Genomic Minds Website Launched

We have recently launched a public engagement website, which can found at the Genomic Minds website. Here you can find a link to Cardiff sciSCREEN and access a number of essays written by the speakers at our past events. This is still a work in progress and new posts, and improvements in functionality are on their way. However, we are always open to your suggestions on what you would like to see, so please do let us know your thoughts by posting here, or on our facebook group (just search Cardiff sciSCREEN in facebook).

against austerity

The resistance to immiseration in Europe is heating up and beginning to spread. In France, open-ended strikes are continuing, with students now joining in. Friends and comrades from Contrainfo (Athens) share this report on an occupation of the Acropolis by precarious cultural workers.

GR

‘Beneath the Acropolis we go on strike…’

by Contrainfo
15 October 2010

Approximately 100 ministry contractual employees barricaded themselves inside the Acropolis site overnight on Wednesday, 13 October, demanding two years of back pay and permanent contracts. They padlocked the entrance gates and refused to allow in tourists. Guardians of the Acropolis site (Athens, Greece) work in behalf of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Tourism either as civil servants (with permanent contracts) or as contractual employees (with temporal contracts). More than 400 contract-workers of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism have been working unpaid for up to 22 months. These are workers who have up to 20 years of service. The Greek government shows them the door of unemployment. Most of them will be laid off after years of flexible and underpaid work.


The following morning, Thursday, 14 October, the director of the First Inspectorate of Prehistoric Classical Antiquities filled a lawsuit, thus giving excuse to police squads to storm the site. Approximately 80 employees refused to open the gate against police squads, even when cops entered from a side door tear-gassing and beating with fury protesters, passers-by, even (so-called) journalists. There were people injured (unconfirmed number) and at least one witnessed arrest.

Workers remained in the archaeological site, which was shut down throughout the day. The same afternoon, under heavy rain, a solidarity gathering had been called in the presence of police and security force. The assemblers were beaten by police. Two of the slogans were ‘Beneath the Acropolis we go on strike; we think of the slaves rather than Phidias,’ and ‘Solidarity is peoples’ weapon – War against the bosses’ war.’

Mass media mocked the strikers, with hysterical scaremongering for ‘tourists who have traveled from far-flung countries, and will not see the Parthenon’ and comments such as ‘authorities often are sensitive [!] to protests at the emblematic ancient site, particularly as the country largely relies on tourism for revenue’… With the most famous recipe, that of brainwashing, international and Greek media prepares public opinion to accept the brutal repression at all levels.

See Contrainfo for video and continuing coverage. See also Occupied London.

Busy Times for sciSCREEN

Over the space of just over a week, sciSCREEN will be involved in screenings of three films at Chapter Arts Centre. As advertised, there will a screening and discussion of Der Golem on Sunday 31st of October. On Tuesday 9th November, in conjunction with the ESRC Centre for Business Relationships, Accountability, Sustainability and Society (BRASS), and as part of Sustainability Week, there will be a screening and discussion of The Garden. And on Saturday the 30th October we will distribute a pamphlet on the psychology of disgust before and after a screening of The Human Centipede (‘the sickest film ever?’ The Sun), though a full sciSCREEN discussion might be more than any of us could stomach.

Watch the blog for further details of these events.

brumaria on the general strike

Spain: The General Strike of September 29th

by Brumaria

On September 29th, a General Strike (Huelga general) against the Ley de Reforma Laboral — driven by Zapatero’s government and passed by the parliament — was organized by the practical entirety of labor unions and leftist organizations and parties, with unequal results.

It is necessary to search for the antecedents to said events in the profound economic crisis that Spain has suffered from during the last three years; this crisis (latent and prior to the global crisis of September 2008 involving the financial markets) is inscribed in the following parameters and events:

- Enormous growth of public works and construction of homes during the last 15 years (currently in Spain there are 3 million empty homes)
- Unstoppable increase in the number of unemployed (4 million to date)
- Economic recession, drop in consumption, and zero growth the last two years
- Exponential increase of public debt based on the search for financial resources with which to pay social loans to the unemployed

Zapatero and his social-liberal government’s response was at first to deny the crisis in order to finally accept the measures of cutting social costs, which were pushed by the European Union (the tandem of Merkel and Sarkozy), the International Monetary Fund (experts in ruining countries with economic crises), and the United States’ government. The disparate measures that international Liberalism has imposed on Zapatero can be summarized as follows:
    -cutting public costs
    -stopping investment in public works
    -decreasing pensions and loans for unemployment
    -labor reform that reduces redundancies
    -nullify capacity for refinancing debt in the fierce international markets

This totality of measures, far from stimulating the economy and stopping unemployment, has obtained the opposite results, that is, an increase in unemployment and negative economic growth. All this situates the Socialist Party 14 points below the right in polls taken for the next elections; in some way Zapatero — with tools from liberalism — paves the way for the right, which in a couple of years will give the definitive coup de grâce to the depleted “socialist state.”

