ONE LAST SPIN: The Power and Peril of the Pokies by DREW ROOKE

ONE LAST SPIN: The Power and Peril of the Pokies

DREW ROOKE

Scribe, 2018, 325 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

 

Ever wondered if it possible to win against the pokies?  Why not ask someone who should know, like a poker machine technician - ‘I make these machines in order to grab your money.  I would not be so stupid to play myself’, said one such techo when asked by freelance Sydney journalist, Drew Rooke.  In his book, One Last Spin, Rooke expands on the simple truth that pokies machines are rigged to make you lose. 

The ‘one-armed bandits’ are deliberately engineered to hoover up the loose change from the pockets of casual punters and to deep-mine the bank accounts of the addicts, concentrated in the poorer suburbs, from whom the real pokies profits (40% of them) are to be made.  These jackpot junkies, the ‘problem gamblers’, have their lives shattered in the process. 

A typical pokies machine can chew through $600 to $1,200 of a person’s hard-earned every hour by dangling the shiny lure of the big payout, with just enough tinier wins and frequent near misses engineered into the machine’s program to keep the desperate glued to their seat.  

The machines lie in wait in massed battalions – there are 193,000 pokies in Australia, which (excluding the casino jurisdictions of Macau and Monaco) is the highest per capita rate in the world.  Australia has achieved global leadership by allowing the pokies to colonise much of the pubs and clubs scene. 

The pokies are highly profitable for these community venues.  In 2014-15, pokies accounted for $76 million of NSW rugby league club, Canterbury-Bankstown’s, total revenue of $87 million.  They anchored $52 million of Rooty Hill RSL club’s $84 million revenue.  With the exception of only the North Melbourne Kangaroos, nine of the ten AFL football clubs based in Victoria run pokies, taking in $90 million in revenue.  Across the whole sector, pokies generate 28% of total revenue for pubs and 61% for clubs. 

The upper reaches of the pokies industry also profit handsomely.  Pokies machines creamed $40 million in profit in 2016 for the Sydney-based corporation, Aristocrat Leisure, the second largest pokies manufacturer in the world.  Australia’s two supermarket giants know a solid income-stream when they see one.  Woolworths is the majority owner of Australian Leisure and Hospitality Group which owns 12,000 machines in 400 hotels and clubs.  Coles, through its parent company, Wesfarmers, owns 3,000 pokies in 89 hotels. 

To ensure the House always wins, pokies manufacturers employ vast teams of “mathematicians, software engineers, sound engineers, musicians, artists, graphic designers, industrial designers and animators” to keep their human cash cows engaged in upwards wealth transfer.  All the bells and whistles of the machines augment the activation-by-gambling of the reward centres in the brain in the same way that substance addiction does, with pokies addicts chasing the next high from the ‘feel-good neurotransmitter’, dopamine.  

The pokies industry covers its drug-pushing tracks with PR spin every bit as cynical and loaded as the spin of the machines’ reels.  They acknowledge the issue of problem gamblers but lay the blame on the individual addict as a matter of personal psychological flaws whilst touting the confection that the industry is an altruistic, community-minded provider of harmless entertainment and an essential financer of community sports, charities, schools and hospitals, despite their donations being miniscule as proportion of their total expenditure. 

The industry’s camouflage of public beneficence is embroidered by two main auxiliaries – the anti-nanny-state ninnies and the usual academics-for-hire, at a loose end now that partnership opportunities with Big Tobacco have been stubbed out, who produce the industry-friendly research that attempts to lend some intellectual gloss to the corporate self-interest and social harm of the pokies. 

The industry has its powerful state enablers, too.  Despite strong public opposition to pokies (70-80% of those polled want restrictions on their use), state and federal governments adopt feather-touch regulation, unable even to broach a one-dollar maximum bet per spin.  Governments are content to merely require limp-as-lettuce sloganising to ‘gamble responsibly’ - a term devised by the gambling industry and adopted wholesale by governments precisely because it combines apparent concern with thoroughly innocuous, status-quo-preserving policy. 

The reason for government inaction is not hard to discern.  Between 2000 and 2014, state governments received $45 billion in gambling taxes, a not insignificant average of 6% of total state government revenue.  Cross the industry by crimping their profits and the political costs will be huge, including electoral campaigns against pokies-constraining candidates, and ending the flow of political donations to the big parties. 

Rooke lays out a compelling case against the pokies but there is an even more damning writ to be served against the very institution of gambling.  For what each poker machine, or lottery, or sports wager, is demonstrating is that capitalism can not provide an adequate income for all.  If not born to wealth, your only hope for financial security is dumb luck, with a fortunate few ‘Have-Nots’ getting to join the ‘Haves’, and accelerating wealth inequality whilst stoking envy and resentment in their neighbours.  As with the pokies, so with capitalism – the few win, the many lose.  The only way to beat the pokies is not to play them.  The only way to beat capitalism is to reject it.

