Today's Stories

September 30, 2009

Vijay Prashad
McChyrstal's Afghan Desolation

Paul Craig Roberts
Another War in the Works

September 29, 2009

Marshall Auerback
A Neoliberal Hijacking

Alan Farago
Recovery Without Feeling

Jeff Sher
Shopping for Health Care

Bruce Jackson
60 Minutes and the General

Gareth Porter
Fears of Defeat in Afghanistan

Jonathan Cook
Palestinians in the Israeli Army

Bouthaina Shaaban
Arabs in the International Balance

Dave Lindorff
Looking Under the TARP

Stephen Soldz
Spreading Hysteria About Swine Flu "Hysteria"

Sara Mann
The Party of No Meets the Island of No

Website of the Day
Cosmos, Autotuned

September 28, 2009

Laura Carlsen
The Sound and Fury of the Honduran Coup

Anthony DiMaggio
The U.S., Iran and Nuclear Terror

Paul Craig Roberts
More Lies, More Deceptions

Neve Gordon
On Palestinian Civil Disobedience

Bill Quigley
Street Report From the G20

Harvey Wasserman
Obama's LBJ Moment

Nicola Nasser
Stuck Between Two Failures

Ben Rosenfeld Murder in New Orleans: Remembering Kirsten Brydum

Website of the Day
The Short March

September 25-7, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
The Ruin of His Presidency

Daniel Wolff
Speculating on Education

Rev. William E. Alberts
How "White Magic" Makes the Ism of Race Disappear

Mike Roselle
Send Lawyers, Guns and Money

Saul Landau
Covert Memories From Miami

Eshan Azari
Why Afghan Intellectuals Live in National Despair

Winslow T. Wheeler
The Pentagon Feedlot

Robert Jensen
Is Obama a Socialist?

Jonathan Cook
Sleeping with the Enemy

Nelson P Valdés
Cuba, Hurricanes and the Internet

David Michael Green
Dumping Dubya

Ramzy Baroud
The Goldstone Report and Israeli Impunity

John V. Whitbeck
The Partition Straightjacket

Andy Worthington
Gitmo Trial Delayed ... Again

David Ker Thomson
The Lady Vanishes

Seth Sandronsky
Obama and Race Management

Jim Goodman
Why are Farmers Afraid of Michael Pollen?

Charles R. Larson
From Oppression to Opportunity

David Yearsley
Froberger's Travels

Kim Nicolini
Hardcore Capitalism

Lorenzo Wolff
Transparent Pink

Website of the Weekend
An Emergency Appeal in the Fight Against Big Coal

September 24, 2009

Steven Higgs
Even in Indiana, Doctors Support National Health Insurance

Christopher Brauchli
Death Pays

Marshall Auerback
The Shortfall at the FDIC

Stephanie Westbrook
Italy's Fallen Soldiers

Nadia Hijab
Know Your Dictator

Sen. Russell Feingold
Fixing the Patriot Act, Restoring the Constitution

David Macaray
Goodbye "Norma Rae"

Binoy Kampmark
Curry Bashings in Oz

Joe Allen
Dancing With the Hammer

Website of the Day
The Most Corrupt Members of Congress

September 23, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
The Economy is a Lie, Too

Gabriel Kolko
The United States in Afghanistan: Eight Years Later

Uri Avnery
The Waldorf-Astoria Summit

Shamus Cooke
The First Shots of the Trade War

Missy Beattie
The Sound of Money

Gareth Porter
Taliban Rising

Mark Weisbrot
How Much Repression Will Hillary Clinton Support in Honduras?

Dr. Susan Block
The Murder of Annie Le

Norm Kent
Pot and the Right to Pursue Happiness

Richard Neville
Apocalypse Porno

Website of the Day
In Carver Country

September 22, 2009

Franklin C. Spinney The Huge Hole in Gen. McChrystal's Afghan Counterinsurgency Strategy

Russell Mokhiber
Who's the Pimp?

