china doing some renationalising (like communists should)

China using stimulus to buy private rivals
Kit Gillet, Washington Times, Oct 29 2009

The Chinese government has been using its massive stimulus of the economy in part to reverse years of privatization and allow large state-owned enterprises to grab back assets in major industries. Authorities in Beijing have launched “consolidation drives,” putting pressure on independent steel companies and firms in the iron, coal, energy and airline sectors, among others, to sell majority stakes to state-owned rivals, financial analysts here say. Under China’s $586b economic stimulus plan, banks have been directed to lend to support mergers and acquisitions by state-owned enterprises (SOEs). This disproportionate access to funds, as well as overt government backing, has enabled SOEs to bid aggressively for controlling stakes in privately owned rivals, even when those private companies are in some cases larger than the government enterprises. Xianfang Ren, a senior analyst at IHS Global Insight, said:

SOEs have gained much more from the stimulus package than the private sector. This is inevitable as long as the financial intermediation system, dominated by the state-controlled banking sector, still operates as tools for the government to control and influence the economy. State monopoly remains one major challenge facing the private sector in China.

The most headline-grabbing acquisition to date has been that of Rizhao Steel, one of China’s most profitable non-state steel mills and, until recently, owned by Du Shuanghua, China’s second-richest man in 2008. (He dropped to 41st this year). Du attempted to delay the acquisition by selling a 30% stake to a Hong Kong-based investment company, but reluctantly signed off on the deal in September. The buyer was state-owned Shandong Iron and Steel Group, China’s second-largest steel company, which is controlled by the government of Shandong province and hemorrhaged $188.9m in the first half of 2009. Rizhao saw profits of $87.8m over the same period. Industry analysts said the overall aim of the deal is to help the state negotiate huge iron-ore contracts at lower prices. The coal industry is also seeing a shake-up, though in this case there might be tangible benefits to society because stronger governmental regulation of Chinese mines is long overdue. Alan Heap, managing director of Global Commodity Analysis, Citi Investment Research, said:

Many industries are too unwieldy, and the standout is coal; there are a very large number of very small mines. The consolidation of the coal industry is not necessarily central control for its own sake; it is primarily an efficiency push. The high injury rate is a reflection of poor operating practices.

In 2008, there were 3,215 deaths in China related to coal mining, making it the most dangerous profession in the country. The number of accidents in small mines is eight times higher than in state-owned mines, according to government officials. Earlier this year, the provincial government in coal-rich Shanxi province announced plans to cut the number of mines from 2,200 to 100 within the next year, to coincide with a nationwide consolidation to 10,000 large mines. 70% of mine owners in the province have so far agreed to sell, according to state media, though owners were generally offered only a fraction of their mines’ initial development costs.

Consolidation extends to the airline and delivery sectors. In August, for example, East Star Airlines, the country’s fourth-largest private commercial airliner, became the first Chinese airline to go bankrupt this year after it resisted a takeover by state-owned Air China and had its own restructuring plans rejected by a local court. Its bankruptcy leaves just three remaining private air carriers operating in a country that plans to invest $43.9m in airport construction over the next 12 months. Last month, authorities announced that the state-owned postal service, China Post, will have a complete monopoly on inner-city express mail under 1.76oz and inter-city mail under 3.52oz, which basically covers all letters and small packages. This will put the majority of the country’s 5,000 private mail handlers out of business. Not all analysts agree that the state-led acquisitions and re-nationalization are a bad idea. W.B Lee, a professor at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University who specializes in manufacturing strategy and industrial policy, said:

I don’t think it is going back to a centrally planned economy. It is all about efficiency. If the consolidations were in consumer products, I would be concerned. But energy and the auto sector, for instance, need to be more centralized.

Still, the consolidation drive is clearly troubling for private operators across many sectors in China. Hu Yanping, an analyst at China-based Umetal, predicts the demise of most private players in the steel market. He said:

Chinese private steel companies can’t resist the government-backed takeovers. The government’s purpose is too clear and strong.

deutsch nepal: u r blackhouse (another version)

recorded live at maschinenfest, weststadthalle, essen, 2009

like washington needs a new generation of religious fascists

New Moons are rising
Bill Berkowitz, IPS via Asia Times, Oct 31 2009

This month, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon went to Washington to introduce As a Peace-Loving Global Citizen, his autobiography that, according to the Moon-owned Washington Times, “recounts the joys and challenges, the teachable moments and the monumental experiences of his life, much of it spent as a spiritual leader.” The newspaper reported that Moon received “congratulatory greetings” from Sen. Lieberman, former Sec. State Haig and former Pres. G H W Bush, “hand-delivered by his son Neil Bush.” The younger Bush, who has a long track record of working with Moon-sponsored organizations, told the audience of 1,300:

Rev. Moon is presenting a very simple concept. We are all children of God (or spawn of Satan, as the case may be – RB).

