by Maureen Birchfield

- Murray Horton

This is a first for me – the first time I have reviewed a biography of someone for whom I had earlier written an obituary (my obituary of Elsie Locke is in Watchdog 97, August 2001, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/97/13.htm). In that I wrote: “To the great regret of her family, friends and colleagues, there is one book that she never wrote – her autobiography. Her fascinating life will have to be written up by somebody else”. It is now eight years since Elsie’s death, and this very handsome, lavishly illustrated, extensively detailed and completely fascinating book took five years of research, writing and editing, but it’s been well worth the wait. The writer, Maureen Birchfield, is to be congratulated on capturing the many, many aspects of Elsie’s life in 560 pages. Birchfield is no disinterested observer – her parents were comrades of Elsie’s in the former Communist Party, from the 1930s until the mid 50s and her mother, Connie Birchfield, was a lifelong close friend (and the subject of a 1998 book by her daughter).

Under State Surveillance For Half A Century

If you have been following the revelations in Watchdog this year about the file kept on CAFCA (and many individuals in or associated with it, such as me) for a quarter of a century by the NZ Security Intelligence Service, then you will be fascinated by this book. To quote Birchfield’s Introduction: “…the NZSIS, which confirmed, in August 2006 that it ‘holds information’ on her, including earlier security-related records of the New Zealand Police and the Security Intelligence Bureau’. The then Director of Security for the NZSIS, ER Woods, was not willing to release the records. He explained that ‘a considerable period of time needs to elapse before security concerns, such as the protection of sources of information, diminish … information may generally be considered for release 50 years after the creation of the record or, in the case of personal files, 120 years after the birth of the subject or 50 years after the death of the subject’.

“Following the appointment of Warren Tucker as Director of Security for the NZSIS in 2007, I decided to exercise my right under the Official Information Act to seek a review of Woods’ decision. I was working on my final draft of Elsie’s story when I received a letter from the then Acting Chief Ombudsman, Beverley Wakem, who agreed to undertake a ‘formal investigation’. My complaint was successful: early in May 2008, when my manuscript was all but complete, I received copies of 220 declassified documents relating to Elsie Locke from the NZSIS, as well as a photograph of Elsie’s first husband, Fred Freeman – the first I, or the Locke family, had seen. I have inserted quotes from this new information at appropriate points in the text, as a counterpoint to the information on Elsie gleaned from the public record, and from her own accounts.

“Security records include lists of when and where Elsie attended meetings over about four decades and what she said at those meetings. The record starts in 1933 when the Police Special Branch (PSB) kept its eye on her. During the war years, from 1942 to 1945, the Security Intelligence Bureau (SIB) – part of the Ministry of Defence – also monitored her activities. In 1957 the New Zealand Security Service (NZSS) replaced the PSB and took over surveillance of Elsie and others suspected of subversive activities. In 1969 the NZSS changed its name to the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service (NZSIS).

“From 1962 Elsie’s security record is less detailed, after a handwritten note on an NZSS file stated: ‘She should not now be a target of our organisation except that we should continue to file info that comes our way gratuitously’. The last report about her was made in 1986, when she was reported to have attended, with (husband) Jack, the winter social of the Christchurch Branch of the Socialist Unity Party. After that Elsie’s file consists of documents, press cuttings and reports of public meetings in which she ‘is listed among the attendees’. Throughout the declassified documents are biographical details about Elsie and her family and some incisive descriptions of her character. Most of the information gathered is correct, though there are some interesting errors of fact and judgement…”.

Of course, Elsie was just one member of what former Prime Minister Sir Robert Muldoon once described as” the most notorious Communist family in New Zealand”. Her husband, Jack Locke, was a leading member of the Communist Party for many decades and Chairman of the Christchurch Branch for as long as I knew him. He stayed loyal to the Party through all its various tortuous twists and turns (pro-Soviet, pro-China, pro-Albania, then all alone after the “collapse of Communism”. It is now Socialist Worker). He stayed loyal until his death in 1996 (uncannily, both he and Elsie died aged 88 years and seven months). My obituary of Jack is in Watchdog 84, May 1997, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/8191/84.pdf. Keith Locke was for years a leading figure in the former Socialist Action League, and then in the former New Labour Party and Alliance. He has been a Green MP since 1999. His sister Maire Leadbeater has been a high profile political activist for decades. The SIS kept files on them both since they were kids, starting precisely because of who their parents were and continuing for decades. There was a political scandal in early 2009 when it was revealed that the SIS had spied on Keith for seven years after he was elected to Parliament. Maire wrote about what was in her SIS Personal File - with emphasis on her years in the peace movement - in “Activist Annals” in Watchdog 121, August 2009, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/21/08.htm.

Spies & Traitors

Sticking with the theme of the State spying on the Lockes, Chapter 11 contains several fascinating pages extracted from the unpublished memoirs of the late Ken Martin. This will be of great interest to those who, like me, worked with Ken in various Christchurch committees and campaigns in the 1980s and 90s (he was a member of both CAFCA and the Communist Party for years). In 1958 Ken, an English migrant, joined the William Morris Group (named after the famous 19 th Century British socialist and artist) and its sub-group, the Rouseabouts. Elsie was a founder and driving force in both these cultural groups, plunging into popular culture work once she quit the Party in 1956 (the Soviet invasion and occupation of Hungary that year being the last straw, as it was for so many Western Communists). Ken was alarmed at the political bent of the groups and took his concerns to the cops, who directed him to the Security Service. They recruited Ken as a spy. For several years he spied on Communists and unionists in Christchurch, very specifically the Lockes, getting paid ₤7 per week. “So successful was Ken Martin in his undercover work that he eventually became president of the William Morris Group”. According to his memoirs Ken became uncomfortable in his role as a traitor and quit (not without difficulty) and, having seen the light, genuinely joined the progressive movement. Others have a different opinion as to his subsequent role in Christchurch, considering that he simply carried on doing what he had previously confessed to doing.

Just as a record of several decades of State spying on one individual, and on the Communist Party and peace groups, etc, this book is invaluable. But Maureen Birchfield has not delved into the subject of another State, namely the US, spying on New Zealand Communists during the Cold War. In Watchdog 65, October 1990 we ran a fascinating article entitled “Spies Amongst Us: How The US Embassy Saw New Zealand 1945-60”. It was an analysis of a huge collection of declassified US documents, detailing their take on Communists and unionists in NZ. The most explosive section revealed how Sid Scott, a former General Secretary of the Communist Party (he was expelled following disagreements with his comrades over the invasion of Hungary), contacted the US Embassy and offered his services to tell them everything he knew about the Party and its members in NZ. That Watchdog article devoted several pages to Scott’s dealings with the Embassy. “We have quoted from this fascinating and damning document at such length, because it is so plain and self explanatory. A defector’s debriefing is a very rare event to have recorded in writing. Here is a man telling all he knows about the party he used to head, eagerly offering his services to the other side in the great ideological battle of the 1950s, and suggesting other possible recruits. It is extraordinary by any standard”. Sid Scott features throughout the book, he was a colleague of Elsie’s throughout their two decades as Party leaders and she remained friendly with him after they both left it. But there is no mention in the book of his becoming a traitor after quitting. It finishes mention of him by saying: “His rejection of communism was all-encompassing, and he subsequently replaced his beliefs with orthodox religion. He joined the Methodist Church and, in 1960, told his own story, in “Rebel in a Wrong Cause””. That leaves quite a different conclusion to someone who couldn’t wait to betray his erstwhile comrades to the ideological enemy. “Orthodox religion” has a name for such a person – Judas.

Friend & Colleague

Elsie was a greatly valued friend and colleague for 30 years. She was a foundation member of CAFCINZ (now CAFCA) in 1975 and remained a member until her death. She was a big fan of ours, writing in her 1992 book, "Peace People"*: "…CAFCA has retained its unique blend of research, education of itself and others, and action where appropriate, always with the aim of a truly independent New Zealand". She was involved in all our campaigns and fought some of her own with the very biggest and nastiest of the transnational corporations. I well remember her great pride, in the 1990s, when she got Telecom to drop its demand for payment, including years of arrears, for the outside bell that the former Post Office had installed, free of charge, so that the progressively deaf Elsie could hear the phone ring whilst she was in the garden (no impersonal answerphones for her). In the years that CAFCINZ was a peace group, campaigning on issues like the US military base at Christchurch Airport (which is still there and still an issue), Elsie was in the thick of it. From the 1980s onwards, as those issues were taken up, firstly by the former Citizens for the Demilitarisation of Harewood, and now by the Anti-Bases Campaign (ABC), she remained actively involved. She was an ABC member throughout the 90s. She was too old and frail to come to any of the Waihopai spybase protests, but she did things like recommend books for us to review in Peace Researcher. ABC was honoured to be invited by the family to contribute a couple of our banners to join those displayed during her funeral. Peace was Elsie’s driving passion. Melanie Thomson of the ABC (now in London) remembers Elsie, in her 80s, biking out to the University to speak to the student peace group. Our last talk, not long before her death, was at an ABC public meeting to protest the Government’s law change to allow the spies and cops to tap New Zealanders’ e-mail. Elsie was 88 and frail; computers were of no personal interest to her (her trusty old manual typewriter was a central prop at her funeral – along with her bike, togs and towel), but she turned up and sat in the front row to listen to her Green MP son, Keith, speak on the issue. And she was very generous – from 1993 onwards she donated nearly $1,000 to the CAFCA/ABC Organiser Account, which provides my income.

