The CFMEU: “It’s an attack on us, our wages, our conditions, our right to organise.”

Written by: Louisa L. on 24 July 2024

 

State and federal governments, courts, cops, media, the ALP and ACTU are backing some of the world’s biggest developers, banks and finance corporations against the CFMEU and its members. 

Right now, building workers say, “It’s an attack on us, our wages, our conditions, our right to organise.” 

It’s an attack on the whole working class.

It comes after multiple deregistrations and royal commissions against the old Builders Labourers Federation and its CFMEU offspring first led by the CPA(ML)’s incorruptible comrade John Cummins. Next, workers crushed the 14-year Australian Building and Construction Commission’s attempt to destroy the union by outlawing basic democratic rights for construction workers and their representatives. 

Eyewatering profits

At stake are eyewatering profits to be made from the surplus value created by construction workers. While developers take the least risk and the most money, building companies and subcontractors are squeezed.  

net worth of Meriton’s owner Highrise Harry Triguboff is $23.8 billion. Goodman Group, worth $59.24 billion, is number one of the top ten multi-billion dollar developers on Australia’s stock exchange. 

BlackRock, the biggest US investment firm is one of the biggest security holders in eight of these top developers.  Its CEO and founder Harry Finke has $US8.7 TRILLION in assets. The second biggest US investment firm, The Vanguard Group with $US8.6 trillion assets under management, is one of the top five investors in every single one of the Australian Top 10 listed developers. 

Where does such obscene wealth come from? Plundering nature and exploiting workers’ labour power.

One rule for bosses, another for workers

In the huge MUA-led 1998 waterfront dispute, images of guard dogs and shipyard owner enforcers in balaclavas outraged journalists and public alike. 

Hundreds of thousands joined solidarity actions. 

This time, journalists join the corporate attack, labelling industrial tactics protecting safety in a notoriously dangerous industry ‘criminal’. The best wages and conditions in the country? Also ‘criminal’. 

These journalists have been key in exposing big end and government corruption, like Scott Morrison’s Robodebt that illegally sent debt notices to 443,000 of Australians most vulnerable people, stealing $1.8 billion! No-one charged! 

Or investigating PwC, which designed the Federal Government’s response to minimise tax avoidance and then told corporate clients how to get round them. No one charged! Or KPMG that sent fake invoices to the Defence Department, and was then awarded $70 million contracts in one week! Government contracts despite insider information. No one charged!  

They never mention the good

For decades governments have allowed construction companies to shift money to new companies, and declare the old ones broke – without paying workers entitlements or subcontractors’ bills, then start again with a new company. Zero action for decades!

CFMEU EBAs ensure leave entitlements are paid monthly into industry redundancy trusts and superannuation into industry fund CBUS and, so workers aren’t robbed. Where’s the praise?

As a worker told us, “They never mention all the good the union does.” That good is beyond the seven percent yearly pay rise, double time for all overtime, site, travel and other allowances. It’s beyond the battles that forced governments to outlaw deadly engineered stone, or the NSW mass stopworks after 18-year-old Christopher Cassaniti was crushed to death. 

What about the union’s extensive mental health and suicide prevention work in an industry where excessive hours undermine health? What about its drug and alcohol programs, including residential ones for members and families at Sydney’s Foundation House, and places like it, interstate? 

In the 1950s and early 60s, the Builders Labourers Federation activists overthrew gangster control of the union and industry. 

Living with dignity

Governments, and giant corporations, have been giving contracts to gangsters for decade. Bribes could be paid and received, but it’s impossible for any CFMEU money to be syphoned to them. 

Nationally difficulties arose when the CFMEU made systematic moves into the government run infrastructure sector. An experienced NSW delegate told us, “You can’t pick up a brick or shovel in the civil sector without confronting gangsters and bikies.” Where was the fury while the right-wing ALP Australian Workers Union was covering it all for lousy conditions and pay?

Today construction is the only industry where former prisoners can work and create a new path to controlling their own lives with dignity.

Meanwhile First Peoples, the mentally ill, homeless, those whom an education system divided by wealth has failed, the poor and those who were physically or sexually abused as children are jailed at alarming and escalating rates. In every state, children can be sent to youth prison at 10 years old. But the cabal of super rich and privileged targets an industry and union that might give them a second chance. What’s the real crime here?