In January, Moon will turn 90, and while he’s alive and apparently well, he is deeply involved in charting his group’s future. Last year, Moon named his Harvard-educated youngest son, the 30-year-old Hyung Jin Moon, as the president of the World Unification Church. Another son, Hyun Jin Moon, Moon’s oldest, is also in the mix. Whenever he dies, Moon’s death will nevertheless usher in a major period of adjustment. Moon founded the Unification Church in the 1950s, and it remains a controversial, powerful and misunderstood enterprise to this day. To many observers, Moon’s activities, including accusations of cult-like practices, his imprisonment for tax evasion, the prayer vigils for a Watergate-afflicted president Richard Nixon, his support for right-wing death squads in Central America, the strange spectacle of mass weddings, the church’s close ties to the Bush family and legions of stories about de-programs trying to reclaim Moonified souls, may seem so 20th century. The Unification Church has been a religious, business and political enterprise and there are a number of routes it could take to the future: it could grow like the Mormons, it could remain controversial like Scientology, or it could try to become just another church among many, in other words, more mainstream. While the Moon organization has been prepping for transition to younger leaders for quite some time, Frederick Clarkson, a journalist who has written widely about the church, including in his 1997 book, Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy, told IPS:

Even with the passing from the scene of the man many believe to be the messiah, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Veteran journalist Robert Parry told IPS:

Many of the Moon offspring and the children of other members of the inner circle have been very well educated and have been given experience in running the core operations. I think the business aspects could be rather smoothly transferred. And with the money goes the political influence. There also is an element of ‘The Godfather’ in this, as the second generation may try to further sanitize the organization’s history. That could make the political influence-buying even safer, though it is hard to know whether the second generation shares some of the right-wing politics of the elder Moon, even as that repressive ideology is disguised under the happy-sounding phrase ‘world peace’.

In addition to the myriad Moon-sponsored conferences and events that always seem to be taking place somewhere, it might surprise you to learn that the Unification Church recently sponsored a major soccer tournament in Spain. And while most of the matches didn’t draw huge crowds, the media gave it extensive and generally positive press coverage, a longtime Moon-watcher told IPS. One of the major purposes of the tournament was to mainstream people’s acceptance of Moon and his organization as simply “one religion among many.” According to Hyung Jin Moon, garnering favorable press coverage is an important part of the organization’s mainstreaming strategy as it moves forward. He recently proudly noted that there had been some 85 major articles on the Unification Church in Korea last year and none were negative. Hyung Jin Moon grew up in the US and as such, appears to be interested in introducing some new practices into the organization’s culture. Christopher Landau pointed out in a recent BBC report:

His background means he has already been exposed to a wide range of religious traditions, and seems unafraid to introduce aspects of how other faiths worship into Unification Church services.

For example, a recent service attended by Landau started off with “contemporary mainstream Christian songs written in the US,” instead of “one of the movement’s own hymns.” Perhaps the most notable cultural and religious change being considered revolves around the issue of marriage. For years, Moon presided over mass wedding ceremonies, like the one held earlier this month at the Sun Moon University campus in Seoul, South Korea, involving hundreds of couples, most of whom had never met prior to their wedding day and were chosen by Moon himself. While the public was fascinated by these ceremonies, they were mostly a big turnoff. Hyung Jin Moon told Landau that those practices were under review. Founded as the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity, in the 1990s it became the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification. According to Landau:

The emphasis now seems to be shifting back to conceiving of the movement as a church, and using that clearly defined religious status as a way to campaign for the freedom of its followers.

