Irish trade union delegation report criticizes Israel, governmentsElectronic Intifada - 23 Sep 2008rr r r rr r rr r rr r rr r rr rrr rIn November 2007 the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) sent a very senior delegation of trade union leaders including the President of ICTU and several General Secretaries of major trade unions on a seven-day fact-finding mission to Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The express aim of the delegation was to produce a report that was as impartial and as objective as possible.
What’s the matter with Sunderland?UKWatch.net - 23 Sep 2008Ingratitude, if Madeleine Bunting’s apologia for New Labour is any guide, is what is the matter with Sunderland. The city has been ploughed with an avalanche of development cash. A school is to be rebuilt every year for the next fourteen years. Health centres, children’s centres, business parks, new development zones with the marina, fancy apartments and coffee shops… And the locals react by sputtering “you’ve done nothing for me”, slagging off immigrants and voting Tory. There is some weird “disconnect” between Labour’s actually loveable behaviour toward one of its most loyal constituencies and its dismal status in the popular perception. Working class Toryism, in the form of support for a set of sentiments including ‘individual self-reliance’ and ‘community’ and ‘family values’, is on the rise once more, a la 1979. The obvious conclusion is that the left must rally behind the government. Some version of this is likely to be the overall diagnosis of the soft left as Labour loses its so-called heartlands: regardless of all the disappointments and betrayals, despite the warmongering, privatization, pandering to employers and union-bashing, the real problem is the basic inability of the working class to recognise its true allies. The root problem is its affectless indifference and disloyalty, its susceptibility to racism and nationalism, and its gullibility as regards Tory propaganda. So, what is the truth of the matter? What is the matter with Sunderland? What might Madeleine Bunting have found out had she not been relying upon the word of Chris Mullins MP? One of the most pressing issues facing working class areas in this country, without question, is housing. In Sunderland, as elsewhere, the government has been pressing for the complete privatization of housing stock. Sedgefield Borough Council, for example, having lost a vote in favour of transfer in 2005, has been trying to persuade residents yet again to go with privatization. What is causing the residents to doubt the word of council chiefs is that the company that would take over the houses – Gentoo, formerly the Sunderland Housing Group (eulogised here) – has a track record of failure. The company was awarded an 80m contract in 2002 to regenerate a poor estate called Doxford Park, some six years ago, and it has only recently begun work. Similarly, when thousands of council houses were transferred to the group in 2001, Gentoo/SHG invested millions in new private homes, and neglected to build the rented accomodation it was obliged to build. 6,200 council houses were demolished, sold off or left empty, but the company only built 111 new houses over the next four years. The number of people seeking a home rose from approximately 5,000 to over 19,000. Meanwhile, it did successfully build the private developments, including maritime housing and the Athanaeum – the sort of investment and development that Bunting lauds, albeit with a grudging admission that “critics say” it may not seem of much use to single mothers and those on incapacity benefit. Bear in mind that Gentoo/SHG is a Registered Social Landlord (RSL), exactly the kind of landlord that the government says we have least to fear from. An RSL is answerable to the Housing Corporation, and supposedly behaves better than other private landlords. If the Housing Corporation doesn’t hold them accountable, then those co-responsible for sealing the deal should. In fact, the behaviour of Gentoo/SHG had been noted before by local Labour councillors Mike Tansey and Brynley Sidaway, and they did try to alert residents and fellow councillors to the problem. Both Sidaway and Tansey rejected stock transfer because the result, where the government had been able to impose its scheme, was a rise in rents and an increase in homelessness. However, by 2006, they had been driven out of the Labour Party for their pains. They became independents, and on the back of a successful campaign against stock transfer a lively local Respect group was built. What they had to say was important, and their actions benefited the people they represented. By contrast, Labour policy at both a local and national level pitted it against its traditional working class supporters. There is a clue right there: those elected Labour Party members who try to represent their constituents effectively have been punished and expelled. It is important to understand the rationale behind the government’s transfer policy. It wants to fund housing, but it is committed to a taxation structure that cannot raise the necessary funds without hitting the poor harder. So, either local authorities would have to borrow, thus breaking the government’s fiscal rules, or they would have to neglect housing, thus destroying the working class voting base. By transferring homes to private housing groups like Gentoo/SHG, they can allow huge amounts of money to be borrowed for investment, because the costs will be formally borne by the social landlord. If the government were not so committed to a neoliberal policy