The CFMEU works in this whole corrupt system, but unlike the old BLF, never challenged its right to exist. It’s time to build organisation to challenge that system.

Workers should be able to run their own organisations, democratically and fairly.

The CFMEU is one of Australia’s last unions prepared to take unprotected industrial action. If it goes under, it will undermine rising struggles among workers, when membership is at rock bottom and most workers have their backs to the wall. We call for solidarity. 

 

The ABC and Indo-Pacific psychological warfare

Written by: (Contributed) on 23 July 2024

 

(Source: pacificausttv.com )

A major funding boost for the ABC has coincided with Canberra announcing the Pacific AUS TV Initiative designed to provide extensive media coverage across the Pacific, in line with traditional psychological warfare techniques.

Fears have arisen about China having upgraded their regional media coverage in recent years, enabling Beijing to enhance its diplomatic position in a more favourable light.

The Australian initiative, however, is not original and remains remarkably similar to previous initiatives designed to protect the UK Commonwealth and US hegemonic diplomatic positions and 'interests' through compliant Australian involvement.

In mid-July Canberra announced a $40.5 million upgrade with the ABC, Australia's national broadcaster; a total of $28.4 million has already been allocated over the next five years for the Pacific-Aus TV Initiative marked by enhancing ties between Australian and Pacific Islands media outlets to enable 'Pacific Islands people to access Australian content … and … creating additional news content for Pacific audiences'. (1)

The initiative has placed the Pacific region into the larger Indo-Pacific area 'with efforts to bolster Indo-Pacific media capacity and its ties to Australian-based media … the ABC will also provide support for media partners in the Pacific, South-east Asia and South Asia, and boost its radio transmission across the region'. (2)

The initiative has been established following fears arising about China's 'media foot-print in the Indo-Pacific region … and … to fend off growing Chinese cultural influence across the region'. (3) The initiative forms part of a classic psychological warfare technique, designed to shape favourable opinion toward the US and its allies, to the detriment of adversaries. (4)

The initiative, furthermore, fits comfortably and is best assessed in the context of the US-led Indo-Pacific Strategy (IPS) where 'the US, Japan, India, and Australia form the Quad hemming China in from all sides' while other countries allied with US-led diplomacy are included as lower-level partners. (5) Australia, historically, has been a close US ally with strong involvement in surrounding Asia and Pacific countries. As US diplomatic hostilities with China have increased in recent years, Australia's importance has been  elevated.

The Australian initiative, however, is not new; in fact, it is merely a continuation of similar moves by both the US and UK to use Australia as a regional conduit through which hegemonic diplomacy has been conducted. Australia, it should be noted, has historically maintained the diplomatic position of being a sub-imperial power. (6) The AUKUS relationship is best viewed in that light.

Recent research following the declassification of various government documents about the highly secretive Information Research Department (IRD) has revealed how Australia was quietly drawn into the organisation; initially established as Britain's 'covert Cold War propaganda arm between 1948 and 1977 … the IRD covertly collected and disseminated material to the media to discredit human rights figures, undermine political opponents overseas, help overthrow governments, and promote UK influence and commercial interests around the world'. (7)

The IRD also 'maintained a strong relationship with the BBC. It supplied material, 'provided it was neither quoted directly, nor attributed to the government as being official policy. The BBC was an ideal conduit for IRD material because it was … in a class by itself'. (8) The stifling nature of British society with class privilege merging with state power, was also an ideal recruiting ground for spooks whose designated role was to use Commonwealth positions for ulterior motives and spurious agendas; the past Cold War and merged with the present one, as seen with the recent 'Australian' initiative.  

Australia was initially drawn into the IRD network following a visit by Norman Reddaway to Canberra in late 1970 for a Four Power Information Meeting 'on defence and security strategy in the SE Asia, involving Britain, Australia, New Zealand and the US'. (9) Reddaway was an influential British spook: having served in the Second World War he was recruited to the Foreign Office and was influential in the creation of the IRD. (10) During the 1960s he was assigned to Indonesia as 'the co-ordinator of political warfare', designed to overthrow the progressive and pro-Chinese Sukarno presidential administration. (11)

By 1970, Reddaway was increasingly concerned about threats to traditional hegemonic positions in Asia, which had become a theatre of war and Cold War diplomatic tensions. The Vietnam War was, at that time, well under-way and regarded as a component part of the far-right domino theory of spreading influences across the region; Australian military involvement has been well recorded. The political position of the Labor administrations of Gough Whitlam and their troubled diplomatic relationship with their US counterparts  has been well recorded elsewhere.

