Bulletin N°560
Subject: ON MANUFACTURING SERVILE LABOR IN THE IMPROBABLE AGE OF UNCERTAINTY.
3 March 2013
Grenoble, France
Dear Colleagues and Friends of CEIMSA,
“Capitalists can make money from anything,” my colleague Ronald Creagh from Montpellier recently reminded me. “In London, bookies are now placing bets on who will be the next Pope.” In fact, it is virtually impossible today not to be engaged in a profit-producing activity for the benefit of some capitalist. Teachers and their students, healthcare workers and their patients, soldiers and their enemies, Franc-tireurs and their targets, police and criminals, property owners and homeless people –in fact all of us, whether we are employed in the “forces of order,” or engaged in the “forces of change,” whether we are also creating goods and services for private profits or are simply reproducing social relationships for the profits of the owners of capital, all of us are inescapably part of a system which ineluctably grinds out maximum profits for capitalist investors from every opportunity that arises.
Such a summary of the marxian analysis has all the charm of looking at a Miss America Pageant through the screen of an X-ray machine, but it is nevertheless true; like the air we breathe, this capitalist system exists within each of us as much as we exist within this system, the two parts are practically indistinguishable; the system exploits most of us to the maximum for the profit of a few. What is to be done?
The traditional answer is to organize, so that we can defend ourselves and if possible disarm “the enemy.” But as Michael Mann has pointed out in his book The Sources of Social Power, vol. 3, Global Empires and Revolution, 1890-1945, this effort at collective defense can transform into a catastrophe if the social context is ignored or misinterpreted. The First World War offers a startling example:
The five-month Battle of the Somme cost 1.1 million casualties. On July 1 (the first day), despite lobbing 3 million shells at the Germans, the British army took its heaviest ever one-day losses –57,000, including 19,000 dead. It was also the heaviest one-day loss by any army in either world war, perhaps in any battle ever . . . . At the end of the Battle of the Somme, the British had recovered their territorial losses. They had advanced three kilometers, a death rate of two men per centimeter! However, their determination also had a bigger consequence. The German high command now decided it could not win what it called a ‘war of machines’ on land and turned to submarine warfare at sea, a fateful decision. (p.142)
That such grim determination can lead to a ‘no-win’ situation is historical fact. The challenge is to prevent such a situation from arising. What were the causes of this violence? And what were the modes of manipulation that facilitated the mobilization of so many people to willfully participate in this carnage. Mann goes on to account that,
between August 1914 and June 1918, every month the Germans killed or captured more Entente soldiers than they lost themselves. . . . it cost the Entente $36,485 to kill an enemy soldier, whereas it cost the Central Powers only $11,345 to kill an Entente soldier. . . . (p.143)
He attempts to explain analytically, influenced by the sociological theories of Max Weber, why soldiers agreed to fight. Five main reasons for compliance are suggested; then he concludes:
Although some of these motives were expressed in nationalistic terms, their substance had been present among recruits to European armies over most of the previous millennium: a militaristic culture; supposedly barbaric enemies; local community pressure enforced by respected local notables; masculinity; adventure; steady pay; and encouragement form social hierarchies.
They were not initially afraid, for they expected to win quickly! Once at the front, however, war was not at all like the adventure stories. Death came raining down, but rarely through heroic combat. It came normally from long-range artillery fire. It was unbearable to cower down before it in trenches or areas near the rear with almost wholly unpredictable chances of dying. Officers were convinced that the experience shattered most of their men and that only about 10 percent of their soldiers had the ‘offensive spirit’ to attack the enemy at all. (p.146)
Naturally, soldiers’ motivations varied. Most tried to keep their heads down, a few were superpatriots, a few viscerally hated the enemy, some remained excited by high-octane masculine adventure, some just liked killing people. However, the notion of the pursuit of glory did not last long in the trenches. (p.148)
Mann goes on to explain why there were so few mutinies before the final weeks of the war, and in the British, German, Ottoman, and American armies “there were almost no mutinies.”