mix, it could raise taxation on upper income brackets and on corporations, to fund such investment. The ugly side of this neoliberalism is a tendency to blame the poor for their plight. One of the government’s recent proposals, dreamed up by Housing Minister Caroline Flint, was to compel unemployed recipients of council housing to sign degrading “commitment contracts” which compelled them to agree to actively seek work if they wanted to be allowed a council house – thus blaming the unemployed for their situation and forcing them to humiliate themselves in a lifeless labour market at pain of losing their home. Local Labour Party loyalists felt compelled to distance themselves from Flint’s ideas. There is another clue: the government has been complacent about its core working class vote, assuming that they had nowhere else to go, and therefore has scapegoated working class people for its failures. Another of the government’s prominent policy agendas, so dear to its heart that it made this a central plank in the 2001 election despite over 80% public disapporval, is the private finance initiative. I have written enough about its obscene wastefulness here before. Once again, the rationale behind the policy is that it appears to provide something for nothing: money for investment without incurring debts or driving up taxes in the short-run. But the net result is almost invariably a poorer quality of service and a higher cost. For example, in Coventry, two hospitals were replaced by one hospital, with fewer beds and staff overall, and a final cost of 900m, 30 times higher than it would have been to simply renovate the two existing hospitals and keep the beds and staff. In Northumberland, four fire stations were closed and replaced with two under a 10m PFI scheme. One could go on at some length. In Sunderland, as elsewhere, local government functions including in health, education, road-building, street-lighting and waste management have all been outsourced to private companies under expensive PFI and PPP schemes. Perhaps the most controversial application of the PFI model is in the national health service. Patricia Hewitt announced in 2006 that there would be big cutbacks in public spending on the NHS. She said that the reason was that generous government investment had not been spent on reforms but on salaries for greedy public servants. In fact, as Allyson Pollock pointed out, the government’s market-driven reforms had created the crisis. The costs of this marketisation consumed between 6% and 14% of the NHS national budget, on a conservative estimate. As a result, thousands of NHS staff were shed in hospitals up and down the country. The impact has, predictably, been to alienate Labour’s usual supporters. One of the main campaigners against the government’s NHS cuts in Sunderland has been a well-known local nurse named Kathy Haq, who had been lauded in 1999 for embarking on an unpaid, voluntary mission to improve healthcare in Bangladesh and who had run a support network for victims of a doctor who had raped patients. Haq might have been exactly the sort of person whom New Labour would wish to win over: a devoted public servant and campaigner, who had worked for the NHS for forty years. But she joined Respect when it was launched in the area in 2006, and became the branch secretary. One reason is that City Hospitals Sunderland Foundation Trust ran up debts of over 5m and therefore made plans to shed 10% of its staff, particularly in the Sunderland Royal Hospital. Patients were also angered when local hospitals started to charge for parking, following the lead set by PFI hospitals across the country. Problems within the NHS have been a prominent theme in the local press. In fact, although Bunting refers to the Tory capture for the Ryhope constituency in a bye-election with a low turnout, she does not notice that a surprisingly large component of Labour’s vote, perhaps more than a third, appears to have been redistributed over some years to an independent local campaigner and former journalist known as Patrick Lavelle, who made his name by campaigning on the NHS. Another clue, then: investment isn’t the same thing as provision, and one cannot disaggregate the money supplied from the way it is spent and the policies underpinning it. If working class voters experience a decline in service, the fact that a large amount of money has been spent on producing the decline makes it even worse. The PFI was originally a Tory policy, but by adopting it, the government has handed the Tories one of their main propaganda planks: higher spending equals more bureaucracy and less efficiency. Sunderland is one of the poorest places in England. Mainly as a result of the destruction of its extraction and manufacturing industries, it has suffered a declining population, particularly among working age males, and this trend is projected to continue at least until 2023. That means a smaller tax base for the city, especially as those who remain are likely to be those with the least resources. More than fifty percent of its children live in low income families, according to the Child Poverty Action Group, which is well above the national average. Even official unemployment is almost double the national average [.pdf] according to the Office for National Statistics, while a total of 31% of the working age population is estimated to be out of work. Large numbers of people are kept on long term incapacity benefit to conceal the real rate of unemployment, albeit incapacity among older males in former mining areas is in fact quite widespread. The government has a number of solutions for