Greg Grandin
Zelaya's Brazilian Gambit

Nikolas Kozloff
Salvaging Democracy in Honduras Will Be Tricky

John Ross
Mexico Convulsed by Paranoia

Ron Jacobs
Gen. McChrystal's Salespitch

Tariq Ali
The Afghan Folly

Dave Lindorff
NYT Trashes Single-Payer

Harvey Wasserman
Tom Friedman's Idiocy Atomique

Vijay Prashad
Is Anything Better Than Nothing?

Kareem Shora
After the CIA Torture Report

Website of the Day
Did a State Dept Official Sell Nuclear Secrets?

September 21, 2009

JoAnn Wypijewski
Will Trumka or the Steelworkers Push Labor Into Battle?

Carl Finamore
Backstage at the AFL-CIO Convention

Uri Avnery
Sliming Goldstone and His Report

Nikolas Kozloff
Joe Wilson's Immigration Hypocrisy

Paul Simpson, M.D.
Why Your Doctor May Have PTSD

Alan Nasser
New Deal Liberalism Writes Its Obituary

Ray McGovern
CIA Torturers Running Scared

Dave Lindorff
Thoughts on Saving an Old Barn

Lina Thorne
Women, War and Afghanistan

Jeb Sprague
Confronting the G20

Website of the Day
Petition: Save the Yellowstone Grizzly

September 18-20, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
When Gossip Came Back and Our Modern Age was Born

Russell Mokhiber
Meet the Real Death Panels

Mike Whitney
The Post-Bubble Malaise

David Michael Green
Can America be Salvaged?

Jonathan Cook
Boycott Derails Jerusalem Rail Line

Nadia Hijab
Sinking the Goldstone Report

Mark Weisbrot
Recession, Recovery and Reform: Will Anything Change?

Michael Winship
Let's Make a Deal, Beltway Edition

Michael Leonardi
The Nuclear Dump in the Mediterranean Sea

Andy Worthington
The Kuwaiti Who Met Bin Laden

Fred Gardner
The Prohibitionists' Manifesto

David Macaray
What Happens in Congress Stays in Congress

David Rosen
System Failure and the Garrido Case

Jason Mark
Hacking the Sky

Mike Ferner
In Praise of Senator Baucus

Farzana Versey
The Great Indian Rope Trick

Ron Jacobs
Dr. Guillotin and Dr. Faustus: an Interview with Marc Estrin

elin o'Hara slavick
Flags for Hiroshima: Artist's Statement

Gilad Aztmon
Vengeance, Barbarism and Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds

David Yearsley
Mendelssohn as Organ Maestro

Charles R. Larson
Darkness, Dignity and Hope in Liberia

Lorenzo Wolff
Dialing Up The Clash

Website of the Weekend
Meet Your Conservative Movement

September 17, 2009

Joshua Frank
Max Baucus: the Slick Swindler

Brenda Norrell
Cry Me a River: Uranium and Genocide in Indian Country

Robert Weissman
The Financial Crisis, One Year Later

Pam Martens
The Filmmakers vs. the Capitalists

Franklin Lamb
Palestinian Camps Are Ready to Erupt

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Cuban Five: An Insult to Humanity

Jed Bickman
Drone War Over Pakistan

Alan Farago
The Mayor of Coconut Creek Gets Butterflies

Website of the Day
C.R.O.C.

September 16, 2009

Ray McGovern
Torture and Accountability

Stephen Green
America's Strange Health Care Debate

Andy Worthington
Is Bagram Obama's New Secret Prison?

Dean Baker
Short Sellers: the Unsung Heroes of the Financial Crisis

Anthony DiMaggio
Killing the Messenger

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Cuban Five: The Unheard Call

Benjamin Dangl
Justice Follows Direct Action

Robin Willoughby
The World Seed Conference: Good for Farmers?

