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Bush Admin - The Most Secretive Govt Ever?

Tuesday, September 16th, 2008

(IPS) | The administration of President George W. Bush continues to expand government secrecy across a broad array of agencies and actions — and at greatly increased cost to taxpayers, according to a coalition of groups that promote greater transparency.

Dr. Patrice McDermott, director of Open the Government, a watchdog group, told IPS, “The federal government under the Bush administration has shown its commitment to secrecy by where it has put its money — more no-bid contracts, fewer government employees processing FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] requests, less on training on classification issues, and almost 200 dollars spent on keeping secrets to every dollar allocated to open them.”

“Given our growing deficit, the next administration faces difficult choices in restoring accountable government,” he added.

In its “Secrecy Report Card 2008,” released Sep. 9, the group concluded that the Bush administration “exercised unprecedented levels not only of restriction of access to information about federal government’s policies and decisions, but also of suppression of discussion of those policies and their underpinnings and sources.”

Open the Government is a Washington-based coalition of consumer and good government groups, librarians, environmentalists, labour, journalists, and others.

It says that that classification activity remains significantly higher than before 2001. In 2006, the number of original classification decisions increased to 233,639, after dropping for the two previous years.

The government spent 195 dollars maintaining the secrets already on the books for every one dollar it spent declassifying documents in 2007, a five percent increase in one year.

At the same time, fewer pages were declassified than in 2006. The nation’s 16 intelligence agencies, which account for a large segment of the declassification numbers, are excluded from the total reported figures.

Classified or “black” programmes accounted for about 31.9 billion dollars, or 18 percent of the fiscal year (FY) 2008 Department of Defence (DOD) acquisition funding requested last year. Classified acquisition funding has more than doubled in real terms since FY 1995.

Almost 22 million requests were received under FOIA in 2007, an increase of almost 2 percent over the previous year. But a 2008 study revealed that, in 2007, FOIA spending at 25 key agencies fell by 7.0 million dollars, to 233.8 million dollars, and the agencies put 209 fewer people to work processing FOIA requests.

While the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court does not reveal much about its activities, the Department of Justice reported that, in 2007, the court approved 2,371 orders — rejecting only three and approving two left over from the previous year. Since 2000, federal surveillance activity under the jurisdiction of the court has risen for the ninth year in a row — more than doubling during the Bush administration.

The court was established under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 1978 after revelations of the widespread wiretapping by the administration of Richard M. Nixon to spy on political and activist groups. Recently, efforts to reform the act have been triggered by the Bush administration’s admission that it had conducted secret surveillance programmes in the U.S. without warrants from the court.

In addition, more than 25 percent (worth 114.2 billion dollars) of all contracts awarded by the federal government last year were not subject to open competition — a proportion that has remained largely unchanged for the last eight years.

Investigations by Congress and independent government agencies of the war in Iraq have revealed billions of dollars in no-bid contracts, covering everything from delivering food and water to U.S. troops to providing armed security for U.S. officials and visiting dignitaries. There have been widespread allegations of waste, fraud and abuse by contractors. Several have been convicted and prosecutions of others are pending.

During 2007, government-wide, 64 percent of meetings of the Federal Advisory Committee were closed to the public. Excluding groups advising three agencies that historically have accounted for the majority of closed meetings, 15 percent of the remainder were closed — a 24 percent increase over the number closed in 2006. These numbers do not reflect closed meetings of subcommittees and taskforces.

The Federal Advisory Committee Act was passed in 1972 to ensure that advice by the various advisory committees formed over the years is objective and accessible to the public.

The report also found that in seven years, President Bush has issued at least 156 “signing statements”, challenging over 1,000 provisions of laws passed by Congress. In 2007, eight were issued.

The so-called “state secrets privilege” — invoked only six times between 1953 and 1976 — has been used by the Bush administration a reported 45 times, an average of 6.4 times per year in seven years. This is more than double the average (2.46) in the previous 24 years.

The “state secrets privilege” is a legal doctrine that contends that admission of certain information into court proceedings would endanger U.S. national security. The Bush administration has frequently invoked the privilege to dismiss lawsuits that would be embarrassing to the government, and the courts have generally been deferential to the government’s claims.