the industrial hinterlands, but among them is not a revival of the manufacturing base or of the unions that can maintain decent incomes. One of the few big manufacturers in Sunderland is the Nissan car plant, which was built in 1986. The plant is symbolic of a supposedly ‘new’ high-tech economy vaunted by neoliberals of all stripes. But Nissan has repeatedly threatened to close the plant or slash thousands of jobs, and has repeatedly been bailed out with millions in government grants. And while it does employ thousands of local people, who are unionised, it is hardly a substitute for the massive industries of the past. The government is committed to a City-based growth policy with a strong pound, and as a consequence has seen well over a million manufacturing jobs lost on its watch. As has been widely noticed by now, this is one reason why the UK economy is particularly exposed to the chaos in the financial markets, and why it stands least prepared to withstand a crash. Under New Labour, the remaining mining pits in Sunderland were allowed to disappear, with nothing to replace them. Today, the biggest employer in Sunderland is the government, while the services industry is the biggest sector of employment in the city. The council has sought to rejuvenate the economy by gentrifying it, making it into a more tourist-friendly zone, and building up a financial services industry, which is today almost as big as the manufacturing sector. All of these factors make Sunderland particularly susceptible to the toxic situation that we now face: public sector pay cuts, cuts in spending, a crisis in the financial sector, and higher food and energy prices. In addition, while Bunting mentions a disproportionately high rate of single motherhood and incapacity in Sunderland, she does not mention the government’s policies of rolling back single mother benefits and incapacity benefits. These, in addition to a vindictive plan to force the long-term unemployed to do ‘community service’ as if they were criminals, are poison for a local Labour Party seeking to gather votes. Further, in a city with life expectancy well below the national average, the government’s plans to raise the retirement age and privatise the pension system – while demanding that people save money they don’t have to invest in a pension scheme that floats on the oh-so-reliable stock market – is asking for trouble. To that should be added a recent rise in pensioner poverty, when a fifth of pensioners already lived on less than 5,000 a year. Sunderland is supposedly an example of where the government has genuinely tried to help the poor, yet is losing support from voters who fail to recognise New Labour’s loyalty to them, while imprudently flirting with the Tories. In truth, while New Labour has delivered some very mild reforms, there could hardly be a more dramatic example of its policies failing the working class on the one hand, and punishing them on the other. The story of Sunderland is typical in this respect. There remains one question: will Sunderland go Tory, and if so, will it be for the reasons Bunting suggests? Sunderland still has a majority Labour council, and will probably return a Labour MP even on a relatively low turnout. The worst wipeouts for the government will be in the south-east, while the polls show the Tories making least headway in core Labour areas. Further, there is nothing to support the claim that once heartland Labour constituencies are won over to right-wing sentiments, and Bunting offers no evidence for this assertion. There is certainly nothing comparable to 1979, when Thatcher won on a platform of aggressively right-wing and anti-union policies. David Cameron is successfully appropriating the centrist language and sentiments of New Labour, even positioning themselves to the ‘left’ of the government on some questions. In Wales and Scotland, where there are centre-left and sometimes radical left alternatives, the Tories are not reviving at anywhere near the rate that they have been in England. And while the Tories are likely to be the beneficiaries of government unpopularity in England, the process of party identity breaking down is advancing rapidly for both Labour and Conservative parties. What is the matter with Sunderland is what is the matter with the UK as a whole. The system is failing, the neoliberal solution doesn’t work, parliament is increasingly impervious to our needs, and we’re facing a crisis in which we find elected officials happy to pour money into the City, but extremely reluctant at best to do anything which alters the fundamentally unfair distribution of wealth and power in the society.
Americans Support Major Changes in U.S. Foreign PolicyCampaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran (CASMII) - 23 Sep 2008Summary: Democrats and Republicans alike endorsed—by wide margins—talking with the leaders of countries considered unfriendly to the United States, including Cuba (70%), North Korea (68%), Iran (65%), Burma (63%), and Zimbabwe (61%). Slight majorities of Americans supported talking with Hamas (53%) and Hezbollah (51%), groups the U.S. considers to be terrorist organizations. While higher majorities of Democrats supported talks with these groups, majorities of Republicans did not. In addition, a bipartisan majority of Americans polled also showed a readiness to make a deal with Iran on its nuclear energy program, if Tehran were to allow United Nations weapons inspectors permanent and unfettered access to all of its facilities. In the poll, 56 percent of respondents agreed that Iran should be allowed to continue to produce nuclear fuel for generating electricity. source: Chicago Council on Foreign Affairsread more
