per cent of the company’s profit. In these cases, victims and their relatives often complain about a lack of justice.

In part this reflects the use of regulatory legislation such as the Health and Safety at Work Act, widely associated with lower fines. For cases resulting in death, an alternative avenue is to prosecute for corporate homicide or corporate killing, which, however, is notoriously difficult to do, due to the legal requirement that a company can only be prosecuted if an individual director can also be identified as culpable – a test which is increasingly irrelevant given the size and complexity of corporate decisions. Many jurisdictions, including Scotland, have recently reviewed this legislation, and an expert group made several recommendations ( www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2005/11/14133559/35592 ). In the event however, the then Scottish Executive decided, controversially, that this was a reserved matter and the new Corporate Manslaughter and Homicide Act 2007 covers the whole of the UK. This Act, while containing some improvements, did not go so far as the expert group had recommended in moving away from the doctrine of identification, does not include provisions for the prosecution of individual managers and did not at the time consider sanctions. These, amongst other issues, have been the subject of calls, by the STUC and other groups, for new legislation for Scotland, and indeed, Cathy Jamieson, Minister of Justice at the time of the rejection of Scottish legislation is now said to support it (Herald 21/08/08). At the same time, members of the current government, who supported legislation while in opposition, appear reluctant to re-open the issue.

The issue of sentences continues to be debated. Monetary penalties are generally regarded as too small and other jurisdictions have introduced a wider range of innovative measures. These include, for example, requirements to name and shame companies, provisions for corporate probation and corporate community service, under which the resources and knowledge of corporations can be used to the advantage of victims and the community, thus providing elements of restorative justice. These, also recommended by the Expert Group, have attracted widespread support and it is not yet clear if the (albeit limited) range of penalties envisaged for England and Wales will be introduced in Scotland. These include proposals to increase monetary penalties by relating fines to a company’s turnover, and the recent consultation paper, referred to above, proposes the introduction, in Scotland, of equity fines, related to the overall value of the company. In addition, this paper, which ensures that the issue of sentences remains on the political agenda, also proposes to introduce company background inquiry reports, necessary for courts to establish accurate information about the company’s finances and their history of compliance. These proposals are limited, however, to monetary penalties and relate only to serious offences. For other offences, The Regulatory Enforcement and Sanctions Act of 2008, which encompasses a very wide range of regulatory areas, does include the possibility of equivalents to probation or community service orders, but so far these are only seen as civil, not criminal, sanctions.

This reflects the trend, across many areas, to secure ‘better regulation’ by reducing the amount of ‘burdensome’ regulations. Indeed the proposals in the Regulatory Enforcement and Sanctions Act are based on the assumption that the criminal law is over, rather than under-used against businesses. Despite this however, it can be argued that there is considerable scope for the Scottish Government to consider new and innovative proposals for both legislation and sentencing which might go some way towards meeting victims’ complaints and recognising the significance and harm associated with white collar and corporate crime.

Hazel Croall is Professor of Criminology at Glasgow Caledonian University and served as a member of the Scottish Executive Expert Group on Corporate Homicide.

No principles and no bottle

tim — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 14:16:24 +0000

Conspicuous by his absence in the running order at next week’s TUC in Brighton is, Yes, you’ve guessed it, Prime Minister Gordon Brown, the man who will don his dinner jacket and go running to address City bankers at the drop of a fiver.

And it’s hardly surprising, given that he has been instrumental in betraying everything that the labour movement stands for ever since he took office.

His government’s decision to rule out cash handouts for households struggling with soaring fuel bills was rightly blasted by the trade unions on Friday as a “downright disgrace.”

And his abject surrender to the power companies over their obscene profiteering demonstrates why this newspaper has no time for a man whose treachery has long outweighed any good that he has ever done.

Mr Brown’s wittering on about “no short-term giveaways and gimmicks” does nothing to obscure the fact that he hasn’t had the bottle to take the power firms to task over their highway robbery of working people and has, instead, reneged on his government’s commitment to ease the burden of the increasing number of people who find themselves struggling in fuel poverty.

Talk about energy efficiency, “reducing bills not just temporarily, but permanently,” does nothing to disguise his rubber-stamping of the utilities’ distribution of vastly increased profits to shareholders at the expense of the consumers. And any such savings would be quickly absorbed as the companies continued to jack up prices without restraint.

The outrageous cheek of counterposing the need to make the country more fuel-efficient against the urgent necessity of controlling the privateers in their continued plundering of the nation has infuriated the trade unions and explains why Mr Brown has done a runner rather than face his critics in Brighton.

But face them he must at some time or another, since, without bringing the unions on board, his government doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of re-election.

But what on earth could he tell them?

That he doesn’t want to renationalise the utilities because it would offend his mates in the City and his colleagues in Brussels?

That the market mechanism is the best way of controlling prices, when it is clearly failing to do so?

That it is right that pensioners and the low paid should underwrite massively increased bonuses to shareholders while they are dying of cold or cutting their food budgets in order to do so?

Clearly, none of the answers above would serve.

And, equally clearly, Mr Brown has abandoned any hope of winning the next election for Labour.

It is unpleasantly obvious that new Labour has no answers, no principles and no intention of doing what is right for working people.

New Labour has nailed its colours to the mast of privateering, profiteering and blatant, unbridled capitalism.

It is no longer a question of merely challenging Mr Brown’s leadership of the Labour Party.

Brutally, Labour must remember its roots and honour its generations-long commitment to working people or it will disappear into the vaults of history as yet another failed project and will be replaced by an organisation of the working class which will honour its historic mission to defend and advance the interests of the poor, the oppressed and the exploited in a way that new Labour has no intention of doing.

Prisons- The Wrong Philosophy

tim — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 12:21:49 +0000

“Naive” is the kindest word that can be used to describe the decision by crime reduction charity Nacro to get into bed with private security contractor G4S to bid to run two prisons.

Nacro has a commendable record of opposing private prisons with their priority of producing profits and dividends for shareholders.

It has shared with other members of the Criminal Justice Alliance the view that prisons should not be used simply to lock away wrongdoers but should be part of process of turning people away from crime.

Indeed, there has been widespread agreement on the need to prioritise non-custodial sentences with service and supervision within the community taking the place of isolation and deprivation.

However, it is a giant step away from a general agreement on tackling crime that seeks to convince offenders to recognise their behaviour and to make amends for it to a willingness to be involved in a for-profits enterprise with G4S.

Nacro chief executive Paul Cavadino believes that, if reform charities are involved in the planning of a prison regime, prisons would be more likely to provide high-quality resettlement and rehabilitation.

Wrong, wrong, wrong! Private security contractors, whether G4S or any other company, will operate whichever regime shows the greater likelihood of generating profits for their shareholders.

Mr Cavadino’s mistake lies in believing that he and Nacro can isolate one part of the criminal justice system and engender a humanitarian regime.

But one look at the government’s approach, with its likely adoption of US-style Titan prisons, indicates that new Labour is pushing for profits to be the deciding factor, as it has done in the NHS and other public services.

Profits are prioritised on the basis of cutting down on expenditure, which is why privateers do not pay the same salaries or contribute to the same pension scheme as in publicly operated jails.

Is it likely that privatised prisons, in these same circumstances, would invest more heavily in rehabilitation, education and post-imprisonment supervision than the state sector?

You don’t get to rake in half-yearly profits of £175 million if you have been doing so.

The main problem with the Prison Service is that the government has not been prepared to invest in humane alternatives to the “lock ‘em up and throw the key away” approach favoured by right-wing tabloid newspapers.

It has adopted in reality the desperate and deceitful philosophy of former Tory home secretary Michael Howard, the absurd view that “prison works.”

If prison worked, we would not have the current high rates of recidivism, the widespread availability of class A drugs in jail, and the majority of prisoners having drugs or alcohol abuse problems.

