REVIEWS
- Jeremy Agar
A GENTLE RADICAL:
The Life Of Jeanette Fitzsimons
by Gareth Hughes
Allen & Unwin, Auckland, 2022
Jeanette Fitzsimons' obituary, by Catherine Delahunty and Murray Horton, is in Watchdog154, August 2020, Ed.
"Sincerity. If you can fake that, you've got it made,", observed American comic George Burns. The wisecrack isn't cited much these days, probably because its truth is assumed. Those who make their money from fronting to the public must be putting on an act. They're in it for themselves. So goes the cheap and easy cynicism, for which these days confirming evidence is rife. Politicians? They are the essence of fake, though the better performers manage to erect a persona that can be accepted as "authentic".
The outstanding characteristic of Jeanette Fitzsimons was her palpable honesty. She was what she appeared to be: a modest, civilised person dedicated to doing what she could to make her country a better place. Has any public figure in recent memory been so (really) authentic? This quality was widely discerned: Fitzsimons was cited in polls as the most trusted politician. Yet her passion for a clean and healthy NZ was not immediate and instinctive, her early life having been standard NZ small town and middle class. She was not the gentle radical she was to become until, at 27, she read something which made her think the Earth was in trouble.
Books can be big players in shaping progressive minds. Another key Greens politician, the now retired Sue Kedgley*, brought out an autobiography in 2021 in which she traced her green shoots to having read "women's lib" books in 1971. Fitzsimons had a similar awakening. In her case it was having read "The Limits Of Growth" in 1972. Kedgley's inspiration was feminism; for Fitzsimons, energy and the environment were always what would inform policy. The young women did not then know of each other; it was a new generation emerging. *Jeremy Agar's review of Sue Kedgley's "Fifty Years A Feminist" is in Watchdog 158, December 2021, Ed.
In that same 1972 election year the Values Party, and NZ's impulse away from two-party domination, was born. Values emphasised the environment, evolving into Greenery in 1990. There's plenty here on the passions - and squabbles - of those formative years. The first MMP election was in 1996. Hughes provides a close examination of the time. Reacting to the Rogernomic Lange government, Jim Anderton* had split into New Labour. *Murray Horton's obituary of Jim Anderton is in Watchdog 147, April 2018, Ed.
With the Greens, and several other parties not now around, the Alliance was created. Briefly surging, it was soon to drift down, largely because of the stylistic differences between Anderton, a traditional-style party boss type, and the Greens, who were still loath to dispense with a Values ethic of trying to avoid having a leader.
Flourishing Future Must Be Equally Red & Green
Fitzsimons/Values insisted that economic growth and an obsession with an ever-expanding gross domestic product (GDP) was, in the modern parlance, unsustainable. In this recognition they were decades ahead of all the other political groupings in Parliament, some of whom are still in denial that we have a problem. But Fitzsimons' clarity and her refusal to employ euphemism gave an opportunity to those who wanted to find a pretext for inaction to claim that Greenery wanted plants to flourish while living standards for voters wasted away.
National thought this, but so too, it seems, did Anderton. New Labour emphasised economic issues - and did not bother to show interest in matters environmental. The Greens, conversely, were often scattered or conservative when it came to money. Progressive NZ was not yet ready to see that a flourishing future had to be equally red and green.
The tension between Fitzsimons and Anderton could be adduced by any observer, as could the happier difference between Fitzsimons and Rod Donald*, the male Co-Leader with whom she worked until his sudden death in 2005. From the outside it looked as if their varying styles and personalities were complementary rather than inhibiting, unlike the uneasy Anderton pairing. Hughes' account confirms this impression. *Murray Horton's obituary of Rod Donald is in Watchdog 110, December 2005, Ed.
Locked out of any Cabinet powers by both the Helen Clark Labour Party and the Anderton Alliance, but also by a then-resurgent New Zealand First, Greenery contented itself with concessions which were small in monetary terms but which placed urgent conservation items on the agenda - literally. An important win, the wisdom of which was to become apparent almost immediately, was the banning of the logging of native trees on the West Coast.
Like his subject, Gareth Hughes was for a time a Green MP. He first met Fitzsimons when he applied for a job with the Party, and he is clearly an admirer. This has not prevented him from an adequately distanced objectivity. He sees that his heroine was not perfect. The same principled transparency that made Fitzsimons admirable could veer into the impractical or the stubborn. Hughes points out that a Greens' intransigence over genetic modification (GM) deepened unnecessarily a rift between them and the Clark government, Fitzsimons giving the impression that GM policy was a deal breaker in a way that no other issue could be. Few outside her immediate circle could have agreed.
And did she need to be so ideologically pure as to oppose the widening of the Kopu bridge, where motorists queue on Friday nights, frustrated and delayed in their wish to enter her Coromandel electorate? Principled and consistent, yes, but the idea is to get elected. Jeanette would have corrected this opinion by pointing out that it's not about her, it's about keeping oil guzzling cars off the road.