*I reviewed ”Peace People” in Watchdog 71, November 1992. It remains the only book written by Elsie that I’ve read and/or reviewed. Subtitled “A History Of Peace Activities In New Zealand”, it ends at the election of the Muldoon National government in 1975. Elsie’s daughter, Maire Leadbeater, has taken on the job of writing the next volume, bringing that history up to the present. I can’t think of anyone more appropriate to continue her mother’s work.

Elsie was multi-talented: a lifelong political activist, she was once a leading Communist Party figure (the book contains a photo of the Central Committee in the 1930s – Elsie is the only woman) and remained a socialist all her life. For decades she was a leader of the New Zealand peace movement, long before it achieved critical mass. She lived long enough to see her point of view become the nuclear free status quo in this country. She was an active feminist long before that word was known; a pakeha activist on Maori issues long before that became the norm. She was an indefatigable writer, of books, articles, radio talks and letters to the editor. Her children’s books alone guarantee her immortality. She was a community activist, who devoted decades to improving the Avon Loop, her beloved central Christchurch home for nearly 60 years. A daily swimmer for decades, she led the fight to preserve and improve Centennial Pool, and keep it free of the curse of corporate sponsorship. She was the only living person to have a park named after her in Christchurch history. She won prizes, medals, awards, an honorary Doctorate of Literature from the University of Canterbury and a Distinguished Alumni Award from Auckland University. Since she died several plaques and one (rather controversial) bust have been erected in her honour in Christchurch. The crowd at the book launch included the former Mayor and a former Cabinet Minister.

Throughout all this, she placed her family above all else, being a devoted mother and grandmother (not to mention a grandmother figure to her broader community). For several years, in her 80s, she put everything on hold to take full care of Jack, who was stricken by a series of strokes. She was plain spoken, indeed she could be a crabby old bugger (I know). She had no pretensions – the book quotes a letter she wrote to somebody saying that he may not have heard of her but that did not surprise her because, in her opinion, Elsie was a name more commonly given to a cow! She lived simply, biking and walking everywhere, never having a car and only tolerating the intrusion of a TV set into her home because it was given to Jack as a retirement gift by his freezing works’ workmates. She died alone in the tiny little riverside cottage that had been the family home since 1944. Elsie had a fierce love of all things New Zealand, and only once went overseas, preferring to tramp in her beloved Kiwi bush, until well into her 60s. The lovely cover photo of her, outside her Oxford Terrace cottage, is accompanied by a quote: “To my generation, there is only one home – New Zealand”. She had a love of art and culture, and ensured that her working class family got the same cultural riches as those of the middle class and rich. Right until the very end of her long, long life, she had a razor sharp mind, and the keenest active interest in the world around her. Maureen Birchfield captures this multitude of talents by the best way possible to be able to make sense of it all – compartmentalising it, rather than trying to cover it all chronologically and simultaneously.

Elsie Farrelly was born in 1912, the youngest of six children, and grew up in the tiny south Auckland town of Waiuku. Her repugnance towards war was inculcated in her when young. She grew up in the aftermath of World War 1, and saw first hand the horrors it had wrought. Her mother, Ellen, told that her that the war should never have happened and could have been avoided. Elsie left Waiuku when she was young, but never forsook it, often returning there throughout her long life, and, unusually for a pakeha of her generation, developing strong ties with the local Ngati Te Ata iwi. Her research was vital for its Treaty of Waitangi claim; she had a Maori godson, who spoke movingly of her at the funeral. The Maori Women’s Welfare League made a special visit to Elsie’s wake, to farewell her with songs and stories. In an age when it was common for working class kids, especially girls, to not go to high school, Elsie worked to put herself through Auckland University, graduating with an arts degree in 1933. This was, of course, in the depths of the Depression, which made a profound impact on her. A recent TV drama featured the story of Jim Edwards, the Auckland leader of the Unemployed Workers’ Movement. It was his being batoned by a cop that sparked off the 1932 Queen Street riot by thousands of the unemployed. The injured Edwards went underground for a while before giving himself up and being imprisoned. He spent time at the place where the young Elsie was staying: “He was sitting there with his head heavily bandaged and he was quite groggy actually”.

Communist, Working Class Feminist

From a personal and political point of view, I found the book most interesting when describing the young Elsie and Elsie the Communist. That’s because when I first met her she was about the age that I am now (late 50s) and had long since left the Party and wouldn’t talk about it. She was a fearless young firebrand who joined the Party in Auckland in 1933 and then moved to Wellington (by hitch hiking, her preferred means of travel for decades) where she spent eight years, working in a whole variety of blue collar jobs and becoming a leading figure in the Party. She poured her considerable energy and talent into the Party’s Working Woman newspaper and when that folded it was replaced by the “non-partisan” Woman Today. But the latter proved that class trumps gender – the non-Communist, indeed fervently anti-Communist in some cases, women involved in that went to great lengths to get rid of Elsie. And they succeeded. Elsie was also one of the 1930s’ founders of what is now the Family Planning Association. She was bemused that the women’s movement of the 1970s considered itself the second wave of feminism (following on from the first wave of the late 19 th Century which secured women the vote). It was her view, backed by the evidence, that the women of the 1930s were actually the second wave, and the 70s’ movement should be considered the third wave of NZ feminism.

It is particularly interesting to read about her first marriage (which only lasted a few years and which she never talked about after it ended) to the wonderfully named Frederick Engels Freeman. He was years older than her, a senior Party leader and one who was trained at the Communist International School in Moscow (the Russians paid his costs to get back into the country by a circuitous route when he was banned from re-entering NZ). It was as Elsie Freeman that she did her most intensive work for the Party. She had her oldest son, Don and shortly afterwards the marriage folded; Don was brought up as a Locke along with Elsie’s three kids by her marriage to Jack. Before that happened she had several years as a solo mother in 1930s’ Wellington, when there were no benefits for women in that position and childcare arrangements were rudimentary. Elsie and Fred had no further contact – he remained loyal to the Soviet Union and, entirely appropriately, died of a heart attack after collapsing on the gangway of a Soviet research vessel in Wellington Harbour in 1969 (as President of the local branch of the NZUSSR Society, he had just taken some of the crew on a sightseeing tour).

When World War 2 started the Communist Party opposed it as an imperialist war, which meant that they (along with pacifists and militant unions, etc) were treated as enemies of the State. In 1940 the Police smashed the printery of the People’s Voice, the Party newspaper, and Party leaders went into hiding – Elsie went to Nelson, leaving Don in the care of trusted friends. Upon return to Wellington she was under close Police surveillance; there is a wonderful Police report of how she proved too clever for the cops following her – “Mrs Freeman is a very clever individual”. In 1941 Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, so the Party swung to full support of the war effort, with the men joining up. Elsie married Jack Locke, the Party posted him to Christchurch, which was to be her home for the next 60 years. Jack promptly joined the Air Force and spent several years away from Elsie and Don. In his absence she took over his role and became acting district Secretary of the Party. Keith and Maire were born in 1944 and 45, respectively, followed by the major health crisis of Elsie’s long life, where she had to spend two years (1946-48) flat on her back in hospital, which was the treatment of that time for spinal tuberculosis. Her three young children had to be farmed out to relatives and friends around the country (the fourth, Alison, was born in 1952).

Elsie was never backwards in coming forwards and freely spoke her mind, regardless of who she was addressing. So it was in 1953, after Stalin’s death, when she wrote a 1500 word letter to his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, beginning by saying: ”I write to you as an ordinary member of a small Communist Party in a small country, and before there has been opportunity for full collective discussion on recent world events…”. Maureen Birchfield describes it as reading “like a parent admonishing her child”. Telling him off for the poor quality of Soviet English language propaganda, Elsie wrote: “We shall not advance if we write only what appears to fit with our current slogans and campaigns but must adopt a truly objective approach towards places, people and events, so that every one in our movement has sound data from which he can form his judgment and enter intelligently into discussion”. There is no record that Khrushchev ever read it, let alone replied but it did lead to her being branded “petty bourgeois” by some of her NZ comrades. It was no surprise that Elsie was among those who left the Party as a result of the brutal Soviet invasion and occupation of Hungary in 1956.

