Submitted by unterschreber on Tuesday, 13 May, 2008 - 16:17
Private Eye
Private Eye looks back at the birth of PFI and makes a not-so-surprising discovery.
A reader alerts the Eye to a 1940s history of Benito Mussolini, uncovered by a US think tank, and makes an unkind comparison with Gordon Brown's current favourite policy.
More strapped for cash than Brown ever was, "Mussolini resorted to a subterfuge to pay contractors without increasing his budget. He would make a contract with a private firm to build certain roads or buildings. He would pay no money but sign an agreement to pay for the work on a yeraly instalment plan. No money was paid out by the government. And hence nothing showed up in the budget. Actually the government had contracted a debt just as much as if it had issued a bond. But because no money passed, the whole transaction was omitted from the country's books. However, after making such a contract, each year the government had to find the money to pay the yearly instalments which ran from ten to fifty years. In time, as the number of such contracts increased, the number and amount of the yearly payments grew. By 1932 he had obligated the state for 75 billion lire of such contracts. The yearly payments ran to billions. What he did by these means was to conceal from the people the fact that he was plunging the nation ever deeper into debt." The author, American John T. Flynn, added in a footnote: "For a full and interesting discussion of this wierd chapter in fiscal policy see 'Twelve years of fascist finance', by Dr Gaetano Salvemini, 1935". So yes: the private finance initiative, cornerstone of 'eleven years of Brownite finance', was in fact one of Il Duce's barmier ideas.
Submitted by unterschreber on Tuesday, 15 April, 2008 - 17:56
Private Eye
From Private Eye, the otherwise barely-reported story of the recent Treasury paper underlying the UK government's renewed commitment to more! bigger! better! PFI, which draws on the 'analysis' of PFI fee-farmers PricewaterhouseCoopers, KPMG etc.
Submitted by unterschreber on Thursday, 3 April, 2008 - 18:56
Private Eye (In the Back)
Last year's Royal Mail strikes responsded to an ongoing attack on postal workers' conditions, the origins of which can be traced directly to the competitve, 'harmonized' market being gradually introduced under the EU Postal Directives of 1997 and 2002. The threatened closure of post offices across the UK also falls within the Directives' market logic. (It remains to be seen if local post office user campaigns, whose bandwagon now groans under the weight of Ken Livingstone and a posse of embarrassed/embarrassing Labour MPs, will manage to organize in solidarity with the Royal Mail workers.) This Private Eye squib mentions the workers only in passing and the Directives not at all, but it draws attention to an important mediating stage in the restructuring: the banker-run Shareholder Executive, created in 2002 to subject the UK's remaining state-owned companies to the ultra-short-term criteria of 'shareholder value'
Submitted by unterschreber on Tuesday, 1 April, 2008 - 20:22
Wildcat (Germany)
On March 26 a Financial Times 'Lex' columnist wrote: "Happily for nuclear power, there are new bogeymen in town. Flatulent cows and coal fires are heating up the planet, while autocratic regimes seem to control most of the fossil fuel reserves. As democratic Canada and Australia sit on plenty of uranium, and nuclear power generation is relatively clean once the plants are up and running, the industry seems set to make a comeback. [...] Russia announced this month that it expects to build as many as 42 new domestic reactors by 2030, compared with the 31 it is running now. Its nuclear holding company, Rosatom, created in another fit of state-led industrial reorganisation, hopes to export another 60. Some of these will go to China, which has 11 reactors in operation and five in construction. The plan is to increase Chinese nuclear generation capacity fivefold by 2020, and then triple that by 2030. In the US, plans for 30 new plants have been announced, and several developed countries are eyeing the replacement of similar reactors. So a burst of activity similar to the 1980s, when building work on half of the world's 438 nuclear power stations began, seems likely over the next two decades..." All of which makes now seem like a good moment to return to this 1986 article from German Wildcat (http://www.wildcat-www.de/), which argues that nuclear expansion was never just an 'energy' question: rather it has always played a key role in the restructuring (i.e. casualization, contracting-out, 'precarization', as it's now known) of labour on a geographical and technological basis. The article gives a concrete account of how this worked and how it was resisted last time round in Europe. The analysis of work in a construction boom based on outsourced casual labour is obviously pertinent right now; as for state-initiated, privately implemented nuclear projects, it looks like the implications could be seen soon on a much bigger scale in Russia and China.
Submitted by unterschreber on Wednesday, 19 December, 2007 - 23:30
James Heartfield
Brief historicization (from www.spiked-online.com) of the latest inter-governmental eco-policy deal, looking into the way certain branches of capital established the 'Green' agenda long before its discovery by counter-culture and adoption by mainstream moralism. The ideology of Scarcity is perpetual, but it took on this distinct institutional form during the late 20th century Supply Side ascendancy. Incidentally the implicit contradiction between an 'eco-imperialist' drive to keep the 'underdeveloped' world that way (as a 'non-capitalist' source of loot) and industrial capitals' need to draw ever more labour-power into their orbit was explained by Rosa Luxemburg in 1913 in 'The Accumulation of Capital': "The conditions for the capitalization of surplus-value clash increasingly with the conditions for the renewal of the aggregate capital – a conflict which, incidentally, is merely a counterpart of the contradictions implied in the law of a declining profit rate".
Submitted by unterschreber on Tuesday, 27 November, 2007 - 22:26
Rob Ray
A majority of Royal Mail workers voted today for official acceptance of the stitch-up, sorry, settlement brokered by the Communication Workers Union, ending the recent cycle of strikes against the process leading to implementation of the EU directive on (selective - i.e. skewed against public sector working conditions) 'competition' in postal services. As one postal worker remarked on the Royal Mail Chat site, the point where posties look for a better deal working at Tesco may have been reached. This timely article from Libcom.org by Rob Ray, editor of Freedom anarchist newspaper, looks at the implications of this industrial struggle against a supra-national policy agenda
Submitted by unterschreber on Wednesday, 15 August, 2007 - 20:54
Richard Walker & Daniel Buck
From New Left Review (http://www.newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2678) some solid statistical evidence -- particularly strong on intersections of national, municipal, private and foreign capital -- for a point that might have seemed to border on truism but apparently is not gasped in mainstream 'China studies: the expansion of Chinese industrial capitalism in the last 20 years can is broadly comparable to the same process in Europe and America in the 19th century, and speculation over notions like 'the paradoxes of market socialism' is useless. (Anyone who doubted this should read Zola's Germinal next to any journalistic account of migrant labour in Chinese coal mines.) An earlier but more analytically developed account of some of the same phenomena, by Aufheben, can be found at: http://libcom.org/library/aufheben/aufheben-14-2006/welcome-to-the-chinese-century The notion that 'state capitalism' is something specific to countries outside the 'Western' bloc is also usefully debunked by the excellent histories of Japanese and South Korean working class formation on the Echanges et Mouvement site: http://www.mondialisme.org/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=3
