Datasets:
Recag
/
C4_8

Dataset card Data Studio Files
xet
Community
text
stringlengths
9
78.2k
These are the first lines of the first chapter of Thomas Piketty’s bestselling Capital in the 21st Century.
For Piketty, Marikana represents “distributional conflict” between workers living in “wretched conditions” and mines’ “excessive profits”. It symbolises the inequalities at the heart of his concerns and is a glimpse of the threat to “democratic societies” and the “values of social justice” posed by “a market economy … left to itself”.
Piketty observes the massacre from afar with his telescope of historically grounded economics.
What can be added if we see it close up, with the magnifying glass of forensic sociology?
We now know the workers were gathered peacefully on “the mountain” when police encircled them with razor wire and armoured vehicles. A contingent walked north, towards a settlement where many lived. Police blocked their advance with volleys of tear gas and rubber bullets; some scattered eastwards, many now running. It was then that they were shot with live ammunition. They were not attacking; they were attempting to escape. Seventeen of the 34 dead workers were killed at this first site.
Two days later, with colleagues and students, I attended a 10?000-strong rally of the strikers and their families. Neither the leaders’ speeches nor interviews with workers were recorded in the media. We were served a one-sided version of the event.
On August 20, I returned to Marikana with two field workers. We had a simple goal: to get the workers’ version. What we were told – and then saw for ourselves – was horrific. In response to the initial gunfire, some workers had fled west, across open ground, where many took cover on a rocky outcrop. Another 17 workers were killed there, surrounded and murdered, away from the TV cameras.
The ongoing Farlam commission of inquiry has answered some but not all of our questions.
The main demand of the strike was for a salary of R12?500 a month. This was first raised by just one category of workers, rock drill operators, at just one section of the mine, Karee.
Lonmin decided to award the drill operators a special allowance, partly because of competition with the two bigger platinum companies, which paid higher salaries. But Lomnin bypassed established collective bargaining procedures, so it set a precedent – and also damaged the prestige of the dominant union, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM).
The workers were still dissatisfied, but had gained confidence. The R12?500 demand was taken up by the drill operators across the whole mine, and on August 9 they went on strike and marched to Lonmin’s Marikana headquarters. Inconsistently, management now refused to meet workers’ delegates, and said that demands had to be channelled through the NUM. That night, the strike spread throughout the mine.
The NUM had developed a cosy relationship with the employer and was already losing support, especially at Karee, where workers had joined a new union, the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (Amcu). Partly to unite workers across the union divide, the drill operators had organised their own committee. This soon expanded to include other categories of workers.
On August 10, 3?000 workers marched to the NUM office, calling on the union to take up their demand. One of the local NUM leaders, possibly more, shot at the marchers. Two protesters were severely wounded, but workers thought they had been killed – and perception mattered. The shootings are widely seen as a turning point in the lead-up to the massacre. Workers retreated to their gathering place, where they armed themselves with “traditional weapons”. The NUM’s credibility collapsed.
By August 12, after phone calls to the minister of police by Lonmin bosses and the NUM, the South African Police Service (SAPS) had established a joint operations centre at Marikana. Lonmin provided the police with offices, intelligence, access to more than 200 CCTV cameras, accommodation, food, transport, a helicopter, ambulances, a temporary jail, back-up from 500 security officials, and a convention centre for later debriefing. It also helped to develop the plan that led to the massacre.
On the morning of August 16, the commissioner told the media this was “D-day”. Police ordered four mortuary wagons, each with space for six corpses. These would soon be needed. The police planned for deaths, and Lonmin participated in the planning.
But who was behind this action? In the minuted meeting, the SAPS commissioner said the minister told her somebody “politically high” was calling him: Cyril Ramaphosa, the first general secretary of the NUM, former secretary general of the ruling ANC and, at the time, a member of the Lonmin board. In May this year, Ramaphosa became the deputy president of South Africa.
The day before the massacre, Ramaphosa emailed fellow Lonmin board members to say he had had a meeting with the mines minister, who would brief the president and the Cabinet and “get the minister of police … to act in a more pointed way”.
This year, Amcu led an official strike of platinum miners demanding a minimum salary of R12?500. After five months – the longest strike in South Africa’s mining history – the workers won a partial, but very significant, victory. The massacre was a major factor in maintaining the workers’ solidarity. The deal, which covers three years from 2013, will lead to many of the workers, perhaps most, securing R12?500 by mid-2015.
