Article by Ben Peterson, reprinted from his personal blog leftwin.

Last weekend, negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) broke down. Representatives from 12 Pacific nations had met in Hawaii for negotiations that aimed to create the biggest trade agreement ever. For anti-TPPA activists, this delay is a welcome break. But the trade deal is far from finished. The delay is an important opportunity to up the ante in local resistance to the deal. Looking at how and why the talks have stalled can help to understand its political implications locally, and points towards the resistance that will be necessary to defeat it for good.

Why have the talks stalled
In Aotearoa/New Zealand, the grassroots opposition to the TPPA focuses on issues that will affect the majority of working people:

1. The TPPA will lead to increased costs to important necessities such as medicines
2. The TPPA strengthens the power of international corporations. Democratic processes to regulate against corporations via environmental, health or labour laws are undermined.

These factors will hurt working people in Aotearoa/NZ – but that is not why the NZ government has yet to sign off on the TPPA. For John Key’s government the problem is access to dairy markets. Major countries such as Canada and the US are so far seeking to keep protections for their dairy industries. In New Zealand, dairy is a major industry, and milk a major export. Access to valuable dairy markets in North America is the key gain that the NZ government wants out of the deal, and they are now bargaining hard to get it.

Why this matters
Understanding this helps activists in three ways.

Firstly, this shows who government is working for, and what it hopes to achieve. Some activists have struggled to understand why the NZ government would have anything to do with a deal that will leave the majority of Kiwis worse off. Some then resort to conspiracy theories. John Key is not the puppet of a shadowy new world order based in the US – he represents the very visible rich and powerful at home. This rich and powerful class is happy to sell out ordinary kiwis, if it means they can make more money overseas.

Secondly, this shows that those standing against the TPPA have friends and allies. For the wealthy farmers in NZ, the prize in the TPPA would be the ability to undercut the dairy industry in North America, which could destroy many farming communities there. The NZ dairy mafia in Fonterra have no right to get rich at the expense of farming communities abroad (in the same way they don’t have the right to do it at the expense of the environment at home). These farming communities across the waves in the Americas can be friends and allies in fighting this trade deal – but only if TPPA opponents are focused on the TPPA as a whole and not caught behind the ‘national interests’.

Opponents of the TPPA will only be able to work together with these allies if we keep our focus on the trade deals for the rich. In each of the 12 nations involved in the TPPA negotiations there will be winners. It might be mining magnates from Australia, or manufacturers in South Korea. But in each country, working people will lose.

Finally, it shows how the TPPA can be beaten. The problem is not that the powerful don’t understand. The TPPA will not be stopped by good arguments alone. Powerful people in New Zealand understand the TPPA, and they want it to happen because it can make them richer. The only thing that can stop this money power – is people power. The same ordinary working people who will lose out are the ones who keep the system running. Mobilising popular power can create a political and economic force that can overcome this trade deal, in the same way other treaties have been overcome in the past (for example ANZUS re nuclear ships). This won’t take just rally or petition, and cannot be just through the election of establishment parties, but has to be sustained, vocal and militant. Rather than negotiating a better deal for NZ capitalists, we must reject the TPPA wholesale.

The TPPA NZ Week of Action will be held from the 8th-15th of August. For information on local actions see itsourfuture.org.nz

While there are exciting developments on the Left internationally, here in NZ left activists often feel isolated and the Left seems fragmented. Speakers from a range of Left organisations look at the state of the Left in Aotearoa/NZ, and examine issues such as the relationship between Pakeha leftists and tangata whenua, sexism in the Left and the possibilities for unity.

Speakers: Sue Bradford (Left Wing Think Tank Project) Daphne Lawless (Fightback); Jonathan King (Auckland Action Against Poverty). Entry free but koha appreciated.

7-9pm, Friday August 21st
Grey Lynn Community Centre, Auckland
[Facebook event]

Article by Bruce A Dickson, reprinted from Black Agenda Report (USA).