A SPY NAMED ORPHAN: The Enigma of Donald MacLean by ROLAND PHILIPPS

A SPY NAMED ORPHAN: The Enigma of Donald MacLean

ROLAND PHILIPPS

Bodley Head, 2018, 440 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

 

At Cambridge University in the 1930s, Donald MacLean was popularly known as Donald MacLenin because he was a Red-hot undergraduate, a Communist Party member who railed against “the economic situation, the unemployment, vulgarity in the cinema, rubbish on the bookstalls, the public [private] school, snobbery in the suburbs, more battleships, lower wages”.

 

None of his radicalism, however, stopped MacLean from being hired by the Foreign Office, as Roland Philipps recounts in his biography of the famous Soviet spy (one of the famous Cambridge five - Burgess, Philby, MacLean, Blunt, Cairncross).  As the FO boffins saw it, MacLean’s campus political fervour could be dismissed as the ‘passing fancy of youth’ (in the words of one of MacLean’s ‘handlers’) especially amongst such ‘scions of the bourgeoisie’ as MacLean, son of a senior anti-communist politician, and a graduate, with blue-ribbon academic and sporting honours, of prestigious private school and elite university.

 

Besides, despite their (presumably) temporary Marx crush, the FO valued the Cambridge (presumably ex) communists who formed a rich talent pool of analytically sharp intellects with the added benefit that they, as former Reds, would be invaluable because they knew how the political enemy thought.

 

The FO knew its target demographic well (rich, upper class students, half of whom had, after all, acted as ‘volunteer’ strike-breakers during the 1926 General Strike) but MacLean, however, was made of stouter political stuff, having fallen permanently out of love with, in his handler’s words, the ‘intellectual emptiness and aimlessness of the bourgeois class to which he belonged’.

 

Britain’s diplomatic and intelligence services, however, were not the only ones fishing for recruits in the radicalised universities of the Thirties.  Stalin’s regime, facing capitalist and fascist hostility, was also on the lookout for covert assistance from abroad.

 

As most socialists of the time mistakenly saw Stalin as the almost apostolic embodiment of Marxism, those Western communists tapped on the shoulder to clandestinely help Moscow were predisposed to assist, especially (in the words of Kim Philby) through their ‘enrolment in an elite force’ of revolutionaries.

 

Although he rated the actual business of espionage as ‘like being a lavatory attendant – distasteful but necessary’, MacLean passed UK and US diplomatic state secrets to Moscow for a decade with a WikiLeaks intensity (but a much narrower audience) in the firm belief that he was assisting world peace and socialism.

 

The psychological toll from continually denying his true self in public, however, became a debilitating strain that was only relieved by chronic alcoholism.  MacLean’s loose lips during his booze binges risked blowing his cover - at a dinner-party with a Minister from the newly-elected Labour government, for example, MacLean stormed out, saying that ‘this government is just as bad as any other British government – suppressing coloured people’, prompting the observation by another guest that evening that MacLean ‘looks like a Tory and talks like a Communist’.

 

In her report to Moscow, another of Maclean’s handlers noted the personal tensions arising from MacLean’s unsustainable double life, appending to her praise for the ‘good and brave comrade’ the caveat that ‘he’s been totally detached from party work where he might have grown and learned’.  Gone, for MacLean, was the opportunity for uninhibited debate and discussion amongst a wide range of comrades, replaced by his stunting confinement to the hated world of “stuffy formal dinners and receptions”, his colleagues’ incessant chatter about the ‘communist menace’, their hyperbolic exaggeration of the Soviet threat, and their casual class loathing of the lives and potential political power of the non-Oxbridge lower orders.

 

Clandestinity had forced the separation of MacLean from class and ideological struggle, and from the lifeblood of comradeship.  MacLean could have been a superb radical intellectual grounded by active membership in a working class Marxist party but his political world had, instead, shrunk to the humdrum office drudgery of document copying.

 

When MacLean was eventually about to be tumbled, with a long spell in Wormwood Scrubs awaiting him, he was exfiltrated to Russia in 1951, where he found job satisfaction as a researcher on foreign policy and as an advocate for peaceful detente between East and West.  With Stalin still in power, however, official Moscow was still paranoid about double agents, so MacLean was not entirely safe - as a Russian friend put it, ‘MacLean was decorated with the Order of the Red Banner.  He might equally well have been shot’.

 

MacLean was relieved when Stalin died in 1953 and although he initially supported the Soviet crushing of the 1956 Hungary revolt, MacLean opposed the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, fraternised with Solzhenitsyn and other dissidents, and wrote on his ballot paper for the Supreme Soviet that whilst dissidents are held in prison ‘I can not participate in elections’.

 

It was a calmer but somewhat anti-climactic end to a high, but ultimately faux-climactic, life of espionage.  Much of the Cambridge spies’ efforts yielded little return – Stalin famously dismissed as ‘disinformation’ the covert intelligence that signalled the devastating invasion by Nazi Germany of the Soviet Union, whilst high-level espionage material also failed to add substantively to anything which was not already discernible through intelligent observation and objective interpretation (assets which MacLean possessed in abundance).