Marikana was an “egalitarian movement”. The platinum workers helped to close the “apartheid pay gap”, but also fought for a flat-rate increase, not a percentage adjustment, consciously aimed at reducing income differences among them.
They also made a “claim to justice”. They wanted compensation for the jobs they did; they fought for dignity, and their bosses will doubtless treat them with greater respect in future.
Let us return to Piketty. An account of Marikana could point to accidents of history or focus on peculiarly South African aspects.
Piketty draws our attention to a bigger picture, and this has considerable merit. But what he describes has an opaque quality.
Marikana was a “distributional conflict” – but it was more than this. Workers’ dissatisfaction was about rewards for the quantity and quality of their work and the conditions under which they laboured. When they protested, they did so by halting production, and it was strike action that eventually brought success.
On the other side, employers’ ability to determine income was rooted in ownership of the mines, and they were disturbed by losing an element of control over labour relations, and even feared growing support for nationalisation.
So, Marikana was also about ownership and production, and the connection between both and distribution. Though Marikana did reflect problems with the “market economy”, it was linked to the 2008 crash – that is, a specific crisis. From 2000 to 2008, Lonmin benefited from a profit to labour ratio that averaged 62:38; from 2010 to 2011, after the crash, the ratio was 42:58. It was still making a profit, but not enough to satisfy shareholders. By 2012, its space to make concessions was much reduced.
At the end of his book, Piketty returns to Marikana to argue that “what would matter most would be the publication of detailed accounts of private corporations”. Yet these accounts were available by the time of the five-month strike. Their impact was marginal.
In some respects, the post-apartheid state has been progressive, and this is partly why the massacre was so shocking. The ANC has sought to build a new black bourgeoisie while sustaining a pact with trade unions and, although this provided a base for social reforms, it also produced a tightknit grouping with a common interest in repressing the Lonmin strikers.
For South Africa, Marikana was a turning point. It unmasked private ownership as well as the unequal distribution of income. It underscored the negative role of the police and the ANC, created new political movements and showed the potential of collective mobilisation.
Piketty has exposed the role of wealth and the wealthy in the growth of global inequality and threats to democracy.
But Marikana shows that his analysis has limitations. Michael Burawoy, president of the International Sociological Association, has ascribed these to Piketty’s dearth of theory. I agree.
But, more than this, and in contrast to the author of Capital (in the 19th century) his account suffers, in particular, from a lack of a theoretical and practical commitment to struggle from below, to “self-emancipation”.
Events just fly by in the ever-accelerating rush of Trump Time, so it’s easy enough to miss important ones in the chaos.
Paul Manafort is sentenced twice and indicted a third time! Whoosh! Gone!
In fact, said Pompeo, some visas may already have been denied or revoked, but he refused to “provide details as to who has been affected and who will be affected” (supposedly to protect the confidentiality of visa applicants).
The advent of sound recording deep-sixed this age-old thought experiment and offered a definitive answer: Yes!
I’ve got another one for you, though: if you water-torture someone at a secure military compound and no one is around to see it, is it a war crime?
Well, what if someone does see it? And what if you admit to it -- and to a criminal investigator, no less? And what if you add that you also used electrical torture, too? Is that, in fact, a war crime?
More cut and dried, right?
And what if criminal investigators identified 28 other members of your military unit as having beaten prisoners, tortured them with electric shocks, and water-boarded them? And what if 15 of them actually admitted to those acts? Is that, I ask you, a war crime?
Some people are charged with, tried, or even convicted, of torture: Nazis, Ford Motor Company executives in Argentina, and high-ranking Guatemalan military officers, for example. But others aren’t.
Years ago, when I investigated the particular set of crimes mentioned above that were carried out by U.S. military intelligence personnel in Vietnam, I found that only three of the soldiers involved were even punished. And by punished, I mean that the three received fines or reductions in rank. None served any prison time.
One of the admitted torturers I spoke with was still unrepentant. He explained to me that, were he placed in the same situation again, he would do exactly the same things. And why wouldn’t he? You don’t find Americans in the dock at the International Criminal Court (ICC). But if the Trump administration has its way, as TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon reports so strikingly today, the ICC’s judges and prosecutors might be the ones who find themselves charged and -- though it's a stretch of the imagination -- behind bars. And given what we know about the U.S. prison system, that might also mean finding themselves at risk of torture.