Our prisons are overcrowded because the message coming from government is that more and more people should be locked up.

The government assures us that this illustrates its toughness.

It does no such thing. It is tougher for offenders to be compelled to confront what they have done and to be helped to find a better way of existence than reliance on crime.

Nacro will either be part of this tougher but more humane approach or it will fall for the privateers’ mantra that, if it brings in profits, it works.

Waiting for the barbarians

tim — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 09:56:49 +0000

In his verse ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’, Greek poet Constantine Cavafy describes a country where all public life focuses on its enemies. Citizens wait in the forum because ‘the barbarians are due’. The emperor and consuls are dressed in their finest garments to impress the barbarians when they arrive. Normal laws are suspended, and parliamentary debates cancelled during the present barbarian danger. Then the worst possible news reaches the city: ‘... the barbarians have not come. / And some who have just returned from the border say there are no barbarians any longer.’ The barbarians’ failure to materialise hurts more than their expected arrival – after all, ‘... what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? They were, those people, a kind of solution.’

A generation of Western politicians grew up during the Cold War, when the fear of the ‘barbarians’ of Russia and China was used as a key to international and domestic politics: all confrontations between the West and developing nations were recast as battles between freedom and communist tyranny. Anti-communism dominated home politics during the 1950s, and remained a significant force right up to the collapse of the Soviet bloc. Ideas to the left of the Democrats in US, or of social democracy in Europe, were often painted as illegitimate relations of the communist enemy. Some leading politicians seemed disorientated when the barbarians of the Soviet Union ceased to exist as a unified force. The Soviets had provided a ‘kind of solution’ to how to organise US and European government, and now they were gone.

Leaderships in the White House and Westminster have seized on the new terrorist threat as a new kind of useful barbarian, again shaping much of foreign and domestic policy into the frame provided by the ‘war on terror’. Relations with the developing world are determined according to who is on side in the battle against terrorism, and who harbours the diverse terrorist enemy. Authoritarian regimes like those of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia can be part of the coalition for freedom simply by declaring themselves against terrorism. Populations or nations that find themselves in conflict with the Western consensus – like many Iraqis, Palestinians and Iranians – are lumped together with Osama bin Laden’s small, violent network as part of the terrorist threat. Home politics are also bent towards an authoritarian, surveillance-happy ‘homeland security’, with the suspension of ordinary civil liberties and the enactment of emergency laws. The threat of the new barbarians provides a new and unhappy political ‘solution’. The theme of this book has been that, while legislators and officials are drawn to this political solution by themselves, they are also encouraged along this road by a substantial business lobby with a commercial interest in militaristic and authoritarian responses to the threat of terrorism.

The neoconservatives have a long history of building up the threat of the barbarians. In the 1970s George Bush Sr founded a group called ‘Team B’ to second-guess the CIA’s estimate of Russian weapons and intentions. This group, which included Paul Wolfowitz and other prominent neoconservatives, deliberately overestimated the scale of the Soviet military and the aggressive threat of the Russian leadership in an attempt to derail détente between East and West. From Team B developed the Committee on the Present Danger, a lobbying group which sought to keep up political pressure for a strong, interventionist US army. The Committee fought against anti-military feelings generated by the Vietnam failure, countering them by emphasising the Soviet threat. In effect the Committee on the Present Danger, led by neoconservative figures like Richard Perle, strained to keep the Cold War going. Unfortunately, these ideologues saw their present recede decisively into the past, when the Soviet bloc fell apart during the last decade of the twentieth century.

Unsurprisingly, given this past, neoconservatives like Cheney and Wolfowitz seized on the terrorist threat as a source of new barbarians. They set out an argument that would make the Islamist terrorists into an enemy around which all Western foreign policy – and a substantial amount of domestic policy – could turn. They enthusiastically embraced the idea that the terrorist menace could replace the red menace. A new ‘Committee on the Present Danger’ was formed by figures like James Woolsey to argue that the terrorist threat was not a ‘law enforcement issue’, but rather an ‘existential war’. The US leadership tried to frame all foreign policy questions in terms of the war on terror, in the same way that a previous generation of leaders had tried to squeeze all international conflicts into the frame of anti-communism.

During the Cold War, the US and British leaderships were willing to back any dictator, warlord or coup that was thought to provide protection against communism. For example, millions suffered and died while the West backed the South African regime and its vile proxies in Angola and Namibia, simply because they were seen as bulwarks against the red menace. In Southeast Asia, the Cold War was very hot, taking the form of the Vietnam War. In Central and South America it meant backing death squads against anyone – whether guerrilla or nun – who looked the least bit red. During the war on terror, all conflicts have been squeezed into the framework of the battle with Osama bin Laden – even when, as in the case of Iraq, such a connection had to be fabricated. As during the Cold War, reactionary, authoritarian and bloody regimes – Libya, Egypt, Uzbekistan – were welcomed aboard as long as they were ‘against terrorism’.

Perhaps it is not so surprising that Bush and Cheney tried to update old red-baiting strategies for the age of terror, and to use the war on terror to police domestic opposition to their policies. But Cold War nostalgia was not limited to the US. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown explicitly argued that the Cold War model should be used in the new war on terror – for example, in an article for Rupert Murdoch’s daily Sun newspaper. Brown’s apprentice in his previous post as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Ed Balls, made the same point in a radio interview. Brown wanted the Cold War analogy to sound reassuring after some of Prime Minister Blair’s bellicose stands, by emphasising the ‘cultural’ nature of the conflict with communism and the use of the ‘soft’ power of influence, as well as of the ‘hard’ power of war.

Brown said that the Western confrontation with the Soviets had been ‘a battle fought through books and ideas, even music and the arts’, and a ‘battle for hearts and minds’, as well as one of military power. The cultural war against communism included the covert funding of political organizations and magazines; the imposition of loyalty pledges; the removal of ‘unsound’ people from positions of influence, from Hollywood to local schools; the harassment of labour activists and campaigners – so Brown’s evocation of ‘soft power’ offered little comfort. It underlined the fact that Brown saw himself as continuing with the policy of making into a wide-ranging ‘war’ a conflict with the lethal but thankfully relatively small threat of domestic terrorism.

Brown’s comments about the Cold War were revealing in two ways. Firstly they showed that, though one of the main actors in the war on terror, Tony Blair, had walked off the stage, his understudy Gordon Brown intended to follow a similar script. Secondly, by invoking the Cold War Brown invited us to wonder whether the problems of the Cold War were going to be repeated in the war on terror. The theme of this book has been that President Eisenhower’s warnings about the ‘military–industrial complex’ can be restated for the war on terror: in short, there is a new ‘security–industrial complex’ made up of a circle of businessmen and politicians with a vested interest in responding to the terrorist threat with ever more aggressive, broad, expensive and counterproductive overreactions on the domestic and international fronts. Eisenhower’s warning came from the old Cold War years, but Brown’s attempted revival of one aspect of that conflict showed that the old warning could not, unfortunately, be treated as a mere historical curiosity.

One battle over Iraq, in 2007, affords a clear sense of how closely the British and US political leaderships were intertwined with business interests in the war on terror. The battle was not fought in the streets of Baghdad, but in the courts of Washington, D.C. Rival security companies launched legal actions and political lobbying campaigns to wrestle the most significant private military deal in the Iraq theatre – the ‘Reconstruction Support Services’ contract – out of the hands of Aegis, the British paramilitary company run by Tim Spicer.

This $280 million-a-year contract was at that point one of the most complete military privatisations ever. The deal put a private company in charge of mobile armed units, called Security Escort Teams, guarding the most important political figures. The contract also demanded that the company create and run ‘Reconstruction Operations Centres’ in Iraq, which would be in charge of all other private security companies in the country. These centres would manage military intelligence for the contractors, which they would also provide to the US army. Clauses in the contract said that the private company must have analysts with ‘NATO equivalent SECRET clearance’, who will conduct ‘analysis of foreign intelligence services, terrorist organizations, and their surrogates targeting Department of Defense personnel, resources and facilities’.