Spoiler alert: we have seen the Bernie Sanders show before, and we know exactly how it ends. Bernie has zero likelihood of winning the Democratic nomination for president over Hillary Clinton. Bernie will lose, Hillary will win. When Bernie folds his tent in the summer of 2016, the money, the hopes and prayers, the year of activist zeal that folks put behind Bernie Sanders’ either vanishes into thin air, or directly benefits the Hillary Clinton campaign.

Don’t believe us? Then believe Bernie himself interviewed by George Stephanopoulos on ABC News “This Week” May 3.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So if you lose in this nomination fight, will you support the Democratic nominee?

SANDERS: Yes. I have in the past.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Not going to run as an independent?

SANDERS: No, absolutely not. I’ve been very clear about that.

Bernie Sanders is this election’s Democratic sheepdog. The sheepdog is a card the Democratic party plays every presidential primary season when there’s no White House Democrat running for re-election. The sheepdog is a presidential candidate running ostensibly to the left of the establishment Democrat to whom the billionaires will award the nomination. Sheepdogs are herders, and the sheepdog candidate is charged with herding activists and voters back into the Democratic fold who might otherwise drift leftward and outside of the Democratic party, either staying home or trying to build something outside the two party box.

1984 and 88 the sheepdog candidate was Jesse Jackson. In 92 it was California governor Jerry Brown. In 2000 and 2004 the designated sheepdog was Al Sharpton, and in 2008 it was Dennis Kucinich. This year it’s Vermont senator Bernie Sanders. The function of the sheepdog candidate is to give left activists and voters a reason, however illusory, to believe there’s a place of influence for them inside the Democratic party, if and only if the eventual Democratic nominee can win in November.

Despite casting millions of voters for the likes of Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and other sheepdogs, those leftish Democrat voters are always disregarded when Democrats actually win. Bill Clinton gave us NAFTA, a vicious “welfare reform,” no peace dividend or push for DC statehood, lowered unemployment but mostly in part time and low-wage jobs, and mass incarceration of black and brown people. President Obama doubled down on bailouts of banksters and GM, and immunized them from prosecution but failed to address the most catastrophic fall in black household wealth in history. We got health care for some instead of Medicare for All, the Patriot Act renewed instead of repealed, a race to privatize public education, drone wars and still more mass incarceration of black and brown people. And if President Obama gets his way, we may soon have a global job-destroying wage-lowering NAFTA on steroids, with the TTP and TTIP.

The sheepdog’s job is to divert the energy and enthusiasm of activists a year, a year and a half out from a November election away from building an alternative to the Democratic party, and into his doomed effort. When the sheepdog inevitably folds in the late spring or early summer before a November election, there’s no time remaining to win ballot access for alternative parties or candidates, no time to raise money or organize any effective challenge to the two capitalist parties.

At that point, with all the alternatives foreclosed, the narrative shifts to the familiar “lesser of two evils.” Every sheepdog candidate surrenders the shreds of his credibility to the Democratic nominee in time for the November election. This is how the Bernie Sanders show ends, as the left-leaning warm-up act for Hillary Clinton.

Intent on avoiding the two-party “lesser evil” trap this year, about two hundred activists gathered in Chicago last weekend to consider the future of electoral organizing outside the Democratic and Republican parties. Many of the participants were Greens, including former presidential and vice presidential candidates Jill Stein and Rosa Clemente, the former Green mayor of Richmond California, and many others. There were also representatives from Seattle, where Socialist Alternative’s Kshama Sawant won election to Seattle’s city council, as well as Angela Walker, a black socialist who received 67,000 votes for Milwaukee County sheriff in 2014, and many others, including some who took part in the recent Chicago mayoral election.