Leaving The Party

Elsie didn’t like her CPNZ role to be highlighted. Whenever I mentioned it, in articles or book reviews over the years, she’d ring up and protest that she wasn’t really a leading CPNZ figure for two decades; that it included time when she was raising children or was seriously ill in hospital. But she didn’t downplay her CPNZ role because of shame or anti-Communism. Not at all – the conclusion of our discussions was always that she didn’t like her CPNZ past highlighted "because it upsets Jack". Having seen political differences (namely whether to vote National or Labour) cause rows between my own parents, I could only imagine the difficulty in overcoming a political difference of this magnitude. Jack remained a loyal Communist and CPNZ leader until his death; Elsie quit the Party in 1956.Birchfield’s biography does shed light on those very real tensions within the marriage caused by Elsie and Jack’s political differences – there is one story, possibly apocryphal, that he sawed their double bed in half (it was later rejoined). Elsie developed a stomach ulcer and her papers were found to include unpublished poems to Jack addressing their differences. Yet they remained happily married for 55 years. Elsie told his funeral that the secret was that they agreed to disagree, and because of "good old fashioned love". For several decades Elsie and Jack lived parallel lives when it came to politics but on subjects such as the environment, particularly that of their own beloved Avon Loop, they worked together very closely, very successfully and were a formidable team.

It is obvious from the extracts of her Intelligence file that the spies couldn’t comprehend how she could have left the Party, yet still remain happily married to a leading Party figure. So they remained suspicious that she was secretly still a Communist and, accordingly, kept on spying on her. Her former Party membership continued to cause her problems years later. When she made her one and only overseas trip, to a 1976 writers’ conference in Canada, she was treated as a major security risk during her American transit stops (despite the SIS having recommended that the US give her a visa). Elsie wrote to her family:” I am a very bad enemy of the US and their great nation is in mortal fear of me!”

Peace Activist

After she left the Party, in 1956, Elsie plunged into the numerous other strands of her life, a major one of which was as a peace activist. It wasn’t a new cause for her – she had been involved in peace issues all her life. Nuclear disarmament became her driving passion, and from 1957-70 she was an executive member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), of which she was a founder. She was so central to the peace movement from the 1950s to 70s that it was only appropriate that she wrote "Peace People", the definitive history of the NZ peace movement (up until 1975). She regarded nuclear weapons as constituting a worse evil than Hitler’s crimes against humanity, and was immensely proud of New Zealand’s nuclear free status, not to mention the decades of struggle to bring it about. But she was not a complete pacifist. "I have never said there are no circumstances in which you would not fight; for example, the Maori would have been a lot worse off if they had not resisted in the colonial wars" ( Press, 24/12/91; "Elsie Locke: anti-nuclear arms veteran", Ken Coates). In the same article, she supported the right of people like Nicaraguans and Filipinos to wage armed struggle, for land and justice, but opposed New Zealand having been involved in the Korean and Vietnam Wars. "I don’t like it when they’re trained for jungle warfare. We haven’t got any jungles to be warfaring in". And: "The (first) Gulf War was about oil and if it had not been there, there wouldn’t have been all that action" (ibid). She was interested in the struggle of all peoples for freedom, peace and justice. I well remember her coming to a late 1980s public meeting on Bougainville, despite the fact that she was awaiting a double knee replacement, needed two sticks to stand and walk, and had to crawl (fiercely unaided) into the vehicle taking her there. Peace activist Kate Dewes, in her eulogy, remembered Elsie grappling with Kate’s teenage daughter to carry her favourite banner on the annual Hiroshima Day commemoration.

To the very end she was a peace activist and was honoured as such. In November 2000, both she and Maire received Peacebuilder Awards from the NZ commission of UNESCO. Throughout the 1970s, 80s and 90s she was involved in the anti-bases campaign (long before there was an Anti-Bases Campaign). That great 1980s’ documentary "Islands of the Empire" highlights a scene of Elsie, speaking from the back of a truck, asking protesters outside the US base at Harewood: "Where’s your democracy?" Quite. As mentioned above, her very last public appearance (years after she’d told me she could no longer go out at night) was at an ABC public meeting in 2001, just weeks before she died. She was greeted there like our collective Nana, the veritable grand old lady of the peace movement.

Writer, Environmentalist

The other major string to Elsie’s bow was as a writer, primarily (but not exclusively) of children’s books. All up, she wrote 20 books and was honoured as a writer (for example, she won the Katherine Mansfield Award for non-fiction in 1958, not to mention the honorary doctorate, etc). Her first novel "The Runaway Settlers" was published in 1965 and has been in continuous print longer than any other New Zealand children’s book. The then Mayor of Christchurch, Garry Moore, said in his eulogy that it was his kids’ favourite book. Margaret Mahy, the doyenne of New Zealand children’s writers, also spoke at the funeral and praised Elsie highly. Historian Len Richardson (who also spoke at the launch of this book), praised her writing about working class people such as shepherds and maids. Long before it was fashionable, she incorporated biculturalism as a central feature of her books. I can’t comment on any of her children’s books, because I’ve never read any of them (although I have seen a stage production of "The Runaway Settlers"). Writing was vital to her – for more than 50 years she kept a room to herself in their tiny cottage, packing the kids off into other parts of the house.

There were so many other areas of life into which she plunged. For instance, she and Jack were central figures in the Avon Loop community for more than 50 years, running Christchurch’s first recycling scheme, Avon River clean ups, and carnivals. She was a leading figure in the struggle between those wanting to "develop’’ the Loop and those wanting to retain its character, with some development. She won a major court case against the local hotel, which wanted to impose a major expansion on the neighbourhood. She was a founder of the Avon Loop Planning Association. As the central city became fashionable and gentrified, this neighbourhood of 19 th Century workers’ cottages became a model. She became intimately involved in the politics of the city – Garry Moore, in his eulogy, credited Elsie with getting him motivated into reviving his local residents’ association, which led him onto the City Council and into the Mayoralty. He also described councillors who crossed Elsie as ‘’suicidal’’. Moore was at the book launch and I reminded him of this quote. He stuck by it and said: “She had a presence” and demonstrated her drawing her tiny old body up upon her walking stick to eyeball the Councillors and officials. Preserving her beloved Centennial Pool was her greatest local triumph, marked by the newly created neighbouring park being named after her. She was instrumental in restoring the environment of the Avon as it flows through the Loop, getting the banks replanted in natives, which have attracted back a great variety of native and exotic birds.

In the 90s, she dropped everything for several years to look after Jack, who was incapacitated by a series of strokes. I well remember turning up unannounced one day to find her helping him with his hand exercises, encouraging him to speak, and guiding him around the cottage on his walking frame with me following behind with his wheelchair (in case he fell). It was incredibly hard work, physically gruelling on an 80+ year old tiny woman who had had her own health problems (knee replacements, etc). At times, Jack had to go into hospital or a home, just to give her a break. After he died she resumed her former life, of writing and peace activism, as much as her increasing frailty would allow. In our very last conversation I asked her if it was difficult for her living alone. She replied immediately and directly: "Not as difficult as when I was looking after Jack". That was Elsie, straight to the point, and no sentiment. She didn’t take any shit. One granddaughter told her funeral a wonderful story of accompanying Elsie to the supermarket, just weeks before her death. When the checkout person asked the usual inane "How are you today?" Elsie replied: “And why do YOU want to know?" Woe betide anyone who spoke to her as, or treated her as, a “little old lady”.

Maureen Birchfield is to be congratulated on capturing the essence of such a fascinating, intensely alive, person in this big, beautiful doorstop of a book (don’t drop it on your foot). Maureen was a friend of Elsie’s all of her life, so this was obviously a labour of love, and it shows. Elsie Locke was a hugely influential person in so many quite different aspects of New Zealand life of the 20 th Century, nationally, regionally, and locally. She was years ahead of her time when it came to thinking globally and acting locally. Her influence will continue to stretch out into the 21 st Century and this book will be what people will refer to when they want to find out anything about her life and work.

“HELEN CLARK:

A Political Life”

by Denis Welch, Penguin, North Shore, 2009

- Jeremy Agar

A recurring theme in the coverage of this biography has been that it’s not an authorised account of Helen Clark’s life. “Unauthorised” is sometimes a euphemism for hostile or an indication that the author has an axe to grind. That’s not the case with Denis Welch, unless you think it relevant that Welch admits to a previous candidacy for the Values and Alliance parties. In fact the overall tone ranges between sympathy and disappointment and the assessments are unsurprising.

Welch, a journalist, writes easily. The style is conversational, as though Welch wants to disarm potential critics. This is not a “definitive” study, he’s implying; it’s a conversation with the reader. Don’t expect weight or detail. There’s quite a lot of musing on Clark’s background, asking how come a Waikato farm girl became an Auckland intellectual and why National parents bred a Labourite. Do we need it? In New Zealand these journeys are neither long nor arduous nor unusual. Welch even chucks in a bit of Freudian musing, but the Viennese quack reads like retro junk mail.     

The bulk of the book looks at the Labour caucus following Clark’s entering Parliament in 1981. The caucus, it seems, was rancorous and tribal. Three years later, in Government, with the MPs keeping their heads obsessively down, all went quiet. In this, Welch confirms the impression gained from the daily news, a good reason for his chatty journalistic style as, beyond the office politics, there’s not much to say about the politicians. There were the ins and the out, the ins being led by the future Acters up, who looked to Roger Douglas. The out was Jim Anderton. Most, as always, went with the flow, so the squabbles were petty, personal, and mostly uninformed by knowledge or principle.  

