Dutch election results - right wins

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As ever with news reports about foreign elections, they tend to focus on the mainstream parties' results and the far right. The far right has been big news at least since the NF in France began its rise in the early 90s. By contrast, upswings on the far left tend to be ignored. In France in 2002 the far left candidates won 20% of the vote between them. In Germany Die Link ("The Left") was on almost 10% until recently - they were actually big news for a while. By contrast the rise of the Dutch Socialists has never really become a 'sexy' story, perhaps because Holland's new rightwing anti-immigrant politicians were better at grabbing headlines. The assassination of Pim Fortyn was obviously a very big story in 2002. Now we have the Freedom Party and another charismatic rightwing leader, Geert Wilders, who was banned from Britain a couple of years ago because of his extreme views. Now the Freedom Party has the third largest number of seats, 24, while the third party in the last parliament, the Socialists, lost ten seats, falling back to 15. Although the Christian democrats lost 20 seats, overall the right won 50% of the vote, with the rightwing Liberals now on 31 seats. Labour did pretty well for opposing further commitment to the war in Afghanistan and breaking up the Labour-Christian Democrat coalition. However they probably will not be happy with this result, and may have to form a coalition with the Liberals. The Greens gained 3 seats, meaning overall the leftwing parties got 28 seats, down from 35 in 2006. Labour got 31, down 3. The social liberals, Democrats66, gained 7 seats giving them 10 seats, a massive upswing in support.

Results
Partij Afk. Aantal % +/- Zetels
Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie VVD 1902891 20,45% +5,78% 31 +9
Partij van de Arbeid PvdA 1823542 19,60% -1,60% 30 -3
Partij voor de Vrijheid PVV 1438706 15,46% +9,57% 24 +15
Christen-Democratisch Appèl CDA 1273839 13,69% -12,82% 21 -20
Socialistische Partij SP 918150 9,87% -6,71% 15 -10
Democraten 66 D66 641529 6,89% +4,93% 10 +7
GroenLinks GrLinks 617352 6,63% +2,03% 10 +3
ChristenUnie CU 303529 3,26% -0,71% 5 -1
Staatkundig Gereformeerde Partij SGP 163034 1,75% +0,19% 2 0
Partij voor de Dieren PvdD 120490 1,29% -0,53% 2 0

Totaal geldige stemmen 9305647 150

Iran, WMDs and the Green movement

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This comment on a Guardian article about the Iranian Green movement makes a lot of sense. You would have thought that the Iraq war had taught the neocons and their media friends something about imposing sanctions for non-existent WMDs or alleged support for democracy in the Middle East. Apparently not. One can be opposed to the brutal repression by Iran's regime without supporting the policy of sanctions over Iran's nuclear development. Iran does not have a bomb, unlike Israel, the USA and the UK, who all fail to comply with the NPT treaty.

"The stolen election"

Even Robert Fisk finally admitted that Ahmadinejad won:

"But few news organisations have the facilities or the time or the money to travel around this 659,278 square-mile country – seven times the size of Britain – and interview even the tiniest fraction of its 71 million people. When I visited the slums of south Tehran on Friday, for example, I found that the number of Ahmadinejad supporters grew as Mousavi's support dribbled away. And I wondered whether, across the huge cities and vast deserts of Iran, a similar phenomenon might be discovered. A Channel 4 television crew, to its great credit, went down to Isfahan and the villages around that beautiful city and came back with a suspicion – unprovable, of course, anecdotal, but real – that Ahmadinejad just might have won the election.

"This is also my suspicion: that Ahmadinejad might have scraped in, but not with the huge majority he was awarded."

When will you people learn that these lies will get you nowhere? Where are the media shills who peddled the WMD lies about Iraq now? Disgraced and discredited, forced to bench their media careers and sell their services on the right-wing talk circuit. Is that where Timothy Garton Ash wants to end up?

Iran has no nukes - it was tempted, but decided it wasn't worth it. Iran's leader has popular support. Mousavi - nobody knows who he is outside of Tehran. The Yanks' real beef with Iran has nothing to do with either nukes or democracy. The neocons were warned before they went ahead and demolished Iraq that doing so would empower Iran, which it has. Now the Yanks and Arab states are terrified of a Shiite revolution, one that has already taken place in Lebanon (thanks to Israel's serial invasions) and Iraq (thanks to the Yanks), where Sunnis have been ethnically cleansed out of power and their homes. That's why the Yanks, Israel, and Sunni Arab states all see eye-to-eye when it comes to putting the screws on Iran and its proxies, like Hamas and Hezbollah.

