The Communist Comeback

by ISRAEL SHAMIR
 
Communism in Russia: premature obits? 

Moscow saw its biggest demo in a decade last Saturday. It was a feel-good, peaceful manifestation of youthful Facebook users, and it was already nicknamed the Likes Parade, as the prospective participants had clicked on “like” in response to the call to demonstrate. The predictions were dire: some expected clashes and bloody martyrdom, others hoped for a conquest of the Kremlin and revolution. However things went smoothly. Police were friendly too; riot police were stationed far away near the Kremlin gates so as not to annoy the people. The speakers stressed their desire to avoid revolutionary upheaval; there were speakers from diverse groups including nationalists, the far left, liberals and the far right.

The big winners of the elections (the communists of KPRF and Fair Russia) sent some token representatives but stayed away en masse, leaving the ground to small opposition groups. Crowd assessments varied from 30,000 to 90,000; not too many for a city of 15 million inhabitants, but undoubtedly impressive.

It could also serve as a wakeup call to the Putin administration: for too long a time, they banked on their hold on the mainstream media and on the passivity of the people. Now they have begun to act: the state-owned TV broadcasted pictures of the demo and provided overwhelmingly conservative commentary. Until now, this TV network had preferred to show non-political entertainment, completely blocking out real current events.

The TV program included frightening stories from Cairo, where the Tahrir revolution undermined the economy and brought the Islamists  within reach of power; pictures of the Russian aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov on its way to Syria; and even a previously lost interview of the late writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn speaking against revolutions in general. Memories of  traumatic 1990 were brought back to scare a lot of ordinary Russians. The message was for peaceful and consistent changes, as against revolutions and upheavals, and this resonated well with the rather conservative Russian public outside of the big cities.

However, there are strong voices for change; and these voices found comfort in  US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton’s support. The communists could not stay away from the protests, fearing their own marginalisation; they will demonstrate on December 18.

Putin has some time left until March when he is due for re-election or removal. There is a feeling that he will lose if he should continue to rule by the old methods and rely on the same people. Apparently he understands that,  and has decided that his campaign will be run by the recently formed Popular Front instead of tarnished United Russia. But this is hardly enough. The opposition is demanding a recount and/or reelection; this call may be beaten only by more impressive real deeds.

Putin has to find broad popular support — rely upon the communists, the winners of the parliamentary elections, and remove the most hated and most corrupt officials he inherited from Yeltsin’s administration. This would entail parting ways with neoliberalism’s model and embracing nationalization of  resources, mobilization economics, putting an end to the offshore activities, repatriation of  funds from overseas banks, progressive taxation (if not confiscation) of the super-rich and their assets.

This is a tall order, for Putin played ball with the “offshore aristocracy” and supported the neoliberal agenda. But he may do it in order to survive. US ex-presidential candidate McCain recently threatened Putin with the fate of Kaddafi, and this threat was repeated by some pro-Western protesters in Moscow. This will hardly make him more flexible to Western pressure: Kaddafi followed instructions from Washington for the last five years until his murder — Putin will not repeat his mistake.

Was there election fraud to any great extent? Up to a point, though not to the degree of the general suspicions  I reported last week. United Russia did well in the countryside, in small towns (above 50 per cent) and in the national (ethnic) republics (above 80 per cent). It did less well in the big cities and in the Russian (as opposed to ethnic republics) heartland – about 35 per cent of the vote. The total probably is similar to the official result.

The best tool to judge are the  polls: if the results were manipulated, they would be at great variance with the predictions. The US Moscow embassy confidential cable 09MOSCOW2530 available to us courtesy of Wikileaks assesses Russian pollsters as rather reliable: “Russian public opinion polling firms and their staffs exhibited a thorough knowledge of current survey methods, and the staff we spoke with demonstrated high standards of professionalism. Presnyakova felt that, all other issues aside, the well-educated analysts working at the four organizations maintained a high level of professional ethics. She said they would not “massage” data to achieve a particular result. Nothing we found contradicted this sentiment. …The Duma elections of December 2007 provide a worthwhile test of the four polling organizations. By comparing how these organizations predictions square with actual results, a clearer picture emerges of how well each firm does in estimating public opinion”.