Following further high-level diplomatic meetings between Australia, the UK and US, a Department of Foreign Affairs official, Ross Smith, was selected as Principal Research officer for the newly established 'secret propaganda unit', in October 1971. (12) Smith, not surprisingly, had been previously employed as the Information Attache in the Australian embassy in Jakarta during 1962-65, 'providing contacts and information to Australian reporters and media outlets. His time there had coincided with the period when the IRD was very active in Indonesia producing propaganda designed to undermine left-leaning President Sukarno'. (13) Gross human rights abuses following the 1965 Suharto military coup did not appear to have caused either Smith, or his Australian employers, any concern whatsoever.

Declassified documents from the Australian national archive have revealed that involvement from Canberra was largely concentrated on the South-west Pacific area where the main IRD lacked contacts. It was noted, however, 'the Australians are working up distribution of their material in South-east Asia, and beginning to cultivate potential recipients in the UK through Australia House, who have sought our advice'. (14)     

Once operational the Australian IRD 'distributed … unattributed research briefs and articles written for newspapers and journals, and the potential recipients would have been co-operative journalists writing on the region'. (15) A declassified document from the period has shown how Australia was supposed to organise 'information operations', spoon-feeding
journalists with material designed to influence events in the Western Pacific and South-east Asia region. (16)

Following the elevation of Smith to the position of Consul-General in Lae, PNG, in October, 1974, shortly before independence, control of the IRD passed through the hands of two further spooks who were both well versed in Indonesian affairs. Richard Butler took immediate control of the unit, having been appointed by Richard Woolcott, who later served as Australian ambassador to Indonesia during the period of the brutal invasion of East Timor. Australian support for the military invasion was well known, and despite over 180,000 East Timorese losing their lives in massacres and genocide, the 'problem' was glossed over and subject to diplomatic silence for decades. Canberra, subsequently, only declassified intelligence documents from the period very reluctantly and has proved hesitant about openly discussing any of the revelations, including those surrounding the deaths of the Balibo Five.

It is interesting to note the main IRD organisation was subsequently closed by then British Foreign Secretary Dr. David Owen, in 1977, due to its 'contacts with right-wing journalists and propagandists who were actively anti-Labour'; those involved in the shadowy, spooky world in which they operated, merely took further, and similar, appointments and moved elsewhere. (17)

Its Australian IRD partner also appears to have ceased operations at the same time. It is important to note the whole period of its existence coincided with the rise and fall of Gough Whitlam and his Labor administrations, together with the unification of Vietnam.

It has now, however, been resurrected; to serve similar objectives. But then, that is what they do.

It is also interesting to note official media releases from Canberra about the Pacific Aus TV Initiative have drawn specific attention to the assessed problem of the Solomon Islands, one of Canberra's favourite countries of interest and obsession. They allege the Solomon Star has been accepting funding from China for favourable coverage. No doubt Solomon Islanders, together with their Pacific Island counterparts, are now eagerly awaiting endless streams of dubious Australian media commentary ...

1.     TV push to combat China play for power, The Weekend Australian, 13-14 July 2024.
2.     Ibid.
3.     Ibid.
4.     See: The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, Victor Marchetti and John D, Marks, (London, 1976), with specific reference to Sub-section Part 2, Number 6, Propaganda and Disinformation, pp. 183-209.
5.     See: The reasons behind Washington's push for GSOMIA., Hankyoreh, 12 November 2019.
6.     See: Sub-imperial power, Clinton Fernandez, (Victoria, 2022); and, Island off the coast of Asia, Clinton Fernandez, (Victoria, 2018).
7.     Revealed: Australia's Secret Propaganda Unit, John Mcevoy and Peter Cronau, 16 June 2022, website: https://declassifiedaus.org/2022/06/16/revealed-australias-secret-propaganda-unit/
8.     MI6, Stephen Dorril, (London, 2002), page 78.
9.     Revealed, op.cit.
10.   MI6, Dorril, op.cit., which contains numerous references to both Reddaway and the
        IRD.
11.   Revealed, op.cit.
12.   Ibid.
13.   Ibid.
14.   Copy: Australian IRD, Mr Reddaway, Secret, Declassified, ibid., page 7.
15.   Ibid.
16.   See: Secret IRD, 1971, File – FCO168/4481, Reference – 36/11/1 1972,      Declassified.
17.   MI6, Dorril, op.cit., page 80.