Dutch elections

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You don't have to look as far as Latin America for an example of a successful radical left party. Just hundreds of miles from the UK, the Dutch Socialist Party became the third biggest party in Parliament in the last 2006 elections. Since then the Dutch Labour party has had to constantly look to its left, something that New Labour in Britain hardly ever had to do. There maybe a lesson here for the British Greens, who now have an MP. The Dutch Socialists were formed from the New Left of the late 1960s/early 1970s. In this week's election it is likely they will lose seats. Their current 25 may fall as low as 9 as the Dutch far right make gains. However, the lesson is there that extrparliamentary social movements, which is what the DSP is, can make inroads into mainstream politics as long as they don't forget their roots and become simply a parliamentary talking shop.

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He who pays the piper - the payback

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Prior to 1988, President George W. Bush is a failed oilman. Three times, friends and investors have bailed him out to keep his business from going bankrupt. However, in 1988, the same year his father becomes president, some Saudis buy a portion of his small company, Harken, which has never performed work outside of Texas. Later in the year, Harken wins a contract in the Persian Gulf and starts doing well financially. These transactions seem so suspicious that the Wall Street Journal in 1991 states it “raises the question of… an effort to cozy up to a presidential son.” Two major investors in Bush’s company during this time are Salem bin Laden and Khalid bin Mahfouz. Salem bin Laden dies in a plane crash in Texas in 1988. [Intelligence Newsletter, 3/2/2000; Salon, 11/19/2001] Salem bin Laden is Osama’s oldest brother; Khalid bin Mahfouz is a Saudi banker with a 20 percent stake in BCCI, the bank that uses Saudi and drug money to fund terrorism and the CIA also uses to fund covert operations. The bank will be shut down a few years later and bin Mahfouz will have to pay a $225 million fine (while admitting no wrongdoing) (see October 10, 2001)). [Forbes, 3/18/2002].

October 10, 2001: A 70-page French intelligence report claims: “The financial network of [Osama] bin Laden, as well as his network of investments, is similar to the network put in place in the 1980s by BCCI for its fraudulent operations, often with the same people (former directors and cadres of the bank and its affiliates, arms merchants, oil merchants, Saudi investors). The dominant trait of bin Laden’s operations is that of a terrorist network backed up by a vast financial structure.” The BCCI was the largest Islamic bank in the world before it collapsed in July 1991 (see July 5, 1991). A senior US investigator will later say US agencies are looking into the ties outlined by the French because “they just make so much sense, and so few people from BCCI ever went to jail. BCCI was the mother and father of terrorist financing operations.” The report identifies dozens of companies and individuals who were involved with BCCI and were found to be dealing with bin Laden after the bank collapsed. Many went on to work in banks and charities identified by the US and others as supporting al-Qaeda. About six ex-BCCI figures are repeatedly named, including Saudi multi-millionaire Ghaith Pharaon (see October 10, 2001). The role of Saudi billionaire Khalid bin Mahfouz in supporting bin Laden is emphasized in the report. In 1995, bin Mahfouz paid a $225 million fine in a settlement with US prosecutors for his role in the BCCI scandal. [Washington Post, 2/17/2002] Bin Laden lost money when BCCI was shut down, but may have benefited in the long term as other militants began relying on his financial network instead of BCCI’s (see July 1991 and After July 1991).

The drugs-intelligence-terror complex

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I should apologies for all this faintly 'old' stuff about 911 and George Bush, but I want to record it in one place, as one of millions trying to understand the last decade. This memo from FB whistleblower Coleen Rowley to FBI director Robert Mueller is part of the jigsaw.

I have followed the various 911truth arguments and I have moved away from the missing planes and the demolition theories toward a more plausible conspiracy. It does not deny that WTC7 still looks very much like a controlled demolition. But a flaw in the claims that the Towers could not have collapsed due to fire only, is that they didn't. Both were hit by large jet aircraft, so to compare like with like, one has to compare the collapse of the Towers with like incidents of steel-frame buildings being hit by planes - that's right, there are very few!
Moreover, it seems to me that a lot of the energy has been expended to little effect in trying to prove the highly improbable - that Flight 77 at the Pentagon was 'disappeared' or that buildings were demolished without any eyewitnesses, evidence or whistleblowers coming forward.