National Security Letter (NSL) requests continued to rise; the 2007 numbers are still classified, but the recently unclassified new number for 2006 shows a 4.7 percent increase in requests over 2005. Since enactment of the USA Patriot Act in 2001, the number of NSLs issued has seen an astronomical increase.

The NSL provision of the Patriot Act radically expanded the authority of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to demand personal customer records from Internet Service Providers, financial institutions and credit companies without prior court approval.

Through NSLs, the FBI is authorised to compile dossiers about innocent people and obtain sensitive information such as the web sites a person visits, a list of e-mail addresses with which a person has corresponded, or even unmask the identity of a person who has posted anonymous speech on a political website.

The provision also allows the FBI to forbid or “gag” anyone who receives an NSL from telling anyone about the record demand.

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Quebec man changes name to dodge relentless airport screening

Tuesday, September 16th, 2008

A Quebec businessman whose name is one of the many that have erroneously landed on the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s flight passenger watch list has decided to change his name to avoid lengthy security hassles at the airport.

Mario Labbé, an executive with a Montreal-based record company, says his Canadian passport triggers a red alert on the computers of U.S. customs agents every time he tries to board a flight to the U.S. — which is about once a month for the past seven years.

“I was pulled aside in a room … and you have to wait your turn to finally be released,” Labbé said. “An hour, an hour and a half, two hours, whatever it is after. Once I was caught in Miami like that for six hours.

“It’s always the same questions, about if I’ve lost my passport, if I’ve been to Japan — I don’t know why Japan, but in their file it was something to do with Japan.”

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security wrote a letter to Labbé in 2004, saying he had been placed on their watch list after falling victim to identity theft. At the time, the department said there was no way for his name to be removed.

Although Labbé wrote letters to the U.S. department, his efforts were in vain, prompting him to legally change his name.

“So now, my official name is François Mario Labbé,” he said.

“Then you have to change everything: driver’s license, social insurance, medicare, credit card — everything.”

Although it’s not a big change from Mario Labbé, he said it’s been enough to foil the U.S. customs computers.

The U.S. Transportation Security Administration has said it submits three updated lists to the airlines daily: a “no-fly” list identifying people not allowed to board planes, a “selectee” list of passengers requiring extra screening and another “cleared” list of passengers who have been certified as safe after experiencing problems.

The lists — compiled by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S. using information submitted by 17 different government departments and law enforcement agencies — are designed to keep terrorism suspects off commercial airline flights.

More than a million people are now on the lists, according to Roch Tassé of the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group, and another 25,000 are added each month.

He said there is no way of knowing how many Canadians have been flagged.

Liberal Senator Colin Kenny says his son, a lawyer, has the same problem and that Transport Canada is powerless to help.

Officials at the agency said “‘it’s not my problem, go and talk to the Americans,’” Kenny told CBC News.

U.S. security expert Daniel Steinbock said many people who have no connection to terrorism can end up on the lists. An even bigger problem, he said, is the so-called false positives that turn up if someone has the name of another person already on a list.

“The most notable one in the United States is Sen. Edward Kennedy, who for quite some time was prevented from getting on airplanes. Apparently, there was some other Edward Kennedy who was on the no-fly list,” Steinbock said.

The U.S. Transportation Security Administration has introduced a process for people to follow to have their names removed from a list. But because the backlog of requests is so large, it’s very difficult to get off, Steinbock said.

CBC News

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Coca-Cola to Phase Out Toxic Sodium Benzoate in the U.K.

Tuesday, September 16th, 2008

By David Gutierrez | The Coca-Cola Company has announced that it is in the process of phasing out the use of food additive sodium benzoate in the United Kingdom, after a number of studies have linked it to a wide variety of health problems.

Coca-Cola said that it had begun removing the chemical from its new batches of Diet Coke in January, and that the process would be complete by the end of the year. The company also intends to remove the additive from other soft drinks, although it has yet to find an effective replacement for it in certain fruit-juice containing products, such as Fanta and Dr. Pepper.

Sodium benzoate, also known as E211, is a preservative used to prevent mold from growing in soft drinks. It naturally occurs in certain fruits, including apples, cranberries and fruits, but in much lower concentrations than those used by the beverage industry.

Yet in combination with vitamin C - which naturally occurs in many soft drinks, or is added as another preservative - sodium benzoate can react to form the carcinogenic chemical benzene. Other studies have found that sodium benzoate can cause damage to human DNA, switching off certain sections of the genetic code and increasing the risk of Parkinson’s disease and cirrhosis of the liver.