Eric Walberg
EuroPeace, the Sounds of Silence

James Ridgeway
Bring That "Boy" Down

Website of the Day
Baucus' Bogus Bill

September 15, 2009

Mike Whitney
The Real Lesson of Lehman's Fall

Mutadhar al-Zaidi
The Story of My Shoe

Marshall Auerback
Government Spending is the Solution--Not the Problem

Afshin Rattansi
The Deal That Led to the Srebrenica Massacre: Former UN Spokeswoman Fingers Holbrooke and the Clinton Administration

Jonathan Cook
How US Tax Breaks Fund Israeli Settlers

Gareth Porter:
Niger Redux? IAEA Conceals Evidence Iran Nuke Docs Were Forged

Dave Lindorff
Congress Needs More Catcalls

Winslow T. Wheeler
Obama and Pentagon Pork

Franklin Spinney
Bin Laden's Latest Message and the Nuttiness of the War on Terror

Karen Korenoski /
Michael Yates
Up in Wood Smoke: Boulder's Dirty Little Secret

David Macaray
Government Cheese

Susie Day
President Mao-bama's Little Red Primer

Website of the Day
The Cotton Pickin' Truth: the Persistance of Slavery in Mississippi

September 14, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
The Health Care Deceit

M. G. Piety
The Danes Do It (Health Care) Better

Shamus Cooke
Wall Street Under Obama: Bigger and Riskier

Bouthaina Shaaban
Three Faces and a Homeland

Alvaro Huerta
In Defense of the Undocumented: Immigrants and Health Care

John Ross
Mexico Loses Its History

Harvey Wasserman
The Supreme Court and Corporate Money

Adam Federman
The Plight of the Bumblebee

Stephen Fleischman
The Federal Twist

Robert Jensen
Can Journalism Schools be Relevant in a World on the Brink?

Website of the Day
The Origin of Sex Offender Registries

September 11-13, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Obama's Big Speech: Math Trumps Rhetoric

JoAnn Wypijewski
Trumka Takes Over AFL-CIO

Carl Ginsburg
The Patient as Profit Center

Leonard Peltier
I am Barack Obama's Political Prisoner Now

Franklin Lamb
Ted Kennedy's Changing Take on Israel

Benjamin Dangl
Throwing Bullets at Failed Policies

Mike Whitney
How to Fight Deflation

John Berger
In Search of Antonello

Saul Landau
Watergate and Modern Scandals

Russell Mokhiber
Disgraceful Democrats

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Pryor's Judgment

Felice Pace
NPR's Linda Gradstein Has Done It Again on Gaza

Jordan Flaherty
The Battle Over Discriminatory Housing Laws in New Orleans

Ron Jacobs
It's Time to be Impolite About Afghanistan

David Macaray
The Utility of Boycotts

David Correia
Welcome to the Business-Friendly Carpenter's Union

Robert Bryce
Wind Turbines and Bird Kills

Christopher Brauchli
Defenders of the Classroom

Paul Krassner
Aha! A Few Words About the 9/11 Truth Movement

Charles R. Larson
Deracination

Kim Nicolini
"Extract:" An Exercise in Economic Realism

David Yearsley
Tall Buildings: the Sound and the Silence

Lorenzo Wolff
In Defense of the One Hit Wonder

Poets' Basement
McEnteer and Corseri

Website of the Weekend
Pizarchik: the Wrong Choice

September 10, 2009

Joshua Frank
Inside Hanford's B Reactor: a Tour of the World's Most Toxic Nuclear Site

Dean Baker
Bernanke's Bad Money

Brian M. Downing
The State of U.S. National Security

Franklin C. Spinney
Portrait of an Afghan Firefight: Up Close and Personal

Andy Worthington
No Escape From Guantánamo

Chase Madar
Samantha Power and the Weaponization of Human Rights

Farzana Versey
A Tale of Two Slums

Ronnie Cummins
Whole Foods, Fair Trade and Organics

Binoy Kampmark
Health Care, Obama and the System

Timothy Lebrón
The Conservative Case for Health Care Reform

Charles R. Larson
A Solution to the Health Care Dilemma

Website of the Day
The Debtor's Revolt Begins!

