Libya's Rebels: Yesterday We Tortured Them, Today We Arm Them

There's no doubt that NATO, primarily the UK, France and the US, inserted themselves into the Libyan uprising as a means of gaining control over the course of the Arab Spring. In the case of France, it's clear that expanding the control of Libya's oil - most notably at the expense of Italy - was also part of the reason for Sarkozy's newfound enthusiasm for democracy when only a few weeks earlier he was rather more enthusiastic for keeping the Tunisian dictator in power. Reasserting hegemony in Africa also played no small part in the Libyan adventure.

Nonetheless it is always important to keep in mind that when imperialist powers insert themselves into an insurgency - particularly against a recent ally like Gaddafi - they are at risk of not only unleashing forces that they cannot control but of being exposed for what they really are: double-dealing hypocrites.

To be honest, it doesn't appear to me likely that there will be open resistance to the overall imperial agenda as it is expressed through the new government that is coming into being, led by the NTC. The oil contracts have been signed, the backroom deals have been struck - and NATO's deeply penetrating role in the war against Gaddafi has ensured that the rebel soldiers are dependent upon them for military success of any sort. Over the coming weeks the most likely scenario is that the rebel volunteers will be demobilized or incorporated into the national military. That military and most of the governmental apparatus will remain essentially unchanged from the Gaddafi regime - the police who kept order in Tripoli under Gaddafi will be the same police who keep order under the NTC. The generals who ran the Gaddafi military will run the NTC military. And economic and social policy will be guided by people like Mahmoud Jibril, who was the head of the Gaddafi agency charged with the responsibility of selling off state assets, probably to mostly foreign buyers or other former-Gaddafi officials.

That said, I would be glad to be mistaken. There is a reason why one of the NTC's first acts is to demobilize the rebel soldiers and to clear them out of the capital. People fought for freedom and will be less likely to accept Gaddafi-ism without Gaddafi if they have guns and are organized into fighting units. And with the armed phase of Gaddafi's overthrow all but passed, it is still possible that the remnants of the revolutionary councils that dominated the early phase of the insurgency will re-emerge to challenge the NTC's policy of business-as-usual minus the Brother Leader and some of the more odious aspects of a police state.

But in the initial days it's good to see that, at the very least, some of the duplicity of the United States and Britain are being revealed. The discovery of documents in the Interior Ministry building that show the level of cooperation between the CIA and the Gaddafi regime are something of an embarrassment. As is the fact that the new commander of Tripoli was a victim of CIA torture and the extraordinary rendition program that sent him back to Libya for several years of brutal incarceration. Abdul Hakim Belhaj, a former commander of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group has been undergoing something of a renovation, with a fluff piece in the New York Times, which I covered the other day. He may be claiming that he is now grateful for the support of NATO and the USA - but he hasn't forgotten what was done to him and some reporters have cottoned on to this.

The result is that the British spy agency MI6 is now exposed as having cooperated - perhaps illegally - with the American rendition program and facilitated torture. In some ways nobody ought to be surprised by this but the fact that it is coming out in public at a moment when the UK is jockeying for fat reconstruction and oil contracts is sweet. These revelations are undermining one of the domestic goals of the intervention in Libya - to rehabilitate the idea of humanitarian intervention by demonstrating that the UK, USA and NATO really do have good intentions, even if sometimes they get the details wrong. Let's hope that the revelations keep on coming. There is a sweet irony in the possibility that the countries of NATO will be more fully exposed as having aided Gaddafi in crushing the revolt that they ended up opportunistically supporting.

MI6 knew I was tortured, says Libyan rebel | World news | The Guardian

Veil Ban: French Parliament Stuffed With Racists

French fashion: Is this woman liberated

Today the French Parliament passed a bill banning the wearing of face-covering veils in public. Now, if women are caught in public wearing a veil, they will be forced to pay a $190 fine and enroll in a "citizenship course." The justification for this repressive measure is that it is about protecting the dignity of women.

Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, said earlier this year that the full veil "hurts the dignity of women and is not acceptable in French society".

This, of course, is an enormous crock of you-know-what. First of all there are only perhaps 2,000 women in all of France, out of a population of 62 million people, who wear a full-face veil. But also, this is nothing more than cultural supremacism. Does it not hurt the dignity of women to have to wear high heel shoes and other torture devices? How about short skirts and tight clothes or multi-coloured oil-based creams and powders to emphasize their lips, eyes and cheeks and thus their sexuality? Is breast augmentation supportive of the dignity of women as human beings? Collagen injections? The face veil on women is, of course, an expression of the fact that women are oppressed. But so are these other feminine "necessities". The issue is a cultural and a racial one. It is about attacking an identifiable minority.

Life in France is "carried out with a bare face", Michele Alliot-Marie, the justice minister, said last week as she opened the debate in the National Assembly.

Face-covering veils "call into question the idea of integration, which is founded on the acceptance of the values of our society", Alliot-Marie said.