The contract places the contractor in charge of the most delicate military intelligence. After gathering this intelligence, the company is supposed to use its analysis both to assist the US army in its battle with the insurgency and to help direct the other security firms – keeping them out of harms way in the dangerous Iraqi ‘red zone’. Aegis itself codenamed this contract ‘Project Matrix’. The company told the Washington Post that its teams would go into Iraqi towns and cities and report back to the US – to ‘provide “ground truth” to the Army Corps’ – and help guide other contractors with ‘threat assessments for the people that travel the battlespace’.

Aegis worked hard to keep this lucrative contract. Spicer took great pains to build relations with the US state, hiring Kristi Clemens to run Aegis’s Washington office. Clemens had the right background to lobby for her new employer in the US. Clemens had previously been a spokesperson for Paul Bremer, the US viceroy in Iraq. She later became a Republican political appointee in the US Department of Homeland Security, but left that job after being accused of distorting public statements about terrorism to help get Bush re-elected.

Spicer also hired Robert MacFarlane as an Aegis director. MacFarlane had worked for Ronald Reagan, helping run the Iran–Contra operation. McFarlane was central the plot, which involved selling arms to Iran in return for hostage releases, while using the profits to pay for the ‘secret’ US backing of the Contras in their war against Nicaragua’s government. MacFarlane had been found guilty of misleading Congress in the affair, and had tried to kill himself with an overdose of Valium. He was later pardoned by President Bush Sr. A number of veterans of the Iran–Contra affair turned up in the administration of the younger President Bush, so MacFarlane was a useful contact. The advantage to Iraqis of these legal battles and struggles for influence is less obvious.

Spicer’s new links with the US security establishment did not guarantee that the company would be able to retain its grip on this slice of business. The contract was so central to the new military privatisation that other leading companies tried to take over, keen for their staff to be in charge of the ‘battlespace’ and the delivery of ‘ground truths’ in Iraq. When the contract came up for renewal in 2007, this jewel in the crown of military privatization attracted multiple bids. Two of the companies rejected from the bidding – the US firm Blackwater and the Anglo-South African Erinys – immediately launched court actions, demanding to be reconsidered. One of the consequences of privatisation was that the new wings of the Anglo-American intervention in Iraq now devoted valuable time and resources to fighting each other in court. Links with the political establishment – the British establishment as much as that of the American – were clearly prized by the security companies.

Two British firms were allowed to bid for this US security contract: Spicer’s Aegis and the Armor Group. Aegis had hired a prominent British politician – former Conservative defence minister (and grandson of Winston Churchill), Nicholas Soames. The Armor Group’s chairman was former Conservative defence secretary, Malcolm Rifkind. Rifkind had been Soames’s boss in the last Conservative administration, but now the two MPs were rivals in the battle for Iraqi security cash. The fact that the military companies were so keen to employ former ministers meant that any current or future politician knew that they could look forward to a lucrative career in the new security industry. The ‘revolving door’ between politicians and the security business provided the basis for the new security–industrial complex. It created a financial incentive for politicians to press forward with the subcontracting of state security services. In turn, the security industry had a vested interest in persuading politicians that new military interventions or extended police powers were feasible, and even positive ventures.

This game of musical chairs between positions of political influence and the boardrooms of the security industry is now well documented. Former Conservative leader Michael Howard sits alongside former CIA director William Webster on the advisory board of Diligence, a private intelligence company set up by former MI5 and CIA agents. The traffic of personnel between the new security industry and the leadership of Britain’s political parties affected both the Labour government and opposition. Prime Minister Gordon Brown made several ministerial appointments from outside his own party, announcing that he wanted a government ‘of all the talents’.

One such talent was the former First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Alan West. While Sir Alan had never been talented enough actually to be elected, he did have his admirers. After resigning from the navy, Sir Alan had become a paid adviser to a company called QinetiQ, which had been formed out of Britain’s military laboratories, which had themselves been sold to US-led private investors. QinetiQ’s workshops once housed the historical counterparts of ‘Q’ – the gadget man who supplies James Bond with his spy kit. The newly commercialised boffins knew which way the market was moving, and the firm set up a ‘rapidly expanding security business’ to deal with ‘homeland security’ issues. The company sells surveillance systems, ‘data mining’ programmes to identify ‘dangerous passengers’, scanning machines designed to identify dangerous weapons, and other high-tech security products.

Shortly after Brown appointed the ex-QinetiQ man, the leader of the Conservative opposition, David Cameron, made Dame Pauline Neville-Jones his own senior security advisor. She had formerly been the head of Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee, but in her retirement from public life had been chairwoman of QinetiQ for three years. So the security advisers to both the prime minister and the leader of the opposition had worked for the same security-focused company. The government could approach the terrorist threat politically or technically: it could aim to reduce the terrorist danger by trying to bring enough disaffected people into the political consensus, to isolate the hard core, violent minority; but it could also look to expensive computerized security systems as a way of trying to identify terrorist groups. The strong presence of security industry veterans in the political process makes the latter strategy more likely.

The nexus of links between the political class and the new security industry can both make company employees into ministers and ministers into company employees. Lord George Robertson – previously Labour defence secretary and then head of NATO – now works for Englefield Capital, a banking firm that owns GSL, which itself operates the private prisons, immigration detention centres and secure transport that form the backbone of the private security industry. The post-ministerial career of former home secretary, David Blunkett, includes a job advising Entrust, a Texas-based security firm bidding for work on Britain’s identity card. Former Labour cabinet minister Lord Barnett runs Atos Origin, a French-owned company also bidding for work on the identity card.

The US and British states have taken on new powers to fight the war on terror, and then promptly delegated these powers to a new and growing corporate sector. discontent over individual parts of the war on terror has not yet been enough to substantially shift British or US policy. One of the many reasons that the transatlantic leadership continues to reach for militaristic and authoritarian solutions to current crises is that there is now a substantial commercial lobby beckoning them in this direction. The first step towards unravelling the influence of the security–industrial complex is the recognition that it exists. I hope this book goes a little way towards making that possible.
Footnote

War on Terror, Inc: Corporate Profiteering from the Politics of Fear, by Solomon Hughes, is published by Verso, price £16.99

Labour proposes huge increase in state surveillance

tim — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 12:16:10 +0000

In a further escalation of the attack on democratic rights, the Labour government is proposing a huge increase in state surveillance. It is implementing new measures under the pretext of the “war on terror” to intrude ever deeper into the private lives of people who are viewed as potential criminals rather than citizens.

As things stand, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) introduced in 2004 allows hundreds of public bodies to monitor communications without a court warrant. The Commissioner for the Interception of Communications, Paul Kennedy, oversees 795 agencies and organisations permitted by RIPA to acquire communications data. These include 9 intelligence agencies, 52 police forces, 12 other law enforcement agencies, 139 prisons, 475 local authorities, and 108 other organisations such as the Post Office and the Food Standards Agency.

There were 519,000 requests for information in 2006/07, mainly from the police and security services—up from 440,000 the previous year. Official reports say law enforcement agencies were also authorised to “interfere with someone’s property” about 3,000 times in 2007/08, mount 355 “intrusive surveillance” operations (breaking in to someone’s property or planting a bug) and carry out 18,767 cases of “directed surveillance” (following someone and recording their activities).

Currently, telecommunications companies must store records of all phone calls for a year so that they can be examined. In 2005, Statewatch News Online revealed how T-mobile had “an automated e-mail system that allows law enforcement agencies to retrieve subscriber and billing details by consulting the system directly—all they need is a mobile phone number. This process requires no human intervention from T-mobile staff: the system automatically generates spreadsheets showing the subscriber and billing information and sends them to the law enforcement e-mail address.”

