verging_on_random

Global authoritarianism

The USA is by far the most powerful military nation in the world, so much so that no other combination of countries can realistically threaten it with conventional military action. That’s the way the USA likes it and the fundamental objective of US defence policy is to prevent any other country ever being able to mount a serious challenge to American dominance.

The latest demonstration of this policy is the USA’s objection to China developing a rocket that can knock out low-orbit satellites. China tested it successfully the other day (on one of their own satellites, I hasten to add). Such a weapon would be very useful in a war, taking out US spy satellites and thereby depriving America of one of its most significant advantages in a conflict.

So isn’t it eminently predictable and not unreasonable that a country like China should try to reduce the enormous imbalance of military capability that currently exists between it and the USA?  Not according to the US. They run the goddam world and under the Bush administration they don’t bother to hide it.

Under a space policy authorized by President Bush in August, the United States asserts a right to “freedom of action in space” and says it will “deter others from either impeding those rights or developing capabilities intended to do so.”

The policy includes the right to “deny, if necessary, adversaries the use of space capabilities hostile to U.S. national interests.”

In accordance with this asserted right, the USA has protested to China. One commentator observed:

“The thing that is surprising and disturbing is that [the Chinese] have chosen this moment to demonstrate a military capability that can only be aimed at the United States”

I love the offended tone. America has a huge military advantage, it’s well-known that the Pentagon’s ‘big war’ plans are all based on conflict with China, but when China tries to develop weapons that will leave it slightly less disadvantaged, it’s doing something ‘aimed at the USA’ as if that’s an aggressive move.

What is most concerning is that ’several U.S. allies, including Canada and Australia, also have registered protests.’ I haven’t seen any mention of this locally; is our government’s mindless support of the Bush administration now so taken for granted that a diplomatic protest with as little merit as this can be made without anybody caring or even noticing? Apparently.

Who replaced Rudd as foreign affairs spokesperson again? Better lift your game, whoever you are.

The end of unions?

Kim Beazley’s been reading the tea leaves. He reckons that the next election will see either the Liberal Party or the trade unions struggling for survival. Since majority opinion (and in this instance I’m part of the majority) favours another win for Howard this year, Kim’s prediction is that “it would be difficult to see a recognisable union movement surviving a decade”.

The grounds for this argument are that the WorkChoices legislation will make it too hard for unions to retain membership. Well perhaps he’s right but I rather doubt it.

The forerunners of today’s trade unions started to develop early in the 19th century. Members were subject to criminal sanctions - indeed some of our earliest convicts were transported for participating in trade union activities. Early trade unions were militant activists who were prepared to break the law and risk serious personal consequences to support their cause.

Over time, the laws of England and other English-speaking countries were changed to give trade unionists immunity from civil and criminal liability, as long as their actions met certain conditions. WorkChoices has made those conditions quite a lot tougher but they still give unionists quite a lot of freedom to do things that would otherwise be unlawful. Trade unionists in 2007 face nothing like the legal impediments that their counterparts confronted in 1807.

Being a trade unionist in many countries has often meant risking harassment, imprisonment or worse. During the Suharto years in Indonesia, defying the approved national trade union organisation by setting up a local workplace body was a serious offence. Likewise in PR China and the USSR in its heyday. But workers still did it because they believed in the justice of their cause.

There are no significant legal barriers to trade unions operating in Australia under the WorkChoices legislation. If they cease to exist it will be because workers don’t believe in collective action any more, or at least not enough of them to make unions viable. If that’s what happens let’s call a spade a spade and not hide from reality by blaming the Howard Government for oppressing unions.

If our economy stays buoyant for another 10 years then Kim may well be correct - there might not be a recognisable trade union movement. However I think that’s unlikely. I think it’s more likely that a few recessions and individual industry crises will make enough workers nervous to keep some sort of trade union organisation going. If a few state governments return to the Coalition, as must happen eventually, that will accelerate the process as state public servants rediscover the benefits of solidarity.

