Contributed
Military planning is now well under-way by the United States to implement a region-wide Electronic Warfare system across the Asia-Pacific.
The Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) being installed in South Korea (ROK) at present forms only one component part of a much larger system aimed at containing and encircling China to reassert traditional US hegemonic positions.
The centre of the US war-drive in the region is its 'powerful X-band radar, which forms the heart of the system'. (1) The system rests upon various component parts placed in strategic locations, each with a range of thousands of kilometres. (2) Later disclosures acknowledged early component facilities included an installation on Aomori Prefecture, Northern Japan, as early as 2006. (3)
In 2012 the US military were using the military-industrial complex and companies such as Raytheon, converging upon the Pentagon, to build six similar systems. They were described by a US government official, as, 'laying the foundations for a region-wide' system, linked to similar facilities in 'Japan, South Korea and Australia'. (4)
Disclosures in Australia have already revealed military planning for the system began in 2004 when the then right-wing Howard Coalition government 'gave the green light' for cooperation with the US to already existing facilities which now include 'similarly equipped Aegis ships in the US and Japanese fleets to form an embryonic region-wide missile defence shield'. (5)
The present THAAD system being installed in the ROK is a further component part of the already existing system. Likewise, recent publicity given to 'a stronger relationship with the US and having an Australian mainland-based missile defence system' which was 'similar to the THAAD the US has deployed to South Korea' form a further component part. (6)
The THAAD system in the ROK has also been hastily built following mass protests in the country and presidential elections scheduled for 9 May and is expected to be 'fully operational by the end of April' before presidential frontrunner Moon Jae-in who has opposed the THAAD system is expected to take office. (7)
The US system is based upon radar being used to detect incoming missiles, which detect and identify where it was launched and the target. An interceptor is then fired which uses kinetic energy to destroy the missile. (8) The system, in military jargon, is an Electronic Warfare system defined as 'a specialised tool that enhances many air and space functions at multiple levels of conflict'. (9)
EW systems are based upon the achievement of technological superiority. Problems, however, arise.
Critics of the system, for example, argue the system has little to do with the interception of incoming missiles and more about widespread surveillance across the region for intelligence purposes. Such criticism has carried considerable weight following further embarrassing disclosures about US defence and security facilities.
A recent acknowledgement about the existence of the highly secret US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) outside Washington using the X-band system and THAAD facilities does cast serious doubts over US military planning. (10) Despite high-level war-mongering rhetoric directed toward the northern DPRK, the Trump administration have been reluctantly forced to openly acknowledge the THAAD system in the ROK 'works against China' due to its 'radar fans go all the way through Manchuria'. (11)
Revelations about the NGA and its Australian counterpart facilities, raise serious questions about the nature of US military planning. Official media statements released in Australia have noted 'plans to deploy the THAAD system have angered not only North Korea, but also China and Russia which see the system's powerful radars as a security threat'. (12)
The US NGA facilities were completed in 2011 using an ARGUS-15, 1.8 billion pixel system hovering 4 miles high over the earth. Beforehand the intelligence work was conducted by the CIA. Its 'persistent stare technology' now, however, produces huge downloads of visual intelligence information and 'its principal function is to analyse the billions of images and miles of video captured' by the strategically-placed facilities. (13)
The Australian counterpart facilities, the Geospatial-Intelligence Organisation (AGIO) appear to have become operational in 2003 and were closely linked to the Defence Signals Directorate (DSD). (14) Its existence was secret until between 15,000 and 20,000 documents from Australian agencies were accessed by Edward Snowden then employed as a contractor with the US National Security Agency (NSA) and revealed in November 2013. A major part of US intelligence operations coordinated through Australia appear to have been surveillance of the Asia-Pacific region with a particular interest in Indonesian affairs, which included the activities of the inner circle of President Yudhoyono. (15)
The Australian involvement also included 'the interception of Indonesian naval and military communications' through secret monitoring facilities on the Cocos Islands which were linked to similar signals intelligence at Shoal Bay Receiving Station near Darwin. (16) The highly sensitive Cocos Islands system in the India Ocean was noted as forming part 'of a wider defence communications network' and hidden within coconut palm groves to avoid detection. It is significant to note the facilities rest well within the same arc as those based on Diego Garcia which are central to US global intelligence operations.