From next year, internet service providers will also be compelled to collect information about the web sites people visit and details of their emails. The Home Office said the new measures would force companies to store “a billion incidents of data exchange a day” and dismisses any concerns about these developments with the usual mantra, “we consider that these measures are a proportionate interference with individuals’ right to privacy to ensure protection of the public.”

There are plans to force all companies to hand over their data to one central “super” database so that government agencies will no longer need to submit requests to individual companies.

The government is also putting pressure on organisations besides the police and security services to make more use of spying powers. Kennedy complained, “I am concerned that so many authorities who applied for powers to be given to them, apparently do not use them and I do not know why this is … if this state of affairs continues unexplained, then consideration must be given to removing the powers from them.

“During the period covered by this report only 154 local authorities made use of their powers to acquire communications data. A total of 1,707 requests were made for communications data and the vast majority were for basic subscriber information. Very few local authorities have used their powers to acquire itemized call records in relation to the investigations, which they have conducted. Indeed our inspections have shown that generally the local authorities could make much more use of communications data as a powerful tool to investigate crime.”

UK Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, agreed saying, “The commissioners’ reports offer valuable oversight and provide reassurance that these powers are being used appropriately.” She added: “We need to ensure Ripa powers are used appropriately and are not undermined.”

Smith’s last remark is a reference to the recent furore over local authorities using phone and email records and carrying out video surveillance of people applying for schools for their children, housing benefit and other social services. The papers were also full of headlines about spying operations to detect dogs fouling the footpaths and people using refuse bins improperly.

Sir Christopher Rose, the Chief Surveillance Commissioner, warned local authorities that they risked losing “the protection that RIPA affords.” He used the “lack of understanding of the legislation” shown by councils and their “serious misunderstanding of the concept of proportionality” to call on them to “invest in properly trained intelligence officers who could operate covertly.”

Rose added, “The government is reviewing those public authorities that have access to these powers to ensure that they have a continuing and justifiable requirement for them. On completion the government will list the authorities that can use each of the powers and the purposes for which they can use them, and set out revised codes of practice.”

Simon Milton, outgoing chairman of the Local Government Association (LGA), attempted to defend local authorities against these accusations saying, “Councils have been criticised for using the powers in relation to issues that can be portrayed as trivial or not considered a crime by the public. Yet councils are caught between the rock of public opinion and the hard place of being told they should actually be using some of these powers more widely.” He agreed, however, that, “... it is important that they use these powers carefully and appropriately and we will be working with [the Surveillance Commissioner] to help enable this.”

Last April, Milton was the driving force behind a proposal to use supermarkets to collect data on migrant workers. Communities Secretary, Hazel Blears, told MPs, “The LGA has recently suggested that we look at footfall in supermarkets. They reckon Tesco has pretty good accurate information about the people who use their stores. I welcome that kind of imaginative thinking if it can help us to get a better and more accurate view at the local level of what the impact [of migration] is.”

Earlier this year popular opposition to Labour’s anti-terror legislation and its erosion of civil liberties allowed former Conservative Shadow Home Secretary David Davis to adopt the mantle of “defender of liberty” when he won the Haltemprice and Howden by-election. A similar thing has happened with these new proposals. Ken Jones, president of the Association of Chief Police Officers has warned about “the ceding of intrusive powers to local government and other bodies and giving them access to once sacrosanct personal data” and Dominic Grieve, the current Conservative Shadow Home Secretary, said, “Yet again the Government has proved itself unable to resist the temptation to take a power, quite properly designed to combat terrorism, to snoop on the lives of ordinary people in everyday circumstances.”

The new powers are linked to the enactment in British law of a European Union directive on data retention, which the Labour government was largely responsible for steamrolling through the European Union in 2005.

It claimed they were vital to defeat terrorism after the September 11, 2001 bombings in New York but, in fact, the EU was considering police-state measures well before then. In 1998, attempts were made in the Enfopol proposals to allow law enforcement agencies access to all communications, which were only withdrawn after widespread condemnation by civil liberties groups. This, after all, was not long after the enactment of limited reforms expressed in Human Rights Acts and Data Protection procedures.

However, following George Bush’s October 2001 letter to the EU, which demanded that countries “revise draft privacy directives that call for mandatory destruction to permit the retention of critical data for a reasonable period” the Belgian government back by the UK introduced proposals for mandatory data retention.

In October 2005, after months of secret meetings, the European Council with its UK Presidency published a draft directive. The UK Home Secretary, Charles Clark, warned the European Parliament that if it did not vote for the proposals “he would make sure [it] would no longer have a say on any justice and home affairs matters.”

Civil rights organisations put their faith in the European Parliament to block the proposals. One NGO asked, “... the European Parliament faces a crucial decision. Is this the type of society we would like to live in? A society where all our actions are recorded, all of our interactions may be mapped, treating the use of communications infrastructures as criminal activity.”

In the event, the draft was fast-tracked through the parliament with little debate and few amendments and became law after the vast majority of socialist and conservative MEPs voted for it.

As many lawyers and experts pointed out, any EU member state was, in effect, now free to retain “any type of data for any type of security purpose for any period at all.” They expressed concern that there would inevitably be demands for more draconian measures such as ID cards required to use internet cafes, the banning of all international email services such as Hotmail, and blocking the use of all non-European Internet Service Providers.

The unprecedented infringements of civil liberties that the Labour government and its European counterparts have implemented and are proposing are not motivated by the “war on terror”. As the political representatives of big business and the super-rich, they are conscious that they cannot secure a popular mandate for policies based on militarism, colonial conquest and the systematic destruction of the living standards of millions of people and are preparing other means for their enforcement.

SATs fiasco- Labour’s failure

tim — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 11:50:33 +0000

On August 15, the British Labour government’s regulatory body, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), terminated the contract of the company responsible for marking Standard Assessment Tasks (SATs) school test papers (which are mandatory for all school children in England aged 11 and 14 years.)

The QCA had only signed the £156 million, five-year contract with ETS Europe (a branch of the US-based Educational Testing Service Global BV) in February 2007. However, a series of major problems with the administration and marking of the tests this year caused almost a month’s delay in publishing the majority of results for key stage two (11-year-olds) and three (14-year-olds). Key stage three results were not released until August 12, although some were still incomplete.

Not only was the deadline missed, but the accuracy of marking was severely compromised, with many schools reporting that inexplicable results in some cases suggested that the markers either did not understand the questions themselves or that there was not adequate time to check.

When ETS was awarded the contract to administer the SATs, it had boasted of a new method to ensure marking accuracy. Markers would have to sit online tests every time they had assessed 80 exam papers, supposedly to ensure they were marking to the given criteria. In practice, however, the markers were given no feedback other than a pass or fail and could not adjust their marking accordingly.

Not only was the marker training inferior to previous years, but markers did not receive papers in sufficient time, as they were sent from schools to a central depot and then on. This meant the papers had to be marked under tremendous pressure during school term time, further undermining accuracy. Papers/scripts that were near the borderline of grades were not double-checked, as was the case in previous years. On top of this, some markers received no papers at all, while others received papers for the wrong subject. Unlike in previous years, pupil registers had to be checked online and marks for every single question submitted online—an extremely time-consuming if not futile exercise, exacerbated by crashed websites and helplines that went unanswered.

Following the virtual collapse of the test paper marking system, the QCA and ETS Europe agreed to dissolve the contract with immediate effect. Under the agreement, ETS Europe is expected to pay back £24.1 million of the nearly £40 million it received to run this year’s testing process and is to be stripped of the five-year deal. Government agencies will now oversee the delivery of the last 30,000 results and the appeal process. ETS has been banned from contacting schools directly.