A secure material routine reinforced the sense of unit loyalty that developed across most armies. It was the only available protective environment, enveloping the soldier… It was a true cage …, in which the well-fed animals felt more secure inside than outside, and where they couldn’t see far outside the cage in any case. (p.150)
The reproduction of social relationships goes on every day, whether we are consciousness of it or not. In times of crises it becomes more evident that our freedoms of choice are constrained, but constraints are ever-present, at all times; they are the proverbial ‘rules of the game,’ in a deadly competition that is not of our making but nevertheless involves all of us.
The 7 items below describe the important aspects of life within today’s capitalism-in-crisis system, with all the limitations that are inherent. Max Weber's concept of the cage is palpable in today’s institutions, where we witness so many people around us seeking the feeling of greater security, at any price.
Item A., from New York economics Professor Richard Wolff, is a video of his interview with Bill Moyers discussing his new book,
Item B., from Fred Lonidier, on promoting union solidarity and having fun: Playing the board game, “Strike”.
Item C., from Al Burke, is a copy of Joseph Farrell's response to Jemima Khan’s attack on Julian Assange.
Item D., from Reader Supported News, is a copy of “The True Cost of War,” the full statement by Bradley Manning at his pretrial hearing.
Item E., from Mark Crispin Miller, is a video essay by The Huffington Post on the growth of student debt.
Item F., sent to us by Professor Edward S. Herman, contain links to Wikileaks’ documents on anti-Veneuela campaign.
Item G., from Reader Supported News, is an artcle by Eric Lichtblau, first published in the New York Times on the new discovery of the astounding number of Nazi prison camps.
And finally, we offer readers a taste of the pathology of a control system and an individual’s attempt to escape from it, from the famous Hollywood film,
Sleeping with the Enemy
(1991)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKqHWVRhjWg
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A.
from Richard Wolff :
Date: 21 February 2013
Subject: The fight for economic justice.
Democracy at Work
Economist Richard Wolff joins Bill Moyers to shine light on the disaster left behind in capitalism's wake, and to discuss the fight for economic justice, including a fair minimum wage.
Richard Wolff on Fighting for Economic Justice and Fair Wages
http://truth-out.org/news/item/14794-richard-wolff-on-fighting-for-economic-justice-and-fair-wages
______________________
B.
from Fred Lonidier :
Date: 26 February 2013
Subject: Cry for the dead, and fight like hell for the living.
Would You Like to Educate Working Class Families About Teachers and Education Related Unions, Promote Union Solidarity, and Have Fun Doing It?
Better yet, when was the last time you:
§ Played a board game with your friends, family, and fellow workers that's about the Ninety-Nine Percenters? About us?
§ Played a board game about working class families with middle class values with the good of society in mind?
§ Played a board game about union strategy? Organizing? Collective bargaining? Political persuasion? Deadlocked contract negotiations? Going on strike?
NEVER!
But that's about to change because there's a new board game in town- about Main Street versus Wall Street-and it's called STRIKE! And it's coming to you and your rank and file members from Fratire Publishing.
So forget the staid monotony of that traditional board game more fitting for the One Percenters-and picket your way into the STRIKE! -zone.
But don't take my word for it! Read what William J. Perez - Business Manager and Executive Secretary for BCTD's Riverside & San Bernardino Counties Building and Construction Trades Council of the AFL-CIO had to say about STRIKE! when he first play tested it.
"I can really get into this game!"
and
"I think you have a hit on your hands!"
The STRIKE! Board Game is now on sale at www.StrikeBoardGame.com and our weekly STRIKE! Board Game Newsletter is issued every Monday noting each union's10% weekly or monthly promotional discount. All union members receive a 10% discount when they purchase on-line during their designated promotion period (but they can purchase any time before or after).
Would your members be interested?
Of course they would-so this is all you have to do:
Please instruct your website, e-newsletter, and/or e-mail list manager to forward the STRIKE! board game promotion by e-mail to all of your members. If you need a press release or promotional copy for your newsletter or a flyer to post at your local office-please let me know and I can provide a pdf file for that-or use this e-mail instead.
If you're interested and/or on board, please REPLY that you are-and I'll follow up to see if there is anything else you may need or need to know.
Thank you and I look forward to seeing you in the STRIKE! zone.