AMERICA 2nd
by Isaac Stone Fish
Scribe, Victoria, 2022
A while back I reviewed "Hidden Hand" * by Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg, both of whom were not at all keen on Xi Jinping's China. Fish cites them here, backing their somewhat pessimistic views, while sharing their frequently skewed interpretation of global relations (*Watchdog156, April 2021) For a look at Xi's internal control, see my review of "We Have Been Harmonised" by Kai Strittmatter, in Watchdog 153, April 2020.
Anti-Communism Clouds View
The common problem is that the trio allow their anti-communism to cloud their view. All three dub contemporary China as "Leninist", which it is not. China is "communist" only in name, the language being retained in order to suggest legitimacy and consistency. Xi is thinking practicalities. He is an arch pragmatist with no interest in theoretical justifications. Unfortunately, pragmatism Xi-style includes promoting a personality cult replete with a "Xithought" echoing of Mao Zedong. It marks China's current reversion to authoritarianism and repression as a new Cold War stirs in the Pacific with China and the US bloc building tension with their tit-for-tat provocations.
Mao's visage still looks out onto Tiananmen Square. He is not there because Xi or his more moderate predecessors are "Maoist"; he's there for the same reason that George Washington is always evoked by American Presidents, whatever the relevance or irrelevance might be. If regimes raise a flag, they need to keep saluting it.
When Fish suggests that Mao "looked to the Russians" and that Xi "today remains Leninist", he is beating a Cold War drum. Mao in reality did not "look to the Russians", and neither did the Russians "look" to Mao. Fish's implication is that the West was threatened by a united (and expansionist) communist bloc. Few historians would concur.
Fish is on more conventional ground when he outlines earlier relations between China and the US. Modern China can be dated from 1911 when the feudalistic Manchu dynasty collapsed. The next year Sun Yat-sen, who had gone to high school in Honolulu, was talking "democracy" and encouraging Christian prayers. Sun surrounded himself with America advisers, one of whom liked to talk of an imminent "United States of China".
It was not to be, Sun having been succeeded by Chiang Kai-shek's "authoritarian" Nationalists. Being resolutely anti-communist, Chiang was backed by the US, but Mao's Red Army won out in 1949, when the Nationalists retreated to Taiwan. Now, over 70 years later, we are being reminded that Xi sees Taiwan's return to mainland control as unfinished business. Again, it's not about "communism" or "capitalism". It's about the big boys kicking over the little boys' sand castles (these posturings echo the US/NATO talk about an emerging democratic post-Soviet eastern Europe. Or the "Arab Spring" which never enjoyed its summer).
All this background is inserted to justify Fish's central argument: that China is an existential threat to America. To do so, he reverts to some more dubious history by suggesting that Mao "suffused Lenin's principles with the 5th Century BCE philosopher Sunzi". He quotes "The Art Of War" to the effect that "war should overwhelm the enemy's will", that the wise leader should "attack the enemy's plans" by waging "public opinion warfare".
"The Art Of War" is a perennial favourite with mediocre thinkers. It gives the unwarranted impression that some deep philosophising is going on. It is especially favoured by those who like to mystify matters Chinese by proposing that people like President Xi think in terms of millennia, while the rest of us are mired in an ahistorical present tense.
By doing so, Fish and his school want to leave us with the impression that the Chinese are uniquely subtle and patient. It's nonsense. Xi is not following a 2,700-year-old tradition; he's very much in the here and now, doing what he can to extend his country's influence and, more importantly, his own power. Tactical opportunism should not be reinvented as fiendishly clever strategy.
Henry Kissinger Is China's Man In The West
Fish is more accurate with some withering criticism of influential Americans who snuggle up to Chinese money. Henry Kissinger features prominently here as China's "most important asset" in the West. Since his time in the Government Kissinger has offered "geopolitical-economic advice" for big money, acting as China's main Western enabler. Always wrongly credited with huge brainpower, Kissinger is more realistically assessed as an unprincipled advocate for the strong against the weak. He saw early on that China was a growing influence and offered his help.
Kissinger set the tone when he refused to condemn the Chinese government's 1989 assault on pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, saying "I wouldn't do sanctions". The State might well have acted with "brutality", but so what? "No other government would have allowed protestors to stay in the square". Henry sees the world in terms of "Realpolitik" (in May 2022, as battles in the Donbas region heated up and the Government he notoriously worked for was increasing its lethal aid to Ukraine, Kissinger suggested that they should reward Russia for its barbarism by ceding territory).
Henry was helped by the likes of President GWB Bush, who let it be known that he regarded Deng Xiaoping as the "greatest" leader he had met. It was Deng who led the move away from Maoism with his 1976 advice that Beijing was keen to "open the windows, breathe the fresh air and at the same time fight the flies and insects".
Tibet features in an extensive passage about Hollywood's frequent waves of admiration for the Dalai Lama, a romantic body of opinion opposite to Kissingerian grovelling. Being remote, "spiritual" and exotic, Tibet is a favourite with film celebrities. Fish makes the surprising admission that at one stage he expected Tibet to attain independence, but that surely has never been likely. No Chinese government, whatever its nominal colour, would allow that. As Kissinger would be keen to explain.