U.S. should work with Iran to attack terrorismCampaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran (CASMII) - 23 Sep 2008Summary: MemarianThe surge in Iraq would not have been successful if, after three rounds of U.S.-Iran negotiations on the condition of security in Iraq, Iran had not cooperated by controlling the Shiite militia leader, Muqtada al-Sadr, and initiated intense control over Iran-Iraq border. Al Qaeda threatens both Iran and the United States. Despite two costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. efforts to end terrorism have not succeeded. source: San Francisco Chronicleread more
The McCain-Palin Project: War With IranCampaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran (CASMII) - 23 Sep 2008Summary: Andrew SullivanShe and/or McCain will launch a pre-emptive strike on Iran. This much we know. It isn’t a matter of if but when. For McCain, it is a matter of fighting wars to win, instead of accepting any limits on American power. For Palin, it is a matter of theological destiny. For Americans, it may be a decision about whether America will start a Third World War or try to prevent it. source: Daily Dishread more
Headlines for September 23, 2008Democracy Now - 23 Sep 2008Stock Market Falls Over Bailout Concerns, Legality of $700 Billion Bailout Questioned, Obama Blames Crisis on Greed and Irresponsibility, Sen. McCain Defends $40 Million Payout for Campaign Aide, Wall Street’s Big Five Handed Out $39 Billion in Bonuses in 2007, McCain’s Campaign Manager Linked to Mortgage Giants, Congress Prepares $25 Billion Bailout for Automakers, Poll: Racial Prejudice Could Cost Obama the Election, McCain & Obama Set Up Transition Teams, Commission of Presidential Debates Urged to Make Public Secret Contract, Ron Paul Endorses Constitution Party Candidate, Shell Opens Up Office in Baghdad, Ex-Iraqi Official: $13 Billion in Reconstruction Money Lost, US War Resister Granted Stay of Deportation in Canada, US Military Releases Journalist Held in Afghanistan for 11 Months, Court Orders Pentagon to Release Prisoner Abuse Photos, Pakistani Troops Open Fire on US Helicopters, Livni Asked to Form New Israel Government, Chavez Expels Human Rights Watch Officials, 42 Die in Somali Fighting, Trial of GOP Sen. Ted Stevens Begins
Crossing the Line focuses on Arab undermining of boycott movementElectronic Intifada - 23 Sep 2008rr r r rr r rr r rr r rr r rr rrr rThis week on Crossing The Line: While boycott and divestment campaigns in Europe and the United States become more sophisticated and widespread, the Arab world’s longstanding boycott of Israel is being undermined by Arab governments and private companies. Host Naji Ali speaks with Wassim Al-Adel, a London-based Syrian blogger about this disturbing trend.
Mutual censorship in the West Bank and GazaElectronic Intifada - 23 Sep 2008rr r r rr r rr r rr r rr r rr rrr rGAZA CITY (IPS) – So much is missing as you walk down the street along the shops of Gaza. Food and medicines kept out by the blockade enforced by Israel; but also newspapers once a part of the street landscape. Al-Hayat Al-Jadeeda and Al-Ayyam, two newspapers loyal to Fatah, are not around any more. And for once, you couldn’t blame the Israelis for censorship.
Victory in Iraq? Not so muchUKWatch.net - 23 Sep 2008?They create a desolation and call it ?peace?? – Tacitus US Republican Vice-Presidential nominee Sarah Palin last week accused Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama of failing to recognise the “coming victory in Iraq“. What’s the nature of this “victory” that Palin’s talking about? Has the US finally won the Iraq War? Not so much. For the last few months its been taken as read by many in the political mainstream that the “surge” of extra US troops into Iraq “worked” in quelling the violence that had been reaching cataclysmic levels by late 2006. In fact, this is a vast over-simplification, if not a self-serving lie put about by the war’s supporters. A number of other factors have contributed to bringing down the levels of daily killings (which still remain extraordinarily high). The ?surge? is merely one of these, at best is possibly the least of them, and at worst has in some respects been a countervailing force. The principal factors behind the decline in violence are: the unilateral ceasefire of Moqtada al-Sadr’s anti-occupation Shia militia; the decision made by nationalist Sunni insurgents, before the ?surge? was conceived of, to concentrate their fire on the extremist “al-Qaeda” elements amongst them that had been responsible for the major attacks on Shia civilians; and the fact that the civil war in Baghdad has essentially played itself out, with Sunnis and Shia respectively expelled from mixed communities, the two groups divided, and no more ‘sectarian cleansing’ to be done (the outcome being a net win for the Shia forces). Let’s look at each of these in turn. The Mahdi Army ceasefire may have been called with one eye on the coming influx of US troops, but it was still a unilateral decision. The fact is that Moqtada al Sadr continues to defy the US, five years after the occupiers set out to “kill or capture” him; as we saw in March when attempts to go after his Mahdi Army met with humiliating defeat. The US always wanted al-Sadr out of the way. By now, he’s more powerful than ever. No US “victory” here. Then there’s the decision of Sunni nationalist insurgents to turn on al Qaeda, i.e. the foreign religious extremists who had come to Iraq to wage jihad both on the US and the Shia population. This