The ICC’s origins go back to the Nuremberg trials at the end of World War II. In 1943, the leaders of the Allied powers -- England, France, the United States, and the Soviet Union -- met in Tehran, Iran. One subject on the table: how, once the war was won, the Allies would deal with Nazi war criminals. Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin is said to have proposed simply lining up and executing 50,000 Nazis. American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt reportedly tried to break the resulting tension by jokingly suggesting that 49,000 might be sufficient.
The solution was to demonstrate that their prosecutions had a basis in the Geneva Conventions and other international treaties -- in, that is, the already existing laws of war. In the process of designing those prosecutions, they consolidated and advanced the meaning and power of international law itself, a concept particularly needed in a postwar world of atomic weapons and a looming U.S.-Soviet conflict. Three-quarters of a century and many wars and weapon systems later, enforceable international law still remains humanity’s best hope for adjudicating past war crimes and preventing future ones -- but only if great nations like the United States do not declare themselves exceptions to the rule of law.
Nor has any court ever prosecuted those responsible for the U.S. firebombing of 67 Japanese cities. Those lesser-known attacks killed hundreds of thousands of civilians and reduced many of that country’s largely wooden urban areas to ashes. Robert McNamara, secretary of defense under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson (and an architect of American policy in Vietnam), described those attacks in Errol Morris’s brilliant documentary The Fog of War.
The following year, however, Clinton actually signed the Rome Statute, the treaty creating the ICC. In fact, the United States had been instrumental in drafting the court’s procedures, rules of evidence, and definitions of various crimes. In spite of that Foreign Relations Authorization Act, it looked as if the U.S. was on the way to future full participation in the ICC. The year 2000, however, saw the election of George W. Bush.
It was John Bolton, then Bush’s undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, who sent the notification letter to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and personally trekked to U.N. headquarters in New York City to “unsign” the Rome Statute.
In its menacing rejection of the court, the Trump administration is turning its back on the system of international law and justice the United States helped establish at Nuremberg. The rule of law must not hold only, as hotelier Leona Helmsley once said about taxes, for “the little people.” If Donald Trump had truly wanted to “make America great again,” he would have recognized that international law is not just for the little countries.
The greater a world power, the more consequential is its submission to the rule of law. The attacks of John Bolton and Mike Pompeo on the ICC, however, simply represent a new spate of lawless actions from a lawless administration in an increasingly lawless era in Washington.
I'm that guy. The guy that everyone hates. The guy who made it so difficult to open your bag of potato chips. And this is the story of how, when and why I did it.
It was my first job right out of school. I was working for Hercules Chemical, a company that no longer exists, although you have to blame that on someone else. I was in the Packaging Films Group, making multilayer polypropylene films for food packaging. The film had a heat-seal adhesive on one side of the polypropylene base. One of our larger clients used our films to make potato chip bags. The problem they had with our existing films was that the they seal was too weak. The client's chip-making plants were located west of the Rocky Mountains, so when trucks would drive their chips out to California, some of the seals would open up due to the pressure difference between the high altitude air and the air sealed inside the bag. And so they needed a stronger seal from us, which was then passed down to me.
Other options besides a stronger seal are technically possible but not economically feasible. Potato chip bags are made on a vertical form-fill-seal(VFFS) machine. The preprinted film is unrolled and shaped to form a tube. A seal is made along the tube forming the back of the bag, and a seal is also made at 90 degrees to this back seal, pinching the tube and forming the bottom of the bag. The chips are then added to the bag. This is actually a very cool process that is more complicated than you might imagine. The chips are fed to a number of weigh-pans located just above the bag opening. Each pan has a fraction of the total weight to be added, say one-eighth. A computer then decides which combination of eight pans are to be dumped into the bag so as to most closely match the desired value. While it would be much cheaper to have a single pan machine, having the additional pans very quickly pay for themselves. All of this is done at high speed. I would love to post a video of a VFFS machine, but I've not ever found one that really shows the process very well to someone who's not seen one.
The point here is that while technical options exist to prevent premature opening of the bag, such as reducing the initial air pressure in the bag, attempting to add this to the existing processing equipment would be a nightmare. So it was necessary to increase the seal strength.
In a heat seal, you are attempting to melt the adhesive polymer and get it to flow into the other layer. Upon cooling, the two layers are now entangled and show adhesion. The strength of a heat-seal depends on three and only three variables: time, temperature and pressure. Increasing any of this will increase the strength of the bond, but most manufacturing engineers are really only open to increasing pressure. Increasing sealing time slows the entire process, and increase the sealing temperature also slows the process since it takes longer to heat the adhesives to the higher temperature, that adds to the time as well. The best option was to develop an adhesive that sealed at a lower temperature, something that was successfully accomplished, or so I'm led to believe from all the complaints that colleagues pile on me now that they know I'm that guy.