 

Philipps’ biography of MacLean, with its focus on espionage tradecraft, spy psychology and adventure narrative, has all the political depth of a Boys Own Bumper Book of Spies, and lazily rests in an ‘our spies good, their spies bad’ framework.  It only lightly intersects with the bigger political dimension of the spy drama.  Whilst the book automatically associates, with Pavlovian predictability, the ‘t’ words (treason, treachery) with MacLean, the real betrayal going on was the corruption of socialist values and revolutionaries’ lives by Stalinism, which in turn had its roots in the capitalist military and economic war waged against the fledgling Bolshevik state, a war which created the material scarcity and isolation that nurtured the rise of a privileged, undemocratic, bureaucratic class.

 

The Stalinist casualty roll was gigantic and it included MacLean amongst its number.  Donald MacLean, socialist, was more betrayed than betrayer.

Stardust & Golden DOUG McEACHERN

STARDUST & GOLDEN
DOUG McEACHERN

UWA Publishing, 2018, 208 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

 

Two Adelaide University students from opposite ends of the social scale - Mark (solid proletarian stock) and Stephen (from the leafier postcodes) – discover something in common.  There is a war in Vietnam to stop and a hide-and-seek game of conscription to navigate.  They both register for the call-up ballot in full anti-war (T-shirt and leaflet) mode, outside the offices of the Department of Labour and National Service, trusting to luck that their number won’t come up or hoping to string out student deferral of the khaki crunch point.

 

Doug McEachern’s novel follows the progress and regress of the two friends as “endless acrimonious debates over militancy” pepper their student group house in inner-city North Adelaide.  Mark, the most militant, although not a patch on the unruly Maoists and anarchists, makes a tactical error whilst leading an anti-war march through the city, taking the protesters too close to police, flicking the spring that unleashes the coiled fury of the state, primed for any pretext to exercise physical and judicial muscle.

 

Arrests, farcical trials, and convictions made and overturned, are followed by the two young men’s looming decisions about whether to go underground as draft resisters after receiving the fateful letter announcing their ‘success’ in the conscription lottery.  Their choice of response will, it turns out, carry great human cost.

 

Four decades on, and Mark, a “fed-up” oil industry consultant, chucks in his job and revisits those days and their legacy of  “unwanted memories” and “unfinished business”, not just to do with the war but also with an unwanted pregnancy, that afflicted the household.

 

At times, the characters’ relationships teeter on the Melrose Place edge (Mary - the Christian non-violent direct actionist - sums it up in “I love Angela and she doesn’t love me.  She loves Stephen and Stephen doesn’t love her.  Jane and Edward pretend to live together but they’re always falling apart”) but, like the 1990s cult American TV soap, it is oddly compelling.  Unlike the shallow B-grade Hollywood dross, however, there are large matters of political and social import at stake in the personal travails.

 

McEachern (a sixties’ anti-war campaigner, then university academic and now novelist in south coast retirement in South Australia) writes what he knows about first-hand which gives his novel authenticity.  There is also a bit of preliminary throat-clearing, scene-setting and character development that takes a while to move up through the gears before the story takes on an independent life of its own and motors towards a climax that avoids neat conclusion, is never quite predictable and carries some emotional power.

 

So, there are some ‘first novel nerves’, then, but the book turns out all right on the night.  McEachern has the makings of a fine novelist and we should look forward to more to come from him.

REBEL PRINCE (Tom Bower) & MEGHAN (Andrew Morton)

REBEL PRINCE: The Power, Passion and Defiance of Prince Charles

TOM BOWER, William Collins, 2018

MEGHAN: A Hollywood Princess

ANDREW MORTON, Michael O’Mara Books, 2018

Review by Phil Shannon

 

‘Nobody knows what utter hell it is to be Prince of Wales’, whined Charles, the heir to the British throne.  All that handshaking and small talk is ‘an intolerable burden’, his never-right office temperature ‘makes my life so unbearable’, first-class seats on commercial airflights are ‘so uncomfortable’.  The prince’s self-pitying outbursts reveal his lack of understanding of the lives of his ‘subjects’ who would be delighted if their only complaints about life included living in multiple palaces, owning a fleet of luxury cars, taking skiing holidays to Aspen, and being allowed to treat taxpaying as purely voluntary on an annual income of £20 million. 

The royalty-obsessive Tom Bower, in Rebel Prince, takes us inside the bubble of Charles and the other mediaeval relics.  Amongst the tedious palace intrigues, eyelid-shuttering family squabbles and tiresome protocol ‘controversies’ are some you-wouldn’t-read-about-it (except that you are) insights into princely privilege and elitist entitlement. 

