All too easy for Corbyn as Maybot reduced to babble

John Crace Guardian report

Prime minister Theresa May speaking during PMQs in the House of Commons, London. Photograph: Jessica Taylor/UK Parliament/PA

Theresa May had a lot on her mind during her leader’s speech at the Tory party conference in Birmingham last week. Trying to avoid falling scenery. Not accepting a P45. Not losing her voice. A low bar, but one that required all her concentration. So much so that she made the basic error of failing to actually check what she was reading out.

In hindsight, the prime minister will come to regret having declared that austerity was over. It might have gone down well enough with a conference audience that was willing her to get to the end of her hour-long dirge without toppling over, but it was never likely to survive wider scrutiny.

With the International Monetary Fund having just declared the UK’s public finances to be in a more catatonic state than those of the Gambia, Kenya and Uganda, and with no guarantee of a Brexit deal that won’t make everyone even more worse off, telling the country it had never had it so good could be seen to be a little premature.

Jeremy Corbyn may still not be a natural at parliamentary set pieces but he is enough of a pro these days to spot an open goal when it is presented. So at the start of prime minister’s questions he put the ball on the spot and did the business. Nothing fancy, just a straightforward tap-in. There were 5,000 fewer mental health nurses than there had been in 2010. When was austerity going to end for mental health services?

You’d have thought May might have had some inkling that the Labour leader would go in on austerity, but instead she seemed genuinely surprised. Um, er, she was sure everything was fine because she had recently appointed a minister for suicide prevention. Not sure this would be at the top of many mental health professionals’ priorities. Corbyn raised an eyebrow, pointed out that her own health secretary had said mental health services were hopeless, and moved on to policing. When would austerity be over for the police?

May had no real idea. Soon, very soon, she hoped. Could we move on to something else? Corbyn obliged by switching to education. When would austerity end for teachers?

The prime minister was now so panicky that she began using bogus statistics that had already been discredited after the education secretary used them two days previously. Like many in government, she now seems to believe that repeating a lie often enough will turn it into the truth.

Next up were the failures of the Conservative-led local councils of Northamptonshire and Somerset, both of which were near enough broke. Now May completely lost touch with reality and went into Maybot autopilot. The reason the councils had no money had nothing to do with them having no money. It was because of something else, though she couldn’t remember what.

“There are better times ahead,” the prime minister ended feebly. Throughout the previous exchanges, the Tory benches had been unusually quiet, sensing their leader was flatlining her way to oblivion. Now they fell silent. Telling people things are going to get a bit better generally only serves to remind them of just how rubbish they currently are. And the prospect of taking a few weeks longer to starve to death isn’t always cause for celebration.

Corbyn rather appeared to lose interest by the time he reached his final question – it was all just too easy – but Labour’s Caroline Flint kept up the pressure by quoting the government’s own predictions that most of the cuts had yet to come through and people on universal credit would be £200 worse off each month. Esther McVey, the work and pensions minister, appeared delighted by this but May looked hollow-eyed and broken. There was just enough sentience remaining for her to be aware of her own inadequacy.

By the time Ken Clarke had pointed out there was no parliamentary majority for any kind of Brexit deal she looked capable of negotiating, May was left with nothing but her own incoherence. A binary babble of meaningless ones and zeros.

Long before the end, the Commons had voted with its feet and there were huge gaps on the benches of both sides of the house. There’s only so much mediocrity anyone can take. Even Theresa May. For a brief moment, she appeared tempted to make for the exit herself. After all, silence could only have raised the tone of the proceedings. But then a flicker of doubt. Perhaps no one would even notice she had gone. Not even herself.

'Vote to protect creation': Rabbi's plea to Wentworth voters

A senior rabbi in Wentworth has written to his congregation with an extraordinary message urging them to consider the "moral issue of climate change" when they vote in next week's byelection.

Rabbi Jeffrey Kamins, who serves at Emanuel Synagogue in Woollahra, has weighed into the key byelection issue in Malcolm Turnbull's former seat and implored people "to vote to protect creation."

"I speak as a concerned individual, and certainly not on behalf of my congregation, yet I encourage them to think of the future as they vote in the present," Rabbi Kamins said.

Alex Turnbull, the son of Malcolm Turnbull, has also made a dramatic intervention in the byelection and cited climate change policy as a major failing of the Liberals.

In an explosive message posted on social media, Alex Turnbull, an investor based in Singapore, said voters should take a stand and not vote for the Liberals in Wentworth.

The End of the Myth of Green Capitalism

The IPCC report landed in public consciousness on Monday. By Tuesday it was forgotten. On the day the most comprehensive and chilling prospectus on climate breakdown was published most newspapers in Britain led with Strictly Come Dancing. In the evening the BBC’s flagship Newsnight invited a Trump-supporting climate denier on television. Today the UK govt announced they would re-start fracking.  Brazil are on the brink of electing a fascist who wants to cut down the Amazon rain forest.