A prominent university gets a well-deserved dressing down for having cancelled a talk that the Dalai Lama was to give on the grounds that it would offend Beijing. There are extensive lists of similar self-censorship. Disney features prominently, accused of cutting and pasting its products to appease China. What does the author think the future holds? He assesses as a "false choice" the options of ignoring the China threat or "yield(ing) gracefully" or "retreat(ing) to being second".
More A Whimper Than A Bang
What he is saying is that, like it or not, China as a global power is here to stay and that it's going to keep pushing the boundaries to extend its influence. That is neither surprising nor necessarily worrying. It's what all the big players do. Yet he can't resist tossing in an unsubstantiated aside about "when the two sides eventually go to war".
He's right to suggest that the Biden Administration will want to whittle down Chinese military and diplomatic power while seeking to work with it over climate change. China will have the same (opposite) aims. There will be gestures of cooperation but neither country will stop swatting flies and insects. At the end, as at the beginning, we're served up pure Yankee arrogance with the allegation that China poses a threat to the one world power that has been keeping the globe safe, that being the US of A. Much of the blame for the recent tensions is due to the UK, US and Aussie nuclear sub escalation (AUKUS). Really dumb.
America second? That's wild hyperbole. Not now nor in the foreseeable future will China surpass American power, whether it's military, economic or cultural. By chastising Disney for kowtowing to China Fish unintentionally makes the same point. Probably no corporation has ever wielded the global cultural power of the creator of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. Nothing comparable is likely to emerge from east Asia any time soon.
Here in NZ confused, and often contradictory, attitudes to China mirror what's on offer in the US. The National Party is Kissingerian in its Neville Chamberlain-style endorsement of China lest it stops buying our exports, while the liberal Left is also unwilling to criticise lest it be said to be "racist" or "colonialist". And Labour Party orthodoxy combines both strains of thought. A rational, informed analysis of Xi and his policies seem now to be as distant as the era of Chinese global hegemony.
THE FUTURE OF UNIONS AND WORKER REPRESENTATION
by Anthony Forsyth
Hart, Sydney, 2022
OUR MEMBERS BE UNLIMITED
by Sam Wallman
Scribe, Victoria, 2022
In one way this pair of books could not be more different. In another way they could hardly be more similar. Anthony Forsyth has provided a detailed analysis of the trade union movement in four countries; Sam Wallman has come out with a comic book. The essential similarity is that both writer and cartoonist are Australians who are passionate about the workers whom they are championing.
Forsyth's focus is on how the union movement is responding to the challenges ushered in by the digital economy. He compares four countries from the liberal capitalist world which he knows best: the US, the UK, Italy and Australia, staying very much in the present tense and suggesting how the near future might turn out.
Digital Picket Line
Workers these days are looking out from a "digital picket line", facing corporations like Uber, which brands itself as a "technology company rather than a transportation company" and insists its staff are contractors rather than employees, thereby forcing its workers to provide their own vehicles, and to take care of what should be employers' responsibilities, like health insurance. Forsyth sees this as meaning that "an Uber driver (is) as close to a piece of code as Uber could find".
Uber, he argues, pioneered this now ubiquitous tactic. Its power to depress costs and squeeze workers is extensive. He cites a study which points out that "people who are in dire need of extra income can become amateur chefs, painters, furniture assembly experts, personal assistants or cabbies... These one-off gigs are mostly low-paid".
Language is important in crafting these evasions, with talk of how minimum wage strugglers are "independent suppliers" and "partners" with their billionaire owners. A favourite which has slipped itself into all corners of current neoliberalism - and surprisingly not emphasised here - is how all are in the same "team". Forsyth quotes another researcher, who writes that the world's Ubers have written a "narrative of glamorised freelance-style work which would especially appeal to tech-savvy millennials".
Myth Of "Flexibility" & "Decentralisation"
Notions that workers in tech revel in a liberating and cool lifestyle in which they enjoy "flexibility" and "entrepreneurship" replace the historic reality that they are being ripped off. There is little difference essentially between the four countries under review. In all of them working people face the realities of a neoliberal world in which the ability of wage and salary earners to bargain for decent wages and working conditions has been relentlessly opposed by those notorious "market forces".
Digitalism has compounded the challenge, and not just by amassing unprecedented wealth and influence within the IT (information technology) and social media empires. Their ideology of individualism has buttressed traditional corporate exploitation. At the time of writing, for instance, the "Metaverse", Mark Zuckerberg's less than modest term for his business universe, was advertising a conference at which "decentralisation" was to be a central theme. "Flexible" individuals, that is, are on their own, while the Goliaths like Facebook have CENTRALISED power to an extent that our planet has never previously known.
Wallman's comic is a nice antidote to these manipulations. His starting point, as expressed in his title, is that all working people have the same interest in cooperating with each other. A favourite word is "collective", designating a theme that he illustrates copiously with a lively history of the union movement.
This pair of books, stylistically so different and thematically identical, could be a valuable resource for raising unionists' consciousness at time when so much of the popular culture tells them they are yesterday's news. Both authors want their lasting impression to be hints as to how to forge a democratic, social future.