ETS Europe had hoped to prove itself in the English school system so as to expand elsewhere in Europe. It won the SATs contract despite a catalogue of past failures to deliver on its commitments. In 2002, software errors by ETS led to serious failures, including giving the wrong marks, in the graduate management admission test (GMAT) in the US. According to the New York Times, in 2004, mismanagement by ETS led to more than 40,000 teachers taking a flawed exam and ETS paying out millions of dollars in compensation.

From the very start of its contract in England, there had been problems with the delivery and collection of test papers from schools, the electronic registration and moderating system crashed, and markers and schools could not log on. The helpline was constantly engaged. Thousands of teachers dropped out of the marking scheme, and many other markers resigned. A backlog grew, forcing ETS to set up 24-hour emergency marking centres. According to the Guardian newspaper, at one point, the National Assessment Agency went in and found 10,000 unopened emails from increasingly desperate schools.

Now, the exams regulator, Ofqual, has asked Lord Sutherland to head an inquiry into the delays. Ofqual head Kathleen Tattersall said that if there is a significant rise in schools appealing over results, then all 1 million SATs results should be annulled. The general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, Mick Brookes, said that such appeals “are set to rocket.” He has urged the schools inspection body Ofsted to disregard SATs results when making a judgement on a school. Results that Ofsted deems poor could contribute to a school being placed in the failing category of “special measures,” in some cases resulting in heads and teachers losing their jobs.

State education given over to the market

While no parent, teacher or child in England will shed a tear on the departure of such a clearly incompetent company from schools across the country, the more fundamental issue exposed by this latest crisis is not the marking but the actual tests themselves. But rather than replace the testing system, as most teachers, educationalists and parents have been arguing—well before the latest marking fiasco—the government intends to replace one company with another in order to continue with the whole flawed testing enterprise.

Teacher unions have already cast doubt on whether a new contract could be awarded in time to deliver next year’s SATs and called on ministers to overhaul the system. Schools secretary Ed Balls said he was “open to reform long-term.” He floated “lower-intensity” testing but flatly ruled out suspending SATs for 2009.

The government has hinted that the data-handling firm Capita may be contracted to run next year’s SATs. Ken Boston, chief executive of the QCA, said it would launch an urgent tendering process and that he expected organisations that previously expressed an interest to bid again. ETS was one of five companies short-listed two years ago. According to the Guardian, two of the three other major exam boards have already ruled themselves out of the contract, on the basis that they did not believe there was a strong enough educational rationale for the SATs tests. Greg Watson, head of the OCR exam board, said it did not bid because the tests were used to measure schools against one another, rather than qualifying a child at a certain level and diagnosing skills. A second exam board, AQA, also said it had not bid because of concerns about the purpose of the tests.

One unnamed senior examiner said that the process was so educationally “vacuous” that it would actually be more suited to a company such as Capita, which is used to dealing with large-scale public sector data projects rather than educational examinations. So indefensible have the SATs now become that a former aide of Tony Blair admitted recently that they risked turning schools into “drab, joyless assessment factories” where preparation for tests crowds out real learning.

The disparity between the overblown election promises the Labour government made on education policy and the subsequent mess that it has made in the school system has been widely acknowledged. But the government and the media are seeking to conceal how and why this has happened.

The cash-starved and moribund education system that emerged after 18 years of Conservative-rule was the one of the most glaring examples of the socially regressive policies of the Thatcher and Major administrations.

In the absence of a mass socialist alternative to address this, the right-wing “new” Labour Party under Blair successfully capitalised on popular support for a radical break with the pro-market policies of the past and for a reduction in the levels of social inequality that rocketed following the speculative boom of the 1980s.

On taking office in 1997, Blair and then-chancellor Gordon Brown kept rigorously to Tory spending limits while introducing cosmetic changes in education—such as more classroom assistants and the introduction of learning mentors. Most significantly, however, the Labour government sought to introduce the most pro-business agenda in education for a generation. Virtually every area of education was opened up to corporate profit making; from the building of school infrastructure, the development of business-friendly “specialist schools,” the increase of “faith schools” and to the setting up of private “academies.”

State schools have become testing grounds for ever-more uninspired ways to narrow the already prescriptive national curriculum and force children through a selective testing system. The effects of teaching to the tests—as in the present SATs—on especially young children is to squeeze out the joy of learning that should be inherent in an imaginative, widely scoped, generously resourced syllabus. This contributes significantly to the growing levels of disaffection amongst pupils that has been confirmed by international reports on the levels of unhappiness amongst children in the UK.

Furthermore, teachers have been demoralised as they are turned into part-time administrators of prescribed curriculum, while being scapegoated and even publicly hounded by the government for its own policy failures. Many well-meaning teachers have found themselves grubbing for each test paper point instead of being free to open young minds to the exploration and discovery of the world around them. Crowning it all, each school faces the constant threat of government inspection whereby they are monitored, praised or punished on the basis of fulfilling increasingly arbitrary targets. Schools are encouraged to compete against one another—via league tables—in a desperate bid for decreasing resources. At the end of this process, parents are thrown into a scramble to get a place at the “best” school for their children.

The end result of the corporate-inspired curriculum and the assessment system—the implementation of which has been the mainstay of the Labour government’s education policy since taking office in 1997—is the straitjacketing of the intellectual and imaginative capacities of children in order to provide for the demands of big-business and industry.

The government’s education policies have long since alienated millions of parents, but such is the damage it has caused, the very corporate interests that it sought to serve have signalled their dismay at the results of the school system. After complaining about the low literacy and numeracy levels of school levers, the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) announced recently that it was withdrawing its support for the government’s new diplomas, which were intended to replace the current A-Levels (taken at 18 years of age). Whatever new schemes Labour devises in response to such criticisms, its continued drive to redistribute wealth away from working people to big business and the super-rich, further fuelling social inequality, means it is incapable of arriving at a “better,” or more just education policy.

Making Arms, Wasting Skills

Ellie Keen — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Alternatives to militarism and arms production

Executive Summary

Arms production is now an international military-industrial network, dominated by US-based corporations including Boeing and Lockheed Martin, the essential function of which is to support the United States in maintaining its military supremacy and its geo-strategic goal of continued access to energy supplies. The leading European arms companies, BAE Systems, EADS and Thales, have pursued aggressive acquisition programmes in the USA to gain access to the lucrative American market. BAE, which already had an effective monopoly position in UK arms manufacture, is now one of the largest suppliers to the Pentagon, generating more sales in the US than the UK.

Various trends are clear, including the increasing use of foreign subsidiaries and subcontractors by these corporations and the rationalisation of the traditional, domestic arms manufacturing bases in the USA and Europe, with significant job losses. For example, since the early 1980s, UK arms-related employment declined from 740,000 to 315,000 by 2006.

A hierarchy of production exists, with the United States maintaining clear supremacy in first-tier sophisticated military platforms based on its massive procurement and R&D programmes, including the most advanced fighter aircraft and weapons such as satellite-guided missiles. This ensures its domination of the global arms trade and provides a form of technological leverage with client states to gain support for its over-arching strategic goals. Second-tier suppliers include the UK, France, and Russia offer other large platforms and weapons but with lesser capabilities. However, there are emerging nations including South Africa, South Korea, Brazil and India that have used their role as subcontractors in the international structure to modernise their own manufacturing capacity and now seek to challenge existing second-tier suppliers in their export markets. Below this is a much larger group of countries supplying basic, mass-produced weapons including sub-machine guns and rifles.

The arms trade is characterised by an intense supply-side dynamic to sell high-technology weapons into areas of regional tension like the Middle East and there are widespread allegations of corruption and bribery around these contracts, such as the Al Yamamah deal between BAE and Saudi Arabia to supply Typhoon/Eurofighter. At the same time, the diffusion of arms production has made it increasingly difficult both to monitor and control the arms trade when regional arms races are an increasing threat and may trigger the outbreak of major conflicts.