The report wasn’t so much apocalyptic as precise.

A queue of professional climate science deniers were sufficiently unsettled to evoke their well-trodden disinformation. Over at Steve Bannon’s alt-right Breibart, James Delingpole called the IPCC report: “wailing hysteria and worryingly eco-fascistic policy prescriptions”. Similar panic could be read in all the usual outlets: the Spectator; Sun; Telegraph, Daily Mail; and across the BBC.

The crisis-non-crisis leaves many people in turns utterly despondent, or consciously, doggedly oblivious.

Why can’t we make the changes we need to make?

The first and the most obvious reason is the myth of green capitalism, the myth that any of this is redeemable. Instead of wondering why Exxon or BP aren’t converting their business model, we need to be taking them over, shutting them down and switching them off. Instead we’re rinsing out our bottle tops and demanding a Plastic Straw ban.

Hyper-capitalism requires hyper-individualism. This is incompatible with our species surviving.

As Martin Lukacs has written:

“Anything resembling a collective check on corporate power has become a target of the elite: lobbying and corporate donations, hollowing out democracies, have obstructed green policies and kept fossil fuel subsidies flowing; and the rights of associations like unions, the most effective means for workers to wield power together, have been undercut whenever possible.

At the very moment when climate change demands an unprecedented collective public response, neoliberal ideology stands in the way. Which is why, if we want to bring down emissions fast, we will need to overcome all of its free-market mantras: take railways and utilities and energy grids back into public control; regulate corporations to phase out fossil fuels; and raise taxes to pay for massive investment in climate-ready infrastructure and renewable energy — so that solar panels can go on everyone’s rooftop, not just on those who can afford it.

Neoliberalism has not merely ensured this agenda is politically unrealistic: it has also tried to make it culturally unthinkable. Its celebration of competitive self-interest and hyper-individualism, its stigmatization of compassion and solidarity, has frayed our collective bonds. It has spread, like an insidious anti-social toxin.”

Hyper-individualism isn’t just ineffective it’s isolating and dispiriting.

You can’t buy your way out of climate breakdown, nor can you recycle your way out of this level of crisis. Changing the means of production, changing the endless cycle of productivism and consumerism is the only way back.

Ending the obsession with growth and accumulation is the only way to avoid the catastrophic species loss, collapse in biodiversity, rising sea levels, an ice-free Arctic, ocean acidification, crop failure and the loss of our coral reefs that the report lays out in minute detail.

But this isn’t what the people who run the world want to do.

The problem isn’t that we don’t know what to do.

We know exactly what needs to be done.

As the Canadian author Naomi Klein explains:

“We have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism, the reigning ideology for the entire period we have been struggling to find a way out of this crisis. We are stuck because the actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe — and would benefit the vast majority — are extremely threatening to an elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets. That problem might not have been insurmountable had it presented itself at another point in our history. But it is our great collective misfortune that the scientific community made its decisive diagnosis of the climate threat at the precise moment when those elites were enjoying more unfettered political, cultural, and intellectual power than at any point since the 1920s.”

Umair Haque suggest that the “mathematics of catastrophe” means that the other, competing reason we will not manage to survive this process is that the challenge comes at the moment when capitalism is morphing into a form of fascism as it struggles with it’s own failures.

He charts the descent, the closing of a window since the Kyoto Protocol, during which America elected the King of Idiots (“Why Catastrophic Climate Change is Probably Inevitable Now“):

“Before the neofascist wave, the world might have indeed “solved” climate change. Maybe not in the hard sense that life would go on tomorrow as it does today — but in the soft sense that the worst and most vicious scenarios were mostly outlandish science fiction. That is because before the neofascist wave, we could imagine nations cooperating, if slowly, reluctantly, in piecemeal ways, towards things like protecting life, reducing carbon, pricing in the environment, and so on. These things can only be done through global cooperation, after all.

But after the neofascist wave, global cooperation — especially of a genuinely beneficial kind, not a predatory kind — began to become less and less possible by the day. The world was unravelling. When countries were trashing the United Nations and humiliating their allies and proclaiming how little they needed the world (all to score minor-league wins for oligarchs, who cashed in their chips, laughing )— how could such a globe cooperate more then? It couldn’t — and it can’t. So the neofascist wave which we are now in also means drastically less global cooperation — but less global cooperation means incalculably worse climate change.”

That doesn’t sound good does it?

Some people – like Mario Molina, Veerabhadran Ramanathan, Durwood J. Zaelke and David Wallace-Wells – think it’s far worse.