In their look at Amazon, comic and academic treatise provide the same exhibit to exemplify the modern capitalist. Amazon has combined time-dishonoured bullying tactics with the new ideology of "flexibility", reminding us that, when it comes to the exploitation of working people, only the methods have changed. Since publication, Amazon workers have won the right to unionise but the Aussies could have looked closer to home than America to find some more promise.
The Ardern government's current proposal to legislate a "fair pay agreement" negotiation with the right to collective bargaining is a potential - and much overdue - measure which would provide the basis for New Zealanders to regain some of their share of the national enterprise that has been eroded from them. It's the most significant single constructive change on offer. Which is why Rightwing profiteers oppose it with their patently insincere talk of the need to allow for "flexibility".
REVIEWS
- Greg Waite
THE WORLD FOR SALE
Money, Power And The Traders Who Barter The Earth's Resources
by Javier Blas and Jack Farchy
Penguin Random House, UK, 2021
This book traces the evolution of the trading companies which buy and sell commodities - notably oil - across the world. To set the scene, the original "seven sisters" - now ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron and BP - had controlled world trade in oil from the breakup of Rockefeller's Standard Oil Trust in 1911 right up to the 1960s. These were vertically integrated companies, owning oil wells, refineries and retail outlets. Crude oil was purchased at "posted prices" set by the refiners in each region; international trading outside this oligopoly hardly existed.
From 1960 to 1970 things began to change. The Soviet Union started to export oil through independent traders, and prices fell slightly as a result - then Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard in 1971, hoping to support the US economy. With oil prices set in US dollars, returns to Middle East countries supplying oil fell, and the OPEC (Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) nations moved to seize back control of their natural resources from foreign trading companies.
In September 1973 the oil companies met OPEC in Vienna for talks, and in October Egypt and Syria crossed into Israeli-held territories. The talks failed and OPEC made their own decision, raising prices by 70% - which was just the beginning for the oil price shock. The trading companies jumped on the chance to create new international markets and maximise their profits among this new volatility. "The World For Sale" follows a small group of companies through this formative period for our modern economy, starting with Marc Rich + Co in 1974, through to Glencore, Vitol and Cargill today.
Much of this story was untold before the book's two authors started following the trading companies as part of their jobs at the Financial Times. Until recently these were private companies, jointly owned by rich investors with their senior traders. They kept their exploits secret to protect their markets and profits, and also their tendency to push beyond the limits of law and morals. But don't expect too much coverage of the moral issues or cost of corruption here. Traders are routinely described as tireless, swashbuckling, buccaneering, adventurous, innovative - and willing to bend the rules.
Easy To Be Tireless When You Can Take This Sort Of Money
Back when Marc Rich + Co formed the top traders expected half a million a year. Later, a coal trader who worked at Glencore for 15 years without reaching senior management received a payout of $US160 million when he left in 2006. "It's not outlandish to speculate that this one company has turned more than 100 people into $100 millionaires". And where does all that money come from? You and I, buying food and petrol.
Marc Rich + Co worked with Fidel Castro's Cuba, Muammar Gaddafi's Libya, Nicolae Ceausescu's Romania and Augusto Pinochet's Chile. Marc was eventually indicted in the US on federal charges of tax evasion, wire fraud, racketeering, and trading oil from Iran despite the embargo during the American hostage crisis. He moved to Switzerland where he retired to ski and admire his art collection.
Other trading companies provided critical support for separatist wars in Sudan, Syria and Iraq, borrowing from banks to pay cash up front for oil to be delivered later by fragile newly independent regions needing to buy arms to control regional resources. By the end of the 1990s, the Vitol Group was the world's largest independent oil distributor, weaving a complex web of cash and bartered deals with newly independent nations from the former Soviet Union.
Derivatives - bets on future prices - allowed traders to take on much larger contracts with less risk from the 1980s. And from the late 1990s rising industrialisation in China opened up a new era of higher commodity prices and much higher profits for traders. And with that extra surplus, these relatively new companies now aimed to become vertically integrated just like the oil oligopoly they'd displaced, diversifying into mines, refineries, packing plants and other physical assets.
There are a lot of very scary stories along the way. Here's just a few. Remember 2003, when Zimbabwe was in a financial and economic crisis, with inflation out of control and food shortages? The Zimbabwean central bank couldn't print new notes fast enough to keep up with the devaluations. Trading company Cargill had a large cotton operation there but needed cash to pay the small-scale farmers.
So, they simply asked a local company to print 7.5 billion Zimbabwean dollars (US$2.2m) and guaranteed the notes by depositing funds with a local bank. The money had the Cargill Cotton logo and was signed by its top two executives. And when they were deposited at the bank after a purchase, they were worth less due to the runaway deflation, adding to company profits. "That makes Monopoly money even better business than cotton in this oddball economy", the Deputy Chief of the American Embassy in Harare wrote in a diplomatic cable.