has been hugely significant, and one cannot discount the effect of the US decision to stop fighting these nationalists guerrillas (who were always the bulk of the insurgency) and to pay them to concentrate on fighting and killing off al Qaeda. But the Sunni backlash against the religious extremists was not a US invention. It began as far back as 2005, and US backing for the movement was as much a pragmatic recognition that (a) it could not defeat the nationalist insurgency and (b) only those nationalists could defeat al Qaeda. Paying people to stop shooting at you and to instead fight some other people that you can’t beat either is not in anyone’s definition of “victory” as far as I’m aware. And as for the third and possibly most important factor – the final Shia victory in the sectarian “Battle of Baghdad” which saw mixed neighbourhoods purged and thousands driven out of their homes – this is not merely a question of the US not being able to take credit for the relative peace that came after the civil war burnt itself out. No small amount of blame attaches to the US military itself for these gruesome events. As Michael Schwartz has argued in this indispensible analysis of the “surge” in Baghdad, US tactics may actually have facilitated the sectarian cleansing and effective Shia takeover. Either way, violence appears to have petered out in large part because one group of armed thugs achieved victory over the other, at massive cost to the civilian population, and not because the US stepped in as peacekeeper to enforce an early end to the fighting. So the US mostly isn’t fighting the Shia nationalists anymore because the Shia nationalists stood down of their own accord. It mostly isn’t fighting the Sunni nationalists any more because (a) its paying them to fight Al Qaeda instead (which they were already doing) and (b) it couldn’t beat them anyway, so its had to learn to live with them. It isn’t fighting Al Qaeda anymore because its paying the Sunni nationalists to do that for it, since it couldn’t beat Al Qaeda itself. And the Sunni and Shia aren’t fighting each other anymore (or are doing so a lot less) because that battle’s (mostly) over (at least in Baghdad) and the Shia won. The case for saying that US “surge” has “worked” and that Washington can soon declare “victory” is, therefore, a little on the thin side. What’s also misguided is the related insinuation that Iraq has become in some way peaceful. Iraq is still one of the most violent places in the world, with levels of daily killing equivalent to those of the Lebanese civil war. Last month at least 360 civilians were killed and more than 470 wounded in violence. Adjust that for the size of the total population and you?re talking about the equivalent of 800 plus British deaths and over a thousand injuries in political/military violence over 31 days. Imagine that occurring in a Soviet-occupied United Kingdom, while Kremlin leaders prattle on about “victory” and ?success?. And remember that these are just the deaths that journalists and officials know about and are able to verify. Yes, things aren’t as bad in Iraq as they were in 2006. But the fact that the blood now washes up to your waist, as opposed to your neck, doesn’t make Iraq something other than a bloodbath. Demanding that people accept some of the worst levels of violence on earth as some sort of good news story displays a pretty low regard for human life on Palin’s part. The people best placed to judge the success of US military strategy are those who have to live with it on a daily basis: the Iraqi public. They don’t get interviewed at length by the major news networks, or write op-eds for the Washington Post, but their opinions are relevant nonetheless. By March 2008, when this [.pdf] poll was taken, it was already close to being conventional wisdom in the West that the “surge had worked”. Clearly a lot of Iraqis hadn’t received the memo. The poll asks whether the ?surge? has helped in the five areas where beneficial effects were promised: security where troop levels have increased, security in other areas, conditions for political dialogue, the ability of the Iraqi government to operate, and the pace of economic development. On each of those areas, the proportion of Iraqis saying the ?surge? had been beneficial ranged between 21 and 36 per cent. Between 42 and 53 per cent said it has made things worse. The balance was made up by those saying it had made no difference. So in each area, between 63 and 79 per cent of Iraqis say the ?surge? had made things worse or made no difference. That’s between 63 and 70 per cent in the case of security and 79 per cent in the case of political reconciliation (the latter of which we’re given to understand was the overall purpose of the ?surge?). Of course, the real aim of the ?surge? was for the US to get Iraq properly under its control, not to perform an act of altruism or humanitarian relief work from which it has nothing to gain for itself, though that is exactly how the ?surge? has been described, practically without exception, in our media and amongst our politicians. The question of whether it is for one country to forcibly place another country under its control, for its own purposes and against the wishes of majority of people in the latter country, is hardly one that should be ignored – though it has been. In any event, the ?surge? appears to have failed in this respect. With the Iraqi government apparently now moving to reject the US demand for a permanent military presence and privileged access to oil reserves, the real reason for the 2003 invasion. What was supposed to be an US-client