 

New Delegate Rights Clause in Awards - A Small but Significant Win By Workers

Written by: Ned K. on 22 July 2024

 

 

From 1 July 2024 a standard Delegates Rights clause was included in Awards which provide the minimum wages and conditions for workers in most industries and sectors.

The new clause was one of the changes to the Fair Work Act that workers in unions had demanded the Albanese Government support through legislation prior to its election in 2022.

When the Fair Work Act 2009 replaced the Howard Government's industrial laws, it was called by many workers "Work Choices Lite" as it unsurprisingly still favored the capitalists, not the workers, reflecting the reality of capitalism.

One example of this was that the Gillard and Rudd Government's Fair Work Act did not even mention the word "Delegate" in the whole Act! Yet Gillard said the new Act had "got the balance right" regarding the competing interests of capitalists and workers!

The new clauses in Awards from 1 July 2024 about Delegate Rights provide workers in any workplace or employed by any employer with the entitlement to elect Union Delegates to represent their interests regarding any issues that need to be taken up with the boss.

The wording of the new clause in Awards is such that it enables workers who are members of a Union to elect Delegates provided the Delegate works for the same employer as the Union members. In practice this means that workers who work for one employer but in different locations such as Road Traffic workers or contract cleaners who work in several workplaces in the same day, are still entitled to elect their own Union Delegate. This is important for workers in industries where mobility is par for the course.

In the early to mid-2000s a progressive researcher David Peetz did a study of the impact of the employer and Howard Government attack on workers’ capacity to act collectively in their own interests. He found that where there were active elected Union Delegates representing and uniting workers around issues, the impact of the hostile employer and Government attacks on workers was much less effective.

Peetz found this was even more the case when the Delegates were elected rather than appointed by the (sometimes) more remote Union Organizer or Union Executive or Secretary.

Interestingly, the new Delegate clause in Awards says that a Delegate can be "elected" or "appointed" by higher levels of the Union!

Progressive union leaderships will surely ensure that ALL Delegates are elected by members and endorsed by relevant Councils or Executive Committees of their Union.

The only reason a Delegate elected by members they work with is NOT endorsed by higher bodies of their Union would be that the elected Delegate had a history of behaviour and values unacceptable to members of the Union as a whole. For example, proof of criminal activities, racist towards certain workers, evidence of being a boss's stooge!

Now that the Delegate clauses are law, it raises the question of whether an appointed administrator of a Union by a Government or Fair Work Commission had the capitalist legal system power to declare any Delegate elected by members to no longer be a Delegate!

Labor Minister Confirms “No refund” at NATO Summit

 Written by: Nick G. on 19 July 2024

 

Labor’s Assistant Minister for Defence Matt Thistlethwaite has embarrassingly confirmed that the two amounts of $A4.7billion gifted to the US and UK miliary machines in an effort to pump prime the AUKUS arrangements will not be refunded if the arrangements fall apart.

Australia is a partner, not a member of NATO, but the government deemed it important that it strut its stuff at last week’s Washington summit.

While there, Thistlewaite was interviewed by US online Breaking Defence magazine.

Their first question raised the issue that that under a new administration and Congress AUKUS might “lose some steam.”

Thistlewaite referred to” conversations that I’ve had with congressmen and -women yesterday from both sides of the aisle” and believed that regardless of who won the US election, AUKUS’s future was assured.

“They see the strategic importance of it for security and peace in the Indo-Pacific” he said, “but they also see the industrial uplift that will come from Pillar II, and that means jobs in their districts.”

A few questions later, Breaking Defence asked: “There was some question in Parliament recently about the $5 billion payment to the US to bolster the sub industrial base, and what would happen if the AUKUS deal for Virginia-class subs falls apart. What would happen to that money? Is that actually a concern at all?”

Now that matter arose from a Senate Estimates hearing on May 6 when Greens Senator David Shoebridge questioned the Head of the Australian Submarine Agency, Vice-Admiral Jonathan Mead, who refused to answer a series of questions about whether Australia will get its money back if the US fails to transfer Virginia class submarines in the 2030s.

The government has had nearly 3 months to work out how to spin this matter, or if it wanted to, how to reply honestly to the question.