Corey Lee Wilson
President
______________
C.
from Al Burke :
Date: 2 March 2013
Subject: Joseph Farrell's response to Jemima Khan’s attack on Julian Assange.
http://www.nnn.se
Enclosed below, an informative and well-informed response to Jemima Khan's recent attack on Julian Assange in The New Statesman. The author is one of Julian's closest collaborators, whom I have met and deem to be very reliable. Please note the request to refrain from publication (at least for the time being). -- Al Burke
Date: 2013-03-02
Subject: Jemima Khan
Here is a letter sent on Friday from WikiLeaks 'ambassador' Joseph Farrell to Jemima Khan in response to her hostile article in the New Statesman. Khan's article followed criticism made by WikiLeaks about
the title of a forth coming $2.5m Universal documentary, "We Steal Secrets: The story of WikiLeaks", in which Khan was given an "Executive Producer" role. You may forward the letter to interested parties since it covers quite a few media myths, but please don't publish it.
- - - - -
Dear Jemima,
As you can imagine, when I read your article in the New Statesman I was very surprised. I was also shocked, but most of all, I was disappointed. When you told me in September 2011 that Alex Gibney, who had been commissioned by Universal to do a WikiLeaks documentary, had approached you to offer you an Executive Producer position on his film I attempted to ask you subtly why you thought he was offering you the position. My exact words were: "Being called an Executive Producer on one of Alex
Gibney's films is full of kudos and will certainly be very helpful in any further documentary projects. I am an inherent cynic (likely augmented by this work) but, if he is not asking for any production money, then it is purely a matter of branding and using your name as an endorsement."
Before approaching you, Gibney had already been trying desperately to get an interview with Julian for more than half a year, since February 2011, and had thus far been unsuccessful. I feared he might have been using you, not because he valued your opinions on the film, or because he was likely to ever ask you to produce anything else with him in the future, but because he needed access to Julian. In fact, just two months before the film premiered at Sundance you said to me that you were "getting my agent to insist I see the finished Gibney doc". That, in itself, struck me as an executive producer with very limited executive power.
Without access and without original interview footage, Gibney needed a tool to legitimise his film and add credibility to it. And, in the absence of the exclusive interview with Julian, what better way than to have the journalist celebrity who is publicly known to be a friend of Julian named in the credits? I am certain you were aware of that risk, because when you told me you were accepting the Executive Producer role you said: "I will still try to persuade Julian (via you) to cooperate (as I have done in the past) not because I'm now officially involved in the film – it's not contingent upon any access to Julian – but because I genuinely think he needs friends not enemies now".
From the moment Gibney approached us we did extensive research into him. We looked deep and took advice from people who knew him and some who had worked with him. Every colleague, ally, friend and even the documentarians we spoke to advised us against an interview with Gibney. Yet we were open to talks, we were ready for dialogue, and we engaged with him and with Alexis Bloom, his producer. None of our meetings allayed our fears that their piece was not going to be the true story.
They did not appear genuine to us and they seemed to have many prejudices about Julian and the organisation. Their angle favoured sensationalism from the beginning, an angle I would have thought you would oppose had you had any influence on the picture. Julian has had significant relationships with hundreds of people. Your list of so-called alienated and disaffected allies is not long: your article mentions nine people, one of whom Julian has never actually even met.
You list Mark Stephens, an internationally little-known media lawyer who had a contractual dispute with Julian and who charged Julian more than half a million pounds for a magistrate's court case defence. Yet you overlook Gareth Peirce, "the doyenne of British defence lawyers"; Michael Ratner, President Emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights and other lawyers at the CCR; Baltasar Garzon, the Spanish judge; Jennifer Robinson, who left Mark Stephens' firm over the issue; Baroness Helena Kennedy QC; Geoffrey Robertson QC, the acclaimed human rights lawyer whose table you sit at regularly; John Jones; Julian Burnside SC and Julian's other lawyers in Australia; his lawyers in Ecuador; the Icelandic lawyers; the Danish lawyers; the Washington lawyers; or any of the rest of an international team of dozens of lawyers who represent or advise Julian and WikiLeaks.