The US also appear to use Australian involvement through other diplomatic channels with sensitive surveillance equipment ostensibly used for countering terrorist threats and people-smuggling in the wider region although the main focus 'is political, diplomatic and economic intelligence' with specific reference to neighbourhood links with Chinese interests. (17) It was in this particular context the acknowledgement Australian Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) 'regularly taped the conversations of ordinary Australians' was officially linked to the collection of 'foreign intelligence' at the highest level in Canberra. (18)
A major concern for US-led western intelligence agencies face, however, is the problem of technological advances with signals intelligence (SIGINT) require greater involvement of human intelligence (HUMINT) to provide localised information. Technological advances are also labour intensive. Local agents, usually referred to as Ground Human and organised into networks through intelligence agencies, are required to identify areas and persons of interest.
The large-scale recruitment of Ground Human agents would appear well under-way in the Asia-Pacific. The US have been extending their influence in the region through numerous educational scholarships to prestigious institutions, the establishment of localised training agencies based on entities such as the Hudson Institute and exchanging of personnel in the corporate sector together with other seemingly generous behaviour and lavish displays of generosity.
A library, in a quiet Adelaide suburb in South Australia with a high density of higher socio-economic residents, for example, was recently found to have been used for recruitment by US consular staff with a particular interest in students from a local private high school who were about to graduate. The interviews took place in as formal setting across a table on which a full-size US flag was draped. Similar ones, no doubt, have also taken place across the Asia-Pacific region.
The softer diplomacy, displayed by the US in South Australia, would appear to rest upon far harder military planning in a part of the country with widespread defence industries, many of which are in the forefront of research and development of electronic equipment used for intelligence purposes.
1. Kim keeps going ballistic,
The Australian, 14 March 2017.
2. Ibid.
3. U.S. Seeks New Asia Defences,
The Wall Street Journal, Friday-Sunday, 24-6 August 2012.
4. Ibid.
5. Kim keeps going ballistic, op.cit., 14 March 2017, see also,
RAAF targets F-35 missile deal,
The Australian, 7 April 2017.
6. Protect cities from North Korean nukes,
The Australian, 14 March 2017.
7. Kim keeps going ballistic, op.cit., 14 March 2017, see also,
US missile equipment reaches South Korea,
The Australian, 27 April 2017.
8. Kim keeps going ballistic, ibid, 14 March 2017.
9. Definition – Air Force Doctrine 251, 5 November 2002,
Pentagon, Operational Doctrine, US.
10. The Multibillion-Dollar U.S. Spy Agency You Haven't Heard Of,
James Bamford, Information Clearing House, 22 March 2017.
11. Shield aimed at hurting China,
The Australian, 7 April, 2017.
12. Take that Kim: 'son of star wars' arrives in the South,
The Australian, 8 March 2017.
13. Shield aimed at hurting China, op.cit., 7 April 2017.
14. Spy chief in defence of SBY mission,
The Australian, 27 January 2014.
15. Ibid.
16. Listening post revealed on Cocos Islands,
The Age (Melbourne), 1 November 2013.
17. Revealed: How Australia spies on its neighbours,
The Age (Melbourne), 31 October 2013.
18. Spies are listening,
The Australian, 6 June 2002.
By Duncan B.
Poultry processor Baiada announced late last year that it was closing its Victorian operations. This left 16 chicken farmers without supply contract and limited options to find other uses for their huge chicken sheds. 100 workers are also without jobs with the closure of Baiada’s Laverton North plant. A company spokesman blamed “marketing conditions” for the need to consolidate Baiada’s national processing operations.
Baiada has been involved in a price war with its rival Ingham’s. Fears have been expressed in the industry that chickens will be the “new $1 milk” as Coles and Woolworths are cutting the cost of roast chickens sold in their supermarkets.
Baiada is a privately-owned Australian company whose operations include poultry broiler and breeder farms, hatcheries, processing plants, feed milling and protein recovery. It operates in NSW, Vic and SA and employs about 2200 workers. Baiada supplies chickens under the Lilydale and Steggles brands to all the major supermarkets, and fast food companies such as Mc Donalds, KFC, Red Rooster, and Pizza Hut.
Baiada has been in trouble repeatedly in recent years. For example, in 2010, the Fair Work Ombudsman investigated allegations that a Baiada company, Adelaide Poultry, was underpaying its workers. The company was found to have contravened workplace laws and was subjected to an “enforceable undertaking” made under the “Fair Work” Act.