September 9, 2009

Richard Neville
Trigger-Happy in Afghanistan

Melissa Checker
Double Jeopardy: Carbon Offsets and Human Rights Abuses

Nadia Hijab
Settling for ... Settlements?

Robert Weissman
The Stakes at the Supreme Court

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Arabs Call for General Strike

Russell Mokhiber
Pollan, Mackey, Whole Foods and Single Payer

James Ridgeway
The Dotty Factor: Will Demented Geezers Wreck the Economy?

Richard W. Behan
Obama's Imperative in Afghanistan

James McEnteer
The Photo and the Secretary: How to Appall Robert Gates

Martha Rosenberg
Hatchery Horrors

Website of the Day
Belmondo Verité

September 8, 2009

Henry A. Giroux
The Corporate Stranglehold on Education

Stephen Soldz
Psychologist Accused of War Crimes Opposes Investigations

John Ross
Rituals of the Absurd

Jeff Leys
Health Care vs. Warfare: the Future of the Afghan War

Mike Whitney Ashcroft: Repugnant to the Constitution

Shamus Cooke
Obama's Empty Labor Day Speech

Ellen Brown
Did Lehman Brothers Fall or Was It Pushed?

Norman Solomon Men With Guns: In Kabul and Washington

Deepak Tripathi
The Axis of Evil and the Great Satan

Laray Polk
Personality Cults, Indoctrination and Inculcation

Charles R. Larson
Just Who Does He Think He Is?

Website of the Day
The President is Not a Guidance Counselor

September 7, 2009

Vicente Navarro
Obama's Mistakes in Health Care Reform

Bouthaina Shaaban
In Praise of Admiral Mullen

David Macaray
Obama's Labor Day Report Card

Paul Craig Roberts
Indefensible Nation

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Ads Warn Against Marrying Non-Jews

Conn Hallinan
Brazil Flexes Its Muscles

Walter Brasch
The Origins of Labor Day, the Unknown Holiday

Mark Weisbrot
IMF Gives Honduran Government $175 Million

Carl Finamore
China's Birthday Stimulation

C. G. Estabrook
Advance Text of Obama's Big Speech

Website of the Day
One Down, 20,000 to Go

September 4-6, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Deeper Into the Tunnel

Carl Ginsburg
Saving New Orleans' Charity Hospital

Jonathan Cook
The Missing Link in Israeli Organ Theft?

George Wuerthner
The Unintended Consequences of Wolf Hunting

Marc Levy
The Bling They Curse and Carry

Ray McGovern
Holbrooke's Afghan Benchmark

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
It Happened in Miami

Joe Paff
Organizing the Mission

Gareth Porter
Taliban's Tank-Killing Bombs Came From CIA, Not Iran

Devin Beaulieu
Scaremongering About Bolivia and Islam

Anthony Papa
Why Leslie Crocker Snyder Should Not Become New York City's New DA

David Ker Thomson
Love and Dekes in Utopia

Don Fitz
The Case of the Biodevastation 7: What the Police Won't Apologize For

Lee Sustar /
S. Sepehri
The Fallout From Iran's Elections

Jim Goodman
Why Honor Organized Labor?

Wajahat Ali
Domestic Crusaders: Making Muslim American Theater

Ron Jacobs
Agitator Journalism: Remembering Ramparts

Helen Redmond
The Lion Sleeps Tonight: the Crimes and Misdemeanors of Teddy Kennedy

John V. Walsh
Obama to Cindy Sheehan: Get Lost

Charles R. Larson
Mandanipour's Masterpiece: Censoring an Iranian Love Story

Mark Scaramella
Ho-Bleeping-Hum: a Few Well-Chosen Words About Valerie Plame's Book

David Yearsley
Cameron Carpenter's Amazing Organ Transplants

Ben Sonnenberg
Hooking, Breaking Friendships, Cross-Dressing and, Above All, Delphine Seyrig

Poets' Basement
Davies, Orloski and Bready

Website of the Weekend
Architectural Semiotics with Glenn Beck

September 3, 2009

Marcus Rediker
Inside Auburn Prison

Ron Jacobs
Embedded With the Taliban

Mike Whitney
How Bad Will It Get?