You list Jamie Byng, who published an unprepared, unapproved, unfinished manuscript that had not been fact-checked without Julian's knowledge, but you do not mention Colin Robinson or John Oakes of OR Books, with whom Julian has published a successful and acclaimed book without any problems or disagreements. Neither do you mention the more than fifteen other publishers who are releasing his Cypherpunks book in various languages, or indeed the publishers of Underground with whom he has maintained a good relationship for more than fifteen years.
You list Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who sabotaged WikiLeaks' anonymous online submission system, first stole and then deleted more than 3,000 submissions evidencing, inter alia, war crimes, corruption and bank fraud. He also started a rival organisation, OpenLeaks, a still-born branding exercise with zero publications. His entire livelihood is earned by constantly backstabbing the man who fired him.
You list a person, who you incorrectly describe as "the technical whizz behind much of the WikiLeaks platform", who was in actual fact a technician contracted to upgrade our submission platform according to Julian's architectural design specifications. He was first referred to in Domscheit-Berg's book as "the architect", a propaganda term invented by Domscheit-Berg for his book well after he was suspended from WikiLeaks. The term is clearly designed as an attempt to steal Julian's creative authority. But you are correct that this is the way that he is portrayed in Daniel Domscheit-Berg's book, which contains numerous falsehoods. I am, as I have always been, at your disposal to clarify those stories that are promoted in an attempt to harm WikiLeaks and Julian and to give you the true facts. Had I known you had an interest in the architectural make-up of the submissions platform and its coding genesis, I could have explained this to you further in person.
You list the Guardian and the New York Times, the two organisations who broke their agreements with us. One of the contractual clauses that the Guardian broke was to disclose a password that unlocked a list to all the diplomatic cables, which it published in its book in an act of gross negligence. Both the Guardian and the New York Times have written factually incorrect books about us to whitewash their deceitful actions, which they continue to profit from and promote. You don't, however, mention the 110 media partners with whom we have ongoing working relationships, some of whom have also written books about WikiLeaks but who donate all the profits to us, as a gesture and in solidarity to help us circumvent a banking blockade that has eroded the majority of our resources.
Why don't you list the hundreds of activists, researchers and publishers who play a day-to-day role in WikiLeaks' operations – the technicians who maintain servers; the developers, mathematicians and cryptographers who build new search interfaces and oversee the internal security protocol; those who curate data for us; the investigators who corroborate submitted material; or the managers and ministrators who plan and bring projects to fruition?
Why don't you list the allies and friends across the world who enjoy a close personal relationship with Julian and who are part of the same support community that you once were – the more than 150 people you spent time with at Julian's private 40th birthday party, to which Julian was generous enough to invite even Alex Gibney?
Is it because they do not seek acclaim in the press and because they do not say negative things about Julian, and hence have zero currency in the news?
As to falling out with Alex Gibney, Julian never fell out with him –Gibney was never a friend in the first place so there was never any relationship to fall apart. Alex Gibney was just another one in a long list of people trying to cash in on Julian and WikiLeaks. You may remember me saying how utterly offensive I find it that there are all these people out there who are benefiting financially from Julian, while the organisation suffers a banking blockade and lawyers have eaten away all of his personal funds.
You asked me for a response to David Allen Green's article on 20th August 2012 and I told you that it was being produced. I told you that your request for this response did not go directly to Julian as you thought it had, but instead that it came to me. My email to you after we met said: "I will get you a response to the DAG article and, as I said, blame me, not him, for the lack of response." What you asked for was not as simple as you thought, which was that Julian could probably rattle off the legal sections and sub-sections by heart – the response was far more complicated than that.
I have attached it. It is 55,972 words long, which is roughly 70 per cent of the length of a doctoral thesis. Julian's legal defence committee prioritised this and asked a person to look into the arguments in depth, in order to produce a compelling response due to the harm caused by David Allen Green's sinformation. It was peer-reviewed and revised and took six months to produce for you – a time resource that does not come cheap to a defence committee that has to deal with simultaneous challenges, David Allen Green being just one.
Something of this length and detail ought to have taken three years to produce.
I did not merely tell you that Julian was "very busy". You know that.