The UK has accepted a subsidiary role to the US in the latter’s broader strategy of global military force projection not least because it seeks to retain access to leading edge military technologies, including nuclear weapons. But the cost of this subservience is continued multi-billion pound expenditure on a range of sophisticated equipment that offers no contribution to the country’s real security needs; a significant and shameful role in a corrupt and dangerous arms trade; and no real commitment to support efforts at international disarmament, including nuclear disarmament.

Supporters of the military economy and the arms trade argue that, despite the massive job losses in the sector, they provide the UK with internationally successful, high technology niches in aerospace, engineering and electronics, as well as skilled work and spin-offs beneficial to the civil sector. But the real cost has been the diversion of resources from other forms of manufacturing activity that, if provided with similar long-term government investment, could actually have generated greater employment and direct benefits to the civil economy through improved technologies and industrial processes.

The dominance of BAE as a systems integrator for military aircraft, nuclear submarines and surface vessels is clear. However, the decline in arms employment has left only a handful of local economies with a residual dependency on military R&D and production, including Preston, Barrowin- Furness, Yeovil, Brough and Glasgow. These reflect the pattern of regional concentration in the North West, South West and South East, although the latter is not as significant as it was. Even at these sites, there have been considerable job losses since the 1980s and there is continued vulnerability to further rationalisation.

The military aircraft sector is particularly dependent on arms exports, with the BAE Brough site in East Yorkshire facing closure because of the lack of follow-on orders for the Hawk trainer aircraft. The Warton site in Lancashire is also heavily dependent on the Saudi Arabian contracts for Typhoon aircraft, and is vulnerable to regime change should the corrupt Al Saud absolute monarchy be overthrown.

Overall, because arms-related employment constitutes such a small proportion of national employment, the adjustment from a further restructuring based on deep cuts to military expenditure, is a minor one. Only in these small pockets of local dependency would further assistance be required to help diversify the local economies. This would be the sort of restructuring that many local areas have experienced after the loss of a staple industry and can be done successfully through support to regional and local economic development agencies in order to create a diversified and robust economic base.

More ambitiously, central government has a vital role to play in developing a radical, political economy of arms conversion and common security. By moving away from military force projection and arms sale promotion, the UK could carry out deep cuts in domestic procurement including the cancellation of Trident and other major offensive weapons platforms, as well as adopting comprehensive controls on arms exports, including the suspension of weapons exports to the Middle East. The substantial savings in military expenditure could help to fund a major arms conversion programme.

Here the emphasis would be on environmental challenges, including a multi-billion pound public investment in renewable energy, particularly offshore wind and wave power, that would substantially cut the UK’s carbon emissions and reduce dependency on imported oil, gas and uranium supplies. These new industries will also generate more jobs than those lost from the restructuring of the arms industry. In this way, the UK would be taking a leading role in establishing a new form of international security framework based on disarmament and sustainable economic development.

Download the whole report here

Iraq's Oil Wealth on the Block

Ellie Keen — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 16:14:37 +0000

Last week saw the biggest step so far towards transferring Iraqi oil into the hands of foreign multinational companies, sparking renewed accusations that the US-UK war on Iraq was really motivated by an oil grab.

The Oil Ministry announced on 30 June that foreign oil companies would be invited to bid for contracts to develop six of Iraq’s largest oilfields, which together contain around half of the country’s known oil reserves.

Yet most commentators missed the significance of the move – that it would give away more to foreign companies than had been planned at any point since the Constitution was written in 2005, and possibly more than any major oil producer has given since the colonial era.

The contracts were (with one exception) for the second stage of development of the oilfields, to come after the one- or two-year no-bid contracts that the Ministry has been privately negotiating with Shell, BP, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Total and four smaller companies. The Ministry had also intended to sign those last week, but has delayed signing to some time this month.

To understand what’s at stake, we need to take a short diversion into some oil industry contract terminology. Last week’s announcement was of longer-term “risk service contracts” (RSCs), a kind of half-way house in the range of contract types.

The shorter (no-bid) contracts that would come first are known as “technical service contracts” (TSCs), where companies simply act as contractors to a government client who calls the shots, for a fixed fee – albeit with some strange features that I described in my last article for niqash.

These are contrasted with what the companies really want in Iraq – the dreaded “production sharing agreements” (PSAs), which would give them control over the fields, a large share of the oil extracted, and the potential for huge profits.

Last week’s RSCs are somewhere between TSCs and PSAs. It’s a model that has been used in Latin America, and is very similar to the “buyback contracts” used in Iran. The foreign company invests the capital (like in a PSA), but rather than getting a share of the oil, it gets a specified rate of return on its investment (say, 15%). And after a number of years, the oilfield reverts to national control. The government has not released the details of the contracts; but it appears they would be for either 7 or 9 years (in contrast to 22 years for a PSA or 1-2 years for a TSC)*.

The Oil Minister made much of the fact that he was not offering PSAs – to reassure Iraqis that they need not fear a great giveaway.

But that the contracts were not PSAs misses the point. All six of the fields – Rumaila, Kirkuk, West Qurna, Zubair, Maysan and Bai Hasan – are already producing oil, and actually together account for more than 90% of Iraq’s current production. As such, their investment and technology needs are relatively minor, and could easily be provided within the public sector, as they have been for more than 30 years.

Ever since the Constitution was written in 2005, Iraqi oil policy has been that fields already producing oil would stay in Iraqi hands – and that only for new, undeveloped fields would development contracts be offered to foreign companies. Even the draft Oil Law – which has been so controversial for giving away too much – required that fields already producing oil would be “managed and operated” by the Iraq National Oil Company (INOC).

That policy was reversed last week – giving the “backbone of Iraq’s oil production” (in the Minister’s own words) also to foreign companies – fields that were never going to be on offer in any form. It remains to be seen what happens to new fields.

The positive portrayal of a negative step was repeated when the Minister also emphasised that companies would have to “give” at least a 25% stake in each project to INOC. But this was never the companies’ to give – in fact, the true implication of the announcement is that they may take 75% away from INOC.

Even for new fields, a 25% INOC stake would have been derisory. Libya, for instance, requires a public stake of around 80% for new exploration contracts (and for much smaller fields than Iraq’s). Nigeria, which is seen as one of the OPEC members most friendly to western companies, requires that the Nigeria National Petroleum Company take a 55% stake in onshore projects.

It was in the 1950s, as the colonial era was coming to a close, that a minimum of 51% became the norm in major oil producers. Now Iraq appears to be stepping back to the age of subjugation to the interests of foreign powers. Hardly the progressive move the Minister claimed.

For the most part, the international media were willing to accept the spin about how Iraq would get a great deal – some reports even celebrated how the companies were charitably “helping” Iraq rebuild its oil sector. The coverage clearly signified how far the Iraqi oil debate has been twisted over the last five years.

Iraqi oil policy and mainstream discussion of it have rested on two assumptions: that Iraq’s oil can only be effectively developed by the western oil majors, and that the contracts offered have to provide for the companies’ needs (or sometimes the oil market’s needs) first and foremost. Consistently absent has been any conception of what is in the best interests of the Iraqi people.

The big question is why the Oil Ministry would want to bring in the multinationals for these fields. The Ministry is not short of cash: in fact, it has been consistently unable to spend the funds provided to it, so is now sitting on billions of dollars that could be invested in the fields. And technology can easily be purchased, whilst Iraqis maintained the management of the fields.

The true explanation seems almost too obvious for most commentators to spot. One radio interviewer asked me “Why shouldn’t the Iraqi government sign these contracts if it wants to? – it’s not as if someone’s holding a gun to their head”.

In fact, that is exactly what is being held to Iraqis’ heads. Or more precisely, over 150,000 guns.

The Iraqi government owes its very existence to the foreign troops that remain in the country. And with the occupiers playing a greater role than the Iraqi electorate in whether the government stands or falls, it is inevitable that the government will respond more to the views of the former.