In 2011 the ACCC commenced federal court action against Baiada alleging misleading and deceptive conduct and making misleading representations that meat chickens were “free to roam around in large barns.” In 2013, Baiada was hit with $400,000 in penalties over this case.
In 2015, Baiada was in the news again over allegations that migrant workers supplied by labour hire companies were being exploited in Baiada factories. The Fair Work Ombudsman found that the company was paying workers on holiday “417 class” working visas about half the lawful minimum wage and that they worked up to 18 hours a day without paid overtime. The workers were paid in cash and forced to live in sub-standard housing. Baiada agreed to repay up to $500,000 in wages that the contractors failed to pay workers, even though it did not directly employ them.
This brings us to Baiada’s latest attack on its workers. In March this year, Baiada announced plans to reduce the wages to the award rate for new casual employees taken on through labour-hire firms. These workers would be paid about $25 an hour rather than the union-negotiated rate of over $38 per hour. About 40% of Baiada’s casual staff are contract employees, so there are substantial savings to be made for the company. Baiada originally tried to impose the wage cuts on all of its casual staff, but backed down in the face of union opposition.
Companies such as Baiada are able to reduce wages by exploiting a loophole through the use of labour-hire companies which allows them to get around the union-agreed site rate. This creates a “second class” of workers who receive up to 40% less than the worker next to them for doing the same job.
Murray Goulburn to Close Factories
Dairy co-operative Murray Goulburn has announced that it will close dairy factories in Rochester and Kiewa (Vic) and Edith Creek (Tas), with an expected loss of 360 jobs. Murray Goulburn has suffered a 20% reduction in milk supply since it reduced the farm gate price to its suppliers last year.
The actions of these two agribusiness companies once again demonstrates that there is a firm basis for unity between farmers and the workers who process agricultural products in the dairy factories, mills and food companies.
Contributed
Resurrecting the Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC) has long been a dream of construction corporations and the corporate ruling class, even though Labor’s replacement, the Fair Work Building and Construction, already had its own anti-worker, anti-CFMEU teeth. Now the ABCC and its surrounding laws are back.
Many Enterprise Bargaining Agreements (EBAs) have expired or are about to, leaving some workers without a pay rise for over 12 months. The ABCC’s National Building Code lists things like site allowances and over award payments as non-compliant. It is backdated to cover agreements registered already, as well as new agreements.
Government and the ABCC are pressuring companies, saying they can tender for government jobs – an expensive process - but if they aren’t code compliant, no tender will be awarded. Every one of a company’s sites, and all their sub-contractors, have to be compliant, not just the project being tendered for. Even non-compliant EBAs already registered, around 2,300 nationwide, will have to be varied or terminated.
ABCC chief, Nigel Hadgkiss will decide if they are code compliant. He released guidelines, said he didn’t want to read long documents, and it was up to companies to submit compliant agreements.
Boom causing problems for big corporations
Agreements can’t be varied without union agreement. Some construction workers want their union to tell the government that they won’t vary, and that every tier one corporation will be locked out of government contracts. The very biggest of these, CIMIC, Lendlease, Mirvac and Fletcher Building are Business Council of Australia members. This would only leave small companies able to tender.
In boom areas, especially Sydney and Melbourne, time frames for completion of buildings haven’t changed, and developers are unlikely to give extensions if workers strike.
Corporations are complaining to the CFMEU, which in turn says the Master Builders Association (MBA), dominated by the biggest construction companies, created the problem by demanding a crackdown on unions. The CFMEU says the MBA needs to fix it. An important split in the MBA has widened.
Big construction firm Probuild told the Senate Estimates Committee the situation is unworkable, and will cause trouble in a currently harmonious industry. No wonder. It has twelve major constructions in four states, including Australia’s tallest residential towers under construction in Sydney for Chinese developer Greenland, due for completion in 2019, and the Aurora Melbourne Central. Most of the projects are in Sydney or Melbourne where industrial action is most likely. Lendlease is in a similar situation, and also complained to the federal government.
Michaelia Cash was scathing. She represents the view of the whole corporate ruling class, that worker’s powers to make gains or resist attacks have to be crushed. She’d turned herself inside out serving corporations by re-establishing the ABCC, only to have a section of them whinge. Cash labelled them ‘part of a cartel we have to smash’.
Mirvac is in a different situation, as a developer and construction company combined, owning huge swathes of the Sydney residential market.