But what results did General Strike achieve? Without a doubt we can describe it as a failure, or perhaps as a complicated failure. Allow us to explain ourselves; these were basically the results [turnouts]:

    -Education, between 3-5% following
    -Public administration, less than 5%
    -Public services, less than 5%
    -Construction, around 20%
    -General industry, around 90%
    -Automobile industry, 100%
    -Mining industry, 100%

If we abide by the available data we can extrapolate the following conclusions:

1. The General Strike was organized to a much lesser degree by the unions that represent the greatest number of workers
2. Zapatero’s government lacks an economic strategy beyond the recommendations of international financial liberalism
3. The General Strike of September 29th failed, but it clearly triumphed where there exists a “working class” with a strong tradition in political, union-based activity
4. The 4 million unemployed, a significant number of which are immigrants, continue to be a group that is heterogeneous and disorganized politically, a group that barely survives off of public loans, which in turn slow down growth
5. All this constitutes an explosive mix that nevertheless has failed to produce any kind of political consciousness or social alarm in spite of the fact that all of the information indicates that the worst has yet to come
6. The incidents on the day of the strike were minimal, marginalized, and without political significance
7. The protests organized at the end of the strike were not followed by a significant portion of the population

To finish this quick summary, we pose a couple of difficult-to-answer questions.

- Has the working class disappeared, has it become invisible, or is it in a state of transition?

- Do concepts such as “Post-Fordism” and “multitude” need to be revised in political theory?

The above remarks were sent in response to an inquiry I sent the editors of the Spanish leftist journal Brumaria. I asked for a local view, to probe the mirage of media representations. The text, a sobering critique of the actual strike no less than a scathing indictment of Zapatero's "Socialist liberalism," was written by Brumaria director Dario Corbeira and translated by managing editor Daniel Patrick Rodriguez. Thanks to both.
GR

spectacle and austerity

Across France on Saturday (2 October), huge demos protested misery measures. But how huge, and who decides if such protests matter?

No secret: the business of capitalist news media is to market assertion, not to expose the truth about what happens. Circulating along with all the other transmitted garbage, truth rushes past, like slips of the tongue - but above all as truth about the concentration of social power congealed in every media report.

In the current coverage of resistance to austerity in Europe, what is striking is how relentlessly state and corporate news reports reduce massive, embodied contestation to mere contention - to assertion and counter-assertion about how many protesters were actually in the street.

The process is a form of castration: precisely the logic of spectacular representation Guy Debord raged against more than forty years ago. Maybe it won't be useless to recall how it works, and see how it is still operating today.


Power's representations of struggles from below routinely alternate between two forms.

If resistance is growing, mediated power repeats the mantra that it does not matter: austerity measures are necessary and inevitable, and we will ram them through anyway, no matter what you do.

If resistance weakens, mediated power congratulates itself for finding its predictions confirmed: that's right, just like we said, told you so, what exists is best because it exists and cannot be contested.

Struggles "appear" within the spectacle in one form or the other: defeated in advance or in fact, but in any case always and only defeated. The two castrating forms of representation are like the barbs of the pitchfork analytic philosophers use to spear and dismiss whatever fails to please them: inconvenient propositions are either "interesting but false" or "true but trivial."

Those in struggle can afford neither to ignore the castrating representation machine nor to mistake its products for reality and fate. Facing the media, they have to be both radically critical and strategic. Clarity about how it works is some protection against demoralization.

How many protested? Protesters say X, police say X/2. The battle of numbers is inevitable under the logic of spectacle. The aim of reducing the quality of struggle to quantity in this way is always to insist that nothing can change unless our masters above say so.

The representations, in turn, effect the balance of forces they are supposed to represent: if resisting workers can be convinced that the turnout for their strike failed to meet expectations or that the size of demos is falling and people are going back home, then this undercuts their morale and position in the force field. On the other hand, if a struggle is perceived to be growing and has a change of winning its aims, then those watching may dare to join it and thereby cease to be spectators.

Thus the cliché of hyper-mediatized capitalist politics: perception is reality, spin works. Radical praxis opposes the context that confirms this but in the meantime cannot ignore it: what is being contested, after all, is not the number of protesters but the repeated assertion that austerity is inevitable, that life cannot be organized otherwise.