Republished from It's The Rheo Thing with kind permission from John Spevacek.
Following temperatures in the mid 20s for the past few days, it’s back to average or below average cooler days, and some chilly nights.
The Met Office forecast for today is cloudy inland but some sunshine on the coast.
There’s also high levels of pollen (being called a ‘pollen bomb’ by some sources) left over by the warm weather for the next day or so.
However, tomorrow cooler conditions sweep in and there will be overcast conditions and the possibility of light rain.
A cold westerly wind will also make it feel a degree or two colder during the day, even down to 9 or 10 degC!
By Thursday (April 26) the nights could be down as low as 5degC so gardeners may need to protect some plants.
The outlook for Friday (April 27) until early May isn’t particularly exciting.
The Met Office says that sunny spells and showers are likely on Friday with some showers heavy with a risk of hail and thunder.
Similar conditions are likely on Saturday, but there is a chance of some longer spells of rain developing from the west or north-west.
It will be generally rather cold.
Into the start of May conditions will be generally changeable and windy at times.
Temperatures will be near or just below average, with only a small chance of warmer conditions.
And it's not too shabby: It generated $228 million in revenue this quarter, and a net income loss of $100 million.
What it means: Microsoft's acquisition of LinkedIn closed in December, so the latter didn't even contribute a full quarter's financials. For context, LinkedIn generated $960 million in revenue the previous quarter. Now as part of Microsoft, it won't publish updated member numbers, but it will still have to show it's growing its revenue and getting users to spend more and more time on the service.
The electric car company has filed a lawsuit against Sterling Anderson, a former director of Autopilot programs, for allegedly trying to poach employees for his own startup and taking confidential information, according to TechCrunch.
Why now? Self-driving technology is one of the hottest areas in the industry right now, so it's no wonder that that there's fierce competition among companies.
Since 1984, Forbes has tracked Michael Jackson's earnings and wealth. The following is a timeline of the King of Pop's financial history, from his Thriller success to HIStory's unrealized potential.
In 1984, Jackson was at the height of popularity. Two years earlier, he had released Thriller, which went on to become the top-selling album of all time. A year later, he moonwalked across the small screen in the television special "Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever." While he never toured solo to promote Thriller, he did a slew of concerts with his brothers to promote their Victory album. Victory sold a disappointing 2 million copies, but Jackson's annual earnings topped $50 million.
After the first Pepsi campaign featuring Jackson was successful, the cola company signed him to another three-year, $10 million deal. The pop star had a calm year in 1986, though he remained in the press due to outlandish personal tales, some of which were true, including the adoption of Bubbles the monkey. Others were false, including rumors of sleeping him in a hyperbaric chamber.
Jackson released Thriller follow-up Bad in 1987. The album was commercially successful, but it was the accompanying world tour that brought in the majority of his earnings.
Jackson's Bad World Tour lasted throughout 1988 with over 140 scheduled dates. After his cut of merchandise sales, Jackson earned over $60 million from the tour. His earnings were bolstered by sales of his autobiography, Moonwalk, Pepsi endorsements and other music publishing (including the Beatles catalog). He also purchased land on which he built the Neverland ranch in 1988 for $17 million.
Since Forbes began tracking Jackson, Bad and Thriller had sold more than 60 million copies combined, earning the pop star more than $100 million. Moonwalk had sold 425,000 copies. He had bought the rights to the Beatles' ATV publishing music catalog, earning $3 million a year. He inked a $10 million deal with Pepsi, and his TV specials and videocassettes earned him millions more.
In 1990, Jackson was $85 million shy of cracking the Forbes 400 list of Wealthiest Americans. His net worth had climbed $105 million in six years, hampered only by a bad habit of amassing debt.
Jackson signed a six-album, $65 million deal with Sony in 1991, making him one of music's best-compensated artists. The deal gave the gloved one his own record label, a production deal with Sony's Columbia Pictures, a $5 million advance for each of the six albums and a landmark royalty rate of $2 per album. At the time, Jackson's wealth in the world of entertainers was second only to Bill Cosby, who had amassed a fortune of $290 million.
After settling sexual molestation charges out of court, Jackson wed Lisa Marie Presley in 1994. His catalog ownership and royalties from previous projects continued to keep his earnings in the double-digits.