Last week, the New York Times revealed that US advisers had helped shape the new contracts. The State Department responded that its advice was purely technical, and gave the example of helping draft arbitration clauses. Those clauses, which determine how the contracts will be adjudicated outside the country by secretive investment courts, would probably be seen by most Iraqis as rather more than a technical issue. But for the USA, for multinational companies to run the industry is simply a natural way of doing things.

State Department spokesman Tom Casey added that the US role is similar to that of a lawyer helping a client draw up a will. It was an apt analogy. The USA sees Iraq’s economy as in its dying throes, and is helping the Iraqi government decide how much of its estate to bequeath to BP, Shell or Exxon.

But all is not yet lost for advocates of Iraqi sovereignty over its oil. Companies are not to bid for the contracts until next March, and signing is not expected until summer 2009 – giving plenty of time for the policy to change. During this time, the political landscape will alter significantly following the departure of the Bush/Cheney administration.

And the so-far successful Iraqi campaign against oil privatisation continues to make progress. According to press reports, the Oil Minister has finally agreed to open the technical service contracts to parliamentary scrutiny before they are signed. This is a welcome move, although it needs to be extended: all Iraqis should have a right to know what is being done to their natural resources.

For the US administration, it might seem like a dangerously radical idea to let Iraqis decide the future of their oil. But with Cheney and Bush on their way out, there may even be a prospect that the idea will take hold.

———

The Kurdistan Regional Government released details of the federal government’s model exploration and development contract, which included up to 7 years of exploration, 2 years of appraisal, 5 years of development and 2 years of transfer of the field back to the government. The six fields announced last week were for development only – so we are assuming the same duration, minus the exploration period. Similarly, the draft oil law provides for up to 8 years of exploration, followed by 2 years of appraisal and 20 years of development and production.

Poor get hit as business walks free

tim — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 11:51:39 +0000

Even as the government admits to a £10 billion black hole in its finances caused by its gifting of tax back to businesses to plug their pensions holes, it looks set to U-turn on its policy to close corporation tax loopholes costing the exchequer tens of billions more every year.

Threats from major UK companies to relocate overseas or into tax havens has prompted a move to revise corporation tax rules following high-profile complaints that the UK’s taxation levels are significantly higher than elsewhere in the EU.

Pharmaceuticals giant Shire recently announced it would relocate to Ireland to take advantage of the low tax regime there.

While UK law stipulates a basic corporation tax of 28%, corporations on average pay closer to 22%, with some of the largest paying significantly under this figure.

A simplification of the rules mooted by the treasury last year would have closed loopholes which at present allow huge levels of tax evasion.

The UK has recently come under fire for itself maintaining more tax havens under British rule than anywhere else in the world, something which campaign groups argue has directly led to tens of thousands of deaths.

Corporate tax avoidance is thought to cost £25 billion every year – more than twice the amount these major companies were gifted by the government in tax breaks to allow them to refill the pension pots they themselves had emptied.

In two years, the same amount would pay for the total line of credit currently being offered to major banks as part of the credit crunch – £50 billion is being underwritten in loans to maintain the flow of money through the economy.

The same banks, along with a host of other companies, are already benefiting from government handouts this year to the tune of £10 billion, as they pour money into pension funds to keep them afloat.

This money, rather than coming from profits or business chiefs who were the investors who caused the problem, is being paid in from taxes.

Pension deficits have soared by more than £100bn in the past year, the Pension Protection Fund said recently.

Meanwhile, as the Treasury struggles to maintain its financial balance, fears are rising that the pensioners themselves could be at risk of falling prey to the 10p tax band changes which the government have proposed.

Up to 420,000 pensioners with small private pensions of up to £1,000 a year could start having to pay tax of £200 a year from next April, under new plans – potentially raising around £80 million a year.

The Greatest Stick-Up In History

Ellie Keen — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Once oil passed $140 a barrel, even the most rabidly rightwing media hosts had to prove their populist credibility by devoting a portion of every show to bashing Big Oil. Some have gone so far as to invite me on for a friendly chat about an insidious new phenomenon: “disaster capitalism.” It usually goes well — until it doesn’t.

For instance, “independent conservative” radio host Jerry Doyle and I were having a perfectly amiable conversation about sleazy insurance companies and inept politicians when this happened: “I think I have a quick way to bring the prices down,” Doyle announced. “We’ve invested $650bn to liberate a nation of 25 million people, shouldn’t we just demand that they give us oil? There should be tankers after tankers backed up like a traffic jam getting into the Lincoln Tunnel, the stinkin’ Lincoln, at rush-hour with thank-you notes from the Iraqi government … Why don’t we just take the oil? We’ve invested it liberating a country. I can have the problem solved of gas prices coming down in 10 days, not 10 years.”

There were a couple of problems with Doyle’s plan, of course. The first was that he was describing the biggest stick-up in world history. The second that he was too late. “We” are already heisting Iraq’s oil, or at least are on the brink of doing so.

It started with no-bid service contracts announced for Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Shell, BP and Total (they have yet to be signed but are still on course). Paying multinationals for their technical expertise is not unusual in itself. What is odd is that such contracts almost invariably go to oil service companies — not to the oil majors, whose work is exploring, producing and owning carbon wealth. The contracts only make sense in the context of reports that the oil majors have insisted on the right of first refusal on subsequent contracts handed out to manage and produce Iraq’s oilfields. In other words, other companies will be free to bid on those future contracts, but these companies will win.

One week after the no-bid service deals were announced, the world caught its first glimpse of the real prize. After years of backroom arm-twisting, Iraq is officially flinging open six of its major oilfields, accounting for half of its known reserves, to foreign investors. According to Iraq’s oil minister, the long-term contracts will be signed within a year. While ostensibly under the control of the Iraq National Oil Company, foreign corporations will keep 75% of the value of the contracts, leaving just 25% for their Iraqi partners.

That kind of ratio is unheard of in oil-rich Arab and Persian states, where achieving majority national control over oil was the defining victory of anti-colonial struggles. According to Greg Muttitt, a London-based oil expert, the assumption up until now was that foreign multinationals would be brought in to develop new fields in Iraq — not to take over those which are already in production and therefore require minimal technical support. “The policy was always to allocate these fields to the Iraq National Oil Company,” he told me. “This is a total reversal of that policy, giving the Iraq National Oil Company a mere 25% instead of the planned 100%.”

So what makes such lousy deals possible in Iraq, which has already suffered so much? Paradoxically, it is Iraq’s suffering — its never-ending crisis — that is the rationale for an arrangement that threatens to drain Iraq’s treasury of its main revenue source. The logic goes like this: Iraq’s oil industry needs foreign expertise because years of punishing sanctions starved it of new technology, while the invasion and continuing violence degraded it further. And Iraq needs to start producing more oil urgently. Why? Also because of the war. The country is shattered and the billions handed out in no-bid contracts to western firms have failed to rebuild it.

And that’s where the new contracts come in: they will raise more money, but Iraq has become such a treacherous place that the oil majors must be induced to take the risk of investing. Thus the invasion of Iraq neatly creates the argument for its subsequent pillage.

Several of the architects of the Iraq war no longer even bother to deny that oil was a major motivator for the invasion. On US National Public Radio’s To the Point, Fadhil Chalabi, one of the primary Iraqi advisers to the Bush administration in the lead-up to the invasion, recently described the war as “a strategic move on the part of the United States of America and the UK to have a military presence in the Gulf in order to secure [oil] supplies in the future”. Chalabi, who served as Iraq’s oil undersecretary of state and met with the oil majors before the invasion, described this as “a primary objective”.