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Untold Story of the Cuban Five: Indictment À La Carte

Saul Landau
Moby Dick and Asian Typhoons

Anat Matar
Israeli Academics Must Pay a Price to End Occupation

Tanya Golash-Boza
How Immigration Enforcement is Weakening National Security

Dave Lindorff
Which Side Are You On?

Andy Worthington
The Story of Gitmo's Two Syrians

Website of the Day
Plundering Appalachia

September 2, 2009

John Ross
Mexico's Plagues

Vijay Prashad
Hey Ram, the Things the Financial Times Group Does!

Rev. Jim Rigby
Why is Universal Health Care "Un-American"?

Joanne Mariner
What the Inspector General Found

Missy Beattie
Hejira: At Martha's Vineyard with Cindy Sheehan

Soren Ambrose
Multilateral Money

Diane Farsetta
Water: the Newest Wave of Corporate "Social Responsibility"

Nadia Hijab
Mulling Mullen's Message

Shamus Cooke
How to Lower the Deficit Without Killing Social Security

Charles R. Larson
Is Dick Cheney Running Scared?

Website of the Day
Inside the Egg Hatchery

September 1, 2009

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Wolf at Trout Creek

Paul Craig Roberts
Why Not Sanctions for Israel?

Mark T. Harris
The Whole Foods Boycott: It's About More Than CEO Hypocrisy

Dean Baker
Bank Profits Are Up: Did You Hear Anyone Say, "Thank You"?

Jeffrey Buchanan
Ending the Human Rights Crisis in KatrinaRitaVille

Robin Mittenthal
A Sea of Monocrops: Old MacDonald Never Had a Farm Like This

Ellen Brown
Mercury Mischief

Martha Rosenberg
Vytorin Marketing is Back

Website of the Day
Crazy Town Hall Protester Interviews

September 30, 2009

Media Hype Distorts So-Called Racist Strikes

Why British Workers Are Angry

By SEAUMAS MILNE

As the economic crisis has deepened and unemployment mushroomed, powerful voices opposing national action to protect jobs and industries, whether by governments or trade unions, have grown louder. From Davos to Detroit, the warning has gone out that “protectionism” is the path to 1930s-style perdition, opening the way to international conflict and decline. No matter that free-market globalization is almost universally recognized to have been at the heart of the financial meltdown that triggered the slump. Only through unfettered competition, many western politicians and pundits still insist, can growth resume and nationalist passions be restrained.

That was the media and political refrain that greeted multiple walkouts by thousands of engineering construction workers at oil refineries and power stations across Britain in January and February over the exclusion of local Labor from major new contracts. Strikes erupted again in late May, when Polish workers were brought in to replace local Labor at the South Hook liquefied natural gas terminal in Wales – and again in June, when 650 construction workers were sacked for taking unofficial industrial action, and then reinstated after thousands joined sympathy strikes across the country.

The fact that some pickets in the earlier stoppages held placards calling for “British jobs for British workers” seemed to confirm the worst: this was a spasm of chauvinist protest against foreign workers that had to be rejected and faced down. The unofficial strikes were denounced as “indefensible” by the prime minister Gordon Brown, while his business secretary, Peter Mandelson, warned against the dangers of xenophobia – and the most backward sections of Britain’s mass-circulation press oozed “understanding” for people they would normally castigate as selfish wreckers.