Sodium benzoate also made the news recently as one of the chemicals implicated in increasing children’s risk of hyperactivity in a study by researchers from Southampton University. The other six implicated chemicals were all food colorings.

In response to the study, the British Food Standards Agency called for the six colors to be banned, but did not ask the same for sodium benzoate.

Coke attributed its decision not to the health effects of the additive, but to increasing consumer demand for natural ingredients.

“We are continuously looking at emerging trends and listening to our consumers thoughts about ingredients,” a company spokesperson said.

Competing companies have no plans to stop using the ingredient.

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McCain Now Claims to be Reformer of Wall Street

Tuesday, September 16th, 2008

By Matthew Rothschild |

Today is not a good day if you’re a free marketeer.

Lehman Brothers has collapsed.

Merrill Lynch sold itself off to Bank of America.

The stock market tumbled badly out of the gate.

And the specter of 1929 has reared its frightening head.

In taking stock, if you’ll excuse the expression, a couple of conclusions leap to mind.

First, this is what happens when you deregulate the financial markets.

With the repeal of Glass-Steagall, the New Deal banking law that Phil Gramm, Robert Rubin, and Bill Clinton agreed to toss overboard in 1999, the distinction between traditional banks and other financial institutions vanished.

As a consequence, all these institutions took on more risk, and everything got shakier.

And then the Fed, under Alan Greenspan, refused to regulate the subprime mortgage peddlers, and in fact, egged them on to ridiculous heights.

The Fed and the Treasury Department also let bloom a thousand funky financial instruments that were beyond the control of regulators.

Lehman Brothers placed itself in the center of this maelstrom. “Lehman, the number one underwriter of mortgage-backed bonds last year, amassed a giant portfolio of properties and mortgage-related securities,” The Washington Post reported. “But the value of the assets began to sink last year amid a spike in mortgage defaults by homeowners with subprime credit.”

Now we’ve got a mess on our hands, and we need the opposite of traditional Republican economics, which John McCain had been advocating until, well, this morning.

We need more government regulation, not less.

We need more government involvement in the economy, not less.

But that is not the Republican mantra.

“Economic freedom expands the prosperity pie; government can only divide it up,” says the Republican Platform. “That is why Republicans advocate lower taxes, reasonable regulation, and smaller, smarter government.”

But today, “economic freedom” and less regulation—which is what Republicans mean by “reasonable” regulation–have brought disaster.

Yet you wouldn’t know that by McCain’s statement on the Lehman collapse and that attendant volatility.

“I promise you: We will never put America in this position again. We will clean up Wall Street,” McCain said. “The McCain-Palin administration will replace an outdated, patchwork quilt of regulatory oversight and bring transparency and accountability to Wall Street. We will reform the regulatory bodies of government.”

But what does he mean by “reform”?

That is the question—not only about his plans for Wall Street, but for America. As far as Wall Street goes, McCain sounds, on the surface, like Eliot Spitzer, pre-call girl. But when Republicans talk about regulatory reform, they usually mean the gutting of regulation.

We’ve had eight years of a Republican President who didn’t believe in regulation, and we had eight years before that of a Democratic President who governed for Wall Street.

We’re seeing the results before our very eyes.

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Army scientists want to create ‘brain-wave helmet’

Tuesday, September 16th, 2008

By Mark Thompson / Washington | Soldiers barking orders at each other is so 20th Century. That’s why the U.S. Army has just awarded a $4 million contract to begin developing “thought helmets” that would harness silent brain waves for secure communication among troops. Ultimately, the Army hopes the project will “lead to direct mental control of military systems by thought alone.”

If this sounds insane, it would have been as recently as a few years ago. But improvements in computing power and a better understanding of how the brain works have scientists busy hunting for the distinctive neural fingerprints that flash through a brain when a person is talking to himself. The Army’s initial goal is to capture those brain waves with incredibly sophisticated software that then translates the waves into audible radio messages for other troops in the field. “It’d be radio without a microphone, ” says Dr. Elmar Schmeisser, the Army neuroscientist overseeing the program. “Because soldiers are already trained to talk in clean, clear and formulaic ways, it would be a very small step to have them think that way.”