Rethinking its policies regarding marriage and the introduction of popular Christian music into church services appear to be aimed at making the church less idiosyncratic and more acceptable to the public. However, the piece of the puzzle left unexplored by Landau, and most other mainstream journalists reporting on Moon’s operations, is the recognition of the organization’s political power and influence both in the US and abroad. At the heart of Moon’s political project in the US is the Washington Times, a newspaper that, according to some reports, has cost Moon more than $3b since its founding. However, the importance of the Times to the conservative movement far outweighs its expensive price tag. The newspaper recently announced that in collaboration with the Heritage Foundation and several other organizations, it was launching TheConservatives.com, “a website with technology that allows activists to talk up to ideological and party leaders and interact in innovative ways.” John Solomon, executive editor and vice president for content of the Washington Times, said:

TheConservatives.com creates a cutting-edge new marriage between the social publishing world of bloggers and the social networking world of Twitter, YouTube and the like. Most opinion sites today enable thought-leaders to talk down to the masses, but TheConservatives.com empowers users to change the direction of that dialogue, allowing the Joe the Plumbers of the world to speak up to major thinkers like Newt Gingrich.

Parry pointed out:

Using the Washington Times as a propagandist for the Reagan-Bush crowd, Moon sanitized himself as much as anyone could ever imagine. By investing smartly in the US conservative movement, and thus gaining influential defenders of his own, he also intimidated much of the US news media and US government investigators from discussing his real history or looking too deeply at his curious funding methods.

what an amazingly stupid argument

Cannabis comes from ruthless, violent men (extracts)
Tom Whipple, Times, Oct 31 2009

We were in the trashed remnants of a cannabis factory. “This, according to the police, is where the Vietnamese women slept,” James said. We moved into an airier room, with tall ceilings. “And this is where they harvested the weed.” He pointed the way. “This is the worst bit. We only found it recently,” he said. The room was like a parody of a pimp’s bedroom: zebra-print duvet covers, furry sofas, fake gold. But the most arresting sight was not the bling. Because in a corner was a large cage, big enough for one man, or perhaps two small women. On its floor was a small, dirty mattress and a bucket. “We don’t,” James said, “like to think what this was used for.” Britain’s cannabis does not come from freedom-loving hippies sticking one to the Man. It comes from ruthless, violent businessmen. It comes from the sort of men who put women in cages.

That’s because you keep it illegal, you moron – RB

i was never too impressed by vedanta anyway

The heart of India is under attack (extracts)
Arundhati Roy, Guardian, Oct 30 2009

The low, flat-topped hills of south Orissa have been sold for the bauxite they contain. Niyamgiri hill has been sold to a company named Vedanta. It’s one of the biggest mining corporations in the world and is owned by Anil Agarwal, the Indian billionaire who lives in London in a mansion that once belonged to the Shah of Iran. Vedanta is only one of the many multinational corporations closing in on Orissa. Special police with totemic names like Greyhounds, Cobras and Scorpions are scouring the forests with a licence to kill. Now the government is going to deploy the Indo-Tibetan border police and tens of thousands of paramilitary troops. It plans to set up a brigade headquarters in Bilaspur (which will displace nine villages) and an air base in Rajnandgaon (which will displace seven). And now the helicopters of the Indian air force have been given the right to fire in “self-defence”. Not much news comes out of the forests. Lalgarh in West Bengal has been cordoned off.

Meanwhile, the Indian establishment has unleashed its most potent weapon. Almost overnight, our embedded media has substituted its steady supply of planted, unsubstantiated, hysterical stories about “Islamist terrorism” with planted, unsubstantiated, hysterical stories about “Red terrorism”. In the midst of this racket, at ground zero, the cordon of silence is being inexorably tightened. The “Sri Lanka solution” could very well be on the cards. It’s not for nothing that the Indian government blocked a European move in the UN asking for an international probe into war crimes committed by the government of Sri Lanka in its recent offensive against the Tamil Tigers. The first move in that direction is the concerted campaign that has been orchestrated to shoehorn the myriad forms of resistance taking place in this country into a simple George Bush binary: If you are not with us, you are with the Maoists. The deliberate exaggeration of the Maoist “threat” helps the state justify militarisation.

