The other moonwalker

Neil Armstrong became a celebrity overnight. The Apollo 11 Moon landing marked a seismic shift in space exploration during a time when the world was captivated by space. It was watched by the largest television audience of its time, and President Nixon put in a congratulatory phone call just after the US flag was planted.
On the astronauts' return, Nasa sent them on a world tour. Although Neil Armstrong initially went along with the celebrations, he always remained aloof; an elusive presence who preferred to talk about facts rather than feelings. He started to decline speeches and interviews, eventually refusing to sign autographs and shying away from being photographed in public. If Armstrong spent just one afternoon signing autographs he could make a million dollars, but he's always refused. He didn't want to profit from his Moon walk financially .
Andrew Smith, author of Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth explains that his conclusion is , Armstrong, now 78, believes simply that he did not deserve the attention.
"There were 400,000 people that worked on that Moon landing programme in various different ways and he thinks he didn't deserve all the credit just because he did the flying part"

A man of humility

Parecon and Capt Kirk

Ahhh, now i know where Michael Albert got his Parecon ideas , from watching too much Star Trek and listening too much to Captain Kirk

(c) "Money" and Ownership in the Federation.
Federation citizens possess what a 20th century capitalist would refer to as "money" only in a limited way. What corresponds most closely to "money" in the Federation is referred to as "credits". These are earned by working, the more and harder one works, the more "credits" an individual earns. One can then use these to purchase food, transportation, living space, etc. Once one spends a credit, it disappears, it is not transferable to the store or anyone else (except parents to children). It is simply deducted from one's total. To get more, one must work more. Credits cannot be traded, except for some controlled gamboling instances, and cannot be stolen. The deduction and accumulation of credits is more of a bookkeeping system than anything else. As above, production units that produce transporters, food, etc. do not trade money for inputs, but simply get what was decided upon by the participatory planning process.
Due to advances in computer technology, product distribution outlets possess technology that tracks and records individuals as they make purchases through facial recognition and other means. Citizens simply take what they need when they need it, and are told by AI systems of their credit deduction and total at the time of purchase.
Thus the common assertion by Federation citizens that people don't have money in the 23rd century is entirely understandable and accurate.
Though one can buy and own food, transportation, living space, etc. in the federation, the ownership of the means of production is not allowed. Thus farms, ships, industrial plants, etc. are collectively owned by all, and in a another sense, by no-one.
Though one might think that the facilitation boards involved in the planning process would be a likely candidate for corruption, the lack of tradable money, transparency of facilitation meetings and rules such as facilitation workers cannot handle data from their own region have made this close to impossible, with very few such instances in the entire history of the federation.
1) Since everyone has a balanced job complex, there has been a powerful incentive to eliminate rote, dangerous, and arduous work. This led to increased robotics and computer development. (2) The less planning iterations needed, the better. This has led to increased computer technology, replicators, and a massive industrial base that astounds even people today, such that only three planning iterations are needed, and everyone basically gets what they want, on average. (3) The participatory planning process has allowed federation citizens to express their desire to allocate resources to explore strange new worlds and new civilizations.

But more accurately it would appear that someone from Parecon has infiltrated Star Trek and chosen to reconstruct The Federation to reflect Parecon society and i have to confess a bit jealousy about such an imaginative website to promote their ideas

Another website describes the Federation 's economy as "Marxist" but not all that sympathetically

Whats going on

All eyes are presently on Iran these days , or reporting the supposed conciliatory overtures of the Israeli government concerning the establishment of a Palestinian State but what of Gaza that not so long ago suffered the wrathful retribution of Israel .

Virtually all exports are blocked, which has devastated Gaza's economy, pushing unemployment to 40%. Some 80% of the population live in poverty, if aid is discounted, according to UN figures. Half Gaza's population depends on UN rations which cover only two-thirds of dietary requirements. Many families have little or no income with which to make up the shortfall.

Some basic foodstuffs and medicine are allowed into Gaza, but the UN says a whole host of other items have not been allowed in.Recently blocked items: light bulbs, candles, matches, books, musical instruments, crayons, clothing, shoes, mattresses, sheets, blankets, tea, coffee, chocolate, nuts . No petrol or diesel since Nov 2008 (except for the UN) . Half required cooking gas allowed . Virtually no building materials allowed in .

Mr Bailey of Oxfam said "it's a humanitarian crisis for the people that have no money or are living in tents because their homes were destroyed. And it's a human crisis for one and half million people who don't know where to look for hope."