Jackson released HIStory: Past, Present and Future, a double album with one disc a greatest hits collection and the other dedicated to new material. The album sold 7 million copies, a modest showing for the King of Pop. But thanks to a lucrative profit-sharing deal with Sony Music and his catalog, Jackson continued to bring in tens of millions each year.
Buckling from public pressure, Hyundai bailed out as a HIStory tour sponsor. But with Saudi Arabian Prince Al-Waleed stepping in as a sponsor and the Sultan of Brunei shelling out seven figures for Jackson to perform at his birthday celebration, Jackson was relying on fans outside the U.S. for his income.
Jackson completed the HIStory tour in October 1997. It was one of the most successful tours in music history, at least in terms of audience. The show reached 4.5 million fans in 35 countries during the 13 months it remained on the road. But it was rumored that much of the revenue went toward paying off debts from his 1993 Dangerous World Tour, which was cut short.
In debt for at least $200 million, but bearing publishing holdings worth an estimated $450 million, Forbes estimated Jackson's wealth at $350 million in 2003. His assets also included the Neverland Ranch and homes in Encino, Calif., and Las Vegas. At the time, he had pulled in an estimated total of $100 million from touring, $30 million from endorsements, $20 million from films and $25 million from merchandise sales, in addition to album sales profits.
The gloved one didn't make it to the stage for his grand finale, scheduled for London's O2 arena in July. Jackson's posthumous earnings were bolstered by a merchandising deal and the rights to the use of his name and likeness in the Sony film This Is It. He also earned millions from album sales, radio play and music video marathons in the weeks following his death. Jackson's estate has also solid earning potential in the future, due to his valuable stake in the Sony/ATV catalog and the publishing rights to his own catalog of music.
Many South Floridians will be heading to Washington, D.C., this weekend to witness another history-making event: the second inauguration of Barack Obama as president of the United States.
Some will arrive on buses, others on planes and trains, all eager to be in the nation's capital Monday when Obama is sworn in for a new term.
Among them will be Kevin Mitchell, of Fort Lauderdale, who's organized two buses with more than 100 people to travel to Washington for the festivities.
For the 2009 presidential inauguration, Mitchell arranged a similar bus trip with about 54 people who wanted to see Obama sworn in as the first black U.S. president.
"It's been very good. I've doubled capacity from the first inauguration," Mitchell said of the response to this year's bus trips.
On the buses this year will be a mix of students, families and "people who just want to go because they again want to witness that part of history," Mitchell said.
The bus trip departs Saturday, returns Tuesday and costs $375 per person, which includes transportation and one night of hotel accommodation, Mitchell said Friday. "I have about seven spots left."
Although the crowd on the National Mall isn't expected to be as big as in 2009, when 1.8 million people flocked to Washington to witness Obama's first inauguration, about 600,000 to 800,000 people are expected to attend this year's festivities.
If you're planning to go to Washington and haven't made arrangements yet, chances of finding decent airfares and hotel rates in the city center are slim, but there's still some availability, travel specialists say.
Airlines: Travelers can expect airfares to Washington to be "a little expensive" at this point, CheapOair executive Mark Drusch said. "If you want to save money, look at alternative airports like Baltimore and Dulles." Also check airfare comparison websites for the best deals, he advised.
On Friday, round-trip nonstop airfares from Fort Lauderdale to Washington, DCA, for a Saturday-Tuesday trip started at $451, while flights into Dulles and Baltimore were priced from $426 and $447.
Bus: Greyhound still had tickets available for buses leaving Fort Lauderdale to Washington as of Friday afternoon, spokesman Tim Stokes said. But travelers should act fast to get the best rates, he advised. One-way bus tickets for Saturday or Sunday departures ranged from $124 to $188, according to greyhound.com.
Car rental: Rental cars are still available at airport locations for Enterprise, Alamo and National, Enterprise Holdings spokeswoman Yona Spiegelglass said Friday. Rates vary by pickup location, and out-of-state mileage charges may apply. Enterprise also has neighborhood locations with availability.
Train: Amtrak is seeing a slight increase in ridership in the days leading up to the inauguration, and has added two extra Acela Express trains between New York and Washington on Monday, spokeswoman Christina Leeds said.
From South Florida, inauguration-goers can hop on the Silver Meteor or Silver Star trains, which both go to D.C., Leeds said. As of Friday, there was still availability on these trains, depending on final destination.