There was trans-partisan interest in a 50-state ballot access drive to put the Green Party’s Jill Stein on the presidential ballot for 2016 presidential race. Currently the law keeps Greens and others off the ballot in more than half the states. Precise details vary according to state law, but if a third party candidate after obtaining one-time ballot access receives about 2% of total votes, a new ballot line is created, granting ballot access to any potential candidate from school board to sheriff to US congress who wants to run as something other than a Republican or Democrat. That, many participants agreed, would be a significant puncture in the legal thicket that now protects Democrats against competition on the ballot from their left. But a nationwide trans-partisan ballot access campaign to create a national alternative to the two capitalist parties is something left activists must begin serious work a good 18 months before a November election, essentially right now.

Whether or not a national ballot access campaign is undertaken by Greens and others, a Bernie Sanders candidacy is an invitation to do again what’s been done in 1984, 1988, 1992, 2000, 2004 and 2008. Bernie’s candidacy is a blast toward the past, an invitation to herd and be herded like sheep back into the Democratic fold, to fundraise and canvass and recruit and mobilize for Bernie, as he warms up the crowd for Hillary. Bernie is a sheepdog.

The question is, are we sheep?

Class polarisation: 30,000 workers on strike at China’s biggest shoe factory in 2014.

In 20 years, China has gone from the most equal country in Asia in terms of income distribution to the least equal country. While the transformation has proven profitable for a minority, tens of thousands of workers have taken strike action against paltry wages and conditions.

This restructuring has also meant increased vulnerability to fluctuations in the stock market.

In a piece originally published at Green Left Weekly (Australia), John Rainford examines the context of the recent stock market crash in China.

Australia managed its way through the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) in better shape than most countries, mostly due to two factors.

The first was $83 billion in Australian government stimulus spending, the third largest in the world as a percentage of GDP, behind the US and South Korea.

The second was resilient demand for iron ore and coal exports to China which came from an initial US$4 trillion in Chinese stimulus spending organised through the country’s banks.

This Keynesian counter-cyclical deficit spending led to China also being relatively unaffected by the GFC from its onset in 2008. But much of the cheap debt available in China was funnelled into property and share market speculation. This created a dual bubble that was always going to burst at some point.

In the year from June 2014, the Chinese stock market value rose by 100%. But in just three weeks from late June, the stock market lost a quarter of this value, wiping out $2.4 trillion of investor’s money and affecting financial markets around the globe.

China’s rise

China’s rise to a leading world economic power has been meteoric. It can be dated from 1978 when the Chinese Communist Party leadership under Deng Xiaoping (referred to by Mao Zedong as a secret “capitalist roader” during the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76) announced a program of economic reform. This involved “four modernisations” in agriculture, industry, education, and science and defence.

These were designed to introduce market forces to the Chinese economy.

Fortuitously for China’s leader’s ambition, the turn to neoliberalism in the rich countries from the 1980s opened up the opportunity for China to become incorporated into the global market. This allowed China to develop a peculiar form of market economy that was variously controlled or manipulated by a state still claiming to be socialist. “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” remains the official party line.

What it has delivered so far is a mixed bag of environmental degradation, social inequality, state suppression, and rampant corruption. This has come alongside spectacular economic growth, rising living standards for a significant part of the population and a burgeoning middle class who have reportedly pumped more than 10% of their new-found wealth into the Chinese stock market.

China’s largely state-owned banking system, which has financed the boom, grew rapidly after the mid-1980s. In less than a decade, the number of branches of state banks went from 60,000 to 144,000, with the number of employees increasing from 974 thousand to 1.9 million. In this period, their deposits increased from 427.3 billion yuan to 2.3 trillion yuan, while total loans went from 590.5 billion yuan to 2.6 trillion yuan.

Property bubble

This led to a property bubble forcing the Chinese government to spend almost as much to clean up bad loans as the US government did to bail out the savinsg and loans finance sector in 1987 ($124 billion).

When, in 2003, the Chinese government transferred $45 billion in foreign exchange reserves to two large state banks, it was the third largest bailout of the banking system in less than six years.