“The table below provides the estimates for the organizations in the week just prior to the Duma elections. The bottom line provides the actual results.

                            United  Just Russia  KPRF     LDPR

VTsIOM                    62                   12                   8                 7

Levada Center          66                   12                   8                 6

Election Results       64                   12                  8                 8

Apparently their predictive ability is quite good. As for last week elections, they predicted the results with a similar degree of precision:

Polls, November 19-20, 2011        

54  per cent 17  per cent 12  per cent 10  per cent

Levada Center, November 11, 2011 —

53  per cent 20  per cent 12  per cent 9  per cent

Election results                          

49 per cent         19 per cent         11 per cent

For this reason, one should take the cries of fraud with a grain of salt. This does not mean the elections were fair and honest: the communists and the opposition had very little access to the mainstream media. I was told by an editor of a large Moscow newspaper that the communists refuse to grease the media’s wheels, and as a result they are being blocked from the printed media as well. United Russia, I was told, pays very well, and this ensures its good image in the press. This is the case on  public TV as well. Though state-owned TV is not allowed to charge parties, my TV contacts told me that other parties pay for their coverage with  funds provided by the Kremlin, while the communists get no funds and do not pay. In short, the Russian elections are as unfair as anywhere in the money-based world.

Vengeance of history

However, the most interesting part of the story remained obscured for  Western readers, and that is the comeback of communists. In the 1990s, the story of the decade was the demise of communism. It was supposed to be dead for good, this aberration of sacred property rights; and celebrating its death, Francis Fukuyama declared The End of History. But apparently rumours of its death were somewhat exaggerated.

The comeback has some good reasons in the Russian experience. While for the West the 1990s were not bad, the Russians (and other post-Soviet states) had an awful time. Their leaders derailed the country in order to kill communism, as they admitted later. Research institutes, hospitals, military and industry had been turned off at the source and sent to “make money and to become self-reliant.”  In scientific centres this drastic ‘market reform’  led to starvation and to mass emigration; while the father of the reform, the late Egor Gaydar, called for “adjustment to the means”.  Though things have improved greatly since 1992, they are still not as good as they were in  Soviet days. Now people refuse to view the restoration of capitalism as the final chapter, which can’t be overturned.

This success of communists is not surprising to careful readers of the Wikileaks cables. In a cable called “Communist Party: Not Dead Yet”, the US Ambassador in Moscow reported to the State Department in 2006: “Most observers describe the Communist Party (KPRF) as a party on life-support sustained by nostalgic pensioners. The cliché has it that as party stalwarts die off, so too will the KPRF. This assessment, however, ignores a relatively constant level of support, despite the demographics, and the attraction that some feel for a well-defined political party structure. The KPRF accommodates not only the “Soviet” socialist traditionalists, but also a new generation of intellectuals who wish, literally, to overthrow Russia’s current system which they believe only helps a select few.”

For a while (between 2003 and 2008) the Party lost its following as Russia received oil revenues and Putin stabilised economy, but after the 2008 crisis, it picked up again. The US Ambassador wrote in 2009: “The Communist Party has benefited from the economic crisis by attracting increased membership and strengthening its position as a populist alternative to the party of power, United Russia. The invigorated Communists demonstrated that they can organize rallies across the country, and most observers expect KPRF will pick up votes in March 1 regional elections. These successes have resulted from the party’s three-pronged strategy: parliamentary initiatives aimed at pocketbook issues; public protests and actions that demonstrate party vigor; and an “ideological campaign” to communicate their message and appeal to new and younger voters.”