Which raises the question of the American State's view of these private companies which worked corruptly and directly against official State policy on South Africa, Cuba, Russia, Syria and Iraq to name just a few. "The CIA used to come to us", recalled David Tendler of Philipp Brothers 1975-1984. "They used to visit us... talk to us about the economy, talk to us about what you're seeing... They felt we were a source of information on countries".
Remember the US oil-for-food programme for Iraq, intended to stop oil money being diverted to new wars? The traders found ways around it, opening shell companies in Panama and the Bahamas so "surcharges" could be paid to Baghdad and oil contracts routed to its allies - to Russia, and to French politicians who had argued in favour of lifting the sanctions.
Wild Deals
In the dying days of the Soviet Union all kinds of wild deals were struck. PepsiCo briefly became one of the world's largest naval powers when it agreed that, in exchange for the Pepsi it was selling to the Soviet Union, it would be paid with 17 Soviet submarines, a cruiser, a frigate and a destroyer, to be sold for scrap. PepsiCo's chairman joked to the White House: "We're disarming the Soviet Union faster than you are". But the collapse of the Soviet Union was the biggest opportunity of all for traders. Suddenly, a closed system was a part of the world economy.
"The team at Marc Rich + Co went to great lengths to make sure Tarasov (the Soviet Union's first millionaire in the 1980s) would return to the Soviet Union a happy man. They put him in a suite at the Meridien Hotel in Piccadilly. They hired a boat on the Thames with an orchestra to entertain him. And in the evenings 'they hired several nightclubs, where they told me to take any dancer I wanted back to my room: everything had already been paid for on the company account. Of course, at the end I signed the contract'".
With Putin's invasion of Ukraine, the coverage here of his dealings with the first-round oligarchs is particularly interesting: "When he first came to power at the turn of the millennium, Putin had offered the oligarchs an implicit deal: he would not seek to reverse the privatisation deals, but they in turn should stay out of politics. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the owner of oil company Yukos, was the oligarch who more than any other tested the boundaries of Putin's stance. Yukos was one of the most aggressive users of offshore companies and low-tax special economic zones to reduce its tax bill".
"And Khodorkovsky became increasingly bold - even provocative. He challenged Putin over corruption in a televised meeting at the Kremlin. He said that he would retire from Yukos in 2007 - the year before Putin would be required by the constitution to step down - and allowed speculation to build that he might be interested in a move into politics. And he started talks with Chevron and Exxon-Mobil to sell a stake in Yukos. (Soon after) ... Russia's richest oligarch was under arrest".
As Yukos collapsed under the Kremlin's campaign against it, trading house Gunvor stepped in to keep oil exports moving. (The firm's founder) "Tornqvist says he knew in advance that Yukos would be taken down. He says that Khodorkovsky made two mistakes. The first was to ignore Putin's warning not to meddle in Russian politics. The second was his talks to sell Yukos to a US oil company".
"'You can imagine the anger. These guys got this for free. They didn't pay for this: they got it. And they're now going to sell it to an American multinational? That was the moment they decided to take him down,'' Tornqvist says. 'They're very open about it ... If we allow this to happen, Russia will fall apart. Russia's riches will end up everywhere, and the Russian people will get nothing'". So, Putin understands a bit about foreign control.
The trader's connections in Russia were again critical in the summer of 2010, after a drought devastated Russian wheat crops. Glencore had taken positions that grain prices would rise, then spoke in favour of an export ban with its Russian contacts, who did just that. By February 2011 prices for wheat had doubled, a big factor in the Arab Spring protest movements which spread rapidly across the Middle East and began the Syrian conflict.
More recently, as economic progress and global stability have become more volatile, the American political machine has increased its financial surveillance. In 2014 they uncovered Trafigura's web of shell companies to hide trade with Cuba. Did they act against the Singapore-based trader? No, they hit France's largest bank BNP Paribas with a $US9 billion settlement for its role in hiding the money laundering. And Cuba was one of Trafigura's smallest partners. No wish to uncover the West's role in Russia's collapse, obviously.
What Rules, What Order?
For years, many commodity traders had looked on sanctions and embargoes as an opportunity, but times were changing. This is how the authors describe it: "For decades, the US had imposed its will around the world using its pre-eminent military might. But now, after years of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US public was tired of wars. Under President Barack Obama, Washington found a new method to enforce its will: using the power of the dollar in the global financial system as a weapon".
"Sanctions programmes proliferated as a tool of US foreign policy. All of this was possible because of the overwhelming importance of the US dollar. As the US became the world's dominant economy in the second half of the 20th Century, a large proportion of the global trade was priced in US dollars - including almost all commodities".
"Because any US dollar transaction must be cleared through an American bank, US sanctions took on 'enormous weight and influence beyond our borders', according to Jack Lew, the Treasury Secretary 2013 to 2017". "But the US went further still, introducing a new concept called 'secondary sanctions', the threat to block access to the US financial system to companies that had done business with sanctioned entities, even if they hadn't done so in dollars. The effect was to make the US the world's policeman".
