MoPress

Author: mopress

  • We are all Iraqis now [excerpt from an unfinished article]

    A Question to Front-Line Iraq:
    Where Do we Go from Here?

    By Greg Moses
    http://peacefile.org/wordpress

    The front-line war against terror now belongs to the citizens of Al Iraq. On the one side, they face the terror of the USA; on the other side, Al Qaeda. In the middle of this cross-fire stands the false security of martial law, a preview of the middling history that we will all share, soon enough, if we do not stand up for a progressive alternative here and now.

    We are all Iraqis now. Where is our progressive alternative?…

    [Please reply with your quotes & suggestions.]

    cheers,
    Greg Moses
    gmosesx@prodigy.net

  • See How They Say It: Labor Bedevil

    Can we get a rewrite on that lead?

    Again, the capitalist double standard strikes Korean workers. Here’s how the trouble looks on CNN [July 8]: “SEOUL (Reuters) – Workers at Kia Motors Corp., South Korea’s second-largest automaker, returned to work on Thursday after settling a pay deal, but labor unrest was set to bedevil the Korean auto industry as GM Daewoo workers opted to strike.”
    ————————————————-

  • But? Does “management arrogance” ever “bedevil” GM in the lead paragraph? The story goes on to explain that GM’s plans for the purchase of Daewoo fail to specify a date for its takeover of the oldest Daewoo auto plant in Korea.

    • ————————————————-
    The story continues: “Analysts have said higher labor costs could reduce local automakers’ competitive advantage over high-wage U.S. and Japanese rivals and help accelerate a trend of job outsourcing spurred by cheap costs in China.”
    ————————————————-

  • But? What takes blame for “accelerating” outsourcing? GM management?

    • ————————————————-
    Why don’t we send this back to the copy desk for a union re-write: “GM’s failure to specify provisions for workers at Daewoo’s oldest auto plant forced Korean auto workers to assume the strike position…again. ”

    See Deadly Double Standards

  • Nigerian Labor Wins Management Positions

    As President Obasanjo Assumes Chair of African Union

    by Greg Moses
    09 Jul 2004

    http://austin.indymedia.org/newswire/display/17091/index.php

    Labor agitation in Nigeria wins concessions as the financial press complains of incessant strikes and the Nigerian president increases his power in African affairs.

    Nigerian oil managers won the right to serve as “production superintendents” for the European petroleum giant Total-Elf-Fina after an all-night bargaining session Wednesday that was reportedly brokered by the Nigerian ministry of labor.

    After the agreement was reached, the company resumed its Nigerian operations, which account for ten percent of the nation’s oil output. Total-Elf-Fina had shut down its Nigerian operations on Friday, July 2, citing “safety concerns” over the labor impasse.

    The prized management positions had previously been reserved for expatriate employees, according to the Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria (PENGASSA), the “white collar” union of Nigerian gas and oil workers. According to reports from union sources, salaries paid to expatriate (foreign) managers were largely responsible for the industry’s rising costs.

    The concession from Total-Elf-Fina follows complaints in the Nigerian Business Times that Nigerian labor has been guilty of “incessant strike actions” that “have had devastating effects on the economy of the nation.”

    According to the Business Times report by Lucas Ajanaku and Odidison Omankhanlen, Nigeria has seen an unprecedented rate of strike actions during the past five years. A recent three-day strike over rising gas prices, “is said to have cost the nation consecutively N200 billion with at least, one life, lost,” claim the authors, who note that the loss of a single life is the lowest casualty rate for a strike in recent memory.

    If the financial press in Nigeria is weary of labor action, other reports suggest that Nigerian civil society was angered by labor’s decision to call off the most recent protest strike after only three days. The Nigerian Labor Congress (NLC) suspended the strike after winning a court ruling that ordered the government to enforce price caps on gasoline.

    As with the rest of the world, gas prices have been going up in Nigeria, but many Nigerians argue that the government should keep the gas prices lower through subsidies financed by windfall profits earned from sales of Nigerian crude. Nigerian citizens are aware that the government makes enormous profits from the “upstream” sale of oil, and they widely expect to see those profits plowed back into “downstream” subsidies for their daily consumption of gasoline.

    In an article separate from the one mentioned above, Omankhanlen reports that one Nigerian activist who participated in NLC deliberations said there was, “no justification for suspending the strike, stressing that the government would take them as jesters, for the fact that the strike had not made any meaningful impact.”