Alliot-Marie and Sarkozy would know, like ever French person, that the inability to integrate into French society is precisely why the immigrant ghettoes that surround major French cities periodically explode in riots and protests. The children and grand-children of immigrants are still not accepted as French and are denied equal participation in French society by French laws, French social policy and French attitudes. If Alliot-Marie and Sarkozy were truly interested in bringing immigrants "into the fold" they wouldn't be forcing women who wear the veil into their homes to avoid being punished. How is it liberating for a woman, supposedly oppressed by her husband, to face the coercion of the French state to do something that is unacceptable to her husband, her community and possibly even to herself.
This has nothing to do with women's dignity and everything to do with pandering to the far right and to sowing divisions at a time of heightened anger over French austerity plans. At the end of June there was a nationwide general strike and over 200 demonstrations, mobilizing some 2 million people, across France against plans to raise the retirement age. Deflecting people's anger onto immigrants has served the French ruling class well in the past - and the Nazis. In the 1980s it led to the dramatic rise of Jean Marie Le Pen's fascist National Front. The FN has been diminished in recent years but it could easily spring back to life with this kind of backlash.
That's why it is so dangerous that the French left has been utterly terrible on the question of the veil and the hijab. The opposition Socialist Party walked out of the vote in parliament, not because it opposes a ban per se, but because it thought that it should only be confined to government buildings. Apparently it is better to merely exclude these women from gaining access to social services. What if they were being abused and wanted to access help? Apparently they would have to disrobe first. But even the French far-left has not been consistent in supporting the right of women to choose what garments they will wear. The New Anti-capitalist Party selected a hijab wearing woman to stand on one of their electoral lists in the most recent election. Not only did this spark a huge outcry in the media, the NPA itself was split over the question, with the fight continuing. The French left must get clear on the question of the veil - it is a question of racism. And, just like in Afghanistan, we must give no quarter to the bombers who would "liberate" women  by invading their country, we must oppose attempts to "liberate" women by forcing them to give up their social customs against their will.

Chinese Workers Kick Ass

Pity the poor GM workers who read about Chinese steelworkers and realize that if only they'd kidnapped their boss and did a little rioting they would have gotten a better deal. In fact, Chinese workers at the Linzhou Iron & Steel Company halted government plans to privatize their company. Three weeks ago some poor dumbass from another steel company told a group of 30,000 workers that most of them would be laid off and got himself beaten to death in what was a very large riot.

Some of this sounds very familiar - in France workers have taken to "bossnapping" and threatening to blow up capital equipment at their factories when they get lay-off notices.

In Britain and Ireland there have been occupations at Waterford Glass, Thomas Cook, Vestas (a wind turbine manufacturer), and Visteon (a car parts company).

In South Korea a spectacular and sometimes violent (check out those slingshots in the picture above - they were used to defend the occupation) occupation of the Ssangyong car plant - that fended off numerous assaults by police commandoes - managed to save half the jobs at the plant. Originally all the workers were slated for layoff.

On a smaller scale, here in Toronto, of course, we had a 36-day strike by city workers that managed to take the edge off of the city's concessions demands. Even the National Post thought that the workers won. And anything that pisses off the National Post can't but bring warmth to a left-wingers heart.

Could we be seeing a serious global re-emergence of working class militancy and even, gasp, victories?

Attention Earthlings: Please Proceed To The Emergency Exits In A Disorderly Fashion

I'm not sure if you've noticed but the world is going to hell in a handbasket. We've already had Iceland go tits up, followed by its government after a few weeks of rioting and protests. And it looks like they won't be the last. Next on the list is jolly old Britain - affectionately called "Reykjavik-on-Thames":

"The question in Britain is no longer when the economy will enter a recession, but when it will enter a depression, with many bracing for a slump that could rival the 1930s in severity. GDP fell 1.5 percent in the fourth quarter of 2008, and the European Union estimates it will contract another 2.8 percent in 2009. Unemployment is projected to balloon to more than 8 percent by year's end, and an estimated 23 percent of adult Britons currently consider their debt level 'unmanageable.'"