Uninterested In Economics; Rogernomics Filled The Vacuum

Welch writes that few in the caucus - or party - were interested in economics, so did nothing to resist the Rogernomes. In any case, all involved were so bent on getting rid of Muldoon that the jolt to neo-liberalism was at first ignored. Another factor was Labour’s resolve to look united. Debate over policy, even if MPs had been temperamentally equipped to mount a challenge, has never been Labour’s way. Policy discussion risks looking intellectual or radical, and Labour orthodoxy has always dreaded the intellectual and the radical. 

As we are frequently reminded, Labourites are happiest tinkering about with social legislation. Near the end of his book Welch talks about the Electoral Finance Act and - of course - the “anti-smacking” Act. Like Phil Goff, like most conventional wisdom, he thinks they were the reason for Labour’s demise. Here, however, he doesn’t go beyond the sort of obvious comment that readers will have come across in the pub and on the bus, where the assumption - fed by Big Media - that the Electoral Finance Act was rejected at the grassroots as Nanny Statist has not been convincing. Welch doesn’t look at earlier episodes, such as the dog tagging controversy, so we have only thin context and little perspective. Had the Government offered a reason for its usual supporters to get interested, National’s sniping would have missed its mark.      

Clark, as all commentators seem to agree, was a pragmatist biding her time. Welch argues that, being a woman interested in foreign policy, Clark had to prove herself to the blokes who knew that economic policy, seen as masculine, was where the action was. She was frequently criticised for not being inspirational or aspirational, but how could she have inspired? By leaving intact the Douglas-Richardson legacy there was little to offer - except peripheral, nagging lectures about how to manage the inequality and anti-social carping that has ensued. In any case, Clark has never done the vision thing.  

Clark Did Little For Environment

It remains a mystery why the Clark government did so little to improve the environment. One reason is clear. Winston Peters and Peter Dunne are charter members of the blokes’ brigade. Otherwise dissimilar, they’re both colour blind to anything Green, and feel compelled to ridicule anything which could one day replace the cant of neo-liberalism. Labour could have gone over their heads. We could have had one of those paradigm shifts that academics talk about. For nine years, though, Labour missed plentiful opportunities to act on climate change, sustainable energy, habitat destruction and peak oil. Instead it’s been the Key government, working with the Opposition Greens, that’s (at last) joined the rest of the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development by bringing in some modest and Nanny Statist help for insulating houses.     

NZ was a prominent member of the opposition to whalers, but even that might have been unhelpful to Labour. Saving the whales is one of those distant, safe issues that brand a government internationally as nice. As no domestic lobbies are challenged by an anti-whaling posture, public opinion is reminded of all the harder jobs that have been overlooked. Of course the slaughter of whales (and sharks and dolphins and albatrosses) has to stop. The trouble is that saving the whales, while leaving the big corporates unchallenged, is like a Madonna adoption of an African baby or a South Park episode. It’s liberal chic, a target for the polluters and their supporters to throw darts at. And in the meantime only token efforts are made to halt the rush to extinction of our native fauna. 

A more robust attempt to halt environmental damage could have allowed Labour to merge its social critique with a systematic analysis of economic policy. Perhaps, had the Greens or the Alliance garnered a few more seats, it could have begun. Then the electorate might have been enthused. It’s always said (by the Tory media) that people don’t want a Government to act too strongly on their behalf, but until one of them does, we’ll never know.  Welch, himself aware that the neo-liberal orthodoxy has been a disaster - he dubs it the Big Lie - suggests that Clark could have tried harder. Yet the politicians he interviews all think either that nothing could have been done or that nothing should have been done, and he unearths no deeper substance. So the big question he implies isn’t answered: where will a new politics come from? 

Moral Weakness, Collective Failure

When the book came out Clark told an interviewer on National Radio that she would not have authorised a biography so soon after her Government’s defeat, it being too soon for history to have made up its mind (but there was an “official” bio way back in 2001, penned by Brian Edwards, a public relations adviser to Clark and the Labour Party). Anticipating this sort of response, Welch alludes to the oft-repeated example of China’s Zhou Enlai (Premier from 1949 until his death in 1976. Ed.) Asked if the French Revolution had been a good idea, the great man apparently replied that it was too soon to know. This is popularly taken to indicate Zhou’s deep wisdom. Historians are more likely to think that he didn’t want to talk about the French Revolution or that he couldn’t. The passage of time does not of itself aid understanding, and in the case of the fifth Labour government it’s not likely that later writers will enjoy a perspective denied Welch. 

We won’t have to wait centuries. In the wake of the big crash, it’s become common for mainstream opinion to note that neo-liberalism hasn’t worked. Trillions of dollars of global wealth has evaporated and millions have been thrown out of work. The pity is that the Clark government never veered from its support for the policies that led to the disaster. There just wasn’t the understanding or the will to offer an alternative. Few will have been surprised by Clark’s caution. Labour governments have never cared to speak truth to power. Reading Welch, the impression we get of parliamentarians, from both sides of the House, is of moral weakness and of a collective failure of the imagination. 

“THE PREDATOR STATE:

How Conservatives Abandoned The Free Market & Why Liberals Should Too”,

by James K Galbraith, Free Press, New York, 2008

- Jeremy Agar

We’ve witnessed shock and awe in Iraq, the financial meltdown in New York and the quagmire in Afghanistan, but for James Galbraith the emblem of the Bush years was not a metaphor of destruction. It was Hurricane Katrina. Years after the event, New Orleans is still forlorn and whole suburbs are still uninhabitable. Why could the world’s superpower, with its dominant economy and vast military, the country with the most advanced technology, not do better? It didn’t because the federal Government didn’t see why it should bother. New Orleans hosted no space centre or stock market or air force base. It didn’t even have a good baseball team. It was too poor and black to matter.

To cynics this might be unsurprising, but an objective observer would find it hard to imagine a failure of this scale under any preceding President. This is because New Orleans was the victim of a Bushite attack on the role of the state itself. We’re used to the idea that there are winners and losers in politics, and that rival parties tend to alternate, but traditionally governments have governed in the interests of a public, however that public is defined. Other Republican administrations might have thought New Orleans was too Democratic to be a priority. That wasn’t Bush. He denied it help as a matter of deliberate policy. Bush, says Galbraith, was building a predator state. This he defines to be a state which exists for “the systematic abuse of public institutions for private profit or, equivalently, the systematic undermining of public protections for the benefit of private clients”. 

Dismantling Democracy For the Benefit Of Big Business

Predators can’t publicly admit to their intent, which is to dismantle the democratic state and restructure it so that it operates in the exclusive interest of big business. Instead they moan about the dangers of regulation. Galbraith points out that most of us assume that society is guided by rules to protect us - he mentions the need to assure people that they can buy safe food, safe cars or TVs that don’t catch fire - so the predators have to talk fast. Originally written before the Wall Street collapses, “The Predator State” didn’t aim at the very large targets that have since presented themselves. The need for oversight of banks and finance companies is now generally accepted, and Galbraith’s account is all the better for having emphasised less obvious villains. The predators favour expressions like “moral hazard” and “transparency” to make out that they are reforming the economy so that all is fair and equal. Galbraith thinks that in fact it’s ever harder for consumers to get a fair go. The size, power and technology of modern corporations, he says, mean that we can’t distinguish between those which are “progressive and relatively clean and others that are regressive and corrupt. Because the activities are complex, ordinary consumers cannot tell which is which. And for this reason, regulation is necessary [his emphasis]”.

Galbraith is American, as is his intended audience. The son of the great JK Galbraith, he is highly regarded in his own right, being best known for his analyses of US policy. In Galbraith’s sub-title, “conservative” translates as Reagan-Bush; “liberal” is basically the Democrats. Here, Galbraith is happy to be seen as a polemicist, as a party propagandist even, lecturing fellow Democrats (in New Zealand political culture, Labour is “liberal” and Galbraith’s basic themes can be applied to the Clark government and the Goff succession and his critique can be read as a companion to Denis Welch’s biography of Clark, reviewed above. The Key government has both “liberal” and “conservative” elements and at this early stage of National’s coalition, it’s an open question as to which wing will dominate. Galbraith will be scrutinising the Obama Administration for signs it’s heard him).     

He takes after his father, both with his outlook and his acerbic style. The Galbraiths are essentially defenders of the Roosevelt legacy of Government involvement in guiding the economy. James is explicit in his defence of the middle class and the tradition of “public services and public capital development”. He’s more of a conservative than the latter-day zealots who have stolen the word. Galbraith has run out of patience. The predator state is the US version of neo-liberal orthodoxy, an ideology which regular Watchdog readers will recognise. He’s looking at the way in which the predators, America’s Rogernomes, have captured policy and set the agenda. Having done so, by defining the limits of the possible, they’ve forced progressives into a permanently reactive defence. “Conservatives” have convinced the liberals they know what they’re talking about.