Take, for example, Charles’ 146 staff of butlers, cooks, secretaries, chauffeurs, gardeners (including a dozen retired Indian soldiers to pick snails from his flowerbed by torchlight) and valets (to run his bath, lay out his daily five clothes changes, replenish the royal lavatory paper, rake the gravel and plump the cushions). 

To these employees, the petulant autocrat is typically capricious.  Should any luckless royal worker displease him in any way (being two minutes late with his breakfast eggs, for example, or cutting his sandwiches into squares rather than triangles) it was goodbye without so much as a thankyou. 

If real work was a foreign concept to Charles, so was the cost of transport.  The tab for the prince’s unlimited access to private jets, trains and helicopters is picked up by the taxpayer, such as his £18,916 trip on the royal train to visit a pub.  Public transport is a total mystery to Charles - when he once breathlessly announced that he’d ‘been on the Tube, you know’, a friend’s reply was quick: ‘yes, but only to open a line’. 

The pampered toff’s extravagance saw Charles’ popularity perpetually in the doldrums, even plunging to just 4% approval after what was seen, because of his adulterous affair with Camilla Parker-Bowles, as his betrayal of (Saint) Diana (an active adulterer herself). 

Charles unsuccessfully attempted to ameliorate his reputation for material indulgence by setting up two dozen royal-brand charities.  He didn’t shake a tin on a street corner, however, but rather he would hit up rich corporates, celebrities and foreign royals (entry price £50,000) in return for royal photo-ops (fourth spot behind the Queen at Ascot, perhaps, or an invite to a royal wedding) for those hoping some regal fairy dust might settle on them and their brand. 

Being green was another plank in the Charles refurbishment project.  The prince opposes genetically-modified crops, fossil-fuelled global warming, plastic pollution, tropical deforestation and species extinction (although foxes do not make the cut - they were made for being torn apart by the hounds of the ‘Tally-Ho’ set).  His environmental image was  undone, however, by his frequent travel to international environment events by private jet, trailing massive quantities of CO₂ emissions, or by taking a 250 mile helicopter trip straight after exhorting people to fight climate change by turning off their lights. 

As with his environmentalism (which is more New Age hokum than science-based), even when Charles gets something right, he does so for the wrong reasons.  He opposed the 2003 Iraq War, for example, not on anti-war or anti-imperialist principle but because of his Arabism (a creed which also allows him to shill for British military sales to Middle East despotisms).  

As a philosopher, Charles also shows a certain lack of rigour and realism.  He adheres to a theory of mystical harmony, based on the ‘sacred geometry of the body’ (related, somehow, to the Fibonacci number sequence) and which, if upset, results in a ‘disturbed flow of blood’, for which he recommends Bach Flower Remedies, coffee enemas, carrot juice and homeopathy. 

Alas, for Charles It is all so different now from the good old pre-industrial, pre-Enlightenment days, which also had the added bonus of political rule by absolute monarchy, the days before ‘scientists, planners and socialists upset the old order’, as he once lamented. 

 

If not through the pre-modern, scandal-dogged Charles, then perhaps there can be a Markle-led return of the monarchy to its full, magical glory by adding some Hollywood sparkle?  Andrew Morton, a Royalty enthusiast and purple-prose specialist, certainly hopes so.  In MEGHAN, he pulls out all stops for the latest ‘Commoner’ bridal acquisition to the royal household who could “make the monarchy seem more inclusive and relevant in an ever-changing world”. 

Markle is a bi-racial divorcee, a liberal foe of Trump and Brexit, and a television star whose roles have seen her snorting cocaine, doing striptease, performing oral sex and generally displaying flesh.  Her Tinsel Town fame and income was duly balanced, however, by the requisite good works (soup kitchen volunteer for the homeless) of toiling amongst the needy. 

Markle is no Hollywood airhead – she has a degree in international relations, during which she became a fan of Noam Chomsky, the left-libertarian, anti-imperialist intellectual.  The feminist child prodigy (she had written letters of complaint about sexist advertising) went on to become a United Nations gender-equality advocate. 

Markle’s common, even radical, attire, though, has its fraying edges.  She clearly didn’t pack Chomsky’s selected works for her visit to the troops on her United Service Organisation entertainment tour of US military bases and Navy destroyers - on the contrary, she felt ‘very, very blessed’ to support the US war machine. 

Markle does not explain how her television persona, which traded off her looks, helped to advance the cause of female emancipation, or how, as the voice of World Vision, a global evangelical Christian charity which refuses to employ same-sex couples, advances equality. 

Nor can Markle square her love of multi-thousand-dollar dresses and fashion accessories with her outreach to ordinary people and their rather more down-market sartorial prospects.  True, she does flaunt her ‘ethical brand’ handbags, ‘conflict-free’ diamonds and ‘cruelty-free’ coats but the moral gloss wears thin when Markle retires with the Royal women-folk on Boxing Day whilst the men engage in the jolly Christmas past-time of slaughtering hundreds of pheasants on the Queen’s estate, including top shooting by Charles and Diana’s two sons, ‘the killer Wales’, Princes William and Harry of Wales. 