    “How could one ever contemplate suspending the strike,” said another activist quoted by Omankhanlen. “This was not our arrangement. People we have mobilised will take us as unserious people. I will never have anything to do with labour again. And remember, this is not the first time this is happening. We cannot afford to be fooled again.”

    Earlier this year, the NLC negotiated with the government to set price caps on gasoline, but independent oil marketers have not adhered to the agreement. A July 15 hearing has been set to resume court deliberations on the matter.

    Returning to the article jointly written by Ajanaku and Omankhanlen, the authors concede that there are few realistic alternatives to strike action in a nation where politics tend to follow the influence of oil money. In such a context, labor cannot effectively lobby against big oil in the legislature, nor can it rely on judicial or police authorities to stand up independently against multi-billion dollar oil interests.

    “The pursuit of legal approach by labour as an alternative dispute resolution avenue suffers yet its own shortcomings,” write Ajanaku and Omankhanlen, “government hardly obey court orders while the process of obtaining justice in the country is rather long and unwieldy.”

    The recent overnight bargaining session between unionists and Total-Elf-Fina reportedly took place at Port Harcourt, the city where Ken Saro-Wiwa was hanged with eight other activists in 1995. “Nor imprisonment nor death can stop our ultimate victory,” pledged Saro-Wiwa in his famous closing statement to the Nigerian Military Appointed Tribunal that sentenced him to death for his activism against Shell Oil.

    “A worker without a future and a say in matters relating to his own growth is a slave,” argues PENGASSAN President Louis Brown Ogbeifun in a February speech.

    “Time has come for labour to have a rethink and a rebirth, if we do not want to be swallowed by the negative impact of global processes,” says Brown Ogbeifun in the speech posted at the PENGASSAN website. “Staying afloat will depend on our strength, unity, focus and proactive fight against injustices and not against ourselves, for a house divided against itself can never stand. If the advanced nations want us to accept their pills of globalization, then they must be transparent, fair, just and objective in adaptation of globalization ideals to the reality of our background. They must come to equity with clean hands and stop seeing Africa as a dumping ground for imperialists left over.”

    Exxon-Mobil this week replaced the manager of its Nigerian operations in a move that coincides with an impasse in that company’s labor negotiations. On July 1, the petroleum unions issued a 21-day warning to their Exxon-Mobil subsidiary and announced that workers would be wearing red, boycotting lunch, and engaging in a two-hour work stoppage as signs of solidarity in preparation for a strike, should one be needed.

    Reporter Victor Ahiuma-Young, writing for the Nigerian Vanguard, quotes an un-named source as saying that relations between Nigerian unions and the Exxon-Mobil subsidiary had deteriorated since Mobil was taken over by Exxon. In addition, sources allege that a provisional settlement between unions and the company was scuttled by interference from an official of the government-owned oil company, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation.

    It is widely reported that Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo personally oversees the Nigerian oil business. Obasanjo last week was named chair of the African Union Commission during its three-day summit in Ethiopia. According to a summary report posted at the United Nations’ IRIN website, Obasanjo promised to take tough stands, “on hot spots like Sudan, Cote d’Ivoire and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.”

    “These issues demonstrate our determination to be proactive. Without peace, there is no development,” said Obasanjo,

    Meanwhile this week, negotiations with Shell Oil were reported to be “going well.”

    See also:

    http://austin.indymedia.org/newswire/display/17062/index.php

  • Friday, July 9th, 2004: Unfair and Inaccurate Reporting

    My sleep was disturbed at about 3 AM, so I went out for a walk, and slept in the car until sunrise. I did a sunrise pipe ceremony this morning by myself by a river, the weather was so perfect. Smoking the sacred pipe and seeing my prayers rise to heaven in the smoke gave me a profound sense of peace. I wrote a poem and got a call from Ray saying he bound some copies of my self-pub’d books for me. At 8 AM I got online and answered my emails and sent several days of this to peacefile. I went to the chiropractor to help correct my neck and prevent a migrane. It worked. I felt much better. Then I went to pick up the bound books from Ray; traffic in New Paltz was bad so I turned around and went back to 9W, where I got some French fires at a fast food place and read the paper in the A/C.