But they don’t themselves believe what they say. From the Reagan White House (and from Margaret Thatcher’s British government at the same time) the world was lectured about the virtues of small government and individual responsibility, rhetoric which still inspires conservatives and intimidates liberals. Yet no one is pushing Reaganite ideas now. The words are lies. At the core of (what’s called) conservatism is the ideal that has inspired every President since the Gipper (Reagan’s nickname. Ed.). And every NZ Prime Minister. That’s TINA’s* siren song of free trade, the dream of a world trading happily, getting rich, and living in peace. Governments have steered towards the sound - and wrecked the ship of state on the rocks of reality. “Free trade” has been reduced to a label, pasted over trade agreements that are anything but “free”. *TINA=There Is No Alternative, the definitive propaganda acronym of the Reagan/Thatcher/Douglas years. Ed.

The sweet words are useful to the predators: “’Conservatives’ praise the free market because to do so gives cover to themselves and their friends in raiding the public trough... And there are those that praise the ‘free market’ simply because they fear that, otherwise, they will be exposed as heretics, accused of being socialists, perhaps even driven from public life” Democrats (those in a NZ context the media calls the Centre Left) don’t analyse the policy that ensues or engage in debate over alternatives.

The Myth Of The “Free Market”

The central predatory conceit is the “free market”, a theoretical construct that rarely exists in the actual world. Free markets, in the view of both Galbraith and the predators, would be places in which buyers and sellers exchange in conditions of equal power and information. For its rhetoric about “choice” and “transparency” to be credible, predatory theory needs to claim it’s achieving this. Without such purity - often expressed through the metaphor of the level playing field - the marketeers can hardly say that there is no need for State regulation.        

Galbraith, however, points out that ‘“freedom to choose’ merely reproduces, in conditions of comparative but far from complete disorder, the phenomena of planning, rationing, queuing, indoctrination, and control that characterise unfree systems”. It is “a freedom for stable large corporations with substantial political power [and] control over resources, labour, product design, distribution [and] planned obsolescence” to exercise control over markets, up to and including “the management of all the consequences, including environmental and political ones”.

Successful corporations have innovated and “[t]he very purpose of a new technology is of course to create a monopoly where none previously existed”. There really are free markets, Galbraith suggests, but they survive not because of, but in spite of, the predators, as relics of a smaller, less mediated, more democratic world. One example often given is of farmers’ markets. Galbraith’s is secondhand bookshops. So liberals shouldn’t talk about free markets as though they were real. And they shouldn’t say they’re a good idea.

Neither should they praise “comparative advantage”, the theory of how free markets best work globally. The original, textbook illustration of “comparative advantage” goes back to the 18 th Century when David Ricardo offered the example of how England, which was an efficient producer of wool, might trade with Portugal, which was an efficient producer of wine. Rather than England trying to produce wine, and Portugal, wool, they should each specialise in what they do best. That’s a good reason for international trade, and the case against “free trade” has never denied such a banal truism. As an illustration, Ricardo’s example has the virtue of simplicity, but, as Galbraith comments, the 21 st Century is more complex. There are now 220 countries and thousands of commodities, and simple reciprocities like England/wool versus Portugal/wine don’t exist.

The attempt to pretend otherwise has been frequently - and inevitably - a failure. Galbraith cites Mongolia. The theoretical economists in their offices looked at their maps and their power points and saw that, of all 220 countries, none could match Mongolia for having wide and unclaimed grasslands. No other country had so many cattle, camels, sheep and goats, especially not in comparison with other aspects of the economy. Given their assumptions, the economists’ conclusion was logically necessary: Mongolia should have even bigger herds, and it would be comparatively advantaged by devoting all its energies to growing its herds. That’s what it was good for. Of course the herds should be privatised. The one possible result was soon achieved: overgrazing and desertification.

The theory has a further flaw that Galbraith does not emphasise. Comparative advantage assumes an equality of political power that seldom exists in reality. New Zealand’s colonial history was marked by the comparative advantage that was guaranteed for Britain, for whom colonies existed as sources of cheap primary products. Creating a certain market for NZ was OK - up to a point. The flipside was that UK manufacturers and exporters didn’t want the colonial economy to mature. They would have been happy with a permanently dependent, capital-starved monoculture Down Under.

Comparative advantage. It sounds OK, but, in Galbraith’s summation, it’s “more a slogan than analysis”. As such, it has considerable propaganda value. Comparative advantage is how the predators justify “free trade” as the global version of “free markets”. Look, they’re saying, everyone’s better off. Seeking our own personal gain, we happen to help everyone do better. This, a tenet of Ricardo’s contemporary, Adam Smith, is the favourite maxim of the globalisers. It’s all neat and tidy, logically and ethically unassailable, but it is rarely true.   

This appropriation of language is Galbraith’s theme. When liberals aver the need for balanced budgets, he continues, they are again “parroting dead conservatives”. To be unbalanced is to be profligate, irresponsible - the pejoratives are almost as various as they are frequent (consider how on a tightfisted Budget night commentators like to describe a cut in progressive social spending as “prudent”). Here Galbraith makes a key point. “The public discussion of fiscal policy has lost contact with reality altogether; it became instead a pantomime of vice and virtue”. It’s really about domestic policy. The conservatives do not themselves believe in balanced budgets, as Reagan’s and Dubya’s huge deficits attest, and their supporters recognise they’re listening to a code. The military budget can be insanely unbalanced. It’s the (public) health budget that needs to be prudently balanced.

The Predator State Is The Biggest Of Big Governments

There is one overarching deception. The hype is of a small State, with all the familiar hyperbole about getting the Government off our backs and out of our pockets. On the contrary. Galbraith concludes that the “predator state” is the biggest of big governments and the deceptive language is a cover for its mission, which is to convert the role of the State from promoting the public interest to acting as a pusher for private corporate gain. The predator state “is a coalition of relentless opponents of the regulatory framework on which public purpose depends”. The policy choice we have to make is not the advertised match between “Government” and “market”. The actual choice is between a Government acting for citizens and a Government acting for corporations.

Galbraith has some interesting remarks about “elitism”, a favourite - if contradictory - swear word among neo-liberals. In the all-market world, money rules. By this Galbraith does not just refer to the obvious power of capital to get its way. For the predators the rule of money is a moral principle. Rather than being the unavoidable but sometimes unwelcome mark of a dynamic society (the way it’s seen by “liberals”), the power of money is the precondition for establishing the predator state. That’s because it “breaks down old distinctions, so any charlatan can be a banker or president... These are therefore the democratic professions, while those like mathematics or physical science that continue to govern themselves, to impose reasonably strict professional standards, are elitist. Money cannot buy an appointment in a physics department, and for this reason, physicists constitute a group whose public values are not entirely to be trusted”.

This is part of the reason Reagan and Bush the Younger made much of being regular guys, as opposed to the pointy headed Democrats and “socialists”. That sort of populist rhetoric, endemic to Rightist regimes, is unremarkable. Galbraith is saying that the attack on “elitism” is rather more than this traditional demagoguery. The predators attack “elites” because their continued existence is a challenge to the dictatorship of money. The “elites” live by standards, and they are legitimised through public regulations that exist outside the coercive power of the predator state. So these have to be eliminated. Galbraith alludes to Dubya’s notorious invocation to New Yorkers, in the wake of 9/11, to go shopping. This was more than the mere vulgarity it might have seemed. To shop is to ignore the Big Brother predator state and thus be free.

New Zealanders might have wondered why it was that the politicians who have seemed to be most exercised about “elitism” were Acters like Rodney Hide and Richard Prebble, men whose self-definition was about nurturing tall poppies and risk-taking entrepreneurs. To a market propagandist, a Shell or a BP (or a Telecom) was the expression of freedom, the triumph of individual initiative: NZ’s elites are said to be comprised of working people protected by Government grants or, worse, professional or trade qualifications, or, worst of all, a union. Often - dangerously - their jobs involve the dissemination of information. That’s why neo-liberalism, which forever prattles about excellence and prostrates itself before billionaires, asks public opinion to swallow the notion that “elitism” is a bad thing, and that our elites are to be found in school staffrooms, public libraries, art galleries, undergraduate classes and orchestras, and on TV1 or National Radio.   

Inequality Is Inefficient

Galbraith’s central theme is that inequality is inefficient, and the besetting sin of the predators is their claim that equality and freedom are incompatible. The “liberals” assume we have to choose between wealth creation and social justice, but Galbraith shows that the opposite is the case. The more egalitarian societies tend to be better off. So there is a double confusion. The predators are inspired by the cliché that a rising tide lifts all boats. But the tide went out, stranding AIG, Lehman Brothers and Bernie Madoff.

Galbraith might have made more of an explicit link between his discussion about elites and this conclusion. This is because the “elites”, bashed by neo-lib propaganda as dead weights on the economy, are in fact some of our main guarantors of both equality and wealth. His discussion of US policy, informed by a career of involvement, is authoritative. He discusses US private health - based on a fallacy in that there is “no market in health care or within it” - and voucher schools. Both are wasteful. Public health must cost less than private health. He mentions “scares” over social security, fostered to panic Americans into an acceptance of the need for privatisation.  