Educating workers about cutthroat history
The union has won some concessions. Agreements must meet the Australian Standards, delayed payments which often keep workers or subbies waiting must be paid every month, and corporations must advertise locally for workers, but there are no penalties if companies don’t comply. The CFMEU can now challenge ABCC rulings in court, but many workers reckon only the solicitors win from this.
In a sign that builders still have underlying unity, despite the MBA ructions, none are sending agreement lodgements to the CFMEU for ratification. It’s likely corporations plan to go directly to workers, cut the union out and offer the same wages and conditions. This may appeal to those younger workers, and even some union organisers, who don’t understand the bosses’ cutthroat industrial history, and think current high pay and conditions dropped from the sky.
The chance of a working class victory in court depends on the strength of united worker action. In 1983, Norm Gallagher, Builders Labourers Federation General Secretary and one of our party’s Vice Chairpersons, was gaoled for telling the truth, by an ancient contempt law, ‘Scandalising the Court’. Back then, unions were stronger, but the principal remains. Unity in action is still workers’ greatest power.
On being released from gaol after a previous contempt charge, Gallagher told one television channel: ‘the rank and file of the union ... has shown such fine support of the officials of the union and I believe that by their actions in demonstrating in walking off jobs ... I believe that has been the main reason for the court changing its mind.’ He’d nailed it, and frightened the construction bosses and the court that too much education of workers was happening under his leadership.
But it was another statement, a pointless boast, that if he had been fined the union would pay it for him, that the court used to justify the jail sentence.
The danger of overestimating strength
There are still new and mid generation building workers who are prepared to go to gaol rather than answer an ABCC summons, but they’ve lost some of the illusions of the past.
They recognise there is no revolutionary situation, and that even if there were, trade unions at their best simply serve workers’ interests by uniting them and teaching them to fight effectively, but don’t challenge capitalism itself.
A veteran BLF activist told Vanguard, a failing of that inspirational fighting union was that its leaders overestimated the BLF’s power, behaving as if the union had the ability to take on the ruling class as a whole. He said the BLF also failed to take evasive action when ‘the tsunami was coming towards it’.
Too much was decided at the centre, and too little by the rank and file. Arrogance sometimes affected decision-making, and changed circumstances weren’t taken into account. Close allies, including the much loved and admired John Cummins from Victoria, were abused and cast aside if they warned of this or dared to disagree with decisions from above.
Cummins’ tactics were to be proven right, helping resurrect the best ideals and actions of the BLF within the CFMEU.
Very different dangers face workers and their trade unions today. Too much energy has been co-opted into parliamentary campaigning, copied holus bolus from Obama’s first successful election campaign. In the USA, it fostered illusions that Obama’s election would improve the lives of the people, change foreign policy from aggression to peace making, and close torture camps like Guantanamo Bay.
Little changed except tactics. The ruling class still ruled, and crushed people’s hopes.
Given the contempt with which politicians are held in Australia, this is the worst of all possible times to head down this path. Now’s the time to unite the working class and its allies to organise to fight for an independent working class agenda going far beyond targeted-seats’ campaigns. Parliament isn’t the answer. Nor is the ALP. They’re part of the problem, but their ability to deceive people that Australia is truly democratic is wearing dangerously thin.
The national CFMEU strike and rally in March signalled the way forward. United struggle, not isolated campaigning encouraging individuals to vote out the Coalition, will see concrete results. It’s not if you don’t campaign you lose. The key words are unite and fight.
by Bill F.
US President Trump has signed an executive order scrapping climate change laws that applied environmental restrictions to oil, gas, coal and coal seam gas extraction, and sure enough, the subservient Australian government is echoing Trump’s call to vandalise the environment.
Trump has torn up regulations that protect rivers and lakes from mining pollution, has reduced coal company taxes, approved two more oil pipelines that were previously blocked by environmental and social protests, and wants to lift fuel efficiency standards on cars and trucks. The Turnbull government is heading down the same track, but won’t need to do much about cars and trucks as our standards are pretty weak already.
The Trump administration is also considering withdrawing from the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement which limits US greenhouse gas emissions to 26-28% by 2025 (compared to 2005 level). Australia’s commitment is similar, but even less – 26-28% by 2030.
These moves are designed to boost the profits of the giant resource and energy monopolies that stand at the core of US imperialism.