But Thistlewaite seemed clueless in his response, adding nothing to Mead’s earlier unsatisfactory answer.

“There’s been no indication at all to us that the Virginia classes aren’t going to be delivered,” mumbled Thistlewaite. “So we’re working on the assumption that we will acquire that capability from 2027. The planning is in place, including, importantly, the people transfer. So the deployments of US submariners, all that planning is starting to take place already. So there’s been no indication at all that that commitment won’t be met.”

Yes, you idiot, you can assume there are fairies at the bottom of the garden too, but the question was, will we get our money back if the submarines are not delivered. 

The government will still not say either “Yes” or “No”.  Just one of two words, Matt Thistlewaite. We don’t need any more than that.

Comforting for the US submariners who will be rotated through Fleet Base West, WA’s HMAS Stirling, Thistlewaite reported that “We’ve got a body called Defense Housing Australia. They’ve just gone out to the market for a tender to build 550 homes around the base for submariners and their families, and the response to the tender has been great.”

The government was “working at speed” on this and other infrastructure, he said.

It’s a pity the government is not “working at speed” to address the acute housing shortage facing its own people. 

 

Salute the heroic comrades of the Rojava revolution.

Written by: Nick G. on 19 July 2024

 

On  July 19, 2012, armed fighters of the People’s Protection Units (YPG) captured the city of Kobane from government forces in north-east Syria.

Further victories against Syrian government forces and those of ISIS saw the creation of Rojava as an autonomous region in which the cultural, religious and political freedom of all people has been established. Significantly for the region, its Constitution also explicitly states the equal rights and freedom of women and also "mandates public institutions to work towards the elimination of gender discrimination".

In celebration of the 12th anniversary of the Rojava revolution, we encourage our readers to download the book Rojava: People in Arms to gain an understanding of the Kurdish people’s struggle. It can be downloaded at the bottom of this page:  Rojava: Peoples in Arms – #RiseUp4Rojava

 

The Bezosmoth

Written by: Humphrey McQueen on 17 July 2024

 

(Above: A 10ft tall Bezos is he target of workers engaged in a March 20, 2021 international day of solidarity with Alabama Amazon workers.  Photo by Joe Piette  Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0)

 

This article is republished with the kind permission of the author, Marxist historian Humphrey McQueen.  It first appeared on the Pearls and Irritations website on July 13, 2024-eds.

 

Behold, now behemoth … Behold, he drinketh up a river …
The Book of Job, 40: 15 and 23. 

‘Most of us don’t know 95 percent of what Amazon is doing,’ Amy Webb warns in her The Big Nine (2019). While Amazon Prime is diverting audiences with its rom-com, The Idea of You, the Australian Signals Directorate is paying Amazon Web Services two billion dollars to store secrets in three locations on the Cloud with a golden lining for Amazon which holds the largest slice globally, at around a third. 

(Will the ASD sites need Dutton’s nuclear plants to power them?)

Jeff Bezos began by distributing books in July 1994 to customers with discretionary incomes to build into ‘The Everything Store,’ helping to put 2,500 bookshops out of business. (Brad Stone, The Everything Store, 2013) First called Cadabra, as in the slight-of-hand magic spell ‘abracadabra,’ then rebranded Amazon within a few months to match the mightiest river with its expansive delta. 

The tributaries to Amazon’s reported income of $6.7 billion for 2023 have a common spring in the labours of 1.46 million ‘Amazonians’ employed as wage-slaves in warehouses, on piece-rates for the Mechanical Turk, or as ‘in/dependent’ delivery drivers for Amazon Flex. 

In Management-Speak, Amazon warehouses are ‘fulfillment centers,’ which is true for packages but not for the pickers and packers who endure them as ‘hellscapes.’ Unlike chattel-slaves who could run off into the Amazon delta, wage-slaves have nowhere to hide from the all-seeing-eye of devices which have patrolled ‘Scamazon’ for twenty years. 

The Wall Street Journal parades ‘Besozism’ as an advance on Taylorism and Fordism for its ‘mix of surveillance, measurement, psychological tricks, targets, incentives, sloganeering … and an ever-growing array of clever and often proprietary technologies.’ 

On the frontier of Telematics, Amazon patented a wrist-band which reports hand-movements, before sending vibrations back to nudge the workers into being more productive. 