Ironically, it’s likely that the most effective unions will be the most militant ones: unions that know how to make the best use of their limited rights to take direct action, or who can judge when they can get away with unlawful direct action. Knowing that their whole existence depends on having the enthusiastic commitment of members it will be in their interests to generate a sense of grievance amongst workers. The 1983-96 Accords era of co-operation and consensus will most likely be characterised by future union leaders as a massive strategic error by the likes of Bill Kelty and Laurie Carmichael.

If Labor wins under Rudd a whole different set of issues will arise. The unions will be desperate to have Labor introduce legislative changes that future Coalition governments would find hard to reverse. Rudd might be loathe to do this of course, and since even the most rabid ALP supporter would concede that Labor won’t control the senate, there will be lots of scope for further IR fun and games.

But unions cease to be a recognisable movement in Australia? I doubt it, at least not within 10 years. But if it does happen let’s be clear about the fundamental reason: it will not be down to evil conservative oppression. It will reflect the fact that workers no longer see any point in belonging.

Commodification … that’s the name of the game

It would be interesting to time-travel back to the society that first developed the concept that property was owned by an individual instead of being held in common for the collective good. We could ask if they had really thought through the ramifications of this revolutionary way of thinking. It seems to me that the privatisation of property will proceed according to its own inexorable logic until every single aspect of our lives has become a commodity to be bought and sold on the market.

I was reflecting on this on my run this morning. My return to running has gone pretty well, thank you so much everyone who inquired . I wake up some nights with a throbbing left ankle and my right knee aches quite a lot so it’s just like old times. But what got me to thinking was how few other joggers I see on my daily lurch. When I did it in Sydney years ago there were lots of us infesting the streets and parks and golf courses with our sweating bodies and our superior smiles but round here I’m lucky to see one other jogger a week.

I think this is because I mainly run barefoot on the beach. I mentioned this to a salesman in an athletic shoe shop where I went to buy some shoes just for the times when I feel like a change from the beach. He reeled in horror and tried to give me 10 good medical reasons why running barefoot on the sand like nature intended will cause every bone, tendon and muscle in my body to tear itself asunder. But I knew what was really upsetting him. In his world view running is part of being fit and fitness isn’t something you just go and do. Fitness is something you buy.

My local GP has a similar world view. When I whine about my sore ankle he suggests that swimming might be a better way to exercise. I explained that drowning while trying to swim a decent distance beyond the break wasn’t my idea of staying fit and he was completely taken aback. The idea that someone would do proper serious ‘keep fit’ swimming at the beach, for free, had obviously never crossed his mind. It should be done at a proper gym with a pool. Fitness is something you buy.

Many things apart from fitness have become commodities over the last 20 or 30 years. Some are notorious and still cause old-timers to laugh: dog washing, lawn-mowing, doing tax returns, dog walking. A lot of other things have crept up more insidiously. Food, for example.

Since I moved from Sydney I try to grow as many of my own vegetables as I can. My neighbours, passers-by and indeed the landlord have viewed this with an uneasy mixture of awe, resentment and irritation. Over the years literally hundreds of tourists have stopped to gaze in admiration , stunned that somebody can actually grow vegetables like the ones they buy in shops. Sometimes they’re so impressed they come back the next day with friends. The landlord and a few neighbours didn’t like it because I had veges growing in the front garden, when everybody knows they belong down the back out of sight, but that’s a story for another day.

Today’s point is that not so long ago most people grew at least some of their own food. God my dad even had chooks. Collecting the eggs was one of my daily chores and watching dad cut a chook’s head off was a def highlight of Christmas. Now however food is overwhelmingly something to be bought at a shop. Moreover the food is becoming ever more processed, either as fast food/restaurant meals that are ready to eat or as endless packages in the supermarket that only need to be microwaved. Food preparation has itself become a commodity that you buy.