Some senior trading figures with links to Putin's inner circle were placed under sanctions after the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014. So, can we expect a safer world and less support for corrupt dictators to control their country's resources? The authors note that as the older trading companies increase their legal compliance in response to the rising risk of financial consequences, the Chinese government has woken up to their high profits and is building its own commodity trading capability. With no assets in the US and less need for the US dollar, they are less vulnerable to the threat of sanctions. Corruption never sleeps.
We are told the West offers a rules-based international order - but what rules, and what order? The US/UK-led invasion of Iraq was a fraud. Big power vetoes in the United Nations and International Monetary Funds is a farce. Corporations are more powerful than governments. The world looked bad enough, before I learned from this book how free trading companies are to start wars and support kleptocrats. Now we should be really worried.
MEN WHO HATE WOMEN
by Laura Bates
Simon & Schuster, London, 2020
This book documents nine distinct online and real-life communities which encourage hatred of women. Many of these overlap with Rightwing extremism, and many of the technical tools they use have been adopted and expanded by the political Right. No surprise there, because they share so much in common. Criticism of the other, and a "version of the truth" which claims the moral high ground.
The Incels: Violent Misogynists
Today, investigative journalism is rare in mainstream media and Western security services remain fixated on Left and green alternatives, so this extremism has been growing unchecked. To make it clear how bad this has got, it's worth looking at some unpleasant but real examples from Laura's first chapter on communities promoting misogyny, about "incels". Incel is a contraction of involuntary celibacy and this online community is devoted to violent hatred of women, actively recruiting members who might have very real problems and vulnerabilities, and telling them women are the cause of all their woes.
The "logic" runs something like this: the world is stacked against men; government and society favour women over men; the myth of male privilege is promoted by a feminist conspiracy; women are constantly hungry for sex but only with attractive men; later, women settle with and exploit one man; less attractive men are therefore cursed to a lifetime of unfair sexual frustration. Discussions include topics like "Why I support the legalisation of rape", "acid attacks are the great equaliser", "feminism is the problem, rape is the solution". While only a few extremists act out these online fantasies, this community is growing rapidly and who knows what sort of future they are creating for us all.
It's crazy stuff but don't make the mistake of assuming these ideas reach just a small minority. There are 100,000 subscribers on an incel thread of Reddit, and many more who read these forums without joining. The writers often hide behind the defence that comments are ironic or humorous ways to make a point but this is just dishonesty. Their strategy of presenting themselves as the true victims, even while engaging in mass coordinated sexual harassment, is typical of the online "manosphere". The real victims must be presented as the oppressors.
Taking the online reaction to #metoo as an example, online "trolls" put out stories on social media and gaming Websites suggesting that women were inventing and exaggerating the harassment they received, to attract attention and make male gamers ("who are just trying to protect their 'culture'") look bad. Others claimed that feminists themselves had sent the death and bomb threats, in order to publicise their story.
A narrative of the progressive Left as "snowflakes", "social justice warriors", "feminazis", "professional victims" and the "perpetually offended" emerged. Thus, coordinated harassment became justified as a form of moral self-defence. Ring any bells with the Wellington covid protestors? National's programme of using dirt from the SIS (Security Intelligence Service) to smear community activists?
Elliot Rodger is a hero cited in many of these forums - he shot 20 victims with six dying, after posting a 107,000-word incel manifesto online. And Laura cites 13 other US cases of similar mass killings driven by online misogyny. A common theme among them is the refusal of mainstream media to publish anything about their hatred of women, focusing instead on their isolation and mental health.
The man who drove into the crowd at Charlottesville USA in 2017 chanting "White sharia now" was an example of the intersection of incel and alt-Right culture. "White sharia" argues that white men should adopt their own version of what they perceive as the Islamic practice of enslaving women, forcing white women through rape and servitude to become "baby factories" and ensuring the "purity" of the race
Bodybuilding & Gaming Forums: Grooming For Misogyny
One of the core ideas among young incels is a conviction that their physical unattractiveness leads to their lack of sex, a natural insecurity when you're young which is amplified online. Bodybuilding forums are being used as a recruiting ground: "Within the online discussion forum of bodybuilding.com, teen body building is by far the most active and popular section, with almost ten times as many posts as the next most common subsection. These are young, impressionable users. The miscellaneous section of the forum covering gaming, relationships, and politics, contains over 93 million posts, compared to just 382,600 under the category of sports training - so bodybuilding is not actually the most popular topic on the bodybuilding forum".
"The average posts in the 'politics' section might just as easily appear on an incel, Mens Rights Activists or alt-Right website. There are threads about rape in which posters declare: 'There is no such thing as rape, rape is a fabrication of the female mind', 'Fckin feminist government. When did rape become a crime? Men used to go around raping bishes all the time', 'It's only rape once the chloroform wears off' - passing off misogyny and normalisation of sexual violence as a 'joke'".
Gaming, of course, is another source of grooming for misogyny. According to a US study 97% of teen boys and 83% of teen girls play video games. Gaming interaction includes online chat which can take place in private chat rooms. For those with ulterior motives for connecting with young men, this is the perfect environment. Leaders of these communities actively boast about targeting young men. "Always include memes, funny gifs, Twitter embeds and YouTube videos in every post", says the Daily Stormer style guide. "Packing your message inside existing cultural memes and humour can be viewed as a delivery method. Something like adding cherry flavour to children's medicine'.