On the other hand, following the money to Florida flight schools, the Saudis and Bush family history, you come to the conclusion that a criminal conspiracy involving an intricate global network was behind 911, and it involved a lot of people besides VP Cheney. The Saudi-Bush-Cheney links go back a long way, as does a history of US complicity and involvement in a network supporting global terrorism.

Rowley's memo suggests that elements of the FBI wanted to prevent the terrorist plot from being foiled. This has happened many times before, dating back to the stymying of investigations into BCCI and terrorism in the 1980s and the Bosnia connection in the 1990s.

The probable conspiracy is that senior government officials knew of the plot and did nothing, because the network behind it is 'untouchable' and is closely connected to the US intelligence agencies and their shadows in the underworld of international criminal finance. Perhaps the whole thing should be called the drugs-intelligence-terror complex. There is also the fact that Saudi pilots were being trained on US military facilities and flight schools in the run-up to 911 - and that all the remaining high-level Saudis connected to this programme and plot were then flown out of the country in the wake of 911, bypassing the flight ban in place. Meanwhile the Pakistani ISI was implicated in terrorist funding and training while their boss was hanging out in Washington with the intelligence and security establishment and was embraced by them.
According to the other well-known FBI whistleblower Sibil Edmonds, Condoleeza Rice lied about the US not knowing a terror plot involving hijacked aircraft was imminent. Most of the world intelligence community seemed to know about it, including the Israelis, the French and Russians. Nothing was done, even after the authorities knew hijacked planes were in the air.

This, combined with the known ties between the President and Saudis, including the Bin Ladens, at Riggs Bank and going back to BCCI, is the substance of a credible conspiracy that has never been answered by an independent investigation. The 'too many must have known' argument does not hold with this conspiracy since some have already bravely come forward, while comparatively few people would need to be involved, and most of them are either foreign nationals or people directly involved in the criminal-drug-terror network behind the attacks. People made millions out of this - and were also culpable directly or indirectly for the attacks - and so have good reasons, alongside fear of reprisals, for remaining silent.

And this has happened before. Look at how our security services stood by while Pakistanii-Saudi-CIA criminal bank BCCI funded terrorism all over the world until it collapsed in 1991.

Capitalist Destruction or New Civilization?

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The most serious aspect of the crisis facing the global capitalist system is not the bankruptcy of financial corporations, or the global economic downturn, or the discrediting of its institutions of political control. The greatest threat to the continuity of the capitalist mode of production is the environmental crisis caused by the irrational destruction of nature, to the point of jeopardizing the ability of self-regeneration of the ecosystems on which our survival depends.

For many analysts, however, a new long cycle of economic growth would be able to take off thanks to the efforts of countries like China and India, now converted into more desirable markets for transnational capital because of their abundant and “unregulated” cheap labor.

What analysts often do not reveal is that the high rate of GDP growth in China is misleading if one takes into account that the figures do not include the serious environmental and social liabilities generated by the “market socialism” adopted by this nation since 1979. Indeed, since the late nineties, “the World Bank estimated that pollution cost the country the equivalent of 8% of its annual production. That is, the enviable growth in China (...) is almost offset by hidden environmental [and social] costs, such as reduced life expectancy and declining arable land.”[1]

The economies of China and India will be forced to include in their accounting, sooner or later, the huge economic losses caused by global warming and climate disasters, depletion and water pollution, deforestation and desertification of soils, chemical pollution of food, declining wild fish stocks, the mass extinction of plant and animal species, depletion and scarcity of renewable energies, overpopulation and pollution in cities, migration and pandemics. Each and every one of these environmental liabilities must be paid, on time, for all humanity.