If contestation can be reduced to mere contention, the real stakes never have to be acknowledged. This is particularly clear in an online report posted Sunday on France24: it pretends to mistake the war of representation for the main object to be reported and represented. The first part is reproduced below.
GR

French unions hail protests a success but govt says numbers are 'down'

by France24 (3 Oct 2010)

Almost three million people joined protests across France to voice anger over changes to the retirement age according to trade union officials, while the French government put the figure at 900,000. Unions called on the government to "open dialogue".

AFP - French unions on Saturday brought millions of protestors onto the streets, they said, shunning strikes for rallies in their latest salvo against President Nicolas Sarkozy’s pensions reform plan.

“Around 2.9 million” demonstrators have taken part, the CFDT union’s deputy leader Marcel Grignard told AFP, “roughly the same number” as during the last day of action against raising the retirement age from 60 to 62 on September 23.

“This is a successful mobilisation. We expect the government finally to pay attention to this popular expression and take action on its plan,” Grignard said.

But the interior ministry said that numbers were down, with 899,000 taking part in over 200 rallies around France, although in western cities such as Rennes heavy rain reduced the number of demonstrators.

“Everyone recognises this evening that the movement has got no bigger,” said government spokesman Luc Chatel.

The protests were the first to be held at the weekend after two days of weekday strike action in September that failed to bow the government.

The previous day of action ended in an argument over how many people took part: police said numbers were down from the previous September 7 protest at around one million, unions said they were up at three million.

the fightback

Three days ago (29 September), the first general strike in Spain in eight years coincided with a general call-out from the European Trade Union Confederation to protest Eurozone austerity programs. The strike, although limited in time, was evidently strong and effective, and union actions and protest demos took place in many European capitals  - including Brussels, where 100,000 workers took to the streets.

As usual, state and corporate media reports offered a striking demonstration of their own - of their own spectacular biases. Following a Reuters news wire, most media outlets led with the assertion that "tens of thousands" of protesters had demonstrated across Europe. You would have had to work hard to learn that there were 50,000 in Lisbon alone -- or that demos or strike actions or both took place in Ireland, Spain, Portugal, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, Romania, Slovenia, Serbia, Italy, Greece and Cyprus.

In one of the rare reports that did not go out of its way to discount and dismiss what happened, Deutsche Welle admitted that in Spain the general strike "hit Spanish industry and transportation hard" and that some sectors of industry were "paralyzed." Indeed, Spanish workers refuted repeated predictions from above that turnout to the strike would be poor: in the event, millions of workers - perhaps as many as 10 million - withheld their labor-power. The UGT trade union confederation claims 70 percent of its members participated, and that in the steel and energy sectors "almost all employees had taken part."

In Slovenia, public sector workers continued an open-ended strike in the face of a two-year pay freeze. In Dublin, a cement worker drove his truck into the front gate of Parliament; across the drum was painted TOXIC BANK ANGLO. In Greece striking dockworkers shut down ports, public transport workers shut down the Athens Metro, and public hospitals had to rely on emergency staffing as doctors went out on strike.

This weekend, ports across France will continue to be shut down by strikes that began on Friday (1 October). Demos today will protest pension "reform."

All this despite the message relentlessly broadcast from on high: there is no alternative, there is no alternative, be resigned to it, you really are resigned, everyone else is and so are you, yes you are, repeat after us...

The markets, it is true, did not register much panic. But European workers know that increasing the pressure is the only way to force capital's technocrats to back down. If those targeted for immiseration are resolved and follow up on this good start, they will shift the balance of forces. Then we'll see.

Collective self-defense against planned austerity is the counter-order of the day. Specific concessions are surely winnable. But just as surely, there will be no security for anyone until the whole global context of austerity is called more radically to account. An injury to one, as the black cat knows, is an injury to all...

GR

new false start

New START's Big Winners: US Nuke Complex, Pentagon, and Contractors

by Darwin Bond-Graham

(17 Sept 2010)

Passage of New START in a 14-4 vote out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is already being hailed by Democrats and arms control NGOs as a substantial victory. A floor vote for ratification is now apparently set to occur after the elections.

While ratification is by no means guaranteed, there are several clear winners already: Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Aerojet General, Alliant Techsystems, Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore nuclear weapons laboratories, Y-12 nuclear labs, the Pentagon, and Bechtel Corporation.

While much noise has been made about the New START treaty's cut to the nuclear weapons stockpile, the actual required reduction in arms may be as low as 8%, or 162 warheads out of a total of thousands. Furthermore, keep in mind too that this only affects deployed strategic warheads, not "tactical" weapons, and not weapons in the "reserve" stockpile.

So why the big deal? Why are both sides fighting like mad over a treaty that really requires virtually no change to the status quo US-Russia relationship and US nuclear stockpile?