B-movie buffs may recall that Clint Eastwood used similar “brain-computer interface” technology in 1982’s Firefox, named for the Soviet fighter plane whose weapons were controlled by the pilot’s thoughts. (Clint was sent to steal the plane, natch.) Yet it’s not as far-fetched as you might think: video gamers are eagerly awaiting a crude commercial version of brain wave technology — a $299 headset from San Francisco-based Emotiv Systems — in summer 2009.

The Army doesn’t move quite as fast as gamers though. The military’s vastly more sophisticated system may be a decade or two away from reality, let alone implementation. The five-year contract it awarded last month to a coalition of scientists from the University of California at Irvine, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Maryland, seeks to “decode the activity in brain networks” so that a soldier could radio commands to one or many comrades by thinking of the message he wanted to relay and who should get it. Initially, the recipients would most likely hear transmissions rendered by a robotic voice via earphones. But scientists eventually hope to deliver a version in which commands are rendered in the speaker’s voice and indicate the speaker’s distance and direction from the listener.

“Having a soldier gain the ability to communicate without any overt movement would be invaluable both in the battlefield as well as in combat casualty care,” the Army said in last year’s contract solicitation. “It would provide a revolutionary technology for silent communication and orientation that is inherently immune to external environmental sound and light.”

The key challenge will be to develop software able to pinpoint the speech-related brain waves picked up by the 128-sensor array that ultimately will be buried inside a helmet. Those sensors detect the minute electrical charges generated by nerve pathways in the brain when thinking occurs. The sensors will generate an electroencephalogram — a confusing pile of squiggles on a computer screen — that scientists will study to find those vital to communicating. “We think we can train a computer to understand those squiggles to the point that they can read off the commands that your brain is issuing to your mouth and lips,” Schmeisser says. Unfortunately, it’s not a matter of finding the single right squiggle. “There’s no golden neuron that’s talking,” he says.

Dr. Mike D’Zmura of UC-Irvine, the lead scientist on the project, says his task is akin to finding the right strands on a plate full of pasta. “You need to pick out the relevant pieces of spaghetti,” he says, “and sometimes they have to be torn apart and re-attached to others.” But with ever-increasing computing power the task can be done in real time, he says. Users also will have to be trained to think loudly. “How do we get a person to think something to themselves in a way that leaves a very strong signal in EEGs that we can read off against the background noise?” D’Zmura asks. Finally, because every person’s EEG is different, persons using “thought helmets” will have to be trained so that computers intercepting their unspoken commands recognize each user’s unique mental pattern.

Both scientists pre-emptively deny expected charges that they’re literally messing with soldiers’ minds. “A lot of people interpret wires coming out of the head as some sort of mind reading,” D’Zmura sighs. “But there’s no way you can get there from here,” Schmeisser insists. “Not only do you have to be willing, but since your brain is unique, you have to train the system to read your mind — so it’s impossible to do it against someone’s will and without their active and sustained cooperation.”

And don’t overlook potential civilian benefits. “How often have you been annoyed by people screaming into their cell phones?” Schmeisser asks. “What if instead of their Bluetooth earpiece it was a Bluetooth headpiece and their mouth is shut and there’s blessed silence all around you?” Sounds like one of those rare slices of the U.S. military budget even pacifists might support.

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DRUGS: A BUSINESS FOR OUR TIMES

Tuesday, September 16th, 2008

By Sam Smith - Progressive Review | Since there is so much bad financial news these days, we thought this might cheer you up. The drug business is doing extremely well, thanks in large part to years of de facto subsidy by the perversely misnamed “war on drugs.”

A recent CNN report said the Coast Guard had seized $4.7 billion worth of cocaine last year. That’s only the amount the Coast Guard seized and it’s only the value of cocaine, not all the other drugs.

The value is just shy of the $4.83 billion Google earned in the last quarter of last year. At the time Google had about 16,000 employees.

When you are able to lose $4.7 billion a year in just one product line and still keep growing, you’ve got an impressive business.

Back in 1997, I interviewed Billy Bear Bottoms, the pilot for one of the biggest drug importers of the time, Barry Seal. Bottoms told me that Seal had made about 50 trips of 300 kilos each, or approximately 16 tons total.

The Coast Guard recently seized one vessel - a self propelled semi-submersible that costs up to a million bucks to build - and found seven tons on the craft or 21 times as much as the notorious Seal was able to transport on one trip. Another of this year’s seizures amount to more than Seal was able to import on 50 flights.