Plunder and Pollution
In Australia, companies such as Chevron, Woodside, Santos, Exxon, BHP, Origin, Arrow Energy and Shell have long-term contracts to supply gas to Japan and other Asian countries. Not content with their current reserves and with limited access to coal seam gas, they are now hell-bent on plundering domestic supplies, not only to meet their contractual obligations, but also to impose higher prices on the domestic market through the creation of an artificial shortage.
At the bidding of the gas export monopolies, the Turnbull government has launched a frantic campaign to force the state governments to lift their bans and moratoriums on coal seam gas extraction. It panders to the climate change deniers who disparage solar and wind and other sources of clean, renewable energy.
And, it ignores the fact that the gas giants already sit on massive untapped reserves on land and off-shore, and that any so-called “shortage” is contrived and manipulated.
It also ignores the widespread community opposition to the whole idea of fracking and the devastation of water catchments, farming land and wildlife that follows. The Australian people have time and again registered their opposition to fracking and will certainly mobilise once more to defeat Turnbull’s plans.
The federal government has also proposed that the resources of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, originally established to finance renewable energy projects such as wind farms and solar-thermal power, be turned over to funding new coal-fired power stations based on the myth of “clean coal” and the speculative carbon capture and underground storage system.
Appeasing the climate deniers and apologists for imperialism, the Turnbull government is moving to grant the notorious Indian-owned Adani Corporation a $1 billion loan to build a railway line to haul coal from its Carmichael mine in the Galilee Basin in Queensland to an upgraded port at Abbot Point on the edge of the endangered Great Barrier Reef.
Missing out
While our public schools, hospitals and social services are suffering cut-backs in government funding and plenty of cash is flowing to support US wars and military provocations, the taxes paid by the corporate monopolies are minimal and the benefit from their plunder of resources is even less.
A Fairfax report investigated the application of the Petroleum Resource Rent Tax (PRRT) by the federal government on the oil and gas industry. This sector is dominated by multinational ventures off the Western Australia coast and coal seam gas (fracking) in Queensland and NSW. It uncovered the shameful information that just 8 out of 149 resource projects paid any PRRT in the year 2014-15, in spite of collective revenues in excess of $25 billion!
The PRRT is structured to tax only “super-profits” and is not a royalty based on the amount of oil or gas extracted. Companies can then write off their exploration and construction costs to reduce the amount of tax due and carry forward this credit for years to come. According to the Tax Office figure obtained by Fairfax Media, these tax credits are now worth $187 billion.
From its production of 100 billion cubic metres of LNG, Qatar currently picks up $26.6 billion in royalties. For a similar amount of gas, the Treasury estimates the Australian government will get a miserable $800 million! This massive betrayal of Australia’s national interests demonstrates the abject collaboration of the local ruling class with the corporate beneficiaries of imperialism.
Choking on their muck I
n our part of the world, Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions have increased 7.5% since the 2014 scrapping of the carbon price. Kelly O’Shanassy, chief executive of the Australian Conservation Foundation said, "This latest data provides more evidence Turnbull government policies that are supposedly designed to cut Australia's climate pollution are simply not doing the job.”
The latest National Pollutant Inventory listed 93 key toxins, including particulates that can spur premature death by worsening existing heart and lung conditions. One of the worse was the recently closed Hazelwood brown coal-fired power station which emitted 61,425 tonnes of toxins in the last year, including 700 tonnes of fine particulates that can enter the human blood stream.
Other notable polluters include Bayswater in NSW (770% increase in five years), Tarong in Queensland (237% in one year!), Bulga in the Hunter Valley (32% in one year), and Drake Coal in Queensland (25% in one year).
Nationalise the power industry!
Critical resources like oil, gas, coal and water and the associated infrastructure such as refineries, mines, ports, pipelines, power stations and transmission lines should be owned and controlled by the people, not these greedy foreign and local monopolies.
Only then can these industries be managed for the benefit of the people, with regulated pricing and strict environmental and export controls. Only then can the people make rational decisions on the phasing out of fossil fuels for energy and re-building manufacturing and other industries on a clean and sustainable basis.
This just isn’t going to happen under the current system of imperialism/capitalism when the dominant US imperialist ruling class and their local agents are profit-addicted to fossil fuels.
Revolutionary change is what is called for – as the contradiction between monopoly capitalism and the working people is sharper than ever.
Louisa L.
Sovereignty and Treaty lie at the heart of building socialism in this continent.
Throwing off colonial shackles is unfinished business along the path to socialism, but it’s impossible without Treaty, a concept encompassing the myriad of Treaties, first between Sovereign Peoples themselves, then with people’s organisations and much later with government.