“Communist leaders have lambasted the ruling government’s handling of the economic crisis, claiming that it favors the rich and ignores systemic weaknesses of the capitalist system. In a February 5 meeting, KPRF Deputy Chairman Ivan Melnikov told us that the government’s anti-crisis strategy was ‘not effective’ and was ‘the same as the Titanic’s after it hit the iceberg…to save the first-class passengers first.’  The KPRF has responded to the government’s anti-crisis measures with far-reaching proposals for nationalization and aggressive state intervention to bolster production and employment. KPRF Chairman Gennadi Zyuganov has repeatedly called for complete government takeover of all natural resources in Russia in order to distribute the country’s wealth directly to its citizens. Zyuganov also called on Putin and Medvedev to sack Finance Minister Aleksey Kudrin for his alleged bungling of the government’s anti-crisis policies”.

This wish of communists was recently fulfilled, and Alexei Kudrin has been sacked.

The financial crisis in Europe and in the US makes this shift of Russian public opinion especially important. The position of the 99 per cent went south with the destruction of the communist option in 1991, when the 1 per cent succeeded in convincing the rest that there is no alternative to their version of the market and that resistance is futile. With the resurrection of Russian communism,  Americans and Europeans will regain some leverage vis-á-vis  their elites, and, who knows, perhaps they will find their own way out of the impasse.

Israel Shamir can be reached at adam@israelshamir.net

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The Politics of Doomsday

by CONN HALLINAN
 

In a recent New York Times article the newspaper’s senior science writer, William J. Broad, takes a dig at Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich’s obsession with the possibility of a “nightmarish of doomsday scenarios: a nuclear blast high above the United States that would instantly throw the United States in a dark age.”

The phenomenon that Gingrich refers to is an electromagnetic pulse (EMP), one side effect of a nuclear explosion. EMPs can destroy or disrupt virtually anything electrical, from computers to power grids. As the Times points out, Gingrich has used this potential threat to advocate bombing Iran and North Korea. “I favor taking out the Iranian and North Korean missiles on their sites,” he told the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in 2009. Gingrich has also talked up the EMP “threat” on the campaign trail.

Broad dismisses EMPs as “a poorly understood phenomenon of the nuclear age” and quotes Missile Defense Agency spokesman Richard Lehner poo-pooing the damage from an EMP attack as “pretty theoretical.”

While the Times is correct in dismissing any Iranian or North Korean threat—neither country has missiles capable of reaching the U.S., Iran doesn’t have nuclear weapons, and both have never demonstrated a desire to commit national suicide—what Broad does not mention is that the effects of EMP are hardly “poorly understood”: the U.S. has an “E-bomb” in its arsenal.

More than that, the Pentagon considered using it during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Asked directly if the U.S. was considering using an EMP weapon, then 

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld answered, “You never know.”

The U.S. has known about the effects of EMPs since 1958, when a series of nuclear tests in the Pacific knocked out streetlights in Hawaii and radio reception in Australia for 18 hours. In large enough doses, EMPs can fry every electrical circuit in range, many of them permanently. One would essentially go from the 21^st century to the 19^th century in a few nanoseconds.

The U.S. began researching how to use EMPs as weapons shortly after the Pacific tests, and, while the details are classified, the Livermore and Los Alamos national labs have apparently come up with a working version of an “E-bomb.”

The principle is simple enough: a tube filled with explosives, wrapped with copper wire, encased in a metal shell. The copper wire is used to create a powerful magnetic field and when the explosives are fired, they compress the magnetic field to produce a powerful burst of electromagnetic energy called the “Compton effect.”

A large enough device can generate up to two billion watts, about what Hoover Dam turns out in a day.

The weapon is attached to a cruise missile. Any piloted craft would run the risk of frying its own electronics, because EMP waves can bounce off objects, like the ground, and be reflected back at the attack craft.

Britain’s Matra Bae Dynamics has produced an artillery shell that generates an EMP wave and is capable of knocking out electrical systems for several square miles.