In their soon-to-be-published Out of This Earth: East India Adivasis and the Aluminum Cartel, Samarendra Das and Felix Padel say that the financial value of the bauxite deposits of Orissa alone is $2270b (more than twice India’s GDP). That was at 2004 prices. At today’s prices it would be about $4000b. Of this, officially the government gets a royalty of less than 7%. Quite often, if the mining company is a known and recognised one, the chances are that, even though the ore is still in the mountain, it will have already been traded on the futures market. Expand the $4000b to include the value of the millions of tonnes of high-quality iron ore in Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand and the 28 other precious mineral resources, including uranium, limestone, dolomite, coal, tin, granite, marble, copper, diamond, gold, quartzite, corundum, beryl, alexandrite, silica, fluorite and garnet. Add to that the power plants, the dams, the highways, the steel and cement factories, the aluminium smelters, and all the other infrastructure projects that are part of the hundreds of MoUs (more than 90 in Jharkhand alone) that have been signed. Scores of corporations, from relatively unknown ones to the biggest mining companies and steel manufacturers in the world, are in the fray to appropriate adivasi homelands: the Mittals, Jindals, Tata, Essar, Posco, Rio Tinto, BHP Billiton and, of course, Vedanta. There’s an MoU on every mountain, river and forest glade. And most of this is secret. It’s not in the public domain.

Union home minister P Chidambaram has, in his career as a corporate lawyer, represented several mining corporations. He was a non-executive director of Vedanta, a position from which he resigned the day he became finance minister in 2004. When he became finance minister, one of the first clearances he gave for FDI was to Twinstar Holdings, a Mauritius-based company, to buy shares in Sterlite, a part of the Vedanta group. When activists from Orissa filed a case against Vedanta in the supreme court, citing its violations of government guidelines and pointing out that the Norwegian Pension Fund had withdrawn its investment from the company alleging gross environmental damage and human rights violations committed by the company, Justice Kapadia suggested that Vedanta be substituted with Sterlite, a sister company of the same group. He then blithely announced in an open court that he, too, had shares in Sterlite. He gave forest clearance to Sterlite to go ahead with the mining, without rebutting the report of the supreme court’s own committee…

cosmological sketches

I have been reading a lot of very erudite stuff about ancient and medieval cosmology, and its reflections in Muslim theology and philosophy. There is a great deal by Henry Corbin, both online and even more in print form, about this, with particular reference to Iranian Shi’ism. I don’t really trust Corbin, since I think he has an agenda, of apparently a Jungian sort (most of his papers were first published in the Eranos Yearbook). Jungianism is still psychoanalytical enough to be antinominian, by which I mean that the innermost Self is pictured as a sort of Id, prior to and resistant to any sort of rule. However, in his eagerness to fill out this picture with detail, Corbin provides a lot of interesting facts, albeit arranged rather tendentiously, so that the reader gains the impression that Shi’ites are more antinomian than they actually are.

The fundamental questions in ancient cosmology have to do not merely with the layout of the cosmos, but also with the origin of ‘Evil’. The ancient cosmologists thought of the cosmos as a system of concentric spheres with the earth in the middle. On the outside of all the spheres was God, who was limitless light. Each sphere was ruled by an angel, and each sphere reduced the amount of light getting through from outside, so that the innermost sphere was the darkest of all, and also the only one containing matter as such (‘the four elements’).

Since each angel rules an entire sphere, it makes an enormous difference if one postulates (as the Manicheans did, and as the Isma’ilis apparently still do, and as in effect Lurianic kabbalah does) that one of them ‘fell’ from its original station. The third angel, the ruler of the sphere of Saturn, is thought of in these schemes as having ‘fallen’ either inadvertently or deliberately, and ended up as ruler of the tenth sphere, which is of course our own dear earth. Having one’s planet ruled by a fallen angel is pretty close to Gnosticism proper, which has the earth ruled by a rebellious Demiurge, in effect an anti-god or satan.

Many ancient cosmologists believed that, although each sphere is essentially simple, the sphere of the fixed stars contained a multitude of souls, which were minor angels, and which were incarnated in human beings on earth during their lifetimes. This is also a sort of ‘fallen angel’ theory, since while we live on earth our lives are hardly angelic; on the contrary we are temporarily imprisoned in vile and corruptible matter. They also believed that the earth, unlike the other planetary spheres, is inherently full of multiplicity — they were not aware that the planets also contain variegated elements, but thought of them as simply angelic units.

The Qur’an emphatically does not believe in fallen angels. In the Qur’an, ‘Satan’ is just a jinn, which is a terrestrial spirit, and was never an angel. This makes Islam inherently much more optimistic than other Western religions, since a mere jinn, though obviously a terrifically fertile source of evil, is hardly as powerful as a fallen angel, let alone an ‘anti-god’. Ismai’lism, then, if Corbin is right about it, is a remarkable throwback.