Along with other distributors, Bezos had rented the first-generation KIVA robots ‘to increase the output capacity of their warehouses; store and ship a wider range of product; shorten the amount of time required to fill an order; and ultimately either lower the cost of their services, increase their profits, or both.’ In 2012, Bezos bought KIVA’s manufacturer for $775m., rebranding it Amazon Robotics. He did not renew its contracts with competitors such as the now bankrupt Toys’R’US, which had to set up its own. One product-line which his ‘Everything Store’ does not sell is its labour-slaving technologies. 

An Amazon recruit takes a couple of days to learn to pull sticky tape at the maximum speed from its dispenser without twisting it. The dispenser is programmed to extrude the exact length but workers out-performed the device at fastening the tape around cartons of multiple shapes and sizes. A novice who does not pick up that knack by the third day is ‘set free.’ The Bezosmoth did not rack up his cool trillion by dispensing with fixed-capital at that rate. Like every agent of capital, he juggles outlays between equipment and wages in pursuit of more than the average rate of profit. 

Workplace-wide sensors track every move of every Amazonian down to the milli-second to determine the floating average ‘rate’ at each warehouse, helping to lift the pick-rate from 100 to 300 per hour per worker. AI devices report in real time the pick-rates around the planet, globalising labour-times. Saving one milli-second is nothing. To do so 1,000 times per second on a 10-hour shift piles up on the bottom line.   

What the Bezosmoth insists on as ‘the rate’ confirms Marx’s recognition that ‘everything that shortens the necessary labour-time required for the reproduction of labour-power, extends the domain of surplus labour’ to realise as profit

Cardinal automatic scanners replaced scanning by hand in 2021. Loaded with Augmented Reality ID vision and AI, they pluck items of up to 22kg., read the labels, place them in the correct bin before they are moved further along the shipping process. Promoted by Amazon as a boon to the ‘pickers’ by reducing repetitive strain, Cardinal is a blessing for a boss suffering workforce churn because of those injuries, or who are burnt out after two weeks of 10-hour days. Gift vouchers cannot retain recruits.

Amazon’s conglomerations of labour rival those at Detroit auto-makers before the 1980s. Once brought together, workers can become ‘dangerous classes’. Bezos’s determination to block unions is more than his ‘trademark hard-charging attitude towards work.’ Even a tame-cat union might negotiate legally-enforceable agreements which hamper Amazon’s redirecting of labour to increase the ‘rate.’ 

Amazon’s acceleration machine does not clock-off at the warehouse gate. Its monopsony clout compels suppliers to drive down the labour-times required for the units that their workers produce. Amazon’s abuse of its labour-force points to how effects from its practices spread back down its supply chains and across to competitors. 

Amazon runs flexibility-scheduling platforms which let its full-time workers choose their shifts. Should they fail to put in thirty hours during the week, they lose one point. Chalk up eight points for a range of faults, and you’re fired: ‘expectation of the sack is pervasive.’ Nothing is ‘flexible’ in that power relationship, any more than there is in ‘the rate’ set in Amazon hellscapes. Nonetheless, ‘the rate’ remains ‘flexible’ in that its victims are pushed to go ever faster. 

These congeries subject ever more full-time permanents to the conditions of a gig economy. Bezosism will not mean that all jobs will become gigs but that they all will be managed as if they were, as David Weil explores in The Fissured Workplace (2014).  

For the 2023 mid-year sales in Australia, Amazon recruited 1,000 drivers with their own vehicles, thereby externalizing fixed-capital costs, as does UBER. Cost-of-living pressures boosted the number of applicants willing to accept low rates of pay since an Amazon gig was not their principal source of earnings but what their recruiters called ‘extra cash,’ and the applicants experienced as desperate measures. 

Low wages at Amazon help to keep them down at DoorDash and Uber, while all three benefit from their employees’ being driven to chase two or three jobs to cobble together a living income.

Next year, will open a four-storey fulfillment centre, the size of the eleven  Melbourne Cricket Grounds, on Macaulay Rd, North Melbourne, while installing robots at both north Melbourne and the Craigieburn site, close by Tullamarine, the better to despatch to regional centers adding a threat to their street-front outlets.

The Bezomoth makes local governments in the U.S. of A. compete with offers of tax concessions and the like for the privilege of having a warehouse built in their district to the detriment of existing distributors and retailers. 