government in Baghdad now thumbs its nose at Washington and sidles up to, of all people, the Iranians. Do Palin and McCain really call that success, even on their own warped terms? Apparently dishonesty and greed now battle it out with rank stupidity for control of the United States government. The 2003 invasion of Iraq devastated the country, driving well over 4 million Iraqis out of their homes (or around one in every six of the population) and killing perhaps a million (or around one in every twenty-nine of the population) according to the best estimates available. The refugees included many of Iraq’s former professional classes, driven into poverty and marginalisation in neighbouring countries, their children into malnutrition, their daughters into prostitution. Those left behind fare little better, be they the maimed, the bereaved, the unemployed, the impoverished, the imprisoned or the tortured. Nothing can erase the suffering that has taken place over the last five years, or return the hundreds of thousands of dead to their loved ones. This tsunami of grief was delivered to Iraq by an aggressive war of choice, instigated under a cloak of propaganda and straightforward lying, that was aimed at no more lofty a goal than the acquisition of greater wealth and power. To talk of “victory” in Iraq is obscene, as indeed is any reaction from anyone in Britain and America other than outright cringing shame. Yet not only is it a commonly accepted truth, here and in the US, that the “surge has worked”, but early backers of the ?surge? are now lauded as wise sages of military and foreign policy. A little over a year ago John McCain’s bid for the White House was seen as little more than the quixotic last gasp of a failed militarist, his approval rating for the Republican candidate languishing in the single digits. McCain’s subsequent political resurrection rested almost entirely on the notion that “the surge worked”, as he had doggedly insisted it would, and it is in many ways to this misapprehension that we can attribute the now present danger of a McCain-Palin Presidency from January 2009, with all the chilling prospects that raises for the United States and the world.
London Protesters Demand an End to US CoupsUKWatch.net - 23 Sep 2008Scores of solidarity campaigners picketed the US embassy in London on Wednesday night before a huge rally at the National Union of Journalists head office to demand an end to US interference in Latin America. Responding to ongoing coup attempts in Bolivia and Venezuela, NUJ general secretary Jeremy Dear said that it was ironic that he was protesting outside the US embassy when its government had nationalised more of its economy in the last few days than Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez had in the last decade. “The US is standing up for privilege, for the interest of the few against the interest of the many and will go to any length to achieve it,” he stormed. “It will go to the lengths that it did in Chile and will drown the revolution in blood if it gets the opportunity,” referring to the CIA-orchestrated coup against Salvadore Allende 35 years ago. “But there is one big difference – we are prepared, we have learned the lessons and we are already organised.” The 100-strong crowd chanted “No More Coups” and waved colourful solidarity banners as embassy workers left for the day. Dozens of people made speeches in English and Spanish, with some making the point that, in the dying days of US President Bush’s regime, many people thought that he would attack Iran – yet it was clear that Latin America was the real target. Loud cheers went up whenever speakers brought up the expulsion the US ambassador in Bolivia because of his links to coup-plotters and Venezuela doing the same in solidarity, with cries of “Yankee go home” filling Grosvenor Square. At the NUJ headquarters, Bolivian ambassador Maria Beatriz Souviron explained how the traditional political system in Bolivia had been swept away with the election of Evo Morales. “He has given people hope for the first time. There has not just been a change in who controls the state, but also a change in culture in a country that has been racist for so long.” Bolivia Solidarity Campaign organiser Amancay Colque, who helped organise the actions with Hands Off Venezuela, brought harrowing news from the northern state of Pando, where the far-right governor threatened to split from Bolivia and had paid mercenaries to machine-gun rural workers loyal to Morales. She explained how the elite was fuelling racism to try to divide Bolivians and that, in the right’s eastern stronghold of Santa Cruz, it was now impossible for an Aymara or Quechua indigenous Bolivian to walk down the street without being attacked. John McDonnell MP pointed out that “what is happening is not a personal attack on Morales or Chavez but an attack on the seeds of socialism that they are spreading. “What the US is terrified of is the prospect that socialism will catch light all across the Americas, so of course it has to go on the attack. But it is exactly for this moment that solidarity campaigns exist.” Venezuelan charge d’affaires Felix Plasencia said that he was “honoured to stand with Bolivia as all Latin America struggles for dignity, sovereignty and independence. We have finally thrown off the US Monroe Doctrine that treated us as their ?backyard’ for 200 years. “The aim now is to extend this people’s power throughout Latin America and the solidarity shown to Bolivia as it fights back against counter-revolutionaries is a significant step in uniting our countries,” he added to great applause.