The ordinary-titled Ms Markle is now Her Royal Highness, Duchess of Sussex, Princess, and the once feminist equality campaigner who bent the knee to no man now gives, and receives, the curtsy by rank.  Markle’s social ascension is meant to show that economic class is so much old conceptual hat - it is all about being ‘aspirational’ now.  All you have to do is marry a prince. 

The royals are not, as their PR flaks like to proclaim, ‘Just Like You and Me’.  Every Royal Birth, Death and Marriage, every syrupy episode in The House of Windsor, this week and every week until the end of time, carries the message that hierarchy and inequality are inevitable. 

In Trotsky’s choice phrase, however, the ‘dustbin of history’ still has an opening for the archaic, expensive, undemocratic institution of monarchy with its foul waste of dividing society into Royals and Commoners, rulers and subjects, upstairs and downstairs, stars and extras.  Time to take out the rubbish.

DISSENT: The Student Press in 1960s Australia by SALLY WOOD

DISSENT: The Student Press in 1960s Australia

SALLY PERCIVAL WOOD

Scribe, 2017, 310 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

 

Dissent didn’t obey strict decade-demarcation lines on Australian campuses in the radical 1960s, writes Dr Sally Wood (historian, Deakin University) in DISSENT: The Student Press in 1960s Australia.  In 1961, for example, university students were still mostly from a privileged background and a largely conservative lot in their attire (“jacket-and-tie and short-back-and-sides” for the young men and “stiffly coiffured hair, twin-sets and skirts below the knee” for the women), in their music (classical and jazz rather than rock ‘n’ roll) and in their politics as they placidly read their rather anodyne student newspapers which mirrored rather than challenged the establishment press.

 

This non-threatening stasis was impolitely disturbed by the rapid government expansion of higher education to meet the intellectual-worker needs of a modernising Australian economy.  The consequent infusion of new, working class, student blood recharged a student body that was much less deferential to the mystique of the ivory tower and more ready to challenge the social and political orthodoxies of the age.  A more subversive uni rag was at the forefront of this campus transformation.

 

Wood opens colourful time-capsules of the opinionated articles, heated editorials, energised letters and crazy cartoons from the revitalised student press, covering censorship, sexual liberation, homosexuality, abortion, Aboriginal rights, the Cold War, an anti-Stalinist socialism, poverty and housing, education reform and the environment.  The slaughter and lies of the Vietnam War, and conscription (which took one-fifth of twenty-year-old Australian men in a ‘Lottery of Death’), in particular, signalled the high-water-mark of student publishing dissent. 

 

Some issues were slower to take flight.  It wasn’t until 1971 that Adelaide University’s On Dit ‘Bird of the Week’ page became extinct as female students threw off their ‘Miss University’ sashes and took control of their bodies.  One year later, purged by the Women’s Liberation Movement, On Dit had became the only Australian student newspaper admitted as a member of the Underground Press Syndicate, a global alternative-media collective.

 

In sixties Australia, each student newspaper issue was keenly awaited and savoured in depth, and the uni rag could wield an influence beyond the campus, being seen as a “credible participant in shaping political discourse and challenging pubic policy”.  A decline of the student newspaper followed, however, and Wood dates its demise from the election of a reforming Whitlam Labor government in 1972 which signalled not only a significant achievement of much of the student agenda but also quelled most of the ferment.   

 

The retrenchment of dissent was accelerated by the market-based restructuring of higher education in which the university increasingly became a business, Vice-Chancellors overpaid CEOs, education a commodity, students consumers and a degree purely an instrumental means to a vocational end.

 

Whilst the university culture, including the student newspaper, has been profoundly and negatively effected by this external economic context, there have been some own goals, too, says Wood.  Her prime culprit is a post-Marxist ‘identity politics’ where race, ethnicity, sex, gender and sexuality have sidelined a socialist class politics that had given a coherence and solidarity to the disparate struggles of the oppressed.

 

“The preponderance of stories about identity”, says Wood, would make the student newspaper of today “incomprehensible” to an earlier generation of baby-boomer undergraduates.  Whilst the economic and political foundations of capitalism are not only now met with more assent than dissent, gone, too, is “the university tradition of debate and the contest of ideas” in a world of eggshell-vulnerable ‘identity’.

Whilst the uni rag of the sixties took vigorous sides on issues, it also retained a robust commitment to free speech, and free-wheeling intellectual exploration and debate, carrying articles presenting all shades of opinion.  Now, however, in a student world of No Platforming, Monash University’s Lot’s Wife, for example, has a policy against publishing ‘any material that is objectionable or discriminatory’, an “eerie reminder”, says Wood, of the 1950s censorship of ‘objectionable’ literature.

Form, too, has deteriorated along with content, adds Wood.  The “bland magazine” format of the current crop of student newspapers with their emphasis on brevity and visuals rather than textual substance resembles an undisciplined blog in tone and structure.