And then, for NZ, an especially relevant item: “The mania for markets where markets do not belong reached an absurd level with electricity in the 1990s.... But it is a market that cannot be made competitive on the supply side, at least for household users. Until the day of household windmills and universal solar panels, electricity inevitably pits a small number of major producers against millions of (politically) powerless consumers. Treating this as a ‘free market’ is a recipe for disaster”. That’s even more true for tiny NZ.

On climate change: We won’t clean the planet by masses of individual decisions. It’s “not a matter of market choices but of the way [people’s] lives are organised, of the housing patterns and transportation networks and power grids”. In common with the rest of the world Americans and New Zealanders are calling for a healthy planet, but our governments are hesitant to respond. Galbraith finishes with the suggestion that we might be blundering into the greatest of all market failures. Climate change is about the future and “[t]he great fallacy of the market myth lies simply in the belief, for which no foundation in economics exists, that markets can think ahead. But they cannot. The role of planning is to provide that voice, if necessary against the concerted interest and organised power of those alive today”.

“SPIES FOR HIRE”

by Tim Shorrock, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2008

- Jeremy Agar

It used to be so simple. In the crude formulations of Joe McCarthy*, spies betrayed America by hiding rolls of film in pumpkins and phone booths for Russians to deliver to Stalin, while the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and its founding Director J Edgar Hoover shadowed them. Now it’s a different game. Spying is being privatised and contracted out, and so treason has been redefined as opposition to corporate America. * US Senator Joe McCarthy , with his inquisitions and deranged accusations, became synonymous with the anti-Communist witchhunts and hysteria in the 1950s. Ed.

After an earthquake or a flood the looters come out. For corporate looters 9/11 was a perfect storm, the chance for the perfect heist. Motive: get what you can while you can. Opportunity: a moment when the world tolerated American power; and advances in computer technology. Alibi: Mix legitimate and opportunistic motives and hide behind a lexicon of soothing platitudes to do with partnership, security, innovation and intelligence; when in doubt, bang on about “terrorists”.  America spends around $US60 billion a year on intelligence gathering, $US45 billion of which is going to private contractors. “Spies For Hire” tells the story. It’s a fascinating account, detailed and scholarly. Although it’s comparatively long, it never goes off topic, which is the privatisation of spying and how it came about. Shorrock, a journalist, knows his subject well.  

It started with the ideological bias of the 1980s’ Reagan presidency, when the President told his people that the Government he had been elected to guide was the “problem” - a languishing economy and society - that America had to solve. President Bill Clinton was more centrist, but his terms coincided with the end of the Cold War, when it became harder to justify a huge military budget and, caught short by Iraq and Afghanistan, the Government had to contract out. This misleadingly plausible explanation for the privatisation of spying has commonly been noted, but Shorrock, while he doesn’t necessarily disagree, has much more to say.  

GIG, Netcentricity, C3I, TIA

Something called The Global Information Grid (GIG) was the brainchild of Donald Rumsfeld (President George Bush’s first Secretary of Defense. Ed.), “the man who forced the armed services to embrace the revolutionary, information technology-driven concept of network centric warfare. The road to military domination, he believed, was to create a global, network-based communications system for all information and intelligence on military operations; transformation and ‘netcentricity’ were the keys to future American power”. 

Eccentricity we understand, but just what is “netcentricity”? Shorrock quotes one official sounding definition, which explains that it’s to do with “communications infrastructure that supports intelligence missions, and enhances information sharing ... from military bases in the United States to tactical mobile platforms”. Still confused? Shorrock couldn’t make sense of it either so he asked an intelligence expert. He too was “having a little difficulty figuring out whether the GIG is a piece of hardware, a programme or a slogan”. The expert thought GIG was an aspect of C3I. And C3I is command, control, communications, and intelligence. So that’s cleared that up. The vagueness helps the power elites, who are themselves all about C3I. Money for the military and the spies has always sloshed about in budgets hidden from public view and the new dispensation allows for even less accountability. For potential watchdogs GIG creates a shifting and often invisible target. 

It might sound as new as tomorrow, but the hope of total knowledge in order to exercise total power has been around a long time, and not just in science fiction. Way back in President Eisenhower’s day, in the 1950s, the US military worked on a Single Integrated Operational Plan. More recently Reaganites hatched a Total Information Awareness scheme [TIA], a misnomer in that Congress was kept in the dark. After Congress found out about it, TIA was scrapped. The politicians aren’t too happy about “netcentricity” either, perhaps seeing that once outsourcing is added to secrecy, their shelf life might be short (for another discussion of TIA see my review of “Spies, Lies And The War On Terror”, in Peace Researcher 38, July 2009, http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr38-175d.htm).  

Intelligence Industrial Complex

Shorrock has come up with his own acronym. He calls this new world order the “Intelligence Industrial Complex”. He’s alluding to Eisenhower’s warning of an emerging “military industrial complex”. Fifty years ago, as he left office, the popular Ike, who had been Commander of the Allied Forces in World War 2, was emboldened to point out what he felt unable to express as President: that the combined interests of the military and the corporations who served them were effectively running the country. Progressive, democratic opinion had long been making this point, but Eisenhower’s conservative credentials and his mana within Washington circles gave the phrase authority in polite circles - even if it did nothing to curb the growth of corporate power - and the existence of the military-industrial complex is the day before yesterday’s news.  

Shorrock is updating the story. The power elites change in degree, he’s implying, but not in kind. He has interesting things to say about 9/11, a day which George Bush immediately exploited to project American power around the place. Shorrock doesn’t pause here either to belabour the obvious. His focus is always sharply on the business of spying.  9/11 was in 2001. The next year, Bush announced a public and private “partnership” which would defeat the terrorist enemy. An influential commentator, one of the legions of academics and journalists who grow rich and famous by telling America that the needs of the “Intelligence Industrial Complex” are the needs of Americans, noted that private corporations controlled 90% of US communications, energy and transport, so citizens should butt out. The business of spying, which depended on corporate expertise, was “too important to be left to the Government alone”. A spokesman from Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the fattest of all the pigs at the public trough, elaborated:  “All of our critical infrastructure we’re depending on”, was privately owned, he explained, so “our moral responsibility is to understand the change and have firms engaged in a public-private partnership to protect their businesses and the citizens of this country”.

Corporate intellectuals can always be relied on to stitch the package together and wrap with bright ribbons. A 2003 offering from the Roundtable summed up the new netcentricity, the world of The Global Information Grid: “Many old paradigms that dominated the American pysche before 9/11 have been set aside since the events of that tragic day, [to allow an] anti-terror joint venture” between corporate America and its junior partner, the US government. “So also must the historic Government-business relationships of the past be redefined in a new era of cooperation and collaboration ....Historical suspicions and adversarial relationships between Government-as-regulator and business-as-regulated have traditionally made cooperation difficult. In the current security climate, this could prove disastrous to the common objective of enhancing homeland security”.

Perhaps junior partner is misleadingly overstating the planned role for the Federal government. Procurer would be closer. Roundtable has an NZ branch, where one of the jolly rogers has long lectured us about the perils of public policy being “captured” by the self-interested. Roundtable’s NZ flunkey, Roger Kerr, has spent decades lecturing us about “moral hazard”. The inconsistency is blatant. If there’s one solution for what ails us that you can rely on hearing about from the Complexes and their mates around the Roundtable it’s that governments and taxes need to shrink. How has the American version of “Government-as-regulator and business-as-regulated” gone? Bush’s immediate 9/11 response was to set up a Department of Homeland Security to coordinate intelligence, so this is an agency that closely reflects the new ideology. Shorrock says that within three years the new spy bureaucracy was spending an annual $US16 billion on goods and services tendered to private interests.

Dubya was following a lead from Booz Allen, whose advice was that governments needed to create “new types” of partnerships and “new types of market incentives”. The Chief Executive Officer attempted to spin a claim of a public service motivation. “Business leaders”, he managed, “cannot opt out of geopolitics and leave the job of security solely to Government and the military”. As Booz Allen’s Global Security Unit head sees it, Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) exist “to reduce risk and help ensure resilience in corporations, government agencies and critical infrastructures”. They ensure resilience in corporations all right, but that’s because the risk that’s being reduced is private risk. 

Where are all the conspiracy theorists now that we need them? Instead of inventing silly stories about moon landings or 9/11 they could look at the real conspiracies hatched in the weeks after 9/12. They’re called “partnerships”. According to Roundtable scripture, about the worst thing governments can do is to grant subsidies. Never mind that the entire new Complex is nothing but a subsidy to private corporations. The old-style (public) intelligence arm of the Government, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), has joined in. It now has a venture capital firm that provides information technology for the PPPs. Shorrock argues that this is really a Government subsidy that allows companies to hire lobbyists to expand their market share.

As the definition of “terror” gets vaguer, the gap between public and private responsibility narrows and the web of corporate power widens. Shorrock took notes at a 2004 conference when a Booz Allen executive was criticising the US Freedom of Information Act because it let public interest groups obtain environmental information about corporations. America, the suit worried, needed PPPs “that work together so that industry can feel confident that when it discloses something it’s not disclosing something in such a way it can be used in litigation against it or more disasters that terrorists could find out about”. Parts of that sound close to the definition of terrorism that we’ve been told about in New Zealand. 