The Patron Saint of CharlatansUKWatch.net - 23 Sep 2008Does Moore’s law now apply to human civilisation? In 1965 Gordon Moore observed that the density of transistors on integrated circuits doubles every two years or so, and predicted this would continue. Similar laws now seem to apply to every aspect of computing. And, perhaps, to the rest of the world. The information available, the scale of human interactions, the detail involved in financial deals and trading relationships and political decisions appear to be growing exponentially. We are drowning in complexity. To be good citizens we must understand what is done in our name. But how? We lean ever more heavily on experts. But who can we now trust? Corporate PR has become so sophisticated that it’s almost impossible for most people to tell the difference between genuine science and greenwash, or real grassroots campaigns and the astroturf lobbies concocted by consultants.1 PR companies set up institutes with impressive names which publish what purport to be scientific papers, sometimes in the font and format of genuine journals.2 They accuse real scientists of every charge that could be levelled at themselves: junk science, hidden funding, undisclosed interests and inflated credentials. If journalists have any remaining function, it is to help people navigate this world: to try to understand the crushingly dull documents that most people don’t have time for, to smoke out the fakes and show how to recognise the genuine article. But we mess up too. The most we can promise is to try not to make the same mistake twice. So what can you say about a man who makes the same mistake 38 times? Who, when confronted by a mountain of evidence demonstrating that his informant is a charlatan convicted under the Trade Descriptions Act, continues to repeat his claims? Who elevates the untested claims of bloggers above peer-reviewed papers? Who sticks to his path through a blizzard of facts? What should we deduce about the Sunday Telegraph‘s columnist Christopher Booker? This week Richard Wilson’s book Don’t Get Fooled Again is published.3 It contains a fascinating chapter on Booker’s claims about white asbestos. Since 2002, he has published 38 articles on this topic, and every one of them is wrong. He champions the work of John Bridle, who has described himself as “the world’s foremost authority on asbestos science”.4 Bridle has claimed to possess an honorary professorship from the Russian Academy of Sciences, to be a consultant to an institute at the University of Glamorgan, the chief asbestos consultant for an asbestos centre in Lisbon, and a consultant to Vale of Glamorgan trading standards department.5 None of these claims is true. Neither the institute at the University of Glamorgan nor the centre in Lisbon have ever existed.6 His only relationship with the Glamorgan trading standards department is to have been successfully prosecuted by it for claiming a qualification he does not possess.78 None of this deters Mr Booker. Armed with Bridle’s claims, for the past six years he has waged a campaign against asbestos science. White asbestos cement, he maintains “poses no measurable risk to health”.9 He contends that “not a single case” of mesothelioma – the cancer caused by exposure to asbestos – “has ever been scientifically linked with asbestos cement”.10 A paper commissioned by the UK’s Health and Safety Executive, he says, “concluded that the risk from white asbestos is ‘virtually zero’”.11 Booker tells me he has read this paper. Oh yes? The term he quotes – “virtually zero” – does not appear in it.12 It does show that white asbestos (chrysotile) is less dangerous than brown or blue asbestos. But, while there is uncertainty about the numbers, it still presents a risk of mesothelioma, which depends on the level of exposure. People exposed to a high dose (between 10 and 100 fibres per millilitre per year (f/ml.yr)) have a risk (around two deaths per 100,000 for each f/ml.yr) of contracting this cancer. Only when the dose falls to less than 0.1 f/ml.yr does it become “probably insignficant”.13 But Booker’s columns contain no such caveat. He creates the impression that white asbestos is safe at all doses. The paper he misquotes also cites five scientific studies of exposure to asbestos cement, which record “high levels of mesothelioma mortality”.1415161718 Two years ago, John Bridle’s misleading CV and dodgy record were exposed by the BBC’s You and Yours programme.19 So the BBC immediately became part of the conspiracy: in Booker’s words “a concerted move by the powerful ‘anti-asbestos lobby’ to silence Bridle”.20 He suggested that the broadcasting regulator Ofcom would clear Bridle’s name.21 In June this year it threw out Bridle’s complaint and published evidence even more damning than that contained in the programme.22 So has Booker changed the way he sees “Britain’s leading practical asbestos expert”? Far from it. He tells me that “my view of Ofcom has plummeted”23: it too has joined the conspiracy. We are not talking about trivia here. This is a matter of life and death. How many people might have been exposed to dangerous levels of asbestos dust as a result of reading and believing Booker’s columns? For several years he has been waging a similar war against “warmist alarmists”, by which he means climate scientists. Nine days ago, for