 

The student newspaper has not only lost its capacity to épater le bourgeois (to shock and outrage respectable opinion) but also its ability, and desire, to dissect the bourgeoisie’s economic and political power.  Wood’s call to “reinvigorate the student magazines” of today with a healthy dose of sixties passion and politics deserves to be answered.

RED REBELS: The Glazers and the FC Revolution by JOHN-PAUL O'NEILL

RED REBELS: The Glazers and the FC Revolution

John-Paul O’Neill
Yellow Jersey Press/Vintage, 2017, 270 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

Sir Alex Ferguson was deeply affronted by the Manchester United Football Club supporters who got stroppy about the proposed takeover of the club by the US corporate raider, Malcolm Glazer, in 2004 - ‘they carried on to the degree where they actually thought they should have a say in the running of the football club’, exclaimed the outraged coach.

Ferguson had, however, gotten to the core of things by starkly asking just whose club it is.  Did it belong to moneyed managers like Ferguson?  To capitalist owners like Glazer or his profiteering predecessors (ever since 1902 when local brewers bought out and renamed the distinctly proletarian but near-bankrupt railwaymen’s team of Newton Heath as a vehicle to sell beer)?  To the foreign mercenaries (the players) who, without a drop of Mancunian blood in them, simply follow the transfer money?  Or, as John-Paul O’Neill, former passionate MU supporter and author of Red Rebels, believes, the fans who give their club its true local heart?

O’Neill saw MU as a football club not a business, a community not a commercial brand – unlike the view of the corporate pirate, Glazer, who eyed off MU for pecuniary reasons and bought a majority shareholding in the world’s richest club through a massive, debt-fuelled loan which was to be repaid by more profit-chasing corporate boxes, expensive seated areas, higher ticket prices and in-your-face sponsorship.

Whilst hoovering millions of pounds out of the club to keep its new owner in dividend heaven, and to keep pace with large interest repayments, Glazer has made the club itself the ultimate collateral against the loans, threatening the 126 year old institution with death from crippling debt should interest rates rise.

Fan resistance to the Glazer takeover looked doomed, however.  Glazer’s grip on MU was not to be prised loose by protests, pitch invasions, match disruption by tossing beach balls onto the field, boycotts of MU’s corporate sponsors, pulling the plug (literally) on TV coverage to sabotage the broadcasting revenue stream, the wearing of mourning black instead of MU’s trademark red, or a quixotic Shareholders’ United plan to buy back ownership (Glazer’s controlling stake was bought for £780 million, while most of MU’s 30,000 ordinary members owned a fiver’s worth of shares each).

O’Neill, editor of Red Issue, the independent fanzine famed for its caustic but literate criticism of the MU elite, floated one last ditch option – because Glazer’s financiers were banking on MU fans’ continued loyalty, why not seriously dent MU’s fan and revenue base by setting up, from scratch, an alternative Manchester team, one based on community ownership and control, one that would be obedient to democracy not the Dollar.

Thus was Football Club United of Manchester (FCUM) born as a protest tactic to pressure MU to abandon Glazer and return the club to its supporters.  O’Neill took his cue from rank and file AFC Wimbledon fans who had set up a supporter-owned replacement club when theirs was torn up by its London roots and transplanted north to become Milton Keynes Dons.

To work as an effective protest, FCUM would have to be viable but, only seven weeks out from the start of the 2005-06 season, the rebel movement had no club, no structure, no money, no ground, no coach, no players.  They also faced opposition from the doom-merchants and naysayers, the nervous nellies and cynics, the big talkers and empty promisers, hostile journalists (‘does anyone seriously believe people will stop watching MU because of who’s running the club?’, snarked one), logistical setbacks, the fading fires of enthusiasm, MU’s former hooligans who got physical, and devoted MU fans who taunted FCUM followers with cries of ‘Judas’ and ‘traitor’.

Nevertheless, all obstacles were overcome as the audacious football revolutionaries won the commitment of thousands of MU fans on the basis of the club’s founding principle of democratic ownership and control - each paid-up member would be a co-owner;  election of the governing board and all major club policy decisions would be decided on a one-member-one-vote basis;  ticket prices would be affordable;  local youth development would be prioritised for the playing ranks;  the club would be a non-profit organisation that avoided “outright commercialism” (including on-shirt sponsorship); any profits would be re-invested in the club.

 

Neither would the football revolution stop outside the club premises.  FCUM was dubbed the ‘Red Rebels’ by the local press not just because they were rebelling against MU’s traditional jersey colour but also because the club’s founders envisaged a club with a left-leaning “social conscience“.  Players and management, for example, banned interviews with the BBC in solidarity with the Beeb’s striking journalists.