Echelon

NZ gets a mention here. That’s because of Echelon and its listening posts. Horrock reminds us that this Clinton-era eavesdropping was revealed by a UK engineer in 1997. Harried by European politicians, CIA chief George Tenet went into denial mode. “The notion that we collect intelligence to promote American business interests is simply wrong”, he told Congress. Yet he did concede that signals intelligence (SIGINT) “has provided information about the intentions of foreign businesses, some operated by governments, to violate US laws or sanctions or to deny US businesses a level playing field”. Nicky Hager’s 1996 book “Secret Power” is the definitive work on Echelon and NZ’s role in it, namely the Waihopai spybase. Ed.

A former CIA chief felt freer to write accurately about Echelon. Because he is always disciplined, his topic being the spy industry’s presence within the US political economy, Shorrock relegates to a footnote one of the most revealing of all his citations. For a general interest readership in NZ, home of the twin domes at Waihopai, the ex-spook’s opinion about Europe merits space:  “Yes, my Continental friends, we have spied on you. We have spied on you because you bribe. Your companies’ products are often more costly, less technically advanced or both, than your American competitors’. As a result, you bribe a lot. Your governments largely still dominate your economies, so you have much greater difficulty than we in innovating, encouraging labour mobility, reducing costs, attracting capital to fast moving young businesses and adapting quickly to changing economic circumstances.... Get serious, Europeans. Stop blaming us and reform your own statist economic policies.... Then we won’t need to spy on you”.

This series of slogans reads as though the spook has gone to a Roundtable seminar and scribbled cribnotes on his sleeve for the test. But in doing so, he’s shuffled his notes, and forgotten that, to appease domestic wimps and liberals, Arabs and the terrorists shouldn’t be publicly whipped in the same speech in which you bash North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) European allies. Was this clown, a person known as a “subject-matter expert” on terrorism, the one who first complained about France being the land of “cheese-eating surrender monkeys”? Jim Woolsey once directed the CIA. A mate of Dick Cheney, Bush’s Vice President, Woolsey “retired” to the boards of some big defence contractors, and chaired a federal think tank, the decisions of which direct the course of millions of public dollars. Woolsey was an adviser on US Iraq policy, one of the usually anonymous members of the private government, where he called for war contracts in Iraq to go only to US firms.* Inevitably, shamefully, two years after he penned his piece for the Wall Street Journal, as Shorrock reports, Woolsey co-founded the “first private equity fund to invest solely in homeland security and intelligence markets”. He soon raised $US500 million to splurge, largely from union pension funds. They’ve now got close to $US1 billion. As their latest Website message points out, “Federal Spending Presents Big Opportunities For Paladin Portfolio”. You could say it’s not rocket science. That’s the pedigree of one of the more forthright builders of Echelon. As a justification for NZ taxpayers to support American spies, it’s as flat as a dome at Waihopai (referring to the aftermath of the 2008 deflation of one of the spybase’s domes by Ploughshares activists. The dome has been replaced, in 2009. Ed.).* For an account of US “rebuilding” of Iraq, see my review of “The Bush Agenda: Invading The World, One Economy At A Time” by Antonia Juhasz, Watchdog 112, August 2006, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/12/08.htm.

“Partnership” Subverted

Shorrock’s book is a major publishing event in that it has provided as thorough and informed a review of US policy that we’re likely to see. It’s especially valuable in showing how the “Intelligence Industrial Complex” came about. The relevance goes well beyond US policy or defence contracting. In fact, the machinations of the “Intelligence Industrial Complex” look very like the blueprint for how to run a Roundtable government. The Key government might like Woolsey-like “partnerships”, but they’re weaselly things. Shorrock concludes: “Once reserved for partial privatisations in which private capital was mobilised to support public utilities such as subways and roads, that term has been subverted in post-9/11 America to mean something very specific to national security: defence, homeland security, and intelligence contracts and practically any Government decision that favours business interests. In reality ‘partnerships’ are a convenient cover for the perpetuation of private interests”.

In November 2009, Tim Shorrock, in partnership with the US-based group, CorpWatch, set up a new Website, Spies For Hire http://www.crocodyl.org/spiesforhire, which enables journalists, activists, researchers and the public to track America’s most important intelligence contractors. Ed.

“THE FUTURE OF GLOBAL RELATIONS:

Crumbling Walls, Rising Regions”

by Terrence Edward Paupp, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2009

- Jeremy Agar

Despite the title and subtitle, 11 of Paupp’s 12 chapters are about “hegemony” This concept has do with the idea of absolute power, a hegemon being a ruler who cannot be resisted. As a sociological concept it’s more about ideological influence than brute force - which, as an idea, is uninteresting. What can you say about it, when no possibilities exist? Besides, such absolutes don’t exist in our 21 st Century world. Paupp didn’t invent hegemony, but it’s scarcely a widely used term. It tends to frequent this section of this publication, because, like Paupp, Watchdog writers apply it to one of our recurring topics - American cultural and economic domination. But as a concept it almost never comes up in popular publications - if only because the subjects of the hegemon don’t recognise they’re captives. The rarity of the word is a problem because Paupp does not use “hegemony” to describe a reality that various synonyms could stand in for. For him, it’s an explanatory first principle, a theoretical underpinning.

This book is not so much about global relations or crumbling walls as it is about hegemonic theory itself, as conceived by an Italian philosopher. Antonio Gramsci was an inventive and stimulating thinker, but basing an analysis on Gramsci’s philosophy - especially when Paupp scarcely mentions Gramsci or his preconceptions - is an approach that the general reader might find overly academic and abstract. If you didn’t know about Gramsci before opening the book, you’d wonder what was going on. Paupp’s argument is that US power has been virtually unchallengeable, but that it’s now waning. Both aspects of this thesis have been advanced by not a few writers, and scarcely an issue of Watchdog goes out without at least one review of one of their books. The difficulty with Paupp’s account is that his Gramscian musings take precedence and the general argument gets lost in thicket of sociological reference. 

Little In The Way Of Facts

Paupp does not go into specifics so that we can’t engage with this ostensible topic of global politics. Why is the US in decline? Who will succeed it? Beyond the talk of a “new regionalism” that will reflect the coming “multipolar” reality, there is little in the way of facts. At times Paupp seems to be suggesting that the world will reject a hegemonic power because that would make more sense for all concerned, as though we just need to pull ourselves together. A key emerging influence, he notes, is the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), the Asian free trade bloc, which Paupp considers to be Confucian and therefore imbued by a desire “to promote peace, everlasting amity and cooperation”.         

The old order, formed by the Cold War’s rigidities, is obsolete. The new order, Paupp tells us, is based on a voluntary ethic, coming from within. Yes and no. As Gramsci would surely point out, the impulse to power and domination isn’t something that comes or goes based on cultural or ethnic moods and an analysis of hegemony needs to isolate what causes hegemony to come about and what conditions cause it to continue or to decline. Instead of worrying whether the US qualifies as a theoretical model to illustrate “hegemony”, he might well have looked at the specifics to do with US relations with the rest of the world.          

The one chapter that does not have “hegemony” in its title is called “the paradigm of emancipation”. Paupp seems to be suggesting that people are now interested in freeing themselves - as though this is a new thing. For that to be convincing, he needed to have explained how American power came about through social motivations that are somehow uniquely malign and outdated. That would be a big ask. For all his protestations about the wellbeing of the planet, Paupp comes across as an American academic playing the liberal guilt card. It’s perhaps ironic that as an example of one American group of thinktankers he calls “liberal imperialists” he cites Michael Ignatieff. This is a good call on Ignatieff, but just because he’s done a lot of work in the US, it doesn’t make him an American. Paupp seems to not realise that Ignatieff is leader of the Canadian Liberal Party and quite likely to be Canada’s next Prime Minister. Those “crumbling walls” might not be such a self-evidently good thing. We could instead put up some walls (regulations) and some barriers (to unfettered free markets). The real hegemon is not America, the country, but neo-liberalism, the economic practice, which is global. At one point, Paupp offers the thought that American hegemony plus global capitalism added up to “globalisation”. He should have stuck to this idea. For a good corrective to all this, Paupp could do worse than read Galbraith’s “The Predator State”, reviewed above.

“THE GREAT NEW ZEALAND FISHING SCANDAL”

A Documentary By Guye Henderson

- Jeremy Agar

The scandal, says Guye Henderson, is that hundreds of millions of dollars worth of fish are being trawled by foreign fishing operators, leaving few opportunities for local trawlers. Fishing as small business is scarcely viable. This has left its mark on the small fishing communities, which were once a defining aspect of many small ports and towns. Henderson sees these fishers as being “among the last Kiwi battlers” (Listener, 8/8/09). In many ways their story is the story of middle NZ in the era of the foreign transnational.