Molina, Ramanathan and Zaelke, writing for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, point to the fact the IPCC largely ignores the issue of feedback loops, what happens as integrated systems fail and collapse? They write:

“So far, average temperatures have risen by one degree Celsius. Adding 50 percent more warming to reach 1.5 degrees won’t simply increase impacts by the same percentage—bad as that would be. Instead, it risks setting up feedbacks that could fall like dangerous dominos, fundamentally destabilizing the planet. This is analyzed in a recent study showing that the window to prevent runaway climate change and a “hot house” super-heated planet is closing much faster than previously understood.

These cascading feedbacks include the loss of the Arctic’s sea ice, which could disappear entirely in summer in the next 15 years. The ice serves as a shield, reflecting heat back into the atmosphere, but is increasingly being melted into water that absorbs heat instead. Losing the ice  would tremendously increase the Arctic’s warming, which is already at least twice the global average rate. This, in turn, would accelerate the collapse of permafrost, releasing its ancient stores of methane, a super climate pollutant 30 times more potent in causing warming than carbon dioxide.

By largely ignoring such feedbacks, the IPCC report fails to adequately warn leaders about the cluster of six similar climate tipping points that could be crossed between today’s temperature and an increase to 1.5 degrees—let alone nearly another dozen tipping points between 1.5 and 2 degrees. These wildcards could very likely push the climate system beyond human ability to control.”

There are of course other feedback loops, like the issue of climate migration fuelling the shift to fascism that Umair Haque outlines.

Writing in The Intelligencer (“UN Says Climate Genocide Is Coming. It’s Actually Worse Than That”) wrote that:

“…the action needed is at a scale and a speed almost unimaginable to most of us. The IPCC report called it unprecedented. Other activists often see one precedent, in all of human history, citing the model of how the United States prepared for World War II, and calling for a global mobilization of that kind — all of the world’s rivalrous societies and nationalistic governments and self-interested industries organized around the common pursuit of a stable and comfortable climate as though warming was an existential threat.

It is. And the World War II mobilization metaphor is not hyperbole. To avoid warming of the kind the IPCC now calls catastrophic requires a complete rebuilding of the entire energy infrastructure of the world, a thorough reworking of agricultural practices and diet to entirely eliminate carbon emissions from farming, and a battery of cultural changes to the way those of us in the wealthy West, at least, conduct our lives. And we need to do all of that in two, or possibly three, decades. As a comparison, simply the last phase of the recent three-stop extension of New York City’s Second Avenue subway line took 12 years.”

If all of this sounds apocalyptic, I’m sorry.

Molina, Ramanathan and Zaelke, suggest that “neither fatalism nor despair are warranted, but rather a sense of urgent, or even running-scared, optimism.”

There is no doubt that we have the resources, the innovative capacity, drive and imagination to salvage the situation. Jim Skea  co-chair of IPCC Working Group III. said that limiting global warming to 1.5 degree C is “possible within the laws of chemistry and physics” …”But doing so would require unprecedented changes.”

As contrived indifference meets abject poverty and celebrity moronism, it’s difficult to have faith that this is feasible.

We will need to overturn Frederic Jameson’s famous dictum that “it has become easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”. This is not just a socio-economic crisis of systemic proportions, but also a crisis of the imagination. We’ll need to upset all of the internalised myths we’ve consumed and been groomed to believe in: growth is good, choice is good, endless choice is best; accumulation is a goal in itself, we are masters of nature.

If we can’t throw off these myths we will die of consumption.

O’Dwyer with serious questions to answer over lobbying leak

8 October 2018

Kelly O’Dwyer and the Morrison government have serious questions to answer following reports that they directed private lobbyists to pressure the crossbench over laws that would weaken our rights at work.

Reports in the Australian newspaper today of communications between lobbyists SAS Group and unnamed members of the crossbench appear to reveal that the Government is directing the lobbying efforts.

The report quotes an email to the crossbench that includes the admission that “The government has asked us to meet with crossbench senators during the current parliamentary break given the significance and urgency of this matter.”

The matter referred to is an attempt to legislate to undermine a court decision that would have prevented employers falsely classifying permanent employees as casuals, and granting backpay to people who’d been denied paid leave because of false classifications.

Quotes attributable to ACTU Secretary Sally McManus:

• “It is deeply concerning that the Morrison Government appears to be directing lobbying efforts to undermine a court decision protecting the rights of working people.
• “Kelly O’Dwyer must come clean on what she knew about the activities of the SAS group, who in the Morrison Government is directing them, and why the Morrison Government is directing private lobbyists to speak to the crossbench.
• “The job of the Government should be to protect working people and ensure those who’ve been denied their legal rights receive justice, not to undermine court decisions to suit the whims of the business lobby.
• “It is important that we get to the bottom of this deeply concerning affair.”

Tom McDonald on Peter Hartcher's call to deregister the CFMMEU

Tom McDonald, former National Secretary Building Workers Industrial Union & Founding Trustee of Construction and Building Unions Superannuation (CBUS), wrote to Fairfax national political editor Peter Hartcher, in response to Hartcher’s call for the CFMMEU to be de-registered.