What I did say was that he was very busy and that we were a very small core team. Your email asking for a response to the David Allen Green piece was written the day after Julian made his first speech in public since he had entered the embassy, four days after he formally obtained asylum and only five days after the embassy was surrounded by more than 50 Metropolitan police who were preparing to force their way into the diplomatic mission to get him. On top of this, we were still publishing the Syria Files and we had just begun a new release, the Detainee Policies. I told you that since the establishment of the Guantanamo Bay prison facility none of the world's media and none of the world's NGOs had released a single Guantanamo Bay Manual, and we had just released our third. During all of this, we were also dealing with the vitriol coming from the UK establishment media while Julian was having his asylum claim evidence reviewed. He was (and still is) in fear of being extradited onwards to the United States, he had not been outside in more than two months, and he was overseeing the publication of hundreds of thousands of documents.
Over a lunch you questioned this fear of extradition to the US, and when I asked you what you would do in his position you refused to answer the question. I asked you more than six times what you would do in his shoes. Having offered to cooperate with the Swedish investigation non-stop for the past two years and been refused with no proper explanation, and believing that you would end up in an American prison for decades, in solitary confinement and under SAMs, what would you do? You never gave me a concrete answer. Instead, you skirted the question with another question and discounted the numerous legal opinions out there, favouring instead an article by David Allen Green.
I reiterated that Julian had never said that it would be likely in practice that he would face the death penalty, although the Espionage Act permits this. But more to the point, and one that everyone always ignores, there was (and still is) the fear of being extradited to face life imprisonment and almost certainly torture or other inhumane and degrading treatment for his publishing activities.
I told you that the Swedish authorities could, if they wanted to, charge Julian in absentia. Even if they were to do that, they should, according to their own procedures, conduct an interview with him before requesting his extradition. I repeated that he remains available even in the embassy for questioning by the Swedish authorities should they wish to employ the standard procedures they use regularly in other cases.
I explained to you how the argument that "he is no more vulnerable to extradition to the US from Sweden than he is from the UK" is a red herring. I explained why the US had not already requested his extradition from the UK, because this would create a case of competing extradition requests that the Home Secretary would have to judicially review and prioritise one over the other, thereby creating political embarrassment for a major ally whichever way the decision went. I cited the US Ambassador's own admission that the US would wait to see what happened with the Swedish case before they made a move. I was careful to explain this with Jennifer Robinson present to add a legal perspective if needed. However, in spite of this explanation, you allowed this claim not only to go into your article but also to remain in Gibney's film – expressed in remarks made by Baroness Helena Kennedy QC that have been misleadingly edited to remove their proper context.
She has since said that she "did not expect that he [Gibney] would fillet my interview" and also says "I regret thinking I could present a sensible perspective". Irrespective of my explanations and those of two lawyers whose counsel you seek yourself, you could have spoken to Julian in person. He did call you – more than once. You could have called back. You could have come to visit him to check on his well-being, as many others have done. On that note, you were never invited just for a "photo opportunity". You were invited to the embassy by us in September but you heard that there was a paparazzi waiting outside the embassy. This is no great surprise following the biggest diplomatic incident in recent years.
However, you knew about it beforehand and avoided it. Then I relayed a request from Vivienne Westwood's team, asking you if you would model her "I am Julian Assange" t-shirt at her fashion show. The request came after you had already said you were unavailable even to attend her show. This was her idea and her request. She was trying to do something to help us and thought you would want to do the same. You were also invited to visit Julian shortly after he entered the embassy on 22nd June; for tea and cake on his birthday on 3rd July; for a sureties' get-together in late July; for afternoon tea on 11th September and again on the 9th October; and for a breakfast meeting on the 21st December. All of which you declined. These are all times when you could have asked Julian in person about your issues. As you will recall from your discussion the last time you saw him, in December 2011, he enjoys debate and disagreement. How do you know that Julian had not seen the Gibney film by the time it premiered? We do not steal secrets but people leak things to us. Irrespective of the "ironic" meaning behind the title of the film you claim it has, it will not be understood by the general public with that meaning. What they will see is a straightforward conjunction of a quote, a proper noun and the word "story", and they will read it as such. It is tantamount to someone doing a documentary about you and calling it "I am a War Apologist: The Jemima Khan Story" because they had interviewed someone completely unrelated to you and quoted them saying "I am a war apologist".