Fishing operates through a quota system, the foreign vessels having been leased quotas by the big NZ quota holders. More than once we’re told that this transfer was a good idea at the time because NZ did not have an experienced industry. Viewers were left to wonder how the ensuing foreign domination and overfishing could have been avoided. This part of the doco might well have been expanded. Neither Henderson nor the men he interviews have a problem with the quota system itself. In fact, we’re told that, internationally, NZ is considered to have managed its resources comparatively well. There is more room for scepticism here, but small boat operators with a depleting resource aren’t the people to worry about sustainable oceans. There’s no mention of what the few big NZ companies have been up to.

This aired on the Documentary Channel in August 2009, and it shows its TV origins. The fishers we hear from have a good case and they put it well, but the doco is too long. It needed editing so that there was less repetition. Two of the ports are misspelled. As Henderson has said, the situation is messy and the answers are elusive. It’s good that he lets the fishers speak for themselves, and that he doesn’t come up with pat answers, but, to begin to form a response, we needed to hear from other players.

“FLAT EARTH NEWS”

by Nick Davies, Vintage Books

- John Kelcher

This book was first published in 2008. The author, Nick Davies is an experienced investigative journalist who writes for the Guardian newspaper. Glancing at the blurb and back cover endorsements, I’m reminded of just how many crap books make such bold claims and then fail to deliver. “Flat Earth News” not only delivers but is essential reading for anyone who reads newspapers. Davies chronicles the demise of English, and to a lesser extent American, journalism. He takes us back to an older generation of powerful and aristocratic media owners like Lord Beaverbrook, who said of the Daily Express: “I run the paper for the purpose of making propaganda and with no other motive”. Back then enough profits were reinvested to allow staff time to dig a little and check their stories. Though far from Utopia, post-War papers allowed investigative journalism to become established. The large readerships expected politicians to front up and the credibility of journalists and newspapers was cautiously guarded.

Rupert Murdoch

Enter the leading villain of the piece, Rupert Murdoch, who heralds the age of the rule of accountants. Murdoch brings a new bottom line and ruthlessness that fundamentally changes the craft of journalism into churnalism. Murdoch is less concerned with propaganda than making money. Though this didn’t prevent his media empire from supporting the invasion of Iraq and the phony weapons of mass destruction story; no doubt that was a profitable move. In 1983 he also published, much to the dismay of his staff, the fake “Hitler diaries”, even though their authenticity was obviously doubtful (the “Hitler diaries” were one of the great hoaxes of the 20 th Century. Ed.).

Murdoch weasels his way into Fleet Street and then, in the 1986 shift to Wapping, smashes the unions who had played an essential part in balancing the power of the owners against the craft of the journalists. Suddenly journalists were expected to be a lot more productive with a lot less resources. Unsurprisingly, standards plummeted and some of the shady practices of court reporting, such as the use of stolen information became routine newsroom practice. Light is shone on the world of private detectives and corrupt officers who access police and other supposedly private databases. There are ”blaggers” who specialise in conning confidential information from people over the phone and Benjie the infamous binman who at the height of his popularity collected and sifted through 130 rubbish bags a day in search of juicy titbits, celebrity gossip and political dirt. All of this paid for by Britain’s daily newspapers.

“Flat Earth News” tells the story but Davies backs up this ripping yarn with number crunching and the assistance of researchers from the University of Cardiff. In the case study on the “Millennium Bug”, researchers meticulously analyse and trace stories back to their sources. We hear how, out of frustration at being ignored by management, a little known Canadian IT professional, hyped up his concerns about “Y2K”. He managed to get their attention and started to get media interviews. Suddenly, the story goes global, snowballing and endlessly feeding on itself. Finally it leaps out of journalism and into the realm of politics. The rest is history.

“Weapons Of Mass Destruction” & Astroturf Groups

Davies brings his extensive insider knowledge and contacts to bear. He documents the rise of public relations (PR) and how overworked journalists have become a seamless channel for spin from well paid and well resourced public relations agents. Many of these PR people were senior journalists who run rings around young inexperienced and overworked journalists. He goes into a lot of detail over the “weapons of mass destruction” debacle, the successful progagandising of the Observer by Tony Blair’s infamous spin doctor Alastair Campbell, the vicious campaign against the BBC over the ”Kelly Affair” and the Government’s damage control operation and fudged Hutton Inquiry.

Dr David Kelly was a British Ministry of Defence weapons expert who took part in the UN inspections of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. In a 2003 interview with the BBC he inadvertently blew the whistle on the fabrication of the so-called evidence of Saddam’s non-existent “weapons of mass destruction”, evidence which was used as the justification for the US/UK invasion of Iraq. Kelly’s revelations caused enormous uproar in Britain and, soon afterwards, he was found dead. The official verdict by the Hutton Inquiry was that he had killed himself but there have been plenty of doubts expressed about that. The Hutton Inquiry was widely regarded as a whitewash. Ed.

Despite some damming accounts Davies is quite fair on his colleagues. Some later admitting that they were bamboozled by PR propaganda. He points out that they are effectively working in news factories. So instead of producing, say, three stories a day, many journalists are churning out as many as nine or ten stories. The first thing to go is checking. The disease has also spread to “wire” companies like Reuters and Associated Press, which have been historically treated as approved sources (no checking needed) by everyone, including the BBC.

Davies makes a very strong argument that the chief role of the journalist is to tell the truth. Without being able to check stories journalists simply cannot do their job, which is to seek out the truth. He also questions the much heard mantra of balance and sees this as a lever for inserting misinformation and propaganda into stories. The journalist’s job is really to dig, rather than have a bob each way. Balance is also a convenient tool for the fast and loose treatment of facts: perfect for instant stories from the news factory.

He rips into lobby groups and “Astroturf” front groups: they are named after the artificial grass because they have been set up and funded to appear as grassroots organisations, but are actually run by PR agents for corporates such as oil companies. He mentions influential lobby groups like Honest Reporting, a pro-Israeli lobby group which wages mass email campaigns against media outlets who run stories sympathetic to Palestine, making life hell for any editor who crosses their line. Davies’ style is very much that of a print journalist. The text is dense and the complex weave of stories and sources can tire the reader, though it’s such meaty stuff you read on. Fortunately he doesn’t get stuck in journo mode and rounds off the journalistic stuff with explanations, summaries and even some theory.

Nick Davies’ Ten Rules Of Production

Rule One: Run cheap stories

Rule Two: Select safe facts

Rule Three: Avoid Electric Fences: powerful organisations and individuals will use their power to hurt journalists and papers that stray too far from official lines.

Rule Four: select safe ideas - that don’t challenge the orthodoxy of the power elite.

Rule Five: Always give both sides to the story: this is the wedge that well-funded Astroturf groups such as climate change deniers use to plant doubt in the minds of the public and more importantly politicians.

Rule Six: Give them what they want: pander to their prejudices, celebrity gossip and tits’n’ bums, travel, food, cars and miles of sport.

Rule Seven: Bias against the truth: habitual failure to give context or historical background, always favouring simplicity over complexity, treating news as isolated events, and constantly dumbing down stories.

Rule Eight: Give them what they want to believe in: Populism – war heroes, heartland battlers, self-made billionaires, Lotto winners and still more sport.

Rule Nine: Go with the moral panic: During time of crisis sell the heightened emotional state back to the public – i.e. compulsory mourning for Lady Di.

Rule Ten: The Ninja Turtle syndrome – Run stories that every one else is running: like the phenomenally successful and morally dubious children’s merchandising cartoon “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles”; everyone’s in on the act, so it must be good.

Should Be Compulsory Reading For Journalism Students

There are many startling stories here. One that should also be mentioned is the huge level of resources devoted by Intelligence agencies to communications. Davies describes a large and effective network of feeders who slip propaganda and disinformation into the media mainstream. Huge budgets are allocated to various arms of military “information operations” and “psychological operations”. Together these groups amount to an additional military force. This fifth column, so to speak, is acknowledged by the top brass as being a vital tool for covert operations, propaganda and the seamless feeding of disinformation into the global media networks. The world’s largest “Intelligence” agency spends more on these services than Reuters, the world largest wire agency.

“Flat Earth News” is very thorough, it’s not just about newspapers; it covers the whole field of journalism. It covers all the bottlenecks that stop journalists doing their jobs and stop readers from finding out what’s really going on. These include restrictive libel laws and the lazy and self-interested professional bodies like the Press Complaints Council, Broadcast and Advertising Standards bodies and he is particularly critical of the English legal system that, with ample evidence, failed to convict any newspaper for paying for stolen confidential information. The power of this book is its depth of knowledge, complexity and detail, which is used to tell one of the big stories of our time. Its content is rich enough to be an academic text and should be compulsory reading for journalism and media studies students.

The success of “Flat Earth News” reflects how unsustainable hyper-capitalism has gone global. Journalists all over the planet are suffering from the same contagion. Ironically Rupert Murdoch predicts the disappearance of the printed newspaper within 20 years, no thanks to his own efforts. Personally I think it will take a lot longer to completely replace paper and ink. And the most sustainable business model may well be that of outlets like the Guardian or the Center for Public Integrity ( http://www.publicintegrity.org/) which are run as non-profit trusts.

Nick Davies interviewed by Kim Hill, Radio New Zealand, Saturday Morning with Kim Hill, 30/8/08: http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/saturday/20080830