One day, and sadly far too late, we will finally learn that the biggest driver of the drug trade is US law enforcement.

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Intelligence officer claims CIA was complicit in torture in Uzbekistan

Tuesday, September 16th, 2008

By Neil Mackay | THE CIA SENT ITS agents into Uzbekistan torture chambers to observe the abuse of alleged Islamic terrorists, acc-ording to a dissident member of the Uzbek security services who is now seeking political asylum in the UK after fleeing Tashkent.

Ikrom Yakubov, a former major in the National Security Service (SNB), accused the CIA of involvement in torture sessions in the central Asian republic in an exclusive interview with the Sunday Herald, during which he made a series of startling claims. These include claims that: l Britain’s Richard Conroy, the UN’s co-ordinator in Uzbekistan, was assassinated on the orders of Islam Karimov, the president of Uzbekistan. Karimov has been described as one of the world’s worst dictators and his rule, since 1991, has been characterised by allegations of torture (including claims that victims were boiled alive), media control, fake elections and brutality against human rights organisations and pro-democracy activists; l a series of bomb attacks in the capital, Tashkent, in March 2004 were organised by the SNB in order to tighten Karimov’s dictatorial rule and ramp up the threat from Islamic terror groups; l Karimov ordered the notorious Andijan massacre in May 2005, when Uzbek security forces fired on protesters, killing anything up to 1500 people; l Karimov’s regime routinely framed innocent Muslims on charges of involvement in Islamist terror and invented bogus terror threats to maintain his grip on the country, and l the CIA used a secret detention facility in Uzbekistan where suspects in the “war on terror” were taken from around the world to be tortured by SNB interrogators.

Yakubov fled Uzbekistan and sought asylum in the UK this month. Craig Murray, Britain’s former ambassador to Uzbekistan and a harsh critic of the Karimov regime, has vouched for Yakubov’s bona-fides, claiming he is confident of his background as an intelligence officer and that he finds Yakubov’s story believable.

Yakubov fell out of favour with the SNB after writing a series of official reports for the Uzbek National Security Council which were deemed critical of the intelligence services. He was later accused of spying for America and by 2007 was arrested and tortured with beatings. By 2008, and now working with human rights groups, Yakubov left the country and, from Turkey, wrote a series of anonymous articles criticising Karimov and the intelligence services, which he posted on the internet.

Yakubov says the SNB responded by emailing death threats to him, saying they knew his real identity. His cousin was subsequently killed, and Yakubov is sure that SNB agents were responsible for his death, as threats had also been made against his family.

Yakubov’s most powerful claim relates to a meeting in 2002 with an American official whom Yakubov’s chief in the SNB described as a CIA agent.

“The man introduced himself to me as Andrew,” said Yakubov. “We drove some 15 kilometres from Tashkent to the town of Chirchik, where the SNB has a secret detention centre located underground. We entered the jail and there was an SNB officer torturing a man. Andrew and I watched for about 10 minutes. We were both present while this man was being beaten around the neck with a stick.

“The victim had been captured by the Americans in Afghanistan and taken to Uzbekistan for interrogation by the SNB. He was supposed to be an Islamist. Andrew then went into the administration room and came out 20 minutes later with a bag full of papers.”

Yakubov said the American did not protest or urge the torturer to stop beating the prisoner. Instead, Yakubov said, Andrew told sexual jokes and taught him to swear in English. “He certainly did not appear upset by what he witnessed,” Yakubov said.

Yakubov also claimed that Conroy, a senior British UN official based in Tashkent, was killed on the orders of the government because he was aware that senior officials were involved in international drug trafficking. Conroy died when his plane crashed in January 2004 in the Uzbek capital. Yakubov says he was told by a friend, also a member of the intelligence services that a bomb was placed on the plane by the SNB.

According to Yakubov, a series of bomb attacks in Tashkent in 2004, which the government blamed on Islamist suicide bombers, was organised by the SNB. Yakubov said: “The intention was to show the world and Uzbekistan that only Karimov could guarantee peace and safety. It helped him maintain power.”

Yakubov added that this policy also involved the SNB “setting up” fake Islamic terror groups to keep public panic ramped up.