Invading countries to seize their natural resources is illegal under the Geneva conventions. That means the huge task of rebuilding Iraq’s infrastructure — including its oil infrastructure — is the financial responsibility of Iraq’s invaders. They should be forced to pay reparations, just as Saddam Hussein’s regime paid $9bn to Kuwait in reparations for its 1990 invasion. Instead, Iraq is being forced to sell 75% of its national patrimony to pay the bills for its own illegal invasion and occupation.

Naomi Klein is the author of No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, and of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. She wrote and co-produced “The Take,” a documentary about Argentina’s occupied factory movement.

Bush Is Trying To Impose A Classic Colonial Status on Iraq

tim — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 10:59:19 +0000

Whatever the Iraq war was about, we were assured, it definitely wasn’t about oil. Tony Blair called the idea a “conspiracy theory”. It was about democracy and dictatorship, weapons of mass destruction and human rights, anything but oil. Donald Rumsfeld, then US defence secretary, insisted the conflict had “literally nothing to do with oil”. When Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the US Federal Reserve, wrote last autumn, “Everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil,” he was treated as if he were some senile old gent who’d embarrassingly lost the plot.

That argument is going to be a good deal harder to make from next week, when four of the western world’s largest oil corporations are due to sign contracts for the renewed exploitation of Iraq’s vast reserves. Initially, these are to be two-year deals to boost production in Iraq’s largest oilfields. But not only did the four energy giants — BP, Exxon Mobil, Shell and Total — write their own contracts with the Iraqi government, an unheard-of practice: they have also reportedly secured rights of first refusal on the far more lucrative 30-year production contracts expected once a new US-sponsored oil law is passed, allowing a wholesale western takeover. Big Oil is back with a vengeance.

It’s a similar story when it comes to the future of the US occupation itself. The last thing on anyone’s mind, we were told when the tanks rolled in, was permanent US control, let alone the recolonisation of Iraq. This was about the Iraqis finally getting a chance to run their own affairs in freedom. But five years on, George Bush and Dick Cheney are putting the screws on their Green Zone government to sign a secret deal for indefinite military occupation, which would effectively reduce Iraq to a long-term vassal state.

In April, I was leaked a draft copy of this “strategic framework agreement”, intended to replace the existing UN mandate at the end of the year. Details of the document, which came from a source at the heart of the Iraqi government, were published in the Guardian — including indefinite authorisation for the US to “conduct military operations in Iraq and to detain individuals when necessary for imperative reasons of security”. Since then, much more has emerged about the accompanying “status of forces agreement” the US administration wants to impose: including more than 50 US military bases, full control of Iraqi airspace, legal immunity for US military and private security firms, and the right to conduct armed operations throughout the country without consulting the Iraqi government.

This goes far beyond other such agreements the US has around the world and would shackle Iraq with a permanent puppet status. Not surprisingly, it has led to uproar in the country and opposition in the US, where congress will be denied a vote on the arrangement because the administration has chosen not to call it a treaty.

But it also evokes powerful memories in Iraq, which has been down this road before. After Britain invaded and occupied Iraq during the first world war, it imposed a strikingly similar treaty on its puppet government in 1930 in preparation for the country’s nominal independence. Just as in George Bush’s version, Britain awarded itself military bases, the right to conduct military operations, and legal immunity for its forces — though the proposed new US powers and restrictions on Iraqi sovereignty go even further than in the pre-war colonial treaty.

To add to this sense of imperial revival, the four oil companies now preparing to return in triumph to Iraq were the original partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company, which Britain gave a free hand in the 1920s to dine off Iraq’s wealth in a famously exploitative deal. The Anglo-Iraqi treaty and those bitterly unjust oil concessions dominated Iraqi politics for decades, feeding riots, uprisings and coups until the monarchy was overthrown, the tables turned on the oil companies and the British were finally sent packing by the radical nationalist General Qasim in 1958.

The 50th anniversary of the 1958 revolution appropriately falls next month. But Bush and Cheney seem increasingly determined to force through both their security agreement and the stalled law for the privatisation of Iraq’s oil industry before the US election. The signs are that, despite intense Iraqi opposition, a combination of strong-arm tactics, bribery and some watering down of the most extreme US demands may yet secure the full imperial package.

When Bush contradicted Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki earlier this month on the occupation deal and predicted: “If I were a betting man, we’ll reach an agreement with the Iraqis,” he sounded as if he knew what he was talking about — rather as he did when he explained a couple of weeks ago that he was “confident” Gordon Brown would not after all be cutting British troop numbers in Basra according to any fixed timetable. Meanwhile, Iraq’s foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, is suddenly sounding similarly confident about “progress” on the oil law because “the Americans are very keen”.

Perhaps they are all coming to believe the Bush administration propaganda that the surge has succeeded and Iraq is starting to “fix itself” in time for the US election, as the Economist’s cover story put it last week. Much is still being made of the decline in US casualties and resistance attacks to 2004 levels, even though the factors behind that drop are widely acknowledged to be contingent and precarious. Given the carnage of the past few days alone — including seven US soldiers killed since the weekend and a Baghdad car bomb that butchered 65 people — as well as this week’s withering US Government Accountability Office report on the administration’s claims of “progress” in Iraq, any other view would seem perverse.

What is certain is that, if Bush’s blueprint for indefinite foreign rule in Iraq and the takeover of its oil is forced down the throats of the Iraqi people, resistance and bloodshed will increase. Of course, it’s true that the US and Britain didn’t invade Iraq only for its oil. It was a projection of American power in the world’s most strategically sensitive region, with oil at its heart, which has brought catastrophe to Iraq and great danger to the Middle East and the wider world. That’s why the struggle to restore Iraq’s independence matters far beyond its borders — it is a global necessity.

Big Oil's Big Lie

Ellie Keen — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 21:49:32 +0000

Of course, it’s not a crime, and it’s hard to see how, in a free society, it could or should become one. But the culpability of the energy firms the climate scientist James Hansen will indict in his testimony to Congress today is clear. If we fail to stop runaway climate change, it will be largely because of campaigning by oil, coal and electricity companies, and the network of lobbyists, fake experts and thinktanks they have sponsored.

The operation sprang directly from Big Tobacco’s war against science. It has used the same fake experts, the same public relations companies and the same tactics: as I showed in my book Heat, the campaign against action on climate change was partly launched by the tobacco company Philip Morris. But while the tobacco companies’ professional liars were smoked out by a massive class action in the US, the sponsored climate change deniers still have massive influence over public perception. A survey published yesterday by the Observer shows that six out of ten people in Britain agreed that “many scientific experts still question if humans are contributing to climate change.” This is an inaccurate perception, which results from Big Energy’s lobbying.

Almost without exception, the scientists who claim to doubt that manmade climate change is taking place fall into two categories: either they are not qualified in the branch of science they are discussing or they have received money from fossil fuel companies. Of all the self-professed climate “sceptics”, I have been able to find only one – Dr John Christy of the University of Alabama – who has relevant qualifications and who does not appear to have received fees from lobby groups or thinktanks sponsored by the energy companies. But even he has had to admit that the figures on which he based his claims were the results of “errors in the … data”.

The others are the very opposite of sceptics. Many of them are paid to start with a conclusion – that climate change isn’t happening or isn’t important – then to find data and arguments to support it. In most cases, they cherrypick scientific findings; in a few cases, like the fake scientific paper attached to the celebrated Oregon petition, they make them up altogether. But people who don’t understand the difference between a peer-reviewed paper and a pamphlet are taken in. The energy companies’ propaganda campaign is amplified by scientific illiterates in the media, such as Melanie Phillips, Christopher Booker, Nigel Lawson, Alexander Cockburn and the television producer (who made Channel 4’s documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle) Martin Durkin.

I don’t believe that the energy companies should be prosecuted for commissioning the truckload of trash their sponsored experts publish. But their campaign of disinformation must be exposed again and again. Like the tobacco lobbyists, they are not only delaying essential public action; they also create the impression that science is for sale to the highest bidder.

The awful truth is that sometimes it is.