From the BBC

the failure of the trickle down strategy

The Trotskyist website WSWS has posted an interesting article on the failure of New Labour reformism .

For the last three decades the Institute of Fiscal Studies has produced a report on the UK Gini coefficient ( The Gini coefficient can range from 0 to 1 and provides an objective measure of income inequality, which allows every country to be ranked against others and against its own past performance. A coefficient of 0 would mean income is shared equally between all individuals, whilst a coefficient of 1 would mean one person within the population has all the income and everyone else none. So a higher Gini coefficient figure indicates a higher level of inequality ).

The figure has increased from 0.25 when Thatcher came to power to now 0.36, beyond the normal bounds of inequality seen in developed countries.

The report also notes that the number of those in relative poverty, which is defined as those with an income less than 60 percent of the median, has risen over the last three years.

“Poverty for working-age adults without dependent children is now at its highest level since the start of our comparable time series in 1961,” according to the IFS report.

The IFS report concludes, “Over the past three years, average living standards have continued to stagnate, though poverty and income inequality both rose. We expect that the current recession will again lead to a change in the course of poverty inequality and average living standards. Unfortunately, the only thing we can be near-certain of is that average living standards will fall, but we cannot be sure how this pain will be shared.” - i think we can guess who .

The contrast between rich and poor is even starker when the mean or arithmetical average is considered. The mean earnings figure for 2007-08 was £487 a week. It is calculated that 65 percent of the population earn less than this sum. A small proportion of the population, 1.2 million, has earnings above £1,500 a week. The incomes of Members of Parliament range up to £1,100 a week, putting them above 91 percent of the population. Only nine percent of households in the UK have a higher income. If their expenses are included in the calculation they have a higher income than 96 percent of the UK population. If they have a working partner, their household income is in the very top income bracket.

“Ten years ago the government committed to eradicating child poverty but these figures show progress has stalled,” Hilary Fisher, director of End Child Poverty said. “In the previous two years, child poverty actually rose. Progress has been made on child poverty, but the UK is way off track on its targets. Budget 2009 invested less than a pint of milk per week per child in family incomes and did nothing to narrow the gap.”

A Joseph Rowntree Foundation Report concluded that the measures brought in by the Labour government to address inequality were stalling.The report issued in February stated that “child poverty remains amongst the highest in Europe,” despite the fact that the government had focused on this area. Health inequalities also continued to widen.

“The UK’s experience in the 1980s and 1990s showed that the strategy of hoping that growth in living standards at the top would ‘trickle down’ to those at the bottom did not work."

Black US Poverty

The National Urban League released its annual "State of Black America" report. Blacks were twice as likely to be unemployed, three times more likely to live in poverty and more than six times as likely to be imprisoned compared with whites, the study said. Blacks also lost their homes due to foreclosure at a greater rate than other ethnic groups.
25 percent of black Americans still in poverty.

According to Survey of Consumer Finances from the Federal Reserve, the “wealth gap” between white Americans and Black Americans has gotten worse in recent years. The latest available data (from 2007) shows that for every dollar in wealth held by a white household, the typical Black household has just 10 cents. Hispanics have now moved ahead of Blacks. They now have 12 cents in wealth for every dollar of white wealth.

Wealth accumulation tends to be inter-generational. Indeed, most experts agree that the single biggest predictor of how much wealth you will accumulate is the net worth of your parents and how much of it they were able to pass on to you. However, this economic truism does not explain why Hispanics have started to accumulate more wealth than Blacks.

Overall, however; the years of the Bush administration were not good for most Americans. The Federal Reserve report shows that the net worth of the average American family is less today than it was in 2001.

Cuba Libre ?

Faced with an aging population and a life expectancy of 77.3 years Cuba's government has raised the retirement threshold by five years, to 60 for women and 65 for men . About 90 percent of Cubans have government jobs, and now both sexes must work at least 30 years, not 25, to get a full pension. When fully phased in by 2015 it means Cuba's retirement age will exceed Latin America's average of 59 for women and 62 for men .
The government says 3 million people attended town-hall meetings to discuss the potential retirement age increase last year, with 99.1 percent supporting it.

As Cuba's work force shrinks, the ratio of workers to retirees has narrowed from seven-to-one in 1970 to three-to-one today. Had the country not raised its retirement age, the ratio would have been two-to-one by 2025, the government said.

Now just where in this decadent capitalist world of ours have we heard the exact same arguments being made and almost the exact same solutions being implemented , i wonder ?