Also up for nomination as "Country Most Likely To Go Up In Flames" are Latvia and Greece - both scenes of recent rioting - the Ukraine (which is having gas pains, thanks to the Russians), and Nicaragua - have they ever really recovered from the US' illegal war against the Sandanistas. No wonder current president - and former Sandanista leader - Daniel Ortega has said that the financial meltdown is a sign that "God is punishing the United States". Not an unreasonable suggestion but I think it more accurate to say that greedy, asshole capitalists are the real source of America's (and our) problems.
The US Army would like to add to that list Mexico, which has been engaged in an increasingly violent and destabilizing war against "narco-gangsters." The Mexicans ought to hope that they don't get the same medicine as the Pakistanis, who are also on the "nearing collapse" list of the US Army. Their prescription involves repeated military incursions by the US military and CIA, firing missiles at local leaders who the US doesn't like.
Even Israel, which the Christian Fundamentalists would have you believe is watched over by God himself as his plan for the Second Coming unfolds, has just taken a kicking at the World Economic Forum in Davos. In case you don't know, the WEF is a big capitalist jaw wag where they politely discuss how they will carve up the planet. Well, this year the Prime Minister of Turkey, Israel's closest ally, told Israeli president Shimon Peres "When it comes to killing, you know well how to kill” before storming out of a panel discussion of the Gaza crisis.
But the greatest pleasure must be the massive general strike that swept over France today. It was something of a love letter to that country's president, Nikolas Sarkozy. As I understand it the first sentence went as follows: "Dear Sarko: Get your fucking act together and do something about the collapse of capitalism. Asshole." Of course, it sounds much more romantic in French. Anyway, 70% of the population supported the general strike and something like 300,000 demonstrated in Paris so that they could blow Sarkozy a kiss live and in person.
Meanwhile, here in exciting Canada, our government managed the biggest horseshit recession budget ever - look for the neo-liberal measures to have zero impact on the recession. Not to worry about any more crises or opposition coalitions - head Opposition Knob, Michael "I love torture as long as it doesn't hurt too much" Ignatieff, has told Harper he can do what he wants as long as he sends him a memo every so often telling him what he is doing. For a guy who thinks torture's OK as a policy tool, he sure is a wimp. Well, I guess that's what you get when the most defining feature of Canadian culture, besides hockey and constitutional crises, is just how darn polite we are. Seriously people, are we really gonna let France show us up while Harper can't work up a fart to save us from our imminent doom?

French Fry Right Wing Prez

Ah, I love the French. They may elect a right-wing goon as president but, it seems, it’s only to better get some kicks in.
It’s been less than a year since Sarkozy stomped his way to the presidency over the increasingly right-wing Socialist Party candidate, Segolene Royal. But in that time he has managed to see his approval ratings fall from a high of 67 percent to around 39 percent today.
No doubt it has to do with his broad full frontal assault on French working people, starting with his attack on the “special regime pensions” of French train workers. This led to a national rail strike that ended with a qualified victory for Sarkozy but not the thumping he was hoping for as he had to offer pay increases and a bump in pension payments in return to increasing working time to 40 from 37.5 years.
Now, with the French economy all but stagnating and government deficits rising, Sarkozy has tried to take on different groups but often has failed in the face of mass resistance. Fisherman blockading ports over high fuel prices, won subsidies. Students protesting rules opening up university funding to the private sector lost on the central demand but won an extra $5 billion in state funding to upgrade deteriorating classrooms. And, recently, taxi drivers struck and defeated Sarkozy’s plans to de-regulate their industry.
So much for his slogan of burying the legacy of 1968, the year when French workers launched the largest general strike in history up to that point.
The failure of Sarkozy’s claimed goal of making France a place where one could “work more to earn more” is now leading to revolts in the private sector with the first ever national strike by retail workers in early February. There have also been walkouts in 17 McDonald’s and some workers have taken to holding managers hostage to win demands.

“This week the tyre giant Michelin continued talks over the closure of a plant in Toul, eastern France, after a government-appointed mediator secured the release of two managers whom workers had locked in a room for three days. It follows an incident last month when workers outraged at planned job cuts at the Miko ice-cream factory in Saint-Dizier locked up their British manager, Prakash Patel.
“This week, staff at a Ford plant near Bordeaux blockaded their factory and L'Oréal cosmetics staff took to the streets under the banner ‘because we're worth it’, asking for pay rises after their company's good financial results.”

Sarko isn’t yet down and out, not by a long shot. And he’s going for the usual weak spots in the lead-up to municipal elections that at present look set to deliver a big blow to his UMP party. Just last week 1,200 cops were sent into raid working class estates in the middle of the night to arrest 35 people from their beds as supposed leaders in the rioting that took place after cops killed two immigrant kids riding a mini-bike.
However, even this is blowing up in his face since it was clear to most that the whole thing was a press propaganda opportunity. The media arrived and had cameras set-up to film the raids before even the cops were there.
And his UMP party is fracturing under the pressure of resistance and the free-fall in the polls. Sarko can’t even get his own way in the town where he used to be mayor. Here, he tried to impose his spokesman to head the UMP list in town council elections but it was rejected by the council group – including by his own 22-year old son.
Nobody can accuse the French of having any sacred cows when even the right wing son of a right wing president skewers his father prior to a critical election.
With all this turmoil, the hope is that the left can revive itself and break out of the neo-liberal impasse into which the “governmental left” of the Socialist Party has fallen. At the February congress of the Ligue Communiste Revolutionaire, a small but significant far left party in France, they voted to set-up a broad anti-capitalist party with all those on the left who want to present an anti-neo-liberal alternative in upcoming elections.
The LCR’s presidential candidate, Olivier Besancenot, has a very high profile in the French media and was the only candidate to the left of the Socialists to increase his share of the vote last year. If they can tap into the growing sentiment for an alternative to Sarko and the governmental left, the French political scene could have an even bigger shake-up in the coming period.