People who work with children in the US and UK now hear anti-feminist ideas being quoted by young boys and girls. Mostly young people do not go seeking this content; the algorithms serve it up to them. For example, during the 2016 US election YouTube was six times more likely to serve up an anti-Clinton video than an anti-Trump video, and that's with all the stupidity of Trump creating such laughable content. Trump won that election by just 80,000 votes, but YouTube videos related to the election were watched 80 billion times... In the US today, and in a growing list of countries where global public relations companies have spread, you win elections by video, not in person.
The algorithms behind online platforms are designed to maximise revenue through prioritising longer video content over the user's search phrase. Extremists of all stripes take advantage of this truth behind applications' hype to build their online communities, increasing their influence and their incomes. After that introduction to incel culture, Laura Bates provides a well-researched chapter on other misogynist forums:
- The pickup gurus who sell techniques to manipulate women into casual sex
- Men's Rights Activists who are really Women's Wrongs Activists
- Trolls who coordinate online harassment of women who support women
- Men who use physical and/or sexual violence against women
- Men who exploit other men through grooming then charging for misogynist courses
- Men afraid of vocal women like #metoo who undermine or minimalise sexual abuse
- Men and boys who absorb the rationalisations behind these forums as they filter into the mainstream
All these communities love the metaphor borrowed from cult film "The Matrix", taking the "red pill" to see the "real world", because its emotional appeal can be harnessed to promote their twisted view of the real world. We all saw this at work in New Zealand's coronavirus protests - how persuasive absolute rubbish could be when wrapped up in a carefully crafted version of the truth, how unshakeable crazy beliefs became, how consistently they made Government the villain, how dishonest and calculating the promoters were when uncovered.
These communities play to many natural appeals - the desire to belong to a group, an explanation for work insecurity as skilled women encroach on traditional male preserves, the suggestion that personal problems are unrelated to, say, the anti-social nature of obsessive online gaming but rather a vast conspiracy, the instant gratification of feeling justified and attacking the oppressor online, the fantasy of extreme actions without thinking of the consequences.
Epidemic Of Real-World Violence In The Manosphere
Chapter 6 includes distressing global statistics on real-world violence against women. As Laura Bates writes: "Men hurt women. It is a fact. It is an epidemic. It is a public health catastrophe. It is normal. Over a third of all women worldwide have experienced physical and/or sexual violence in their lives, and that figure does not count sexual harassment. We cannot discuss violent misogynistic extremism and male supremacy without contextualising it in a world in which violence against women is at stratospheric levels. The manosphere is both a symptom of that inequality and a furious backlash against attempts to reduce it".
Bates' final chapter focuses on men trying to create more balanced roles for themselves. Traditional masculinity is tough to live up to - showing strength and hiding weakness, dominating personal relationships, never admitting vulnerability, treating spouses and children as dependents not partners and sources of support, money and status over job satisfaction. The result can be isolation, depression and worse.
"We are reaping the fruit sown by local authority cuts and community centre closures: the gradual, systematic disappearance of real-life places for boys to hang out and socialise, so they turn to online hang-outs instead. We also need to address the social divisions that are driven by stigma, prejudice and absurd stereotypes. The low-level racism that allows white boys to grow up already thinking boys who don't look like them are different, threatening, invaders".
"The sexism that shames and sexualises mixed-sex childhood friendships, and leads to near-total gender segregation by the early teens. As simple as it sounds, if young men knew other people from different communities, if they had meaningful friendships with girls their own age, they wouldn't be so easy to trick into believing monstrous distortions about what those 'other' groups represent. They would push back because they would know better."
Bates ends by speaking positively about her and others' success working in schools, countering boys' stereotypes and creating space for girls to be an equal part of these conversations. But for those falling into the grip of the manosphere, we also need a responsive solution. Police and security services need to act against illegal online activity, governments need to regulate dishonest online social media corporations which promote extreme content, forcing them to address their social harm. Journalists need to get real about online misogyny. Without these changes, promotion of mass online misogyny and political ignorance will likely outpace community efforts to counter it.
SHE'S A KILLER
by Kirsten McDougall
Victoria University Press, 2021
We don't usually review fiction here, but this novel is different. It's set in a disconcertingly familiar dystopia where inequality is even more obvious than today. New Zealand is welcoming "wealthugees", wealthy immigrants from climate-ravaged nations, while Palmerston North riots and locals starve and pay for water by the litre. It's like entering an edgy dream where you live out some version of our own near-future, then wake up with a nagging feeling we are heading down that same road.
Our unreliable narrator, Alice, is stuck in a job she hates and gives glib answers to why she hasn't "done anything" with her life. Recently, her invisible friend has returned - the kind of childhood voice who advises eating all the chocolates, or burning down the house. And Alice's one friend is married to a smarmy architect for the rich, and through his connections is preparing to move away to one of the new luxury survival communes. Enter, two terrorists who have much clearer ideas on what to do. It's a crazy mix, but then, ours is rapidly turning into a crazy world. Alice's empty life and introverted negativity might be the result of her personal demons, or they may be a natural product of this near-future disaster.