instance, he attacked Michael Mann for publishing a paper that shows (alongside scores of other studies) that global temperatures do indeed follow the famous hockey-stick pattern: a moderate long-term cooling trend terminating in a sudden upward bend. Mann, Booker told his readers, had been “selective … in his new data, excluding anything which confirmed the Medieval Warming”.24 But Mann’s paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, uses every uncluttered high-resolution proxy temperature record in the public domain.25 How did Booker trip up so badly? By using the claims of unqualified bloggers to refute peer-reviewed studies. Under their guidance he routinely mistakes weather for climate and makes claims about the temperature record that bear no relation to the studies he cites. My favourite Booker column is the piece he wrote in February, titled “So it appears that Arctic ice isn’t vanishing after all”. In September 2007, he reported, “sea ice cover had shrunk to the lowest level ever recorded. But for some reason the warmists are less keen on the latest satellite findings, reported by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration … Its graph of northern hemisphere sea ice area, which shows the ice shrinking from 13,000 million sq km to just 4 million from the start of 2007 to October, also shows it now almost back to 13 million sq km”.26 To reinforce this point, he helpfully republished the graph, showing that the ice had indeed expanded between September and January. The Sunday Telegraph continues to employ a man who cannot tell the difference between summer and winter. But for the Wikipedia Professor of Gibberish, this patron saint of charlatans, even the seasons are negotiable. Booker remains right, whatever the evidence says. It is hard to think of any journalist – Melanie Phillips included – who has spread more misinformation. The world becomes even harder to navigate. You cannot trust the people who tell you whom to trust. 1. See Chapter 2 (The Denial Industry) of my book Heat: how to stop the planet burning. 2007. Penguin, London. 2. See for example Arthur B. Robinson, Sallie L. Baliunas, Willie Soon, And Zachary W. Robinson, 1998. Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide. Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine and the George C. Marshall Institute. http://www.oism.org/pproject/s33p36.htm. This paper was printed in the font and format of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 3. Richard Wilson, 2008. Don?t Get Fooled Again: a sceptic?s guide to life. Icon Books, Cambridge. 4. Ofcom, June 2008. Broadcast Bulletin No. 111. Complaint by Professor John Bridle brought on his behalf by Fisher Scoggins LLP. http://www.ofcom.org.uk/tv/obb/prog_cb/obb111/issue111.pdf 5. You and Yours, BBC Radio 4, 18th October 2006. 6. ibid. 7. ibid. 8. I wrote to John Bridle twice seeking to put questions to him, but though – according to Christopher Booker – he is aware of my emails, he has not replied. 9. Christopher Booker, 25th May 2008. Farmers face 6bn bill for asbestos clean-up. Sunday Telegraph. 10. Christopher Booker, 31st January 2004. The BBC helps to sex up the asbestos threat. Sunday Telegraph. 11. Christopher Booker, 12th January 2002. Billions to be spent on nonexistent risk. Sunday Telegraph. 12. John T. Hodgson And Andrew Darnton, 2000. The Quantitative Risks of Mesothelioma and Lung Cancer in Relation to Asbestos Exposure. Annals of Occupational Hygiene, Vol. 44, No. 8, pp. 565?601. 13. ibid, Table 11. 14. M. Albin, Jacobson, K., Attawell, R., Johannson, L. and Wellinder, H., 1990. Mortality and cancer morbidity in cohorts of asbestos cement workers and referents. British Journal of Industrial Medicine. Vol. 47, 602?610. 15. M. Albin, Johansson, L., Pooley, F. D., Jakobsson, K., Attawell, R. and Mitha, R., 1990. Mineral fibres, fibrosis and
asbestos products in the lungs from deceased asbestos cement workers. British Journal of Industrial Medicine. Vol. 47, 747?774. 16. M.M.Finkelstein, 1984. Mortality among employees of an Ontario asbestos-cement factory. American Review of Respiratory Disease. Vol. 129, 750?761. 17. M.M.Finkelstein and Vingilis, J. J., 1984. Radiographic abnormalities among asbestos cement workers: and exposure response study. American Review of Respiratory Disease. Vol. 129, 17?22. 18. M.M.Finkelstein, 1989. Mortality among employees of an Ontario factory manufacturing insulation materials from amosite asbestos. American Journal of Industrial Medicine. Vol. 15, 477?481. 19. You and Yours, ibid. 20. Christopher Booker, 14th October 2006. The BBC falls for the asbestos scam. Sunday Telegraph. 21. Christopher Booker and Richard North, 2007. Scared to Death. From BSE to global warming: why scares are costing us the earth. P319. Continuum, London. 22. Ofcom, ibid. 23. Christopher Booker, 22nd September 2008. By telephone. 24. Christopher Booker, 14th September 2008. Climate change chicanery. Sunday Telegraph. 25. Michael E. Mann et al, 9th September 2008. Proxy-based reconstructions of hemispheric and global surface temperature variations over the past two millennia. PNAS. Vol. 105, No. 36, pp13252?13257. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0805721105. 26. Christopher Booker, 4th February 2008. So it appears that Arctic ice isn?t vanishing after all. Sunday Telegraph.