Here's why in a nutshell:

1. The Democrats, led by the Obama administration, want the treaty badly in order to prove that their means of combating proliferation and the rising power of states like Iran is better than the Republican strategy. The difference essentially is that the Democrats propose to give the impression that the USA is cutting its arsenal and seeking "global zero." Of course it's not and the Dems intend to fund the US nuclear complex at large levels. Long-range national security state doctrine calls for keeping nukes far into the future, and modernizing them the whole way along. But the Democratic foreign policy establishment thinks their plan will provide superior power, diplomatic and military, when dealing with nations that pose a threat to US imperial interests. It's a tough balancing act, this anti-nuclear nuclearism! Thankfully the liberal militarists have found willing allies in the foundation community. Funds and NGOs like Ploughshares, American Friends Service Committee, and Peace Action West have lobbied extensively for ratification, proving that a little money goes a long way in politics.

2. The Republican strategy remains what the old gipper gave us - "peace through strength." G. W. Bush pursued it with his aggressive nuclear weapons programs, but the Democrats managed to back him down. Undeterred, many Republicans think the Democrats are wasting the national security state's time and energy and would just rather invest huge sums in weapons and invade and occupy nations as a first and early recourse when problems arise. There remains a great deal of ideological opposition to treaties, especially arms control pacts, whether or not they actually constrain US military might.

3. In addition to this acrimonious debate about imperial strategy, there's bread and butter. While New START doesn't pose any threats to any military funding whatsoever, it does offer a major opportunity to demand huge funding increases for several weapons programs.

    A. Chief among these is the nuclear weapons program. New START ratification is being used as the primary forum in which to hash out the budget for nuclear weapons over the next ten years. Thus far supporters of the nuke complex have gotten a pretty good deal; a minimum $10 billion increase over the next ten years to build a new plutonium pit factory, new uranium plant, new weapons components factory, and other major capital projects. Corker and Isakson's votes on September 16 to pass the treaty to the full Senate for a ratification vote may signal that they have received even larger funding commitments for the huge nuclear facilities in their states, or that they will use their vote on the floor to extort better deals between now and then.

    B. Then there's "missile defense" and "prompt global strike." Missile defense has its own agency in the Pentagon and budget larger than the NNSA's. Prompt global strike, a new conventional strategic weapons system capable of killing anyone on the planet in under an hour with hypersonic munitions, is a multi-hundred million dollar and growing program. Both are getting very large increases in Obama's FY2011 budget, due in part to Republican demands that neither program be constrained by New START. Of course the treaty does not such thing, but the concern is really a theatrical way of demanding even larger increases for these weapons systems. The Democrats are too happy to oblige. Obama and Biden are champions of prompt global strike.

4. Thus the Senators on both sides of the debate are working for the nuclear weapons complex, Pentagon, and their powerful corporate contractors. The Democrats have already offered up major funding increases, even before Republican opposition. Conservatives have only pulled the issue further to the right, and arms control foundations and NGOs have fed the whole process by making New START out to be vastly more important and meaningful than it objectively is.

Still don't see the bi-partisan consensus to fund the nuclear weapons complex and Pentagon's missile defense and prompt global strike programs and contractors? The campaign finance data for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee members' 2010 election cycle bank accounts demonstrates why the interests of the nuclear weapons complex and other weapons programs are absolutely not threatened by New START.

Raytheon, Textron, Lockheed, Boeing, United Technologies, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, SAIC, Carlyle, BAE, EADS all contract with the Missile Defense Agency and related Pentagon program offices. Lockheed serves at the lead contractor for prompt global strike. Bechtel, Honeywell, CH2M Hill, McDermott (through its BWXT subsidiary), URS, Flour, and Lockheed Martin contract with the NNSA to operate the US nuclear weapons complex. AECOM is subcontractor for the US nuclear weapons program.

For a detailed breakdown of each Committee member's nuke sector donors, go here.

Darwin analyzes the politics and power plays behind new START more fully in "New START: A brief analysis of the treaty ratification process, campaign finance, and lobbying activities," posted on sung a lot of songs.

Darwin's Summary:

For many reasons the New START treaty is proving to be a costly affirmation of nuclear arms as a national priority. The ratification process has empowered pro-nuclear interest groups. Debate during ratification has also cemented assurances to fund the multi-billion dollar missile defense and prompt global strike weapons systems while undermining the possibility of political opposition. Campaign contribution and lobbying disclosure data both help to explain why corporate contractors with stakes in these programs have been ably protected by both Republican and Democratic Senators throughout the ratification debate. Like the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty that was debated in the 1990s, the political process of New START ratification has insulated nuclear weapons spending, as well as large budgets for other weapons systems. On balance New START has already exerted strong anti-disarmament influences on federal decision-makers, making it an arms affirmation treaty.