That alarm was echoed across Europe. In Italy, the chair of Italy’s employers’ organization Confindustria, Emma Marcegaglia, quoted Margaret Thatcher to appeal to Britain not “to go wobbly” on the free market in the face of “raw nationalistic instincts”. Even some who might have been expected to welcome a resurgence of working class action joined the criticism – such as the spokesman of France’s New Anti-Capitalist Party, Olivier Besancenot, who singled out the British strikes as one of several “worrying xenophobic movements”.

Given the way the dispute was reported, both at home and abroad, such reactions are scarcely surprising. But they reflect a serious misreading of what took place – and could very well happen again – as well as a wider response to the crisis that risks ramping up, rather than defusing, anti-migrant sentiment across Europe.

As Derek Simpson, joint leader of Britain’s biggest union Unite said at the time, the power construction strikes were in reality “not about race or immigration” but “about class”. The dispute was triggered when sub-contracted work on a new £200m ($300m) desulphurization unit at the Total-owned Lindsey refinery near Grimsby in Lincolnshire was re-assigned to a Sicilian company, Irem, which brought in a non-union Italian and Portuguese workforce to replace local Labor. The Irem workers were housed in a barge on the river Humber, bussed into the construction site every day and kept separate from other workers, who were convinced from the start that the contract had been won by bypassing union agreements on pay and conditions – though the company denied it (while failing to provide the evidence).

Equal access

With even clearer evidence of wage undercutting and exclusion of local workers from construction work, sub-contracted by the French company Alstom at Staythorpe power station in Nottinghamshire, and at the German-owned privatised energy corporation E.ON’s Isle of Grain site in Kent – using Polish and Spanish workers flown in for the purpose – wildcat strikes spread throughout the sector, from south Wales to northeast Scotland. Within a few days, they had closed more than 20 power plants and refineries across Britain.

The walkouts were all illegal. Under British anti-union laws, introduced by the Thatcher government and retained by New Labor, solidarity action is banned. But the strikers’ industrial muscle and the effectiveness of the stoppages ensured that no employer felt strong enough to take the two main unions that stood behind the walkouts – Unite and the GMB – to court. However, the unions could not openly endorse or lead the strikes without running the risk of heavy fines or sequestration of union assets. In that vacuum, some strikers initially used the “British jobs for British workers” slogan to mock the prime minister, who had cynically appropriated the far-right catchphrase at Labor’s 2007 conference.

But that was never a demand of the strike committee, which called instead for equal access for British-based Labor, of whatever nationality, and the enforcement of union-negotiated agreements in all engineering construction contracts. Within a couple of days, the more nationalistic slogans had been replaced, while posters were displayed on the Lindsey picket line in Italian calling on the Italian workers to join the strikes. Even “workers of the world unite” made an appearance.

There was clearly a danger that the dispute could have been diverted into a chauvinistic blind alley, but it didn’t happen. Union activists gave short shrift to far-right British National Party infiltrators. The strikers didn’t scapegoat the foreign workers; they blamed the government and the employers. And the real nature of the strikes was driven home by the hundreds of Polish migrant workers who joined the walkouts at Langage power station in Plymouth: this was a campaign not for privileges for indigenous over foreign workers, but against the use of foreign-based contract Labor to exclude or undercut all workers in Britain.

But the narratives of a protectionist threat and working class racism are so ingrained in the mainstream British media that news reports simply adjusted reality accordingly. In the BBC’s main evening TV news bulletin, one striker was shown saying, “we can’t work alongside of them”, in a reference to Italian and Portuguese workers. The second part of the sentence – “we’re segregated from them” – was cut, turning the meaning of what the man was saying on its head and giving the false impression that local workers were refusing to work with foreigners. Meanwhile, tabloid newspaper journalists tried to convince picketing workers to be photographed with Union Jack flags.

“The reporting of the strikes was based on a massive misconception,” Paul McDowall, Unite shop steward at the Lindsey site, insists. “The real purpose of our action was quite simply to protect the terms and conditions, pay, welfare and health and safety that we’ve built up over many years – and that remains the case. It had nothing to do with xenophobia.”