Raising children of course has become a ‘must have’ commodity. In only a couple of decades pre-school child care has moved from a social oddity to an entitlement that’s so taken for granted we even expect the government to subsidise it. Likewise looking after the old folks. None of this living with one of the kids when you’re too old to look after yourself. Off to a nursing home with you! The kids will chip in and get you the best care that money can buy.

Entertainment in the form of sports and hobbies has also been largely transformed into doing things that cost money. Thank god for surfing and the anti-materialist culture that goes with it, where lots of kids can still get out and have lots of fun without having to spend heaps of money (I’m making a distinction here between genuine surfers and kids who go to the beach once every now and then to show off all the cool gear they bought at City Beach). But surfing’s only available to those who live close to the beach. For most kids, whether they’re on the net, on the phone, on the PSP or listening to the iPod, a big proportion of everyday entertainment involves money changing hands. And not just kids either of course.

People continue to resist this relentless commodification but its a losing battle. Currently education, health care and even basic security are in the process of being transformed from public benefits to private commodities. Yes a safety net will be retained for those who can’t afford to be in the market, but for how long? The more people who regard their education as something that they have personally ordered and paid for, the less willingness there will be to tolerate others being educated by the State. ‘Let them buy their own like I had to’ will be the philosophy.

I don’t regard this as a good thing. Nevertheless societies based on markets have their own internal logic and I don’t really see any likelihood of things changing in my lifetime. It does raise one interesting issue however: what will happen when capitalism reaches maturity and every single aspect of people’s lives is a commodity to be purchased in a market? Where will capitalism then find the endless growth that it needs to survive? I have no idea, but I suspect it will be an ugly scene and I’m rather glad I won’t be around to find out.

The lust for power

Executive governments everywhere have one thing in common: they yearn to increase their power over the individual citizen. The eternal glory of true Conservatives (as opposed to the radical opportunists who hide behind the ‘neo’-conservative label) is that they shine a steady spotlight on this insatiable lust for executive power and warn us to be ever vigilant against the encroaching tentacles of the State*.

Historically, the only circumstances in which the bulk of the population will grudgingly accept an increased role for the State is in time of national crisis such as war. This explains in part why presidents of the USA, in their resistance against Congressional oversight that began at least as long ago as Lincoln’s time, love the rhetoric of war. From the Cold War through the War on Crime, the War on Drugs and the War on Poverty to the War on Terror, as presciently described by Orwell in 1984, wars of one kind or another have become a fixture in the USA.

This is all a matter for the yanks of course, they’re big and ugly enough to take care of themselves, except that our own prime minister has attached himself to George W Bush like one of those fish that latches on to a shark. He too has adopted the rhetoric of war to justify all kinds of increases in government powers, some of which go close to the suppression of dissent.

The danger is that over time, this rhetoric unconsciously seeps into everyday language. For example, through constant repetition most people continue to talk about the ‘war in Iraq’, when the true description is the ‘post-invasion occupation of Iraq’. The problems with the notion of a ‘war on terror’ are that it can’t be defined, there is no way of identifying the enemy and nobody can say how we will know when we’ve ‘won’. Indeed Howard has made noises from time to time that the ‘war’ will go on for generations.

It would be a mistake to see this as a party-political issue. Tony Blair’s Labour Government has been equally keen to justify increased government authority using war rhetoric.

If we accept the logic of the ‘war on terror’, it implies an endless tendency towards authoritarian government. Assuredly for the foreseeable future we won’t ‘win’ the war, therefore it will be argued that more government powers are required. When these likewise fail to deliver victory, even sterner measures will be required ad infinitum.

Club Troppo carried a good story last week about the need to see terrorism as an intelligence/policing problem not a ‘war’. We need lots of calm, rational analyses like that to counter the self-serving rhetoric of politicians.

*I’m not suggesting that executive governments lust to control us from evil motives (though some do, of course). Mainly they want it because it makes their jobs easier.

Incipent totalitarianism

The right to a fair trial is a basic feature of democratic societies and proper legal representation is fundamental to a fair trial. Imagine the outrage - justified outrage - if big corporate clients threatened law firms in Australia that if they represented people charged with terrorism offences, they’d lose the corporate accounts.

