vendredi 8 août 2008

Fear the wrath of the poor

Good site over at http://le-poireau-rouge.blogspot.com/. One report is about the general strike in South Africa, which hasn't received any attention at all in the MSM. The country's own Mail and Guardian though, gives the heading "Fear the wrath of the poor" to its treatment of the worker action that paralysed South Africa earlier this week. The boss' representatives do their best to ridicule the stoppages, but their rhetoric is jaded and threadbeare. In fact the whole piece is biased.

The article is split into two halves. The attention given to the union action comes last and includes detials on the police presence, there to 'keep the peace'. This means that some economist's view point is given more immediacy than the strike of hundreds of thousands of working people. Thi is important because the people tend to pay more attention to the start of a piece of writing than then end. (Novels are different). Further the message of the start of an article influences the way the second section is interpreted. So far, so obvious. Here, the first ten paragraphs or so are taken up by the likes of Russell Lamberti, economic strategist at the Econometrix consultancy who blubs on about ""The unions are striking against something they can't control. Food and fuel prices are determined by global markets and not by policy. It's not a conspiracy against the poor.""
The first claim is false. Workers can control the means of production. The second is true but it is based in policy decisions. The third point is patently false. But no scepticism about these ideas is offered to the reader. Instead, the paper concentrates on a few burning tyres, the conclusions of travel company and police spokespeople and the timid demands of the conservative trades union movement. The people themselves were absent from the report, yet they are there in gigantic numbers. 93% strike action in some of South Africa's mines, a whole country on strike workers everywhere in the world gathering political strength.

Fear the wrath of the poor indeed. For We/they are very angry