    The Republicans had gotten a press release to be distributed by AP that was truly ludicrous. They positioned an article on “how important the voters think this election is,” kind of a non-story, and then used as a graphic a poll showing Bush with 46% and Kerry with 41%. I thought that was a little odd, so I read it over three times and read the fine print, and figured out that the poll shown in the large graphic was from June 9th, one month earlier!! I have heard that the latest poll shows Kerry with 46% and Bush with 44%. Kerry’s popularity has risen at least 5% in one month, and this article was deliberately designed to misinform the public.

    That made me wonder just how much the release of Michael Moore’s flick and choosing John Edwards had affected the polls that they had to stoop to simple deception in order to keep up appearances. That’s it. I’m calling the guys (and gals) from FAIR, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. What is the current poll anyway? Hardcopy or Hardball or Hardass, one of those shows, said Bush was at an all time low, and that was days ago.

    Then I went to Poughkeepsie and then the library and did another pass on Robert Jay’s editing project, and wrote letters to Robert, to my cousin Mary and Eddie Benton Benaise. I mailed my screenplay to Mary, using Marist’s post office, but sent it to an old address, which I only found out afterwards. Mary is a professor of screenplay writing and worked on the screenplays for the Leprauchan series. Not that it’s fair to say that, since they were meant to be “grade B” by design. She had given me some excellent advice on “Hollywood” plot development two years ago, so I wanted more advice on the finished draft.

    I went back to the post office ten minutes before closing time, at 4:20, and they were closed and the employees nowhere to be found. I wrote a note (noting the time) telling them the correct address then floated it through the grate. It floated through the air, across the desk, across the work table and down to the floor behind the counter. I’m sure they will find it, but they will probably not lift a finger to help out, sending it knowingly to a wrong address. They didn’t call me. I had also written a long letter to Eddie and sent him Paths of Light Paths of Darkness, which he has not seen. Then I went to visit a friend and went to see King Arthur after playing some baseball at Riverfront Park in Beacon. I had an appointment to interview Pete Seeger at the Sloop Club meeting, but for some reason the meeting was cancelled. I hope Pete is okay.

    Review and Explanation of King Arthur

    King Arthur turned out to be a big winner, though not for everyone’s taste. Newsweek gave it a weak review, and indeed some of the acting was bad, especially Arthur, but Gwenevere was totally, like, radical! Anyway, it was not based on King Arthur legends and fairtales, but on recent discoveries in eastern England among Roman ruins, suggesting there was a real King Arthur who lived around 300 AD. The political innuendos were clear, at least to me. The Romans (The United States) pulls out of Britain, (Iraq) a third world country they have occupied for a long time, training and employing locals (Iraqi police) to keep down their own people. The Romans leave suddenly, leaving Britain (Baghdad) in chaos, and the Saxons (Kurds) are invading from the north, crossing Hadrians Wall (the line between Kurdish Iraq and Bath Party Iraq.) King Arthur is one of these half Romans, half locals (like the people Bremmer is turning Iraq over to) who was promised freedom, but is now told he must rescue a princely son of the Bishop who is in enemy territory before gaining freedom to return to Rome, the center of civilization and intellectual knowledge. (New York, location of the Republican Convention). (This reminded me of the National Guardsmen who went back to their families after being promised freedom, and were then told they must return to Baghdad).

    Arthur’s men rescue the prince (Bush?) whose life is run by the Bishop (Ashcroft) who is a religious fanatic who imprisons and tortures the non-Christians (Islamic Iraqis) he has captured in his secret prison. (Abu Greib, or I’m a monkey’s uncle). The movie dwells a long time on this issue, and makes strong statements against Christianity and those who torture others. Arthur follows a Roman philosopher who may have been Plotinius, who teaches individual freedom and human rights. The prince then tells him the man has been excommunicated and assassinated. (Wellstone?) Arthur loses interest in going to Rome. The girl (a WTO-style protester type, whose face paint makes her look like she just left a bodypainting workshop at Starwood) kills the Bishop. After Arthur rescues the prince, he joins the Pagan resistance and defeats the Saxons. He and his men are given their “visas” to go to Rome, but he says that real freedom is something you are born with that no one can take from you, and that if people want to follow a tyrant it is really their own choice (so much for Operation Iraqi Freedom; in other words, the people could have overthrown Saddam if they wanted to). I thought the parallels were pretty obvious but clever nonetheless. It reminded me quite a bit of The Last Samurai, which has a similar subliminal message.