The Chinese government has responded to the latest stock market rout by organising market brokerages to invest in a blue-chip exchange-traded fund. This will buy shares to stem share price losses. It has also suspended any new stock market listings, raised quotas for foreigners to buy stocks, and the central bank will provide funds to encourage investors to borrow to buy shares. This unorthodox approach which appears to be analogous to throwing petrol on a fire.

The vastly overvalued stock market is a result of China trying to manage a transition from the reliance on exports and infrastructure development that has sustained its phenomenal growth rates, to raising domestic consumption as a driver of growth.

The country responded to the GFC by ramping up infrastructure spending. It raised its contribution to GDP growth from about 25% in the 1990s to 90% in 2009, the year it began the largest infrastructure stimulus spending in history. In the period from 2008-13, new credit available across the economy increased by more than $20 trillion, an amount larger than the size of the entire US commercial banking sector.

China is also shifting from the foreign direct investment (FDI) that it relied on to sustain its rapid economic growth, to outbound direct investment (ODI). This grew at an average 19% each year between 2009-14. In 2014, ODI was $116 billion, almost on a par with FDI of $120 billion.

The envious view of China’s economy held by many countries takes on a different hue when seen from the perspective of a large number of Chinese citizens. In 20 years, it has gone from the most equal country in Asia in terms of income distribution to the least equal country. According to some reports, a third of its people live on less than $2 a day.

A significant amount of the capital accumulated by companies operating in China has come from not just low-paid labour but from unpaid labour.

Labour surplus

This has led to another major problem that China has to contend with — huge labour surpluses that it must either absorb or be ready to repress. This will be much more difficult in a slowing economy, and the extent of the problem can be gauged by the official figures which recorded more than 184,000 occurrences of mass unrest in 2013.

The Maoist notion of the masses being made up of “workers, the peasantry, the intelligentsia and the national bourgeoisie whose interests are harmonious with each other and the state” is certainly not the case now, if it ever was.

China has long been funding US debt so the US can continue to consume China’s surplus production. Should the Chinese economy fall into recession, or even enter a long period of stagnation like Japan, the fragile, jobless and anaemic recovery from the GFC in the rich world would come to a halt.

The US would likely be the first country affected as it is the largest destination for Chinese investment. As to how Australia might fare: leaving aside the obvious further contraction of iron ore and coal exports, last year China became the biggest foreign investor in Australia, with $64.5 billion coming into the country in 2014.

The Abbott government will be hoping that the Chinese Communist Party gets its response right.

NZDF in Iraq.

Guest article by Val Morse for upcoming Fightback international issue.

In George Orwell’s novel 1984, the Ministry of Truth is responsible for the continual updating of historical records so that they always accord with the official party line. Original documents are incinerated in a “memory hole” and disgraced people are “unpersoned,” all traces of them erased. A state of perpetual war exists, and the enemy is being constantly redefined.
I’ve been thinking a lot about remembering and forgetting in terms of war and trauma. I’ve been thinking about it because New Zealand has gone back to war in Iraq, and I feel so full of anger with the memory of all that has happened there for the past 14 years alive in my mind. And I feel full of rage at the deliberate forgetting that is going on now.

I think it is easy to forget about the horror of war, about bodies being ripped apart by the millions, about the torture, about the summary executions, the nighttime raids, the drone strikes. It’s easy to forget the transparent power grabs and the blatant lies. It is easy, not because we willfully try to forget, but rather, because our forgetting serves power.

Power needs us to forget. It needs us to forget in order that we will consent to do it again. It simply needs to erase enough of the truth and enough of the horror, enough of the time, to make the desired course of action tenable in the minds of many, if not most, people.

This is the point at which we have arrived. New Zealand has now been in a state of perpetual war for 14 years. It started on 8 October 2001 when NZ joined Operation Enduring Freedom, and it has never stopped.