 

The FCUM revolution, however, went a bit Animal Farm after its heady early days as the club’s philosophy was betrayed by a bureaucratic clique which developed around chief executive Andy Walsh, who appointed his former comrades from ‘Militant Tendency’ (the highly sectarian Trotskyoid entryists who had tried to take over the Labour Party from within during the 1980s) to “nice, cushy roles” and robust salaries within the administration whilst manoeuvring his allies onto the board.  The ‘Walshocracy’ recklessly pursued revenue and completely stuffed up the club’s finances with debt, ironically replicating the Glazer debt debacle at MU.

At times, O’Neill got a bit down in the dumps with a touch of the Orwells, wondering if it was worth keeping the FCUM dream alive, but, together with his “small band of idealists”, he mobilised members behind FCUM’s original banner of “protest and rebellion” and, defying Orwell’s anti-revolutionary defeatist pessimism, there was a second, successful, revolution with the undemocratic, nepotistic, dissent-crushing board of betrayers routed in 2016.

On the field, after starting football life in the very bottom tier of English football, nine whole Divisions below MU in the Premier League, FCUM had stunning early success, winning promotion season by season until their part-time players met stiffer competition further up football’s professional pyramid where mid-table mediocrity and relegation scares awaited them.  But they have survived.

So has MU, however, where Glazer appears to have been accepted.  A trophy cabinet of silverware has lulled fans into passivity on ownership issues whilst a monetary era of record low interest rates has kept, for now, a lid on the debt time-bomb of £400  million bequeathed by Glazer even as the American tycoon has shovelled out £1 billion in money-for-nothing dividends.

Not just in terms of footballing glamour, but on fundamentally political issues of democracy, ownership and control, the member-run, community team of FCUM and the make-a-buck commercial team of MU are truly in different leagues.   Although the book’s regurgative, blow-by-blow, email-by-email account of the internal FCUM power struggle could have done with some cruel-to-be-kind editing, O’Neill has, with Red Rebels, played a blinder.

THE DOOMSDAY MACHINE: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, DANIEL ELLSBERG

THE DOOMSDAY MACHINE: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner

DANIEL ELLSBERG

Bloomsbury, 2017, 420 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

 

One of the first reactions of Daniel Ellsberg to his revelatory acquaintance with US nuclear war planning in the 1960s was for the private sector consultant to the White House and Department of Defence to decline to join the superannuation scheme of his company, the RAND corporation.  Ellsberg had gloomily concluded that he would not last the distance to collect on any retirement pension because he believed that US atomic war strategy made nuclear Armageddon more likely, and frighteningly near.

 

Ellsberg’s other response, however, was to redouble his vow to oppose nuclear weapons, initially as a civilian alarm-raiser within the US administration, then by leaking the government’s nuclear war secrets in what would have been a precursor to his historic exposé of the US war in Vietnam (the Pentagon Papers).

 

In The Doomsday Machine, Ellsberg writes that it was the stark projections of a nuclear war’s body count - “the extermination of over half a billion people” from blast, heat, fire and radioactive fallout, and then, globally, from the crop-failure and starvation resulting from the sun-smothering, stratospheric soot and smoke of a decades-long ‘nuclear winter’ - that flicked him from technocrat-with-a-conscience to law-defying activist.

 

After failed attempts to rouse Presidents and Defence Secretaries, it was with “a different level of civilian authority in mind” that Ellsberg took direct action.  When he photocopied the Top Secret Pentagon Papers held in his office safe, Ellsberg also Xeroxed its other contents – eight thousand highly classified documents on US nuclear war planning. 

 

As public release of the Vietnam secrets took real-time priority, Ellsberg stashed the nuclear war material in a garbage bag buried in his brother’s backyard compost heap.  Barely one step ahead of the FBI who came poking around after their suspected Vietnam leaker, he relocated the bag to the local rubbish tip where it met disaster from the rain and wind of tropical storm Doria in 1971.

 

Ellsberg’s document retrieval team desperately searched for the lost bag but did not find it before the contents of the trash site were used as landfill and concreted over for the construction of an apartment complex.  Now, however, digging through his memory and subsequent research, Ellsberg, for the first time, tells what he knew and the nuclear myths that continue to need busting.

 

‘Nuclear deterrence’ has kept the peace for seventy years?  Myth.  Only extraordinary good luck has kept the weapons, locked-and-loaded during geo-political crises and always at the launch mercy of “false alarms, accidents and unauthorised launches”, in their silos.  Deterrence, the alleged principle behind the balance of terror that has supposedly prevented nuclear war for seven decades, is “a deliberate deception”.

 

The ability to inflict retaliatory atomic carnage was never the defining, ‘defensive’ feature of nuclear weapons.  Their whole point is to be the nuclear muscle behind offensive military and political aggression.  The Bomb allows a nuclear-armed state, like a fist-happy footballer ‘getting in first with the retaliation’, to land the first blow.  Why allow an enemy the first shot, especially when even one thermo-nuclear H-bomb (a thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima-type A-bomb, which itself packed half the total firepower of all the bombs used in the second world war) would result in the mass frying and irradiation of untold civilians.