Amazon drops suppliers for ‘no reason’ other than a encourage les autres – thereby reminding all of them that no one of them is indispensable and so they had better cop whatever terms Amazon dishes out. It shifts the costs of holding inventory back to suppliers by making them wait for payment. Amazon’s behaviour is worse than that from Supermarkets here.

Amazon employs 7,000 Australians, 4,000 in the Cloud and 2,000 ‘permanents’ in its six fulfilment centers; 1,300 are body-hire, and 3,000 more in/dependent delivery contractors. To protect their rights at work, how much due diligence did AustralianSuper exercise before its ‘ethical’ investment in Amazon’s robotic fulfillment center at Craigieburn?

In like vein, under which kind of labour relations will the Australian Cloud staff be employed: Bezosism or FairWork? Will the ‘Labor values’ of Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, Tony Burke, ensure workers’ rights to unionise and to disconnect?

Gender equity should also be a concern given Kristi Coulter’s 2023 memoir, Exit Interview, that throughout twelve years as an Amazon executive she had been bullied and never given a top job. 

Given how easy it was for PriceWaterhouseCooper to bamboozle Tax Office sleuths, what chance will Defense boffins have in a showdown with the Bezomoth? Hard bargaining assumes that the prospect of post-retirement consultancies for politicians, bureaucrats and top brass does not make them a soft touch. After all, they are safe from another whistle-blower after the jailing of David McBride. 

One certainty is the contract will be another commercial-in-confidence trick. 

He who sups with The Bezosmoth, should have a long spoon. 

 

The Imminent Catastrophes behind Elon Musk’s “Starship”

 Written by: Leo A. on 17 July 2024

 

(Above: Elon Musk at the Kennedy Space Centre in 2020 with then President Trump in preparation for the launch of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.  Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/   Public Domain)

An often-overlooked way in which Australia is kept dependent on foreign powers is through access to space. Since this country currently has no orbital launch ability of its own (this could change later this year with Gilmour Space’s Bowen Orbital Spaceport granted Australia’s first orbital launch facility licence), Australian satellites must be launched on foreign soil by foreign, typically American or French, space programs. 

One of these programs, Elon Musk’s American corporation SpaceX, has been regularly making their way into the news headlines. The most recent topic of discussion concerns test flights of the “Starship” launch system, the most recent of which took place on June 6. There are two key causes of concern that should be considered in light of these recent developments. 
 
A New Greenhouse Gas Catastrophe 
 
First, the environmental impact of this new rocket has been mostly overlooked – perhaps due to the assumption that Starship is no more environmentally harmful than similar rocket systems, or perhaps due to the assumption that anything sufficiently “futuristic-looking” can’t possibly have a catastrophic environmental impact. Both of these assumptions are false. 
 
What sets SpaceX’s Starship apart from previous heavy-lift launch vehicles is the chemical reaction used for its propulsion system. All large rockets are powered by a combination of an oxidiser and a fuel. Like similar systems, Starship uses liquid oxygen as its oxidiser, no problem there, but unlike similar systems it uses liquid methane as its fuel (this combination is sometimes referred to as “methalox”). 
 
Methane is an extremely strong greenhouse gas, dozens of times as effective as carbon dioxide at trapping heat in Earth’s atmosphere. While the methane is intended to be burned in the ignition chamber during launch without leaking into the air, there are many steps in the process in which this could happen. Consider all the moments during the production, storage, transportation etc of the methane in which some of it can escape containment. Not to mention how much of it might not even ignite when it’s injected into the chamber and could simply exit the nozzle into the air, or how much of it may be released into the air during an explosive launch or re-entry failure (of which there have already been several). Even for the methane that does ignite as intended, the combustion reaction produces carbon dioxide as an exhaust product, so either way thousands of tonnes of greenhouse gases are being released with every launch. Now multiply that by the thousands of launches that are being planned, and a very serious problem begins to emerge. 
 
And why was such a devastating fuel chosen for the Starship programme? This question was answered in detail in a 2016 presentation when the programme was pitched in detail for the first time. Three fuel options were originally considered – kerosene, hydrogen and methane. Kerosene cannot be manufactured using the available resources of any worlds besides Earth, so the choice was primarily between hydrogen and methane. Reasons given in the presentation for choosing methane over hydrogen included several “disadvantages” of hydrogen that have already been resolved across decades of aerospace experience in using hydrogen in rocket propulsion. But one line in the comparison chart sticks out like a sore thumb: “Cost of propellant”. 
 