Can you imagine a government coming out and encouraging corporate CEOs to do this? Not only that, but naming names. Like Attorney-General Ruddock going on Alan Jones’ show and saying something like “Alan did you know the Smith & Jones law firm is representing the people who planned to blow up Lucas Heights? I really think business leaders should tell Smith & Jones that they either represent terrorists or they represent corporate clients but they can’t expect to do both.” I know the standards of ministerial accountability in Australia are laughable but even so, I believe an Attorney-General who said such a thing in Australia would be sacked.

However, the American deputy secretary directly responsible for detainees has said exactly that. Even though the story appeared in the Washington Post I didn’t believe it until I got primary verification. The official concerned, whose name is Stimson, was interviewed on radio. Here’s an extract from the story:

“Actually you know I think the news story that you’re really going to start seeing in the next couple of weeks is this: As a result of a FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] request through a major news organization, somebody asked, ‘Who are the lawyers around this country representing detainees down there,’ and you know what, it’s shocking,” he said.

Mr. Stimson proceeded to reel off the names of these firms, adding, “I think, quite honestly, when corporate CEOs see that those firms are representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom line back in 2001, those CEOs are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms, and I think that is going to have major play in the next few weeks. And we want to watch that play out.”

There’s commentary on the story here.

It’s a hugely significant story because it reveals how the Bush administration thinks. When they say “You’re either with us or against us” they mean it literally. Does anybody doubt after this incident that if they had the power to deny terrorist suspects any legal rights at all, they would do it?

Ruddock assures us that the Americans have assured him that David Hicks will receive a fair trial. Yeah sure.

Iran’s anti-U.S. president heads to Venezuela

OMG - they’re encircling our ally.

Pointless post

Funny things happen when you move house. The other day I searched high and low for my favourite corn bread recipe. Nope, it’s gone.

So just now I opened Yes’s The Word Is Live triple album, which I play maybe once every two years, and there’s the recipe. Obvious place to put it really. IDK why I didn’t look there in the first place.

Intelligence sources have revealed …

From time to time you read comments from somebody to the effect that mere mortal folk like us shouldn’t question our betters on important matters of national security. Unlike us, the argument goes, our national leaders have access to all the secret intelligence reports. They know the truth about the world scene, the dreadful secrets that can’t be disclosed to the rest of us because … well just because, OK? What’s the point of having intelligence agencies if you don’t have lots of big secrets?

People who think like this have watched too many of the wrong kind of spy movies I reckon. You know the kind … the head of MI5 lifts the green telephone that hasn’t been used since the Profumo affair … “Prime Minister I need to see you immediately … yes our agent in Moscow has uncovered a plot to assassinate the Queen … for god’s sake don’t tell anyone, our agent’s life will be put in deadly peril.” People who think real life is like this are everywhere; one owns Harrod’s in London . Their lives must be miserable, worrying about all those unknown plots that their worthy leaders are busy dealing with. One imagines John Howard in his office after midnight, poring over the latest secret briefings from ASIS with a worried frown. “Get me Lord Downer on the scrambler,” he tells his secretary … “Lexie have you seen this top secret warning that the president of Iran doesn’t like Israel? Oh it’s in The Australian is it? Well it’s still a worry.”

The ‘leave it to those in the know’ brigade are amongst the worryingly large number of people who seem incapable of reflecting intelligently on the past. I mean we have plenty of evidence that our leaders don’t spend any time studying and evaluating intelligence data. They don’t study or evaluate any bloody thing. To whit:

• The 16 US intelligence agencies produced a combined report that found, as a matter of fact, that the Iraq invasion and occupation had increased the risk of terrorism. Howard said he hadn’t read it. It was ‘another contribution to the debate’, he said.
• The Stern Report, commissioned by the British Treasury, found that the cost of not taking action to reverse global warming would far exceed the cost of doing it. Howard said he ‘wasn’t convinced by the science’. No, he hadn’t read the report.
• Laughing Phil Ruddock has been defending the government’s refusal to do anything about David Hicks’ imprisonment in a concentration camp for years, but it emerged this week that he’s never bothered to read the brief of evidence that the prosecution will rely on.
• The defence offered by Downer, Vaile, Howard and anybody else involved in the AWB scandal was that they didn’t know what was going on. Yes, they admitted that they might have seen some cables from embassy staff but they didn’t remember. Downer got quite terse about it … like he’s a busy man, doncha know? He can’t be expected to sit and read piles of intelligence reports.

In short, our leaders don’t have the time (or perhaps the inclination) to study and interpret intelligence data. For god’s sake, half the US Congress still can’t explain the difference between Sunnis and Shiites. All politicians want is summaries of intelligence, from which they pick and choose points to support their preferred course of action. Anybody who doubts this is really not living in the reality-based world.

Today’s intelligence triumph reveals that Osama bin Laden is in … go on, guess. Which country do you reckon old Osama’s in?

Well done everybody who said ‘Pakistan’. It’s official, just been announced today.

I confess to having been under the impression since 2001 that Al Qaeda’s headquarters (to the extent they have one) moved back and forth between Pakistan and Afghanistan. I thought everyone knew that, even without having access to secret intelligence reports. That’s where they hatch their evil schemes, though I don’t really understand how you can plan to bomb the London underground from a cave in the hills outside Quetta.

Anyway now that Al Qaeda’s whereabouts are a known known, what is the Bush administration going to do about it? I mean they’ve invaded Afghanistan and Iraq as part of the War On Terror but Pakistan’s supposed to be an ally. Sending in a few special forces to hunt down Osama and his mates should be a piece of cake.

Except apparently this isn’t possible. Nobody is explaining why not. No doubt the reasons lie in that top secret ‘President Bush’s eyes only’ report from Our Man in Lahore.

‘Winning’ in Iraq

So having spent a year or three vowing that while he’s prepared to consider a change of tactics, the strategy in Iraq is not for turning, today Dubya announced a change in … strategy. Except that when you analyse it, if it’s a change in anything at all, it’s a change in … tactics.

I didn’t watch the whole thing – you think I have no life at all? -  and I’m sure anyone who’s remotely interested will be overwhelmed with commentary over the next few days, but I thought I’d put my two bobs’ worth in anyway.

The new measures are a mix of military optimism and Harvard Business School Management By Objectives (MBO), circa 1975. First to the military optimism.

More troops will be sent to Iraq, bringing the total up almost to the level in January, 2005. Dubya asked himself why they would succeed where others have failed. It’s a reasonable question. The answer, apparently, is that in the past American and Iraqi troops ‘cleared’ an area of bad guys but as soon as they moved on, the bad guys would just come back. Bastards. But with more troops, they can hang on to the cleared areas indefinitely.

Two questions occur to my simple mind about this new tactic:

1. Won’t the bad guys just go somewhere else and cause trouble? Then the troops will have to leave the cleared areas and go to the new ones, meaning the bad guys can come back again … it’s like that amusement arcade game where you have to keep hitting the heads that pop up. I guess you could make it successful if you had enough troops to lock down the entire country, but I can’t see a 16% increase being enough to make that huge a difference.
2. To the extent that the tactic succeeds, haven’t you just created an obligation of indefinite duration? It’s a bit like grabbing a snake by the head: you stop the snake doing any harm but how will you ever let go? Once American troops are committed to clear-and-hold operations they can only be relieved if Iraqi forces develop the capacity to take over the holding bit, which obviously they can’t do now. The history of the occupation would make one pessimistic that they’ll be able to do it any time soon either, meaning that the ‘surge’ of extra troops is likely to be required indefinitely.