The idea behind the “E-bomb” is that it would blind and disable any military force, but not inflict casualties (except if you are wearing a pacemaker or have electrical implants).  “The electromagnetic pulse generator is emerging as one of the strongest contenders…to find effective weapons to defeat an enemy without causing loss of life,” writes David Fulghum, an EMP expert.

But EMP waves would also paralyze ambulances, hospitals, power plants and water pumping systems, a specific violation of the Geneva Conventions.  Article 54, for instance, explicitly forbids rendering “useless” any “drinking water installations.”

There are ways to shield devices from EMPs, but they are expensive. So-called Faraday Cages intercept EMPs and redirect them into the ground, much like  lightening rod.

While the exact details of the U.S. “E-bomb” are classified, its existence is hardly a secret. Nor is the U.S. the only nation currently researching the uses of EMPs. Any country with a nuclear weapon—Great Britain, France, Russia, China, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea—is undoubtedly aware of its capabilities.

The fact that the effects of EMPs are well known, and that the U.S.—and apparently a number of other nations—has weaponized the phenomena, make it all the more curious that the Times treated the issue so lightly and failed to mention the U.S. program. Indeed, Broad says, “many scientists consider it yesteryear’s concern.”

That would certainly come as a surprise to the Livermore and Los Alamos National labs and the U.S. Air Force’s Research Laboratory at Kirtland Air Force base in New Mexico. There is also a test lab in Virginia.

Any such weapon should certainly be illegal under the strictures of the Geneva Conventions. Like poison gas, EMPs do not distinguish between military and civilian and, as such, are illegal under Article 48 requiring that warring parties “shall at all times distinguish between civilian population and combatants and between civilian objects and military objectives and accordingly shall direct their operation only against military objectives.”

Gingrich’s apocalyptic views on EMPs are longstanding, but he also uses them as raw meat for the “bomb Teheran and Pyongyang” crowd, a cynical election ploy from one of the more cynical politicians to grace the current U.S. stage.

But the “E-bomb” is real, and the general rule is, if you give the military a new toy, eventually they will want to test it in the real world. That world is filled with civilians— so-called “collaterals”— who will end up absorbing the brunt of this weapon.

Isn’t that worth reporting?

Conn Hallinan can be read at dispatchesfromtheedgeblog.wordpress.com. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, forthcoming from AK Press.  

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BY INDY STAFF

 

Environmental activist Ekayani Chamberlain wants local politicians to know exactly how dirty and dangerous hydro-fracking is. On Nov. 30, Chamberlain stopped by Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s New York City office with a bottle of fracked water. Along with it came a letter, excerpted below.

Message in a Bottle:

I am supplying you with a “message in a bottle” today in an attempt to bring you up to speed in real life terms about the effects of hydro- fracking. This bottle of water is contaminated with fracking fluid , the toxic chemicals used to force gas out of the ground. It was taken from The Sautners’ well who no longer have clean water to drink as a result of being fracked but who are no longer being delivered clean water. They reside in Dimock, Pa. just 35 miles from the border of Hancock, New York . Please use extreme caution and Do Not drink this water or dispose of it. My best recommendation would be that you have it sent directly to a truly independent laboratory for it to be analyzed to fully understand the toxic effects. I wanted to bring some reality to the table as I don’t think you have been able to visit the town of Dimock up till now to see firsthand the conditions there.

I understand that you have some skepticism about the scientific research out of Cornell that has been done on the hazards so like a true New Yorker I cut to the chase and provide you with the cold hard facts in terms of this evidence. Water seeps everywhere. That is it’s unique and marvelous quality. Trying to outrun this contaminated water in the form of rain, snow will be impossible. That same quality we admire will become deadly and all pervasive once permanently poisoned with fracking fluid. Please consider your daughters. Please consider us and abandon this ill conceived plan to drill anywhere in New York State either near our water sheds or on so called “private lands.” Water knows no such boundaries as it travels in clouds, disperses as condensation on our oceans and rivers and comes out of our taps. As you can see the environmental impact is nothing short of epic in the havoc it will produce.

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