The socialism of the Gaelic Athletic Association

On a previous blog we discussed anarchist football , while surfing i came across this interesting article on the Gaelic Athletic Association in Ireland . Founded in 1884 with over 1 million members in 2,600 clubs .

Its players are amateurs, the grass roots are as important as the top echelons, and the majority of big games remain on free-to-air TV. And unlike football, clubs cannot be bought and sold and there are no private club owners. On the administrative side, club members elect an executive committee to carry out the running of the club on an annual basis. At the higher echelons of the GAA, such members must vacate their post after four years.

But Dr David Hassan of the University of Ulster denies that running the game with volunteers at grass-roots level means off-field activities are also "amateur". "At a community level, local competent professional people who are sympathetic to the GAA often do administrative jobs, such as a local accountant becoming club treasurer."

"The clubs and games are based in the community and operate on behalf of those people who are based in the community. If the grass roots say some policy proposal is a move in the wrong direction, the administrators cannot just say - as may be the case in English soccer - 'This is just business'."

Perfectly understandable

The Edinburgh home of former Royal Bank of Scotland boss Sir Fred Goodwin has been attacked . A police car is now guarding the entrance to Sir Fred's home, in the Grange area of the city.

Three smashed ground-floor windows of the stone villa were clearly visible. In the driveway, the rear window of a dark-coloured Mercedes saloon was smashed, as well as the nearside rear passenger window.

A statement was issued to Edinburgh's Evening News on Wednesday morning by a group which claimed it was behind the attack.
It said: "We are angry that rich people, like him, are paying themselves a huge amount of money, and living in luxury, while ordinary people are made unemployed, destitute and homeless. This is a crime. Bank bosses should be jailed. This is just the beginning."

No comment ;-)

Capitalism is the problem - socialism is the solution

Continuing my doom and gloom , the end is nigh , contributions .

Famines affecting a billion people will threaten global food security during the 21st century, according to a leading US scientist. Nina Fedoroff, the US State Department chief scientist, is convinced that food shortages will be the biggest challenge facing the world as temperatures and population levels rise. Food security in the coming years, she said, is “a huge problem” that has been met with little more than complacency. “We are asleep at the switch,” she said.

Dr Fedoroff said famines that strike a billion people are quite possible in a world where climate change has damaged food production and the human population has risen to nine billion. Even wealthy countries like Britain and the United States will struggle to feed many of their citizens, with the poorest in society likely to suffer the most.

Temperatures, which are rising as a result of climate change, are expected to cause savage reductions in productivity in vast areas of the world’s most fertile lands. During the 2003 European heatwave crop yields fell by 20 to 25 per cent in France and this is a pattern likely to be repeated on a much wider scale in the future.

free education

An alternative school in southern Scotland which was closed more than a decade ago after is set to reopen. Kilquhanity House near Castle Douglas has been given the go-ahead to become a day school for 15 pupils. Former pupil Andrew Pyle is to be the school's new head teacher.
He said the children would be offered a creative and flexible education where they could choose what to study and homework and exams would be optional.

Kilquhanity was founded in 1940 by John Aitkenhead to provide an alternative to ordinary schools. He felt they delivered an education which was too authoritarian and too utilitarian.
At Kilquhanity youngsters were expected to fill their time but could opt to play the piano all day or explore the woods. Rules were decided by a weekly council meeting in which the youngest child had the same voting rights as the head teacher.
Many youngsters went on to become gifted artists, designers or writers.
Mr Aitkenhead closed the school in 1997 after a visit from inspectors who criticised education standards and the state of the buildings. He died a year later.

"If Kilquhanity can offer you anything it is the ability to adapt to the uncertain futures that our children probably are going to face. I am not entirely sure that conventional education and state education is going to do that any more." Mr Pyle said

the gaza tragedy

The BBC news headline called it "abuse" and "vandalism". Why the delicacy ? The reported words of an Israeli described what it was "cold blooded murder". The testimonies were published by the military academy at Oranim College.

"The testimonies conveyed an atmosphere in which one feels entitled to use unrestricted force against Palestinians," academy director Dany Zamir told public radio.
"The climate in general was that lives of Palestinians are much, much less important than the lives of our soldiers " A soldier's testimony.
The soldiers' testimonies also reportedly told of an unusually high intervention by military and non-military rabbis, who circulated pamphlets describing the war in religious terminology.
"All the articles had one clear message," one soldier said. "We are the people of Israel, we arrived in the country almost by miracle, now we need to fight to uproot the gentiles who interfere with re-conquering the Holy Land.Many soldiers' feelings were that this was a war of religion."