An Australia based on invasion and theft, cannot progress to a republic of any worth, with its own independent institutions emerging from struggle, let alone independence from corporate rule or socialism.
Over a year ago, Narungga Elder, Tauto Sansbury said that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples were ‘being cut into pieces,’ but that Treaty marked a way forward no matter how long it took to achieve.
Sovereign Peoples have long highlighted John Howard as the godfather of constitutional recognition, his aim to undermine the 30-year united demand by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples for Treaty’s fundamental change.
First Nations’ leaders and groups like Sovereign Union have outlined constitutional recognition’s legal potential to destroy Sovereignty, never ceded in 230 years of invasion and illegal occupation.
Since then, Sovereign Peoples’ fightback has made in-roads even within the massively-funded Recognise roadshow, which continues as invitation only, locking out those First Peoples who disagree.
Burning brighter
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples reject deals done behind closed doors.
While First Nations caution that current treaties being discussed with governments have grave dangers too, Elders have inspired the young to take the fight for unity forward. Their grass roots’ organisations ignite powerful and intensified struggles.
National Unity Government organised the five-day Sovereignty Workshop just held in Canberra in conjunction with the Frontier Wars March on April 25.
At Uluru soon, a national Recognise gathering will be met by many elected delegates standing for Sovereignty and Law. While they may be outnumbered by pro-Recognise elected and centrally appointed delegates, they will build on spirit of the Wave Hill Walk Off’s 50th Anniversary gathering of 2016.
The Tent Embassy’s fire is burning brighter, its slogan, ‘Land. Life. Language. Liberation’, pinpointing the heart of struggle and the reparations Treaty must bring.
Young people build struggle through Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance, drawing 50,000 people onto Melbourne streets and round the country on Invasion Day, and through FISTT, Fighting In Solidarity Towards Treaties.
In these, and other organisations and numerous smaller events across the country, new leaders are created in struggle, not by corporate training packages.
Both Elders and young people are targeting corporations and capitalism. They reject division and disunity.
Inheritors of invasion
The inheritors of invasion, multinationals, organised and led by the Business Council of Australia, are the chief source of division amongst Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples.
This Business Council drive to disunity has many aspects, detailed in a forthcoming Spirit of Eureka publication recently seen by Vanguard, and soon to be available for download from http://www.spiritofeureka.org/.
For years Sovereign Union, among others, has consistently highlighted one aspect, the use of Recognise to create a corporate-backed mass movement, undermining the pre-existing demand for Treaty by Sovereign Peoples.
Currently over 300,000 Indigenous and non-Indigenous people and organisations are registered supporters of Recognise, the overwhelming majority of them oblivious of the BCA’s agenda.
Sovereign Peoples not only have much to teach about how to live sustainably on this continent. They have survived violent invasion and dispossession, yet still they organise and struggle. They have done this under the most difficult circumstances imaginable since 1788.
While unease and outright fear grip many Australians as new-style fascism grows, Sovereign Peoples have 230 years of collective lessons of courage, unity and refusal to accept dictatorship. Sovereign Peoples find strength in the experience and tenacity of Elders and in the energy and fire of youth. We all have much to learn.
Alongside a reorganised, reinvigorated, fighting movement of non-Indigenous Australians led by the working class, united Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples have a power and strength far beyond their small numbers. It’s time to listen to and learn from them. It’s time to organise and fight.
Jamie C. (With some content from a Spirit of Eureka leaflet distributed at March for Science)
Science is important not only because of its obvious technological benefits to humanity, but also because it gives us an ever-deeper understanding of the universe.
Science never upholds theories based on inadequate evidence and unfalsifiable ideas, but rather seeks its truths from facts. Research and experiment give rise to ever better theories, or models, explaining more and more phenomena in the real world.
A good theory explains more than the facts it was designed to explain. But no theory is sacred: there is always a myriad of scientists trying to show a theory is, at least partially, false.
Additionally, research papers need evidence-based results and go through a strict peer-review process. Consequently, when there is a large consensus amongst relevant scientists, that consensus should be respected.
Recently, however, the Western world has treated science contemptuously ignoring many a consensus.
When profits of multinational corporations are threatened, the 98% of consensus scientists are given equal or less time in the billionaire-owned media, than the 2% opposing. In this way, doubt is created, and the short-term interests of the big end of town take precedence over the long-term interests of Jack & Jill Citizen.