Ironically, in 2005 Hazel Blears, then a Home Office minister, invoked the Tashkent bombings during a debate on government anti-terror measures. Craig Murray, ambassador to Tashkent at the time of the bombings, said evidence he saw with his own eyes did not point towards Islamist suicide attacks. He claimed the alleged sites of the bombings showed no craters “or even a crack in paving stones”. The body of one suicide bomber was unmarked.

Murray informed London about his findings and the Joint Terrorism Assessment Centre agreed that there were “serious flaws in the Uzbek government account”. Murray added: “I concluded that these events were a series of extrajudicial killings, covered by a highly controlled and limited agent-provocateur operation.”

The Andijan massacre was also ordered by Karimov to terrify the populace, Yakubov said, and prevent any popular pro-democracy movement developing.

Yakubov, who is awaiting interview by British intelligence and an immigration hearing, insists he would be either killed or tortured and jailed indefinitely if he were forced to return. He also fears assassination attempts by the SNB while in the UK.

He added: “I am a dissident not just because I believe in democracy and human rights, but also because as an intelligence officer, I saw my colleagues fabricating cases against ordinary Muslims, making them out to be terrorists and religious radicals.”

Murray has spoken to a number of high-level contacts in Uzbekistan, and senior opposition figures in exile, who he says all vouched for Yakubov as an intelligence officer.

Murray added: ”Personally, I believe what Ikrom Yakubov is saying. His account comes over as naturalistic to me. Funnily enough, he even told me that he’d been involved in setting up a demonstration against me in Tashkent in 2004, which was organised because of statements I’d made about human rights abuses. He also says that he was keeping tabs on my love life while I was there.”

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Union leaders stifle growing militancy of London Underground workers

Tuesday, September 16th, 2008

By Daniel O’Flynn and Paul Mitchell | Leaders of the Rail, Maritime and Transport trade union (RMT) are seeking to stifle the growing militancy on the London Underground rail system and prevent the development of a political opposition to the Labour government.

On August 19, the RMT Executive suspended a 72-hour strike by 1,000 engineers and maintenance workers at private infrastructure company Tube Lines after accepting a wage deal of 4.99 percent backdated to April this year and the promise of a rise next year equal to inflation.

RMT General Secretary Bob Crow said, “RMT members at Tube Lines are to be congratulated for the unity and commitment they have displayed during this dispute, not least in the face of hostile media coverage.” He admitted the union had had difficulty selling the deal.

The following day, on August 20, the executive called off a threatened 48-hour strike by 700 cleaners working for subcontractors ISS, ICS, Initial and GBM.

The cleaners had voted by 99.2 percent for industrial action and already held several strikes in an effort to force new Conservative London Mayor Boris Johnson to honour the pledge made by former Labour Mayor Ken Livingstone to pay them the “London living wage” of £7.45 an hour. Livingstone had used this promise to defuse anger after the collapse last year of the Metronet public private partnership (PPP) with debts of £2 billion. In return, the RMT suspended strike action and campaigned for Metronet to be taken over by state-run Transport for London (TfL) permanently rather than sold off—the Labour government’s favoured option.

In the event, Johnson backed down, claiming it was a “trivial dispute,” but made it clear his aim is to get a no-strike regime imposed on London’s transport system as a prelude to further attacks on wages and conditions. The agreement meant cleaners working on Metronet lines received a rise from £5.50 to £7.45 an hour from September 1, 2008. Workers on Tube Lines will have to wait until April 1, 2009, to receive the full amount.

Crow declared, “This is a massive breakthrough which will see all Tube cleaners paid the London living wage by next April at the latest.”

The Tube workers withstood massive intimidation from management, the government and the media to break through the government’s 2 percent wage limit for the public sector. However, to claim that these pay awards represent a “massive breakthrough” is a distortion.

The cleaners’ new wage rates are no more now than cleaners on the Underground earned before privatisation. Their demands for 28 days’ holiday, sick pay, pension rights, travel concessions and the end of what is called “third party sackings” in which they can be sacked without redress to disciplinary hearings or independent appeals remain unresolved.

Since the agreement was made, the cleaning companies, which previously turned a blind eye to the employment of undocumented workers, have suddenly introduced national insurance checks. At least three workers have been detained and two deported.