Coupled with these tactical matters is a series of political ‘benchmarks’ that the Iraqi government will be expected to meet. Anybody who’s undergone a formal performance appraisal in a large organisation will be familiar with the logic underpinning benchmarks. Hell, I’ve been teaching it for years.

• You set the employee/Iraq some overall performance objectives for the next 12 months;
• You establish Key Performance Indicators (‘benchmarks’) that you and the employee/Iraqi government will use to evaluate progress towards achieving those objectives.

What’s the next stage of the analogy? Well in an organisation, an employee who wasn’t meeting benchmarks might be given some training, counselled, warned and finally sacked. I guess the Iraqi equivalents are given some advice, given some serious advice, warned and finally … what? Withdraw American troops and leave the Iraqis to slug it out?

Dubya’s in a bind. Again today he emphasised all the terrible consequences that will befall America if the bad guys are allowed to win in Iraq. So if he’s going to be consistent he can’t withdraw American forces, it would be contrary to the USA’s interests. That would seem to leave the business option: sack the Iraqi government and get the head-hunters in to recruit a new one.

I’m sure there’ll be furious discussion about whether Dubya’s program will ‘work’ militarily but it seems to me that the discussion would be more profitably directed elsewhere – to his summary of the awful consequences of failure in Iraq, as defined by him. If he’s right, then of course it’s constructive to discuss the best way to achieve success. But if he’s wrong, then the sensible thing to do is get the hell out of there as soon as possible.

I believe he’s wrong, but I’m not dogmatic about it. I’d like to read a lot more rational debate that refers to solid evidence about what is actually happening in Iraq, free of the endless spin and the defining frame of the ‘war on terror’. In the mean time, I’d have to say that Dubya’s latest announcements are no more than the latest reactive response to events that are pretty much beyond anyone’s ability to control.

Teaching and learning

Academics seem to have a bad rep in the blogosphere. I’ve lost count of the number of comments I’ve read that sneer at uni lecturers and the crap that they teach. Lucky I have a thick skin.

Some of these comments however illustrate the fundamental misconception that many people have about the university experience. They talk about ‘what kids get taught’ (they usually talk about ‘kids’, thereby revealing their ignorance of contemporary university life. At the uni where I do most of my teaching, half the students are well beyond the ‘kid’ stage). It’s this ‘get taught’ expression that discloses how people misunderstand the purpose of studying at uni.

People shouldn’t go to university to ‘get taught’; they should go there to learn. There’s a huge difference. Universities are staffed by academics who are extremely knowledgeable in a very narrow field. Those academics have to guide the learning of students in areas much, much wider than their own narrow specialities. Therefore it’s not a matter of professors saying “Sit there while I teach you what you need to know”, it’s more a matter of saying “Here’s a bunch of things that you need to understand and I’m here to help you do it.”

Lots of uni students never grasp that simple principle. It’s too hard; makes them take too much responsibility for their own learning. They tend to be the ones who regard education as just another market transaction: “Here’s my money, now transfer that knowledge I’ve paid for.” A lot of MBA students think like that … “Hey you accepted my enrolment so obviously I’m clever enough so if I’m not getting good grades it’s obviously your fault for being a crap teacher.”

Take my own field of employment relations. I used to ‘teach’ it at TAFE sometimes and felt like a fraud because I was telling students how to recruit and select staff and so on when I knew that these mainstream practices had all sorts of problems not mentioned in the approved textbook. At uni, I present basically the same material but emphasise how much we don’t know, and how important it is for managers to understand their own unique workplace and develop their HRM policies and procedures accordingly.

Most students never get it. They want the ‘correct’ answer so they can pass assignments and get their B Bus or whatever. And good luck to them, I’m not knocking them. That’s exactly how I behaved when I did my first degree. But it’s a bit much when they start whining afterwards that they never learnt anything ‘practical’ at uni. And when doddery old dickheads start citing their grandkids’ experiences to claim that unis ‘teach’ a lot of nonsense … well it’s a bit sad is all.

The good news is that maybe 10% of students do get what it’s all about. They make the whole thing worthwhile.