Climate Science Research
Multinational companies & their associations have opposed climate science findings for years, while publicly giving lip-service support.
A 2012 US Union of Concerned Scientists report noted that General Electric backed six environmental research groups accepting the scientific climate change consensus, whilst funding four organisations questioning it.
The multinational oil giant, ConocoPhillips said in 2011 that it “recognises” human activity leads to climate change, yet in 2009 argued against the Environmental Protection Agency’s determination that heat-trapping greenhouse gases were pollutants endangering public welfare.
The US Chamber of Commerce and the US National Association of Manufacturers have doggedly fought greater environmental regulation. Now the situation is even worse with a climate change denier as US President.
David Suzuki, the well-known Canadian scientist, pointing out that Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper cancelled virtually all Canadian research on climate change, put it well: “…the politicians and corporate executives are driven by a totally different set of values, by the drive for profit, for growth, and for power”.
Australia’s plight — business first, science last
Although Turnbull renewed the CSIRO climate science focus — research which once led the world — and reversed some of the more than 1000 sackings of the Abbott era, irreplaceable experts such as the CSIRO’s Dr John Church, an expert in estimating & understanding sea-level rise, have lost their jobs.
As the Climate Science Centre head said, “You can’t cut a third of a climate science group and not suffer some damage to reputation” and agreed that the losses would have a major negative impact on Australian research.
Whilst “crying poor” that it must lower the deficit and leaving hundreds of scientists jobless, the Turnbull administration sings from the multinational hymn book, somehow finding money to reduce taxes for smaller businesses as the first step towards implementing the Business Council of Australia’s goal of an across-the-board business tax reduction to 22%. The Business Council allows only the very largest corporations as members.
“Clean coal” nonsense
The current administration also peddles the anti-scientific “clean coal” theory. Burning coal for electricity emits toxic & carcinogenic substances into our air, water & land. The Australian Academy of Technological Science and Engineering estimated coal’s health impacts cost taxpayers $2.6 billion per year and the new plants still produce about 80% of the emissions of an equivalent old plant, while renewables such as wind & solar emit zero emissions. Moreover, “clean coal” prevents Australia meeting its obligations to reduce emissions, by 2030, 26-28% below 2005 levels.
What is the answer?
The attitude to science is a class question: the ruling class often ignores science when its short-term profits are at stake whereas genuine respect for science advantages the working class and its allies.
We need to fight for an independent working class agenda including proper respect for scientific conclusions, and work towards an independent and socialist Australia in which evidence-based science research is not at the mercy of imperialist greed.
Editorial
This year marks the centenary of the Great October Socialist revolution – the Bolshevik revolution – and it also marks the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Marx’s Capital. Both of these events mark major milestones in the struggle for the emancipation of the working classes from the yoke of capitalism; a step on the way to building the classless society of communism.
First published in 1867, in Hamburg, Capital sought to lay bare the ‘laws of motion’ of capitalism so as those exploited and oppressed by it could have a clear understanding of the source of their exploitation and oppression.
What Marx accomplished in Capital was to go beyond the insights of Adam Smith and David Ricardo (two of the founders of bourgeois political economy), in particular, correcting mistakes that Smith and Ricardo had made in their expositions on the labour theory of value.
Marx demonstrated that the value of commodities is determined by the quantity of socially necessary labour time spent on their production.
As Lenin pointed out in a very succinct piece on the three sources and three components of Marxism, bourgeois economists prior to Marx had seen a relationship between things (commodity exchange) whereas Marx astutely revealed the relations between people masked by the surface phenomena of the exchange of commodities.
Marx in Capital highlighted how with the advent of capitalism as the dominant mode of production in Britain (spreading to Western Europe and beyond in relatively quick succession) a worker’s capacity to labour – labour power – was turned into a commodity itself.
By paying the price of this commodity (wages) a capitalist is able to extract from workers more value (over the course of the working day, week, month, year) than what they are paid in wages; that is to say, surplus value is created by workers. Surplus value being the source of profit, the Holy Grail of capitalists.
Marx undertook the arduous task of researching and writing Capital to arm the proletariat in the class struggle against capitalists and capitalism. It is a book that requires diligence and hard study to understand. For those of us struggling to build socialism here and abroad though, it is required reading.
Nor was he only a great theorist, but also a committed activist who declared, “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways, the point is to change it.”