It is one thing to publicly disagree with someone, or even to distance oneself in public from a former ally, but it is quite another to use one's own publication to the further harm of a political refugee suffering the persecution of a superpower. I imagine you must have vetted the magazine cover, which claims that Julian is 'alone'. Julian is not alone. That New Statesman front page was used to harm the entire WikiLeaks project out of disaffection. It was also an attempt to cast a shadow on all his allies. And yet you were the one who said: "he needs friends not enemies…". Julian has both friends and enemies. He does not need or seek friends who only agree with him (in fact, I have not met one non-argumentative friend of his) but he certainly does not need friends who are in fact enemies.
From the point of view of defending a film in which you feature as "Executive Producer", your actions are straightforward: your name is on the credits of a dated WikiLeaks documentary with a prejudicial title which features all the hostile people who haven't had anything to do with WikiLeaks in years. You chose a production credit over principle and in doing so attacked a vulnerable political activist and fellow journalist, something which I know to be beneath you.
In disappointment,
Joseph Farrell
(David Allen Green response is now on
http://justice4assange.com/extraditing-assange.html
_________________________
Al Burke
E-mail: editor@nnn.se
Internet: http://www.nnn.se
Tel. +46/(0)8 - 731 9200
Skype: nordic.news
____________
D.
From Reader Supported News :
Date: 2 March 2013
Subject: Bradley Manning, the 21st-century Witness.
his statement below was read by Bradley E. Bradley at a providence inquiry for his formal plea of guilty to one specification as charged and nine specifications for lesser included offenses. He pled not guilty to 12 other specifications. This rush transcript was taken by journalist Alexa O'Brien at the Article 39(a) session of United States v. Pfc. Bradley Manning on February 28, 2013 at Fort Meade, MD, USA.
Bradley Manning : True Cost of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/370-wikileaks/16288-focus-true-cost-of-the-wars-in-iraq-and-afghanistan
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E.
From Mark Crispin Miler :
Date: 28 February 2013
Subject: Student Debt is growing…
http://markcrispinmiller.com
Total student debt has nearly tripled over the past eight years, a new report from the New York Federal Reserve has found.
Total student debt stands at $966 billion as of the fourth quarter of 2012, the N.Y. Fed said in press materials, with a 70 percent increase in both the number of borrowers and the average balance per person. The overall number of borrowers past due on their student loan payments has also grown, from under 10 percent in 2004 to 17 percent in 2012.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/28/student-debt-new-york-fed_n_2783103.html
by Tyler Kingkade
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F.
From Edward S. Herman :
Date: 26 February 2013
Subject: Wikileaks documents on anti-Veneuela campaign.
http://wikileaks.org/
WikiLeaks reveals imperialist plots against Venezuela
http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/53422
by Paul Dobson
WikiLeaks has published over 40,000 secret documents regarding Venezuela<http://search.wikileaks.org/gifiles/?q=Venezuela*%7CCaracas&mfrom=&mto=secure%40stratfor.com&title=¬itle=&date=&nofrom=¬o=&count=50&sort=0&file=&docid=>, which show the clear hand of US imperialism in efforts to topple popular
and democratically elected leader Hugo Chavez.
The documents, which date from July 2004 to December 2011 and which were published through WikiLeaks twitter account @wikileaks and which are now
available on WikilLeaks Global Intelligence Files online<http://search.wikileaks.org/gifiles/?q=Venezuela*%7CCaracas&mfrom=&mto=secure%40stratfor.com&title=¬itle=&date=&nofrom=¬o=&count=50&sort=0&file=&docid=>, are based on emails taken from the private US-based intelligence company,
Stratfor.
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G.
From Reader Supported News :
Date: 2 March 2013
Subject: Murder Incorporated: The Nazi genocide grows larger.
Researchers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum began the grim task of documenting all the ghettos, slave labor sites, concentration camps and killing factories that the Nazis set up throughout Europe. What they have found so far has shocked even scholars steeped in the history of the Holocaust.
The Holocaust Just Got More Shocking
http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/328-121/16290-the-holocaust-just-got-more-shocking
by Eric Lichtblau