I have my doubts about the idea of human souls originating from the sphere of the fixed stars. I would say that human souls are sui generis (just as, I suppose, the souls of jinns are) and bear little resemblance to the starry angelic host. I need to read some actual Suhrawardi and some Mulla Sadra, to find out what mainstream Shi’ites really think about all this in detail.

advantages of being a shi’ite

Last night I dreamed among other things of a big unoccupied cube-shaped building, empty except for some incomplete breeze-block partitions, that I could enter and leave at will. This contrasts with a dream I had a few years ago, when I was considering Sunnism. In that earlier dream, I was trapped inside a bare, sealed cube of about the same size by some sort of magician.

if rowland’s reporting had any effect, they’d kick her out

This is analogous to Ken Livingstone’s famous remark (& book title), “If voting changed anything, they’d abolish it.” – RB

Palestinians homeless again after eviction
Al Jazeera, Oct 29 2009

The UN is calling on Israel to immediately stop demolishing Palestinian homes in occupied East Jerusalem. The UN says 60,000 Palestinians may be at risk of being forcibly evicted. Israel says the houses are built without construction permits, which Palestinians say are almost impossible to obtain. Our correspondent Jacky Rowland is in Sheikh Jarrah, where Israeli police dismantled a tent set up by a Palestinian family already evicted by Israeli orders in August.

lots of lovely free propaganda from the US

US senators attack Goldstone Report
Tali Minsberg, JPost, OCt 30 2009

In the wake of the Goldstone Report, 10 state senators, through the American-Israel Friendship League and the National Conference of State Legislatures, are on a study tour of Israel. With a jam-packed itinerary, the NCSL delegation is meeting with officials such as Ron Dermer, senior adviser to Netanyahu, and Daniel Taub, director-general of the Foreign Ministry’s Law Division. No. 1 on the meeting agenda? Goldstone. According to Georgia State Sen. Balfour, president of the NCSL, the Goldstone document is misunderstood in the US. Balfour said he agreed with the US government’s disapproval of the Goldstone Report, saying:

Yesterday we had a meeting about the Goldstone Report. The average American says, ‘Hey, war crimes?’, but then you read it and you see almost everything we do is a war crime. Sometimes there are civilian casualties, which is horrible. But is that a war crime? If so, that changes the way we define war. If israel is accused of war crimes, every soldier is going to be a war criminal. If you bomb an al-Qaida terrorist and one of their family members dies, that would be a war crime. I wouldn’t even say that the report is one-sided. It is perverted and it changes the game of war. When they set up terror missiles next to a school, on top of a hospital, in front of a kindergarten, that ought to be a war crime. When they set up missiles on schools and hospitals, you eventually have to take those missiles out. People will read an article and say, ‘Israel bombed Lebanon?!’ What they do not know, however, is Lebanon sent 10,000 bombs. The goal of the trip is to become familiar with Israel, the issues and the country. Israel gives us perspective on how to solve our problems. We will go back wondering and thinking how we can work similarly.

Indeed, John Bolton has argued that the Goldstone Report has strong implications for the future of the US and warfare. Bolton wrote in an Oct 19 WSJ op-ed:

In the UN, Israel frequently serves as a surrogate target in lieu of the US, particularly concerning the use of military force preemptively or in self-defense. Accordingly, UN decisions on ostensibly Israel-specific issues can lay a predicate (he means ‘precedent’ – RB) for subsequent action against, or efforts to constrain, the US. Goldstone’s recommendation to convoke the International Criminal Court is like putting a loaded pistol to Israel’s head, or, in the future, to America’s.

US ‘doesn’t understand its own interests,’ what a shame

Hagel named to intelligence board
JTA, Oct 29 2009

Obama named retired US Sen. Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican, to co-chair the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board. Hagel, who will co-chair the board with former Sen. David Boren (D-Okla.), was considered a critic of Israel by many pro-Israel activists during his two terms in the Senate, which ended early this year. He told an Arab-American group in 2007 that his support for Israel was not “automatic,” and in an interview for Middle East negotiator Aaron David Miller’s book said that “the Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people” on Capitol Hill. Hagel also was one of a handful of senators who frequently did not sign AIPAC-backed letters related to Israel and the peace process, and opposed additional sanctions on Iran. The Republican Jewish Coalition criticized the appointment as a matter for serious concern. RJC Executive Director Matt Brooks said in a statement:

A review of Hagel’s record over the years on these issues reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the region and of the nature of the threats to US interests in the region.