For 14 years, New Zealand has been fighting illegitimate wars of aggression in the Middle East and Central Asia resulting in the deaths of millions of people. It has committed grave human rights violations and has contributed to the massive destabilisation of the entire region that may ultimately engulf the entire world. It has done so for empire, for the continued triumphal march of western neo-liberal capitalism across the globe.

But lest we imagine that this war is simply about money, let us consider a comment from Edward Said’s Orientalism:

“…without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand that enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage – and even produce – the Orient politically, socially, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively…European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self” (2003, p3)

Waging this war is not simply about economic exploitation of the Middle East (defined as part of the Orient by Said), but rather about a very long project of European (and later American) empire to own, by way of produced knowledge, the very idea of what that place is and who those people are. It is the “other” against which the West is measured and understood. The “war on terrorism” should, then, also be understood as part of a continual exercise in re/establishing cultural superiority and promulgating white supremacy.

Lest we forget – or rather, lest some remember, New Zealand has been a regular contributor to this discourse of Orientalism for 100 years. Its invasions of the lands of Egypt, Palestine, Jordan, Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran in the First World War produced enduring constructions of ‘the Turk,’ ‘the Gippo’ and the ‘nigger.’

The memory machine that geared up in anticipation of the 100th anniversary of the Gallipoli landing (and will continue for another 4 years) does not prefer that we remember the racism, both institutional and individual, that was a daily, intimate part of New Zealand life. Nor is power served by too many people thinking too much about the boots of New Zealand soldiers tramping through the same lands as “our” soldiers from 100 years ago did for much the same reasons. This is most certainly why the prime minister pulled back from his childish suggestion of deploying an “Anzac-badged” unit, caught up as he must have been in some deluded poppy-induced patriotic fervor, and instead, remembered that he was trying to make us all forget.

In one way, forgetting the reality of war is a good idea. It is good for the actual people who fought the battles, or who lost their friends, families, communities, and livelihoods. When I contemplate the extreme trauma that bearing witness to the execution of your family might entail, I imagine that some forgetting might well be necessary to enduring the crushing weight of the pain. How can a person go on living knowing that everyone they ever loved was brutally murdered? Similarly, it would seem that to some extent, those who are doing the murdering might also need to do a bit of forgetting – the First World War was where the first experiences of post-traumatic stress disorder were recorded. Young men, if they survived the trenches, were destroyed human beings haunted by memories of piles of bodies and body parts everywhere, the stench of rotting flesh and explosions all around them. Today, thousands of returned soldiers wander the streets in the United States, homeless and suffering from deep psychological disorders as a result of the war; they are expected to return to “normal life” after years of combat.

One of my favourite quotes is a line from Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” I think it says a lot about what the role of the radical left should be in this age of perpetual war. I think that the left can and should be remembering. We should remember George Bush and Tony Blair’s lies. We should remember Fallujah. We should remember Abu Ghraib. We should remember Guantanamo. We should remember Band-E-Timur. We should remember Labour’s deployment of NZSAS for “long range reconnaissance and direct action missions” in Afghanistan. We should remember NZ’s special trade status for joining the 2003 occupation of Iraq. We should remember Ahmed Zaoui. We should remember Daryl Jones. We should remember war is peacekeeping. We should remember the horror. We should remember the dead.

We should also remember our history – a history of resistance – to this perpetual war. We should remember February 15, 2003 when we joined the world to march against war. We should remember picketing the Labour Party and calling its war supporters “Scabs.” We should remember the “Citizens Weapons Inspection” of the US embassy. We should remember Father Peter Murnane pouring blood on the carpet of the US ambassador. We should remember hounding Australian prime minister John Howard as he toured Wellington. We should remember burning the flags of empires. We should remember shutting down the weapons conference. We should remember the Ploughshares popping the Waihopai spy dome. We should remember Chelsea Manning. We should remember the dreams of peace with justice and self-determination for all of the world’s people.

For if we ever hope to escape this Ministry of Truth – the so-called “war on terrorism” – we must wage a ceaseless war on forgetting.