Reasons for anger

In the event, the strike at Lindsey refinery was settled with a deal that opened up jobs linked to the disputed contract to British-based workers without loss to the Italians and Portuguese, as well as creating the right for local union officials to audit the pay and conditions of imported Labor.

Already, the quarantining of the Italian and Portuguese workers has ended and, rather than increasing tensions between British and foreign workers, the strikes have at least ensured that they are now able to communicate, making it more difficult for the employers to set one group against another.

Nevertheless, disputes at Staythorpe and the Isle of Grain have continued, industrial action is possible at the Olympic village site in east London, and conflict has twice re-ignited at Lindsey, as evidence emerged that Irem had indeed undercut union agreements by employing lower-skilled, lower-paid Labor on the contract – while skilled engineering construction workers at the refinery now stand to lose their jobs. The eruption of renewed unofficial strikes at energy construction sites across Britain in May, which led to a rapid climbdown by Hertel UK over attempts to exclude local Labor at Milford Haven’s South Hook terminal, was repeated the following month, when 51 workers were laid off in violation of the agreement that settled the February dispute. Hundreds walked out in protest. When they were sacked, solidarity action spread across Britain until the contractor was forced to back down.

Meanwhile, the broader backlash grows against the deregulated, race-to-the-bottom neoliberal order on which New Labor was built and that is now being so comprehensively discredited by the economic crisis it unleashed. Underlying these strikes was not only rising joblessness, but also the continued erosion of the much-acclaimed European social model – and the posted workers’ directive in particular, supposed to protect workers from exactly the kind of social dumping through contracted Labor that was the focus of the dispute.

In Britain, as elsewhere, the government implemented the directive in the weakest possible form, requiring only the minimum wage and basic employment rights for workers shipped in from elsewhere in the European Union. Both the directive and wider worker protection have now been further undermined by a string of European Court of Justice judgments – in the Laval, Viking and Rueffert cases – which have tipped the balance still further in favour of corporate freedom to undercut pay and conditions. And despite the British prime minister’s insistence that he has turned his back on “untrammelled markets”, Brown’s government has opposed attempts in recent months to reverse the impact of the court’s decisions.

That enduring neoliberal mindset – the inheritance of Thatcherism – and the hire-and-fire Labor market it has nurtured, are part of the reason why these issues have come to a head in a sharper form in Britain than in some other parts of Europe. But the idea that encouraging European corporations to send groups of workers back and forth across the continent to live in segregated barges and hostels hundreds of miles from home, while others are thrown out of work, might be a progressive development – or even necessary to generate the productivity growth to propel Europe out of recession – is absurd. And it will clearly no longer be tolerated in the midst of lengthening dole queues and a deregulation-fuelled crisis.

That is what has driven the refinery and power station walkouts, not xenophobia – let alone racism. With more than 100,000 jobs a month being lost across the country, a closely-knit skilled workforce saw the prospect of secure work on a series of new construction sites melting before their eyes – while for the employers, growing unemployment and insecurity offered the opportunity to exploit EU competition rules and opaque sub-contracting chains to cut Labor costs.

That was understood by the European federations of engineering, construction and chemical workers’ unions, which described the original British strike campaign as part of a wider expression of “anger by working people at the prevailing EU settlement which prioritizes the needs of business and capital over those of Labor”. But just as the failure of European centre-left governments in recent years to represent working-class communities has opened the door to the far right, the insistence of the media and political class on branding workers who organize to defend their jobs and living standards as xenophobes could end up turning a fiction into reality.

Seumas Milne is a journalist at The Guardian, London.

This article appears in the current edition of this excellent monthly, whose English language edition can be found at mondediplo.com. This full text appears by agreement with Le Monde Diplomatique. CounterPunch features one or two articles from LMD every month.

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