The invoices generated by climate change, for example, have already begun to alarm some sectors of financial capitalism, such as insurance companies. In 2000 a group of researchers led by Andrew Dlugolecki, belonging to CGMU Insurance Group (the largest insurance group in Britain), published a report according to which the property damage caused by global climate change showed a growth rate of 10% annually. If this trend continues, by the year 2065 the upward curve of losses will surpass Gross World Product growth, estimated at 3% annually. This means that the magnitude of the damage caused by the greenhouse effect that year will be identical to the volume of all the wealth produced on the planet. According Dlugolecki, long before the two lines intersect, the global economy will become bankrupt.[2]

Given this evidence, there is increasing uncertainty as to the possibility that capitalism (powered by China, the U.S., or both) will reach a new cycle of expansion similar to what occurred between 1945 and 1970. Similarly, it is absurd to think that it is feasible to transform the prevailing social relations of production and build a new society that is truly equitable, participatory, and sustainable, using the same energy patterns, technology and products developed over the past three centuries by the system of domination it aims to transform.

This apparent impasse does not mean that we are doomed to barbarism or that we reject outright the entire scientific and technological legacy of modernity. What corresponds to this dilemma is to be cautious against the risk of shipwreck, which would be any alternative socio-political project, to be led by the compulsive desire for reproduction of productive forces deployed by capitalism, without a critical assessment of its ecological, social, political and cultural effects. Do not forget that the stranglehold on political democracy and workers’ management caused by giving priority to technology and arms competition with the West was one of the fundamental causes of the collapse or involution of the most important trials of the Twentieth Century socialists.

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Unlearnt lessons from 13 years of Labour

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From Ross McKibben in London review of Books:

Brown accepted as proven what he was told by the City and its spokespersons in the media. He moved from what was perceived to be an electoral necessity – you can’t win elections if you alienate the City – to a belief that prevailing City opinion was right, that it was on the side of history. Much followed from this: light-touch regulation, a culture of remuneration that scandalised most of the country, a banking crisis, dithering in response to that crisis, a colossal bail-out of the banks with consequences that hang over the country’s finances, and then a failure to make the banks behave responsibly even when they were owned by the government. Brown, and Blair, and their colleagues, forgot a lesson most Labour leaders once learned at their mothers’ knee: when the ideologues of finance capital and the market come calling, you keep the door shut.

The next mistake was to embrace ‘choice’. The belief in choice followed naturally from a belief in the efficacy of the market, which was taken for granted by the people Labour ministers listened to. This had very damaging consequences both in education and in health. In education it predicated parental choice as the foundation of policy. It gave parents unique rights. But why should parents have such rights? In the jargon, education is a ‘social good’ not a ‘private good’. How and where our children are taught must be a collective not an individual decision; and that is the view of most parents. They want their children to get a good education, but they are prepared to let the professionals do it, as surveys have repeatedly confirmed. Despite this, the right to choose was thought paramount by New Labour and was to be encouraged by creating an array of different kinds of school where efficient parents could find what they wanted. Except, of course, that they couldn’t. Only some got their choice, and they were often the best connected, best informed. Attempts to correct this via lotteries only outraged the losers even more. Far from encouraging social harmony, choice encouraged a war of all against all. Far from solidifying the Labour vote, choice undermined it. And it left the way open for the Conservative Party’s silly proposals for ‘free schools’: parent-run, state-financed independent schools spuriously claimed to empower the poor.

...Labour now has time to repent at leisure. What should it do? Disowning its immediate past would be a good first step, but it has to elect a new leader and all the serious candidates are heavily implicated, for better or worse, in the New Labour ‘project’. One thing it is in no danger of doing is retreating into socialist rhetoric of the early 1980s variety, which is a relief. It could, of course, do nothing, since as the only opposition party it might expect to be the inevitable beneficiary of the coalition’s unpopularity. That would be risky. The coalition need not become unpopular, and even if it does the smaller parties could also benefit. Rather, Labour should emphasise the extent to which it is the party of public provision and collective life. It should also accept that the obsession with choice was a dead end, that the middle classes, aspirational or otherwise, do not always demand choice or pursue their own interests at the expense of everything else. All that choice has done is to create false markets in which there are as many losers as winners. Such markets do nothing to consolidate the Labour vote.

Then their is constitutional reform....Fundamentally, Labour has a Tory conception of the British state, which is why a Con-Lab government is not as mad an idea as it sounds. Bit by bit over its history Labour has come to accept the political institutions of the imperial state: monarchy, aristocracy, primitive electoral systems, independent nuclear weapons, the intelligence services (once thought the class enemy), the special relationship.

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