 

US nuclear war strategy was, from the start, designed for ‘first-use’, to take out all the nuclear weapons of the then-Soviet and Chinese foes, either in a pre-emptive attack or in an escalation of a regional Cold War conflict.  The “planned slaughter” of billions of people is in-built into such a system.

 

Nuclear weapons have never been used since Hiroshima?  Not so.  Every single President from Truman to Trump has made direct threats, risky bluffs or entertained thoughts of raining atomic fire and fury on an adversary.  All have kept nuclear weapons’ use as an option ‘on the table’ to force a geo-political adversary to back down, exactly as a gun pointed at the head is used as a persuader.  Ellsberg cites two dozen post-war occasions of such ‘atomic diplomacy’ by Washington, from Korea to Cuba, from Berlin to Vietnam, from Iran to Pyongyang.  The use of nuclear weapons is ‘unthinkable’?  Think again.

 

But at least there is no such thing as an omnicidal Doomsday Machine which is only the stuff of fiction?  Untrue.  The US nuclear arsenal, says Ellsberg, is a ‘Doomsday Machine’ (Russia has its own equivalent, too), a system that is pre-programmed to ‘use them or lose them’, to fire all its missiles at once.

 

A RAND colleague had once described such a Doomsday plan as a parody of ‘mutually assured destruction’, the nuclear deterrence strategy at the time.  Stanley Kubrick, gave the concept a darkly satirical run in Dr. Strangelove, his 1964 movie in which a lunatic general, using his delegated authority, initiates a nuclear attack against the Soviet Union, triggering the Soviet’s Doomsday Machine to unleash all its H-bombs in response and wiping out all life on Earth in a giant nuclear conflagration.  When Ellsberg saw the film, he remarked ‘That was a documentary!’.

 

The bomb is safely under Presidential veto control?  An illusion.  On hair-trigger alert, the bombs await only a presidential order to launch, or the command of the President’s many authorised delegates (top military officers) or, “reverberating downward in a widening circle” of launch authority, their numerous subordinates (field commanders, ship captains, even individual bomber pilots), on their own, possibly ill-informed, initiative.

 

Vote Democrat in the hope that wiser heads and warmer hearts will prevail in the White House?  Delusory.  Barak Obama, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, presided, for eight years, over thousands of nuclear weapons and authorised $1 trillion to ‘modernise’ the US nuclear arsenal.  The ‘liberal icon’, Hillary Clinton, was as orthodox a nuclear hawk as one could fear to find.  The fiery ‘socialist’, Bernie Sanders, was a budget-conscious nuclear downsizer but no  abolitionist.  In these rancorous anti-Trump times, however, it has only been these Democrats’ nemesis, the bombastic Trump, who has worn any heat on the issue whilst the smooth Obama, the sensible Hillary and the radical Sanders were given a free pass.

 

As Ellsberg notes, it isn’t Trump who is mad but the nuclear weapons system itself.  Proliferation to rogue or unstable nations is less of a threat, says Ellsberg, than the existing nuclear weapons inventory of the nine nuclear-armed states, primarily the US and Russia, poised to launch at a moment’s notice - the bombs are a “catastrophe waiting to happen”.  Ellsberg finds that, with all its buttressing myths discarded, there is “a dizzying irrationality, madness, insanity at the heart and soul of our nuclear planning”. 

 

Ever since Hiroshima, which had appalled the young Ellsberg, he had abhorred nuclear weapons, even when he was swept up in a lot of anti-communist Cold War malarkey about fictional missile gaps and “cold-blooded Bolshevik leaders”, even when he served as a Commie-fighting officer in the US Marines, even when he was a leading Harvard scholar of deterrence theory as a ‘necessary evil’.

 

And even when Ellsberg, in the economics (not nuclear) arm of RAND, had to pitch in with RAND’s “military intellectuals” on immediate, and inevitably nuclear, Cold War crises, he tried, fruitlessly, to tame the bomb.  He drafted guidance for the Pentagon recommending alternatives to the Doomsday plan, including ‘limited’ nuclear war by attacking ‘just’ Russia and ‘sparing’ China, or attacking ‘just’ military, not civilian, targets.  It wasn’t much of an improvement, he now concedes, but “you should have seen the plan it was replacing!”.

 

Ellsberg learnt that all the original nuclear war principles and the Cold War fictions the US government and military lived by were political theatre and lies.  Such fundamental dishonesty and policy gibberish are still current - “the basic elements of American readiness for nuclear war remain today what they were almost sixty years ago,” concludes Ellsberg.

 

Ellsberg laments that public discussion of US nuclear war strategy is taboo but, despite the sometimes hard going technical matter and his frequently bewildering wanderings through the bureaucratic maze, Ellsberg’s book, and his courageous example of truth-telling, can only help to transgress the politically-induced complacency and acquiescence that surrounds nuclear weapons and their threat of planetary ruin.  Ban the Bomb!