The soldiers’ testimonies include accounts of an unarmed old woman being shot at a distance of 100 yards, a woman and her two children being killed after Israeli soldiers ordered them from their house into the line of fire of a sniper and soldiers clearing houses by shooting anyone they encountered on sight.
“That’s the beauty of Gaza. You see a man walking, he doesn’t have to have a weapon, and you can shoot him,” one soldier told Danny Zamir, the head of the Rabin pre-military academy
"When we entered a house, we were supposed to bust down the door and start shooting inside and just go up storey by storey… I call that murder..." One non-commissioned officer told Mr Zamir

1,434 people dead, 960 of them civilians.

Israel's Defence Minister Ehud Barak told Israel Radio that "I still say we have the most moral army in the world. Of course there may be exceptions..."

one to put in your diary

Growing world population will cause a "perfect storm" of food, energy and water shortages by 2030, the UK government chief scientist has warned. By 2030 the demand for resources will create a crisis with dire consequences. Prof John Beddington said “If we don’t address this, we can expect major destabilisation, an increase in rioting and potentially significant problems with international migration, as people move out to avoid food and water shortages.”

Demand for food and energy will jump 50% by 2030 and for fresh water by 30%, as the population tops 8.3 billion . Climate change will exacerbate matters in unpredictable ways. The United Nations Environment Programme predicts widespread water shortages across Africa, Europe and Asia by 2025. The amount of fresh water available per head of the population is expected to decline sharply in that time.
Improving agricultural productivity globally was one way to tackle the problem .At present, 30-40% of all crops are lost due to pest and disease before they are harvested.

BBC memory lapse

The BBC reports " Making the Post Office the "people's bank" could secure its future and help those not served by banks, a coalition of MPs and interest groups is arguing.They are due to outline plans for a Post Bank, offering a wide range of financial services at its branches. ..."

Yet in the whole report by the BBC not one single mention of Girobank and its shameful sell-off to Alliance and Leicester for a pittance in 1990 .
Girobank had grown rapidly to become Britain's sixth biggest bank in a few years after its launch in 1968. Lets not forget these facts about Girobank .

According to wikipedia , It was the first bank designed with computerised operations in mind; the first bank in Europe to adopt OCR (optical character recognition) technology; the first UK bank to offer free accounts to individuals; and the first bank in Europe to offer telephone banking, beating the much trumpeted First Direct service by several years. It is widely credited for shaking up the UK banking market, forcing competitors to innovate and respond to the needs of the mass market...Although the Giro did offer personal loans through a third party, it did not offer many of these main services on its own behalf until after the relaunch in 1978. It added savings accounts, overdrafts, revolving credit accounts, credit and debit cards, and was instrumental in the formation of the LINK ATM consortium of smaller banks and building societies which led the commercial clearing banks to begin linking their own networks which they had hitherto refused to do. It was also quick to establish internet banking and mass market it to its customers. So although the Girobank ended up looking much like any other bank, it was clearly nothing like the type of bank it originally expected to be, but it had also been instrumental in changing the competitive nature of the banking market in the UK and had been a great innovator.

It will also be remembered according to The Guardian for introducing the first interest-paying current account in a move that forced the high street banks to fall into line.

If memory serves me right , it was sold for £300 -odd million yet surprisingly enough - not , Alliance and Leicester valued it in its following financial report at about a billion pounds .

Yet the BBC conveniently forgets this past privatisation of the Post Office assets failure and the then government's short sightedness when it is preently busy trumpetting Mandelson's attempts to sell off Royal Mail !!

water wars

A report by the World Economic Forum, which runs the annual Davos meetings of the international business and financial elite, says that lack of water, will "soon tear into various parts of the global economic system" and "start to emerge as a headline geopolitical issue".

60 per cent of China's 669 cities are already short of water.

The World Water Development Report, compiled by 24 UN agencies under the auspices of Unesco, adds that shortages are already beginning to constrain economic growth in areas as diverse and California, China, Australia, India and Indonesia.

The report also expects water conflicts to break out in the Middle East, Haiti, Sri Lanka, Colombia and other countries.
"Conflicts about water can occur at all scales," it warns. "Hydrological shocks" brought about by climate change are likely to "increase the risk of major national and international security threats".