That’s what it’s really about. Methane was the cheapest of the three rocket fuels to mass-produce. As fancy and “shiny” as Elon Musk’s projects depict themselves, in the end they’re driven by the same motivations as any other bourgeois entity. 
 
The rejected fuel option, hydrogen, may deserve a closer look. At the present time, nearly all of the world's current supply of hydrogen is unsustainably created from fossil fuels, however there are methods of producing it in a clean, renewable manner, and these methods could theoretically be scaled up during a transition away from fossil fuels. It appears doubtful that clean hydrogen could itself become a major energy source, as some capitalists such as Twiggy Forrest claim, however it does not have to be in order to be used for space travel. Unlike methane, hydrogen itself isn’t a greenhouse gas, and in any case doesn’t remain in Earth’s atmosphere for long. And the combustion product of hydrogen and oxygen is water. In other words, the exhaust forms a tiny, temporary artificial cloud during launch. There are other environmentally-friendly methods of reaching space as well, some of which do not involve traditional rockets at all. 
 
American Tools of War 
 
Musk’s venture, like other parts of the space program, is intimately tied to Imperialist warfare - both supporting current wars and preparing for future ones. This has always been true, in fact the American space program began as little more than a military project for developing ICBMs aimed at the Soviet Union, China, and their allies. In the present day, military satellites serve numerous functions in support of the war machine, ranging from long-distance communications to spying on an opponent’s actions. SpaceX already regularly launches military satellites, and isn’t even against repurposing non-military satellites into tools of war. For example, the “Starlink” satellite network, supposedly designed to assist in giving internet access to remote communities, has been used by Ukrainian forces in the ongoing inter-imperialist proxy war so regularly that the one time Musk didn’t allow it’s use became newsworthy. 
 
Unlike any orbital launch vehicle currently in use, Starship has the capability to launch over a hundred tonnes of payload into low earth orbit at once. Such a capability in American hands can, and will, be used for malicious purposes. In the immediate, short-term future, this will play a role in the ongoing campaigns of imperialist aggression around the world. In the more distant, long-term future, the roles of military satellites may expand to encompass, for example, the ability to directly strike targets on the ground from orbit, and this may be seen in the larger conflicts that Australia will likely be dragged into. 
 
Looking deeper into the future 
 
We shouldn’t lose sight of another risk that could emerge if the Starship programme is successful at establishing regular interplanetary travel for profit-oriented purposes. Environmental destruction will follow wherever the interests of capital are given priority, and there’s no reason this trend would not continue offworld. By now lead, microplastics, and other pollutants have been found in every rainforest, glacier and deep-sea trench on Earth. Even Low Earth Orbit has been polluted by the Kessler Effect over the past few decades (and the Starlink project has made this far worse in recent years). Deep Space remains the one place that has yet to be corrupted by capitalism, and it should remain that way. One world has already been devastated by careless exploitation, we should hope that number does not increase. 
 
This does not mean that space travel itself is inherently reactionary or counterrevolutionary. If anything, history shows us the opposite. While many of the Soviet Space Program’s most infamous accomplishments took place during the 1960s, Soviet superiority in space already began before this. For example, in July of 1951, the Soviet Union launched the first mammals to survive a flight into space. Three years later in 1954, a developmental plan was proposed for the world’s first artificial satellite – what we now know as Sputnik 1. The foundations of a powerful space program had already been laid by the time of the revisionist takeover.

We should also remember the PRC’s “two bombs one satellite” programme. As early as 1958 Mao Zedong formally announced the development of a Chinese orbital space program. In April of 1970, China’s first satellite was successfully launched into space, making China the fifth nation to put a spacecraft into orbit using its own rocket. So no, the corruption of space travel by bourgeois interests does not make space travel itself inherently negative. 
 
Nor is the often-discussed ambition of populating other worlds (the term “colonization” is often used but appears unsuitable as this has little in common with the deadly colonialism of the past and present) counterrevolutionary either. In fact, this concept was first seriously promoted by a Soviet rocket scientist, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. A few short years after the establishment of the USSR, he published a plan for the long-term expansion of the human species into space. 
 
And this will likely happen in the future. Other worlds will likely be populated, not as a result of some billionaire’s side-project, but as the result of a socialist endeavour – likely of an international collaboration of socialist states. If the struggles of the present day are eventually won, this will be just one part of the bright future our children and grandchildren can look forward to.