Crazy But Real
"She's A Killer" plays with that feeling we surely all feel today. How can something that crazy really be happening? Trump saying turn off the weapons detectors, they're not trying to kill me. Paper plans to slow climate change and rising temperatures. Everyday food items you can't afford and citizenship for sale to the rich. This novel pushes you to re examine how you view the world, and offers a grim window into the troubles we shall face soon enough. Here's an excerpt from the book:
"The fancy supermarket was just like any other on the outside, an unpromising cold hangar with a tin roof. But there were security guards at the door. They looked me up and down but let me through as soon as three other people had left. As well as guarding against riots, they were there to enforce strict number controls. No one wanted to buy their gourmet produce cheek by jowl. People said that the owners were part of a black market, able to stock products that common stores could rarely get hold of".
"At the entrance, essences of coffee and freshly baked bread, smoked garlic and flaky sea salt met your nose and demanded you fill your trolley. Baskets were stacked with asparagus in three different colours, yams, coconuts, banana shallots, black garlic, chilies with unpronounceable names. There was a whole aisle dedicated to tomatoes and lettuces - cherry, cos, Roma, iceberg, heritage, rocket, bok choy, pompom, endive, radicchio. Then there were the breads of the world. And the meats of the world. All it took was money. Money could buy you edible Eden in compostable packaging".
"Despite the wealthugee situation, the fancy supermarket was still full of food and hot mums in expensive jeans, men in casual suits, tattooed well-groomed people. Joining them now were the personal shoppers of the wealthugees, young people who'd only ever had jobs with short-term contracts, who paid two-thirds of their wages in rent and had been on SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors i.e., antidepressants) since they were nine. Their grandparents had held up education and social mobility as prizes only 50 years earlier, but now being a PA (personal assistant) for a wealthugee family was considered a hot job".
"Eggplants, onions and oranges were a decent price, but potatoes were through the roof. It was as if a toddler had gone around pricing stock according to whether they liked it or not. All the absurdly costed items carried an unobtrusive cursive script sign below their per-kilo price tags with ridiculous food narratives. Due to potato blight and supply issues, this product is experiencing a price surge ... Due to a new strain of wheat weevil, bread is now a luxury item ... Due to suicidal cows, sirloin will cost you a vital organ. It made no sense but no one seemed to mind".
Why Regulation Is Necessary
Kirsten McDougall explains: "Many people will recognise the fancy supermarket in this scene for the place it is. When I was growing up such supermarkets hadn't yet been invented in New Zealand, and now there are many. Sheds designed like 'farmers' markets'. A place for the bourgeoisie to buy the very best produce our fair land has to offer. My conflicted feelings about such shops are evident in this scene. My inner socialist would love much tighter monitors and controls on food prices - like they do in France with baguettes. In the last Wellington lockdown, folk were documenting $17 kilo blocks of tasty cheese in their local supermarkets. Seventeen dollars!!".
"'She's A Killer' is set "in the near future" when a massive influx of wealthugees, rich people running from the worst effects of the climate apocalypse, has created havoc in Aotearoa. In the supermarket scene there is no rationale for the crazy price surges and no one really knows if they're due to genuine pestilence and suicidal cows, or whether it's just the vendors taking everyone for a ride. I mean, I'd be depressed if I were a cow, but I've heard of New Zealand supermarket's duopoly issue. We all know how much more it costs to fill our trollies these days".
"I wrote this novel in 2019 before the pandemic started, imagining a version of life in a few years. But when it came to editing the manuscript in 2020, after having experienced the first lockdown, details like the security guards limiting shopper entry were suddenly real. It becomes less of a stretch of imagination to see how far prices can go".
"My book is about climate change, the havoc it will wreak on our lives, but it's also about economic disparity, and how we let it happen as if by accident. We can design a way around disparity. It's called regulation. Perhaps my book is also about why regulation is necessary - for carbon emissions, food prices, housing".
"Countdown and Foodstuffs have come under pressure from the Commerce Commission for not being competitive enough (again, regulation would help here). It's the families living in poverty who suffer the most in the race for greater profits. It's them bearing the brunt of the duopoly, and those who cling onto the middle class by their bare teeth are not far behind. I hate that we allow people to starve while others can buy $20 cheeses. My novel only pushes the dial out a little; 'a few years from now'. I put heaps of jokes in the book to keep the reader entertained, but 'She's A Killer' is also a warning".
"I was speaking with climate change scientist Dave Lowe yesterday (26/10/21). His memoir, 'The Alarmist', came out this year (2021) - documenting the past 50 years he's spent measuring the rise in the atmosphere's carbon. He wrote that book to tell the story to a wider public, to reach beyond scientists. He wrote it partly out of anger. He's known the science intimately for decades, we all know the science now, but nothing is happening fast enough to make real change. I laughed and said, that as writers we have rage in common as a motivating factor".
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