The CFMMEU led large union demonstrations in multiple locations to demand the Right to Strike on Thursday, with over 8000 workers participating in Sydney CBD alone.

Dear Peter

I look forward to reading your articles in the Sydney Morning Herald and listening to you being interviewed on important political and social events etc.

Your contributions are underpinned by various values I share with you and the arguments are supported by rational reasoning, facts and history and help people to make informed decisions that are an essential element of our democracy.

Your view that the CFMEU (now CFMMEU) should be deregistered came as a shock to me and prompted me to write this letter to you.

CFMMEU members rally for the right to strike in Newcastle on Thursday 6th September 2018

In my view the CFMEU should be judged on its achievements for working people because that is the purpose of its existence.

Without the CFMEU the MUA would have been crushed. We would not have full workers compensation pay if there had not been an illegal strike by building workers in 1971 that ended the system of half pay to injured workers. We would not have RDOs, a world-best system of industry based universal superannuation, nor jointly lawfully-recognised employer and worker safety committees. But for the BWIU (now part of the CFMEU), we would now have a much lower minimum wage. We would not have universal redundancy pay and but for Green Bans a lot of our heritage would have been lost and we would have had massive over-development. Many more examples could be given.

The CFMEU played a key role in all of the struggles of the ACTU, one being the defeat of Work Choices that would have taken us a long way down the road to Americanisation of our industrial relations system which has impoverished many millions of American families.

Today the Australian workers and our society need stronger unions to address the challenges ahead not the destruction of a union. Unions need to be militant in their tactics when all other ways to achieve justice have failed.

What I am trying to describe as a defence of my union is best told in the publication “The Quiet Revolution” which I am posting to you.

I now want to raise with you a couple of other thoughts but first it is important to recognise that the CFMEU spans several industries in addition to the construction industry – power generation, mining, forestry, furniture, maritime and now clothing.

But the CFMEU is only criticised for its tactics used in the building and construction industry. The reason is that the construction industry is different to all other industries.

Anyone can work in the building industry as a worker or as a sub-contractor (employer) because they don’t need start -up capital. So, we have every type of people in the industry ranging from gangsters, thugs and corrupt elements and across to hard-working and principled workers.

Construction projects are being completed every day and new projects started every day. There is always a dozen or more contractors (employers) on a building construction site – some who complete their contracts before others start. Trying to negotiate enterprise agreements is very difficult particularly when some contractors are shonky operators who break every rule in the book, pay cash in hand, don’t pay taxes, ignore safety regulations, don’t pay entitlements such as superannuation etc. Contractors are on and off the site as is their workforce and others only come on the site in finishing fitting-out stages.

The industry is probably the most culturally diverse in Australia which brings with it communication difficulties and problems and at times a clash in cultures.

A building site is safe one day but not the next as building workers move from completing a section of work to a new section of work and the nature of accidents are more serious than accidents in most other industries.

The union organiser is expected to solve all these problems and deal with all these employers in circumstances where time is the enemy. I personally can understand what leads to what others describe as stand-over tactics and I think those that criticise them would do the same if faced with the same circumstances.

This is the situation the union organiser is likely to face day in and day out, week in and week out. For these and other reasons, aggressive tactics are often needed, and threats are needed, to help achieve what the workers want and need. In other words, the organiser has to break the law to enforce the law and make the site safe or move the employer into negotiation.

I don’t agree with all the tactics and language which may be used by organisers, but they are not the most important issue. Of greater importance is - do they achieve results that benefit building workers?

When it comes to corruption, even petty corruption such as accepting gifts from employers, there should be zero tolerance if an organiser has engaged in any corrupt behaviour. I know they would be immediately sacked from the union.

When I look at findings of the various Royal Commissions, I think criticism of the tactics and behaviour of the CFMEU officials are relatively insignificant compared with what has been disclosed with Royal Commissions into the Banks and Insurance Companies and the Churches- where people have lost life-long savings, made bankrupt, or abused and sexually assaulted.

The question I ask you Peter - why should the union be de-registered? Even its critics must accept that the union’s actions did not have the same disastrous effects on the lives of many as revealed by those other Royal Commissions?

The truth is that the actions of the union helped save lives and benefitted building workers.

I believe that financial institutions and religious organisations are an essential part of our society, so they must be preserved and at the same time held accountable. I also believe that militant unions are an essential part of our system of democracy and they must be preserved.

Note: There is a fundamental difference in what happened in respect of the Gallagher BLF – one being they lost the support of the ACTU whereas the CFMEU has unanimous support of the ACTU.

Yours sincerely

Tom McDonald
Former National Secretary BWIU & Founding Trustee of CBUS