In addition, the industrial action was called off just as rail workers at the Charing Cross group of stations, East Ham group and Rickmansworth group were taking action. Bill posters working at CBS Outdoor and Eurostar cleaners had voted unanimously to strike. Other public sector workers are also threatening industrial action.

For all the RMT’s denunciations of conditions on the London Underground and criticisms of privatisation, they never address the fact that the trade unions were directly responsible for allowing privatisation to happen in the first place.

Since Labour’s election, it has faithfully served its capitalist masters, tearing up welfare entitlement, privatising key sectors of public services, and overturning democratic rights. No demand has been too great.

The PPP programme was the method by which they championed the privatisation of the London Underground. Claiming the market and corporate efficiency was the optimum way of financing after years of underfunding, proposals for farming out the track, tunnels and signalling to the private sector via the PPP were announced in 2001.

Crow’s election as general secretary of the RMT that year was an expression of how New Labour had alienated large sections of workers. Crow, a former member of the Stalinist Communist Party of Britain, was one of a new layer of officials dubbed the “awkward squad” by the media. Such victories were hailed by left groups such as the Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party as the start of a revival of militant trade unionism that would challenge the government.

Rail workers voted three times for strike action against the PPP proposals, but the RMT repeatedly called-off strikes at the last minute and overturned ballots for action. While workers saw strike action as a means of opposing privatisation, the unions refused to make this their explicit aim. Where one-day strikes did happen, they were the result of unofficial action.

As a result, two new companies, Metronet and Tube Lines, were set up in 2003 to run the maintenance and cleaning operations, many of which were further outsourced.

Crow and the other union bureaucrats hoped to convince the government that it had to make some concessions if it was to avoid class confrontation and retain political credibility. At first, the RMT sought to put pressure on the Labour leaders by withholding union funds. Crow was adamant that “for the trade union movement to abandon the Labour Party would be a serious mistake.” But within the RMT, only a few hundred of its 70,000 members remained members of the party.

At the RMT’s Annual General Meeting in 2003, a vote was passed allowing branches to affiliate to and provide finance for other political organisations of their choosing. Soon after, the Scottish Regional Council applied to the RMT executive for affiliation to the Scottish Socialist Party.

The SSP was the result of the regroupment strategy pursued by the Socialist Party and its predecessor, the Militant Tendency, which claimed that the formation of a new socialist party would arise through a realignment of left elements within the Labour Party, the various fragments of the old Stalinist Communist Party and the smaller left groups. Such parties would be based on a reformist programme, with Marxists operating as a tendency within them much as Militant had operated within the old Labour Party. At first orienting to the defunct Socialist Labour Party set up by British miners’ union leader Arthur Scargill and Rifundazione Comunista in Italy, which emerged out of a split in the Italian Communist Party, the SP then set up the Socialist Alliance, which Crow joined.

The project failed and was subsequently abandoned in England. In Scotland, it enjoyed a longer duration thanks to its explicit embrace of Scottish nationalism and support for the newly devolved capitalist parliament. Later, it too fell apart amidst a bitter split.

In the meantime, the RMT’s flirtation with the SSP led Labour’s national executive to expel the union, claiming it had broken the party’s constitution.

Crow continues to campaign to a more viable political vehicle to help bolster the dwindling political authority of the trade union bureaucracy and the Labour “left,” such as it is. At the second conference of the SP-led Campaign for a New Workers Party, on June 29, he declared, “What our members don’t want to see is another Respect or Socialist Labour Party. They want to see a political party—and we’ve got to move towards it.”

Crow’s proposed alternative for his union has proven to offer no progressive way forward for working people. The era of global production, facilitated by developments in computerisation and telecommunications, has destroyed the basis for such national reformist strategies. No longer able to reconcile its policy of social reforms with its defence of capitalism, Labour has transformed itself into the direct political instrument for imposing the dictates of global capital. The same process has taken place within the trade unions, which have overseen greater exploitation, longer working hours and lower wages.

What is required is the establishment of rank-and-file committees to take the struggle out of the hands of the RMT, coordinate joint action across the London Underground and appeal for support from the millions of workers and commuters whose safety is compromised on a daily basis by the drive to ratchet up exploitation and cut costs. Such an industrial offensive can only succeed if it is linked to a new political strategy, which rejects the capitalist market as the basis for the organisation of economic and social life and places social need over corporate profit.

Have Your Say: Union leaders stifle growing militancy of London Underground workers
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